City Placement. 3,4,5, or 6 squares apart?

[Artifex]

Starting out what is a good rule of thumb for city placement? What radius is good place cities 4 squares apart? or 6 squares apart? or closer? any thoughts?

[ixnay]

It usually depends. If I'm playing on a large map with lots of space, I'll try and give each city the maximal no. of tiles. On a small, 16-civ deathmatch game, though, I cram all my cities together since having several cities is more important than maximizing a few cities.

[Artifex]

Is the maximum # of tiles between cities 6? 3 square radius each right?

[ixnay]

It's 4 squares between the cities, as there's a 2-square radius.

[Tormund]

Depending on your definition of 'optimum' leads to two different answers.

If by 'optimum' you mean city placement without tile sharing, then...
Each city should have four squares separating it from its nearest neighbour in both the horizontal and vertical direction. This will ensure that no tile is shared and the number of wasted tiles will be 4 per city.

If by 'optimum' you mean city placement without tile waste, then...
Each city should have four squares separating it from its nearest neighbour in one direction (horizontally or vertically) and should have only three squares separating it in the other direction. This will ensure that no tile is wasted and the number of shared tiles will be 2 per city.

The latter 'optimum' is the one I recommend you use. Since 2 shared tiles per city will have very little impact on a city's fortunes.

[Hurricane]

Maximum spread is usually a bad idea. Some of the players with very high scores pack their cities very densely together, just 1-3 squares between the cities. This way you get more cites faster, don´t need to build so many roads and can produce faster in the beginning. Later in the game your cities won´t grow so big, which means less unhappiness and less pollution.

[kailhun]

Besides, for most of the game a city will not use all of its tiles or even most of them. Bulding cities close together let's you use most of the land for most of the game while the AI uses only part of it's land.

It also cuts down on the aqueduct building as you can build more cities along the rivers you have.

Robert

[Viseus]

It really depends on what kind of game you're playing. If you want to go for a quick conquest victory, then close cities is definitely the way to go.

I've played a few games lately where I've built every city 3 tiles away from one or more other cities. (That's 2 tiles between each.) This makes growing quicker in the beginning, and it comes in very handy when you are under attack. Whenever you lose a city defender, you can just move the defender of a neighbour city over in a single turn.

Ability to move between cities without ever having to leave a unit outside between turns can be very good in many situations. I remember using this trick in Civ 1 when you had to keep units inside cities at all times to avoid revolt.

However, if you plan on a more drawn-out game, with big cities full of improvements, then you clearly need to give each city as many tiles as you can. It's more expensive to keep many small cities than to keep a few big ones, because you need more improvements, and because corruption will increase.

I generally don't have the patience to play a Civ 3 game slowly enough to make big cities worthwhile, but it's all up to your playing style. You decide.

[Nym]

I generally try 4 squares between each city in order both not to lost space and not to share squares. That is for me the main idea. Then I try to have special ressouces within city radius to avoid building colony ; i find it simplier.
Then... well... it depends how far other civs are from my cities and how important a ressouce is for my civ. I usually accept to share squares when building a city is the only way to get a strategic ressource without trading.

[MyOlde]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by kailhun


It also cuts down on the aqueduct building as you can build more cities along the rivers you have.

Can you explain this a bit, please. What does building on or beside a river do re an aqueduct? (I've seen references to this before and never understood it.)

[kailhun]

Originally posted by MyOlde

>It also cuts down on the aqueduct building as you can build more cities along the rivers you have.<

Can you explain this a bit, please. What does building on or beside a river do re an aqueduct? (I've seen references to this before and never understood it.)

If you build a city on a river square it can grow beyond size 6 without an aqueduct (which a city usually needs to do this). Makes sense. If you live on the rivier you don't need an aqueduct to bring the water in. On the other hand you tend to live near an open sewer too.

Robert

[Capt Dizle]

Given the resource system and the fact that you need to occupied a lot of land early to get your share of resources later.....

The best way to arrange you cities is four tiles appart on the vertical and horizontal as mentioned above but.....

this leaves holes of 4 tiles (2x2) at the intersections (on the vertical axis).

These holes should be used as sites for feeder cities. Produce settlers, workers and military units. They should contain no improvements except barracks and granaries as you see fit. They can be removed later in the game if you like.

When you connect them to your road net you will be in good shape to defend.

Try it, you'll like it.

[Zachriel]

Generally, I play a natural system, so artificial feeder cities, or packing people like bees in a hive, would not fit with my playing style.

In my games, the higher the level, the closer the spacing. On Monarch, I spread out a bit. On Deity, I pack them closer, but still try to maintain some semblance of "reality."

If you want a high score, pack 'em. But, if you want to play a more natural game without excessive corruption, play the terrain.

[Grey Knight]

This thread has focused on "core" IMO, and the maximum folks use in general is 4 squares of spacing. However in the fringes of my empire, when the goal is simply to claim land inside ones cultural boundries I will use 6 tile spacing. I rushbuild some culture (typically temple+library), and in 20 turns it has a radius 3 cultural boundry. At this point if the city is very currupt nuke the library.

Cheers,
Shawn

[Viseus]

Yeah, that 4 tiles apart vertically and horizontally is all well and good in theory, but in practice, too much stuff gets in your way. Such as water. You may be able to lay out your cities in pretty patterns on the open fields, but at the fringes, and especially at coasts, you allways have to compromise a lot. So just use common sense, make sure you get important resources, and don't leave cities too far away to be undefendable.

By the way...one thing that has been bothering me a bit. There is no apparent way to disband cities. Or is there? I've tried the good ol' settler from a too small city trick, but that doesn't seem to work in Civ III. Comments?

[Purple]

I subscribe to Zachriel's and Viseus's philosophy. We don't play on a chessboard, after all (although abstract maps can be created for purposes of equalizing starting conditions).

I do use these spacing schemes as guidelines, but have to consider geography. Besides coastlines (mentioned above, mountains restrict your options.

Generally, the worse the terrain, the closer I position cities. A city in a low-productive area will never grow large enough to exploit all the tiles within its 21-tile area, so even severe overlapping does not restrict city growth. In a desert or hilly/mountainous region I may place cities only two tiles apart.

Larger populations can be supported in grassland, plains, and floodplain areas (as well as jungles, after they are developed) , so I try to "tile the plane" as optimally as possible in those areas.

Rivers are doubly desirable settlement sites, since they produce more food and obviate the need for aqueducts (lakes are good for this, too), so I'll try to found a city on a riverside location if possible.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Purple
Generally, the worse the terrain, the closer I position cities.

Another good "rule of thumb."

[nbarclay]

I usually focus on building cities where they can make good use of terrain rather than focusing on some particular spacing, although I do traditionally prefer to minimize overlap. I've thought about the idea of building smaller towns in between almost purely as unit/worker/settler farms and disbanding them later, but I haven't gotten around to trying that particular trick yet. (At least not in Civ 3; densely packed forest cities on rivers made great settler farms in CTP.)

Nathan

[star mouse]

Originally posted by Viseus
By the way...one thing that has been bothering me a bit. There is no apparent way to disband cities. Or is there? I've tried the good ol' settler from a too small city trick, but that doesn't seem to work in Civ III. Comments?

Cities with excess food production cannot be disbanded.

To disband a city, get the city down to size 2 by building lots of workers, arrange the labourers in the city so there's no excess food production, and produce a settler.

[Deathwalker]

Generally I like to leave 3/4 squares between my cities. In Civ 2 I used to sometimes leave more, but in Civ 3 the computer players would fill ion these areas with there own cities so I leave only 3/4 aquares as a rule of thumb

[kailhun]

In my current game I space the cities 2 tiles apart. This was my first game with this strategy and for the first 5500 years it works great. It allowed a much better use of the land and the production of a lot of units to smash the other civ's.
Now i'm starting to notice an disadvantage. Cities are starting to infringe on the tiles of the other cities. A fast growing city can grab the good foodtiles from a smaller neighbour and inhibit it's growth, even though it can't grow any further itself because of the 12 limit.
Also an individual city won't get a large production because of the limited tile acces. So as the shieldcost of units and buildings rizes the shieldoutput of a city doesn't rise to keep in step.
However, as I've already conquered most of the world this is not really a problem for me.
A solution I read on the forum somewhere is to disband some of the cities and allow the others to grow like 'normal'.

The reason I chose this startegy was the aggresive AI-techtrading. I figured I couldn't keep up in tech and rely on my smaller but superior army to fight offensive and defensive wars. I neede a lot of good units that could win through superior numbers. As the romans the legionairy was my logical choice for first combat unit. And as I needed a lot of them I needed a lot of cities. The hive technique seemed suitable and has worked wonderfully.

I have to say however that while it has been an interesting diversion, it's not my favourite strategy. I prefer the plan for the future strategy. In my next game I will do that again. I fear however that I won't survive.

Any thoughts on the effects of aggresive ai-techtrading on cityplanning?

Robert