How District Adjacency Works

What Each District Draws From

The standard districts split into three families by what feeds them. The Campus and Holy Site are terrain districts: they want features of the map that were there before you arrived. The Commercial Hub, Harbor and Industrial Zone are infrastructure districts: they want rivers, the coast, improvements and, above all, other districts you build. The Theater Square is the odd one out, feeding on wonders and entertainment. The Government Plaza gives rather than takes, handing a flat bonus to every specialty district that touches it while collecting nothing itself.

Two details in the Industrial Zone row deserve a second look. The strategic-resource bonus reads the resource on the tile, not an improvement, so an Industrial Zone can gain a point the turn a technology reveals iron or niter next to it. Quarries, mines and lumber mills work the other way: the improvement must exist, so builders raise production adjacency after the fact and a pillaged mine lowers it until repaired.

• Campus: +1 per adjacent mountain; +2 per reef, geothermal fissure, Great Barrier Reef or Pamukkale tile; +1 per two rainforest tiles; +1 per two adjacent districts; +1 from the Government Plaza.
• Holy Site: +1 per mountain; +2 per natural wonder tile; +1 per two woods tiles; +1 per two districts; +1 from the Government Plaza. Pamukkale is the exception among natural wonders and gives the Holy Site only +1.
• Commercial Hub: +2 for a river; +2 for an adjacent Harbor, Royal Navy Dockyard or Cothon; +1 per two districts; +1 from the Government Plaza; +2 next to Pamukkale.
• Harbor: +2 for touching the City Center; +1 per adjacent sea resource; +1 per two districts; +1 from the Government Plaza. Land terrain and land features give it nothing.
• Industrial Zone: +2 for each adjacent Aqueduct, Dam, Canal or Bath; +1 per quarry; +1 per adjacent strategic resource tile; +1 per two mines or lumber mills; +1 per two districts; +1 from the Government Plaza.
• Theater Square: +2 per adjacent wonder; +2 for an Entertainment Complex or Water Park, including their unique replacements; +1 per two districts; +1 from the Government Plaza; +2 next to Pamukkale.

Minor, Standard, Major, and How They Add Up

The community shorthand of minor, standard and major describes how much one matching tile is worth. A major source gives +2 on its own: a river for the Commercial Hub, a reef for the Campus, an Aqueduct for the Industrial Zone, a wonder for the Theater Square. A standard source gives +1: a mountain, a quarry, a strategic resource, a sea resource. A minor source is worth half a point, which the game expresses as +1 for every two: districts for everyone, rainforest for the Campus, woods for the Holy Site, mines and lumber mills for the Industrial Zone.

Stacking is plain addition. Every neighbouring tile is checked against every rule, and every match counts. A Campus touching two mountains, one reef, the City Center and a Commercial Hub earns two from the mountains, two from the reef and one from the pair of districts, for +5 before any card. Minor sources pool their halves before rounding, and the rounding is downward: three rainforest tiles are worth +1, not one and a half, and a single rainforest plus a single district still makes a whole point together.

The per-two-districts rule is the one most players undercount. It counts the City Center, which is a district. It counts an Aqueduct, a Dam, an Encampment and an Entertainment Complex, even though none of those has adjacency of its own. It does not count the district's own tile or a tile you have merely pinned in the planner. Wonders are treated as a district for this purpose as well, so a Campus beside the Pyramids picks up a half point even though the Pyramids are not on its list of major sources.

Doubling Cards and When They Deserve a Slot

A family of economic policy cards doubles the adjacency yield of one district type across your whole empire: Natural Philosophy for the Campus, Scripture for the Holy Site, Craftsmen for the Industrial Zone, Aesthetics for the Theater Square, Naval Infrastructure for the Harbor, Town Charters for the Commercial Hub, and much later Five-Year Plan for the Campus and Industrial Zone together. They multiply only the adjacency figure. Buildings inside the district, great person points, and citizen slots are untouched, which is exactly why a +1 Campus and a +4 Campus feel so different once the card is in.

Whether a doubling card deserves a slot is a sum, not a habit. Add up the adjacency of every district of that type you own; that total is what the card pays per turn. Three Campuses at +3 each mean Natural Philosophy is worth nine science on an economy that might be making thirty, and nothing else in an economic slot at that stage comes close. Three Campuses at +1 each mean three science, and a settler or builder card is the better use. The same test applies to Craftsmen, which is usually a dead card until Aqueduct and Dam cores are finished and the zones sit at +4 or more.

Timing follows from the test. The natural moment to swap in Natural Philosophy is the turn your second or third Campus finishes, not the turn the civic unlocks. Scripture is worth a slot from the first Holy Sites if you are chasing a religion, because it also accelerates the Great Prophet race, and worth nothing at all if you are not. The late cards that multiply building yields instead pay fully only where adjacency clears a threshold and the city is large, so high adjacency earns twice.

• Take the card when the summed adjacency of that district type beats what the competing card in the same slot would give, and re-run the sum every time you found a city or finish a district.
• Never hold a doubling card for a district type you have only one of; a single +3 district doubled is +3, and almost any other card beats that.

Placement Order: Who Feeds Whom

Adjacency is recalculated live, not frozen at placement. A Campus built before the Government Plaza still gains its plaza point the turn the plaza completes, and a Commercial Hub placed years before its Harbor jumps by two when the Harbor finishes. So the order you build districts in does not change what they are eventually worth. It changes how soon each one starts paying and, since a district's price locks in at placement, what each one costs.

That reframes the question from which district first to which district pays soonest and which one unlocks the rest. Terrain districts win the first test: a Campus on mountains or a Holy Site on a natural wonder is at full value the day it finishes. The Government Plaza wins the second, because every specialty district you later wrap around it gains a point. Infrastructure districts sit in the middle: a Commercial Hub on a river is immediately good and gets better, while an Industrial Zone is usually worth placing only once the Aqueduct beside it exists or is at least under construction.

Geometry does the rest. On a hex grid, three districts can all touch one another only in a triangle, and a Government Plaza realistically touches three or four specialty districts once the City Center and terrain take their share. The shape worth learning is the hub triangle: Commercial Hub on the river, Government Plaza beside it, and a Campus or Theater Square closing the triangle, so each collects from the other two and the plaza point lands on both specialty districts. The production diamond, with an Industrial Zone touching an Aqueduct, a Dam and the plaza, is the same idea aimed at hammers.

Unique Districts That Rewrite the Table

Korea's Seowon is the clearest break with the rules: it must sit on a hill, it takes a fixed base bonus that has nothing to do with mountains, and every adjacent district subtracts one from it. The Government Plaza still adds its point. The practical consequence is a city plan that keeps the Seowon alone on a hill with only the plaza, or nothing, beside it, while all the other districts cluster elsewhere. Because that base is implemented as adjacency, Natural Philosophy doubles it, which is why Korea leads science so early with so little terrain.

Germany's Hansa keeps the Aqueduct, Dam and Canal bonuses of the Industrial Zone but drops mines and quarries entirely. In their place it takes +2 from an adjacent Commercial Hub and +1 from every adjacent resource of any kind, improved or not. That is why the Hansa diamond puts the Commercial Hub, an Aqueduct and a couple of resource tiles around it rather than a belt of mines. The Maya Observatory replaces the Campus and ignores mountains altogether; it draws +1 per two adjacent farms and +2 per plantation, so Maya farmland is science land. Phoenicia's Cothon uses the Harbor's table unchanged, and a Commercial Hub next to it gets the same +2 it would get from a Harbor; the Cothon's value is what it builds, not what it collects.

The rest bend rather than break. Russia's Lavra uses the Holy Site's table exactly, so its edge is the cheaper cost and the extra great person points, not placement. Mali's Suguba replaces the Commercial Hub, keeps the river bonus and adds +2 from an adjacent Holy Site or Lavra, which pairs it naturally with Mali's faith economy. Gaul's Oppidum takes +2 per quarry and +2 per strategic resource, twice the standard rate, and Gaul's mines feed a minor bonus to every other specialty district. Vietnam's Thanh takes +2 from every adjacent district and nothing from terrain. Greece's Acropolis, hill-only, takes +1 per adjacent district instead of per two, +1 from the City Center, and the usual +2 from wonders and entertainment.

Civilization and leader abilities add rows without replacing districts. Japan gives the Campus, Holy Site, Commercial Hub, Harbor, Industrial Zone and Theater Square a full +1 per adjacent district instead of a half, which makes tight clusters the whole plan. The Netherlands gives +2 from rivers to the Campus, Industrial Zone and Theater Square. Brazil upgrades rainforest to a full +1 for the Campus, Holy Site, Commercial Hub and Theater Square, and Indonesia gives the Campus, Holy Site, Industrial Zone and Theater Square a minor bonus from coast tiles. Jadwiga's Holy Sites gain +1 per adjacent district, Jayavarman's gain +2 from rivers, and Theodora's Holy Sites and Hippodromes gain +1 per adjacent farm. With any of these civs the base table is where you start, not where you finish.

Using the Calculator and the Cheat Sheet

The cheat sheet on this site is the table from the previous sections compressed into one screen, with a column per district and the unique replacements folded in when you pick a civilization. It is built for the first ten turns of a new map, when you are reading terrain and want to know whether the reef or the mountain matters more for the Campus you have in mind. After a few games you will need it only for the unique districts.

The calculator answers the harder question, which is what a specific tile will be worth once the city is finished. Pick the civilization, choose the district, and fill in the six neighbours, including districts that do not exist yet but that you honestly intend to build. Then build the same district on the rival tile and compare. The useful number is rarely the one on day one; it is the finished value with the doubling card applied, because that is what the district contributes for the two hundred turns after it is built. Two candidate tiles that look identical at placement often separate by three or four points once the planned neighbours are entered.

Misconceptions That Cost Yields

Most adjacency mistakes are not arithmetic errors; they are rules people believe that the game never had. The list below pairs the most common ones with what actually happens; if a plan of yours depends on one of them, redo it with the calculator before committing production.

• The district's own tile matters: it does not. A Campus on a hill by a river gets nothing for the hill or the river; only the neighbours count.
• You must own the mountain: you do not. Adjacency reads the map, not the border, so a mountain inside a city-state's territory still feeds your Campus.
• The Harbor likes coast or fishing boats: it likes the City Center, sea resources and districts, and nothing else. Coast tiles without resources add zero.
• Adjacency is locked when you place the district: it updates every time a neighbour appears or disappears, in both directions.
• Wonders feed the Campus or Holy Site: only the Theater Square takes the +2 from wonders. Other districts see a wonder as an ordinary neighbour worth half a point.
• Natural Philosophy doubles the Library and University: it doubles the adjacency figure only. Building yields are governed by different cards with their own conditions.

Related pages

• District Adjacency Calculator
• Adjacency Cheat Sheet
• Early District Planning: The First 100 Turns
• City-States and Envoys: Where Your Influence Should Go
• Korea (Seondeok) and the Seowon
• Germany (Barbarossa) and the Hansa