Tips for City Building, City Placement, and Rapid Expansion

[KashmanGamingTTV]

I'm a longtime Civ player, and I finally purchased Civ 6 thanks to the $12 Humble Bundle monthly deal. Obviously, a few elements of the game have changed. I was wondering what tips you all could provide me with regarding city placement and optimal city building to maximize the benefits each city can give you. Additionally, is it true that the game doesn't penalize you as much for rapid expansion as it did in Civ 5?

[Shevaras]

Originally posted by Kashman:

Additionally, is it true that the game doesn't penalize you as much for rapid expansion as it did in Civ 5?

For this, if you make a settler, you lose a population from the city you made it, but you don't get a penalty or something

[killemall]

Originally posted by Kashman:

I'm a longtime Civ player, and I finally purchased Civ 6 thanks to the $12 Humble Bundle monthly deal. Obviously, a few elements of the game have changed. I was wondering what tips you all could provide me with regarding city placement and optimal city building to maximize the benefits each city can give you. Additionally, is it true that the game doesn't penalize you as much for rapid expansion as it did in Civ 5?

Shevaras already answered your last questions. In short, try to place cities:

1) Close to Mountains for Holysite boosts, Science boosts, or if you are looking to create an aqeduct district to get more hosing

2) Close to luxury resources so your people in your city are happy and well fed

3) Close to your enemies if you want to start a conflict. Some civs, such as Poland, relish in this by allowing you to absorb times into your own my putting down an Encampment district.

4) Somewhere with a lot of space to exand. The larger the area around the city, the more useful tiles you can gain. Even farm tile improvements can be better than settling somewhere with abundant, unbuildable mountain tiles.

5) Somewhere along the coast if you want to conquer the seas!

That is about it really. The best course of action I can give you is to look at the surrounding resources and generalize about the future of the city. For example, if you settle with lots of hills, you'll probably have that city become your main production hub as the hills are minable and give your city lots of production. Hope this helped!

[KashmanGamingTTV]

Thanks guys. Are cities still limited to tiles up to 3 spaces away like in Civ 5? I try to space out my cities, if possible, to avoid overlap.

[Shevaras]

Yes it's still like that

[killemall]

Originally posted by Kashman:

Thanks guys. Are cities still limited to tiles up to 3 spaces away like in Civ 5? I try to space out my cities, if possible, to avoid overlap.

Yep! It's still like that, so place your cities wisely...

[gimmethegepgun]

The penalties for going wide are definitely a lot smaller than they were in Civ V.
What you need to know about it is mostly how luxuries work. Luxuries give 4 amenities in total (6 if Aztecs), and are able to give 1 to any city (meaning, not more than 1, so if you have say 2 cities and 2 luxuries both cities get 2 amenities from luxuries, rather than 4). If you have more than 4 cities it will spread luxury amenities out throughout your cities to best try to keep people happy. Also of note is that there's no amenity usage for a city with low population, whereas they continuously go down as a city gets larger.
The other main penalty is that the cost of building districts depends on your number of districts in your entire civ, which includes city centers, so lots of cities will make districts more expensive.

All in all there isn't really a whole lot of reason to not go wide (and you're definitely losing out when you have less than 4 cities since part of your luxuries will be going to waste). Also early warring can get huge gains since capturing Settlers now gives you a Settler instead of converting it into a Worker/Builder, which also makes it generally preferable to capture Settlers instead of cities since you then don't have to deal with penalties associated with taking cities.

[gimmethegepgun]

Another tip for city and district placement is that Industrial and Entertainment districts have buildings that give a benefit to cities whose city center is within 6 tiles of the district. However, the Industrial Zone buildings don't stack with each other (because they nerfed that >.< ) so build Factories and Power Plants in such a way that they cover your cities without overlapping too much.