I want flexible base radii

[Sandman]

It's happened to all of us.

Build your first city, only to find that a freaking little spot of grassland, or worse, a special resource is stuck just out of reach.

There is not enough space to build a viable city, so you are stuck with that little square unused forever. Sure, you could build a city, but it would retard the growth of your capital, and that is supremely bad idea.

I am a petty perfectionist, so I almost always quit the game. That little square will just annoy me for the whole game. I can't stand it. Very occasionally will I forest the area over as a 'national park'.

Every developed civ has a load of cities spead out evenly, with no heavily 'civilized' areas like in real life. Indeed, the worlds biggest cities seem to occur in clusters.

Heavily populated areas don't really seem to exist. The distance between the capital and the surrounding cities will be about the same distance between two Nowheresvilles in the middle of the jungle. I think that this reduces the strategic depth of the game, with city density being pretty uniform.

So I say that the 21 square cross is annoying, boring and unrealistic.

What are the alternatives?

Well, I hear that the CTP series has an expanding city radius. I don't know if it's good or not. Mind you, anything is better that what civ3 has.

One idea would be an base radius which expands in other directions if one direction is cut off. So two cities close to each other will gain squares in other directions, rather than simply overlapping.

Comments/flamings?

[Carver]

If there's a resource out on that one square, this may be one of the few times it pays to use a colony. Also, you can still build a city there - just turn the pop into a specialist and keep it at size one.

Of course that extra city will hurt you corruption wise. I agree the borders should be redone. The ones in CTP were somewhat better. There was a five tile (I think) radius that created your border immeadiately - although you couldn't use all the tiles untill your city grew. The borders in SMAC were best. Your first city created huge borders (15-20 tiles). But if someone put a base close to the border their terr. would encroach on yours. Still, if you built from the outside in, this was fine.

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

Unfortunately you cant colonize basic resources. i hate seeing a cattle 3 spaces from a river because I stay on rivers to avoid building aquaducts, therefore the cattle will never get used until later in the game when i start filling in large underutilized areas.