Regional borders within empires

[Tomice]

I have two related questions:

1) In Civ4, did you miss the feature to see the "actual" fatcross borders between cities that overlap? I found it most annoying that you didn't easily see which tiles belonged to which city. I also missed the ability to easily tell which tiles are within your cultural borders, but are outside your fatcrosses and therefore unworkable.
Has anyone an idea how this will be managed in Civ5? I couldn't tell from the screenshots (it seems you don't see which tiles are worked by neighbouring cities in the city screen).
Ideally, I'd love to see fat imperial borders and thin lines within them to distinguish provinces, like in an actual map, with an option to switch it off.

2) In Civ5, will there be tiles within your empire that are not workable by any city? It seems to me they got rid of this completely. Since there are irregular forms of provinces instead of fatcrosses now, all overlapping issues should be gone now, shouldn't they?

City screen from screenshots section:
http://www.civfanatics.com/gallery/files/1/e3_2010_civ5_c_original.jpg

 

[Shirastro]

If its so hard for you to see the tiles just turn the grid on

I have no problem seeing what tile belongs to what city.

 

[Schuesseled]

1) build a settler, select settler, look around, the fatcrosses are displayed in perfect detail.

 

[Tomice]

Yes, an Yes. Those are the two methods I used to help myself.

Nevertheless, the settler method doesn't show where the overlapping tiles belong, and the graphic is so bold that it covers everything. And it's totally unpractical, because when I'm unsure what improvement to build on a tile with my worker, traditional counting is faster than switching to an idle settler.

You never had this problem in crowded areas (usually conquered from the AI) having to count and check all the time if a tile belongs to your production or cottage city? Or to find the one unused tile inbetween to build a fort?

Maybe it's just me, maybe the average civfanatic has done that so often that he doesn't even have the slightest effort

 

[Shiggs713]

1) No not really. I usually am very vigorous when it comes to city placement, so they usually work out great. After that if some overlap, I will just go into city view and set them up how I want them. Its not too hard for me to visualize the fat cross anyways, but I guess it could be helpful. Even if it was poorly placed AI cities that I conquered, its still not hard to go into each city view and give them the tiles you want them to have so long as they are within the fat cross.

2) I would guess it is possible, but probably not advisable usually unless you were reaching out to get a resource or block an enemy from getting access to an area. I mean if you have a city with no adjacent cities, and its culture reaches out 4-5 tiles would those tiles be workable? I don't even know for sure how far you can extend out from the city, but it seems likely to me that yes, there will be tiles within your lands that the cities cannot work at some point.

 

[Tylerryan79]

I used the bug mod, they have that neat BFC city placement tool. Also after a while counting 2 out 3 wide in each direction becomes second nature. I do think that civ v will take some getting used to, and it would be great if they included a tool for city placement in vanilla, like they have in the bug mod.

 

[Tomice]

concerning Question #2:

To me it seems that in Civ5, if you have a lonely city without neighbours, it would rather quickly spread its culture to all useful ressorces within a distance of 3 tiles. If you want to access horses or oil 4 tiles away, you would need to build more cities.

Unworkable tiles within my borders always seemed wrong to me, especially between densely populated areas. if they kicked the fatcross to avoid all overlapping issues, why would they keep such an unclear concept? Asymetric city shapes are such a nice way to get completely rid of this, as you can more easily reach ressources on small peninsulas and the like, which where a nuisance in civ 4, since you often had a hard time finding a somewhat useful place for the city/fatcross.

 

[Tylerryan79]

I believe it's been said that cities can work tiles 3 out in all directions. It will look more like a circle than a bfc.

I am assuming that a city will grow to the 3 tiles out, the same way in civ iv your city starts as a square the grows to the cross. After the initial growth, the borders would then start to spread towards the horse, and you could speed it up buy buying a tile. You do know that you don't have to have a resource in your citys workable tiles to use it, but only in your cultural borders, with either a fort or an improvement and roads built on it.

Also overlap isn't really a problem, you can always go into the city screen, and click on a shared tile, or tiles, to switch what city is working it. This helps if you want to share a food resource to grow one city faster, then switch back to the other city to have it grow. Basicly whatever the situation may call for.

 

[Tomice]

I know the way it was in Civ4. I used the switch in the city screen very often.

My question is whether someone found it unclear and wished it was better visible. I remember it was quite hard to figure out as beginner. But seemingly, it wasn't an issue for the posters so far.
While using workers, I found it annoying to have to go inside the city screen to see where some tiles belong.

I also asked if you think they might have kicked the "within borders, but not workable" concept in favor of assymetric city growth.

 

[Schuesseled]

it can get a little confusing a button to bring up city radius's would be nice.

 

[Decimatus]

I also want province boundaries, but at least in Civ 5 the fat cross is going away. We will no longer have to carefully position our cities so that we don't have that 1-2 tiles of worthless land in the middle of our empire.

Now, all you have to do is count 3 hexes in any direction. There won't be little gaps that are easy to miss. Of course, if you misplace a city now, you will have 3+ tiles that are useless, but it should happen far less often than inprevious Civs.

 

[12agnar0k]

I cant be 100% sure, infact im not , but it looks to me that culture is now locked in with city tile borders or "fat crosses", this means that the culture surrounding a city will be the tiles it has available to work, and this starts off small and is grown with the cities culture or by rushing with gold. So if this is true and thier is no extra culture claiming of tiles other than what has just been described, cities simply wont obtain tiles they cant utilise with culture.

 

[SilentConfusion]

I believe it's been said that cities can work tiles 3 out in all directions. It will look more like a circle than a bfc.

So BFC will stand for Big Fat Circle now. They probably did this to preserve the acronym.

it can get a little confusing a button to bring up city radius's would be nice.

In Civ IV, you can use the "Ins" (Insert) button to open up the nearest city. This actually saves me a lot of time. You may be talking about a tag button similar to the Resource Tags button, though, which shows all city BFCs. In that case we don't have one of those, although it wouldn't be that hard to implement. Even with asymmetrical culture sprawl, they can just outline the workable tiles which are inside your cultural borders. Not sure if we need this feature, but it might be nice.

 

[Schuesseled]

I believe it's been said that cities can work tiles 3 out in all directions. It will look more like a circle than a bfc.

It will look more like a circle because of the change from squares to hexes.

 

[Schuesseled]

So BFC will stand for Big Fat Circle now. They probably did this to preserve the acronym.



In Civ IV, you can use the "Ins" (Insert) button to open up the nearest city. This actually saves me a lot of time. You may be talking about a tag button similar to the Resource Tags button, though, which shows all city BFCs. In that case we don't have one of those, although it wouldn't be that hard to implement. Even with asymmetrical culture sprawl, they can just outline the workable tiles which are inside your cultural borders. Not sure if we need this feature, but it might be nice.

yes like the resource tag, it would have been a nice feature.

 

[Tomice]

Yes, exactly. A deactivatable feature like the ressource tag or the "show grid" option.

But I realize this topic is hard to discuss without knowing in which way tiles "belong" to a city in civ 5. If you look at the screenshot, the inner circle around Rome is obviously worked, along with a few other tiles.
But how shall we know which of the other tiles belong to the two other cities? Do we know from this screen which tiles between Rome and its neighbours are worked by the other cities? If I click between Rome and (let's call it) "Venice", how should I know if I've just taken away Venice's tile? Did I just cause starvation in Venice? Did I just cause auto-rearrangement of workers in Venice? will my wonder take 20 turns longer without warning?

I am also not sure whether all tiles to the west are workable by Rome? I guess yes, they are all within 3 tiles. But could my borders spread further to the west? Or is eachand every tile within my borders workable by some city?

Some screenshots show cities very close together like here:
http://www.civfanatics.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=2905&original=1

Will the upper city be able to work the tiles on the far side of the lower city (southeast of it)? They are within 3 tiles!