City placement redux (for the third time)

[vmxa1]

Count me in as an anachronistic player as I like pattern19 that yields 19 workable tiles per city. This is not always possible, due to the land or other civs.
Metros are sweat as they can crank out tanks quickly and or build wonders in the late game.
The two problems with this is that you may have trouble with the cultural borders not being expanded in time and that workers must really be managed to prevent improvements on tile that can not be worked for a long time.
It also means travel times are elongated. These are not insurmountable task.
It also means less waste on making early settlers for towns that are going to be abandon ( I hate abandoning). Of course happiness issues are increased, but corruption is not increased.
In short, I am not sure what is the optimal way, except in MP this is fatal. You can not do this against a decent human, only the AI.

[Master Zen]

"The best laid plans do not survive first contact with the enemy"
-von Clausewitz

I quote this to make sure everyone agrees that no matter how we plan our ideal city pattern, TERRAIN, and TERRAIN alone will dictate if it will be in fact as ideal as we thought.

Therefore, although I really liked Sir Ralph's scheme, we must be ready to think fast in case terrain is not favourable to us.

Although personally I like to see nice OCP maps, I think this type of placement should not even be considered in a MP game.

[nbarclay]

I usually use SOTPCS (Seat-Of-The-Pants City Spacing), aiming for 12 workable tiles per city or not much over but not following any particular geometric pattern. I don't care about geometry; I want my cities working the best tiles possible as early as possible. And the way I figure it, if I can't win a game using spacing oriented toward size 12, there's no way I'd win it with wider spacing. If the game is a tough one, I'll need the tighter spacing just to stay competitive through the medieval era. Otherwise, I'll have leveraged my tighter spacing into enough of a lead by the time I get Sanitation that the reduced efficiency of having more, smaller cities won't matter.

My impression is that camp cities work best for people who like early warmongering. Swordsmen (including those who did their initial training with clubs instead of swords) couldn't care less whether their home towns had temples, libraries, marketplaces, and so forth. All they care about is that they had a decent barracks.

In contrast, in a builder-style early game, temporary camp cities are worth far less. Building city improvements in them is essentially worthless, other than barracks to whatever extent units will be produced, and the increased corruption they cause interferes with the productivity of cities that are trying to build improvements that will last the rest of the game.

I probably ought to learn to make better use of temporary cities in games where I'm planning a relatively early military campaign. In my last couple such efforts, I found myself with the gold for the massive warrior upgrades I had planned but I took too long getting enough vet warriors for my planned upgrades. But with the kind of more peaceful early games I usually favor if I have enough space, I suspect that such cities would do more harm than good.

Nathan

[Master Zen]

I find it extremely hard to stay out of wars in the ancient era in Emperor/Deity, especially when I have Russia or Germany as neighbours. Camp cities, with only Barracks thereforee a a constant source for military units and are quite usefull.

On Monarch and below I usually play with OCP if only becouse of the esthetic advantages

[yxhuvud]

Master Zen:

It is not only the terrain that states how the cities should be placed. where your opponents are situated and where their cities are also play a big importance on where to put my cities (and more importantly, in what order I place them).

[Master Zen]

Originally posted by yxhuvud
Master Zen:

It is not only the terrain that states how the cities should be placed. where your opponents are situated and where their cities are also play a big importance on where to put my cities (and more importantly, in what order I place them).

Well, URBAN terrain is terrain too!

You're right. The moment you come in contact with an enemy you must plan your expansion to consider your enemy's possible expansion route too.

[Theseus]

Urban terrain...

Hey, no question, terrain and neighbors and your early game plan and a bunch of of other stuff impact city placement.

But that's of course always been true of the standard tile spacing plans.

What makes this so powerful, IMO, beyond early production and later metros, is the *flexibility*.

And yes, I'd use this in MP all day long. If anything, early power is that much more of an issue.

It definitely needs more fleshing out, playtesting, etc.

And it definitely needs a name.

[Fosse]

The discussion is interesting, but I can't add much now... papers papers papers...

I'd like to propose the name "Ralphing" for this new technique though.

[Dominae]

No offense to Sir Ralph, but I'm not really understanding why this technique is "new". The "camp" idea has been around forever, and implicit in it is the idea that you'll get some large productive cities when the camps are finally disbanded. The exact layout is irrelevant.

Forget the fact that I'm not 100% sold on the idea. Now, are we naming something here just for the sake of naming something? This is all a lot of buzz around what many people have in fact been since the game first came out (almost). Again, no offense to Sir Ralph.


Dominae

[Master Zen]

I'm gonna try "Ralphing" in the progressive game that just started in the Spanish thread today. I know it's not MP but it's on Emperor and early power is necessary on that dificulty level too.

[Theseus]

Dominae, I know what you mean, this is not entirely new.

In fact, I realized this evening that I had done it myself in the AU game we played as Rome... I forget which one, maybe it was Son of SVC... where we started on a small and relatively crappy island to the north (one of my favorite games of all time, btw).

But the difference was that tight city packing was a response to the environment, not a purposeful paradigm for early power and late metros.

Yup, some people have been doing this purposely (Aeson), but not as a systematic methodology.

It's a big conceptual move forward, for me at least.

Naming it:

Ralphing.



Back in the day, this was slang for throwing up!

[Capt Dizle]

From the moment I saw how the game worked I adopted a very simple and effective city placing scheme.

Around my capital I place four mega cities five spaces in each direction, thats four between. But I don't build them first.

That spacing allows each mega city a full 21 tile set to work in the endgame. These cities get the works, full infrastructure.

That spacing allows for four tile "holes" wherein one might place camps, and is flexible to allow them to be built as few as two spaces (one between)from the capital. These are going to be used for workers, settlers, and troops and being very close suffer little corruption. The only infrastructure you really need is a barracks and if on the coast you can put in a harbor to use the sea. These camps are usually built early, but which set gets built first can also depend on expansion needs.

Adjust all this to terrain and you guys can work the puzzle forever and never get a better set because this spacing allows maximum flexibility and immediate power.

[badams52]

Using AU201 as a test case

Okay here we go people. Using AU201 (Ultimate Power) with AU1.05 and playing Egypt on Monarch level, I decided to test out two schemes: 3-tile spacing and "Ralphing" as you have now called it. I spent my time and resources REXing as fast as I could and the first few worker moves were identical in the two games. The worker moves began to change as other cities were founded. For both games, the goody hut produced pottery (luck of the draw).

In the 3-tile game, I got one more goody hut that produced a warrior and did a little more exploring and finding the other civs (partly thanks to the extra warrior early on). When I stopped at 775 BC, I was getting ready to wage war on either the Indians or the French, probably the Indians first and then the French. I ended up building libraries earlier in this game since I got the writing tech advance from England faster then I did in the Ralphing game. Also having gotten to the point of not being able to expand anymore without a large army, I took to building culture.

In the Ralphing game, my expansion looks like it stopped at about the same time as the 3-tile game, but at that point, I was better equipt to go to war. I upgraded my warriors to swordsmen (thanks Dominae), sacked a city and captured Paris giving rise to the placement of Het War and Siout. Just before the picture, I'm about to declare war on England and annex their territory.

I stopped both games at 775 BC and took screenshots.

The screenshots are pretty self explanatory. You can see that the main difference in the two styles is that Ralphing gives you many more units and free units (at least in despotism and monarchy) while the income from the cities in both remains the same though Ralphing yeilded me 14 cities compared to 3-tile's nine. 3-Tile allowed larger cities and more production per city while Ralphing garnered slightly more overall production.

The 3 purple dots are the 3 highest producing which cities you are going to see in the follow up images comparing different advisors.

[badams52]

Ralphing image

Purple Dots: Cities in the advisor shot
Red Dots: Camps
Green Dots: Permanent Cities

One green dot is for a city going to be built once Nottingham is destroyed. And yes, I know the green dot should be one tile SW. I haven't learned to count yet.

[badams52]

Domestic, Military, Culture comparisons