How many cities for good research rate?

[HungryMouse]

Browsing the topics I came across the opinion, that size of your empire does not play as much for research as it did in CIV3. So the question is how many cities I might need to keep up in techs playing on large maps, continents? Any ideas? Usually I have around 15 cities by 1500 without overlap or with 1-2 tile overlap. And quite often I find that 1 or 2 civs research faster than me unless I am financial or organised.

Maybe I should aim at building less cities? usually I try to follow 60% rule when expanding, but it does not seem to be the ultimate solution to the problem. And yes, I build cottages, 3-4 per city, less for production towns.

Settings are: Noble, marathon.

 

[Wodan]

How many cities depends on when in the game you are. Early, you want 4-5 cities. Later, when you have things such as Courthouses (etc), this number increases (as the negatives for new cities can be overcome by the income from each city itself).

Wodan

ps 3-4 cottages per city seems low to me. I would suggest 10-12 per city (0 for production cities).

 

[Ruler]

My thumb of a rule is 6-12 cottages, if it's less don't call it commerce city, if it's 12 it's ok and you don't need to build more cottages.

Good ratio is 3 commerce city 1 production city.

 

[manu-fan]

As my number of cities grow, I tend to reserve about half for researching Money or Research instead of building any buildings or units. That keeps my economy and research ticking along while I use the other half for imporvements and units.

I usually go to war early and have about 7 cities. Then, go to war again and have about 12. Then go to war again and have about 18 etc. etc.

The number of cities does kill the economy, but researching Money in some and building courthouses, markets, etc. can keep everything pumping along.

Cheers.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

Early game? Two. Later game? More.

One good science city will work. That means additionally you need one production city to build all your units.

Don't EVER build units in your science city once you have alphabet and you will research faster than you have ever concieved. Add other cities as needed to bring happiness and health resources (the ones you can't trade for) into your cultural borders, or to capture nearby wonders that the AI built for you.

One note. The 60% rule doesn't help you gauge how fast you are researching as well as you would like, especially once you start specializing/customizing your cities for a single task. Having a really good science city could research as fast at 20% as a decent or mediocre science city could research at 60%. The 60% rule is really more useful when you have nothing but hybrid commerce/ production cities in your empire, and is used to gauge your expansion rate as you add cities from conquest. I like using the 20% rule myself.