City site grab

[Urban Ranger]

When your scout discovers an awesome city site a distance away from your empire, do you plan immediately to make a grab for it i.e. build a city on the spot?

Hm, maybe a site with six resources, a couple of gems, a couple of food, iron, and stone. Will you go for that?

[Blake]

The AI recognizes good sites and will go for them just as aggressively, and they have production bonuses, so usually I find the top-notch sites get nabbed by an AI. They keep the site warm for me until my army of catapults roll up .

So I pretty much go for un-offensive, average sites with immediate payoff (like cows to work) then later take the best sites by force. Worth noting the best sites are often jungle'd too, so it's nice to have the AI do some terrain improvement. Also often the AI will build plantations for you as well so you don't need to get Calander to access the resource. I think it's definitely in your benefit to have the AI build up plantation-heavy sites for you.

[Swiss Pauli]

Always tempted, but since I lost to a city to a culture-flip on warlord, I've been pretty conservative on placement!

[Modo44]

Re: City site grab

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
When your scout discovers an awesome city site a distance away from
your empire, do you plan immediately to make a grab for it i.e. build a city on the spot?

Hm, maybe a site with six resources, a couple of gems, a couple of food, iron, and stone. Will you go for that?

I would, but by the time I am ready to, the AI will be there. Twice. (I play with the maximal possible number of civs.)

[Crossfire]

I had a game last night that had a great coastal city site that was an extra city's distance from my capitol. By going worker/settler and chopping the settler I was there first. I later filled in the middle which was mostly covered by my capitol's culture anyway so there was slim chance of getting a split kingdom. So yes, I try for them. On Monarch, btw.

[trumbo]

Last time I did this Rome built a city *between* the good city spot and my capitol, which led to a long protracted war and a dangerous slowdown in technical investigation, which ended when his praetorians started to appear to kill my axemen, swordsmen and chariots. Bleah!

[Fosse]

I usually shake my head and weep when I see the AI build a city right NEXT to the perfect city square.

You know, carefully thought out so that one of the resources is outside the fat cross. Or shuffled one square away from the ocean when being coastal would provide all the same resources. Or, if it's close enough to my core, being positioned just so it inteferes with my master city-laying plan.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by trumbo
Last time I did this Rome built a city *between* the good city spot and my capitol

That's why you need follow-up moves.