City Radius or National Borders?

[Crouchback]

Originally posted by Gramphos

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.

Is this a new Civ 3 variation on OCC Gramphos?

David

[cassembler]

Two comments:

1) The editor screenshot we've been given has three levels of "citiness"- town, city, and metropolis [I think]. Perhaps metropolis is the three square radius? Can't confirm.

2) Anybody seen evedince of a supply crawler a la SMAC? I though those were freakin' awesome, though not overly powerful.

[albiedamned]

There is no supply crawler, however there is the new concept of colonies. But unlike supply crawlers in SMAC, which could harvest any resource on any square, colonies are only to harvest a strategic or luxury resource and can only be built on the square containing that resource. Colonies can't give you any food, production, or gold, only strategic or luxury resources. At least, I think this is the case.

I agree that supply crawlers were an awesome feature in SMAC. Depending on which faction I played, they were often the center of my strategy. Supply crawlers basically made the OCC possible in SMAC. However there is no historical parallel for supply crawlers so I agree with not including them in Civ3. That was the advantage of SMAC - since they were making up a fictional future world, they could come up with whatever concepts they wanted to make the gameplay more interesting. There weren't restricted by the details of history.

[Dida]

Originally posted by 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.

I like the idea that workable area expands as the city's pop increases.

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

[Gramphos]

Now I'm really confused. this pic shows a rectangular working area.

[lockstep]

Originally posted by Gramphos
Now I'm really confused. this pic shows a rectangular working area.

This may be a hint that the full workable city radius (21 tiles) only comes into effect with a city size of 7 or more (enabled by aqueducts or the supply of freshwater).

[Sava]

Culture determines your national borders. City radius has nothing to do with it, as Dan clearly stated. The AI can still go into your city radius as long as it isn't in your cultural (national) borders.

[Tventano]

I think the Boston example clearly illustrates that you can use all 21 tiles of the city area as long as the tiles are within your cultural boundaries. Thus as long your city has not enough culture (need 10 whole points to grow!) or another civ claims the area you cannot use all tiles. Better method than in CivII there you had to occupy a tile with a military unit for a turn to move away the foreign use, so that you coud use the tile for yourself.

[Ralf]

Originally posted by Tventano
I think the Boston example clearly illustrates that you can use all 21 tiles of the city area as long as the tiles are within your cultural boundaries. Thus as long your city has not enough culture (need 10 whole points to grow!) or another civ claims the area you cannot use all tiles.

No thats incorrect. You can work on any tile within the currenly workable city-area, regardless if your culture-border covers it, or not. If you harvest food, shield or trade on a tile outside your culture-border however - any foreigner can take over your worked tile, without that being considered as cause-of-war by the other Civs. This has been explained and confirmed by a Firaxian way back.