A statement from the Dwarven Lords...

Basil wrote: the cost of sov on that tower would be prohibitive for the lower city

Not necessarily.  Please correct me if I get it wrong, sov I would cost 424 gold and 42 RP per hour.  If the ruined tower is say a 12 clay square it can give you a 2.4% clay bonus for level 1.  

4 closer tiles take up 4 sovereignty structures from your limit of 20.  Distance-based cost is not a trump factor, especially if you're using a 2-3 chanceries and a large number of lvl 1 claims--and I believe you'll find that's exactly what the largest players are doing, along with religiously choosing 7-food city locations.

This sort of thing is coming up several times and it's clear that many people in the conversation are basing their viewpoints on a lack of experience or understanding on how to effectively optimize sovereignty benefits or understand the tradeoffs and opportunity costs.  No, you cannot "catch up" with a 7-food city on 5 food, because every resource, sovereignty claim, and tax point you use to "catch up" was supposed to achieve further gain in production, output, or population.  Raising population increases income with no tradeoff.  Raising taxes cuts into research and basic resource output, making compound cutbacks in sovereignty and T2 building capacity.  Similarly, you cannot waste multiple claims matching the benefit you could get from a single one and call it anything but a net loss.

Rationalizing these sub-optimal situations is just robbing Peter to pay Paul.

And in case I haven't been clear enough, the limits of research output combined with the benefits of Chanceries make level one sovereignty claims king.

Level 5 sov is great for adjacent tiles which are cheap anyway and offer a nice boon when attacking enemy occupations.  But an enemy occupation on a sovereign square is supposed to immediately halt all other benefit from that square anyway, isn't it?  It hardly matters how long the claim takes to drop if it stops supporting the city right away.

If I wanted to disrupt a city, I'd just spam 2 minute token occupations on all sovereign tiles.  The city under fire would be unable to inflict serious damage in retaliation, nor--since the claim occupation must be from the same city--be nearly able to keep up with the sovereignty claims getting canceled.

HonoredMule wrote: But an enemy occupation on a sovereign square is supposed to immediately halt all other benefit from that square anyway, isn't it? If I wanted to disrupt a city, I'd just spam 2 minute token occupations on all sovereign tiles.  The city under fire would be unable to inflict serious damage in retaliation, nor--since the claim occupation must be from the same city--be nearly able to keep up with the sovereignty claims getting canceled.