City Build Orders 3150 BC

[Ben Kenobi]

Why waste our limited cities?
Stuff just the Pikemen!

[Bob_Smurf42]

Yeah, why waste cities? build forts instead!

[cavebear]

Because a city is more resilient and durable than a fortress?

[BruceTheStupid]

Originally posted by cavebear


Yeah. Build a few cities on mountains and fill them with pikemen!

I prefer capturing 1 of theirs if possible - we gain and they lose. If we build a new one, it costs a settler and they don't directly lose out.

Plus I get to kill lots of military units on the way (theirs or mine, so long as there's blood spilled, I'm happy)....

[cavebear]

If we want a city just for the purpose of drawing the attention of another civ, I would prefer it be as lethal to attack as possible. A walled city on a mountain would give us the best defensive advantage available.

[Zedd]

Originally posted by cavebear
If we want a city just for the purpose of drawing the attention of another civ, I would prefer it be as lethal to attack as possible. A walled city on a mountain would give us the best defensive advantage available.

Sound logic but in a game where # of cities and city sizes are limited we are faced with some strategic disadvantages. First of all if we build a city we will have to keep in mind that it is a loss to our civ size until those constraints are overcome. Also when positioned on a mountain the city square will not have the support to maintain a populous, and I would imagine any mountain will be located with other mountains, then if inside enemy territory some terrain may be unavailable. So it seems that supporting that city would be an issue that would need to be covered by food caravans, and units supported from other cities. And IIRC we are not allowed caravans.

I like the idea but these are some considerations to make before implementing any such maneuver.

[BruceTheStupid]

Originally posted by cavebear
If we want a city just for the purpose of drawing the attention of another civ, I would prefer it be as lethal to attack as possible. A walled city on a mountain would give us the best defensive advantage available.

I agree in theory, but it's often not practical. The city ideally needs to be in the heart of the rival CIV (to send out diplomats or attackers from) so chances of mountains being in the right place are small, plus the AI rarely leaves unoccupied land in the heart of it's CIV.

Another option is building a city mid-way between the AI and ourselves, where we can choose the terrain a little more easily. The AI will nearly always attack it as first choice rather than travel further to attack (but beware democarcy and peace - if you're not at war with them they sail past your carefully positioned city and loads of foreign military units build up in your heartland as a prelude to them declaring war). However this becomes less relevant as our CIV expands and we become much bigger and more spread out - the AI has more targets in more possible directions.

[atomant]

are we limited in both the size and number of cities. I thought we limited ourselves to x number of cities, but did not specifiy the size of any one city