Is it worth to build 5th and 6th city in 1000BC on marathon?

[Camillo]

Please help me make a decision. I'm playing one of my first games in Civ5.

Game settings:
- Emperor difficulty level
- map terra, standard size
- Marathon game speed
- 22 civs and 22 city-states
- my Civ is Poland

Current situation:
- year something about 1000BC, recently I went into classical era and dicovered construction
- I have 4 cities, all with walls, 4 workers, 6 archers and 6 spearmen
- my social policies are opened tradition and just completed liberty with an academy built with my great scientist near capital (btw - awesome boost to science, almost twice higher research speed of techs)
- my land is rich of strategic resouces (about 15 Iron and 6 horses) and rich of luxury resources (5 different plus 3 same type plus 1 via trade)
- my capital is 6-size and other cities 3 or 4-size
- for now I have happiness at +7
- I can build 4 collosseums and 1 circus to make it +17 shortly, so I guess it would be a little excess and maybe it's time for more cities to come?
- my neighbors are France, Egypt, Portugal, Persia and Korea - all of them already dislike me for "building cities too aggressively" and I had a few defensive wars recently

And now my problem is:

I have not much free space for new cities, the map is standard with 22 civs so there is not much room, I have only 2 free spots left where I could eventually build cities and I'm affraid it's the last chance now to do so. These spots however does not have any strategical of luxury recources - only natural resources, bananas, deer and so.

Is it worth to build 2 additional settlers and found cities now? I would have happiness hit but maybe I'll benefit in the future due to more growth, science, gold, connections to capital, production etc. For now I have +7 happiness but I can make shortly additional +10 happiness from collosseums and circus.

How big happiness hit would I get for 2 new cities? Is it 4 per city or more? Or depending on how many cities I will have in total?

 

[TheGrandWazoo]

In my opinion, unless they are in a strategic position, its not worth building the new cities if the land around them is never going to be that great.
You might want to build a new city if it is covering a choke point on the map, or if it is a coastal city in a good position to establish trade routes (e.g. you don't have a coastal city yet, or its on the other side of the land mass to your coastal cities so will get more trade)

For a standard size map you will get -3 unhappiness per city, so you do have the happiness to build them.

In my view, your best mode of expansion from here would be conquest. You get extra unhappiness for captured cities, but you can take cities which have luxuries you don't already have. This will also weaken the civ you attack and cause them to drop in score.

My advice here would be to pick the highest scored player out of your neighbours, bribe a few of your friends to attack with you, denounce them and take their capital, provided it has a unique luxury for you.

 

[Camillo]

Thanks, but I like to play peacefully and I don't start wars myself. Ever. So conquering is not really an option.

These spots lack of luxury/strategic recources BUT maybe in the future there will be some coal/oil/uranium/aluminium in there? The more land you have the bigger chance of having all possible strategic resources, right?

So, only -3 happiness per city? Regardless it's the 5th or 2nd city? Isn't it also related to the numer of cities somehow?

 

[Heretiv]

The game really limits you in terms of the number of cities - if you found a bunch more you will get happiness problems as they get bigger - also you will slow down culture and tech acquisition rate. So best not to keep expanding.

For a peaceful win you will need a culture (tourism) win or a diplomatic one. So think about how best to get lots of city state allies OR how to get max culture output.

 

[TheGrandWazoo]

Yes new cities will generate -3 unhappiness, for the base city. Then the citizens will begin to generate unhappiness (1 each). If you have more cities, you'll most likely be creating citizens quicker, so your happiness will go down quicker. Of course, the flip side is you have more slots to build happiness buildings, but generally to survive the early-mid game you will need 1 unique luxury per city (or happiness from mercantile CS).

Building those cities to take the strategic resources is a big gamble. First off, there may not even be anything there. Secondly each city you found will add 5% to the cost of researching techs. That means founding a new city will mean your research is slowed down until that city is making 5% of your total beakers. There is also an increased cost to social policies of 10% - so a similar problem applies to gathering culture.

Depending on the layout of your map, your best option might be to try and stop the AI settling in that land (how easy that will be depends a lot on where the unclaimed land is located)

 

[Beaver79]

Yes. I always expand in the early going if happiness allows it. You have 7 right now without any coliseums or circuses. You could easily plant 2 more and keep everyone happy. If you get those cities down early enough, and BC is early enough, your tech and culture you get from them will easily make up for the +10% increase to culture and +5% to science.

 

[rodrigoq]

Save the settlers, build an army, and go make some puppets.

 

[Camillo]

I decided to expand and build those next 2 cities and I found it to be a good decision. I quickly managed to deal with happiness, made many collosseums and such and got additional luxes via trade. Science, commerce, happiness looks very good now and I gained additional two cities for buildings, production, commerce etc. I guess going wide isn't as scary as I supposed.
Thank for your replies.