Poll - Part 2: Which style is stronger in game: Tall or Wide?

Which playstyle is "Stronger" (More capable of winning the game)

  • Tall (1-4 cities on a standard map) is stronger

    Votes: 28 49.1%
  • Wide (5+ cities on a standard map) is stronger

    Votes: 13 22.8%
  • Both styles are equally strong

    Votes: 2 3.5%
  • Each is stronger than the other for certain victory conditions, but both are overall equal

    Votes: 14 24.6%

  • Total voters
    57
  • Poll closed .

Stalker0

Baller Magnus
Joined
Dec 31, 2005
Messages
10,598
UPDATE: This is an updated poll from the previous thread about this.

Hi all,

I am coming from the Community Balance Patch subforum (come check us out at: http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=497)

As we are working on a new balance for the game, one debate that has come up several times is the concept of TALL vs WIDE balance.

So I wanted to poll the larger community to get your thoughts.

We did a poll earlier, but the common consensus was that Tall should be defined as 1-4 cities, Wide 5+. So this poll factors that in.


To ensure we are all speaking the same language, I have defined the terms below:

TALL: A gameplay style where you build no more than 4 cities (on a standard size map).

WIDE: A gameplay style where you build 5 or more cities at some point in the game (on a standard size map). Note the pace of expansion is not covered here, whether you get "5 cities quickly" or "5 cities at some point in the game", this is considered WIDE gameplay.

Stronger
: This means "more capable of winning the game". I have also included an option if you feel that one gameplay style is stronger at winning the game...for certain victory conditions, and the other is stronger for other styles.


This result is critical to help us for future discussions, so please give us your thoughts. Thank you!
 
I feel that tall is a much easier way to go well. If you were new, I would definitely recommend doing tall to start with. Only 4 cities to manage, citizen management is not as important as you have many citizens in each city, can get introduced to concepts like specialists with less risk - putting a specialist on in a city with only 8 or 9 citizens is a hard choice and can screw up badly, but if you have 20 then it's less risky - and that type of thing just makes it easier. That doesn't make it more powerful, however, and I think a lot of people get confused about that point.

If you have two people who are equally talented at wide and at tall, they're much more equal than people think. If you're going for a science victory, tall will definitely be better. If you're going for a culture victory, I find wide is better - can get a lot of artifacts and great works, only problem being that you need to get a lot of buildings for those NWs -, for diplomacy you will actually go better with wide, as you inhibit a lot of the gold formation of the opponents and you can get a lot more gold from things like trade connections when you're going wide. On top of that you're normally less reliant on food caravans/cargo ships. Domination is definitely depending on the map, and if you're playing MP or AI. If you're playing MP it might be better to have small borders and easier to defend before you boom, but I'm not experienced with MP domination. Against the AI you can go wide and take more resources for stuff like frigates, or just to stop the AI, and the AI can't play tall well so you force them into a worse strategy.

It also depends on the time scale. Tall goes much, much better initially, but then wide slowly catches up and gets ahead. Like the science penalty - 5% per city initially puts you way behind, but if you have 20 cities you will be able to out-tech the guy with 4 cities, given enough time. You just never have enough time on the science victories to catch up really.

Basically, if you're against the AI, wide CAN be as effective as tall, but it's just more difficult to do. It can pay off in different ways, but just takes more work. I think the main thing that makes tall so attractive and easy is the national wonders - if you can get +50% to science, you don't need to worry about whether you have 5 or 6 science specialists, and the food to feed them, etc, so it just makes everything simpler. Might want to do something like have one in every city or have 6 of the building, or something like for every 4 cities you need 2 of the building or something. Making it easier to get NWs shouldn't affect tall too much; they can get them very easily already.
 
As I said before in the other thread, wide is obviously stronger, but far more difficult to set up. But I voted Wide because the question is which is more capable of winning.
 
Voted tall.

Response is same as last poll: Tall has enough momentum to finish the game before wide play (which is technically stronger) can catch up and overtake tall play.

For the majority (read: not people here) I'd say they are about balanced. Given a game which lasts about 400 turns, I find both to be about equal. But for Civ fanatics which finish the game in the 300 or less time frame, wide just cannot keep the same pace. A NC Tradition capital can be pushing out over 300 science before turn 200 alone. Once the wide empire's cities start to get that late-game growth, it will catch up and surpass tall, but sub-300 isn't enough time.

In G&K you could do some neat things with taking over a neighbor's empire and teching off of that, which I'd say qualifies as wide. But BNW's 5% tech cost per city in combination with toned down happiness means that strategy isn't quite as strong as it used to be.
 
I think it is map and civ dependent, with Tall being favorable more often than wide, as far as 'winning' is concerned.

I also think going Tall is 'easier' because the steps are just about the same for every game, at least early on. But wide can definitely trump tall, as far as 'winning' goes it is foolish to not place a 5th city on a great spot or to take and keep some weakly defended neighbor's city (in fact taking such a city from an agressive opponent is ideal since you can setup a kill zone and they'll waste units attacking it for centuries and even if they take it, so what? Can get peace afterwards and it isn't a city that you needed).
 
It depends on your playstyle, but it does help to look at which game functions scale with empire size, and which don't.

Scaling features:
-National wonders (can be quite powerful, and a lot harder to get in wide)
-Happiness (a lot harder to keep a wide civ happy)
-Social policies (more cities may mean more culture, but the threshold to get a new policy increases with each new city)
-Research, to a lesser extent (see above)

Happiness problems can be rectified by quickly getting Order, or by strategically founding cities near Luxury resources, or structuring your religion helpfully, and policies and research can be made easier by ensuring you quickly build culture/science buildings in every city.

Non-scaling features:
-Religion/Faith (more cities = more faith = quicker GP purchases, more cities = more followers = more money from Tithe, etc)
-Culture accumulation (it is a LOT harder to become influential over a wide civ than a tall one)
-Tourism (you have more room to put your great works, and more room to plop down culture giving improvements for Hotels)

You can get around the Religion bit as a small civ by aggressively converting other civs to your religion, or by building Stonehenge or getting Mt. Sinai, or befriending Religious city-states. You can get around the Culture/Tourism stuff by quickly building Guilds and snagging every wonder you can get your hands on.
 
Wide, obviously. More cities means more production queues, more luxuries (which often negates the unhappiness you get from more cities, and buy you time to get happiness buildings), more yields overall (which often overcomes social policy and research speedbumps) and more ways to create internal trade routes which means wide often effectively becomes "wide and tall".

Two things people have to remember:

One, a wide empire doesn't necessarily start wide. They can sim city for a bit, build early national wonders and then expand. That is explicitly laid out in the OP.

Two, remember the question is "which is more capable to win the game", overall. As in, in a game where everything goes, and regardless of victory conditions, which one wins. Which one is more comfortable or easy is really irrelevant to the question.

Put in other words, should the two best players in the world play a game of civ5, and one goes for tall where the other goes wide, I'm almost 100% confident the latter is inevitably going to win.
 
I think it is dependant on the victory conditions, but more of them work better with wide than tall. With tall I need a very specific goal from the start and bee line towards it while fending off others. With wide you can focus on getting an empire up and running and have the ability to focus on a win condition much later in the game. Also with Wide you generally have a better offensive military option if there is a run-away civ.
 
I voted wide, if only because I find 4 cities of my own plus two or three captured capitals to be dominant for pretty much anything.
 
No vote for me, I always seem to play wide. I have no idea which is stronger, I'm a weak player, but wide is more fun.
 
I've mostly play tall, because I'm addicted to building wonders and buildings instead of settlers.
My current game (as Russia) I was only able to found 3 cities on my own before I started running into my neighbors, so I just had to steamroll them and now I'm wide :D
 
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