City Spacing

[hannibcannib]

I want to know how people space their cities
when i have room i use a 5 square grid
but when land is scarce i use 3 and 4 square grids what about u guys??/

[DrSpike]

I 4 space mainly, sometimes 3. 5 has the long term advantage because of no overlaps, but you pay an opportunity cost in the early and midgame. Tighter spacing allows more cities for given landmass and reduces corruption in the cities around your palace. When overlaps start to be a problem just make sure the cities specialising in science have all their squares worked.

For a domination attempt 3 space is fine.

[Arrian]

I go with 4 to 5, with exceptions due to terrain of course. Often I will have 1 square of overlap (4 up, 1 over). I generally dislike overlap and attempt to avoid it when possible.

-Arrian

[Brinoch]

Personally, I'd rather have some overlap and an extra city than let the computer have it, always.

Otherwise, I'm with Arrian. I try for as little interior overlap as possible. However, it's not written in stone. Sometimes, you just need to overlap -- like when you want to culture bomb someone, or when I want to avoid having ocean squares in my city area with no harbor access. ( I hate having those wasted ocean squares... grrr.) I've had cities two squares apart sometimes, but usually I try for the perfect placement.

[player1]

Usually 3 to 4 tiles.
Sometimes even 2 tiles (special cases)

I never have any problems with overlap.
It's only problem in modern age.

And realy not a big one.

The trick is to use all possibile land ==> most production.

If you space too much, you lose productive space.

Simple.

[DrSpike]

Agreed. 5 spacing, whilst pretty, is not strategically optimal for any reasonable criteria.

[Thrawn05]

I space mine in a perfect manner, with no spaces or overlapping city tiles. I usualy have to visialize the city limits, and point to on the screen with my fingure where to plant my settler.

Isn't technology great?

[Capt Dizle]

If you lay out cities on a grid of 5 tiles horizontally, vertically, and diagonally you will see that this leaves "holes" of 4 tiles at the corners. Try laying this out on a piece of paper and you will see what I mean.

Placing "specialist towns" in these holes has its advantages.

These specialist towns can be temporary in nature and are best used for production of workers, settlers and troops, and need no improvements save possibly a granary and or a barracks, based on your wishes.

Defensively, building these towns and putting in roads gives you the ability to reinforce anywhere quickly

If you can place your palace in the center of a land mass this config can give you eight permanent cities and four temps within 5 squares of your palace and still cover a lot of territory and potential resources.

[Harovan]

I also try to avoid overlap. I place my cities by a widely used pattern, in rows of 5-apart cities, with a distance of 4 between the rows and the cities in a row in the mid of gaps of both adjacent rows. Makes an average overlap of 1 per city (0..2).

I make exceptions:
- for strategic and luxury resource access
- for having cities adjacent to rivers
- for having coastal cities
- when they are border cities (halving distance between next city and enemy city then)

This pattern works best at large and huge maps though, or at least standard pangea. At standard continents maps and below it's hardly applicable.

[hannibcannib]

3 SPACES is to close i always have pollution problems

i use colonies to get those resources that cause urban crowding

[DrSpike]

The link between 3-spacing and pollution being..................

[dunk]

Originally posted by Brinoch
( I hate having those wasted ocean squares... grrr.)

I hate this too. My starting point is almost always one tile away from the coast too. So I have to guess which way the water is.

[Giovanni August]

I usally don't care! Where i found a site that looks good for a city I send my settler and build the city!

If, after that there is no more room for cities in neutral terrain, i found some not used tile i put a city there and start producing workers there!

Saluti

[Ethelred]

I like to have a few cities at least with no overlap. The rest I am not so exacting on. Overlapping a two to four squares is OK for cities outside the first ring around the Capital.

I do often have quite a few cities with major overlaps farther from the capital. Those are cities that I placed to force a flip. So my city and a soon to be former AI city will overlap and due to strategic considerations I don't want to abandon either of them. Conquest with culture. As long as both cities can use twelve tiles its not bad to have that kind of overlap. At least I never have to worry about unhappiness in them.

[player1]

I don't see any problem with overlaping.

Must be psihical? ("my cities must be perfect" kind of thing)

Overlaping is in no way bad thing.

Cities overlaps. but you have more cities and all land is used.
No waste of good grassland tiles in feat of overlaping.

And city with up to 5 overlaps is still a super city in modern age, with LOTs of production and gold.

Usualy I build cities with distance of 3 to 4 tiles, sometimes (rarely) 2 tiles, but almost NEVER 5 or more tiles (that's just waste of valuable land).

[DrSpike]

Generally I agree wholeheartedly. In defence of the perfectionist 5 spacers if you have bags of land to expand into it can work. The optimal number of cities in civ3 is pretty fixed, and it you can reach that number with 5 spacing then fine. But most of the time you can't, especially if you play above Monarch. Add in the fact that it's easier to defend tigher empires, and the fact that any disadvantage from tighter spacing comes pretty late in the game and 5 spacing looks a little unnecessary.

[dikwhit]

spacing on cities i find to be much more situation related than as a constant number. Generally all things being equal 5 spacing is nice but 4 spaces offset 1 resulting in 2 overlaps is almost as good.... the overlapping doesnt become an issue even if all cities are set up this way until after hospitals are built. Various situations arise that make spacing at different intervals much more beneficial:
1)resource control no explanation necessary
2)cultural- if going for flipping proximity in spacing to your own cities is irrelevant the closer to AI city more important than spacing to your own
3)stopping ICS- well not stopping but "controlling" to some degree... if your spacing on cities must be altered (bigger or smaller) to slow down the uberexpansion of AI by all means alter it.
There are other situations I'm missing I'm sure but generally while its nice to have an "organized" map building on the always 5 space theory leaves an unworked area 2x2 on each four city "square"