What to do with big cities?

[V.O.C.'02]

What do you do when your cities get really big? My people have only got about 16? tiles they can work, when my city grows bigger then 16, the new ones immediately becomeentertainers, taxmen or scientist. So, is it really important to let your city grow that big because new people only cause polution while teh improductive ***** are not working their tiles.

[theNiceOne]

If you let each city have 21 working squares then each city will of course be more productive. The downside is that they pollute more, and even more important, they need more luxuries etc. to be happy.

I prefer to leave only 12 working squares for each city. This means that I get a lot more productive cities which needs less luxuries. It also means that I get to use all my terrain a long time before Hospitals, instead of having to wait through the entire medieval age with half of the squares wasted.

The downside is a bit more corruption (due to larger number of cities), and that there are no real powerhouse cities that can make wonders fast. The latter could of course be fixed by giving more space to a few selected cities.

[Raion]

It may be important to have scientists, and tax people, and entertainers in this game, simply since one can change them into what one wants.

To negate the unhappy people!
And that can happen with only a town of six.

[fittstim]

Big cities are great.

You can count on extra gold, science or happiness.

A single entertainer/tax collector/scientist is much more effective in a big city that contains plenty of improvements than in a smaller one. Any proportional increase is much, much greater with a larger city.

[Arrian]

VOC,

The downside to packing your cities close together is that after sanitation you will run out of tiles for them to work. I would set up the irrigation/mining such that their growth will stop once they are using all available tiles (let them grow normally, and then quickly change some irrigation to mines once they are at the desired pop level).

I often find that even with "perfectionist" spacing, which I tend to use, that each city may have only 12 really good tiles to work anyway. But once I have RRs, many previously crappy tiles are now pretty good. Often I will actually use extra irrigation + RRs so that I can use mountains I have heretofore ignored (combo of democracy and replaceable parts at this point in the game makes developing such tiles easier). I typically only work mountains in the first 1/2 of the game if they have some sort of special (iron/gold) or if the city in question just has all sorts of food specials.

Anyway, the answer to you question, I believe, is cap their growth once they are working all available tiles.

-Arrian