Sea tiles and the domination limit

[Svar]

I believe that sea tiles don't count towards the domonation. If that's the case how important is the utilization of those tiles in milking the score? When do you first start to consider the available sea tiles in the placement of a coastal city?

 

[Moonsinger]

Yes, sea tiles don't count! I usually keep an eye on the culture ring of those coastal and border towns from the beginning to make sure that they do not grab any more useless land than they should. Meanwhile, before reaching the domination limit, I build dummy town in the tundra or whatever to grab as much land as possible (which I will disband them later once I reach the domination limit). For these dummy towns, I would rush a cheap library (if my civ is scientific) and let its culture ring to expand wild.

 

[SirPleb]

I don't think there is an absolute answer to how important sea tiles are toward score.

Sea tiles don't count toward domination, and also don't count toward territory score.

But happy citizens working sea tiles do count toward the happy citizen score.

So whenever you can get two coastal tiles plus one sea tile inside your territory, and you can have happy citizens working on all three tiles, the resulting score is equivalent to having two irrigated+railed grasslands.

Reasoning:

2 irrigated+railed grass = 2 territory points + 4 happy citizen points + 2 specialist citizen points = 8

2 coastal = 2 territory points + 4 happy citizen points,
+ 1 sea = 2 happy citizen points = 8 points

A higher ratio of sea to coastal means better score, a lower ratio of sea to coastal means lower score.

On most maps by the time you reach the domination limit there isn't enough "good" land for your average to be as good as irrigated+railed grassland. So I generally figure that any time I can pick up at least one sea tile for each two coastal tiles, I'll come out ahead by doing so.

Some other factors which confuse the situation a bit :

1) Coastal towns generally take longer to grow to full size. They need harbors and they tend to reach maximum size slowly because there isn't a big food surplus during their early growth.

2) Sometimes small islands offer the best potential for getting a lot of sea tiles for relatively few coastal tiles. But it may be difficult or impossible to keep all the citizens happy on such an island because the "happiness load" can't be spread across multiple cities with separate marketplaces. One big city has to work all the tiles, and it won't have a food surplus to produce enough entertainers.

 

[superslug]

On a pangaea, I don't usually find sea tiles worth it. But on continents or archipelago, it can be different.