Small cities, small armies, what am I doing wrong?

[Cyric_74]

I usually place on Prince, world size just above standard, and usually manage to do all right, as long as I don't get in any wars. I end up being middle of the pack score wise.

I've noticed though, while my best cities have sizes of 12-14 (late game) at the high end, the computer has tons of cities 15-20 sized.
I usually have a small army of workers, but I have them all automated. Are they not building enough farms? They seem to do a pretty good mix.

Also, they only way I can survive is by keeping a very limited army. I just don't seem to have the resoucres the other civs have, no matter how many cities I have.

My civ and and computer civ each have 5 cities, and we go to war, somehow the computer civ is able to come at me with 10-20 units to my 3. How do I build reasonable size armies and still maintain building my city buildings?

 

[ivj]

In my experience, when you let AI manage your cities, it balances food/production in a way that your city simply cannot grow any further after a certain point (which's usually around 12).

When I want to make large cities (20+), which I would use to create lots of specialist, I usually find a spot with a lot of food around it (talking flood plains, fish/crab) and built it there, with all the approporiate imporvements. I set "emphasize growth" in the city menu, and that city usually develops to 20 pretty quickly (add Lighthouse and granary improvements too). After that, I set a buch of scientists/engineers in that city, and it starts pumping out Great People like crazy (especially, if I'm philosophical).

Other than those specialized cities, normal cities shouldn't grow past 15-18.

If you're picking crappy spots for your cities, no matter how hard you try, they won't grow much.