Yes I am one of those people that are more concerned with production efficiency than aesthetics. I often build several early cities with overlapping fat crosses so they can help my capital and big commerce cities work up their cottages. Sometimes I go back and fill in the gaps between big cities with smaller cities that I use to whip out missionaries or catapults and then use them as drafting engines. A few grassland and plains farms is all a drafting city needs.I like to maximise the usage of tiles under my control including second rate tiles like plains and coastal sea that most players ignore. That allows me to extract all the commerce and hammers earlier than otherwise while city size is limited by happiness and health. For instance where you might build 4 perfect cities I might build 8 cities, 4 good cities that use basically the same high quality resources as yours and 4 second rate helper cities that get second call on any resources and work the left over tiles. While happiness or health is a limitation the second rate cities thrive and help my empire develop quickly by whipping out troops while the good cities concentrate more on building their infrastructure and producing commerce and GPPs. As the game progresses and technologies, trading and my conquests raise the happiness and health the good cities grow at the expense of the helper cities.
It is not a pretty development strategy but it sure is a powerful way to start a game where you are going for domination.
