W(h)ither our mighty metropoli?

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

He's baaaaaaack...


What's our overall City strategy - more cities, grow existing cities to size 5, or grow size 5's to size 8?

We have University - there's nothing to prevent us from adding Settlers to existing Xin cities to grow them to size 8. A size 5 city produces 24 beakers w/ Library. A size 8 city would produce 39 beakers, and 58 (I think) with a University. We currently are producing 67 beakers/turn and science is at 19 turns, to provide a point of reference (naturally, not all cities are Xinning at once). Problem is, we have no way of growing cities beyond size 8, really - celebrations will be nearly impossible in Demo/Republic, and we can't build food Caravans to grow the cities above size 8 by that means. And our terrain is generally ill suited to largescale irrigation. City growth past size 8 will be tough.

Our illustrious Deputy City-Planner had polled the masses and suggested Fundy. Fundy is hard times for Science Xinning, since, IIRC, the science rate is halved for specialists as well as conventional science.

On top of all that, we have imposed a 'soft' rule on ourselves not to ICS (I say 'soft' because it hasn't stopped us so far).

So here's the poll - do we try to grow our existing 'core' cities and improve them, or do we found some new cities and get them, and some other existing cities, to size 5 for science Xin purposes?

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

n.b. The advantage of growing cities to size 8 and beyond is that we can make the Universities/Libraries (and/or Markets and Banks) more cost effective, since we can hire more specialists or work more tiles.

The advantage of getting more cities to size 5 is that we need less infrastructure to keep them out of disorder.

The advantage of building more cities is the ICS advantage, of course - lots more tiles worked in less time, fewer improvements required, more units cranked out (But then, we said we wouldn't ICS )

[Sparrowhawk]

My understanding of ICS'ing is building as many cities as possible (2 squares apart, overlapping), and no improvements. We clearly are not doing that, and I think our best choice is to build more cities, filling in the spaces between our spread out empire. These cities will start out in disorder, so we need defensive units build to travel with the settlers to establish martial law immediately however.

/me throws in his 2 cents worth (which in Canada is about 1/2 a cent American...after taxes )

[Ben Kenobi]

Glad to see the sheriff in charge.

Welcome back!

/me needs to replace broken Civ2 cd since brother stepped on old one.

What's our overall City strategy - more cities, grow existing cities to size 5, or grow size 5's to size 8?

No more cities due to unrest.

I like a threshold, grow core cities to size five, so that we can xin them by disbanding settlers to feed population growth.

As for growing after size 5, we need to improve our terrain so that we generate some decent growth rates. Then, we can drop the xin to focus on city growth.

These are my suggestions, let the sheriff do what he may.

[Hydey]

Originally posted by obiwan18



* obiwan18 needs to replace broken Civ2 cd since brother stepped on old one.

I hope you gave him a nice burial

[-Jrabbit]

Our illustrious Deputy City-Planner had polled the masses and suggested Fundy. Fundy is hard times for Science Xinning, since, IIRC, the science rate is halved for specialists as well as conventional science.

STYOM -- Not sure about the halving of Ein contributions; never heard of that. But it will be hundred of years (explosives, RR, gunpowder, democracy, etc) before we can reach Fundy anyway...

[MrWhereItsAt]

I request, as FAM, that the city to the far north change the tiles worked from one of the river squares to a forest. We lose one food but gain 2 shields, speeding the completion of the Diplomat there significantly.

Cheers

[Ben Kenobi]

I hope you gave him a nice burial

He inadvertently stepped on the cd, so now he just has to get me a new one. Everybody wins.

[Hydey]

Need more voters to help break the 3 way deadlock in the poll

[Yurt]

Grow the big ones and improve the terrain around them.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

If the poll ends in a tie, then I will cast the deciding vote

I had actually hoped for a more decisive result so that I could form a strategy on how to implement the plan (e.g. where will the martial law units come from to garrison new cities? OR do we slow science Xinning down in favour of cash Xinning, so we'll have the money for the needed improvements in bigger cities?)

Getting more cities to size 5 and Xinning them is the easiest option. All we need to do really is add Settlers to existing cities (faster method) and/or irrigate the surrounding terrain (slower method). Most of our cities have temples: temple + 3 units + 1 specialist (any type) = content, at size 5.

Building new cities would get us major unhappiness problems in the near term. Not a disaster - after all, the main city tile is automatically worked, even if the first citizen is an elvis - but it would lessen the advantages of the added cities. If we do choose this approach and build new cities, we ought to be building them on specials.

Growing our cities would also result in unhappiness in those cities - which would require us to build colosseums or cathedrals OR raise the luxury rate. Both of these processes would be expensive. In the long run, it could be worth it if the larger cities can produce more goods/taxes/science. In the short run, these cities wouldn't be able to produce units very fast, or Xin (Xinning would slow the build rate to a crawl).

[cavebear]

That's exactly why I support growing more cities to size 5 and Xinning them. Martial law can prevent most of the unhappiness in a 5 city. When they get larger, we have to spend a lot of shields building happiness infrastructures.

And incidentally, that's why I tend to try and move NONE units to cities for defense and martial law. The shield support is zero for them, and the losses in the field come from shield-supported units.

Speaking of "Xinning", isn't it a good thing that the person who developed the idea had a nice short name that appears as a verb easily? I mean, what if I had developed it? Would anyone want to refer to "cavebearing" their cities? Or "hydeying" them? Or "Sixthousandyearoldmanning" them?

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Until we get to a more favourable government - and I mean Fundy or Commie, I can't see us ever getting any benefit from Demo/Republic - we should probably pay more attention to worker placement, to keep cities from growing into unhappiness problems.

For example, a size 3 city is content with a Temple and 2 units. Size 3 is a good threshhold to stick to unless we want to Xin (yup, good short name, same with oedo and solo. Maybe my name is what's preventing me from being a civ innovator ) it. At size 3, it can put a unit in the field without cutting into shield production.

A size 2 city doesn't produce many shields - so that although it can be kept happy with temple + 1 unit, or 3 units, the production makes that kind of shield investment impractical.

A size 4 city is content with a temple + 3 units. Problem is, the next unit built cuts into the shield production. So effectively, for military purposes, it produces the same number of shields as a size 3 city (if we assume the extra worker adds another shield).

Make sense? My proposal is to get a lot of cities to size 3 and crank out units. If we need more science/tax, then we add 2 Settlers right away and skip size 4 altogether

[cavebear]

Let them go to size 4 and than add a Settler to get them to size 5.

[Ben Kenobi]

That's a different idea from my threshold, to build up our core cities first, and then let the core cities grow past size five.

Since we are only a monarchy, any new Xin cities have to be located close to our capital, otherwise corruption drastically reduces their effectiveness.

Secondly, we have so many cities, that we will need to garrison them just to have them grow to size three, and then to size five. I'm not convinced that your plan adequately accounts for the discontent.

Or "hydeying" them?

Why does this make me thing of rogering?

If Xin Yu did not first come up with this technique, we would probably call it size fiving, or something along those lines. Since Xin has a short name, he gets to hog all the credit.