Top 5 Cities

[Flight]

Simple question: How are they rated?

Im guessing it has a great deal to do with culture and nothing to do with production, size or civilisation status because moscow is currently 3rd, size 1 and Russia is pretty small.

[Arrian]

I'm pretty sure it's just culture.

-Arrian

[Palaiologos]

In civ2 it was according to population and one wonder counted for five citizens.

Isn't the same for civ3?

[stonewall]

According to the manual:

"...ranked by development and size."

Now, what does "development" mean?

[Hunter Hutchins]

I've seen stuff like a size 3 as #1 and a size 5 below it, I would say number or importance of improvements in the largest cities, so size is the last factor considered...

[Vlad Antlerkov]

Looking at one of Zachriel's logs (in which, as the Egyptians, he won a City Culture victory), he had Thebes (his capitol, 8 GWs) as #1, Persepolis (a size 3 city, former Persian capitol, 4 GWs, under Persian control) at #2, and Hakodate (FP and 3 GWs, size 18 or thereabouts) as #3.

I'm guessing they're ranked by number of GWs, then by size, then happiness, then culture.

[metalhead]

I'm not sure about GW. In one game, I had a city with 4 or 5 GW's. The #5 city only had 1, and my city wasn't even listed! I'll comb my saves to see if I can find it.

[vulture]

I'm with Arrian - I think they're just ranked on the culture in that city. When I have several cities in the list, they are always (IIRC) in the order of which produced the most culture. I've seen cities that haven't changed size or built anything recently move up or down the list. And I've noticed the culture of foreign capitals when I've built embassies, and they seem to match up to the ranking (although I wasn't paying close attention at the time).

Should be pretty easy to test it out.

[Flight]

seems likely but i could swear i've had cities on there that i've conquered and so dont have any culture really

[Laertes]

I recently had the top city early in the game, when my rivals had completed wonders and I had nothing. I must have been trailing on culture, as I only had a temple.

However, I had roaded some luxuries early on, so I had relatively high happiness and no unhappies.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Fergus Horkan
I recently had the top city early in the game, when my rivals had completed wonders and I had nothing. I must have been trailing on culture, as I only had a temple.

However, I had roaded some luxuries early on, so I had relatively high happiness and no unhappies.

From what I've seen (and I tend to hit F11 a lot), the cultural component in the top five cities calculation is very definitely dominant, at least once the game gets going. I can't say one way or the other about the very earliest stages of the game, though.

Note also that the dominant cultural factor is based on total accumulated culture rather than on how much culture a city generates per turn. (Try building lots of wonders in a city founded relatively late if you want verification.) Thus, it would take a while for a city that just built a wonder to overtake a city that's had a temple for a significantly longer time. Similarly, capitals are hard to overtake because they have culture accumulated from the palace from the beginning (and the fact that they tend to be relatively quick to get new improvements along the way doesn't hurt either).

Nathan