forum.freeciv.org

I found AIs are always fond of building a lot of cities, and I usually build 13 to 15 cities. I want to ask that how many cities you usually built?

The number of cities depends on the size of the map. However, the AI does tend to put its cities as close as possible to each other. (If you don't like this, set minimum distance between cities to higher in the game options). I prefer to place my cites so their harvest areas don't over lap, but if there is a lack of room for me, I will put them closer but usually at least 3 tiles apart (including one end). This allows the cities to grow bigger.

Same here; I aim for maximally large cities eventually, so I try to avoid any overlap. I set mindist=3 to keep the AIs from spamming the world with small crap. As for number, I tend to go for growth but conflict avoidance in Island games. So I'll fill my island, maybe another one or two, then work on growing a lot, then bribing other cities into my fold. Might have half a dozen cities, might have two dozen, or four dozen...

I find that having more than 5 cities starts to become annoying. More than 10 is just outright tedious due to all the micromanaging you have to do for buildings and such. I"m definitely a fan of largepoxing.

Is this in Web playing? Because in Non-Web 50 cities is a minimum... Ha, ha!

Arbogast wrote:Is this in Web playing? Because in Non-Web 50 cities is a minimum... Ha, ha!

Arbogast, you are of course welcome to provide suggestions about how to improve Freeciv-web. Patches from anyone wanting to help improve it are very welcome!
That said, I don't think the game necessarily becomes better by playing with a huge amount of cities.

Here you can help improve Freeciv-web: https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv-web

Arbogast wrote:Is this in Web playing? Because in Non-Web 50 cities is a minimum... Ha, ha!

? No, it's not.

@AndreasR
I can't play web wise. But I'm happy with non-Web. I am sure that puts me in a small minority. But Thanks for the tip.

@rainbowrobin
You got to keep up with all the AIs out there. They build a lot of cities and conquer a lot of land... Anyway, it was just a little joke.

I tend to use settings that keep the number of cities around 8-12 or less, so a map size smaller than aifill and citymindist of 3.

You really have to be quick at settling at the beginning of the game as the AI grabs all the space very fast. One option I have been meaning to try is to disable building of settlers in the ruleset and then using the starting units setting to put a hard limit of the number of cities you can build. If you want more, you have to capture them. Might be fun!

Ozor Mox wrote:One option I have been meaning to try is to disable building of settlers in the ruleset and then using the starting units setting to put a hard limit of the number of cities you can build. If you want more, you have to capture them. Might be fun!

That's the very reason it's no longer mandatory to have city founder units in the ruleset. Also handy for scenario maps where only predefined cities should be used.