City Placement Analisys

[cumi]

Hello,

I have painted a few files, to visualise and analise some of the city placement strategies.

Red squares - the cities
Dark blue squares - "core" city tiles
Blue - 2 ring of city tiles
Yello - tiles divided between two cities (and only two cities)

1.) Quiet bad 3x4 with lot of lost tiles on the map:

[cumi]

2.) A little bit better but 3x4 placement, with loosing 2 tiles for each city on the map

[cumi]

3.) I like this one, 3x3 having only 2 squares per city, that are divided between two cities. That means each city has only ONE tile less, than the muximum.

[The Mad Monk]

Interesting, but it shouldn't matter as long as none of the really valuable resourses fall into a hole.

[cumi]

4.) Very loosy 4x4 city placement strategy, with loosing 4 squares per city on the map.

[cumi]

5.) A very nice CP strategy. It's a 4x2 strategy with having ONLY 6 squares per city divided with another one. So in this case, each city is loosing ONLY 3 squares. With the border cities the situation is even better.

[cumi]

6.) An interesting 3x3 strategy. All the 2 ring city tiles are divided, but only between 2 cities. So each city has 6 tiles less than the maximum to work on.

Hmmm... This is actually 2x3 strategy

[Major Guz]

I like to place my cities 3 tiles apart (city-tile-tile-city) when possible.
This is mainly because you will use only 12 tiles during most of the game (pre-hospital).
When placed 3 tiles apart cities overlap a lot (compared to some of your graphics), but when you have many cities it does not matter that much because few BIG cities = many small cities, from a pure mathematical point of view.
When taken into consideration the chance at primary resources (oil, uranium or aluminum etc) you will have an advantage in having multiple smaller cities (larger surface area covered, thus bigger chance of important resource) than you would have with fewer bigger cities.

But that is just my point of view.
Compliments on the graphical representations!
I always like it when someone analyzes the thoughts behind the game!

[Dominae]

Nice visuals, cumi.




Dominae

[Arrian]

The best laid plans of mice and men...

Nice visuals, but that will immediately fall apart when you try to apply that to anything but endless stretches of grassland. Add in river systems, coastlines, mountains... and it all goes to hell.

-Arrian

[cumi]

Originally posted by Arrian
The best laid plans of mice and men...

Nice visuals, but that will immediately fall apart when you try to apply that to anything but endless stretches of grassland. Add in river systems, coastlines, mountains... and it all goes to hell.

-Arrian

Yes, I know...

I also posted a message in this thread:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=1760223#post1760223

I wrote my oppinion about city placement in some of the typical and non-optimal map terrain, like cities on coaslines or surrounded only by hills.... I these cases, the cities will not (or there is no need to) grow over a limit and 3 or 4 tiles between the cities can not be a strategy, there will be no overlappings and the city will not exceed even its first ring tiles (dark blue on the images)...

In these cases the pattern must be modified - like a curved dimension or curved space where the axes (x,y) are non-linear functions.

I studied about these vector spaces in the university. There are not simple. Or a complex spaces (complex-vector spaces) with singular point. Very perverz.

cheers

[Konquest02]

Originally posted by cumi

I studied about these vector spaces in the university. There are not simple. Or a complex spaces (complex-vector spaces) with singular point. Very perverz.

Applying complex numbers to Civilization, would that mean having cities spaced by i tiles...?

I don't think city placement will ever come down to a mathematical formula because there is so much involved: geography, ressources, neighbors, etc. You can't all fit that in one formula (even using complex numbers! )

--Kon--

[Catt]

Excellent visuals, cumi!

I think the real tension in city placement strategies comes down to whether or not one is willing to sacrifice "wasted" tiles in the first half (or two-thirds) of a game in exchange for cramped cities, with all the resulting upsides (happiness and pollution, for example) and downsides (increased corruption, perhaps smaller land under one's control, absence of very powerful cities, increased mainteenence costs, for example) in the later game.

A converted 3-tiler would point out that preserving 17 or 18 tiles of worakble terrain for any given city means that, until Sanitation and hospitals, 5 or 6 of those tiles will remain unworked and fallow. A tighter spacing will prevent any one city from working 18 tiles later in the game, but from some point in the middle ages through at least the early industrial times, few, if any, workable tiles will be unproductive.

Catt

[badams52]

Good visuals Cumi it's good to think about city placement and even better that we can analyze and see what cities get to use what tiles, and you did a great job showing different plans.

Originally posted by Arrian
The best laid plans of mice and men...

Nice visuals, but that will immediately fall apart when you try to apply that to anything but endless stretches of grassland. Add in river systems, coastlines, mountains... and it all goes to hell.

I've come to place little importance to making sure a city is next to a river anymore. It's nice, but I prefer building cities based on a grid layout till coast or mountains that is.

If I knew where all the resources were going to pop-up, I might change my building layout, but once your cities can work all the tiles within your cultural borders (aside from the outer cities), the layout becomes little more than a person's preference (when playing SP). I feel that whether you win or not more often comes down to the amount of land owned and the placement of the cities acts little more than window dressing. But I could be wrong.

[vmxa1]

Someone posted (way back) a pattern map for size 1-23 or something. I attacked the pat19. I had to blow it up in paint and turn on the grid to see, but it has no lost tiles and all cities have 19 tiles that can be worked.
Yes, you will often run into terrain issues and things that force a a change, but it is a good guide.
When you want to use closer spacing use a smaller pattern.