Maintanence(corruption)- Civ3 vs Civ 4

[MosquitoE]

One of the big changes I noticed for Civ 4 is the way maintanence costs are calculated.

Previously maintanence was charged individually to each city based on distance/rank. After a certain point any additional cities would never make more than 1 gold. However, if you spammed enough cities, the 1 gold could add up. There was no real disadvantage to just having more and more cities.

With Civ 4 maintanence costs are calculated for the economy as a whole. Building more cities (farther away), will cost money. So before building a new city you have to take in to consideration what it will cost and how much it can contribute. There is a definite disadvantage now to building a city that will add more to maintanence costs than it will produce itself.

Also, you can no longer disband your cities when they have outlived their usefullness. These two changes force you to plan your empire much more carefully.

 

[MrCynical]

I've definitely found that it's now best to only build maybe half a dozen cities and work on those. After that I'll generally only build another city if I really need a particular resource. It's certainly nice to see that ICS no longer works well.

 

[weimingshi]

preindustrial age,I would say the max cities is 12. Any more than that actually do you more harm then good.

Comes to mordern age though, is another story. At this time you should built up a strong economy ( If not, something wrong with the way you play). You can caputure as many cities as you like. Right now I got 40 cities on a huge map, I researched pretty much most of tech, at 80% commerce rate, i get 3000 gold per turn. I use those gold to hurry buildings in newly captured cities.