8 Cities by 275 B.C.: Is That Typical?

[Stuie]

Ok - eight cities is pretty good. Maybe I had a bad start position for growth, but in my current game I only had six cities at 275 BC and the Egyptians were kind enough to have built two of them for me.

[Nikolai]

I suspect you weren't that kind back?

[Stuie]

Originally posted by Nikolai
I suspect you weren't that kind back?

I was kind enough to take Monotheism off her hands in exchange for peace.

[Nikolai]

Oh, but that makes it much more acceptable!

[Sirian]

Yin: Eight by 1AD is about my upper limit. The key thing is getting over the economic tipping point before pushing to far. Do you have Monarchy? Do you have Currency? Those are the key items. Currency brings extra trade income. Monarchy brings extra happiness. Then I can afford to push science down to 30% or thereabouts knowing that it will rebound as I build courthouses, as cities grow upward, as cottages are built, put to use and begin to mature, etc.

We had only three cities at 1AD in RB1 SG, though, because we started the first worker late, chased religion hard, and built early wonders instead of pushing more settlers out the door. Three would be my floor, eight the ceiling, generally speaking.


- Sirian

[yin26]

Interesting. I'm enjoying trying to understand the repercussions of the different approaches. So far I see them as interesting choices and not "one plan trumps" all. If that holds true, that's huge.

[Ninot]

in my current game, with 6 strong cities, im taking on the Germans (i'm the Romans) who have something like 12, but all a little bit smaller. I went for one of their biggest cities, surrounded it and crushed it. They are having a hard time responding now.

Quite happy that # of cities seems irrelevant now.

[clarkcd]

I usually average about 5 cities but I play on the default map size. When I begin absorbing my neighbors is when it reaches 8 or more.

[Aeson]

Re: 8 Cities by 275 B.C.: Is That Typical?

Originally posted by yin26
I'm finally getting some of the pacing down, etc., and seem consistently able (unless geography is really against met) to get about 8 cities by 275 B.C. on Noble difficulty. Is this about the pace for everybody else? How does this compare with the number of cities in Civ 3 by this point?

It's highly map and difficulty dependant of course. Though CIV is nowhere near as variable as Civ III in that regard. The date is not quite the same number of turns in Civ III either. 275BC would have been turn 113-114 (290-270BC). In CIV it's turn 104 on Normal Speed.

In Civ III on Deity, 8 civ Huge maps, I've had 100 cities by around the same date, 200 cities just after the end of the BC's, 400 by 500AD, maxed out city count shortly thereafter. That's pretty much as ICS as Civ III could get. (Those "vast land" settings were really the only ones where ICS was economically as efficient as size 12 city placements, and even then only for a portion of the game, with RCP fixed/unknown, and not exploiting the FP fully.)

Anything near that I would think is economically impossible in CIV. Even if you were willing to run the deficit it would entail, having no research capacity at all, at some point (rather early on) your Settlers and Workers would be on Strike and would disband before you could continue building cities and improving tiles with them. And you'd never have any military. No research, no military, no chance.

Even without those limitations, the expansion would be slower as well, as CIV's Settlers and Workers take longer to build from little cities. Not to mention you simply can't space cities that close anymore, so at the extreme of ICS, it would require 225% the land area to fit the same number of cities into. (Civ III requires 400% the land area to fit the same number of cities into as is possible with no spacing limitation. CIV requires 900% more land.)

But in more standard settings, 12-15 cities by 1000BC is "good" in Civ III (ala QSC over at CFC's GOTM). That was mainly size 12 city placements. Tighter spacing could fit/get 20-25 cities in the same land/timeframe without really becoming ICS even. No one really went near ICS much in the QSC though as it was generally not that efficient.