Favorious,
Q1. I am not sure what the best approach. I can see your point, but I build them close for several reasons:
- Settlers are not wasting time walking in early game. The sooner I plant them the sooner they start making stuff. It might take each settler 6-10 turns to get to the farther location. By then I could be building workers or warriors if I stay closer.
- Corruption. Corruption is brutal in despotism. So packing cities closer reduces the distance corruption.
- There is little penalty for building the cities at this distance. Each city has over 9 tiles to work so they can get up to size 12 easily it will be a long time before they need more. Building further apart just secures land the citizens cant work, which is of little value to me. In fact most of these cities made it to high teens or low 20s in population later in the game. At deity everyone is born unhappy so why have a city get bigger than that you just end up with entertainers to keep everyone happy.
- Deity. This is deity. The AI has tremendous early advantage that I work hard to overcome. Anything I can do to catch up I will.
- It seems unlikely that you can get to the end of expansion phase without a war. So use the wars to acquire more territory. After that, when I run out of space I will just expand by acquisition in the direction that suits me best. Perhaps I need a strategic resource, or want to cripple a rival by taking one, or there is a strategic point on the map to control, or some silly AI makes timely demands of me.
This is actually RCP at work.
Ring 1: Cowtown distance 3.5. I was anxious to put it there to get the cow and help build settlers faster. At the time I was not aware of the AI locations. This is the only city in ring 1
Ring 2: Ravenna distance 4. Neapolis, Pisae, Dyes distance 4.5. These are in the same loop since distance is truncated AFAIK.
Ring 3: zerksees distance 6, Pompeii distance 6.5.
Q2. LOL. That was funny. The Roman civilization was no stranger to living in cities that they did not name. I try to give some of the cities unique names so I remember them. All those city names sound the same after a while. Besides, its sometimes funny when an advisor gives you a message like Burger King has produced cavalry or whatever. Name a city Kmart. Supreme lord, Kmart has produced modern armor. Now thats a Kmart I would want to shop at. You just need the right sense of humor I guess.
Moonsinger,
thanks. I wanted to take a few weeks off civ but I am so addicted I started another game last night on C3C. I dropped back to monarch since it is my first game on C3C. I am going to try for space race or diplomacy win. This will give me some practice and get a HOF entry in a category with plenty of open slots. I need to adjust to loss of RCP and palace rank exploit, and my old despotism -> republic approach to government also needs review with all the changes. How well this goes will determine what I try next.
Next stop, you could try the same thing for Deity in C3C. Since no one has done it, you should have no problem going for the top slot.
