in terms of cost for a new city, we need to either build the following, or find a substitute for them. Listed with hammer cost on normal speed:
settler - 100
worker - 60
granary - 60
monument or missionary - 30
courthouse, merchant, or (?) - 120
+1
, (if playing at emperor+) - possibly covered by a missionary or a special resource, etc.
At higher levels, it's important to get the most out of your hammers (and food converted to hammers). I find that when capturing or settling cities, it's quite helpful to see how many buildings you can do without. In order to get a new city in the early game, you will have to have a settler (for which you may substitute a few attack-worthy military units). For the city to be any good at all, you need a worker. You usually need to build something that will give the city a border pop. (but not if you're creative, and not if you are capturing a city with a religion). And a granary is a necessity if you want to maximize city size and/or slavery-production. What you also need is economic support for the city. (a courthouse or a library, in the new city or elsewhere, may be the right choice.)
A few traits give you one of these things for half price and a few traits make one of the things unnecessary. Creative means you don't need a monument. The economic strength of financial or philosophical makes it much easier to just ignore courthouses in the early game if you feel like it. A big part of how good a trait is depends on how cheaply it allows you to add a productive city to your empire.
Still... say our civ traits and circumstances mean we don't need anything to cover our +1 or our courthouse. that leaves granary, monument, settler, and worker, for a total of 250 hammers (normal speed). Of course, with careful use of slavery we can substitute food for hammers at a favorable ratio, but to rapidly get a new city to be productive we do need about 250 hammers or, more likely, something like 150 hammers and 60+ food. Some of this is paid for by the new city and some is paid for by the old city(cities), but either way it's no small investment and is nothing like the price of a lone settler (which I considered to be the price of a new city when I started playing civ4). I haven't mentioned a military unit garrison, which is another cost of a new city that's going to show up at some point.
One thing worth considering is how much of these costs of getting new cities can be avoided based on the traits (or UUs for that matter) of your civ.
Another thing to consider is timing- if you can time things so that the settler, the availability of a worker, and quite possibly a missionary, and at the same time then you can build/whip a granary and have a fairly good city very quickly. If you build a settler, send it to your city site, found a city, and then send a worker on some turns later (while the new city is working an unimproved plains/cow for 2food/1hammer and trying to whip itself a monument and then granary) it will take a long time before the city is producing anything to help the rest of your empire. If you can send a warrior, settler, worker, and missionary at about the same time to your new city then your city can have a rapid border pop, be working improved tiles from 5 turns after it's founded, have a granary a few turns afterward, and possibly be ready to build/whip more stuff for you to continue with military- or settler-based expansion right then.
I like to think about investments of hammers/food (and beakers) in terms of where I can get the quickest payoff which will be used to get more hammers/food/beakers. If I can get worker/settler/borderpop/granary for my new city in 30 turns, you can bet I don't want to wait 40 turns instead. Getting those settler hammers and worker hammers and monument/missionary hammers to all show up as soon as possible and to be usable as soon as possible is a challenge. But using whipping and chopping in rapid succession can be a big help for this-- whip and chop like a madman (build your new city's worker early for chopping) and you can get 160 (worker-settler) hammers out of your capital in very short order. Once you have multiple cities you might be able to time one to get a worker and another to get a settler at the same time.
By the same token, in the early game building a market (which can be extremely useful by the late game if it gives you +20 gold per turn and 3 happiness) is sometimes a terrible idea. If you start investing hammers in it in a slow-building city, 45 turns before you will get it built, you get nothing out of those hammers for those 45 turns and the market might not reach any great usefulness until a while after that. Had you just built/whipped a military unit (or worker) in 10 turns instead, it might have been able to join up with your other military units on turn 25 and helped you capture a city by turn 30.... maybe even a city that will be producing a bunch of commerce from a special resource by turn 45, more than you'd get out of an early-game market.
Sometimes it's all about instant gratification.
For people who suffer from builder-itis it's also about what you can do without. I find that I can't really do without a granary, worker, and monument to go with every new city. But if it's a city that can't take advantage of other buildings really well and if I can get some good land out of building military, I will start building and whipping expendable attacker units as soon as I have granary-worker-monument in the city.
settler - 100
worker - 60
granary - 60
monument or missionary - 30
courthouse, merchant, or (?) - 120
+1
, (if playing at emperor+) - possibly covered by a missionary or a special resource, etc. At higher levels, it's important to get the most out of your hammers (and food converted to hammers). I find that when capturing or settling cities, it's quite helpful to see how many buildings you can do without. In order to get a new city in the early game, you will have to have a settler (for which you may substitute a few attack-worthy military units). For the city to be any good at all, you need a worker. You usually need to build something that will give the city a border pop. (but not if you're creative, and not if you are capturing a city with a religion). And a granary is a necessity if you want to maximize city size and/or slavery-production. What you also need is economic support for the city. (a courthouse or a library, in the new city or elsewhere, may be the right choice.)
A few traits give you one of these things for half price and a few traits make one of the things unnecessary. Creative means you don't need a monument. The economic strength of financial or philosophical makes it much easier to just ignore courthouses in the early game if you feel like it. A big part of how good a trait is depends on how cheaply it allows you to add a productive city to your empire.
Still... say our civ traits and circumstances mean we don't need anything to cover our +1
or our courthouse. that leaves granary, monument, settler, and worker, for a total of 250 hammers (normal speed). Of course, with careful use of slavery we can substitute food for hammers at a favorable ratio, but to rapidly get a new city to be productive we do need about 250 hammers or, more likely, something like 150 hammers and 60+ food. Some of this is paid for by the new city and some is paid for by the old city(cities), but either way it's no small investment and is nothing like the price of a lone settler (which I considered to be the price of a new city when I started playing civ4). I haven't mentioned a military unit garrison, which is another cost of a new city that's going to show up at some point.One thing worth considering is how much of these costs of getting new cities can be avoided based on the traits (or UUs for that matter) of your civ.
Another thing to consider is timing- if you can time things so that the settler, the availability of a worker, and quite possibly a missionary, and at the same time then you can build/whip a granary and have a fairly good city very quickly. If you build a settler, send it to your city site, found a city, and then send a worker on some turns later (while the new city is working an unimproved plains/cow for 2food/1hammer and trying to whip itself a monument and then granary) it will take a long time before the city is producing anything to help the rest of your empire. If you can send a warrior, settler, worker, and missionary at about the same time to your new city then your city can have a rapid border pop, be working improved tiles from 5 turns after it's founded, have a granary a few turns afterward, and possibly be ready to build/whip more stuff for you to continue with military- or settler-based expansion right then.
I like to think about investments of hammers/food (and beakers) in terms of where I can get the quickest payoff which will be used to get more hammers/food/beakers. If I can get worker/settler/borderpop/granary for my new city in 30 turns, you can bet I don't want to wait 40 turns instead. Getting those settler hammers and worker hammers and monument/missionary hammers to all show up as soon as possible and to be usable as soon as possible is a challenge. But using whipping and chopping in rapid succession can be a big help for this-- whip and chop like a madman (build your new city's worker early for chopping) and you can get 160 (worker-settler) hammers out of your capital in very short order. Once you have multiple cities you might be able to time one to get a worker and another to get a settler at the same time.
By the same token, in the early game building a market (which can be extremely useful by the late game if it gives you +20 gold per turn and 3 happiness) is sometimes a terrible idea. If you start investing hammers in it in a slow-building city, 45 turns before you will get it built, you get nothing out of those hammers for those 45 turns and the market might not reach any great usefulness until a while after that. Had you just built/whipped a military unit (or worker) in 10 turns instead, it might have been able to join up with your other military units on turn 25 and helped you capture a city by turn 30.... maybe even a city that will be producing a bunch of commerce from a special resource by turn 45, more than you'd get out of an early-game market.
Sometimes it's all about instant gratification.
For people who suffer from builder-itis it's also about what you can do without. I find that I can't really do without a granary, worker, and monument to go with every new city. But if it's a city that can't take advantage of other buildings really well and if I can get some good land out of building military, I will start building and whipping expendable attacker units as soon as I have granary-worker-monument in the city.
worth of units.
