City Placement Strategy

[Meshelic]

Ah I see. As I said I'm no economist.

[Theseus]

I'm not sure I understand SR's layout exactly... how many tile movements from city to city?

I will argue for 3 tile movement between cities (i.e., 2-tile spacing), dependent on terrain, rivers, etc.

I think we have to be *ready* for all-out early warfare, whether that becomes our strategy or not.

Should we recruit cracker?

[nbarclay]

I think Sir Ralph's layout is great, subject to adjustments for terrain. I may start borrowing it for SP games.

There are a few other tricks, though, that we ought to keep in mind. If a city has saltwater tiles in its radius, it generally belongs on the coast so it can build a harbor. Also, near the coast, I'll often plan cities in terms of growing to size six working only land tiles and then shifting to using a lot of water tiles as I install aqueducts and my cities expand to size twelve (and perhaps eventually a little beyond). And as others have noted, issues like adequate food, building on rivers to avoid the need for aqueducts, and quick access to bonus tiles tend to interfere with theoretically optimal build patterns.

But I definitely agree with a general theme of keeping cities (especially near human opponents) close for defensive purposes and of not going out of our way to plan in terms of cities' growing past size twelve.

Nathan

[DeepO]

Theseus: in SRs scheme, all cities have 12 tiles to work, whiile staying at a 1 move distance (2 spacing). Of course, it's an ideal, we won't be able to follow it everywhere. But by using the difference between diagonals and vertical distance (diagonal for unit movement, vertical for tiles), we could have the best of 2 worlds.

Coasts: normally, with the same scheme, we should get some 6-8 landtiles to work, and some 10 sea tiles (if the coast would be a straight line, instead of jagged). Which means of course there isn't that much choice for those cities, if those 6 landtiles aren't very good, the production of that city is hampered. But there is something else that can be used here: the scheme SR proposed is valid when all cities are at maximum size, which won't happen until later in the game. So at first, we should be able to switch tiles a bit, and later on make coastal cities primarily for commerce, inland cities for production. This is a strat I also use on SP games without that fixed pattern, if I can be bothered with all the MM of citizens, and believe me, it works. (it's natural, no coastal city will have good production anyway)

DeepO

[ManicStarSeed]

I used to squirm with anything less than 4/5 spacing. Since our excellent performance during the early game of the C3DG, I have been converted. I support spacing cities for 1 turn defender moves. It makes sense to be able to shuffel troops around covertly. More so because 13+ cities will be very unlikely. Our cities will be up more quickly, corruption will be less. The gains using this philosphy seem to be expotential.

I agree that targeting the spacing at 2/3 should be a basic placement philosophy, but still lets do whatever we need to meet our REX goals as they arise.


Mss