18-07-2003 08:33									#1
	City Sites Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

With our brave settlers soon to move out into the world, I think it is high time we discussed the location of our next city, and the next few after that. We have several nice options for city two, but I'd like to hear everyone's opinions on where you'd like to see the next city.

	18-07-2003 08:38									#2
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations

I thought it had been discussed a while back about placing the second city between the wheat and the cow to start a good settler pump. That's my preference. We need more cities so we can eat more food.

	18-07-2003 08:57									#3
	Get a bigger avatar today!

There's a new possiblity for a pump: west of the plains cattle. This city will take a little longer to settle, but Buffet can keep working the wheat while this new city works the two cattle.

I did a corruption sim on both cities, but I can't find it anywhere. I may have forgotten to save it. However, I remember what I saw as the two important points: there was no more than a 1 shield corruption difference, if any at all, at any production level; since working a grass cow means one more shield than working wheat, this difference will be made up for.

I'm not sure if it would be as good a settler pump, though, as it only has 1 bonus grass in its radius (and only one extra grass after that). I'll need to re-run the sim and check if it could still do 4-turn settlers.

	18-07-2003 09:09									#4
	Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

Ah, in all the excitement with 'Poly today I didn't realize the new save was up until now. Yes, that might be a better option. It's CtttC placement which has also been discussed, and Buffet still gets the wheat. A double cattle city is pretty darn good for a settler pump (behind only a flood plains wheat city with cattle). And even though it only has one bonus grassland it looks good for long term production too. The only problem with it that I see is that it will have several coast tiles in it's radius and no way to build any of the coastline improvements (harbor being the main one).

	18-07-2003 10:06									#5
	Got spare money?

Here was my initial thoughts on the city placements. It makes use of the principle of ring city placement (RCP), which it turns out our terrain is rather well suited for. For those unfamiliar with RCP:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showt...&threadid=57026



Consider this placement as a 'temp ring' to establish early on.

This gives us 4 cities with 2nd city corruption numbers (2.5 distance), all of which have fresh water access and are built on unshielded grasslands or plains.

Short term it gives us a lot of production and commerce possibility, but isn't a long term solution in and of itself. The key to the long term solution is to consider Buffet and the northernmost city as temp cities.

Then we get this:



Consider this the 'FP ring', that we build towards, probably making the palace jump or FP build around the start of the Middle Ages. We turn our Settler pump into an FP city, or just jump the Palace there if we haven't found anywhere else to expand to and create a second core in a timely fashion.

3 of the 4 cities in the first 'temp ring' are placed already. Buffet and city site 3 are out of place and would be moved to better sites eventually. The others will give us 9 city sites (including the FP, we don't have to build all of them of course) with a total usable number of tiles of 88 (assuming all 9 are built). A little less than 10 tiles per city. The 8 'ring' cities would all be at 2nd city corruption levels (3.5 distance).

Given that 4 of the 8 sites don't have access to fresh water, and that the FP is a Settler pump and wouldn't want to grow past size 6, the 10 tiles per city should be more than enough to work for most of the Ancient Era, and for a good portion of the Middle Ages.

City sites 4 and 9 are on bonus grassland though, and initially would hurt production. The bonus production is gained back at size 7, and site 9 would be built rather late in any case as it can't be founded until after Buffet is moved. They are two of the better cannidates for cities we leave out of the FP ring. Excluding them would put us at 84 useable tiles for the remaining 7 cities, or 12 tiles per city.