What City Placement do you use?

[Fosse]

And if you don't want to read all of that, (which you should) here's Sir Ralph's specific post...

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=1735956#post1735956

[Catt]

Originally posted by cumi
3.) If my empire is in Switzerland or Austria (hills everywhere, with only few grasslands) ocn is totaly nonsense. All the city tiles will never be used and can not be used. If I irrigate everithing what is possible when I get electricity, I can get cities by c.a.6 size, but never bigger. It is not possible to irrigate hills.

4.) One of the typical pattern is a coastal city surrounded only by hills and water. Is the ocp still usefull? I don't think so. It will be possible to use 2 mined hills, the rest is water. So you can not get a highly productive city anyway, city size over 12 is useless.

I agree that terrain should dictate city locations. As you point out, large mountain ranges severly inhibit city placement. Where coast is involved, but little flatlands are available, I like to build on hills and preserve the flatland as an irrigable tile, and concentrate on exploiting as much of the coast as possible. I am far more likely to stick to a dense 3-tile build (and even occasionally a 2-tile space) along a coastline -- allowing the commerce-rich coasts to go un- or under-developed due to a lack of shields does not strike me as the best decision.

Catt

[Catt]

Originally posted by Artifex
Back on-topic. I voted 3-tile, and am just beginning to do what Catt described: closer or looser city-spacing based on terrain. I will default to 3-tile, but I'm now actively thinking about which tiles will be accessible from various locations, which definitely influences their future placement.

Can you get away with this on emperor?

With all the discussion on city spacing recently, I decided to consciously play my last Emperor game with a looser spacing. The map below gives a good view of my entire empire -- you can see that it is almost all 4-tile spacing; there are even some unused tiles northeast of my capitol Istanbul because I favored coastal acess and didn't force a city into the interior.

I played this game very peacefully -- essentially undertaking only a few offensive expansions. Babylon razed an undefended city in the early ancient age and that cost them 3 cities of their own. When they again attacked without warning, Hammurabi retired. Other than this ancient age land acquisition (and taking one Persian city in my empire) I never again conquered land until the very end of the game -- and then essentially only to shorten a war of aggression launched by others.

The key to this game was a leader-rushed FP in the heart of former Babylonian lands, with the leader coming just as Hammy was seeking asylum. With two functional cores up and running, I believe you can win just about any game on Emperor, peaceful or otherwise. From the point of consolidating the former Babylonians until a spaceship launch, it was essentially all building, trading, and diplomacy.

Three-tile spacing is, IMHO, more powerful and will still be more or less default spacing for me very early in most games, terrain cooperating, but it was nice to see that even with looser spacing and a restriction on warfare, a comfortable win is certainly within reach.

Catt

[BRC]

Nice game Catt. Do you happen to have any saves from the game? I know we talked about this briefly (the 2 cores and resources) strategy, but I would like to see exactly what you managed to "get by" with. Thanks

brc

[Catt]

Originally posted by BRC
Nice game Catt. Do you happen to have any saves from the game? I know we talked about this briefly (the 2 cores and resources) strategy, but I would like to see exactly what you managed to "get by" with. Thanks

I should have plenty. PM me with what you'd like (i.e., ancient age, just after FP, industrial age, whatever) and an email address and I'll send what I have to you. BTW - in this game, rather than do a close FP build, I did use a leader for the FP and managed to have decent (but smallish, overlapping) cores.

Catt

[Odin]

My city placement depends on what part of my empire a city is in. On my boarders I mix 3 and 4 tile spacing; I have a 4 to 5 tile spacing in the interior. I have about 5 "Holy 5 by 5" cities in production rich areas as "wonder factories." I usually play at Monarch on standard or large maps (I don't have enough patience for the huge maps with 16 civs. ). During the REX phase I usually build cities some distance away from my core and then fill in the rest.