Settling decision based on water levels?

[Sherlock]

The 'settler overlay' shows you what tiles have water. There's rich green (best) light green (ok) and light gray (no water).

Do you pay attention to this? Does it make much difference? I always try to settle on the greenest tile and it's really hard to find good spots to start a city that have yields/resources AND water.

Any thoughts on this?

 

[Archon_Wing]

It's pretty important early game since completely dry cities take forever to grow and thus do nothing.

But once Magnus rolls around, any spot can become viable if you just gather resources to grow cities and build districts.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

The 'settler overlay' shows you what tiles have water. There's rich green (best) light green (ok) and light gray (no water).

Do you pay attention to this? Does it make much difference? I always try to settle on the greenest tile and it's really hard to find good spots to start a city that have yields/resources AND water.

Any thoughts on this?

First couple of cities, yes, I think it matters in order to get your pop boosted early.

After that, more often than not you'll do better arranging your cities to fit as many as possible into your available space. There are lots of ways to get enough Housing to get any city up to size 10 for the Rationalism boost, regardless of starting Housing from water.

 

[AmazonQueen]

I always plan out my cities on rivers first and then look at where there are valuable resources I'm missing or big gaps another civ will probably try and settle, and fill in.

 

[Socrates99]

It often does influence how I settle my empire. I even try to settle where I have the option to build aquaducts. It's a long time before neighborhoods show up so settling where I can get decent pop early on helps a lot.

 

[schondette]

I do. Its too much of a bonus not too in the beginning of the game. Its a pretty bad mechanic to be honest because it makes settling so one dimensional. instead of being seen as a bonus for settling on fresh water, it is really a penalty for NOT settling on fresh water. because its effects are rather immediate unlike in civ 5 where not settling on a river/fw meant you didn't get certain buildings later in the game. id prefer that.

aquaducts come too late in the game where your usually only left with second hand settling sites. indicative of another bigger issue of the game where the AI aggressively settle the entire map in like 30 turns

 

[Disgustipated]

Only with Rome might I consider something different. With Rome you really should be building baths. Who turns down +1 amenity at half price? Otherwise I feel like I'm doing something wrong when I settle in gray. It's either coast or fresh water for me.

 

[row2infinity]

I settle on rivers, then coast, then fill in the gray for max # of cities in my claimed land area (usually involves my original capital vicinity and the area of 1 or 2 nearby civs I cleared out prior to warmongering penalties becoming too much of an issue. In some cases I will settle on coast before I've settled as much as I can on rivers so I can get some coastal cities up and running to start working on naval dominance.

 

[Halcyan2]

Rivers are the best. Fresh water + Watermill. I always prioritize these.

Next up are Lakes. Fresh water but no Watermills.

And last of all is Coast.

I rarely bother with Aqueducts. Other than one for Angkor Wat. I usually have better things to build. And by the time I have the ability to consider one, I figure I can just wait longer for Neighborhoods which produce more housing for the tile.

One special mention is Mohenjo-Daro. If this city state is in the game, then I may consider settling a non-optimal site because later on it will get the fresh water bonus.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

One special mention is Mohenjo-Daro. If this city state is in the game, then I may consider settling a non-optimal site because later on it will get the fresh water bonus.

That's good advice if you want to have large cities. If you want to max out your civilization's productivity, though, I'd avoid Mohenjo-Daro and manage your cities' housing to get all of them up to 10 Population and no more (maybe let one go to 15 if you have the amenities and want the era score) and Ecstatic status for the +10% boost to Science and Culture (and all other yields). You can do that without fresh water, which is really only critical for your first couple of cities, which you need to grow fast and have no other cities to help them. After that, its typically better to keep your cities under a tight rein, until you have sufficient amenities to support growth. You can do that through managing the tiles the Population works, but managing the increase in the city's Housing is less work, in my opinion.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I always pay attention to water, because I like to have at least semi-historical city placement, and NO ancient city started away from water: river, coast, oasis, lake, they were requirements.
On the other hand, the Aqueduct comes much, much too late in the game. At Tech: Engineering it is a second-tier Classical Era Technology, which puts in the historical 1 - 500 CE time frame, and Rome was building Aqueducts several hundred years before that, Nineveh had stone aqueducts in the 7th century BCE, and Mohenjo-Daro had civic water supply almost a thousand years before that (I don't think they've been able to find out whether they were masonry or excavated systems, though). Point is, the Aqueduct should come a lot earlier in the game. I would even argue as early as Tech: Masonry, which would give us all some serious decisions to make as to which Districts we wanted to make room for early on...

 

[Halcyan2]

I always pay attention to water, because I like to have at least semi-historical city placement, and NO ancient city started away from water: river, coast, oasis, lake, they were requirements.
On the other hand, the Aqueduct comes much, much too late in the game. At Tech: Engineering it is a second-tier Classical Era Technology, which puts in the historical 1 - 500 CE time frame, and Rome was building Aqueducts several hundred years before that, Nineveh had stone aqueducts in the 7th century BCE, and Mohenjo-Daro had civic water supply almost a thousand years before that (I don't think they've been able to find out whether they were masonry or excavated systems, though). Point is, the Aqueduct should come a lot earlier in the game. I would even argue as early as Tech: Masonry, which would give us all some serious decisions to make as to which Districts we wanted to make room for early on...

Think of it more in terms of pacing for the Housing game feature.

Ancient Era: Granary +2
Classical Era: Aqueduct +2
Industrial Era: Sewer +2
Late Industrial Era: Neighborhood +2 to +6

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Think of it more in terms of pacing for the Housing game feature.

Ancient Era: Granary +2
Classical Era: Aqueduct +2
Industrial Era: Sewer +2
Modern Era: Neighborhood +2 to +6

The problem being that the pacing is neither uniform nor accurate:
Granary comes at Tech: Pottery - 25 Science required - Early Ancient Era
Aqueduct comes at Tech: Engineering - 200 Science Required - Late Classical Era
And then nothing for two Eras, despite the fact that Leonardo da Vinci (and other early Italian 'engineers') was planning sewage treatment facilities during the Renaissance and both Rome and Babylon had sewage facilities ('Cloaca Maxima') during the early Classical Era.
Sewer at Tech: Sanitation - 970 Science required - Late Industrial Era
Neighborhood at Civic: Urbanization, requiring 1060 Culture and actually labeled as a (Late) Industrial Era Civic, not Modern, and building Neighborhoods (2) is a Eureka for Engineering - the Tech for Sewers.

So, I say again, Aqueduct should be an Early Classical, not Late Classical Tech, and the interaction between Sewer and Neighborhood on the one hand implies that Sewers comes with Neighborhoods (both are 'late' Industrial Era, but the first is from Tech, the second from Civic) on the other hand requires 2 Neighborhoods to 'boost' getting Sewers. It's confused, to say the least, but I can live with it because, in fact, it was Urbanization that led directly to modern Sewer systems in Industrial urban complexes like London and Paris. If anything, though, the effects of Sewer Systems and modern Sanitation (Pasteur's Germ Theory and its consequences) are very underrated in the current game: historically, infant mortality rates alone dropped from near 50% to less than 15% within 50 years, even in crowded tenement conditions, and populations in the 'industrial/urban' world soared.

So, I think the best solution without making major changes to the game, would be to move Aqueduct back earlier, and just maybe, if we want to have a faint possibility of building an early Sewer System, have a Great Engineer available in the Classical Era that can build a Sewer for one city, but that's pretty marginal - there are other ways to keep cities growing that don't require so much 'expenditure; for a single purpose.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Like many late game "buildings", Sewers are underpowered for what they cost.

I get the incrementalism built into the game design, but I'd personally prefer more game changing inflection points. Sewers could easily be one of those, doubling the city's total housing, for example, considering how impactful they were on overall urbanization levels. Or maybe doubling the impact of just Neighbourhoods, if you wanted to keep those districts relevant (still need to deal with the relative unimportance of higher population levels though).

Alternatively, Sewers (and Neighbourhoods) could both add Housing and Amenities. Maybe Sewers give +2 Housing, +4 Amenities, while Neighbourhoods give +2/+6 Housing, +2 Amenities. Getting both Housing and Amenities at the same time would better reflect the overall impact of these additions to city life, result in a bigger immediate pop boom, make the extra population more supportable (and therefore more productive), and provide a better return on investment for their cost.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Like many late game "buildings", Sewers are underpowered for what they cost.

Alternatively, Sewers (and Neighbourhoods) could both add Housing and Amenities. Maybe Sewers give +2 Housing, +4 Amenities, while Neighbourhoods give +2/+6 Housing, +2 Amenities. Getting both Housing and Amenities at the same time would better reflect the overall impact of these additions to city life, result in a bigger immediate pop boom, make the extra population more supportable (and therefore more productive), and provide a better return on investment for their cost.

Amenities for Sewers and sewer systems makes perfect sense: quite simply, you cannot live - and stay alive - in a city without a sewer system of some kind, as the modern 'mega-cities' and their slums are proving and Rome could have told them in 600 BCE!

On the other hand, Neighborhoods do not necessarily give Amenities: throwing up tenements (or Roman Insulae) gives you Housing, but it doesn't intrinsically do anything to make that housing attractive.
Suggestion: Neighborhoods in attractive enough locations also give Amenities.
So, a Neighborhood in Charming or Breathtaking tiles gives, respectively, +1 or +2 Amenities in addition to the extra Housing: people will pay big bucks for the view, or Ocean Front, or clifftop high above the clamor of the city...

Neighborhood might also need a rework of its Buildings, because right now, 1 each Food Market and Shopping Mall in a city no matter how big giving a whopping +3 Food or +1 Amenity, respectively, are a total waste of the time and effort it takes to build them. To take a leaf out of European and Asiatic cities as well as just American, I suggest Neighborhoods could have for:
Additional Food:
Street Market (Industrial Era)
Super Market (Atomic Era)
Additional Amenities:
Neighborhood Park/Biergarten (Industrial Era)
Shopping Mall (Atomic Era)

Another possibility, if there is only going to be one 'Neighborhood' building allowed per city, have the amount of Food or Amenities produced by, say, the current Food Market or Shopping Mall not be fixed, but based on the number of Neighborhoods in the city - say, +1 Amenity per Neighborhood from the Mall and +2 Food per Food Market, so it scales at least a bit with city size.

 

[Scaramanga]

I never settle on No Fresh Water unless there's a mountain or fresh water source one tile away and that tile does not have an unremovable resource on it.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I never settle on No Fresh Water unless there's a mountain or fresh water source one tile away and that tile does not have an unremovable resource on it.

This should probably be one of the Ten Commandments of Civ VI

 

[BarbarianHunter]

I never settle on No Fresh Water unless there's a mountain or fresh water source one tile away and that tile does not have an unremovable resource on it.

This should probably be one of the Ten Commandments of Civ VI

If there is anything I've learned about Civ6, it is THOU SHALT NOT HAVE COMMANDMENTS
*Unless you:
1. Immediately buy a granary.
2. Just won an EMERGENCY and can buy builders, create farms, & immediately raise the housing cap.
3. Have unlocked the science for a perpetual motion machine (golden age monumentality + Goddess of the Harvest) and can transform the landscape giving you an 8+ population city w/ abundant housing with neither an aqueduct or fresh water access.
4. Don't want more population at present as your amenities are already stretched enough.
5. Are the suzerain of Mohenjo Daro

 

[liv]

Yeah I agree. There are many reasons to not care about the water level when you settle. Maybe you want that first city to get easy growth but after than it is not that crucial

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

If there is anything I've learned about Civ6, it is THOU SHALT NOT HAVE COMMANDMENTS
*Unless you:
1. Immediately buy a granary.
2. Just won an EMERGENCY and can buy builders, create farms, & immediately raise the housing cap.
3. Have unlocked the science for a perpetual motion machine (golden age monumentality + Goddess of the Harvest) and can transform the landscape giving you an 8+ population city w/ abundant housing with neither an aqueduct or fresh water access.
4. Don't want more population at present as your amenities are already stretched enough.
5. Are the suzerain of Mohenjo Daro

The fact remains, at the Start of the Game, the more options you have the better, because you can only see a couple of tiles in all directions and have little or no idea What is waiting for you. Having water gives you Options, not having water limits your options until you can Build or Add things.
Everything you say is applicable later in the game, and there a host of other considerations tactical, economic, and strategic come into play besides or in addition to Water Availability. But at the start, at your first city, which is what I was referring to (and my apologies for not making that explicit), you just don't know what will be important in the next 20 - 25 turns.