Cities! Cities! Cities!

[Like2frolick]

I am the Uber-newbie, hear me roar! I can defeat the mighty AI in Warlord! <crowd>::Blinks slightly::

Uhm. Anyway.

This thread is for advice on cities. Where is the best place to build cities? Now I know, someones gonna say "four way special" or some other In crowd code I don't understand, so please be ~specific~

I'm a perfectionist. My problem usually is lack of production, most of my cities make like, negligable production, but staggering trade(I usually stay on Oceans....I LOVE oceans, a leg up in trade, food, and exploration)

Now...I was also wondering. I have ToT. Could someone please explain some of the Landforms to me?

------------------
I dunno. I think nukes are cool..If you're the only one who has em.

[Dissident Aggressor]

well with all that trade you can rush build stuff, so production isn't all that good anyways.

What kind of productin are you looking for. I find my production usually isn't that good until just before i get industrialization. sometimes I build king richards crusade just for the hell of it. But the best solution is population. Use we love the __ day to improve this if you want to do it quickly. A high food square like fish I love (despite what others say about it- fish is good). Because this allows me to put a worker on a low food high production special or even a mine in a hill. just be sure to use railroads to to further boost production.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Hey! I'm a newbie who plays perfectionist on ToT! I can answer (some) of this.

First of all, and this is probably obvious, you want balance. The ocean is cool, but too much ocean can really screw up your production until you get miniaturization late in the game. Same goes for grassland. You want your sqaures to compensate for each other, and give you a little of everything. That being said, mountains, glaciers, and tundra are pretty pointless without specials, and you should try to avoid them -- but not at all costs. Because there are two things I find more important that great overall city squares.

The first, of course, is the 4-way special.

Apparently (I learned this here), specials often but not always occur in a kind of swastika pattern, thus:

oSxxo
xxxxS
xxCxx
Sxxxx
oxxSo

where C is the city itself, X is an ordinary city square, S is a special square, and O is a square outside the city. Ideally, you want to build to get all four specials, but this isn't always wise (when, for example, the C square is a mountain or tundra). But you want to go for as many specials as possible. Note that you will often find this pattern, but there will be no special in one of the four squares; sometimes you can "find" the special by transforming the terrain (in my most recent game, grassland sitting where a special should have been turned out to be a pheasant once I transformed the land to forest).

Second, I think maybe the most important thing for my game is city spacing. I tend to build my cities as compactly as possible without overlapping; my ideal is to always to have any given city be no more than five spaces away from it's nearest neighbor, and no closer than one overlapping square. This maximizes size (because you'll build more cities) and resource use (because you'll eventually get all the good stuff) while minimizing travel time for settlers, caravans and military. Building this way means fewer cities in ideal sites, but I'll take 2 great cities, 8 so-so cities, and 2 dogs over 6 great cities anytime.

Finally, as I said, I play ToT -- but I don't know what you mean by "Landforms." That wouldn't be some kind of in crowd code, would it?

------------------
Dig trenches, with our men being killed off like flies? There isn't time to dig trenches. We'll have to buy them ready made. Here, run out and get some trenches.
-- Rufus T. Firefly, the original rush-builder
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by Rufus T. Firefly (edited December 07, 2000).]</font>
[This message has been edited by Rufus T. Firefly (edited December 07, 2000).]

[Like2frolick]

When you start a new game, and it asks what Kind of world you wanna make.

What do each of those things do? What does the age of the world do? ANy ideas what the "Best" Kind of world is (Other than "Large" )

[Dissident Aggressor]

age of world just determines how big the continents are supposedly. the older it is the closer packed the continents are (supposedly like our earths' history).

[Chainsaw]

I'm not 100% sure about that, but I think on a younger world the terrain is more uniform, you have wide areas with similar terrain types. On an old world, very many different terrains are mixed together in a close space.

[Cam]

Just to sort of repeat what Rufus was saying, the below image is an example of a four-way split. While not the 'perfect' site (a little 'light on' with shields, only three river squares) there are worse! Ocean access can be a plus or a minus, depending on your game strategy.

Also note Paul's OCC site - in the '2.1 Opening' section there is some advice on terrain types that might be of interest.

[kcbob]

I don't have ToT but I've got to think this would apply to both it and Civ2.

You have two extremes, 4-special cities and ICS. If you don't want to play either of these to the max, then I would suggest a happy medium of at least one special per city. Two would be better but I'd avoid trying to ensure three and four in each one. (Although, a couple of 4-special cities would be quite potent.)

------------------
Frodo lives!