Originally posted by Revolutionary
@Park Ranger I usually build lots of happiness improvements for their culture so I almost never have happiness problems. And I play in the high difficulty levels usually Demi-god and Deity. I never try to get the max amount of tiles for a city I usually have like 2 or 3 overlaping tiles per near by city, so one city might have like 6 overlaping tiles.
Actually, if you have that many tiles overlapping then our styles are probably very similar! I was thinking more of the first screenshot and the rugged adherence to keeping overlap down to 1-2 tiles per city, total.
But what I should stress is that I rarely use a uniform distribution. Its so terrain dependant - for example in Veky's screen shot I would have put every city in that terrain on freshwater, or coast (or both!), though the ones around the big lake in the NE would be crowded. And the overlap would be around the river/bonus tiles. Hills and tundra and my cities are more spread out. Unlike TNO I'm not concerned with using
all tiles in my territory (though like I said I pobably should) - just the better ones, the earlier the better. ANY tile that yields 3+ food under despotism will probably have a city right beside it (or close enough to use without first cultural expansion).
As far as happiness management goes, lately I've been of the opinion that I could streamline the way I do things. In the past I've been guilty of overkill, bulding Sistine Chapel then trading for 7th and 8th luxuries long before I've got hosptals. Now, whenever I'm luxury-rich (and not playing a religious civ), I've been seeing about skipping the whole temple-cathedral rigamarole, just build the odd colosseum, and use libraries for culture. (JS Bach's is nice for the religion-free approach).
Or vice versa: with Sistine Chapel, I won't depend as much on luxury trades. Just enough to keep WLTKD going in corrupt centres, which is much easier to do effectively now with police and civil engineer specialists.
