Poll of the Day > I always stuggle with initial city placement in civ V

(+) Yeah! (+)

I don't want to waste too many turns finding the right spot, but sometimes I am not near anything and don't know where a good spot it.

I fucked up this time playing as Venice. You get one city. I should have taken more care of where I put it, but I didn't know where the ocean was and didn't feel like wasting a bunch of turns to find it. So I plop my city down next to a river.

I then realized later on that in civ V you cannot launch boats(the Great Galleass, for example) from a river. Never mind in real life boats get to the ocean by following rivers to it, you just can't.

So, how do you guys do it? I feel like optimizing everything from turn 1 is ideal, so found a city asap, but in this case it backfired heavily. But if I take 5+ turns to find a good spot for a city I feel like I am falling behind everybody else. Maybe in the grand scheme of things optimizing from turn 1 doesn't matter. I don't know.

I give 3 turns MAX to find a good first-city spot.

The things I look for (in priority) when settling a city

Good tile yields on settling
Luxuries
Production potential (for vanilla, I look for food potential)
Next to fresh water
Next to coast
Defendable

Of course, these things will shift around depending on which Civ I am playing as (ex: settling next to coast is pretty high up for a Civ like Venice) and if I find that someone like Friendly Neighbor Attila greeting me at my doorsteps, I might pick a more defendable spot to settle on.

argonautweakend posted...

I fucked up this time playing as Venice. You get one city. I should have taken more care of where I put it, but I didn't know where the ocean was and didn't feel like wasting a bunch of turns to find it. So I plop my city down next to a river.

It's unusual for the game to put you anywhere else but the coast at the start of the game if you're playing as Venice. I believe that Civ actually has a strong start bias for coastal spawn placement, so either count yourself super unlucky or play on a map with more ocean tiles

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I was placed fairly close to the ocean as I discovered. I would have found it in like 5-10 turns. But I do struggle since the map is all greyed out I fear I may be going in the wrong direction or something.

Plus if I had known you couldn't launch boats from rivers I would have tried much harder to find the ocean. The dang river I am next to is connected to the dang ocean.

My map formation was actually a representation of Earth, and I was placed in basically the middle of the United States. So either direction I'd have found it without too much effort. But my worry was, what if I go in either direction and I don't find it? Though I should have realized my map choice would lead me to the ocean eventually, since I didn't pick anything anti ocean.

I think even though I plunked a lot of time into this save, I am going to retry venice, find that dang ocean, and do it better. I am actually fairing kinda well, though, but at the same time not having any sort of naval presence is worrying, in addition to the lost sea trade routes.

I have a lot of fun playing 2v6 vs fairly weak AI but taking as many turns as it takes to be able to build my city right next to my friend. The 20+ turn head start actually makes it a pretty big challenge in the mid game, at least for me since I'm not really aware of whatever the meta strats are.

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