Initial City-Placement Guide

klaskeren

Prince
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This is the start of what is a guide on where and how to place your initial city
We start off with this start:

here is the legend:

Yellow represents your plans for domination victory
Red represents your plans for science victory.
Circle represents potential city spots.
Arrow represents movement.

As you can see, fi you are going for science, most likely you will be looking for a mountain, in this case we can see mountains, thus we have some ideas about potential settling spots for sci vic. This means that we should move our warrior in the other direction initially, to scout for a better spot, since if warrior does not find a better spot, then we are going to the mountains. A mistake some players make is that they will say: "Okay im probably going to settle by the mountain, so i should scout that spot with my warrior".
consider these cases:

Warriors finds better city spot to the west: You move your settler to better position in the west.

Warrior finds nothing good in the west: You know that east is the best spot to settle.

In either case, you find the best settling spot.

now consider the outcomes with the "bad" approach:

Warrior finds good city spot in east by mountains: You move settler to east, but do not know if you missed out on a better spot in west.

Warrior finds mediocre (remember that mountain and few resources already make this spot not terrible) city spot in east: You have to assume that there is no better spot since you cant know if there is mountains in west, thus you must settle mountains in east.

So know you see that in the second, and bad, approach, you ended up settling in east, regardless of what your warrior scouted, conclusion is that it was a bad decision to scout east since it had no effect on your settling plans.

The domination spots in this case are not great, but you can consider settling on hill, or on cotton. So applying the same principle as before: warrior moves west to search for anything better.

Next example:


A relatively good start for early domination (ie. SALT) and as you can see, alot of good spots, neither which are strictly better than the other. Here are some pros and cons for the domination spot (in order left to right on screen)

1: Hill tile, unknown extra resources, good long term with extra resources to the west, bad short term if nothing else due to no good tile in 1st ring.
2: can settle on t1, good tile in 1st ring, good wheats for border expansion, though lacking production if you want to crank out units en mass early.
3: Hill settle, get dyes eventually, decent 1st ring tile, borders will expand to salt early. This is probably the best spot, and in light of that comes the rationale for the warrior movement:

Warrior moves 2NE, this is "the solution". because you know that your best city spot can be settled on t1, therefore you will have to find something better, or potentially better (unknown extra resources) on the very first turn, in order for you to change your mind and not settle on spot 3. therefore you cannot explore say 2NW, since your vision of the land west of sheep would be block because sheep is on hill, and thus you would not have enough information before you would have to step on that hill on spot 3 anyway, therefore 2NE is best since this reveals a potentially better spot on t0.

For science we see a mountain that we can settle, but if the area is bad, its probably better to stay with the wheats/salts, conclusion: This one is hard since warrior cannot explore mountain region fast enough, thus the most sensible warrior action is : exploring your initial settling spot, thus helping to determine if this spot is strong or weak. Thus we move 2W or 1W1SW, since this gives most information about the initial settling spot, and will help you determine whether to go for the mountains.

And some general concepts about settling:

Alot of where you want to settle your initial city depends on what kind of game you are going for, One mistake though that some players make is that they only try to maximize the number of resources they get in all of their citys 36 tile range.
you should realize that the resources in the 1st and 2nd ring are much more valuable than the resources in the 3rd ring. This probably matters more than you think. If you have resources which are not luxury resources in the 3rd ring, it counts as almost nothing since it will be a long time until you can make use of them, and by the time you can, the value of the added production/hammers/gold is much less compared to what you city is outputting, at the time when you can work these, as compared to a resource in the 1st ring, which you can work on t0,:
eg:
Wheat in 1st ring, tile yield goes from 2f to 3f, or effectively increases by 50%, as compared to a wheat tile in the 3rd ring which you get once you already have civil service, and lets say you are at pop 13 working 10 freshwater farms and 3 mines, if you include some city resources, lets say this is equal to 12 farms 4 mines, which means that the extra wheat will give you +2 food (+1 and +1 from granny) which would give you a 2/64 yield increase ( 13x4 + 4x3=64) = 1/32 which is about 3 percent. consider that you have this tile only in half the game, and in the half which matters increasingly much less than the early part, and you can maybe estimate that this tile was 1/100 to 1/1000 the use of the wheat in 1st ring, something to keep in mind when you are planning where to settle your city.
With luxes its very different since your happiness does not scale the same way as general resources, you want happiness all throughout your game. Thus having luxes in the 3rd ring is not terrible since you will eventually get them, here it is more a question of evaluating whether you will grab those resources with another city, or if you will need the happiness early.
TL;DR Short term matters more than you think.
Another very important thing, is considering how many hill tiles you will have in your 1st ring, ideally you will have 2 or more. This is because your borders will not expand to hills almost at any time (due to weird coding) and you need those hills early especially for settler production. if you want 4-6 cities, alot of your early production will go into settlers, and thus you want them out as fast as possible, meaning you want as much production as possible meaning you want to work mines, meaning you need mines in your borders, meaning you need hills in your intitial 1st ring, since you will have to buy these tiles else. Its not required, but the difference between 2 hills and no hills in initial city, is often 10 turns down to 7 turns in settler production with tradition start. If you go for 3 settlers then you save 9 turns of production! this is huge when you think about the fact that your city does not grow when you produce settlers, saving 9 turns of settler production is quite close to 9 turns of the game, since your city does little else than grow and build things in the early game, meaning that if you discard the little science you produce during this time, settling with some hills in you borders can save you at least 5-7 turns of the game, meaning that it would be a good idea to walk around for that kind of spot, even for 2-3 full turns.
 

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I don't know if I agree with your assessment of the first scenario.

Even though the starting spot does lack a mountain (for Observatory), it is:

A. Coastal (coastal wonders + coastal trade routes)
B. Next to lots of great resources
C. Petra-capable

And while you circle the hill that is two tiles south, you do not suggest the desert hill that is to the northwest. That provides the extra hammer of production, while giving you coastal *and* Petra options.

Course if you are playing Vanilla then it makes more sense, but with the expansions, coastal trade routes and Petra can be powerhouses!
 
Agree on the coastal point, and I might consider moving to the desert coastal hill as well, but not because it is Petra-eligible. We can only see 3 tiles that would benefit from Petra (may be more to the East past the desert hill), 2 of which are trash tiles (flat desert). But settling in place is very appealing -- a stone and cattle in ring 1 means very quick early growth without having to sacrifice a turn 5 scout. Even in a science game, a mountain in your capital is a luxury, not a necessity. The circled spot next to the mountain keeps the cattle, but loses one stone and your second luxury (marble), while picking up who know what (and you can only learn what by committing your settler to moving).

All that being said, I think the idea behind this thread and the points and issues that Klaskeren is raising are very important. I suspect too few people subject their starting position to the sort of analysis he suggests, and they really should do so.
 
Another thing is, you base your game around your start. I don't think it is wise to predefine your victory path before you even looked at your start.

An alternative to the first start would be to move the warrior along the coast north west to find water resources. If there are, I would settle in place. First ring cattle and stone is too hard to give up. If there are no water resources and I really want to move off the coast, I would 1 turn settle on the cotton. However you will probably end up with the same stuff in your city radius anyway. I would most likely still settle in place because costal just provides so much more flexibility.
 
Echoing the sentiment that settling off the coast just to get a mountain for observatory is questionable in BNW.
 
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