Core city placement

[asleepathewheel]

I'm so glad they removed RCP so I don't feel the need to measure these things out exactly and can do what Dom reccommended.

I personally can't bring myself to abandon my own cities. A failing in my gaming character, no doubt

[vmxa1]

Now what do I do with that nice RCP chart I have? Never mind.

[steven8r]

First, a nod to Footballgod for asking about camps. I too, was wondering about that terminology.

Ok, let's see if I have this correct:
"camp" = a temporary city mostly devoid of Improvements that is used for a particular purpose (building Units, Settlers, Workers, whatever) and is intended to be Abandoned later in the game.

Is that it?

Originally posted by Dominae
6. Coastal city-sites are good candidates for close city-spacing. It's often easy to forget that, with Harbors, all those Coast and Sea tiles can be just as useful as land tiles.

Dominae

Dom, this part confuses me somewhat
With Harbors, the only thing Coastal Cities can get from the Sea is the Food required to sustain the population. It's not until Offshore Platform that any shields can be obtained from the Sea. So I'm guessing that Harbors with a couple of 'terrestrial' tiles to provide Shields would be required?

Thanks,

Steven

[steven8r]

Oh, and Catt (or anyone else),

What is "Ralph"?

Thanks,

Steven

[Dominae]

Originally posted by steven8r
Dom, this part confuses me somewhat
With Harbors, the only thing Coastal Cities can get from the Sea is the Food required to sustain the population. It's not until Offshore Platform that any shields can be obtained from the Sea. So I'm guessing that Harbors with a couple of 'terrestrial' tiles to provide Shields would be required?

The basic idea is that of city specialization. It's simply not efficient to try and turn every city into a production and commerce powerhouse; it takes too long, and spends too many Shields.

For instance, why build a Barracks in all your cities if some of them will not be building military units most of the time? Much better to designate a few cities as perpetual military unit producers, and let the other cities concentrate on other things. This saves on maintenance and Shields. This is half the idea of "camps", the other half being that those cities that do specialize in military unit production can be abandoned later on since they've got almost nothing in the way of infrastructure (usually just a Barracks).

The same concept applies to coastal city-sites. What will these be best at? Commerce. There's no point in trying to build military units there, because as you point out they will be producing very few Shields until Miniaturization. Instead, Harbors, Marketplaces, Libraries and other Commerce-boosting improvements should be focussed on, at the expense of most everything else. Where do you get the Shields to do all this? Use Gold instead Shields; the few hundred Gold you spend on getting just one of those cities commercially productive will pay itself off in no time.

Once you see Coast/Sea tiles as viable tiles despite their zero Shield output, you'll find have that much more land to exploit and, in particular, more land tiles for your inland cities to use.


Dominae

[Capt Dizle]

Being a contrarian, I try to adhere to a perfectionist city placement scheme with camps in the donut holes. Adjust for terrain. Works perfectly well.

The close spacing you really need to do is a cluster around the starting location. Afterwards spread out to grab land and dot the coastline pretty good.

[steven8r]

Ah, I think I see now Dominae.

Basically those Coastal Cities are going for Commerce/Gold/Cashola and not much else--but then you can spend that extra income on more Units/Improvements/whatever elsewhere.

Thank you for the clarification.

Steven

[Footballgod128]

thanks for the pic, that helps alot, is the diff colors the places its things should be placed, the people getting the resources or whatever(dunno the name...)

and steven, for some reason, i wanna think your from texas, but, i dunno why.......

am i right.......

[Catt]

Originally posted by steven8r
Oh, and Catt (or anyone else),

What is "Ralph"?

Sorry -- it is a city placement camp layout that Sir Ralph (hence "Ralphing") laid out in some detail in this thread. I might characterize it as a rigorous camp layout analysis -- but as with all things Civ, flexibility is usually king.

And whether "Ralphing" or "Zenning" (vmxa1's post of Master Zen's layout strategy) or "OCP'ing" or any other "-ing," sometimes acronyms or nicknames leave a lot to be desired when the message is lost because the lingo is not comprehensible.

Catt

[Theseus]

Originally posted by Dominae
What I currently think about (core) city placement:

1. Core cities should be placed in the best positions, as dicated by the lay of the land. If this means 2-tile placement somewhere, so be it. If this means 5-tile placement (to grab a bonus Food resource, or deny a Lux to the AI), so be it. Never deny yourself a good city-spot just because it does not fit into your standard placement scheme. This is the most important rule.

2. However, it's usually not a great idea to chase that perfect spot halfway across the continent, so there's actually an art to placing cities in the early-game.

3. Adherence to specific city placement strategies is actually counter-productive: if you do this, there's a chance you're not doing #1, which is bad. A common example is sticking to OCP for aesthetic reasons. A less common example is camp-building; oftentimes your starting location simply does not support multiple camp cities. Similarly with blindly Ralphing, or 3-tile spacing.

3. The second-most important consideration after #1 is a projection of tile when your cities reach size 12. You want each city to have access to 12 good tiles, and no more, because Hospitals are too far away to incorporate size 13+ cities into your city placement strategy (in other words, the payoff of planning for Metros is simply not worth it). On average, this implies something close to a 3-tile city-placement strategy, but keep in mind point #1 above.

4. A continuation of #3 above: it's okay not to disband camps if they prove useful throughout the Medieval era, or even into the Industrial era. If this occurs, it's probably because your city placement around the camp was not as good as it could have been. Just because a city is two tiles away from another does not mean it should be disbanded ASAP.

5. If the situation does call for 2-tile spacing at numerous spots (ICS), it's usually better to expand further out then backfill for the 2-tile cities. ICS-ing right from the start, you'll find yourself with very little land (i.e. tiles), and probably lacking a Strategic resource or three.

6. Coastal city-sites are good candidates for close city-spacing. It's often easy to forget that, with Harbors, all those Coast and Sea tiles can be just as useful as land tiles.

Hope this helps.

Dominae

Domming? (Don't hate me, Dominae, but what if it sticks?? )

To Catt's point, I have at times been ridiculously obsessed with CP (i.e., city placement), and I'm pretty sure I am to blame for the naming of Ralphing and Zenning (and Domming!).

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Theseus
Domming? (Don't hate me, Dominae, but what if it sticks??

In that case I will have no choice but to hate you...

[vmxa1]

Footballgod128 if you have the bonus CD that came with C3C they have a strat guide with great details on all the placement choices. Nice pictures and all.

[nbarclay]

My city placement foillows absolutely no geometric pattern, but rather follows three main goals.

(1) Make maximum use of high-value tiles, including bonus tiles, grassland with shield, and rivers. Even when I'm not playing agricultural, I like river cities for their extra gold and the fact that they don't need to waste shields on aqueducts. (Note that distance from the capital is an extremely important aspect of value, since it is net output after waste and corruption, not gross output before, that counts. Chasing a distant cow can be a serious waste of a settler who ought to be building a city close to home.)

(2) Use essentiallly all available land and most available coast and sea at size 12. Coastal cities can usually work a lot of land tiles early in the game and then shift to using a higher and higher percentage of coast and sea as the inland cities grow in population and need more land tiles. (Balancing the use of tiles that are a drain on food - hills, mountain, and for non-agricultural civs desert - among cities is also important; a mountain is worth a lot more to a city that can feed a laborer to work it!)

(3) Take advantage of city placement to fill in borders without waiting for individual cities' cultural borders grow. That gives a wider selection of tiles to work than if each city had to choose among only the eight tiles immediately surrounding it.

The end result is a hodge-podge where city placement varies radically in both distance and direction, but where my overall use of the land available is good. I suffer a bit financially in the late game from having to maintain improvements in more cities than if I built hospitals and had huge metropolises, but the benefit in the early game more than makes up for it.

Nathan

[East Street Trader]

OK sea squares do not produce shields until latish on.

But coastal squares produce two arrows from the off - and that means there are lots and lots of occasions when they are useful in their own right.

More so to a micromanager but thoroughly useful even if you like to play a pacy game.

Which makes core coastal cities valuable. But, rather more significantly, in the case of remote cities abundant arrows become substantially more beneficial than abundant shields. Because corruption will reduce even a twenty shield city to just one useable shield. And the improvements which may (eventually) get the useable shields up to a decent number are very costly. Whereas even after corruption has taken the lion's share of the arrows, a simple (and cheap to rush) library will give you a decent return. And corruption does not affect food production. Every time your remote coastal city puts on a head of population there is a nice two arrow square waiting.

Late on I find platforms work wonders in such cities - more cheaply than factories/power plants/manufacturing plants can do. Once the platform is up you get enough shields to make some sort of a dent in the factories/power plants/manufacturing plant requirements and those improvements, when eventually rushed, have a base to bite on.

Shifting to a new point, a factor that has not been mentioned is proximity to fresh water. I find the benefit of not requiring an aquaduct considerable and it is also handy to have the capacity to build a polution free hydro plant later.

So I am very willing to distort city placement to a certain degree to gain those benefits for as many of my (vanilla Civ3) cities as I sensibly can.

[Harovan]

I hate you too, T.