Founding the first city on a hill...

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by Velociryx
Well...to clarify...I would not recommend shorting yourself on hammers to build on a plains hill.

If doing so would rob you of the greater bulk of hammers for a particular city, then it's probably going to cost you more in the end, but where you can arrange it (horses/cows in the vicinity, and hopefully 2-3 other hills), then you can likely afford to lose the one and gain the perma bonuses for your city (which include not only the +1h, but also the perma defensive bonus that stacks with your other city defense bonuses (and it opens up some interesting new promotional possibilities as well, allowing you to take promotions you might otherwise pass on).

All in all...good stuff!



-=Vel=-

It is still worth considering that the “city” improvement adds 2 food to the plains hill but only 1 hammer to the grassland plain. I would still find it hard to ignore the +2 food I get from the deal at the expense of 2 hammers but I guess there might be an occasional situation where a really want a 4 hammer tile – I just can’t imagine it now. Even for building settlers, you can farm some grassland and with this tile plus the city will get the same if the city was founded on the grass and worked a mined hill.

[OK someone now shouts out IMP civs get more from a 0/4/0 hill which I will concede]

[snoopy369]

Actually IMP civs definitely should settle the plains hill, for their first and other early cities ... a 2 size city with 2 forests and the city center will generate 6 hammers for the settler, which is huge; just 1 more hammer means about 4 turns off the settler build (at 6f/4h you get +2/+6 for 8h, 12.5 turns, versus 6f/3h or 6h, 16.6 turns), which makes an earlier city much more reasonable. Early bonuses are often better than larger later bonuses, because they give you other things much faster (the four turns of producing something else, plus the four turns of another city being built, multiplies into other things as you keep pushing everything four turns earlier).