Ideas for Civ6: Civ-Wide Culture to Limit Over Expansion

I realized that after trying Civilization V and being disappointed with it, I became a little obsessed over what I would do to make an amazing Civilization VI. I decided to write up my ideas and share them and see what other think. The results have been split up and placed in several posts like the one below.

Culture – This could be global, and could be used as a primary mechanism to limit empire over expansion. It makes far more sense for culture to be global than happiness. This global culture could be divided evenly among all cities and then the individual city values could be modified by buildings like libraries that increase city culture by X%. Global culture could then be increased a little for every social policy (like civ5), wonder, or religion you have. Because the land available to cities in recent Civ games has depended on the culture in the city, this would give players a choice between having a small number of cities with a lot of land or a large number of cities with little land, rather than creating a set strategy that most players must follow. You might also have to have financial costs like there were in Civ4 but the costs would not be the primary limiters of growth and would not have to rise at such a shockingly fast rate.

i have an idea of upkeep
each city consumes say 2/turn from a nation culture pool, and additional is consumed for policies maintenance. e.g. Monarchy costs 1 per city, Constitution costs 4 per city etc. also it could cost to found new cities (e.g. 10 * era). if national culture goes below zero, additional unhappiness starts to rise quickly.

The OP idea does sound reasonably interesting (although I'm quite satisfied with culture as it is at the moment).

killmeplease's suggestion is also quite good, I think, and would be quite an interesting way of approaching how you gain social policies.

The current system of culture cripples expansion enough. You'll find yourself hard-pressed to complete more then 3 policy trees if your city count is higher than 3 and the unhappiness per city essentially deters players from growing wide at all... the current system is designed so players just turtle... grow big, tall empires and then if need be conquer and puppet other civs cities if you need more land.

I kinda like the idea from Civ III (Although they over-implimented it) of corruption and waste. Maybe don't make it as severe, but perhaps change it so that it is manageable and doesn't make far-off cities completely useless. Culture as the limiting factor just never vibed with me.

Well, one pet peeve of mine would be if the writers in Civ5 who write about historical facts checked them and did it right before shipping the game. But I doubt that'll be fixed by the time we get Civ10

Peacemongerer said:

The current system of culture cripples expansion enough. You'll find yourself hard-pressed to complete more then 3 policy trees if your city count is higher than 3 and the unhappiness per city essentially deters players from growing wide at all... the current system is designed so players just turtle... grow big, tall empires and then if need be conquer and puppet other civs cities if you need more land.

Click to expand...

+1. Yes, Policies and global happiness cripple expansion enough, I wuld say too much.

I proposed a system by the past of basicaly a social policies tree, unlockable with some points that gets lower the more the civ is growing in size. Firaxis retrieved that idea but didn't pushed it far enough.

Indeed, Social policies are
1) Not efficient enough
2) Are in *very* limited separated tree
3) Most of the SPs are not interesting.

For such a system to work better, SPs need to be :

1) efficient with comfortable growth (here : food, production, gold, science, culture and happiness bonuses)
2) be a tree comparable to science one, shorter but with SPs unlockable in a row.
3) the points required (here culture points) must be proportional to the size of the civ. (number of cities for example)
4) it shouldn't be possible to have the same level of SPs in a bigger civ as in a smaller civ, even with culture buildings all the way.
5) Maybe the culture score to reach would not increase with new founded cities, but here would be a hit for culture for each new founded city. For example, if you can have end game a city without wonders of 20 culture (with all culture improvments), then the culture hit for each city is 21. The problem with that is that it would make city states quickly the cultural dominants, which haven't necessarily been true. Maybe some new kind of points should be introduced, like SP points.

I would dare to say that a better system for limiting wide growth could be a "cultural core" approach: the further a city is located from your capital, the less culture it will generate, up to a whooping -75% culture production penalty, plus a -25% culture penalty to occupied cities. That rule would create the following effect:

- Tile adquisition in far away places would rely almost entirely on land purchasing, as it happened historically (hi Alaska!)

- Colonial dynamics will be replicated, with the metropolis focused into culture generation, and colonies in far away lands acting as gold production cities and military outposts

- War mongering would bring economical and resource advantages, but not cultural ones. "Tendering your own garden" (read: build your own cities rather than conquering them) will be an advantage when playing cultural games

- Big empires would still be able to compete in the SP race, but without any advantage over small empires

Indeed, Social policies are
1) Not efficient enough
2) Are in *very* limited separated tree
3) Most of the SPs are not interesting.

Click to expand...

This is entirely true. I once proposed a "double the number of SP, halve its costs" social policy tree approach in order to combat that problem and balance some trees that were in need of a buff such as Autocracy or Religion.

Ikael said:

I would dare to say that a better system for limiting wide growth could be a "cultural core" approach: the further a city is located from your capital, the less culture it will generate, up to a whooping -75% culture production penalty, plus a -25% culture penalty to occupied cities. That rule would create the following effect:

- Tile adquisition in far away places would rely almost entirely on land purchasing, as it happened historically (hi Alaska!)

- Colonial dynamics will be replicated, with the metropolis focused into culture generation, and colonies in far away lands acting as gold production cities and military outposts

- War mongering would bring economical and resource advantages, but not cultural ones. "Tendering your own garden" (read: build your own cities rather than conquering them) will be an advantage when playing cultural games





This is entirely true. I once proposed a "double the number of SP, halve its costs" social policy tree approach in order to combat that problem and balance some trees that were in need of a buff such as Autocracy or Religion.

Click to expand...

I don't want to limit wide growth. I want it to be the equal of small. but I think you got the idea. (by "limiting" I know you were comparing it to what is civ today)

By creating an alternate "tech path" that you can go through with "non-expansion points".

- Big empires would still be able to compete in the SP race, but without any advantage over small empires

Click to expand...

Precisely not. Big empires shouldn't be able to compete in SP race. (in Civ5 they can, because they can build multiple cultural buildings)

In how I see the thing, it would be the same to introduce "corruption" within EVERY city (even the capital) and in every aspect (culture, gold, science, production, etc. except food) the more there is cities, the more the "corruption" is high.

Of course, with this "corruption" idea, every city would soon have a very small production. It's not damageable in "centralized" aspects like science, but it is problematic with production for example. Then, I guess we would have to centralize production also. Everything that is produced may appear in the capital. Or, there would "construction pools", for a better local management, with on-the-will assignable pools. Or maybe that the buidlings would change into "programs" that would make appear a special building in every or most cities.

Or, make it a "tech" tree. The advantage of such a tech tree, is that a nation can switch its politics whenever it wants. For example, it concentrates on only one city first, unlocks a nice tech bonus (+1 science per citizen for example), then switch to wide (expansion). We could even shape the evolution of the different civilizations with such a tree. For example, city states may be powerfull early. Then, with the regular tech tree, wider states may earn city states advantages in modern times (you can't stockpile the different advantages), with the best organizations and regimes expanding into the world.