Whatever happened to the size 40 city!

[James M]

Depending on terrain, it's probably best to cap the size of a city at some point. There's not much sense in having a citizen working a farmed grassland for three food, when he's eating two and loosing another to poor health. The game revolves more around working good tiles than working many.

[Jaguar]

I've got a pair over 20 this game. Right now they're at 20 and 21, and they're still growing.

[Jaguar]

I finished with a city of size 31. I'm not sure whether it was the most efficient use of its resources, but it was fun to have a big pile o' specialists.

[Quillan]

In my current game, my capital is size 30 and still growing as of 1958 or so. Health is the big issue, which is making things stagnate. The area has 5 flood plains along rivers, and the majority of the remainder is farmed grassland. Farmed grassland produces 4 food after biology, so that's basically the same as in Civ 3, just with a different tech from before. But the city's growth to that size has stalled several times throughout the game, as the unhealth has eaten up the extra food it produced. Every time I either secured a new food source or a new health producer, it would grow a bit more and then stall again. I've grown used to the icon and the yellow-green haze there.

[Dis]

It's still nice to see those huge magnificant cities. I kind of miss them. . I haven't gotten past size 20 yet.

I'm not likely to either. As I emphasis production over population. I'm a production whore. I build workshops in a lot of squares.

[khumak]

Originally posted by Dis
It's still nice to see those huge magnificant cities. I kind of miss them. . I haven't gotten past size 20 yet.

I'm not likely to either. As I emphasis production over population. I'm a production whore. I build workshops in a lot of squares.

Actually those food pumping megacities can be incredibly productive because of all those engineer and priest specialists. For instance in a size 30 city you can have 22 workers plus 8 engineers/priests. It's quite common for my largest cities to also be my most productive because of all those engineers and priests. This is especially true if you bother to build a few mines on some hills. IMO workshops aren't worth it unless you use State Property.

[swat-spas2]

First game i played as rome. The expansive trait plus having most of the health resources led to 30, 26, 24, 24, 22 as my largest cities (this was before genetics and FTs). Suffices to say, I was crushing the AI in production. The extra pop was not from a ton of farms really, mostly just that the health resources produce alot of food on the tile itself anyway. I used it primarily as priests and engineers, except in two high trade towns. Rome and Antium were both near 100 production after 3 gorges.(if IW was working a 3rd city would have been even higher)..I don't think the AI, at least the ones on my continent, were competing with that outside of one good mining town in Arabia. In general not every tile can be worked (peaks are useless and desert usually is) so the workers will be around 17-18. That could be a good target pop, but exceeding it not only gives more points, but gives you some flexibility to try generate more GPs. Not exceeding it means more workshops and cottages, but smaller cities. I think you are better off creating a couple of massive cities to make into GP factories, and keep the others around the 15-20 mark and max commerce or hammers.

[tiilikainen]

See here:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=145366

[Diadem]

Some time ago I played a game on setller difficulty to try some strategies out.

My starting position had some food resources (2 cows I think) and 4-5 flood plains. I farmed every square in my city radius, and ran as many specialists as I could all game long. All of them merchants.

I managed to create something like 35 GPs during that game, most of them Great Merchants. I added every single one to my city as a super specialist. This gave me more and more food in my city.

At the end of the game the city was, I think, size 42. With over 20 merchants in it. Pretty impressive.

And the starting position wasn't even that good. I've seen better

[Bobby Chicken]

I have a size 28 with the globe theater and +10 food per turn

[Dis]

size 23 is still my highest.