Cities

“A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.” – Aristotle

Cities are the engines of your civilisation. They produce food to grow, hammers to build, gold to fund your empire, and research to advance through the ages. Every unit, building, wonder, and spaceship part is produced in a city. Mastering city placement, growth, and management is the single most important skill in Annhexation.

Founding Cities

Cities are founded by Settlers (60 production, no tech required). Move a Settler to the desired location and use the Found City command. The Settler is consumed, and a new city of population 1 appears on the tile. You can’t found a city on a tile another civilisation owns, whether you are at war with it or at peace.

Where to Settle

Good city locations share these qualities:

• Near food sources. Grassland (2 food base), river tiles (+1 food with Agriculture), and coast (+1 food, +1 gold) support fast growth.
• Access to production. Hills (+1 production) and Plains (1 food, 1 production) nearby ensure the city can build things at a reasonable pace.
• Near resources. Iron and Horses within future border range unlock powerful military units.
• Defensible terrain. Hills, forests, and rivers near the city provide defensive bonuses for garrisons.
• Spacing. Cities must be more than 3 hexes apart (the game prevents founding closer). A spacing of 4–5 hexes allows each city to claim a productive territory without excessive overlap.

When a city is founded, it immediately claims the surrounding 1-hex radius as its territory. The city centre tile clears any forest (converting it to grassland) and the city receives a founding production bonus of 10 toward its first build.

Population and Growth

How Growth Works

Each citizen (population point) consumes 2 food per turn. Surplus food beyond consumption accumulates toward the next population level. The food required to grow is:

Food to grow = 15 + (population x 5)

Growth slows naturally as cities get larger. Each new citizen requires more food, and cities eventually reach an equilibrium where food production matches consumption.

Starvation

If a city’s food production falls below its consumption (2 food per citizen per turn), the city starves. The food stockpile decreases each turn, and if it reaches zero, the city loses a population point. Starvation can cascade – losing a citizen means fewer tiles are worked, potentially reducing food production further.

Avoid starvation by:

• Building Granaries (+2 food) early.
• Setting city focus to Food in struggling cities.
• Building Farms on nearby tiles.
• Building Aqueducts (+3 food) in large cities.

City Centre Yields

The city centre tile (the hex the city occupies) is always worked for free and provides minimum yields regardless of the underlying terrain:

If the terrain naturally provides higher yields, the higher values are used. For example, a city on grassland hills would provide 2 food (grassland base), 2 production (1 from hills + 1 minimum), and 1 gold (minimum).

Tile Working

Population determines how many tiles a city works beyond the centre:

• Centre tile: Always worked for free.
• Additional tiles: One per population point, chosen automatically based on city focus.

A size-5 city works the centre plus 5 additional tiles (6 total). The game automatically selects the best tiles based on the current city focus setting.

City Focus

City focus determines how the automatic tile selection weights different yields:

Change focus in the city panel. In practice, new cities benefit from Food focus until they reach a target population, then switch to Production or Balanced for building.

Culture and Border Expansion

Every city generates culture each turn. Part of it is intrinsic: a city produces culture equal to the square root of its population, rounded down – 1 at size 1, 2 at size 4, 3 at size 9, 4 at size 16. Buildings add much more on top: Temples (+2), Cathedrals (+4), and wonders like Shakespeare’s Theatre (+8). Culture accumulates and triggers border expansion at set thresholds:

Each expansion pushes the city’s workable area outward, claiming unclaimed tiles and opening new hexes for tile improvements. A city at border level 5 controls a large swathe of territory, providing many workable tiles and a deep defensive perimeter.

You can also buy tiles for gold from the city screen, accelerating expansion when culture alone is too slow. No technology is needed. The tile must be unclaimed, next to that city’s existing territory, and no more than 5 tiles from the city. It costs 10 + 10 gold per tile of distance from the city – 30 gold for a tile 2 away, 60 for one 5 away – and a bought tile can always be worked.

Border Pressure

Borders are not fixed once claimed. Where two civilisations’ territories meet, each city presses on the frontier with its current culture output, and that pressure weakens with distance from the city. If a neighbouring city’s pressure on one of your border tiles reaches double yours, the tile defects to your neighbour – outermost tiles first, never a tile adjacent to its own city, and never in a way that splits a city’s territory in two.

Only present output matters, not accumulated totals – completing a Temple strengthens your entire frontier that same turn. Keep culture flowing in your border cities, or a culturally stronger neighbour will steadily eat into your territory.

Building Construction

Cities build units, buildings, and wonders from their production queue. Each turn, the city’s production output is applied toward the current item. When accumulated production meets or exceeds the item’s cost, it is completed and the next item in the queue begins.

Buildings

Buildings provide permanent bonuses to the city. Key buildings include:

Buildings have ongoing maintenance costs in gold per turn. Factor this into your economy.

Unique Buildings

Each empire replaces one standard building with its own, stronger version. It takes the standard building’s place in the build list – that empire can’t build the original – and counts as it for everything else, such as the University needing a Library.

Wonders

Wonders are unique structures that can only be built once across all civilisations – though a wonder destroyed by a nuclear strike, or lost when its city is razed, can be built again by anyone. If another civilisation completes a wonder before you, you lose the race but not the work: the production you had put in carries over to the city’s next builds, paying for each item in the queue in turn until it is used up. Wonders provide powerful empire-wide or city-specific bonuses. See individual wonder entries in the Annhexopedia for details.

Buying Production

From the very first turn you can buy whatever a city is building: press Buy in the city’s production panel and the item is finished at the end of the turn. The price is 4 gold for every point of production still needed, so buying is cheapest once some of the work is already done – a Settler with 10 production left costs 40 gold. Processes can’t be bought, and a city whose finished unit is waiting for space has to place it first.

Early on, the Palace’s gold and gold from villages make a bought Settler or Worker one of the best ways to speed up your start.

Processes

Instead of building a unit, building, or wonder, a city can run a process — its production is converted into another yield each turn. Three processes are available from the start of the game with no tech requirement:

Research is how an empire keeps pace in the late game. Renaissance and later technologies are priced so that population and science buildings alone fall behind: a science-minded empire turns part of its industry into research. Because the science buildings boost it like the rest of the city’s research, a city with all three turns 30 production into about 34 research. Every city doing this is a city not building an army – that is the choice between science and military strength.

A process never completes — it runs indefinitely until you switch the city to something else. Switching a half-built unit, building or wonder to a process throws away its progress, and the game asks first. Processes cannot be rush-bought, since there is nothing to rush. Production buildings such as Workshop (+2 production) and Factory (+4 production) make processes proportionally more efficient — a city with a Factory running the Research process converts noticeably more production into research than one without.

Coastal Cities

A city is coastal when it sits next to at least one water hex. Water further out in the city’s territory doesn’t count – the city itself has to touch it.

Coastal cities:

• receive a bonus of +1 gold per turn;
• are the only cities that can build naval units – a finished ship launches onto a free water hex next to the city;
• are the only cities that can build a Harbour (+2 gold, +1 food), or England’s Royal Dockyard.

An inland city lists ships and the Harbour greyed out, marked Needs a city next to water. If you plan to take to the sea, found at least one city right on the shore.

City Capture and Resistance

When an enemy melee unit captures your city:

• Population drops by 1 (minimum 1).
• The city enters resistance for 5 turns.
• During resistance, the city produces at half its normal rate. If the new owner has no military unit garrisoned in the city at the start of its turn, the city revolts and returns to you.
• The Palace is removed, and your capital moves to another of your cities. Every other building is kept.
• All territory, improvements, and buildings transfer to the new owner.
• Your aircraft based in the city fly to your nearest other city with an Airport, or carrier with room. Only if you have neither are they lost.

If your capital is captured, the Palace is automatically rebuilt in another city (if you have one), establishing a new capital.

Razing Cities

After capturing an enemy city, you may choose to raze it instead of keeping it. Razing destroys the city entirely – all buildings, improvements, and the city itself are removed from the map. This is useful when a captured city is in an indefensible location or when you want to deny the territory to your enemy.

Capitals cannot be razed – and neither can a civilisation’s original capital after you capture it, since holding the original capitals is how Domination victory is won.

Capital and Palace

Your first city is your capital, which automatically receives the Palace building (free, no maintenance). The Palace provides +3 gold per turn and designates the city as your seat of government.

If your capital is captured, the Palace relocates to your largest remaining city. If you lose every city, the next city you found becomes your capital, with a new Palace – as does a city that revolts back to you while you have no capital. Losing your capital is strategically devastating but not game-ending. However, a rival who holds more than half of the original capitals – theirs among them – wins by Domination, and you can’t win that way yourself while someone else holds yours.

Government and City Yields

Your government type affects all city yields:

Strategic Tips

1. Prioritise food early. A size-1 city is nearly useless. Build a Granary and set Food focus to grow quickly to size 3–4, where the city becomes genuinely productive.

2. Every city needs a Library. The +2 research per city is the foundation of your tech advantage. Build Libraries as soon as Writing is researched.

3. Production is king in wartime. Switch focus to Production and build Workshops/Factories in cities near the front. The ability to replace losses quickly wins wars of attrition.

4. Do not over-expand. Each city’s buildings have maintenance costs. Founding cities faster than your economy can support them leads to gold deficits and a crippled military.

5. Garrison your cities. A single military unit garrisoned in a city provides +25% defence. During resistance after capture, a garrison is what stops the city revolting back to its previous owner.

6. Build Temples for borders. Population alone produces only a trickle of culture – expansion to the higher border levels is painfully slow without Temples, and a city lagging at a low border level misses out on many workable tiles. Culture output also defends your frontier against border pressure from neighbouring cities.