Overlapping Cities?

[6K Man]

Don't think of it as overlapping cities. Think of it as overlapping food.

This.

Food is finite. If you have a city with a LOT of food (say, 4+ food resources), it makes sense to share some of those resources with a second or even a third city. Once the first city grows to its happy cap, you won't want to work all that food, unless you're whipping it (and even then you can grow into unhappiness pretty fast). Rather than avoid working food tiles by your big-enough city, you can use those food tiles to grow other cities.

edit: And moreover - if you have 5 food tiles, you can't work all of them until you grow to size 5, and that takes some time. Better to let a second city work one or 2 of them.

 

[Bibor]

This is the napkin formula I do every time I decide on city placement:
1. What resources is my city grabbing?
2. Does the new city overlap with more than 6 tiles with other cities?
3. Will this city, with all the overlapping, be able to feed itself pre-Biology?
4. Can this city be on a river, be coastal or both? Are the +2 s and/or the harbor buildings worth getting? (for a city I try to be coastal (customs house/harbor), for a production I do like the +2 for heavy industries)
5. If the overlapping is massive (lets say 15 tiles), can this city with 5 working tiles be a good missionary/spy city?
6. Does this city serve a special purpose? To block the AI out, for example?

 

[Acidrain]

If there are special resources to work for a city, I build that city there, does'nt matter if it overlaps with another city.

 

[Roxlimn]

It is not tiles that matter, but population. Land is not power in Civ IV. Population is. Even if you have a huge Civ, if all your cities are 1 pop each, you're going to be steamrolled. With just 8 core cities of exceptional quality, you can rule the world. They don't even need to be using all their tiles.

One of the reasons players win by overlapping cities is because two cities grow population twice as fast, given enough food resources to work. They also grow twice as much population under the same happiness and health limitations, which is an important advantage.

Unlike in earlier iterations of Civilization, using Specialists, even purely for the output and not the GPP, can actually be competitive with working tiles. This means that as long as you have Specialist slots and the food to feed them, your tile footprint and usage doesn't matter as much as it used to.

Harvest your special resources first, prioritizing food. Tiles are prioritized on a case to case basis. Two cities sharing an Iron resource is not a big deal, particularly if neither of them have enough food to leverage that tile effectively, anyway! It'll remain unused between them, and the overlap is moot.