What precisely are the bonuses from upgrading a city tile from level 1 to level 2? Are there any downsides to it? I'm trying to figure out how to weigh keeping a city compact and dense to upgrade the city tiles or to spread out some to get more tiles exploited. But since I can't find anything in the manual which explains what precisely upgrading a city tile does I have no basis for making this decision?

There are no downsides - I don't remember all of the benefits but the most important one (arguably) is that while new boroughs reduce your city happiness, upgraded districts (any city tile is a district, including the center) regain some of the lost happiness.



So to spread wide, you need to stay within a certain pattern that allows for upgraded districts - otherwise you're going to lose out on happiness and production.

Some technologies also give you bonus effects for each level of city district or each level 2 district.

The downsides are because you need a bunch of districts to upgrade the first one, your happiness will take a hit, but once you start having several upgraded districts, happiness will snowball in the other direction.



The other effects are listed in the tooltip (all the bits that mention upgrade). Basically more science, more dust, more influence.

Upgrading the City Center will cause it to produce +3 Dust, +3 Science, +3 influence and adds +15 to your approval.



Upgrading a district will also cause it to produce +3 Dust, +3 Science, and +3 Influence. The -10 penalty to your city approval will be erased and you will instead get +5 approval from the district.

NOTE: Valid as of V1.02 ... later versions may change these rules

Larcent wrote:
Upgrading the City Center will cause it to produce +3 Dust, +3 Science, +3 influence and adds +15 to your approval.



Upgrading a district will also cause it to produce +3 Dust, +3 Science, and +3 Influence. The -10 penalty to your city approval will be erased and you will instead get +5 approval from the district.

The bonus is very clear when you see it in the interface (well, yes, not so clear)...



This means the following: the moment you build a borough, it is level 1, and you get a -1 food, and +1 dust, science, influence, and a -10 happiness.



However if you level up the district, by placing 4 neighbors of level 1, you get a +2 dust, +2 science, +2 influence, +15 happines...





With the level cap of level 2 for almost all factions, you have exactly what Larcent have explained. However, the Cultists have a level cap of 3... This means that, for cultists only, you can raise a level 2 district/city to a level 3, that will give one more time the per-level bonus. This means that , for cultists only, you can get up to +20 happiness from a fully leveled up tile.

placing districts depends on what you're trying to do. if you're trying to maintain happiness then its a good idea to start placing your districts in a ring around you city center. you really only need to place 4 to get the level 2 on your center. if there's an anomaly you're trying to get to, i usually place the districts in a half moon shape, with the city center as one end and the 3rd district at the other end. if this reaches the anomaly, i place the 4th district in the cusp of the half moon and it'll start out as a level 2. you'll have to watch your happiness if you do this because each district will be -10 happiness and this'll add up really fast. you might need to build one of the happiness improvements or make sure you have a luxury resource you can use to boost your happiness. once you have that starting block of districts, you can keep placing districts where they will cause atleast 1 district to level up. you'll end up with a snowball effect of happiness in the positive direction. as stated by others, there are some improvements that affect level 2 districts, and some that require a certain level of happiness to give their bonuses. i actually ignored this on my first game and ended up crashing my economy with extremely low happiness. had to spend a lot of turns infilling districts to level them up and building happiness improvements before i could turn i around. if you maintain a 90% happiness level or greater you can go on a conquest rampage and take a few cities without it really denting your happiness.

It's not obvious to me that you aren't better off spreading out the cities to maximize tiles you have under exploitation and building happiness improvements to offset the penalty than you are placing your city tiles to level up a clump of them. The additional tiles you can exploit will produce WAY more stuff than an extra 2/2/2 IDS you get for levelling up a city tile to level 2. Like WAY MORE assuming you place them well. So as long as you can keep up with the happiness by building happiness improvements or grabbing luxury improvements I think you are probably better off with a sprawling all level 1 city. Will have to look at the math.

AgentTBC wrote:
It's not obvious to me that you aren't better off spreading out the cities to maximize tiles you have under exploitation and building happiness improvements to offset the penalty than you are placing your city tiles to level up a clump of them. The additional tiles you can exploit will produce WAY more stuff than an extra 2/2/2 IDS you get for levelling up a city tile to level 2. Like WAY MORE assuming you place them well. So as long as you can keep up with the happiness by building happiness improvements or grabbing luxury improvements I think you are probably better off with a sprawling all level 1 city. Will have to look at the math.

You also need to factor in the dust and science penalties you face when your city/empire is unhappy.



The Sewer System and the Central Market account for the unhappiness of 4.5 level 1 districts. That's not a lot. Bread and Circuses only reduces unhappiness caused by the number of cities. The Era V techs account for another 5 districts.



I just looked at some of my cities from a game that is around 250 turns. Modifiers from improvements, heroes and workers far and away outstrip flat tile yields, even in a city with a lot of access to river tiles and all the appropriate sciences learned. Because my cities are fervent, I also get additional bonuses to food and industry. Because my whole empire (which is very large) is fervent, I get huge bonuses to dust and science. Also, the influence gains are very helpful for reaching for advanced era empire plan bonuses. This can be quite a challenge when you're playing a wide empire with lots of cities.

Thanks, that's good information. Sounds like you are indeed better off not sprawling out. I might try anyway just to see what happens though :P

Larcent wrote:
You also need to factor in the dust and science penalties you face when your city/empire is unhappy.



The Sewer System and the Central Market account for the unhappiness of 4.5 level 1 districts. That's not a lot. Bread and Circuses only reduces unhappiness caused by the number of cities. The Era V techs account for another 5 districts.



I just looked at some of my cities from a game that is around 250 turns. Modifiers from improvements, heroes and workers far and away outstrip flat tile yields, even in a city with a lot of access to river tiles and all the appropriate sciences learned. Because my cities are fervent, I also get additional bonuses to food and industry. Because my whole empire (which is very large) is fervent, I get huge bonuses to dust and science. Also, the influence gains are very helpful for reaching for advanced era empire plan bonuses. This can be quite a challenge when you're playing a wide empire with lots of cities.

Not sure about this conclusion. Improvements, heroes and workers work in combination with additional tile yields, not instead of. All of the % increases (which only modify the base yield?), all the tile yield improvements, everything stacks. If the terrain/extras are shitty then I would start building boroughs in a circle, but if I've got rivers, anomalies, forests, I would spread out.



Also, before the tier 5 techs (which is late game), you can't really get a large, fervent empire unless you get very lucky with the circumstances. So you're kinda comparing happy vs. content for the majority of the game, no?

red_locust wrote:
Also, before the tier 5 techs (which is late game), you can't really get a large, fervent empire unless you get very lucky with the circumstances. So you're kinda comparing happy vs. content for the majority of the game, no?

Actually I find that on normal or +1 difficulty it's quite hard NOT to have large (1/4th to 1/3rd of the world) size empire fervent due to tons of different resources that you'll be using anyway.



Unless, of course, you run into cultist (or spread your districts too much).



Hate those cultist. I hate them hate them hate them hate them. I always have to pluck them and their religion like a weed they are. Pluck them with steel and fire and... oh, I'm sorry, what I was writing about? Oh yes. Large, fervent cultist destroying empire.

red_locust wrote:
Not sure about this conclusion. Improvements, heroes and workers work in combination with additional tile yields, not instead of. All of the % increases (which only modify the base yield?), all the tile yield improvements, everything stacks. If the terrain/extras are shitty then I would start building boroughs in a circle, but if I've got rivers, anomalies, forests, I would spread out.



Also, before the tier 5 techs (which is late game), you can't really get a large, fervent empire unless you get very lucky with the circumstances. So you're kinda comparing happy vs. content for the majority of the game, no?

I don't mean to suggest an either/or choice. I just wanted to emphasize the values of having a happy/fervent empire are not be discounted in favor of grabbing the odd tile here or there. You can start a city making sure you capture a few prime tiles and then fill in.



And no, I'm comparing happy/content vs uphappy/rebellious, which is what you'll probably end up with if you rely just on tech for happiness when you expand, though if you have good access to wine (or if you're the necrophages) you can do quite well regardless.

Hi all.



Bee out since alpha and now that EL is released, got back to it.



However, sadly, i still did not find clear, in the game, information about how to know (visually or textually or whatever) wich level a district is. Neither did i find more informations or precisions about how to level up a district.



Thanks to previous answers to this thread, i now know how to level up a district. But, how to know levels of districts please ?

You just need to mouse over your districts. Like when you mouse over tiles and it gives you information on the terrain and FIDSI, mousing over a district should show you that it is a district and what level the district is.