Strategy Thread - for quick strategy questions and answers

[NobleHelium]

You should generally plant cities such that:

1) Each city should have at least one 4+ food resource.
2) All resources and useful land tiles are covered by at least one city if possible. Generally wasting flatland plains in non-lategame is fine, but avoid wasting grassland if you can.

Those are the two main rules. You want to settle locations with resources sooner than locations without resources, but that's also modified by distance from your current cities and whether you can quickly hook up food or borrow existing hooked food with the new city. And there may be further strategic considerations such as choke points or defense strongpoints. It's also good to settle cities that can work lakes while having lighthouses.

[Dhalphir]

This is a map that I generated this evening and revealed using the worldbuilder to place some units around, for the purposes of practise

this is what I came up with for dotmapping the first ~8 additional cities on the landmass. Please feel free to shred it to bits with constructive criticism - the only real rules I know for dotmapping so far is

-Overlapping isn't bad if it's food bonuses that are overlapping
-You don't need food bonuses if you have floodplains

[Dhalphir]

(Made the above picture before Noble's reply, thanks for the advice so far!)

[NobleHelium]

In a vacuum, probably this.

City 1: 2E of the capital's corn
City 2: 3E of the marble
City 3: 5N of the capital, assuming the capital has popped borders over the pig
City 4: 1S of the copper
City 5: 7E of the capital
City 6: SE of the southwest pig
City 7: SE of the far east pig
City 8: SW of the clam
City 9: NE of the far east corn
City 10: 1E of the bottom sheep
City 11: Catching the fish in the corner

[Dhalphir]

Thanks for that! I took the liberty of transcribing your dotmap over mine. Some of the locations actually line up, to my surprise, so I'm not as bad at this as I thought. There are a few notable differences, I'll have a closer look and figure out how to rethink the way I view a map.

[NobleHelium]

I edited my post, I'd actually prefer to plant 1E of the south sheep rather than 2E.

Settling on a flood plain destroys it. And plains hill cities are preferable because you get a bonus hammer.

[Old Harry]

- A food resource in the initial nine tiles is good for a fast start.
- Try not to settle on a forest.
- Sharing cottages for your capital to grow onto once you get your happy cap up high is good (on a small to medium map).
- Initial cities very close to the capital keep your costs down and let you tech faster (if they aren't terrible).
- On a hill for defense.

But every situation is going to be different and if you're anything like me you'll be kicking yourself over at least two city locations per game.

[Ellimist]

-Overlapping isn't bad if it's food bonuses that are overlapping

This can apply to other types of tiles too.

Overlapping with cottages can be nice because your cities can shift their population around depending on your current priorities, and you can avoid having them go unworked while you focus on other goals. In addition, you can be grow cottages in your commerce cities before those cities actually become big enough to work all of them.

Overlapping with strong hammer tiles can also be nice because it lets you swap tiles between cities to finish certain things sooner than they otherwise could have done.

[haphazard1]

Lots of good advice here. I will toss in a few of my thoughts on city placement:

- Settling on a desert tile (not a flood plain, just regular desert) is an excellent way of "reclaiming" a useless tile, as it becomes a standard city center.
- As NobleHelium noted, settling on a flood plain destroys the flood plain. Even if the city is later razed, the flood plain is not restored. Sometimes you can not avoid it, but generally you don't want to settle on flood plains as they are just too useful to waste.
- One thing I have not seen mentioned so far is fresh water. The bonus health can be useful (depends on difficulty level, among other things), and rivers provide easy early connection/trade network paths. Fresh water also serves as a start point for chain irrigation after Civil Service, which you should keep in mind when dotmapping.
- Rivers also provide free commerce, which can be very useful early and remains helpful throughout the game. And later they allow for water mills, which can be very powerful with the right civics. Making use of all available river tiles is always a factor I consider when I am dotmapping.
- Coastal sites can be very useful for fishing villages if they have even a single decent resource, especially if it is a food resource. It can be well worth the extra effort to make sure you fully explore coastlines early, so you don't miss a fish or a clam that could allow for a useful city. This exploration also helps spot potential coastal links to other land masses that can be traversed before caravels and Astronomy.
- I see NobleHelium did include two coastal sites in the southwest tundra/ice, but he did not place a city to grab the whales. Either of the two tiles that could reach the whales in the BFC would be pretty crummy cities, sadly. But if you need the happiness it might be worth it. You could also move the clam city 1W so the second border pop would cover the whales, but this would lose the lake so probably not worth weakening that city. As noted earlier, a city that is both coastal and has a lake allows for building a lighthouse, turning the lake into a 3F0H2C tile -- very nice for a tile that does not require a work boat or any worker turns.
- Try to avoid settling one tile off the coast. You end up without naval building options while having water tiles that can not be boosted by a lighthouse, making them pretty crummy. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, as sometimes you need to do it for the rest of your dotmap to work.
- Continuing the previous item, don't worry too much about having a small number of useless/minimal tiles in a city's BFC. Mountains, deserts, ice, non-fresh-water tundra...all are pretty much total junk. But most cities won't grow large enough to need every single tile until late in the game (if ever), and extra people (if you can even feed them in the first place) can always become specialists if you run out of good tiles to work. It is helpful to minimize bad tiles for your first few cities, as these will become your core and will grow to large sizes if any of your cities ever do.

All the other points already made (hills for defense, plains hills for extra city center hammer, food resources, sharing tiles, etc.) also have to be combined into the overall dotmapping process. It is about balancing all these competing priorities and trying to make the most of whatever land you have to work with. One more factor to consider is whether you want to try to create a few really strong cities plus some middling/crummy cities, or a more balanced approach with mostly decent-to-good cities. It can be well worth the trouble to focus your dotmap to create at least a couple really strong cities, which get your key national wonders. But both approaches can work. Some people even like to put national wonders like the HE in otherwise crummy cities, turning them into something decent.

[novice]

Difficulty does not affect your health requirements.