Linking outpost to city or not

[back2space4]

What are your thoughts on linking multiple outposts to city or you don't at all?
Is it worth linking more than one outpost to city and keep the city number low? I am usually linking outpost with low food production to city and keep the fertile one to grow into cities but this decreased my city productivity and money.

[Staber13857]

Math baseline:
First city: Free
Second city: 160
Third city: 510

First Attach: 30
Second Attach: 80
Third Attach: 230
You take a -20 stability hit for every attached outpost

The cost of attaching outpost also seems to go up per your overall city count but I'm not quite sure how the math works out on that yet.

Give the math above, I tend to attach 2 outposts to my first city before trying to upgrade my second. Population wise, it's also more efficient to found outposts turns in advance and wait for them to build up population before attaching them. If the region has poor yields, but strat or lux resources, I leave them unattached until I've run out of things to do with my influence.

[Batailleuse]

depends how/who you play and your Influence economy.
if you happen to generate decent influence try to do 4 link ish cities. its usually enough for decent overall economy.

if you play one of those :

Phoenicia
Carthaginian
Norsemen

having territory near waters makes it easier to instant buy their special buildings with influence, and link them later (post 2-3 era) for insane boost to your cities.

you will get a feel of when you should link territories the more you play

[Troubletcat]

I'll pretty much always have at minimum 3 territories per city, normally 4-5. Current game I have one with 10 after combining two cities. Basically the reason is the city cap - those influence penalties get pretty heavy if you go too far over, and obviously I want to take full use of all of my territory.

I won't generally leave any territories as just an unattached outpost permanently, it's just not taking full use that way - you're missing out on the yields from the exploited tiles around the outpost. There's no reason not to attach it to the closest city when you have enough influence.

If you don't have enough stability, just build another public quarter or whatever.

[archmag]

Activating a certain civic to attach outposts using gold really helps reduce the pressure on influence. It costs in gold twice the cost in influence but gold gains are much higher and there is almost no other way to spend it compared to wonders and civics for influence which always keep it at low levels while gold accumulates to really high numbers.

There needs to be a way to be able to see how much extra stability you have before you can decide if you should or shouldn't join an extra territory. I wish they add this.

[ImBlackMagic]

there's diminishing returns to having outposts attached to a city, district and infra costs scale on the city with number of territories attached and number of districts, although the number of territories weights more there.

early on, better add more territories because there are more benefits

later on, if you dont have districts on a territory, it could be beneficial to detach it, as you would gain net production that way (the prpduction cost of buildings gets scaled down as you detach), i have seen a queue go from 7 turns to 5 doing that, beware tho, you loose some jobs by doing that, so if you're near the population cap, you would start loosing pops there

outpost creation influence cost, and attach costs scale with number of cities and how far you are from a city (this distance cost has a max)

buyout money costs scale insanely with number of territories attached D:

[archmag]

Strange. I don't see what you are describing.

District cost scales with the amount of districts that you already have, not with the amount of attached territories (although outpost itself counts as 1 district too, same as harbour). Attached territories only affect the cost indirectly because you are adding extra districts which are located in those territories. But if you simply build a district the next district (of any type) will cost more.

Production cost of buildings (infrastructure, not districts) remains the same no matter how many territories you attach. Units too are not affected by amount of attached territories.

Buyout cost becomes better the higher the production cost is. For example, it is 9 to 1 for something that costs 1k production and 6 to 1 for something that costs 4k production.

So usually it is better to attach territories if you can afford it because you get all that extra production from more covered tiles. Maybe there is a way to save some production by attaching a territory to a city without districts and then reattaching it to a full city so that you can save on district production cost but it seems to be too much bother to be worth it.

[Troubletcat]

Originally posted by archmag:

Activating a certain civic to attach outposts using gold really helps reduce the pressure on influence. It costs in gold twice the cost in influence but gold gains are much higher and there is almost no other way to spend it compared to wonders and civics for influence which always keep it at low levels while gold accumulates to really high numbers.

There needs to be a way to be able to see how much extra stability you have before you can decide if you should or shouldn't join an extra territory. I wish they add this.

I think this depends a lot on how large of a military you're maintaining. Unit upgrades can run very high in terms of one-shot cost, and maintenance gets quite high as well. I've had situations where I've burned tens of thousands of gold in a single turn on unit upgrades quite easily.

This might be somewhat difficulty dependent - on lower difficulties it's not necessary to maintain such a large military, but if you don't want AI players to massively overpower and decide to faceroll you, you need to keep your army up on high difficulties and that gets expensive.

Plus, you might pick cultures that are more money focused, or cultures that are more influence focused.

So I don't think it's always good to take the civic that switches outpost attach to gold - I've had games where I've had tens of thousands of gold and no need to spend it, and games where I've had tens of thousands of influence and no need to spend it. Depends on the situation.

[ImBlackMagic]

Originally posted by archmag:

Strange. I don't see what you are describing.

District cost scales with the amount of districts that you already have, not with the amount of attached territories (although outpost itself counts as 1 district too, same as harbour). Attached territories only affect the cost indirectly because you are adding extra districts which are located in those territories. But if you simply build a district the next district (of any type) will cost more.

i made a test yesterday, tonight i will get to play after work and upload some images here to show what i'm saying, i will probably start crunching numbers on this subject as well

[ImBlackMagic]

as promised, i did a test, fairly into the game tho, but you can see the industry costs scale heavily with the number of territories attached to a city, here is the relevant information, posted city ui + turn timer for clarity.

https://imgur.com/a/mJrpoQh

[Elvis]

Originally posted by ImBlackMagic:

as promised, i did a test, fairly into the game tho, but you can see the industry costs scale heavily with the number of territories attached to a city, here is the relevant information, posted city ui + turn timer for clarity.

https://imgur.com/a/mJrpoQh

Don't you go from 35 districts to 57 there?

Or is that number something else?

Edit: I believe the hexes around districts (like administration centers) might be counted as well, hence the large jump.

[Infern]

Well the attach cost actually gets more expensive over time too... I had the attach cost for my secondary city be... 2 million... I was like what the hell... Figuring out it would be cheaper just detaching the parts of the city and then destroying the city with a raze command then repopulating it with other means...

[archmag]

Originally posted by Elvis:

Originally posted by ImBlackMagic:

as promised, i did a test, fairly into the game tho, but you can see the industry costs scale heavily with the number of territories attached to a city, here is the relevant information, posted city ui + turn timer for clarity.

https://imgur.com/a/mJrpoQh

Don't you go from 35 districts to 57 there?

Or is that number something else?

Edit: I believe the hexes around districts (like administration centers) might be counted as well, hence the large jump.

Exactly, it's the amount of districts that increased the cost, not just a territory. For a better test I found an outpost which didn't have any districts. Remembered the cost of the next district. Detached the territory with single outpost. Rushed built one district. Looked at the cost of the next one again.

Result: They were almost the same. Which wasn't what I expected. So I reloaded the save again and looked at the territory which I was detaching. Then I noticed the harbour in it. Rushed submarine, ransacked the harbour, skipped a turn, checked cost of the next district again - it was exactly the same as when with detached outpost and single extra rushed food district.

So amount of districts affects the cost, not the amount of attached territories. Outposts, harbours and I guess Wonders count as 1 district.

[Elvis]

Originally posted by archmag:

...So amount of districts affects the cost, not the amount of attached territories. Outposts, harbours and I guess Wonders count as 1 district.

Don't forget luxuries, strategic resources and possibly natural wonders that might count as well ^^;

[archmag]

Originally posted by Infern:

Well the attach cost actually gets more expensive over time too... I had the attach cost for my secondary city be... 2 million... I was like what the hell... Figuring out it would be cheaper just detaching the parts of the city and then destroying the city with a raze command then repopulating it with other means...

Yes, attach cost increases quickly, but in cash mode it seems to plateau around 15k gold. I usually have just 3-4 territories attached by influence because I never have enough of it. When I switched to gold once during the test I was able to attach the whole continent of territories (30+) to a single city using my accumulated 500k gold and the price to attach the next one was still reasonable - 13k (which was less than 1 turn of my income).

Merging cities together is totally different problem. It has a base cost when you merge a city that doesn't have any new infrastructure and has no districts. I don't know what it depends on (in my test at turn 345 with all huge map under my control it was 55k gold, or influence, don't remember which mode I was testing this on). It increases the price for each infrastructure that attached city has which the main city has not (it was 5k for one infrastructure difference (59 vs 60), in another example, the total cost was 900k when I initially tried to attach a recently build city that has all new infrastructure to one of my old ones). It increases the cost for each district in the territory that you are attaching (it was around 2k per district). It slightly increases the cost for population (1k difference after I sacrificed more than 20 pop by rush buying soldiers). I don't see why someone would merge cities seeing this ridiculous cost. It is much cheaper to ransack the city and build outpost which you can attach for less than 15k. The only difference is merging cities lets you merge their infrastructures (it costs less to merge than to pay to rush same infrastructure), but for a case where infrastructures are similar there is no reason to pay the huge base cost of merging.

[archmag]

Originally posted by Elvis:

Originally posted by archmag:

...So amount of districts affects the cost, not the amount of attached territories. Outposts, harbours and I guess Wonders count as 1 district.

Don't forget luxuries, strategic resources and possibly natural wonders that might count as well ^^;

For resources you have to build an artizan district on them before you can collect them, so yeah, those count after you built it. I don't think natural wonders count but I didn't test it.