What are the benefits of each?

What's different between me making an outpost into a city versus just attaching it to the city next door?

Well, more cities means more parallel constructions, so there's that. However, there is a cap to the number of cities you can build, a soft cap of influence costs, but a cap nevertheless. I tend to make cities with 3 or 4 extra territories to make sure I don't need to build as many infrastructure buildings overall, while still keeping a varied production of units and wonders and the like.

1. More territories in a city = bigger potential exploitation zone. Outposts can generate a lot of extra food and production for a city without having to build all the way out to the area, plus you can also build districts off of the outposts. However, more territories does have a debuff to stability, nor do they have walls unless you connect it to the city center, so you have to keep that in mind.

2. More cities with less territories = more things being built at once. Also this is way cheaper in influence. Honestly those are the only good things. You also have to contend with the city cap. And you have to rebuild infrastructure to make them better.

TLDR: Big cities are good, but too big means that the people aren't as happy or defended.

MorshuHimself wrote:

Well, more cities means more parallel constructions, so there's that. However, there is a cap to the number of cities you can build, a soft cap of influence costs, but a cap nevertheless. I tend to make cities with 3 or 4 extra territories to make sure I don't need to build as many infrastructure buildings overall, while still keeping a varied production of units and wonders and the like.

1. More territories in a city = bigger potential exploitation zone. Outposts can generate a lot of extra food and production for a city without having to build all the way out to the area, plus you can also build districts off of the outposts. However, more territories does have a debuff to stability, nor do they have walls unless you connect it to the city center, so you have to keep that in mind.

2. More cities with less territories = more things being built at once. Also this is way cheaper in influence. Honestly those are the only good things. You also have to contend with the city cap. And you have to rebuild infrastructure to make them better.

TLDR: Big cities are good, but too big means that the people aren't as happy or defended.

So attacking an outpost to a city gives me a bigger exploitation zone (IE: I could pull in an area that has an iron deposit) & prevents me running afoul of the soft cap for cities.

But having more cities means I can get bigger boosts to things like religion or research, since each city can have it's own districts.

Is that about right?

Ahh, ok :)