Thanks for the kind words!
I think I got lucky: I didn't realize going in just how powerful internal trade routes would be, but my dotmap did involve a lot of commercial hubs and harbors. I overvalued coastal cities -- saltwater tiles suck in this game -- but it worked out OK. I only built a couple of campuses, but that was enough to power my civ through the tech tree; I lagged a little in culture, but the AI is so garbage it hardly mattered.
Yokohama was a great city purely because of its Industrial Zone. That factory was boosting itself, Kyoto, Shizuoka, Takamatsu, and Okayama. Really worked out well in the dotmap. Sure it required trade route help getting set up, and it never could grow very large, but it was providing a large amount of empire-wide hpt.
I stopped settling where I did because it was obvious that my snowball was sufficient to win the game and I didn't want to deal with the AI getting pissy about my cities or having to micro trade routes or similar nonsense. Your small city spam idea seems totally reasonable, especially with the various "benefits to cities in distance 6" things, but would work better in a civ with a unique district, because those don't count towards district limits (Russia, for example, seems really good for it).
I think I got lucky: I didn't realize going in just how powerful internal trade routes would be, but my dotmap did involve a lot of commercial hubs and harbors. I overvalued coastal cities -- saltwater tiles suck in this game -- but it worked out OK. I only built a couple of campuses, but that was enough to power my civ through the tech tree; I lagged a little in culture, but the AI is so garbage it hardly mattered.
Yokohama was a great city purely because of its Industrial Zone. That factory was boosting itself, Kyoto, Shizuoka, Takamatsu, and Okayama. Really worked out well in the dotmap. Sure it required trade route help getting set up, and it never could grow very large, but it was providing a large amount of empire-wide hpt.
I stopped settling where I did because it was obvious that my snowball was sufficient to win the game and I didn't want to deal with the AI getting pissy about my cities or having to micro trade routes or similar nonsense. Your small city spam idea seems totally reasonable, especially with the various "benefits to cities in distance 6" things, but would work better in a civ with a unique district, because those don't count towards district limits (Russia, for example, seems really good for it).