Optimizing Hansa Placement

[Ganraeln]

I've been puzzling over the best way to place Germany's Hansa districts. I've seen talk on the forums here about pairing them up in a diamond shape along with two commercial districts. This appears to work pretty well, but I'm also thinking that placing these where they're in range (6 hexes) of as many other city centers as possible is also ideal.

So, here's an interesting puzzle.

I'm assuming that 4 intervening hexes between city centers is ideal (i.e., they're 5 hexes apart). In the picture below, the city centers are reddish in color, the commercial hubs are yellow, and the Hansas are green. Each Hansa is placed so that it's adjacent to two commerce hubs (generating 4 cogs) AND is in range of 4 city centers (providing 7 cogs to each of the 4 cities, for a total of 28 cogs).

The city center in the middle doesn't have a hansa or commerce district yet. Where do YOU place it?

 

[jollywonk]

Hopefully the city in the center is your capital, and you place the Hansa right next to it so that it hits every other city settled at min-distance.

You can almost always get +5 in your capital from 3 resources and a commercial hub, and if you pair it with your city center and another district of your choice, you're at +6. Then you get to Guilds and double that to +12.

 

[scrapking]

Its not what you have shown there. (The German Wheel)

All cities are at 4 hexes (min distance) from center city, straight line as you show.

A ring with a radius of 2 hexes from the center city, alternating Hansa / Comm. Centers, but with the Hansas on the same lines as the cities are. This allows for the center city, your capitol, to place its Hansa next to 3 total CCs (including its own)

There is an obstacle to this, and a trick to getting past it - as cities expand and you build the ring, your center city has to own hexes outside the ring or it will become trapped from building / improving / working anything for itself outside the ring. Additional obstacles to creating a German Wheel are Luxes / Strat resources which cannot be built on, and of course mountain / lake terrain.

The advantages are that every city in the "wheel" gets the benefit of every other Hansa. It also makes the most of a relatively small area of the map. It can be defended much easier in a war because of minimized borders / entry points. Its also extremely pleasing to your OCD.

The disadvantages are limits to pop growth / size (though you can still grow high teen pops) and potential Lux exposure limitations. The biggest disadvantage is that 1 nuke essentially ends your game, though I'm not sure that getting nuked is ever an especially survivable event.

 

[Skylark2009]

Here's a turn 1 save for Germany, where I've used map pins to mark a potential three city hub which contains three Hansa and three Commercial Hubs giving each other some very good adjacency bonuses.

I was intending to put this up as a potential starter map in the customisation forum, but it would fit here just as equally well, given the thread title.


https://forums.civfanatics.com/atta...5/?temp_hash=15b8116b69ca9d2f079b9eef35cc64fa



Nothing has been done except part of the map is revealed (with one city state found).

There are some very good adjacency bonuses here if following the layout.

Commercial next to river (+2 gold)
Hansa next to commercial (x2) and two resources each.

City #2 has two sweet spots for a campus (+3) or holy district (+3) bonuses.

 

[Zanaku]

So out of curiosity, because i'm a noob, what happens next? I assume in most games you have more than those 3 cities so how does the "german wheel" actually look? cause based on the picture above, that looks super optimized for 3 cities but after those cities, is it not possible to create district clusters or whatever?

Based on what I've been hearing so far, You would probably settle a 4th city along the river above the capital and at minimum distance (4 tiles)? then how would you place those districts etc. Then I would be looking at eventually getting a city to the left along the river and maybe another farther left to get dyes. Also a city along the river to the right to grab the Tea.

I guess I'm just confused because the 3 city hansa/commercial hub district placement looks great. I just wouldn't know how to proceed with district placement afterwards and for future cities

 

[Jarms48]

You just build another cluster of 2-4 cities, and pre-plan your hanza/commerce districts accordingly. Playing super wide isn't that penalizing so there's almost no negative to just making new clusters.

 

[krakow2000]

Picture from first post... with this cluster capital city will get 7x factory bonus rest will get 4 factory bonus... if you put hansa connected to central city. Or city got limit bonus :>

 

[Ganraeln]

Its not what you have shown there. (The German Wheel)

All cities are at 4 hexes (min distance) from center city, straight line as you show.

A ring with a radius of 2 hexes from the center city, alternating Hansa / Comm. Centers, but with the Hansas on the same lines as the cities are. This allows for the center city, your capitol, to place its Hansa next to 3 total CCs (including its own)

There is an obstacle to this, and a trick to getting past it - as cities expand and you build the ring, your center city has to own hexes outside the ring or it will become trapped from building / improving / working anything for itself outside the ring. Additional obstacles to creating a German Wheel are Luxes / Strat resources which cannot be built on, and of course mountain / lake terrain.

The advantages are that every city in the "wheel" gets the benefit of every other Hansa. It also makes the most of a relatively small area of the map. It can be defended much easier in a war because of minimized borders / entry points. Its also extremely pleasing to your OCD.

The disadvantages are limits to pop growth / size (though you can still grow high teen pops) and potential Lux exposure limitations. The biggest disadvantage is that 1 nuke essentially ends your game, though I'm not sure that getting nuked is ever an especially survivable event.

I considered that. I've found that in practice (so far), I end up varying the distance and position of my cities for other reasons, such as:

• Rivers help growth so much that settling next to them overrides my OCD.
• Mountains, desert, and other impassable terrain will interfere.

I've come to the conclusion (thus my original post) that the raw production boost (from district adjacencies) of the Hansa is less important than it's position relative to other city centers. Getting a Hansa down in position to add even 1 more city center will outweigh any value you might get from district adjacency bonuses - the additional city center will gain 7 cogs, while the owning city might lose 1 or 2.

I'm still wondering if the loss of workable hexes and population outweighs the overlapping Hansa bonuses gained from "ideal" city placement of 4 hexes.

 

[jollywonk]

I'm still wondering if the loss of workable hexes and population outweighs the overlapping Hansa bonuses gained from "ideal" city placement of 4 hexes.

Perhaps one way to think about is if you only allow each city to have their own 2-ring circle, that is 18 tiles. You'll spend the majority of the game housing-capped around, what, 11-13 population? And at 11 pop as Germany you can build 6 districts, which is nearly all of them in the mid-game.

So 18 tiles - 6 tiles for districts leaves 12 tiles for your population to work. Not every tile out of those 12 will be fantastic, but it's generally enough for your population to work, and the only advantage to going out farther is optimizing perhaps 2-3 tiles and providing more space for late-game population. At least as Germany, I would rather optimize early adjacency bonuses than worry about space for late-game population.

 

[WideCoast]

Whats OCD?
Also does mapsize affect the min.distance in which you can settle? Since afaik it's 3tiles between the cities and the OP has 4 in the pic.

 

[gatorsurgeon]

I like the OPs setup, and in my last game on immortal I was able to place 7 cities in this exact pattern and place the Hansas/CDs almost exactly as he did, with Hansa for capital reaching all 6 others as discussed. Once the factories got online I just lapped the field. Spacing the cities with 4 tiles in between instead of 3 gives you a bit more flexibility to avoid having districts on top of resources, etc. This is a very powerful setup, and would be so with any civ. Germany is just going to get it a tad bit faster.

 

[WideCoast]

True, but wouldn't each Hansa get more cities in range with just the 3tiles in between? Even if they stay in place and you just move the cities.
You do eat tiles from cap that way, but atleast one more city gets in range of every Hansa(xept capitol) =12miness worth of cogs?

 

[gatorsurgeon]

Good point re. Factories reaching more cities. The only issue to me is that with a ring that close, you really are cramped in terms of where exactly to put your districts. I personally don't want to be putting districts down on top of luxury resources, etc.

 

[Victoria]

I always place my factories based on my cities rather than my cities based on my factories.
Seems to work better that way but a thread for optimal is I guess what this forum does.

 

[joncnunn]

I always place my factories based on my cities rather than my cities based on my factories.
Seems to work better that way but a thread for optimal is I guess what this forum does.

I would agree. At most IZ adjacency bonuses is a tiebreaker for when multiple factories spots would benefit the same number of cities.
And so consequently for Hansa, the Commercial Districts would end up the ones possibly being relocated vs a standard Industrial District instead of the Hansa.

 

[WideCoast]

Good point re. Factories reaching more cities. The only issue to me is that with a ring that close, you really are cramped in terms of where exactly to put your districts. I personally don't want to be putting districts down on top of luxury resources, etc.

Can you even put them on luxes? I don't think it's that bad if you have the room to put them like that, but then again if coast and whatnot eats half of that pictures tiles and prevents you from even placing more than 4 of those cities I'd put them a bit further apart( learned that the hard way ) Also if you move the Hansas one tile to the "middle"(and the cities are 3tiles apart) you get overlap with every city(if my eyes&brain don't fail me this early), which starts to beat pretty much anything you might get by moving the cities one tile away imo and getting few tiles more to work. THought it's a lategame bonus so you sometimes might want to do that, but if theres that much difference with the tiles as in the OP's pic I'd go for it.

 

[FurballRocker]

Can you even put them on luxes?

I have settled cities on luxuries and received the luxury and also discovered strategic resources under my already build districts and received the strategic resource so from those 2 cases i would assume you can but have not specifically tried it as it has never been a consideration in any of my games.

 

[Victoria]

I believe if you place district over a lux it is destroyed.
The strategic resource appearing under was not a choice you could have been part of so I guess you get the benefit of the doubt.

 

[Browd]

I have settled cities on luxuries and received the luxury and also discovered strategic resources under my already build districts and received the strategic resource so from those 2 cases i would assume you can but have not specifically tried it as it has never been a consideration in any of my games.

I believe if you place district over a lux it is destroyed.
The strategic resource appearing under was not a choice you could have been part of so I guess you get the benefit of the doubt.

If you placed a district on a luxury resource, you must have been playing a modded game, because you cannot do that in the unmodded game. The district does not destroy the luxury -- the luxury blocks placement of the district altogether (and you can't use a builder to remove the luxury either).

You also cannot place a district on an exposed strategic resource -- you can place a district on a tile that has no exposed strategic resource before the you unlokc the tech that exposes that resource, in which case you do get that resource for your empire.

 

[Victoria]

Ikr