Originally posted by Bamspeedy
What would you say about coastal squares then?
Edit 2002/6/3: Originally when I wrote this note I thought that sea tiles counted toward one's territory score. They don't. I've now reworked the note to allow for this.
I really like the coastal and sea regions, and try to include as much of them as possible in the sphere of influence. I also like to grab islands to include the surrounding sea, and large bay areas. I've been doing this because it intuitively seemed right. Time to try analyzing it a bit
Suppose that a coastline is completely straight. The coastal water region is usually one tile wide. So a city placed on the coast will have one sea tile in its workable region for each coastal tile.
For each coastal tile the resulting scoring potential is 5. (Before the difficulty multiplier.) 1 for the coastal tile plus 4 for the two happy citizens. (There isn't another point for the sea tile - it doesn't count toward territory score. Before the 2002/6/3 edit of this note I thought that it did.)
If we build inland instead, the best we can normally do is a grassland tile. Just one grassland, since we are only using one coastal tile in the comparison. (One grassland eats up the same amount toward the domination threshold.) A bonus tile (cattle, wheat, etc.) can do a bit better but they aren't common enough to include here I think. One irrigated+railroaded grassland has a scoring potential of 4. 1 for the tile, plus 2 for the happy citizen working it, plus 1 for the specialist supported by the extra food.
So coastal tiles with sea beyond seem to have a 25% higher scoring potential than grassland. (5 vs 4) And higher again when compared with plains (5 vs 3.5), desert (5 vs 3), or hills (5 vs 2.5? hard to be sure how to count hills - I'm counting it as subtracting from a specialist to feed its worker.)
Expanding the sphere of influence to sea tiles which are further out and cannot be worked by citizens does nothing for score. (I used to do this, thinking it increased score, know better now
)
Irregular coastlines seem to reduce overall the coastal/sea tile ratio, and that will work in the other direction, reducing scoring potential. On running mapstat against my final GOTM5 map I have 471 coastal tiles and 321 sea tiles. I haven't counted them individually but I'm fairly sure that over 80% of the sea tiles are worked by citizens. Multiplying it out this works out to 3.8 points per coastal tile. Not quite as good as grassland, but better than plains. On that particular map there wasn't much grassland so it seems to have been a good move.
Islands: Looking at my final GOTM5 map, there's a small island near the south edge of the map, west of the middle. That island has 9 poor land tiles and 20 coastal tiles around it. I had 3 towns there with a sphere of influence including 33 sea tiles, 19 of which were worked by citizens. Total points: 29 (territory) + 2*38 (happy citizens) + 1 (content citizen) = 106. The same amount of territory as prime grassland would I think be 2 cities on 29 tiles: 29 (territory) + 2*27 (happy citizens) + 29 (specialists) = 112. So the island with poor land is scoring just a bit worse than the best of land. (And on the GOTM5 map there was very little prime land.) Smaller islands should do better I think. And islands with a bit of workable land will also do better of course - this island was nearly the worst case in that regard.
In summary:
After editing this note to allow for sea tiles not counting toward territory score, it seems that grabbing a lot of sea area may or may not be a good thing for score, depending on the map. My previous thinking that grabbing coastal+sea areas is always good does not seem to be justified.
If a map has lots of prime real estate (grassland) it makes sense to grab that before taking coastal areas. Coastal areas will usually be at least as good as plains.
If you do take coastal areas, try to take them in such a way that the row of sea tiles beyond the coastal tiles can be worked by citizens. If you do this then the net result should be a score for each coastal tile which is about as good as a grassland tile. In the best cases, where the coastline is regular and has just one row of coastal tiles, these tiles can increase score even more than grassland.