Optimum City Placement

[CivAl]

What pattern do you use for placing cities. Has anyone come up with a better plan than placing cities North, East, South, and West four squares away, and NE, SE, SW, NW five squares away. This gives your capital all 20 squares, and each suburb has 18 squares to work with. Or do you have a different scheme?

 

[Klasanov]

I place them whereever the land grants resources that my citizens could exploit for the better, without trying to get them to overlap too much. Mountains are good, after your workers invest the time in building a mine. Not too many mountains though, the city neeeds food to grow, and hills and mountains don't give much food. Plains are good, after irrigation is brought to it. Sure, it grows slowly, but the shields you get is nice (Besides, it's another city, so there's more production). Grasslands are good, especially with shields, good for commerce. Rivers (I think) are always good, as no aqueduct is required. The only problem is that it can get too crowded too quickly, causing your extremely claustrophobic people to revolt unless you give them some entertainment, which only shuts them up for so long. But for the wealth they bring in, I think it's a good idea.

 

[Corkmaster]

Sticking with any kind of pattern is even less viable in CivIII than in II because of the need to get at resource squares.
Factors I take into account are; rivers, saves a lot of time ifyou dont have to build an aquaduct later.
Making sure that at least one or two of my first few cities has good food production so I can churn out settlers and workers as soon as possible. This is vital and basically mens grassland especially as irrigation is not much use until Monarchy (which I dont bother with) or Republic comes aong.
Building out in the direction of resources (especially luxuries in the early game) and choke points.
Trying to get sites that gives a mixture of grassland and hills etc. I try and put as many cities as possible on the border between different types of terrain. Not always possible or course.
I will leave gaps or overlap by 2, 3 or 4 squares if neccessary to fit in with terrain.
If I do leave a gap I try and make it a reasonably large one so I can fit a small city/town in later.

 

[jimmytrick]

If you lay out cities on a grid of 5 tiles horizontally, vertically, and diagonally you will see that this leaves "holes" of 4 tiles at the corners. Try laying this out on a piece of paper and you will see what I mean.

Placing "specialist towns" in these holes has its advantages.

These specialist towns can be temporary in nature and are best used for production of workers, settlers and troops, and need no improvements save possibly a granary and or a barracks, based on your wishes.

Defensively, building these towns and putting in roads gives you the ability to reinforce anywhere quickly

If you can place your palace in the center of a land mass this config can give you eight permanent cities and four temps within 5 squares of your palace and still cover a lot of territory and potential resources.

Of course you have to vary this because of terrain but I try to use this as a framework.

 

[Ironikinit]

Here's an old discussion on the topic. I attached an image that shows how I go about it. I think my method is somewhat similar to CivAl's.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16158

 

[BillChin]

I like to build my first two cities very close to the capital. One square away on the diagonal, or two squares away on the straight. A new wrinkle in this scheme is to disband the capital to get a free palace jump to a more central location and to relieve overlapping tiles at the start.

The early dense build makes for easy defense, and a huge early production and research boost. Disbanding the capital is an excellent strategy for peninsula starts or coastal starts on a large land mass. Even if I do not disband, the strategy is sound when a player needs to get going quickly (hostile neighbors) or open land is not available.

 

[rdomarat]

I took Bill's dense build strategy to an extreme one game (Regent, Small Map, Continents, 80% water) when I found myself all alone on a roughly 60-tile island, which was about 80% jungle. You can squeeze in maybe 6 cities without getting much overlap, but I packed in about fifteen cities on the island by going one on the diagonal or three on the straight when founding my next city, ignoring the fact that I was palcing cities in the middle of the jungle. I built worker after worker, and didn't even bother building more than a warrior in each city. Eventually, the jungle was cleared, and I had pretty decent production out of all the cities. By the time I'd researched the tech to sail the seas, I figured I'd be eons behind in the tech race, but I was even with all the other civs by the time I made contact. My production was almost twice what any of the other civs had at the time, which was evident by the equal tech levels without the benefit of trading. I started building my defensive force and assault force and eventually got a pretty substantial beach head on another land mass (much to the dismay of the millions of innocent French citizens burned to death as I marched over their once proud lands).

The cities on my starting island wouldn't grow past 9 or 10, so as a long term strategy, dense build isn't a great idea, but once I'd established myself on the other land mass, I shipped a whole bunch of workers over to one of my new cities, got it up to size 12 (no foreign nationals) and disbanded my capitol, so I could jump the palace to the new land mass while I kept the forbidden palace in the middle of the initial island. I eventually disbanded about half of my initial cities. This provided me with enough settlers to found new cities over the ashes of the razed cities on the new land mass as my armies continued to march over the French, German and English lands.

The early dense build made my civ almost unstopable even with the less than optimal starting location. I was like a man among boys when I first made contact with the other civs.

Reg

 

[Beard Rinker]

Optimal city placement really boils down to what you want to do with the game.

If you are playing to win, and win by the widest margin possible, there is no question that dense city placement is the best strategy. This is the quickest way to build out and have the production capacity to field an army. I would even argue that the size limits on dense cities is an advantage, not a disadvantage. There are less problems with unhappyness, fewer of the expensive city improvements are required, less pollution, and fewer shields lost in production overruns.

On the other hand, if your priorities are not just winning then optimal city placement depends on your personal preference. The thread referenced above by Ironikinit contains a city placement pattern I drew out. This placement pattern gives 100% land coverage with minimal overlap. Although this allows all cities to grow to their maximum potential while not wasting land, it is certainly not the optimal placement for winning a game.