Beginning City Placement

[Jerh9e1k5]

I haven't had much of a chance to play the game so I was wondering if you guys could clear something up for me. I'm used to Civ3 where corruption is a big deal in cities, especially ones that are distant from the capital. In Civ4 is there no corruption? From what I understand its been replaced by happiness and healthiness.

So the farther a city is from your capital does it affect the hapiness or healthiness of that city? Is it now worthwhile to really grab optimum city spots in the beginning of the game even if they are distant? In Civ3 distant cities would be unproductive, therefore even the chance of securing a luxury wasn't enough to tempt me until I had my four core cities up and running.
Thanks for the answers

[Blake]

The concept which replaces corruption is Upkeep, basically new cities have to be subsidised. For example on a Terra map a brand new colony in the New World might be costing 10 gold a turn in Upkeep! That's A LOT more than it makes in income for quite a while.

Upkeep has two components - distance and city count. They work as expected.

Basically you can afford to quickly expand and grab resources (and it's a solid strat) but do make sure to pay attention to your cities upkeep so you don't over-expand..

I usually play with a "Devil may care" expanding strategy, I keep expanding and only stop once all claimable resources are claimed. I have had to set my research to 20% to PAY for that kind of expansion... but recovery has always been possible.

The worst case scenario is you expand like a weed, and upkeep kills your research BEFORE you have critical economy techs like Pottery (for cottages) and Code of Laws (for Courthouses), this leaves you with little ability to recover. But it's quite hard to get into such a state unless you're really trying, overall upkeep is quite forgiving, much moreso than Corruption (until the point you crash your economy, anyway).

[Jerh9e1k5]

Sounds fun!
Thanks for the quick reply Blake.

When you go to found a new city does it tell you what the upkeep for the new city will be? This would be useful in order to know if you could afford it or not.

[Blake]

No, it doesn't tell you. Generally speaking early in the game new cities will be 1-2 upkeep. Very distant cities might be about 5.

As your empire sprawls upkeep at distant cities will rise to 7-15... but by then you'll have established cities and a strong economy so you never really have to pay too much attention to upkeep. Technically you can "afford" almost any level of expansion, it just involves lowering your research rate. Upkeep rises smoothly and gradually, there is no magical number of cities where the upkeep suddenly doubles or something, this is one of the great things about Civ4, it's all rather natural and intuitive.