How far apart do you space your cities?

[Oddible]

I have no idea how big they grow to be able to tell how far to space them. I'm placing them for resources currently.

[ElfQueen]

Good Idea...thats like the only thing you can do...As if you dont want to spend 99% of Time and money ( and nerly not grow ) on Units to stop ppl from building citys there you later vant to to..... AS WE CANT DESTROY CITYS ( only way to do it it to try to get Barbarians to take it ) It REALY mess up endgame :(

[archonsod]

It depends - I'm not sure if there is technically a limit given you can use claim land and absorb outpost to increase the size. The main limitation is population rather than tiles - having a city with 100 tiles is kind of pointless if you don't have 100 citizens in the city to work them. Looking at the resources it can potentially grab reasonably quickly and the required production chains, plus enough space for the requisite food/sanitation/education buildings tends to work well for those cities you intend to absorb - generally specialisation is better than diversification, but it largely depends on things like national spirit and governments chosen too.

[Munk]

If you want a mega-metropolis then placing towns (not vassals - towns) about five tiles away from the city seems to be pretty much the maximum effective land capture (and in the late game it's those random plains tiles that you'll want to have a bazillion of). It's annoying though and the lack of constructable roads can also make town placement a delicate balance. Buildable roads is on my wishlist, personally.

[chazz_play]

I just finished one game on Islands map. The distance between your cities doesn't really matter that much. Each of your cities is what they call a Regional Capital. This name isn't just to make them different from Civ. What matters is making sure each city has plenty of space to spread into for you to build improvements on - it doesn't matter which directions that might be. The cities do not particularly need to spread out in concentric circles due to your being able to place towns to direct how you want that city's region to spread. You can also spend exploration points to force a tile to come into a region.

Essentially, you could place three or four cities very close together for easy defense, then use towns for them each to spread out in opposite directions. For example, if you look at the US state of Florida, you could make your Regional Capital Pensacola or Miami then use towns to spread through the peninsula and panhandle, like Pensacola<>Tallahassee<>Orlando<>Miami to be to fill a long region with all the resources/improvements getting "worked" out of the city at the end but not interfering with the Atlanta/Georgia region to the north.

I found that I preferred an average of about 1.5 hexes minimum between towns (so most 2 if I can do it, but will settle for 1 if needed), but it depends how much good, flat, non-forested land you have. If you want to build a lot of the unique or beneficial improvements that help keep your city going since you can't build duplicate buildings, they just about all require flat grasslands or plains.

Outposts can also be used to reserve land for a particular region until it can absorb it as another town if you don't want to use it for the specialty outpost improvements. Outposts do not become cities unless you remove it and replace it. (I thought it was something that could hold the place of a city until I was ready. Nope. Oops!)

Also, I didn't find that there was such a thing as "strategic" resources in the Civ sense that they were required for certain things, especially military. I found that just about all the resources on the map were much more like "bonus" resources. You have to have certain ones to do a specific chains that exponentially produce more based needs the higher up the chain you can go. BUT, you don't necessarily need to do that. For example, a basic farm produces wheat, which can go to a mill to create flour, which can go to a bakery (or whatever they called it) to produce bread. There is no wheat resource, so you can get it from any farm. If you want to do rice, though, you need to actually have rice. Basically, there are multiple resource chains that all do the same things, so resources aren't in and of themselves as critical. They can help boost you, but not having one, didn't seem to hinder me. You just have to adjust to what you do have and make the most of it.

I know that was long, but I hopes it helps someone. It helped me to just to have to put it in writing.

[TheCollector]

Region capitals (cities) can hold a lot of buildings and can provide a nice income, however constructing all these buildings without enough production resources in their region (or per trade) may become difficult once buildings and units start to cost hundreds of production points. And a bigger population has more needs, requiring more tiles to place improvements to satisfy these needs like food, housing, sanitation, ...

As far as I know each region can have up to 4 towns besides the region capital. Towns are unlocked every few ages, eg 2nd town is unlocked in Age III, 3rd town is unlocked in Age VI, etc.
Location of the towns may depend on the boni you want to score, eg coastal with several fishing locations, lumber with several forest tiles, mining with several hills, ...
(A level 2+ town with improved forest tiles or improved hill tiles can boost early production, eg a level 3 lumber town with 4 improved forest tiles and 2 other improvements yields a bonus of 3x6 = 18 Wealth and 3x4 = 12 production.)

A region with 4 towns is similar to a cluster of 5 cities in Civilization games. However since there are only 4 instead of 6 towns, you usually won't get a perfect circular / hexagonal region around your city but rather a half circle or something different like a tetragon, eg square or diamond. (For exampIe if you start at the west coast of your continent, the towns might form a half circle similar to the numbers 12 - 2 - 4 - 6 on a clock while the city is the center.)

In theory you could preplan and reserve the 4 towns for each region by placing outposts, however these outposts cost Engineering XP and require active protection by a small army since outposts don't provide guard units and every enemy unit may raze them. (Exception are castles in the later game but these cost additional Engineering XP.)

The map has a lot of unusable tiles like water, mountains, desert, etc. Continents are often not that wide so that most bigger regions in the long run may be limited by the coast on one or more sides. In my game there are 2 huge continents spanning from north to south. I started at the coast in 10 tiles distance from an opponent on the other side of the continent. Unfortunately the game placed more vassals inbetween and we also settled some more cities there in the early game so that now this part of the continent (ca 10 x 20 hexes) has like 10 cities / regions and many regions have no room to expand except the ocean.

If you want to grow your cities to a decent size I would suggest to settle cities in around 10 tiles distance from each other so that they can expand over time. (This may depend on the number and quality of usable land tiles.)
Example :
- - T - (-) - C - (-) - T - - | - - T - (-) - C - (-) - T - -
"C" = City, "T" = Town, "-" = empty tile
(Likely AI will try to settle cities inbetween.)

You can use Exploration Points to "Claim Territory" to expand faster and block other players.

[taomastercu]

Depends on your goal. Generally towns should be placed 4-6 tiles away from the region capital. I might say regions should be separated by 10+ tiles. Again hard to be specific for such a broad question.

[The Former]

I don't think there's really a golden rule for this. My only hard and fast rule for myself is to leave at least six or so hexes worth of space between capitals.

[parent child bowl]

Originally posted by taomastercu:

Generally towns should be placed 4-6 tiles away from the region capital.

That's completely unrealistic.

[Dead Goat]

You should never place towns. You should placing outposts that turn into towns when absorbed.

Either way right now it is impossible to stop ai from spamming cities. I do not know how they pump out as many settlers as they do but it is constant.

[TheCollector]

Originally posted by Dead Goat:

Either way right now it is impossible to stop ai from spamming cities. I do not know how they pump out as many settlers as they do but it is constant.

If they don't use Government XP to improve their Government, then they should have more than enough points to buy settlers every few turns. You can check the Nations Screen which Government the AI players have.

[The Former]

Originally posted by Dead Goat:

You should never place towns. You should placing outposts that turn into towns when absorbed.

"Never" is a bit much, I'd say. There may be other things you want to use your engineering XP on depending on your situation. Or outposts, for that matter; sometimes it's worth quickly fortifying a mountain pass as opposed to laying down an outpost with the goal of turning it into a town.

Since absorbing an outpost is a Culture Power anyway, there's functionally not much difference between placing a town or absorbing an outpost, except that one stakes the claim ahead of time for the cost of a Pioneer.

[Exemplar]

Originally posted by chazz_play:

Essentially, you could place three or four cities very close together for easy defense, then use towns for them each to spread out in opposite directions.

Yes, this is how I see it, too. But also yes, try to make your initial settler spot be adjacent to something that will help it grow.

Originally posted by Ärlig, Paradoxriddaren:

Originally posted by Dead Goat:

You should never place towns. You should placing outposts that turn into towns when absorbed.

"Never" is a bit much, I'd say.

I agree. As a matter of fact, my first culture use has been consistently a town placement, and while i will let some regions have only 1 town, they will, where possible, have at least 1 by me from culture.

[Munk]

Originally posted by TheCollector:

If they don't use Government XP to improve their Government, then they should have more than enough points to buy settlers every few turns. You can check the Nations Screen which Government the AI players have.

We don't know what sort of rule modifications the AI enjoys but there's a 16 turn cooldown to spawning consecutive settlers for the human player.

[xyzapip]

Originally posted by Dead Goat:

You should never place towns. You should placing outposts that turn into towns when absorbed.

Either way right now it is impossible to stop ai from spamming cities. I do not know how they pump out as many settlers as they do but it is constant.

You can mod the distance the ai keeps in your files. See: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1268590/discussions/0/4357869564403579334/

[archonsod]

Originally posted by chazz_play:

Also, I didn't find that there was such a thing as "strategic" resources in the Civ sense that they were required for certain things, especially military.

For the most part, though when it comes to things like electricity generation if you don't have access to particular resources (coal and oil) it'll slow you down for an age or so (unless of course you go into Aether).

Originally posted by TheCollector:

In theory you could preplan and reserve the 4 towns for each region by placing outposts, however these outposts cost Engineering XP and require active protection by a small army since outposts don't provide guard units and every enemy unit may raze them. (Exception are castles in the later game but these cost additional Engineering XP.)

Spice Traders national spirit gives all outposts a garrison. Also unlocks an outpost improvement that generates diplomacy and wealth on desert tiles.

It's kind of why the question is a bit moot, because you have national spirits and government types to benefit having lots of outposts, or lots of vassals, or lots of cities, or one really big city. So depending on the choices you've made and are intending to make you may want lots of little cities, or a few really big cities, or a horde of vassals, or ...

Originally posted by Munk:

We don't know what sort of rule modifications the AI enjoys but there's a 16 turn cooldown to spawning consecutive settlers for the human player.

I suspect there is for the AI too. In my experience the AI actually founding new cities itself is fairly slow; it does however have no qualms about conquering independent city states via military, or vassalising them with envoys (and most often both) - in fact I tend to find even late game it's not uncommon to find the AI only has a couple of it's own cities while the rest of its country sounds more like the KISS world tour itinerary.