How many cities?I

[y2jaus]

Hi

I am currently working through the HoF challenges (none submitted yet) at Emperor difficulty and am encountering some significant issues. I will limit myself to two major queries I have to save spamming everyone!

1- For Domination, I am struggling to hack out a significant piece of the map. If i grow too quickly, I hemmorhage cash and cannot match scientific output of other cultures. If i sit, however, on a few key cities, the other civilizations very swiftly outscore me, leading to an incredibly long, painful series of conquests to up my population. Question- what is the 'ideal' number of self built cities, assuming huge map, terra

2- For Culture, I am focusing on three cities, to the detriment of the rest of my empire. I establish a few smaller cities to feed resources and block the enemy AI, but my empire is so tiny that my score appears inconsequential. Question- Is it possible to win a high scoring game with only three cities? ie is it worth eschewing everything else and just building three wonder spammers?

Thanks!

 

[Maben]

I pursue a cultural victory a lot, and I have to say you are going to more than likely require more than just 3 cities in order to safely secure this victory. I would suggest at least 6 cities, this allows you to get 2 religious shrines in 2 of your cities. With only 3 cities there are serious issues to deal with:

1. These cities would be hard to have enough production and GP points and culture in order to become your three legendary cities alone. In short, you can't specialize them.
2. You won't be able to build troops to defend yourself, "wonderspamming" will leave you very vulnerable.
3. You simply won't bring in enough commerce in my opinion to keep up in tech enough to secure victory.

Aim to take over a nearby weak civ, or try to perhaps culturally convert close cities by using specialists and "build culture". I aim for at least 6 cities, in my last cultural win I had 14 in the end.

 

[oyzar]

On huge map terra it might be advantageous to just build the last x cities yourself. This would of course totaly ruin your econom(x is somewhere pretty large, whatever required to get to dom limit). However you don't care since you'll be winning in a few turns.

 

[Pariah]

A cultural victory is much easier with a cathedral-type building (mosque, synagogue, stupa, pagoda etc) for every religion practiced in all 3 of your main cities. On a large map, each cathedral or equivalent requires 3 of the relevant temples - so you need at least 9 cities to build them all, with all your religions spread to every city. On a huge map, this goes up to 4 temples per cathedral - requiring 12 cities.

 

[Cabledawg]

Question- what is the 'ideal' number of self built cities, assuming huge map, terra

The correct answer is the middle 2 numbers in your social security number.

 

[y2jaus]

Thank you to those of you who posted helpful responses.

 

[Indiansmoke]

Domination on Emperor on a huge terra map is very very difficult if not impossible even at Marathon speed. I would suggest to try standard size pangea first.

With cultural victory your score will not be high anyway.

 

[Pariah]

Domination on Emperor on a huge terra map is very very difficult if not impossible..

I'd have thought Domination would virtually impossible on such a map at any difficulty level. Any empire of the required size must be infeasibly expensive in maintenance costs, and so time-consuming to manage that every turn would take ages.

 

[Indiansmoke]

well it might be possible on levels lower than noble, but anything above that I agree.

 

[oyzar]

The correct answer is the middle 2 numbers in your social security number.

I am pretty sure it is at least 3 digits so you are wrong...

 

[DaveMcW]

The answer is 50% science rate.