How Many Cities Should You Build?

Build cities the moment you can afford them. The first three cost 875,000 total and are overwhelmingly the best value. From the fourth on they cost a flat 1,000,000 each, and even then they beat buying land by a wide margin.

The real limit is not gold. It is how many you can fit inland at 15-tile spacing.

What a city gives you

Each city level adds exactly +250,000 to your troop cap. Linear. The tenth level is worth as much as the first.

Land is different. Tiles enter the cap formula at ^0.6, so returns keep shrinking.

Tiles owned	Troop cap	Next tile adds
100	131,698	+190
500	183,255	+100
1,000	226,191	+76
2,000	291,270	+57
5,000	431,445	+40

A “+25,000 per city” figure circulates in some community writeups. The source says 250,000 — a factor of ten. If you have been playing off the smaller number, you have been undervaluing cities by 10×.

One city equals how much land?

Here is the number that decides this game. To match one city level’s +250,000 using land alone:

Current tiles	Tiles needed to match	Extra land required
500	5,046	+4,546
1,000	6,175	+5,175
2,000	8,056	+6,056

At 1,000 tiles, one city is worth multiplying your territory by six. For 125,000 gold. And land has to be defended; a city sits inland doing nothing but working.

Try it in the troop cap calculator.

Cost — the first three are the prize

City cost is min(1,000,000, 2ⁿ × 125,000), where n is how many you already have.

#	Price	Cumulative	Cap per gold
1	125,000	125,000	2.00
2	250,000	375,000	1.00
3	500,000	875,000	0.50
4	1,000,000	1,875,000	0.25
5	1,000,000	2,875,000	0.25
6	1,000,000	3,875,000	0.25

The price caps at 1,000,000, which means the efficiency decline stops there too. There is no point at which you should stop building cities — if you have spare gold, keep going.

But the first three are so far ahead that filling them before spending on anything else is almost always right.

Build time is 2 seconds each. The building cost calculator totals any batch for you.

The real constraint is space

All buildings must be at least 15 tiles apart. And there is a trap:

Clicking within 15 tiles of a same-type building upgrades it instead of placing a new one.

If your city count refuses to go up, this is why. The cap increase is identical either way, but the pricing differs — pick deliberately.

So in practice three things decide your city count:

1. Safe inland area — buildings transfer with territory, so a border city is a gift to your attacker
2. The 15-tile grid — even a big empire cannot pack them tightly
3. Gold income — ports and factories have to sustain the flat 1,000,000 price

So, how many?

Situation	Target
Early (first few minutes)	Three. Before anything else
Midgame, wide interior	As many as gold allows. No ceiling
Midgame, all border and no interior	Switch to defense posts and ports
Late	Everything except space reserved for silos and SAMs

Never build on the border. Buildings change hands with the territory. A border city hands your opponent +250,000 cap.

Cities versus everything else

Spend this	Get this
125,000 → a city	Troop cap +250,000
125,000 → a port	Trade income (only meaningful past distance 300)
50,000 → a defense post	×5 defense within 30 tiles
750,000 → an atom bomb	One-time effect

Early-game gold spent on nukes is six cities you did not build. That shows up directly as falling behind.

More

• Troop cap calculator — cap by tiles and city levels
• Building cost calculator — cumulative cost, shared counters
• Troop Cap and the 42.2% Rule — what to do with the cap once you have it