Still trying to work out city placement, need some help

[Anandre]

Just wanted a quick foreword that these forums are a great read and have helped me learn some neat tricks to get my game up to snuff, especially the SGs. It's amazing to see such a strong community for a game that's as old as Civ IV is.

I just picked up Civ IV a few weeks ago (the first Civ game I've played), and I've started to get a hang of some things, but I'm still lacking in others, especially city placement. I'm currently playing a game as Carthage, on a smallish continent with the Dutch and Incans (assuming at least 2 continents here, picked Shuffle). I have lots of options for commerce/coastal cities, but little in the way of hills for production. The most likely area is in the screenshot, but I can't find a decent spot to place the city. I don't know if I'm trying to be too optimized and wanting to pick up as many hills as I can, but I just don't know how to make this work. This city is still like 2-3 Settlers away, but I'm trying to plan ahead.

I was wondering if someone with a better eye than I could help me find a good spot for a production city. Thanks in advance.

P.S. Sorry for not cropping, my Civ computer is currently disconnected from the Internet (broken wifi adapter ), and I'm just posting this quick from another computer.

P.P.S. Is there a quick and easy way to lay out dotmaps? I do it in Paint by hand, but it's way too tedious.

 

[traius]

While this probably doesn't seem like help, every hill in the picture except for (maybe) the one directly underneath the settler+warrior icons, is a desert hill. Desert hills are just like plain hills, except with -1 production. Another way of putting that is that desert hills are the 4th worst tile in the game, after desert/snow (tie for worst), then un-rivered tundra. This early in the game, (looks like you are settling city 3) the only way to get any real amount of production is slavery. So just make sure the cities you settle get food. Depending on your difficulty and relations with Willem and Huayna, simply settling the gold/floodplains/copper (by going one east of the mountain) will allow you to make a lot of commerce. Alternatively, that corn directly below your cities is going unused, and settling there might be better. It's hard to say without knowing the difficulty (and what is to the west of the corn). The lower the difficulty it is, the more you can get away with far-flung expansions (and thus can expand to the gold without worries), due to both cheaper maintenance and easier to handle barbs.
As for the dot-maps, I just use "alt+s" which allows you to write notes on any tile. I personally only ever write the message "h," for "here" which either means settle here if it is on land, or blockade here if it is on the water, but you can type whatever you want obviously.

 

[Anandre]

Trying my hand at Prince, but I usually get hemmed in by the AI and I'm not good enough to fight my way out. Hayuna hates me, but Willem is Cautious/+1 I believe.

Thanks for the help with the terrain, I'm only now getting used to counting grassland vs plains for settling cities. So much info to consider, even bumping up one difficulty.

 

[Nials]

For dot-mapping, I highly recommend the BUG mod. Has many other useful UI additions as well.

traius is right that desert hills are pretty weak, especially this early in the game where you can at most get 3 from them - nothing that whipping can't easily beat for a long time. Without knowing the rest of the terrain it's hard to say where would be best to settle, but I think you already got some good pointers.

 

[Ghpstage]

The primary consideration for city sites is whether they have enough food, and usually this means it needs a food resource. From food comes everything, production, growth, population and specialists.

Early cities in pamrticular need to have a focus on being settled to become useful very quickly. Generally this means settling adjacent to food (unless you have a Creative leader) to remove the need for a border pop, and close to your other city(ies) so your settler and workers don't need to travel far.
It'll be useful to remember that good second and third city sites don't need lots of good tiles as it won't be able to work all that many for most of the game, they only need a few decent tiles and some food. From this the corn we see in the top left of your SS would be the first place to look around for your next city.

You also want to avoid jungle heavy sites till you have both Iron Working (which usually shouldn't be researched in a hurry), as well as plenty of workers to chop with.

 

[Anandre]

So I've been using the Better AI BUG mod (I think that's the right name), and it's helped me a lot with placing cities and determining if it's worth placing for resources, etc. Now I'm back with a question of city priorities.

I'm playing as Washington on Noble, Pangaea map, standard size. I seem to be smack dab in the middle of most or all of the rest of the civs (Shaka to my north, Ethiopia to my west, pretty sure England is NE of me, unsure of the rest), so it looks like I'm going to have to bust some heads to secure some land. I researched BW and found Copper relatively close, at a (I think) pretty good city spot. My question is, should I make city #2 copper or put city #2 closer to the civ I'm planning on attacking (who I think should be Ethiopia, given that Shaka has free C1 promotion) and city #3 on copper?

Also, if I were to be able to expand peacefully and claim all the land I wanted (which is unlikely), how is my planned city placement? The NW city with Ivory seems to be a decent commerce/production site, the N is 100% cottages (minus the resource), SW seems a bit weak except as a staging area to attack Ethiopia. I think the N city is ok on missing gems if I can either bully Shaka out of the area in an early war, or possibly snag the one east of my planned cottage city.

Thanks again.

 

[Pangaea]

There is jungle to the north, so I wouldn't rush up there this early in the game. It's a bit pointless, except to secure land, because you can't do anything with the jungle and it gives you unhealth.

The copper city is fine. Coastal, riverside, some grassland and a bit of hammers, and food after borderpop. You can also farm those floodplains to grow faster. Maybe chop a forest to get out a monument asap.

This is Noble so maybe getting out cities isn't a huge time concern. The city to the west is a bit crummy with no food, but it does have 3 floodplains you can farm, so there will be some food. Also has a lot of plains, so it's not exactly prime land. But you need to secure some too, before busting heads.

Probably settle copper first and start pumping out axes, then another settler to get the western site. Then fairly soon bust heads with axes. You have marble in the capital, so a good chance to get out Glib and various other marble wonders if you so desire.

Pretty crummy land tbh. Desert to the south, jungle in the north, and barely food anywhere, at least until calendar.

The cities in the north need IW to become anything decent. Maybe Shaka will settle there and develop some decent spots for you. But if not... Depends a bit what's hidden, but maybe put the ele-site 1W so you get food in inner ring (it's calendar though, so iffy). Then the cow 2W of currently, so it gets fresh water from the lake and picks up gems, while also keeping cows in inner ring. You can then put another city near bananas, silk (?) etc. Maybe 1N of banana would be good - or does that miss freshwater? Looks like the river ends there actually. Maybe 1SE of elephant is better. It doesn't get calendar food in inner ring, but it's riverside and could become a fairly powerful commerce site if you cottage it well. There is a lack of proper food throughout so growth will be slow I guess, and of course you need to cut down the jungle to get to all those nice grasslands.

Hard to see from the picture, but if the desert isn't huge, there could be good land to the south of it. It's on the "wrong" side for locking off land, but don't speed is a huge issue on Noble, so probably best to go copper first, scout a bit more, pump out axes and then bust some heads, while also securing the wines to the west for a staging area and locking off a bit of land. If there is good food to the NW of those wines, it could become a good production city with those hills.

 

[Anandre]

Tundra is south of the desert, actually, which is why I'm not too worried about expanding there. I noticed that the AI tends to settle pretty aggressively in my direction, and with me having 2 close neighbors (one of them pretty aggressive), I'm just worried about losing space. Unless I'm expanding slowly, they're really fast. My usual start is something like Worker -> Warrior -> Warrior/Scout -> Settler if at size 4 -> Worker, unless I'm coastal, in which case I get WBs instead of the first Warrior.

 

[Mec AntiKythera]

I don't know if I'm trying to be too optimized and wanting to pick up as many hills as I can, but I just don't know how to make this work. This city is still like 2-3 Settlers away, but I'm trying to plan ahead.

I was wondering if someone with a better eye than I could help me find a good spot for a production city. Thanks in advance.

P.P.S. Is there a quick and easy way to lay out dotmaps? I do it in Paint by hand, but it's way too tedious.

For pure production you need hammer tiles and food to be able to work the hammer tiles. If I ignore whipping or other considerations then the best spots would include the food specials and flood plains and hills/metal/horses. So that's by the irrigated rice or sheep. Farm the flood plains and work the hill mines, perhaps you will pop a resource. But you are right, there are no great hammer city spots.

For dotmaps I used Photoshop/Gimp and with a template so that all I had to do was paste a screehshot and slide potential cities around. I Exported jpegs to compare conflicting solutions. As you improve the need to do this decreases and adding notes to tiles with Alt-S will suffice, but I still like dotmapping as a sport to see all the possible configurations. But I don't use BUG and can't comment on that.

 

[Pangaea]

BUG is great for that, as you can Alt-X and then move the cursor around to easily see what tiles will be included, set down markers here and there to see how cities will overlap, or count up tiles if you fancy that.

 

[Mec AntiKythera]

I will have to try that when I get that far.

 

[nfw]

I say put one on the desert hill 2n1e of the copper, or 2e1n, depending on what's north, but if you already have copper and gold I wouldn't bother with it just now, next priority would be the corn+sheep city (3s of stone so you get 2 hills)

 

[Pisskop]

I see three options.

1) grab the bronze by placing north of the mountains. Plant a farm down and grow fast to militrize. (me )

2) Settle the desert hill by the river to grab the iron. I assume immediate resources>longterm gain in this situation?

3) Go bold and for the horses. Make a quick settle to fill in the gap.

I am a bit war hungrey, so early hook-up= earlier rushing or choking.