Is it worth it to pack the gaps in your empire with "mini" cities?

[Rakso]

I've been playing with continents to remove the feel of a gigantic land war without turning the game into an island hopping campaign (especially with this corruption model).

Especially with the lack of a grid and a bit of adjustment to catch special resources or avoid clumps of mountains, you sometimes find gaps between your key interior cities. Sometimes, you even have 4-5 Plains or Grasslands that can support a decent-sized city, or even a stray resource.

In Civ 1 and 2, once you're settled, you may as well send settlers into these gaps to get free gold. It would seem worthwhile in this one with the long wait to Sanitation, but the corruption model is so bad with your existing cities.

So is it worth it? The culture at least fills in the gaps later, so that's not quite the issue, at least.

[Libertarian]

I would do a cost/benefit analysis on a per-city basis. Will you reap more than you invest?

[Skanky Burns]

I would say yes. Read Vel's strategy thread, specifically the part about "Training Camps". This would do nicely to fill up gaps in your cultural border, increase your military AND culture at the same time, and still allow all your cities to reach a massive size later in the game.

[Badtz Maru]

There is a grid, I believe it's Shift-G, Ctrl-G, or possibly Ctrl-Shift-G. Or you can turn it on from your handy Preferences menu.

[HulluKarhu]

I think Vel called it long term planning..

In the pre patch days my PC desk was covered with print outs of VELs strategies..now very dog eared and coffee stained I can just barely read something about long term strategy city placing..in areas where resouce that only appear later in the game might appear.
I did just that and one small town became a boom city when coal appeared near to its existing iron and then uranium just to the south.
Somewhere in the files forum there is an excel sheet which tells where these areas are likely to be.

[Mokael]

I place mini cities on only couple occasions - resource (be it a visible one, or just a possible tile type), or if it's a river-lake spot (especially if you're religious or scientific civ). Other than that there is no real value. There are exceptions of course - in one game I had only tiles of grass, hills, and forest at my starting location. I had my settlers cross my neighbor's terriotry and build couple cities in the plain-deset region behind them (in the end it wasn't worth it - that desert was useless )

So yeah - you need to look at costs vs benefits.

[absimiliard]

You realize you can get the grid overlay of the map right? Might be CTL-G, but my memory's never great. I use it constantly for city planning.

[Moraelin]

Dunno about him, but _I_ really never knew about that grid. And it's a royal pain in the donkey to count squares without it. I'd hit G on a unit and start moving the mouse slowly "1... 2... 3... damn, I moved wrong, let's try again... 1... 2... 3... 4... oops, not diagonal... 4... 5... HERE."

Thanks for the very valuable tip.

[Rakso]

Yeah, "advance" placement doesn't always work.

In my present game, I got stuck on a continent with the Greeks and Romans, and the only sources of Iron were on the far ends of their sides of the continent, separated from me by all their cities and quite a few Mountains.

I played Egyptian and used my War Chariots as best as I could in the mountainous continent and nibbled on the Roman empire, finally getting their Iron deposit in time for Monarchy, and I get to use the boost and Iron to mount a quick campaign to clean out the Greeks with swordsmen.

From the Wonders messages, though, it seems that six other civs are stuck on another big continent and have been trading tech and trade goods, and I'm lagging behind.

Then I discover that the nearest source of saltpeter is on the next continent, on the far end of the Japanese empire...

[Velociryx]

It's something I highly recommend.

Is it a risk?

Certainly. Call it a calculated gamble. You know where late game resources are likely to pop up, and you know it's in what is generally regarded as crappy terrain (desert, jungle, a monster of a hilly region with limited access to food). But hey....that's okay. If you lay claim to lots of that type of terrain early on, your odds of gettings screwed out of mid/late game resources diminish considerably.

Of course, there's always more than one way to skin the proverbial cat.

You can NOT do it, let culture fill in the gaps for you and trade resources later with the civs that did settle those crappy sites early. IMO, this puts you at a strategic disadvantage, but not a crippling one (still, if it was me, I'd rather HAVE the resource than not).

Finally, you can of course, wait until you get the requisite tech that reveals an advanced resource, and simply take a rival civ's city that has said resource in its radius.

This, to me, is inefficient from a TIME standpoint. Sure, my preferred method is inefficient from the standpoint of a slight increase in corruption (which can, at least to a degree, be dealt with--in my very worst corruption game, I was losing 102 per turn to corruption....that's as bad as it's gotten, and it was more than tolerable), but carries with it the advantage that the very turn those resources become available, I'm using them (cos by that point in the game, I've got roads....well, pretty much everywhere). The other method involves transporting the army, securing the city, capturing or hauling workers over to build roads, rushing a port if it's on another landmass...UGH...what a hassle! I'd rather just get the tech and go....

And, as has been mentioned, those lousy cities are useful for something....under despotism, they can be your sacrificial training grounds (every time they DO grow, pop-rush a troop).



-=Vel=-