On Towards the Stars: How to Settle a City
The first post in the "tactics" section of this guide
[This post is part of a larger strategy guide for Civilization 6]
Strategy is critical for figuring out how to win, but the best strategy in the world will fall over if you don't know the minute details of winning wars or settling cities. In order to actually make progress on your trek to victory, you need to know how to execute each part of your plan. And that means tactics. In the next set of chapters, we'll talk about details and mechanics — starting with an in depth look at how to settle a city. Choosing Where to Settle
Geography matters. The location where you put a city will determine most of its future growth and productivity. Here are a few tips1 for how to think about/prioritize locations:
By default, don't settle in an area where you don't have freshwater. The lack of housing is crippling. Coastal cities work if you have no other choices and you're trying to get your city count up, but they're harder to manage2.
This is obvious, but try and settle near high yield tiles as well as projected yields. You want an even mix of plains and hills — plains give you future triangle farms3, hills give you lots of mines. You can make flat plains tiles work for you, but like coastal cities, it's harder.
All things being equal, try and settle on a hill. City Centers always have at least 2 food, 1 production. If you settle on a 1 food 2 production hill, you can start with 2 food 2 production. It's not a high priority, but can make a difference in the early game when you're choosing between otherwise equivalent locations.
Consider settling early cities on luxury and strategic resources directly. This gives you access to those resources without needing an extra builder. If there's any AI in the game, this is much more important — you can trade those resources to kick start your economy.
Being close to other cities can help you get really strong industrial zone bonuses. In general, thinking about and planning for adjacencies can make a difference in which specific tile you settle on.
But also, don't think too hard about where to settle.
Plan to settle your second and third city on places nearby that have fresh water and the most resources (to get them online as fast as possible). Later, try to fill your immediate geographic area with as many cities as possible, while making sure all of your cities have access to fresh water. Remember that cities have to be at least three tiles away from any other city.
Normally, after exploring my area a bit (maybe around turn 20-30) I'll spend a turn planning where all my cities will go. Use map tacks — you can place them on tiles where you want future cities. If you have the map tacks mod installed, your tacks will automatically tell you if a city placement is invalid for any reason.
Sometimes it's worth moving your earlier cities farther away from your capital, just to clearly define your borders and prevent other civs from moving in. This is especially useful if you have an aggressive neighbor, or if you want to control a choke point before your neighbor can. Keep an eye out for mountain passes or isthmuses — these are good candidates for cities 4 and 5. As a rule of thumb, I’ll generally try to avoid planning for cities that have -8 loyalty or more; anything in that zone will likely need to be conquered. We’ll talk more about how to deal with low loyalty cities later on.
Building Settlers
To state the obvious, you can't build a city without building a settler. Settlers are expensive. They have the longest production time of all early game units, and they take a population from the city that created it which makes all future production slower. And of course, you want to make many settlers quickly, so you can expand as fast as possible. This is a massive investment, and being able to leverage the mechanics of the game to make settlers cheaply and quickly can dramatically increase your odds of winning.
So how can you make settler building cheaper?
The Colonization policy card. Colonization gives you 50% production boost towards settlers, i.e each settler is 33% faster to build. This is the big one — it's consistently available, it comes at the right time, and as a result I use it in all of my games. This also makes the Early Empire civic very strong, and I'll often try and get it as soon as possible (while still getting various boosts).
The Religious Settlements pantheon. With the BBG mod4, this pantheon gives another 20% production boost to settlers. While this is also very strong, I don't take this as frequently — many of the pantheons are very powerful, and often there is something more useful to my strategy than faster settlers. But this is a fantastic fallback pantheon, and definitely worth prioritizing in games where you have a lot of space or need to capture territory quickly. I probably take this in 50% of the games where it is available.
The Ancestral Hall building in the Government Plaza District. In addition to offering yet another way of getting a 50% settler boost, this building also creates a free builder whenever you settle, which can be very strong when you have a lot of territory to cover and want to make your cities productive faster. Note that this option comes out relatively late compared to the other two — in order to access this bonus, you need to have already built a government plaza and unlocked Political Philosophy. As a result, I often have already expanded through my own geographic area, and am more likely to take Warlord's Throne or Audience Chamber instead.
In most games, I really only use Colonization. Because Colonization is a card, I can choose when I no longer need it. The other boosts are great, but I rarely have enough uncontested land that I can make full use of those production bonuses, and I often want a pantheon or Government Plaza building with a boost that will last my whole game.
A good rule of thumb: you should use one of the settler production boosts for every 5 settlers you want to settle. If you have room for 15 cities besides your capital, it's worth taking all three of the above boosts.
Faith Boom
Production isn't the only way to build a settler. If you land a golden age in the Classical Era and select the Monumentality dedication, you can buy settlers with faith at a 30% discount. The faith cost can still be reasonably high, but if you can pull off a faith-based settler boom, the rest of the game is yours to win.
We'll talk about how to land that golden age later on.
“Where should I settle” is possibly the most commonly asked question on the r/civ subreddit, and there are a ton of video guides as well. If you want to learn a bit more about how to think about settling, it’s worth diving into other resources.
Very very rarely, it's worth settling in an area without any water. But in those situations, you should either have an aqueduct location nearby, or you should expect the city to be useless for production and you're just settling to get access to strategic resource or something.
Triangle farms are collections of three farms built by a builder that form a triangle. By default, farms provide +1 food. When you unlock the Feudalism civic, every farm that is adjacent to two other farms gets a +1 food bonus. If you have three farms in a triangle, each farm will have two adjacent farms, and you will get +6 food over the base of the tiles. Each pop requires two food to maintain, so an additional 6 food means you can grow three more population. In civ, food surplus is much more important than base food generation. +6 food is a huge percentage of your surplus!
In the base game, this pantheon just gives you a free settler, which was so incredibly busted that we house banned it.