City Placement. 3,4,5, or 6 squares apart?

[Purple]

I subscribe to Zachriel's and Viseus's philosophy. We don't play on a chessboard, after all (although abstract maps can be created for purposes of equalizing starting conditions).

I do use these spacing schemes as guidelines, but have to consider geography. Besides coastlines (mentioned above, mountains restrict your options.

Generally, the worse the terrain, the closer I position cities. A city in a low-productive area will never grow large enough to exploit all the tiles within its 21-tile area, so even severe overlapping does not restrict city growth. In a desert or hilly/mountainous region I may place cities only two tiles apart.

Larger populations can be supported in grassland, plains, and floodplain areas (as well as jungles, after they are developed) , so I try to "tile the plane" as optimally as possible in those areas.

Rivers are doubly desirable settlement sites, since they produce more food and obviate the need for aqueducts (lakes are good for this, too), so I'll try to found a city on a riverside location if possible.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Purple
Generally, the worse the terrain, the closer I position cities.

Another good "rule of thumb."

[nbarclay]

I usually focus on building cities where they can make good use of terrain rather than focusing on some particular spacing, although I do traditionally prefer to minimize overlap. I've thought about the idea of building smaller towns in between almost purely as unit/worker/settler farms and disbanding them later, but I haven't gotten around to trying that particular trick yet. (At least not in Civ 3; densely packed forest cities on rivers made great settler farms in CTP.)

Nathan

[star mouse]

Originally posted by Viseus
By the way...one thing that has been bothering me a bit. There is no apparent way to disband cities. Or is there? I've tried the good ol' settler from a too small city trick, but that doesn't seem to work in Civ III. Comments?

Cities with excess food production cannot be disbanded.

To disband a city, get the city down to size 2 by building lots of workers, arrange the labourers in the city so there's no excess food production, and produce a settler.

[Deathwalker]

Generally I like to leave 3/4 squares between my cities. In Civ 2 I used to sometimes leave more, but in Civ 3 the computer players would fill ion these areas with there own cities so I leave only 3/4 aquares as a rule of thumb

[kailhun]

In my current game I space the cities 2 tiles apart. This was my first game with this strategy and for the first 5500 years it works great. It allowed a much better use of the land and the production of a lot of units to smash the other civ's.
Now i'm starting to notice an disadvantage. Cities are starting to infringe on the tiles of the other cities. A fast growing city can grab the good foodtiles from a smaller neighbour and inhibit it's growth, even though it can't grow any further itself because of the 12 limit.
Also an individual city won't get a large production because of the limited tile acces. So as the shieldcost of units and buildings rizes the shieldoutput of a city doesn't rise to keep in step.
However, as I've already conquered most of the world this is not really a problem for me.
A solution I read on the forum somewhere is to disband some of the cities and allow the others to grow like 'normal'.

The reason I chose this startegy was the aggresive AI-techtrading. I figured I couldn't keep up in tech and rely on my smaller but superior army to fight offensive and defensive wars. I neede a lot of good units that could win through superior numbers. As the romans the legionairy was my logical choice for first combat unit. And as I needed a lot of them I needed a lot of cities. The hive technique seemed suitable and has worked wonderfully.

I have to say however that while it has been an interesting diversion, it's not my favourite strategy. I prefer the plan for the future strategy. In my next game I will do that again. I fear however that I won't survive.

Any thoughts on the effects of aggresive ai-techtrading on cityplanning?

Robert