Is anyone here reluctant to let their empire grow due to the policy hit?

[Artifex1]

I guess it depends on your strategy but I like policies so I am reluctant to let my empire grow.

 

[Crow, of Earth]

Me too

Considering how Civ4 had few penalties on expanding too much, at least at monarch level, this few cities thing is a bit confusing for me at the moment.

Another advantage to fewer cities so far is that you can have a bit more population empire-wise, due to the happiness limitation, so you also get a bit more science.

Still, in my current game, I have 4 cities in 1000 CE.

 

[Celevin]

I think it's a good penalty.

Culture comes from 3 different spots:
- Controlled cities
- Cultural city states
- Puppets

Both cultural city states and puppets will produce the same culture no matter your number of controlled cities. Your culture from your number of controlled cities should increase as you build more.

I think we'd be seeing VERY different empires for both domination and culture victories if you were to take out puppets and cultural city states.

 

[Slowpoke]

It also helps balance out those who get screwed on world creation and are stuck with only a few cities I suppose. Personally? I just play france. I think in interesting strategy would be to stay at one city, befriend a cultural city state, and stay one city until you have 4-5 policies. Then expand like a beast.

 

[ssh08]

considering you can get more money/research/production from ICS atm, no, its not really much of a handicap

 

[DaveGold]

Get your policies before you expand. After you've expanded, policies will always come too late to help you.

 

[DiamondPirate]

I'm in that boat. I find it very hard to go above 3 cities for culture reasons but then I am by nature a very peaceful player, and you dont need more then that to win Culture/Dip (generally, unless the AI is insanely mean to cities states on-mass.

 

[guczy]

After winning a cultural victory on emperor, epic speed in 2001 with Hiawatha having 16 cities (and not a single puppet state) and only 2 cultured city states as allies im over it

 

[yanner39]

So just to get this straight, the more cities I control ie the ones I settled and annexed, will increase the cost of my social policies, correct?

I noticed this in my current space win where I had trouble unlocking policies in the rationalism branch. Eventually I did, but I think I had 9 cities I controlled and a bunch of other puppets.

I guess a plan is needed early as to what cities I will annex and which ones I won't. In my current game, I annexed 2 former capitals and another city with strong production.

 

[shinkicker]

So just to get this straight, the more cities I control ie the ones I settled and annexed, will increase the cost of my social policies, correct?

I noticed this in my current space win where I had trouble unlocking policies in the rationalism branch. Eventually I did, but I think I had 9 cities I controlled and a bunch of other puppets.

I guess a plan is needed early as to what cities I will annex and which ones I won't. In my current game, I annexed 2 former capitals and another city with strong production.

Each city after your first one adds 20% to the cultural cost of your next social policy. So if you need 200 culture to write a new one and then annex a city, you'll then need 240 culture. Another city = 280.

I typically try to stay at around 4 cities until late in the game, and rely on city states and puppets. In my current game, I had done so well with the city states that when I declared war on Catherine, 5 city states joined me as my allies. One - Babylon - was Russia's neighbor and kept her occupied while I pulled off a major amphibious invasion on her other coast.

By the late game, I'm usually producing enough culture through buildings and monuments that I can afford to annex some of those puppets - slowly, carefully, letting them digest before adding another one. But the days of a massive 60-city civ are gone I think, done in by the new happiness rules.

 

[delra]

There's a certain point in the game when I stop caring about number of cities and just go CIV1 on the map.

 

[Abremms]

it depends on how many turns to the next policy, if its within 10 i generaly wait to drop the next city.

and for the love of god, pick your policy FIRST THING on the turn it comes up. I keep forgetting and going straight to the settler and founding a new city, only to notice later in the turn that i no longer get to adopt a policy because it bumped up the cap! >.<

as far as conquest, i don't puppet as often as i should. I'm a bit of a control freak and i annex whenever i have the happyness for it, generaly leaves me with a large number of cities and a high culture cap. culture buildings in every city adds up though, so its not a HUGE problem, but it is slower than if i Puppet all but 3 cities.

 

[EscapedGoat]

By the late game, I'm usually producing enough culture through buildings and monuments that I can afford to annex some of those puppets - slowly, carefully, letting them digest before adding another one. But the days of a massive 60-city civ are gone I think, done in by the new happiness rules.

Look at the 3rd screenshot in this post:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9744657&postcount=95

61 cities. allmost 400 happiness from buildings. it's possible if you want to.

 

[budweiser]

Right now I am winning a culture game on King as France with only 2 cities and 4 puppets. I am on track to win before 1950AD.

 

[shinkicker]

Look at the 3rd screenshot in this post:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9744657&postcount=95

61 cities. allmost 400 happiness from buildings. it's possible if you want to.

You had 61 cities and your NET happiness was only +19. Must have taken forever to get a natural Golden Age. I'm more impressed that you had positive happiness at all - which would be all you needed for a domination, diplo or science victory. Anything over zero works.

On the other hand, with 61 cities your culture requirements for a new social policy are over 11,000. That's staggering, and more to the point of the OP.

Again - this goes to leader strategy. I could see myself doing something like that with Germany, but with Persia it's critical to Darius' strengths to have happiness closer to 50 or more - in my last game with him I was genning 120+ happiness per turn and getting GAs one almost after another. I easily got a culture win by 1970 through extensive CS alliances, Great Artist landmarks and +culture buildings. In terms of scale I'd think it was immensely easier to do that with a small (8-12 city) empire than one with 61.

Given the income the screens show, can I assume that you kept all the Trading Posts the AI built after you took a city? The numbers on those screens make my head hurt

 

[Zhahz]

Really depends what you want to do. The research/gold/army size from huge empires can outweigh a few extra policies. Plus, if you go nuts with culture buildings you can still do pretty well for culture, you'll just bloom a little later. A bunch of cities with broadcast towers can crank serious culture.

 

[clixor]

Really depends what you want to do. The research/gold/army size from huge empires can outweigh a few extra policies. Plus, if you go nuts with culture buildings you can still do pretty well for culture, you'll just bloom a little later. A bunch of cities with broadcast towers can crank serious culture.

yup. in my current game i have like 9 cities and a few puppets and get like 400 culture a turn. So about every 10 turns or so i get a new policy. not that bad

Also, if you get more gold, you can influence more and get more culture as well.

But i actually like the SP balance in CIV5 a lot. TOO many cities are contraproductive, so late game becomes more interesting compared to CIV4 where you just spammed cities.

 

[alpaca]

You had 61 cities and your NET happiness was only +19. Must have taken forever to get a natural Golden Age. I'm more impressed that you had positive happiness at all - which would be all you needed for a domination, diplo or science victory. Anything over zero works.

On the other hand, with 61 cities your culture requirements for a new social policy are over 11,000. That's staggering, and more to the point of the OP.

Again - this goes to leader strategy. I could see myself doing something like that with Germany, but with Persia it's critical to Darius' strengths to have happiness closer to 50 or more - in my last game with him I was genning 120+ happiness per turn and getting GAs one almost after another. I easily got a culture win by 1970 through extensive CS alliances, Great Artist landmarks and +culture buildings. In terms of scale I'd think it was immensely easier to do that with a small (8-12 city) empire than one with 61.

Given the income the screens show, can I assume that you kept all the Trading Posts the AI built after you took a city? The numbers on those screens make my head hurt

That was actually my game, unfortunately a few turns after these screens the game started crashing so I couldn't test if I could still get a culture victory. The thing is that while 11k cost (with Cristo Redentor, I should add) is high, 600 culture output per turn is, too, and the amount of turns it took to the next policy wasn't much worse than if I'd had only 5 cities because I could afford buying those culture buildings. I'm not arguing that getting policies is easier with an ICS empire, mind. It isn't. Everything else is, though.

I rushed the AIs on my continent with Horsemen at the start. I played that game mostly to compare it with another game played later where I would go for the same early strategy, but then settle for a far thinner population. I built those trade posts myself because buying the buildings where you need them is a lot better than building them, especially if you have Big Ben and Mercantilism for a -50% cost reduction. Obviously, I could have easily conquered the rest of the AIs but I find that setting up a huge sprawling empire is a lot of fun, and winning is easy in this game anyways, so I use it like a toy.

At that point, any new city I founded (and I was still founding cities) immediately got a Colosseum, a Paper Maker, a Monument and Temple and a Harbor if it was on the coast. I was also able to buy Broadcast Towers in any city that finished its Museum. Happiness GA didn't matter much, I got most of them with Great Persons, and of course got the Taj. I don't think the benefits of a golden age are worth over-investing huge amounts of money into happiness buildings, tbh.



To get back on topic: The question you have to ask yourself is whether the policies are worth the cost in production, gold, etc. This is mostly relevant if you have less than, say, 10 cities. Once you have more than that, new cities barely hurt provided you set up your cultural infrastructure reasonably quick. I prefer the robustness and scientific gain of having many cities over the faster policy gain, personally. You don't have to go infinite for this to become true, especially if you wage a war or two. The game mechanics favor two styles of play: Stay as small as possible (for a lot of policies), or get as large as possible (for a lot of gold, science and production), with anything in between being pretty bad.

 

[the streak]

Each city after your first one adds 20% to the cultural cost of your next social policy. So if you need 200 culture to write a new one and then annex a city, you'll then need 240 culture. Another city = 280.

I typically try to stay at around 4 cities until late in the game, and rely on city states and puppets. In my current game, I had done so well with the city states that when I declared war on Catherine, 5 city states joined me as my allies. One - Babylon - was Russia's neighbor and kept her occupied while I pulled off a major amphibious invasion on her other coast.

By the late game, I'm usually producing enough culture through buildings and monuments that I can afford to annex some of those puppets - slowly, carefully, letting them digest before adding another one. But the days of a massive 60-city civ are gone I think, done in by the new happiness rules.

I thought the costs for SP ramps up in a compounding manner. I.e. first city increases costs by 20%, second one increases 20% of that - i.e. 44% total, by the third one it's 73%, etc.

I think the sweet spot is 4-5 cities, after which it becomes pretty hard to make up the penalty. My fairly fast cultural win on emperor was with 5 cities and a bunch of puppets.

 

[alpaca]

I thought the costs for SP ramps up in a compounding manner. I.e. first city increases costs by 20%, second one increases 20% of that - i.e. 44% total, by the third one it's 73%, etc.

I think the sweet spot is 4-5 cities, after which it becomes pretty hard to make up the penalty. My fairly fast cultural win on emperor was with 5 cities and a bunch of puppets.

No, they increase linearly. Each city adds 30% of the capital's base cost on normal-sized maps.