City Sprawl

One thing which bugs me with cities is that they are only 1 tile. It can be size 675, and still one tile.


Limitation of the game, right? No way to change it and all that jazz.

Bullocks.


What would you think of this setup (numbers to be balanced if implemented)?


City works exactly as normal through size 12.

Past size 12 and your city expands. That means there isn't a wheatfield in the Walmart Parking lot. There isn't a stripmine across the street from a stripmall.

What does this mean in game mechanics? It means no farms or Mines in the 8 tiles around the city. Farms change to Villages, Mines to workshops (unless connecting a resource). And no further farms/mines may be built there till city size is under 13 (except to connect resources).

At size 20 the city sprawls the entire BFC, at size 32 it sprawls the third ring of Kurio/CoaTS.

Can you still hit such large cities? :shrug: Maybe with Windmills and ideal resources, possibly with Ancient Forests. Should you be able to? Not really IMO.

One way to still allow large cities would be to allows sliders for your trade route yields. Set the percentage of each trade route which is Commerece, Food or Production (Sliders unlocked at appropriate Techs, about tier 3 tech range)

wow, awesome idea. I support it heavily

you didn't steal this one from MC, right?

Wow, you must really hate specialist economies if you want the farms from large cities to autochange to villages...

Not that I dislike specialist Econ (quite like them actually), just that farms right by a city doesn't work well as a city expands. I would also propose you can get food from trade routes at the same time (to reflect importing food) I'll add that to the first post now

Bothers me too... Dis with 100 or more population looks silly...

This would be a fantastic idea for Vanilla Civ, where a size 20 city corresponds to like 4 million people and you would obviously have city sprawl. But FfH is entirely ancient/midieval, and I'm just not sure I see the city sizes being in the same range. Aside from the Kurios and Infernals, do you really see any cities in the game having more than 100,000 people in them? At that size, I just don't think you have the same sort of extended suburbs that modern cities have.

No, he didn't steal this from me.


I tend to view the actual city size as not being that one tile, but the entire city radius/BFC. I've actually been looking into making cities not clear their tile's improvements, preventing the building of improvements there, or connecting resources without havign the proper improvement built there.

I suppose you could say Dis is a gateway to hell and thus the rest of the city is on the other side of the portal...
And for the Kuriotates that the population is spread out in the surrounding Enclaves... but if that's true maybe a city should stop expanding at a certain point? AND BTW... Sometimes the palace spawns outside the city square... Why can't we do that with expanding a city?

*Magister beat me to the surrounding radius thing

Why give them town improvements? Why not make the city graphics expand? It is funny when 50 and 200 sized cities look the same (although demons probably don't need or get that much personal space). Give the tiles a permanent improvement (which is removed somehow if the city shrinks) to prevent building improvements there. And they are cities for combat purposes. And then expand the workable city radius. 3 when the first 8 tiles are used by the city, 4 when the city encompasses the entire bfc. At any time you have 2 rows to farm to your heart's content. Then we don't need all that many cities, which cuts down micromanagement. Slums wonder and sprawling trait should still give +1 to workable city radius. Since we have fewer cities with higher production levels, we need to be able to complete more than one production per turn. If our super city can build 20 champions every turn, let it.

Alternatively change the terrain of the tiles to 'urban' and prevent any improvements but roads there. They have no yields but the hammer and coin yield for the central city tile is improved when the city expands.

It will be a hell to code I'm sure. I doubt it will happen.

EDIT: Yeah if food came from trade routes expanding the workable radius is not that important.

nice suggestions here! food from trade routes would be awesome, I can't believe that's not part of vanilla Civ from the very start..

If the city did expand like that, would an enemy be able to capture on part of the city? Or would he need to still capture the very center of it?

I think the first on makes more sense, as a larger city would require more troops to defend it.

Questions like that (and the graphics TBH) are the main reason to try and avoid growing the city to be more than 1 tile. It might be possible to just increase the scale of all city graphics so that it seems to take up more than 1 tile, and to forbid ALL improvements in the tiles around the city (but increase the base yields to be a "city standard" so you don't completely choke yourself, possibly also allow some bonus traderoutes). That is why I proposed making the tiles around the city turn into villages, because eventually they would be towns and it would look the most like the city itself had spread out, plus keep your yields from plummeting.

[to_xp]Gekko; said:

nice suggestions here! food from trade routes would be awesome, I can't believe that's not part of vanilla Civ from the very start..

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Yeah, it's never made sense in base Civ that cities have access only to the food in their immediate surroundings.

You'd need to simulate food preservation, though, to be able to transport food over long distances -- in base Civ, this would probably be based on having researched a tech like refrigeration (I think it is).

In FfH I can think of a couple of things:

1) Historically, before the advent of refrigeration, spices like cloves were used to preserve food. Among the resources available in FfH, incense probably comes closest. So a civ with access to incense could have additional food from trade routes.

2) Ice mana would allow freezing food for transporting over distances, analogous to refrigeration, so access to ice mana could also allow additional food from trade routes. Might be a nice little bonus for the Illians, since they're the only ones who can use ice mana.

I like that idea. Tie the ability to use the "Food Slider" for your trade routes to having access to the proper resource. Not sure if there is a decent reason to prevent access to a production slider at all.

The difference between 7 and 8, going by your example, would be huge. This would encourage a really unintuitive strategy of holding the population at 7, if say the inner ring has hills but the outer doesn't.

Even worse would be the second sprawl, which would actually kill citizens since you can't instantaneously convert villages back into farms if the population dips, which makes no sense.

Why do mines get a "can work resources" exception but not farms?

An early city with sufficient food resources can hit size 8 before the borders pop, what happens then?

What's so hard about the concept of one tile being huge? I mean, there's no stack size limit either.

Just keep it as is.

Nor'easter said:

2) Ice mana would allow freezing food for transporting over distances, analogous to refrigeration, so access to ice mana could also allow additional food from trade routes. Might be a nice little bonus for the Illians, since they're the only ones who can use ice mana.

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Cant you get Ice mana from Letum Frigus?

xienwolf said:

I like that idea. Tie the ability to use the "Food Slider" for your trade routes to having access to the proper resource. Not sure if there is a decent reason to prevent access to a production slider at all.

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then you would actually have a very good reason to add the salt resource to the game

One time I thought about making a new "export food" process (similar to the optons to generate gold, research, or culture) that uses a little python to make all the city's excess food be distributed among your other cities, perhaps based on how populous the other cities are.


Yes, Letum Frigus can give anyone Ice mana.

MagisterCultuum said:

Yes, Letum Frigus can give anyone Ice mana.

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I thought that only the Illians could actually make use of Ice mana, though. My mistake, then, thanks for the correction.

Monkeyfinger said:

The difference between 7 and 8, going by your example, would be huge. This would encourage a really unintuitive strategy of holding the population at 7, if say the inner ring has hills but the outer doesn't.

Even worse would be the second sprawl, which would actually kill citizens since you can't instantaneously convert villages back into farms if the population dips, which makes no sense.

Why do mines get a "can work resources" exception but not farms?

An early city with sufficient food resources can hit size 8 before the borders pop, what happens then?

What's so hard about the concept of one tile being huge? I mean, there's no stack size limit either.

Just keep it as is.

Click to expand...

I'll assume you mean 11 and 12, don't think anyone has mentioned placing the first sprawl at 8 (a bit too early in my opinion). And the "Can work resources" exception was meant for both Farms and Mines. The ideal when you reach your second sprawl would be to use primarily windmills/workshops/lumbermills and not so much Towns to gain the bonus production and food that they can offer for you. And your city shouldn't starve itself if enough bonus traderoutes are allowed for the last sprawl level, you just might need to shift the majority of your traderoute income to be food instead of production/commerce.