Optimum City Size?

[MattPilot]

Whats the optimum city size?

I like big cities spaced far apart. Don't like it when everything is crunched up like many do. But anyway, i got lots of big cities, and when querring them, i see all these citizens who can't actually work the tiles because there is no room. So they are tax collectors or something else.

So i'm wondering at what population count does it not matter how many citizens you have in a city? Sure, every new citizen gives ya +2 taxes (if he's a tax collector), but if you take the same population count and start a new city, you get the same 2 gold pieces + more.

I got a city of 18, where not all squares are worked, but it can't grow any further. its output though is 194 shields a turn (thats factory, iron works, nuclear plant). Then i got a city of 27 (still growing), but its output is only around 97 (got only factory & nuclear plant though).

[Kloreep]

Close in is usually better, especially in the early game; it's quite possible to do without Metros at all, as they come so late in the game.

In SP, what I usually do is have two sets of cities: my permanent ones that will grow all the way to metro eventually, and my temporary ones that I will use for military production and then disband once I get Sanitation and need room for my growing Metros.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Each city site will be able to support and suit a different pop most efficiently (so it's dependent on the circumstances of course), but there are a few things to keep in mind.

First is your happiness - there's little point in growing a city so large that you need to divert substantial taxes to keep it happy, or take off enough workers that you start to lose the benefits of all that pop.

Then there's the pollution point - below a population of 12 IIRC there is no pollution from population, certainly very little. The only pollution generated is from shield production, and you need a real monster factory city to get very much pollution from shields alone. As soon as you build a Hospital and have cities growing above 12 pop you start to get LOADS of pollution. This isn't so bad if you can build pollution limiting improvements, but if you are not at them yet the pollution can be rather game-killing as you need to send workers everywhere all the sodding time.

Finally there's how much benefit you get from additional pop. The biggest benefit you can get from a new pop point is if you send it to work on a well-developed city tile, where trade and possibly shields will become worth several times their base values if you have Markets, Banks, Libraries, Factories etc. Once you reach the pop where there are no more tiles to work (the max for a xity with no tiles overlapping with other civs is 20). Sure you can keep turning citizens into taxmen or scientists, but eventually you will run out of food, and is that +2 or +3 gold or science really worth it at that stage, when you could sue the extra food to build workers to clear up your pollution, buid RRs (that appear around that time), or to send to your slowly growing cities to speed their growth?

[vmxa1]

OCP is game dependant. The higher the level the more likely you will be better off with tighter placement and hence fewer tiles to work for each city.

Trying to use cities with 21 tiles is best reserved for levels below Monarch. 19 tiles is doable at Monarch, but after that you will be pressing your luck.

One way to have your cake and eat to, so to speak is with camps.
You can pack some camps in the gaps to start with and later disband them to allow the core cities to use all the tiles or most of them anyway.

One benefit from metros is the abiliy to use the workers that have no tile to increase happiness or taxes or science and even to reduce corruption.