The Urban Sprawl, a theory about the late game.

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

My definition about Urban Sprawl: Maximize the amount of districts in a given area.

By districts I mean the speciality districts which can only be built once per city.

Why Urban Sprawl? A district + buildings give more yield then a citizen can ever hope to give. Districts give great person points. District recive and give adjacency bonus from other districts. Overall districts are the best "tiles" by far. Districts give more powerful trade routes and some of their buildings provide stackable area of effect yield to all nearby city centers.

Yes districts and buildings do cost production to build but citizens are not free either as they cost food to grow.

Requirement for urban sprawl:
ICS: Each city can only support one of each speciality district and that also mean there is a maximum number of speciality district each city can support. Thus the maximum amount of districts you can have in an area is dependent on how many cities you have in that area.

Efficient food production: How many district a city can support is dependent on how many people the city have and people cost food to grow and maintain. The more farmland you need the less land you have left for districts and also the less land you have left for more productive work for your citizens + inefficient food production will lock down your people as farmers which is not efficient use of your citizens.

Housing: You need the ability to provide about 25 housing to each city (25 is about the population you need to build speciality district). The more concentrated the housing is the better because you want to save as much land as possible. 25 housing per city with ICS probably need you to be able to build neighbourhoods but that do not mean you can start the urban sprawl earlier.

 

[Abraxis]

Just a note, 22 for civs with unique speciality districts, and 19 for Germany.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Just a note, 23 for civs with specialty districts, and 19 for Germany.

These civs do have an advantage for the urban spraw while civs with UI may be at a disadvantage.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Well with ICS, each city only has 12 tiles of its own.... for each district the city needs
1 tile for the district
Enough tiles for 3 housing and 6 food.

Late grassland resourceless farms get 3 food+1 per adjacent farm... so you can probably get 7 on a regular basis
You can get additional food from Trade routes, FTW Holy Sites/religious buildings, or Kongo Neighborhoods (all of these come from districts though, so it just cuts the cost of the district)

Neighborhoods give 4-6 housing (with additional from some buildings, water, policies)

so based on that you have
~2.5 tiles per district, not counting additional sources of food (commercial hubs/harbors/HS cheaper) or Housing (harbors/barracks/campus cheaper)

so for ICS you are only going to get about 4-6 districts per city

 

[ThomasClark]

Trying to build as many districts as fast as possible with the best regional effects makes total sense to me. Now, to execute in the face of barbs and Romans...and yeah I significantly prefer civs with a UD over a UI.

One thing I've been mentally wrestling with is placement of farms vs districts. It would be great to be able to place a triangle of 3 cities where in the middle of the 3 you could get all of your farm adjacency bonuses at maximum efficiency. However, you would also like to be able to place districts from different cities next to each other, when reasonable, and especially as Japan.

Btw, what's the most food from a trade route that anyone has seen? Can you get +10 food from a trade route?

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Well with ICS, each city only has 12 tiles of its own.... for each district the city needs

I have not looked into exactly how many tiles each city have to work with but that is why I call the thing Urban Sprawl and not ICS because the main goal is to get as many districts as possible not as many cities as possible. Even then ICS may be worth it due to regional yields and the fact that CS give most concentrated housing.

Btw, what's the most food from a trade route that anyone has seen? Can you get +10 food from a trade route?

I know you can get +4 food from internal trade routes with collectivist card. Internal trade routes may be needed to feed an ICS urban sprawl and may work well.

 

[Larsenex]

Indeed, I think the internal routes are much better this time around then they were last incarnation. As shown by several streams you can create routes in one city and move them to the city that needs production and/or food and have them 'go' from there. I love this depth of play!

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Another trade route card triangular trade give +4 gold and +1 faith for each trade route no matter if they are international or not so you can still get gold from internal trade routes.

 

[indradiva]

Also Urban cities encourage you to build more Wonders, since more than a half of them require a specific district, I think. It's actually a good strategy. Basically, there seem to be two main city building strategies: Urban with high population, many districts per city and many wonders, and Rural that relies more on tile yields and land grab and improvements. I think that tall and wide will be quite well balanced in Civ 6.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Colosseum wonder do definitely encourage you to pack cities around it as all cities within 6 tiles of it get the colosseum bonuses and around the colosseum you can build theater districts for the culture bonus.

Rural work best if you have a unique tile improvement such as the mission which you can spam around a city for a rather decent yield given the very low investment needed. Rural is also decent for culture victory because you need alot of land for parks and such but naturally both strategies can be used. An urban core with rural cities around it for land grab.

Urban is very vurnable to nukes so you want to keep it away from enemy reach if possible.

I would not really call them tall and wide because they have little relationship with civ V stuff. Civilization VI is much more about adapting while civilization V you was locked into strategies before turn 50.

 

[Abraxis]

Trying to build as many districts as fast as possible with the best regional effects makes total sense to me. Now, to execute in the face of barbs and Romans...and yeah I significantly prefer civs with a UD over a UI.

One thing I've been mentally wrestling with is placement of farms vs districts. It would be great to be able to place a triangle of 3 cities where in the middle of the 3 you could get all of your farm adjacency bonuses at maximum efficiency. However, you would also like to be able to place districts from different cities next to each other, when reasonable, and especially as Japan.

Btw, what's the most food from a trade route that anyone has seen? Can you get +10 food from a trade route?

Why on earth would you put the farms on the shared middle land instead of the districts?

 

[ThomasClark]

Why on earth would you put the farms on the shared middle land instead of the districts?

Maximizing the most food for the least hammers put into farms. You could have perhaps only 5 farms per city and your cluster of 15 farms has 6 super-farms with max bonuses (+9, +10 food per farm). Now try building just 5 farms in another city not adjacent to another city's farms - you'll only have one farm getting +8 food - all rough and hasty mental calculations. That would be the merit of it, whether that's better than districts, I'm not sure.

 

[Abraxis]

I think you'd be better off sticking your districts in the shared territory for the adjacency bonuses on secondary resources. Farms can be applied much more frivolously and aught to be a significantly lowe priority in terms of taking up the most valuable spaces in your empire. Yeah they have adjacency bonuses too. But you can take advantage of those anywhere.

 

[ThomasClark]

True that farms will cost less than districts and be a little more spammable later in the game...I guess it's 1-2 extra yields on 8-10 districts across time vs building an extra 20 farms (4 builders, 250+ hammers). I think the math comes down on the side of districts, especially adding in policy cards.

But we should keep in mind that many districts won't naturally want to be in the middle of a potentially farm-able area. Campus and Holy Districts hopefully near mountains. Encampment at an outpost, not in middle of 3 planned cities. The Industrial Zone and Entertainment Complex you definitely want in the middle but the range is enough that you should have enough flexibility to not need to put square in the middle just to hit 3 cities, placing elsewhere hopefully gets you more than those 3. Theatre Square you definitely want against other districts, but that could be against a Harbor/Commercial Hub or against a Campus/Holy District. So it won't usually be so clean that you want to put 10 districts in the middle of 3 cities when you're not Japan.

 

[indradiva]

True that farms will cost less than districts and be a little more spammable later in the game...I guess it's 1-2 extra yields on 8-10 districts across time vs building an extra 20 farms (4 builders, 250+ hammers). I think the math comes down on the side of districts, especially adding in policy cards.

But we should keep in mind that many districts won't naturally want to be in the middle of a potentially farm-able area. Campus and Holy Districts hopefully near mountains. Encampment at an outpost, not in middle of 3 planned cities. The Industrial Zone and Entertainment Complex you definitely want in the middle but the range is enough that you should have enough flexibility to not need to put square in the middle just to hit 3 cities, placing elsewhere hopefully gets you more than those 3. Theatre Square you definitely want against other districts, but that could be against a Harbor/Commercial Hub or against a Campus/Holy District. So it won't usually be so clean that you want to put 10 districts in the middle of 3 cities when you're not Japan.

As for farms, they should be placed somewhere adjacent to a HS/Campus/TS/EntC/Wonder, because you'll want them to be on a tile with high appeal, to later get more housing from neighbourhoods and gold from public transportation card.