# Cities

[Foxhawk]

Marathon, not a small map. How many cities do you build before having to stop expanding? I always seem to either over-expand and crunch my research down to nothing or under expand and lose out on various opportunities. The AI seems to have way, way more cities than I do.

Oh, and answers conditional on age/tech/strategy are welcomed.

[Hobie819]

In the itital expansion I usually build 4 or 5, depending on the resources available. Also, it depends on the number of AI civs. If there are 18 civs then land gets scarse. I usually keep my research at 90%. Whenever I start getting surplus money and have room to continue expansion, I build another settler and go at it.

I find my scouts can usually find anough goodie huts at the start to be able to support the cost of 4 or 5 cities (depending on the game difficulty and number of civs in the game).

[Verrucosus]

I asked a similar question a while ago in the topped strategy thread

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=151801

and received a very detailed and helpful answer from Velociryx in post #10. The discussion there was directed to standard maps. The matter of game speed was not specifically addressed, but Velociryx is very fond of Marathon games, so his comments should apply.

I try to get nine cities by the end of the classical age, but so far - playing on Monarch - I have not been able to get there reliably without a small war or two. I do manage to keep research at 90 % or 80 % for most of this period, but the last two or three cities tend to drive research down to 50 % or so. Normally, I quickly recover because of courthouses and cottage growth.

Verrucosus

[killomatic]

Build two or three, conquer the rest. It's a waste of maintenence and city growth to build settlers to found cities when you can just wait for the nearest AI to get nice and ripe and get large, partially equiped cities with terrain already worked.

Think of building armies as building settlers that cost more shields, don't hinder city growth, and found much much better cities.

This is FAR more true on marathon, the speed you're playing at. Armies seem so disporportionately cheap compared to buildings that you'd be a fool not to capture your cities instead of building them. Also, you get much more use out of armies on marathon without having to upgrade them with gold, and you can wage offensives for longer without getting obsolete.

[Blake]

I'm generally incliend to say that you should expand until there are no more good city sites (a good city site defined as one which will easily pay for itself, usually a good food resource, another resource, and/or plentiful floodplains, lots of grassland is a pro). As long as the cities being founded are good ones, you'll eventually end up in a stronger position once the economy recovers (ie go right down to 0% if the city sites remain)

Once there are no more good city sites, I suggest founding at the BAD city sites as economy allows, generally found new cities as you build courthouses in established cities (as courthouses mitigate much of the city count upkeep), as a rule of thumb, it's okay to found filler cities if your slider setting is 50%-60% or higher.
Certain things are conductive to spamming cities - the Great Lighthouse, Colossus, being Organized, Merchantalism + Rep combo, etc, the more of these factors you have, the earlier you should found "bad" cities.

So basically rapidly expand to all the available good sites, then slowly found the filler cities as economy allows.

Peaceful expansion and military expansion are largely equivilant, it's just the difference between training settlers and building infrastructure and training units and stealing infrastructure, you don't usually have much of a choice since AI's will consume all untaken land before too long. Use the same calculation - if your economy isn't suffering (>50%) then you can afford to conquer more territory and that conquest will tend to pay off in strictly economical terms before the end of the game (until industrial-modern anyway).

Organized leaders can typically expand non-stop with conquering using slavery + org.rel + rushbuy courthouses and missionaries.

[jbp26]

Originally posted by killomatic
Build two or three, conquer the rest. It's a waste of maintenence and city growth to build settlers to found cities when you can just wait for the nearest AI to get nice and ripe and get large, partially equiped cities with terrain already worked.

Think of building armies as building settlers that cost more shields, don't hinder city growth, and found much much better cities.

This is FAR more true on marathon, the speed you're playing at. Armies seem so disporportionately cheap compared to buildings that you'd be a fool not to capture your cities instead of building them. Also, you get much more use out of armies on marathon without having to upgrade them with gold, and you can wage offensives for longer without getting obsolete.

this is great advice.

[couerdelion]

As a rule, the earlier the better for city two will often pay relativelyquick dividends if you have a half-decent site. After that your decisions will be based on how aggressive you want to be.

If you go for an early rush, then you won’t need any more cities and will acquire a couple more anyway so no need to build your own.

For a slightly later war (ie with Swords) you will probably want 1-3 more cities though a lot here depends on terrain. – you may, for example, have been forced to run with 4 cities just to make sure that you get copper, horses and.iron.

Overall, I’d based my call on where your costs are going. I tend to get very uncomfortable with sliders below 50% and will generally stop any peaceful expansion at this stage. Unless you have some mechanism for actively fighting your costs, they will start rising inexorably so the 50% figure above could, even without expansion, fall over time to 30% of less. The 50% threshold is basically the game telling me that I need to research Code of Laws, build courthouses, research Currency, build markets. If I’ve already done that then I’m probably already in trouble.