whats the point of one tile islands?

[Fabio1701]

Hi all,

Picture a 1 tile island, maybe arctic or dessert, who cares. it has maybe two fish next to it. nothing fancy, no oil or luxuries.

Why build a city there? For example on the earth map, 9 tile souths east of the ther is such an island. Is there any reason anyone can think of of buidling a city there?

In civ5 there was: namely a strategic base. Because you could buy everything with gold you could build quite a little fort with airport to put some airplanes and an artillery on it and a great place to resupply damadged ships and what not. it made snece putting sities pretty much anywhere for the extension of your military might.

if I recall correctly in earlier civs (3, 4?) you could built an airstrip on such an island, stil useful.

In civ6 I cant even built an airstrip or fort ouside of my own borders (pleae correct me if I am wrong). so what is the point of thier esitance? Does anyone else think its wierd taht you can't build forts/airstrips outside of your borders? IRL the USA has military bases all over the world and peppering the the pacific.

 

[UWHabs]

You can build airstrips outside of your territory using a military engineer (although you can't clear forests, so if it happened to be a forest tile, you might be out of luck).

You can build a city there and at least base one plane there. if you want more, you'd have to dock a carrier in the city. You can also build a harbor in the city. Worst case though if you want it for military, it would be in your territory so you could use it as a base to heal ships in.

 

[MyOtherName]

I have used cities like that to enable trade routes across a wide ocean.

 

[Jarms48]

I have used cities like that to enable trade routes across a wide ocean.

This. You might need that extra trade post if you're planning to have trade routes across a large ocean. You can also use it as a naval base, to safeguard your waters, heal your ships, and build navies.

 

[paulthebug]

As bomber base.

 

[joncnunn]

Sometimes the only nearly source of a strategic resource is on a one tile island / only reliable source of oil is off the coast of the one tile island.

 

[View619]

As a military or trade outpost.

 

[KmDubya]

If you need it for planes you could just build an airstrip there with a military engineer and base three planes there. You'd want to fortify a strong defender there so someone couldn't get your planes by disembarking there though.

As far as building a nice island city you'd need something like three tiles for districts - commercial, airport, industrial, - a harbor, enough fish to feed everyone and a few hills for mines to produce hammers would be nice. At a minimum you'd be wanting two to four tile islands, the single tile ones are pretty worthless.

 

[MyOtherName]

As far as building a nice island city you'd need something like three tiles for districts - commercial, airport, industrial, - a harbor, enough fish to feed everyone and a few hills for mines to produce hammers would be nice. At a minimum you'd be wanting two to four tile islands, the single tile ones are pretty worthless.

This sounds like you're basically ignoring the "(small) island" aspect of the question and describing what you want out of a normal city.

 

[bladex]

i've seen plenty of these with an oil or some other lux resource nearby. usually on fractal maps.

 

[RealAntithesis]

I kind of miss earlier civs which made tiny island cities quite doable. Civ 6 really needs a (harbour district) building that can add production to water tiles.

 

[Leyrann]

Why does no one live on Rottumerplaat (a small island off the Dutch coast)? Simple: It's too small to build a city on.

Then, why does it exist? Well, because not everything has a use. It's just part of the natural geography.

And before you say, "but this is a game, not real life", I could say the same for: desert (doesn't do anything if you don't have flood plains or petra! wasted space!), vast oceans (you take so long getting across and there's nothing there!), multiple tiles wide mountain ranges (you can't get adjacency bonuses from closed-in mountains, after all), etc etc etc.

And apart from that I think this thread already mentioned enough uses for 1-tile islands.

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

Canal so ships can navigate from one side to the other without a 1 tile diversion!

 

[MaximusPlatypus]

It's arguably better in Civ6 than Civ5 to build a 1-tile island city (assuming it has some sort of utility) due to the lack of penalties per city in 6.

Just my $.02

 

[MyOtherName]

Why does no one live on Rottumerplaat (a small island off the Dutch coast)? Simple: It's too small to build a city on.

Is Rottumerplaat a large enough terrain feature that it would actually have an entire tile by itself (and surrounding water tiles) on a Civ 6 map? The linked map looks more like it would just be glossed over as part of the boundary between water and mainland.

 

[FurballRocker]

I have settled lots of one tile island cities in previous civ games even if just for the ability to station aircraft there and heal ships as a forward military base although i try to find candidate which would also add a bit more to my empire such as luxuries or strategic resources and in civ vi while i still predominantly settle such cities as forward bases they also get to build a harbour which give another trade routes and can be worked for science and extra gold and as there will be little else to build you can then just endlessly spam harbour shipping for more gold and great admiral points.

In the context of the real world and the US example, island bases can really be seen as small outpost towns such as a 1 or 2 pop city.

 

[Leyrann]

Is Rottumerplaat a large enough terrain feature that it would actually have an entire tile by itself (and surrounding water tiles) on a Civ 6 map? The linked map looks more like it would just be glossed over as part of the boundary between water and mainland.

That depends. Are you playing on a map of the Netherlands, or a map of the world?

Another example though: Iceland is probably one tile on a world map. It's got 300k population. Total world population is around 7 billion. That means that one out of every 200 000 people on earth lives there (actually it's even less people, but I like to make my maths easy). Convert to Civ terms, and you'd have one population there, if you'd have 199 999 population on the rest of the map... Quite empty then, I would say. I mean, endgame in Civ 6 you maybe have what, 80 total cities on the map (just taking a stab here) with an average population of 20 (again taking a stab). That means a population of 1600. Not even close to deserving a 1 pop city on Iceland. Maybe, just maybe you would make it if you would look at the "population" values that demographics show you (do we actually have demographics in Civ 6?), but even then a pop 1 would probably be the best you could hope for.

 

[MyOtherName]

Another example though: Iceland is probably one tile on a world map. It's got 300k population. ... Not even close to deserving a 1 pop city on Iceland.

I don't recall if other civs did, but I know that in Civ 4, population points aren't linear measures of population. In Civ 4, Iceland would be halfway between size 3 and size 4. Detroit proper would be size 10, Detroit metro would be size 20, a city representing all of Michigan would be size 27, and Tokyo would be size 30. https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/city-size-population.325492/

Of course, the figures are probably just a very loose fit rather than any attempt at being accurately tuned to simulate reality, but you get the idea; a size 10 city shouldn't be thought of as having 10 times the "real world" population as a size 1 city.

 

[Halcyan2]

You may also want to settle on the tile or at least station a unit there, to prevent barbarian camps from spawning. In such a situation, the camp would keep creating barbarian naval units, which could pose a threat to all shipping units.

 

[Rossticles]

Because if you don't settle it the AI will.