Need for Large City Games

[ohioastronomy]

Production would be far more viable if you could direct the passive growth of cultural boundaries. The refusal of the AI to incorporate hills and forests cripples production; it goes from annoying in a small city to infuriating in a large one.

 

[pi-r8]

"
A better way might be to also build some smaller cities which work nothing but trading posts. I'd like to see someone try this method with Washington and see where they get.
"
this.

If you had plopped out a couple of settlers here:
...then you would have saved a ton of money, am i rite?

And you had the happiness to do that. Even with ghandi, those two cities would be 10 happiness, no more. You could've just let them stick around at size one at first, then build coloseums using the mines of delhi, and let them pay for themselves in happiness.

The main problem with this strategy would be that you would get social policies slower, but at least you wouldn't need monarchy.

I mean, I could be totally off base...but wouldn't the advantages outweigh the happiness cost?

Once you had your two maritime states up, you could run specialists in both cities, probably merchants because their buildings have no maint. cost, and then use the GM's to bribe those very city states.

Yeah that's a good idea. I like this a lot! It would make it hard to get social policies early on, especially if you did something like that for the other cities too, but if the satellite cities can claim most of the hill tiles than you don't really need monarchy. Or any other social policies- I think I'd be fine playing without any. And once these satellite cities grow a bit, they could provide a lot of extra gold.

I'm a little worried that it might cause the AI to declare war on us early on. But really, the AI is so crazy I never have any idea what they're going to do.

FWIW, your attempt was certainly better than anything I’ve managed to achieve, in part because you’ve managed to get biology earlier than I have previously. In addition, I’ve also ended up settling (in some cases many) more than three cities which, of course, necessarily slows down progress by draining more gold from the coffers. (Indeed, based on your save, I think this may be my biggest problem: I’m over-rexxing as a legacy of Civ 4.) That said, I completely understand why you limited settling to three cities in your playthrough – as I mentioned in my earlier posts, it’s all about using common sense to adapt to whatever the map presents you.

Of course, I’ve also noticed that your pics display an awful lot of themes common to my attempts. The most obvious is city growth: it just never seems fast enough IMHO. Indeed, at the risk of going off topic, it’s why I’ve been wondering if Civ 5 needs to amend a building somewhere, perhaps to store 25% food early on – and make the hospital store another 25% (instead of its current 50%). I’ll leave that one to Firaxis and the modders though. Then again, perhaps another civver's playthrough will prove me wrong.

The other issue that your playthrough confirmed was the very point that we’ve been discussing in this thread – that maintenance costs represent a non-trivial handicap to this playstyle. The real issue of course here is that Civ 5 has replaced slavery as the primary means of speeding up production (in Civ 4), with giving you the option to buy units, buildings or tiles in Civ 5. Of course however, there is a key difference between the two mechanics: one (slavery) is local – you can whip in any city, independent of whether you whipped in another city. By contrast, the amount of gold you have available to buy things in Civ 5 is a global (ie. empire wide) constraint – if you buy something in one city, you have less gold available by definition to buy something in another city. And IMHO, maintenance costs represent a very real handicap to accumulating gold after it’s spent in an infrastructure heavy game.

The great thing about your playthrough is that, in a sense, it’s a very pure illustration of what can be achieved in a Civ 5 world. The absence of any military action until the late game means that you didn’t need to unnecessarily divert hammers into military units. This contrasts with my tendency to plump for horsemen and wage some war before growing cities across “my” continent.

With all that in mind, I suspect you may well be right re: the difficulty associated with settling 10+ cities. As I’ve mentioned, settling more cities to secure good land is exactly what I’ve been trying to do, but invariably end up having to accept the compromise of lower pop cities and a skeletal infrastructure across the empire. Hopefully though, someone out there can show me what I’ve been missing.

Most importantly, I’m glad that you found this playstyle more fun. Quite frankly, that’s more important than anything else IMHO. Talking of fun, I haven’t played Washington since my very first Civ 5 game...something about manifest destiny = conquest motivated that choice. Now that you mention him though, maybe it’s time for me to give him another whirl. Thanks again for your playthrough!

haha glad you liked it. I think I always like the building parts of Civ more than the warfare parts. I got pretty lucky in this game though- good land and peaceful neighbors. I don't see how this style of play will ever really work well unless they make some major changes in the game, like increasing growth speed. I don't see how I could have grown much faster, while maintaining decent production.

 

[aemer]

I've thought about it, and 10 size 20 cities on emperor...it seems like you would need a good chunk of land for one, so with that in mind I started a game.

Note that I use legendary start - It obviously skews things in favor of the player on the higher difficulties - but the way I see it, this thread is about having fun with a civ-building strategy, so that's ok. It shouldn't be a cakewalk, you should be challenged, and you shouldn't use in-game exploits...but so long as this is reasonably satisfied, different settings are a-go.

Like I mentioned, I think having a cheap but effective military will really help with this strategy, since you can secure a large empire with very few units. Of course, an intrinsic part of the strategy is that there must be a dense infrastructure too...so you should have something that helps with the maintenence costs.

Enter china. Their Ub is not only a library, it also provides 4 gold. Sure, it costs 1 gold in maintenence, but the 4 gold grows with the economy buildings into a late game average of probably 6 gold per city. So I've got at least an extra 60 gold a turn you can pour into building maintenence.

A city tile itself will pay for the paper maker, a coloseum, and an entire theatre with just a bank and a market.... That's pretty good!

A size 20 Chinese city will, from the UB and the economy building modifiers alone pay for a stadium, and 4/5th of a theatre ~ 6-7 happiness.

Compare with Ghandi: A size 20 city will get 8 happiness from ghandi's ability.

But I digress.

Here's where I'm at on turn 83:


I just barely managed to overpower the iroquis. I basically beelined ironworking to get a heroic epic in the capital. As soon as the epic was up, I settled on iron right next to hiawatha, upgraded a warrior, and purchased a warrior which I then upgraded. My starting warrior turned into a spearman in a hut.

I clashed with hiawatha, stealing a worker that was hooking up his only iron before it was done. I'm clearly not a great civ-player - a clever archer usage let hiawatha (how did this AI manage to pull _that_ off?!) pushed all my guys back, but not till I had fought enough to spawn a great general. I snuck him up past a barbarian encampment through the city states, I took the honor tree and grabbed the promotion that boosts units when they have other guys next to them, and then I stomped all over hiawatha. In hindsight the GG was enough to, well, GG hiawatha, so that was dumb, but the game is only on emperor...There's probably room for a few errors here and there.

Now don't get me wrong; this game won't be about military conquest. But it should be plain to see for everybody that there's not a lot of room, and 10 big cities take up a _lot_ of space. Additionally, I really wanted to seize at least _one_ extra capital in addition to my starting one, to secure additional luxuries from the legendary start setting.

With hiawatha's capital down, I've secured the nothern land-corridor firmly enough (I only kept the capital, burned the rest). The western corridor is insanely slim...once I have a fort set up, nothings gonna get through; and if it does, that means I'm under attack, which means I get an extra great general soon, which means I can plonk down a citadel.

In other words, I've provided military security for my coming empire...now I need to plan it out. Figure out some sort of plan so I know what i need to do to get my empire where it needs to be.

That's more tricky than I would like. I have access to 6 disparate luxuries once I get calandar; butter up the right maritime city state, and I get dyes....so that's 35 happiness. Then there's the surplus resources: If I can sell silver and other resources I have a ton of, to more than 1 empire now, post patch, I can hawk a total of 12 surplus resources. Ideally, this would translate into the remaining 8 luxuries, but I'll be lucky if I can get half that. Either way, the most I can hope to attain by bribing city states and trading with other empires is an additional 40 happiness.
The difficulty level gives me 9 happiness, and the natural wonders give me at most 7. That's 91 happiness, and I need at least 210.

Building a theatre, a coloseum, and a stadium in each city, I get another 120 happiness, bringing me to 211...so it _can_ be done with buildings and trade alone, but that's a nasty 14 gold per city.

But what alternatives do i even have? smaller happiness-surplus cities could probably carry me some of the way, but I'm not sure any other approach will even make a dent.

And if it's going to be little happiness boosters that gets me there, i need to settle everything everywhere yesterday, and then pick 10 cities I need to grow.

As far as I can figure, a happiness booster city of size 1, with 2 hammers in its own tile and 2 hammers in the tile it works will take 180 turns to provide a net 5 happiness for no cost....

And then...that strategy would pretty much just be a slightly modified infinite city sprawl wouldn't it?

Gah.

Suggestions requested =P

 

[learner gamer]

@aemer: A legendary start eh? Although it’s not quite what I was envisaging (which was more along the lines of playing from a standard start), it could be a useful approach. After all, if the extra resources available from it are sufficient to make this playstyle work, but a series of standard starts doesn’t, it may provide some food for thought at Firaxis or the modding community. It may well, for example, indicate the need to improve tile yields on standard starts – assuming there’s a desire to make the game more appealing to the builders out there. As an aside BTW, I thought your opening was spot on...settling good cities requires securing good land...and that may indeed require evicting the previous occupant.

You’ve now arrived at a very interesting juncture – and your analysis is very welcome IMHO. That said, I think it perfectly illustrates the difficulties of building large, infrastructure heavy cities in Civ 5, given the happiness mechanic.

IMHO, there are two paths that you can take to help (and indeed, you may end up combining them to some degree, as I mention in the last paragraph). The simplest approach is to scale back the number of large cities settled. Indeed, given the shape of the landmass you’re on, it has some merit IMHO as a common sense solution.

That said, there is another path to take, because there are things that can be done to help get you the happiness you need to maintain 10 large cities. The most obvious option in this case is to build a circus in those cities which have access to ivory or horses (such as Onondaga), for another three happiness. Of course, a circus costs three maintenance per turn in gold, so the solution’s not without cost.

Another option that I can see is to look to social policies for help. Meritocracy (in the liberty tree) for instance, fits in very nicely IMHO with what we’re trying to achieve here, since it provides a happiness boost from all cities connected to the capital with a trade route. Planned economy will reduce unhappiness to help too – and it has the benefit of being in the order policy tree which boosts building production, and (if socialism is adopted) helps to lower maintenance costs. The order policy tree also dovetails nicely with wanting biology to unlock hospitals. Protectionism (at the very end of the commerce tree) will also provide a nice boost to happiness, if you do manage to secure access to a large number of luxury resources. There are one or two other policies that can help too – my suggestion FWIW therefore, is to have a think about what social policies your empire will need.

Of course, thinking about what social policies to adopt (and which ones you’ll have to forgo in exchange) is only part of the choice. There are also other issues to consider, such as how to manage the timing of city settlement and the adoption of social policy, given that settling more cities will make subsequent social policies more expensive. In addition, your desired social policy path has implications for how you decide to unlock the tech tree (and vice versa). In my experience, large empires make for some particularly tough choices...and learning which ones work best is precisely why Roxlimn’s idea to start this thread was a great one IMHO!

FWIW, I’d therefore proceed in your game by having a think about which social policies you want to adopt - and how that influences your tech path and the timing with which you settle your cities. Make the right choices and you could well unlock the builder potential of Civ 5, which many (like me) are currently also trying to do. All that said, let’s not forget the over-riding principle here: Civ 5 is meant to be fun. So, if you need to adjust the various guidelines and, say, settle a city or two less than ten, then common sense suggests that’s what you should do IMHO. At the very least, I hope these playthroughs will clarify for us all what is possible in Civ 5 – and if it turns out that the targets we’ve set are unachievable, the builders among us can always bring any issues these games raise to the attention of Firaxis or the modding community to make Civ 5 fun for all of us, builders and warmongers alike.

EDIT: Just another thought...wonders like The Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame will help with happiness too.

 

[Slowpoke]

Part of a byproduct of the Mega Mod I made is allowing end game to have large cities. You're still stuck small until you get theatres, though.

But with vanilla... I'd honestly say ghandi's the way to go for lots of 20 size cities. Admittedly with other civs you get early benefits, but man late game happiness buildings are really inefficient. Skipping theatres is a major plus.

 

[pi-r8]

Legendary start is a good idea for this type of game. I don't blame you at all for rushing the enemy capital either, I think you would have probably had to duke it out with him eventually. However... you're going to run into some difficulty now.

Looking at your land, none of your cities has a good source of freshwater. The best is Onondaga, with 3 riverside grasslands, and I guess Shanghai can expand to claim 3 also. However, 3 isn't really enough for fast growth, and Guangzhou and Beijing don't have ANY. I guess Beijing gets extra food from maritime states (lucky that you have 3) but Guangzhou will grow very slowly until you get fertilizer. You might be better off just keeping it small, and using it only to work trading posts.

Speaking of city states... Sidon and Singapore both have good land, with the potential to grow very big. Low production, though. Have you considered conquering them? You should at least settle another city northwest of Sidon to use the freshwater and hills there.

Overall though, I don't think this land is good for making cities. Despite all the grassland, the lack of freshwater/hills combination sites just makes things impossible. You'll probably have to beeline fertilizer, if you really want to put in 10 size 20 cities here. Honestly I think you guys should give up on making 10 big cities, at least not unless you want to first clear out your whole continent with a horsemen rush. There just isn't enough good land to feed 10 big cities in a normal continent.

 

[eric_]

Re: using smaller cities to support your economy, I just posted an idea along those lines in this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=392886&page=2

Basically, it's a variation on ICS that you could maybe call "urban center strategy" or "suburban strategy" where you have clusters of 3 - 5 cities, with a core city of each cluster focusing on a central need of the empire (production, gold, culture, or, in this case, food). The others in the cluster would be placed to grab near-ish resources, with population kept low other than maybe one per cluster (if not less) to work trading posts if/as necessary.

Benefits would be that all cities in a cluster could share some production tiles for when they need a relevant building, more luxuries can be had without purchasing tiles, road maintenance can be kept down as only selected clustered cities will be connected (say, to connect a luxury, and via short routes), with only the core cities connected directly back to the capital.

 

[Slowpoke]

Re: using smaller cities to support your economy, I just posted an idea along those lines in this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=392886&page=2

Basically, it's a variation on ICS that you could maybe call "urban center strategy" or "suburban strategy" where you have clusters of 3 - 5 cities, with a core city of each cluster focusing on a central need of the empire (production, gold, culture, or, in this case, food). The others in the cluster would be placed to grab near-ish resources, with population kept low other than maybe one per cluster (if not less) to work trading posts if/as necessary.

Benefits would be that all cities in a cluster could share some production tiles for when they need a relevant building, more luxuries can be had without purchasing tiles, road maintenance can be kept down as only selected clustered cities will be connected (say, to connect a luxury, and via short routes), with only the core cities connected directly back to the capital.

Yeah, that's really hard to micro, though. With maritimes I often find my little cities growing fast even with "production focus/avoid growth" check. Really now, I want to avoid friggin' growing, so stop growing!!!!

 

[eric_]

Yeah...true. Sometimes in that scenario I'll put some citizens on unemployment so they provide a while draining some food (assuming I don't have a viable specialist slot for them).

 

[yanner39]

A little late in the thread, but I thought I'd share my thoughts.

Food and growth is definitely an issue in this game. In my first win, a diplo victory, I had 5 Maritime City-States as allies and I won in the 1800's AD. My capital did not even reach size 20 and I had 7 or 8 cities only and my beaker rate was 591 per turn.

One problem is that I can get some good production later in the game, but early on, I have no desire to waste my hammers on a waay too expensive granary (for what it brings anyways) and watermill.

Also, I have to jump on the "not building all the buildings" bandwagon, simply because the hammers are so scarce, I don't want to waist them on an Armory for example.

To solve this low production problem, especially early, I'd like to be able to finish production of my granary by paying gold to subcontractors at a reduced price. IE put some hammers in and scale back the price as it's being completed.

One thing that would be cool but probably logistically impossible is to transfer food between cities. So say I was 3 or 4 big cities and 8 or 9 small ones, I can transfer some food from the smaller cities when they reach the desired size 4 and moved them to a city that I wish to grow to size 25.

EDIT: Just to say that I find ICS pretty cool but I do find it gets a little boring especially since, again, I'm not building a who bunch of infrastructure. So the I'm just building science or gold, whatever I need at the time.

 

[learner gamer]

Honestly I think you guys should give up on making 10 big cities, at least not unless you want to first clear out your whole continent with a horsemen rush. There just isn't enough good land to feed 10 big cities in a normal continent.

Yeah, this may well be true – and precisely where common sense needs to prevail IMHO. Indeed, it might also help to explain why civvers like me are struggling with this very type of game. Whilst the move to hexes means - in theory at least – that a city should be able to secure more hammers, beakers and / or gold than a Civ 4 city which works fewer tiles in a BFC, it seems IMHO that the combination of map requirements and Civ 5 mechanics is limiting horizontal and vertical growth to the extent that the potential benefits available from working all those hexes, (which I presume played some part in Firaxis’ choice of hammer build costs), isn’t being realised – because the hexes don’t get worked in a network of large cities. I really hope this thread proves me wrong though.

 

[HermannLombard]

I'm sure it's been mentioned 67 times over, but a big boost to this style (well, to almost any style) would be for the "focus" setting to change the AI priorities for choosing new tiles, and make the default setting value production a bit more than it does now (which would be the food focus).

 

[E66man]

Gold: This seems like the biggest problem. Lots of buildings means lots of maintenence. Normally you pay for that with trading posts but... if the cities are already working lots of farms and lots of mines, how can they also work trading posts? You might be able to switch between working mines and working trading posts. But I think the easiest solution would be to designate one city to work nothing but trading posts, and don't build anything there except the gold buildings. They'll take a really long time to build, but that's OK.

If the return rate on trade routes scales upwards based on population, wouldn't Arabia also be a helpful civ, since the high city populations would then be the extreme you can take your cities to in order to max this bonus (the other extreme being ICS)?

 

[E66man]

To solve this low production problem, especially early, I'd like to be able to finish production of my granary by paying gold to subcontractors at a reduced price. IE put some hammers in and scale back the price as it's being completed.

One thing that would be cool but probably logistically impossible is to transfer food between cities. So say I was 3 or 4 big cities and 8 or 9 small ones, I can transfer some food from the smaller cities when they reach the desired size 4 and moved them to a city that I wish to grow to size 25.

It bugs me to no end they dropped the ability to get a cash discount if you try to rush buy a building or unit currently in progress.

Using smaller cities to ship their food to help support one or more massive cities is another feature I miss from previous versions. Another thing to chalk up to the 'let's just take every aspect of the game back to square one' mentality that seems to have been the guiding principle of Civ V.

 

[eric_]

It bugs me to no end they dropped the ability to get a cash discount if you try to rush buy a building or unit currently in progress.

I think it's already so easy to buy things in the game that it makes sense, although I do think you should at least get a portion of the hammers dumped into the next production project.

Using smaller cities to ship their food to help support one or more massive cities is another feature I miss from previous versions.

I think the "urban center" idea I was talking about kind of emulates this. You can use the low-pop "suburb" cities to work necessary resources, freeing up the larger city's population to work food tiles.

 

[City Raider]

I play a lot of games as Washington, and I can certainly say the discount in tile buying is nice. You can usually buy initial tiles for like 35-40 range. Can't remember 3rd ring tiles off hand. I've often planted a city and immediately bought 4 tiles and spent less than 200. Thats without the Social Policy bonus.
I do that on my borader cities to either block off some land to back fill later or prevent the AI from just dropping a city immediately on my boarder.

 

[Roxlimn]

pi-r8:

It's not impossible - it just takes a long time, and you'll probably need to take over some land from the AI. I'm not sure if this necessitates Horseman rushing. I've successfully been able to prosecute normal-looking wars of aggression against the AI to gain more land. It'll definitely push back the schedule, but this doesn't necessarily mean that the game is all but over at that point, if you have runaway AIs on other continents.

That said, 10 cities of size 20 and over is so powerful that it means that you have dominated your own continent, regardless of how you actually got there.

 

[Gaizokubanou]

Roxlimm, you should just post your own emperor/immortal/deity game where you didn't cheese out all the AI near you with warmongering but still stayed competative with science/economy going for big cities before telling others how the game works.

 

[pi-r8]

Yeah, this may well be true – and precisely where common sense needs to prevail IMHO. Indeed, it might also help to explain why civvers like me are struggling with this very type of game. Whilst the move to hexes means - in theory at least – that a city should be able to secure more hammers, beakers and / or gold than a Civ 4 city which works fewer tiles in a BFC, it seems IMHO that the combination of map requirements and Civ 5 mechanics is limiting horizontal and vertical growth to the extent that the potential benefits available from working all those hexes, (which I presume played some part in Firaxis’ choice of hammer build costs), isn’t being realised – because the hexes don’t get worked in a network of large cities. I really hope this thread proves me wrong though.

It's kind of shocking to see just how big a full size city is in this game. If you really wanted to work all available tiles, it takes up a massive chunk of land- 7 tiles across! I think Firaxis really doesn't want you to have more than a few cities like that. Of course you don't really need to work all available tiles, but you do pretty much need all the available hills and freshwater grassland/food tiles.

If the return rate on trade routes scales upwards based on population, wouldn't Arabia also be a helpful civ, since the high city populations would then be the extreme you can take your cities to in order to max this bonus (the other extreme being ICS)?

Arabia just gets a flat+1 bonus/trade route, which doesn't increase with city size. So they're actually best with the ICS strategy. China is much better though, since they effectively get +4 gold/city.

pi-r8:

It's not impossible - it just takes a long time, and you'll probably need to take over some land from the AI. I'm not sure if this necessitates Horseman rushing. I've successfully been able to prosecute normal-looking wars of aggression against the AI to gain more land. It'll definitely push back the schedule, but this doesn't necessarily mean that the game is all but over at that point, if you have runaway AIs on other continents.

That said, 10 cities of size 20 and over is so powerful that it means that you have dominated your own continent, regardless of how you actually got there.

I'd like to see a screenshot of you actually getting 10 cities of size 20. Preferably before the year 2000 . I know it's POSSIBLE, but I want to grow big cities in a reasonable amount of time, so that I can actually do something with that growth.

 

[Roxlimn]

Year 2000? That's most definitely possible. I'm not sure I even have any games that went that long. I think I had a game like that as Songhai - a couple past size 30 and many cities past size 20. Won when I teched Globalization for the UN. The main issue is to have enough time to grow them all, and the gold income. I get production crazy sometimes and have to retro-fit cities into Trade ones so I still get decent gold for buying things.

I believe I've seen a screenie here somewhere with 7 or 8 size 30+ cities. That's what's really impressive. My dinky little game doesn't even come close.