City Radius or National Borders?

[Crouchback]

From the Gamespot preview
Culture determines national and city boundaries. For example, at the beginning of the game, your city radius will be only one square. As soon as your first city acquires 10 culture points, its radius will extend to two squares. Thereafter, as it attains higher and higher levels of culture, its radius will continue to expand.

I'm completely confused by culture now.

Does a city start off able to work its full 21 square radius, and is it just national borders that expand?

Or, does a city require culture to expand its workable squares? And can it do so beyond the 21 squares as in CTP2?

Why am I so concerned: ICS. Don't bother expanding cities just build new ones.

David

[Ralf]

I agree that above quote only adds to the confusion. The Gamespot previewer have probably missunderstood it, hopefully.

As I have come to understand it; the traditional food-shield-trade city-area can now expand in two steps: First 8 surrounding squares at the beginning, then at a certain pop-threshold, the remaining surrounding squares, adding upp to 20 squares + the city-square itself, comes available. Period.

And that the culture-border (wich is a seperate system) starts out with nothing - then expands step-by-step upto a maximal of 5-6 squares away.

[Faboba]

Pop threshold of 8 anyone?

That would tie in with the aqueduct assuming they've not changed it

[Crouchback]

Originally posted by Faboba
Pop threshold of 8 anyone?

That would tie in with the aqueduct assuming they've not changed it

Yeah, but 8 over the 21 squares not just the ring of 1 tile plus the city tile, which gives an ICS bonus when the city only needs 20 food to grow under 8.

David

[lockstep]

Looking at the editor screenshot at Civ3.com, I guess they´ve changed it to 6 (aqueduct) and 12 (hospital).

[Grim Legacy]

No culture affects only the borders (territorial claim vs other civs) and also the harvesting of special resources. You'd need a colony otherwise + road.

The food and normal resources are always limited to and equally available on the old city radius.

[Gramphos]

See this thread, it was where this discussion started (I believe)

Also see the following post by Dan (My boldtype)

Originally posted by Dan Magaha FIRAXIS
The way it currently stands, your borders are separate from your "workable city tiles". The number of city tiles you can work does increase as your city grows, but it doesn't expand nearly as far as your city borders do. Even if your city has only the beginning 1-square (no) border, you can work the requisite number of surrounding squares. But until those squares actually fall within your borders, the enemy can come onto them and do what he pleases. Once you've got borders around those squares, you can tell the other players to get out (and in most cases, they listen).

As for colonies, the resources go to whoever builds a colony and connects it with a road first. Consequently, colonies become key while your borders are expanding, and if you leave them unguarded or weakly guarded, you will pay the price. Also, since colonies need to be connected to a city with roads, an enemy can destroy your roads and sever the connection to that resource.

This can be disastrous, especially when you're relying on goods to pacify unhappy citizens. I had a game going this week and the CPU destroyed my roads at a key juncture and sent four cities into revolt.


Dan
Firaxis Games, Inc.

And this screen as well. The bottom image has 0 cp and only 1 size radius. (The white line marks the working area)

[Crouchback]

Thanks for the post Gramphos, guess that about nails it. But I hesitate to think how a two stage city development will effect the game play in the early stages. Never did no good in CTP2, I know that.

David

[Ralf]

I dont think above is clarifying enough. Both the city's culture-border and the city's working-area (dealing with food/trade/shields) expands, according to above quote. The working-area is maxed out at 21 tiles.

According to this settler surveying screenshot + the question/answer seems to indikate that the survey-outline is the working-area - NOT the culture-border.

[Grim Legacy]

Originally posted by Ralf
I dont think above is clarifying enough. Both the city's culture-border and the city's working-area (dealing with food/trade/shields) expands, according to above quote. The working-area is maxed out at 21 tiles.

According to this settler surveying screenshot + the question/answer seems to indikate that the survey-outline is the working-area - NOT the culture-border.

Hm? I think gramphos made it perfectly clear with his quote. I was pretty close myself, but I missed the point that the workable city tiles also grow...but only to their 21 max.

What is still unclear now?

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by Grim Legacy
Hm? I think gramphos made it perfectly clear with his quote. I was pretty close myself, but I missed the point that the workable city tiles also grow...but only to their 21 max.

Well, we don't know for sure that the working area can expand more then 21. AFAIK we have not seen any very strong culture cities.

[Grim Legacy]

Well from the quote ("not nearly as far") and from my faint memory of reading it somewhere I more or less assumed that the old number of tiles was going to be the max. But ok... this is maybe not for sure. Understood.

[albiedamned]

I think this screenshot link from the Civ3 site might help:

http://www.civ3.com/images/screenshots/citymgmt2.jpg

In this picture, the city (Paris) is fairly large, yet can only work the traditional 20 square radius. However it has amassed over 3000 culture points, which means its borders have gone through 3 expansions (10, 100, 1000). So its borders should now be 4 squares away from the city. The borders aren't even visible in the screenshot, presumably because they have merged with the borders of the neighboring cities.

So I think that your city radius (that is, the workable tiles) starts out at just 8 squares, but expands to the traditional 20 squares when your city border grows to 2. And since that should happen fairly quickly (it only takes 10 culture points), then for most of the game your cities will have the traditional 20 square workable city radius. I doubt the city radius ever goes beyond 20, no matter how large the city borders get.

Of course, I could be wrong. . . we won't know for sure until we get our hands on the game!

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by albiedamned
Of course, I could be wrong. . . we won't know for sure until we get our hands on the game!

We won't know for sure until we have won by cultural victory with one city (not total civ).

But I believe that it would be hard to fit any bigger city radius in the city screen.

[Ralf]

Originally posted by albiedamned
So I think that your city radius (that is, the workable tiles) starts out at just 8 squares, but expands to the traditional 20 squares when your city border grows to 2.

I strongly suspect that the tile-accessibility from 8 to 20 working-tiles has more to do with the population threshold-size - not with expanding cultural borders. After all; its a question of having enough pops to employ for field-work - not if they are culturally educated enough, or not.