Less Cities, Bigger Cities

Instead of having a vast empire of vast numbers of cities, how about a vast empire with a small number of vast cities.
i.e. instead of 10 small (pop 1-12) cities, 1 huge (pop 100) occupying the space those 10 small cities would occupy.
Think about it, instead of a city occupying one square it occupies 21 squares (the size of a city radius after one cultural expansion) and can gather food and reasources from an unbelievable amount of squares, and so on...

It's just an idea I thought of, I haven't really thought it through... pick out the goods and the faults, and state any comments you have.

Good in theory, bad in practice. Civ as a game is geared around a ton of small cities not fewer larger ones. For one corruption would need to be revamped, second keeping 200 people happy would be quite a problem and eat up all your gold.

But more importantly pricing would have to dramatically change, while it would be fine in the early ages once hospitals hit you'd have to multiply build costs by 5. Or something like that. As it stands now in the late IA, early MA you can have 10 or so cities spitting out tanks every turn. With your change you could get Wonders in 1 turn, but you'd have like 3 cities spitting out tanks every turn with about 300 shields wasted in each.

Genghis Khan:

As you say, "good in theory". I think what Runedot's really getting at is that he gets bored managing 50+ cities towards the end of the game. I do too! I know the feelings behind his idea of having fewer, more important cities.

This is still a very valid message to send to Firaxis, IMHO. There's nothing wrong with the idea in practice, it just take a more radical approach than either of you are thinking. Yes, it would not be a good idea to simply enlarge the city radius, with the other factors you name staying the same (corruption, unhappiness, high IA production, waste of shields, etc). I've thought of some schemes myself that would allow for fewer, more meaningful cities, but I'd rather not go into details on this thread

From my POV, this issue relates to the problem of micromanagement-overload in Civ. I wish for the designers of Civ4 to really tackle that problem head-on.

hr_oskar said:

Genghis Khan:
I think what Runedot's really getting at is that he gets bored managing 50+ cities towards the end of the game. I do too! I know the feelings behind his idea of having fewer, more important cities.

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While I agree that reducing micromanagent is a worthy goal, I'm curious why someone who's bored managing 50+ cities doesn't just play on a smaller map size? For that matter - if the game mechanics are changed so that a normal sized map has enough fewer cities to ease micromanagement, then presumably the smaller maps would also fewer cities, and it might not be so fun to play a tiny map and only have 2-3 cities!

I'm just pointing out that the number of cities is already easily adjustable - just play a different sized map. The real goal should be to reduce micromanagment so that 50+ cities can be more fun - some people like to have empires with many many cities, so simply reducing the number of cities in the game would annoy as many people as it pleased.

Soren said that one of the goals for Civ 4 will be to make things more manageable, and getting rid of the less fun elements like pollution, corruption and rioting that just add tedium to the game.

I do agree with judgement in that changing the map size can easily cut down on the amount of micromanagement necessary. You can have maps down to like 15x15 tiles, so there should never be a problem. You could get down to having only 4 or 5 cities on the entire map if you want.

having only considered the concept of five minutes ago, my idea is not fully developed, but the concept of large cities sounds positive to me.
basically, my proposition would be to simulate the concept of a megalopolis, like boston-washington or tokyo-kobe. in the modern age, when 5 or more cities had sufficient population, transport, and commercial links, the possibility of forming a megalopolis would open.
this would have one major drawback. to represent the full urbanization of these tiles, food production would be decreased significantly. thus, one would have to figure out how to feed this large population, something currently impossible in civ 3. this difficulty could surely be overcome, though, if the megalopolis concept were implemented
on the other hand, it would involve multiple advantages. the first is that they become large commercial centers, thus generating huge revenue. secondly, industry would also benefit slightly, because of the ease of transport. furthermore, transportation of anything would evidently become instantaneous throughout this megalopolis.
that is all i have right now, but i have not had much time to think about it. naturally, elaborations are welcome

Sounds way too radical for me. I think all that's needed is an easier way of managing many cities.

the mormegil said:

I think all that's needed is an easier way of managing many cities.

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You can find a solution to that here
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=87198

After consideration I actually think it might be quite a good idea. When a city reaches a certain pop and culture it expands to a 4 or 9 square city. Then there would be special buildings and bonuses for big cities like this.

Bad idea! Two thumbs DOWN!

I like having a bunch of big cities around, just like it is in real life.

judgement said:

While I agree that reducing micromanagent is a worthy goal, I'm curious why someone who's bored managing 50+ cities doesn't just play on a smaller map size?

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You're right, I can play smaller maps, but that incidentally means fewer AI players, which I don't like . Still, the MM annoys me so much that I'm simply not going to play epic games on large or huge maps anymore.

Ultimately I think my own solution would not be to have fewer cities; rather, if I could simply treat some of my conquered cities as vassals, receiving a simple gpt tribute (or whatever) in return for not having to manage them (while I'd still have to defend them and they'd be within my own borders)... I know I can sort of do this already by appointing the governor or setting the cities to Wealth and hiring tax men and so on. Currently optimal strategy calls for a little more management than that, however, and in any case I would feel much better if it were a simple game function and in most cases superior to micromanaging, in game effects.

Also I'd love to see the possibility of building smaller, less complete "cities", or depots rather, for some simple purpose. Some cities I build are only intended to do one thing, e.g. secure a resource; provide an airport, harbor, barracks; make a canal; temporarily advance my border (that's an exploit actually); etc.

Personally, I think this could work as ONE possible game strategy!
As is touched on in the 'Is civ an outdated concept' thread, the 50-100 cities per civ thing is just another symptom of the 'bigger is better' phenomenon that needs to be knocked on the head. This syndrome is whats behind Rexing, ICS and land-grabbing!
The way Runedots idea could work is as follows:

1) Break 'corruption' up into two components-crime and waste.
-crime is based on distance, technology, government and city size factors. The more overpopulated a city becomes, the more crime you have. Prior to certain techs, distance from your capital would also be a factor. i.e. the 'Wild West' phenomenon. Crime would also be effected by trade in 'contraband'! The more crime you have, the more unhappy your people are!
-Waste represents lost production via ineffiency. Smaller cities have a bigger waste problem than bigger ones. Crime can increase waste and certain technologies/improvements can either increase and/or decrease waste in a city! Distance should NOT be a factor in waste. Waste contributes to pollution.

2) With this new approach to waste/crime, there is no inherent disadvantage in either 'building up' or 'building out' (i.e. small empire big cities OR big empire smaller cities.) Each one has its pro's and cons. Smaller empires have more problems of overcrowding, crime and pollution. Larger empires avoid many of these problems, but have an increased risk of negative events impacting on them, such as Civil Wars, plagues and Dark Ages.

3) To further balance out the two building strategies, it should be possible to build multiple improvements of the same type. i.e. multiple libraries, multiple factories etc. This will allow a civ with a small but dense nation to be competitive with a more 'spread out' civ. However, there would be inherent limitations to this approach. First, you would only be able to build as many, of one improvement, as your city size allows-so a size 4 city would allow you to build 4 libraries. Secondly, these multiple improvements would be subject to the 'law of diminishing returns', where each new improvement grants, perhaps, half of the bonus that the one before did! So, for instance, if a factory gives you a +50% bonus to production, then 2 factories would only give you +75%, 3 would grant you +87% and so on. Yet you would still have to pay the full maintainance cost for each improvement! This would, therefore, still make the spread out approach to empire building a viable one-especially in the early game!

Anyway, thats how I see it working !!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Being one of those who lives in the BosWash megalopolis region, I can assure you that there is food production. New Jersey is known as the "Garden State", Massachusetts has a lot of dairy and cranberries, etc. The idea that a megalopolis would have its food taken away is not very realistic.

perhaps what i was mentioning was taken too far. while largely urbanized areas still produce food, it is nowhere near enough to feed the population, which is simply the point i was trying to make, and an alternative way to feed them than cultivating tiles is necessary.

I did'nt read al replies so do not take it in consideration if it has been said.

The idea is good of course. Unimaginable is a city with 100 people. Like Gengis Kahn said, it will give you more problems. However, it does bring something interesting and I don't know if it is complicated or not.

Sometimes (probably every times), the places you build your cities creates tiles that neither of you cities can use. And some times, they are very interesting. It would be nice if a bit city, bigger than the basic size and with a cultural importance enough, would be able to use it, in addition to its tiles.

I like the idea of reducing the amount of management and I like the idea of bigger cities.
Maybe a way could be the following:
you start off as now, while time passes and you get more and more cities (and the city grows and you move to more advanced government) neighboring cities "melt", like Buda and Pest became Budapest. The new Budapest would still appear as two cities on the map, but the city screen would be one; all city-improvements would be kept, but all city-needs would be doubled (i.e. need two temples...).
When times passes again you could "melt" 3 cities and so on.
That is the way in real life. Think how many cities New York City swallowed since its founding

How would you fit a 5 X 5 city in the City View? How would you defend a 5 X 5 city against attack; put one unit in each of its 20 perimeter tiles?
The idea has potential, but it seems like you want Firaxis to do all the work.
How do you suggest they work out the problems a bunch of large cities would create?

Multiple City Improvements seems to be one solution that works, but this seems to add an exponential amount of complexity to the game, without increasing playability to a similar degree.

It think it would be cool enough just to be able to expand the workable tiles of the city. I always found it very unrealistic that a city would have some arbitrary limit to the countryside that contributes to it.

Milan's Warrior said:

I like the idea of reducing the amount of management and I like the idea of bigger cities.
Maybe a way could be the following:
you start off as now, while time passes and you get more and more cities (and the city grows and you move to more advanced government) neighboring cities "melt", like Buda and Pest became Budapest. The new Budapest would still appear as two cities on the map, but the city screen would be one; all city-improvements would be kept, but all city-needs would be doubled (i.e. need two temples...).
When times passes again you could "melt" 3 cities and so on.
That is the way in real life. Think how many cities New York City swallowed since its founding

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That whould be an excelent way to solve the problem, ideally we could start off on a map with hundreds of civs, and what counts as an entire Empire in the Ancient age (Egypt) would get merged into single 'city' in the Modern Age, keeping the number of cities you are dealing with relatively low, but also constant throughout time (assuming your empire size is near the maximum for the time period.)