Versailles and forbidden city locations?

[Geronimo]

Suppose you are playing a terra type map in which the new world consists of two continents connected by a narrow isthmus and you have a roughly equal number of cities in both the north and south continent with a couple additional cities on the isthmus itself.

If you can only build either the versailles wonder or the forbidden national wonder (but not both) in the new world where should you site the secondary palace wonder? On the isthmus where it is more or less in the center of the overall distant new world colonies but where it has only one nearby city, or is it better to choose the city in either the north or south continent which has the most immediate neighbors and site it there?

In other words is the discount in maintenance greatest if you make sure the new capitol is as close to cnetered as possible or is the discount greatest when the new capitol will be as close as possible to as many cities as possible?

[wodan11]

Good question. My gut feeling is that you should place it right smack in the middle (rather than wherever you can fit 5 good cities in a circle around the center city, or as close to this ideal as you can get).

For example, say you have a "barbell" shaped layout, with two circles of 5 cities each surroounding a 6th city, and the two circles are linked by a 13th city right in the middle.

You could put the FP at the 13th city, and you'll pay low maintenance for the two closest cities on each circle, total 4 at low cost. Next closest cities/cost will be 6, and furthest away will be 2. There will be 0 cities which are "really" far away. 1/4/6/2/0.

If, instead, you put the FP in the middle of one of the circles, you'll pay low cost for 5 cities, next higher for 1 city, next for 2, next for 4. 1/5/1/2/4.

See what I mean?

To get any better analysis than this, ultimately you would have to do an analysis of the exact distances and compare to the distance calculation function (you'd probably have to dig it out of the xml).

Wodan

[gdgrimm]

Well, if you go State Property, the question is mute. :-)

I don't recall my Math studies real well, but I think it'll boil down to somebody looking at the distance calculation (probably in the SDK) and noting whether the distance penalty is linear (i.e. twice the distance is twice the distance penalty) or exponential (i.e. twice the distance is more than twice the penalty).

If linear, I don't think it makes any difference.

If exponential, you definitely want it in the middle.

BTW, this might also be skewed by where the larger cities are. If the distance penalty is also influenced by city size, and the northern cities are larger than the southern cities, you may want it up on the northern part (or on the northern end of the isthmus).

Sorry, but I'm not familiar enough with the details of the formula to comment further. You could probably do a WorldBuilder experiment and figure it out, though.

[Blake]

In practice the difference is sufficiently little that you simply want to build it in the most productive city - whatever city can get it up the fasted in the new world.