small or large empire: which is better?

[The diplomat]

I was wondering what people thought. Which do you think is better in civ3, to have a large empire or a small one?

Obviously, the more territory you have the better your chances will be that you have an important strategic ressource within your borders. So, a large empire probably will have better luck getting control of strategic ressources. And of course, you will need a large empire at some point, if you are pursuing a domination victory.

On the other side, large empires will face severe corruption and waste problems depending on how big they actually are.

I always play on a standard map. I have found that expanding to about 6-7 cities is not neccessarily bad at all. For one, my corruption and waste are minimal so my empire is actually much more efficient than the larger empires. And furthermore, since I started developing my infrastructure sooner, I have better culture. In almost all my games so far, culture has really given me an advantage that I would not have had in civ2. For example, the AI will expand like mad, building cities anywhere there is room. However it often backfires, because there cities simply defect to me a few turns later.

So, my empire is smaller than others but it has more infrastructure, much higher culture and much less corruption. Those are very powerful in any game. In civ2, If I stopped expanding after 6 cities I would probably lose for sure, but I think civ3 favors the smaller empire much more than before. I have done very well in most of my games, just focusing on developing my "smaller" empires.

I really get the impression that in civ3, the rule is bigger is not better! It is often better to develop smaller but more efficient empires rather than try to build a huge powerful empire right away.

[player1]

This reminds me on my fist game on Regent.
I haven't enought room for more then 6-7 cities. So I existed that way for a long time & suddendly 4 enemy cities reverted to me. I luckly these cities contained also some strategie resouses.
Later I conquered part of Zulu & American civilizations and placed Forbbiden Palace in Atlanta.

I had a 18 cities & my corruption was only rampant (wich no way of fixing) in one distant American city.
Other cities had a not so bad corruption.
Other cities were pretty productive, especially because of WLTKD (we love the king day)
Since I had many Luxuries it wasn't a problem.

Tip:
If you want to conquer, you should first attack civs closer to your Palace & F. Palace.

[Dis]

large

interesting enough, I was having monetary problems with monarchy with my smaller empire (I was only playing warlord). Granted I was beefing up infrastructure for my future change to Democracy, but I still had trouble keeping my science rate at a decent level. But before I hit democracy I wanted to conquer the rest of my continent. After I did so, my income went up by a large margin. I had tons of corruption, but I was still bringing in trade arrows, so I had plenty of gold coming in. And when I hit Democracy, things really took off. It should be noted that I rushed built my forbidden palace during this time as well.

yeah corruption sucks, but 1 trade arrow is better than none.

[eMarkM]

I like em large. I'll build up to 8-10 cities if I can and eventually I try to take out the closest, weakest civ and build the Forbidden Palace in their old capital. This keeps corruption down to reasonable levels (<20% total).

If you can do this, you will generally have the largest empire and have a lot more options to win. Larger civ means better chance of getting good resources, more $$, more production.

e