If you can grab territory, Should you? Or should you stop expanding at some point?

[The Pioneer]

The main reason for grabbing all the land you possibly can is to deny it from the AI. A second and not a less important reason is resources, the more land you have the more the chances that you will control more resources (you should try to build cities in any terrain, unlike Civ 2), which will give you control over the game!

So long...

[RedBird]

Originally posted by Aeson
Adding more cities won't change corruption in your already founded cities unless you are in Communism, or the new cities are closer to your Palace/FP than the old.

Aeson, I just watched the end-movie of your 63K point victory posted on the CivFanatics site. Absolutely incredible. I'm in awe.

But despite that I'm still going to question your statement. I would agree that distance corruption will not be increased in the inner cities by new cities in distant locations, but if one had not already exceeded your OCN (Optimal number of cities as determined by map-size for those not familiar with the term) wouldn't new cities increase the corruption in all cities? This is really a question, not a challenge. I've seen the corruption threads, but I'm still foggy on this.

I'm in a similar situation. I have a (small) newly-emptied continent which I kicked the Russians off of. I have one city on it because that's where all the world's Ivory is. Due to the RR's I built on the continent I have enough units to kick anyone back off if they try to land to colonize. Thus there's no need for me to colonize to prevent AI from taking it since they can't get onto it. Any new city will be a one-shield city. So far I haven't colonized it, but after I see .SAV's like your win I have to wonder.

[Aeson]

I'm not absolutely sure on the corruption, but this is how I think it works.

OCN corruption is based off of the city #, which is determined by ordering of distance from the capitol/fp. I'm not sure how it's ordered in cases of distance ties though. The closest city will always suffer the same OCN corruption regardless of how many other cities there are. The same applies for each city number. So building a far away city won't alter the corruption rates of core cities. Building an interior city can change around the ordering of cities, and thus increase corruption for already founded cities.

Communism is the exception of course, where each new city increases the corruption flat rate for all cities.

As for completely corrupt cities, they will pay for themselves in population and shields in 30 turns assuming there is any food source within it's radius. The territory/resources claimed by the city, and the production/population growth for the rest of the game are just icing on the cake after that. These cities also make great 'buffers' along your border. If the AI launches a suprise attack, you lose a city that doesn't mean much, instead of a more valuable productive city.

There is very little trade-off for building a settler in a city which is sitting at it's population limit and has a granary (full). You lose 2 pop the first turn, 1 of which grows back the very next turn, leaving only half the food box to be filled to get back to maximum size. Then you get 1 more pop once the city is founded. You can almost always build a worker from the new city in 10 turns, which can be added to the original city's population if it hasn't grown back already. With irrigation and railroads this city can spit out a worker every 10 turns for the rest of the game and still end up growing itself. Over the course of a game this can really pay off, especially if you have many of these cities.

Not to mention how drafting occasionally in these cities can quickly built up a huge military, to be used in war or disbanded for shields in other cities. How each extra city increases the AI's estimation of your power. How these cities can produce their own settlers to continue on with founding more such cities...

The only reasons not to build them that I can think of is if the war to free up more territory would be too costly, or if you really want to be in communism. There are other benefits of war which will usually pay off by themselves (leaders, eliminating AI threats) anyways though. Communism has it's flaws, and isn't worth changing to.

So build the cities!

[Lord Merciless]

A Commercial Civ can have 100+ cities on a huge map and suffers less than 25% of total corruption.

[Thrawn05]

I spread as much as I can without breaking my empire into pieces on the same continent (I don't want to have to rely on ROP too much).

Once that's done, I find islands (they are great for staging a "D-Day" operation if I need to) and spread as much as I can on totaly unused larger islands/continents.

I really hate seeing large islands with a city from each civ overlapping each other, it's just ugly looking. This is somthing Firaxis coule improve on I guess.

Once I pretty much spread my empire out as much as possible, I find a good place to put my FP and build it.

[Arrian]

I think Aeson is right about this. Your home continent is safe, Artifex (sounds like you have a nice, optimal Palace/FP setup), but the cities you found far away will be nearly totally corrupt. That's fine, since their purpose isn't really to produce things. They are there to provide luxuries to keep your people happy, resources, claim territory and add more happy people to your empire (both boost your score).

I typically buy temples, marketplaces and aqueducts in totally corrupt areas if I want to boost my score. Those improvements provide a lot of happy faces. The city will hit size 12 (running 10% luxury spending, this should probably keep the city in WLTKD). If you want to go all out, buy a hospital and a cathedral.

I've pretty much stopped doing this, though. I don't really care about my score, and I am kinda obsessive about having an efficient empire. So lately conquered continents have ended up with 1 port city and several colonies. The upside is that any units you have over there will go elite killing the resurgent barbs

-Arrian

[alexman]

Originally posted by Aeson
I'm not absolutely sure on the corruption, but this is how I think it works.

*alexman put's on corruption-expert hat (it's the only hat he owns)

You are 100% correct. In non-communist governments, the rank of each city for number-of-cities corruption calculations is based on its distance from the capital (or FP). In this case, adding a city farther away does not affect corruption in existing cities.

*alexman takes off corruption-expert hat and becomes his clueless self once more.

[Cookie Monster]

Corruption be damned sire, take more land so that we may be on the road to domination!


By the time you are worrying about having too many cities and corruption up the wazoo you should have factories, dams, solar plants, etc. in all your cities that count. Rely on their monstrous production abilities to continue building up your empire. Those cities that can only produce 1 or 2 shields? Why not build tons of explorers and disband them in these cities to help out with production?



Are there any thoughts on this?