No cluttered Civ 7

[Securion]

Building improvements (and districts, wonders, etc) usually made Civ 6 look terribly cluttered. I suggest you try to make improvements that blend in a bit more or dont be exactly the same all the time, like if you build five tree farms it dont show five carbon copies of a tree farm but instead becomes a tree farm area...

Also please please no more cartoon style.

 

[Krajzen]

I do have this problem with civ6 but I mean the different thing by the word 'clutter', namely I think that the map is way too densely packed with cities and units. Too small city areas, cities in small distance from one another and 1UPT
1) Look really messy and unreadable
2) Make logistics and warfare a terrible chore, especially when you are attacking and face crossfire from many directions constantly (made even worse by encampments), you also face a constant traffic jam
3) ...the previous point makes it also very hard for AI to conquer other AIs and especially the human player, leading to low military challenge and not very dynamic world

For the love of God, I really hope civ7 increases distance between cities from 3 - 4 tiles to 5 - 6 tiles (making city borders appropriately larger) and fundamentally changes or removes 1UPT system.

 

[ShadowWarrior]

I hate 1 UPT. I also hate the fact that district and wonder take up one whole hexagram.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I do have this problem with civ6 but I mean the different thing by the word 'clutter', namely I think that the map is way too densely packed with cities and units. Too small city areas, cities in small distance from one another and 1UPT
1) Look really messy and unreadable
2) Make logistics and warfare a terrible chore, especially when you are attacking and face crossfire from many directions constantly (made even worse by encampments), you also face a constant traffic jam
3) ...the previous point makes it also very hard for AI to conquer other AIs and especially the human player, leading to low military challenge and not very dynamic world

For the love of God, I really hope civ7 increases distance between cities from 3 - 4 tiles to 5 - 6 tiles (making city borders appropriately larger) and fundamentally changes or removes 1UPT system.

I think a better solution to Map Clutter would be to restrict the ability to exploit the map to more accurately portray Human Impact on the map.

Instead of arbitrarily spacing out cities, reduce the radius that the city can exploit tiles until later Technologies and Improvements extend transportation and reduce the number of early places you can place a viable city. No large city before railroads, for instance, was far from a river or a coast, preferably both or several rivers. Any other position required major infrastructure to provide water or the city stayed small and insignificant.

That would force the player (and, hopefully, the AI) to choose city sites carefully until the Industrial Era (over half-way through the game, effectively), so that while there might be 'clusters' of cities in really good areas (like the watersheds of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Chinese Yellow and Hwang-Ho river plains) large parts of the map would by necessity remain the province of smaller 'settlements', camps, Improvements, etc for much of the game.

IF in addition we require City Districts to be contiguous so that each city must be a compact single entity and relegate everything else to sub-city and partial tile settlements, camps or improvements, and I think the map will automatically be visually 'decluttered', at least until late game technologies make populations soar and the modern sprawling Megalopolis (Megalopolae?) possible.

 

[Zaarin]

Megalopolis (Megalopolae?)

It's a third-declension noun from Greek so: megalopoles in Latin, megalopoleis in Greek; Wiktionary says megalopolises, megalopoleis, and megalopoli (a hyperforeignism because Americans think attaching -i to a word looks smart; see also, octopi) are all accepted plurals.

Anyway, yes, I love all your ideas here. It would much more naturally reflect the way human settlements clustered historically.

 

[Sirsquier]

I think a better solution to Map Clutter would be to restrict the ability to exploit the map to more accurately portray Human Impact on the map.

Instead of arbitrarily spacing out cities, reduce the radius that the city can exploit tiles until later Technologies and Improvements extend transportation and reduce the number of early places you can place a viable city. No large city before railroads, for instance, was far from a river or a coast, preferably both or several rivers. Any other position required major infrastructure to provide water or the city stayed small and insignificant.

That would force the player (and, hopefully, the AI) to choose city sites carefully until the Industrial Era (over half-way through the game, effectively), so that while there might be 'clusters' of cities in really good areas (like the watersheds of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Chinese Yellow and Hwang-Ho river plains) large parts of the map would by necessity remain the province of smaller 'settlements', camps, Improvements, etc for much of the game.

IF in addition we require City Districts to be contiguous so that each city must be a compact single entity and relegate everything else to sub-city and partial tile settlements, camps or improvements, and I think the map will automatically be visually 'decluttered', at least until late game technologies make populations soar and the modern sprawling Megalopolis (Megalopolae?) possible.

Small note you might want to allow settlement near important resources/wonders even if there is no nearby water source at least late classical-early medieval forward. This is realistic as if something is of high enough value, people will find a way to get it. Be that digging wells, making aquaducts, ect.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Small note you might want to allow settlement near important resources/wonders even if there is no nearby water source at least late classical-early medieval forward. This is realistic as if something is of high enough value, people will find a way to get it. Be that digging wells, making aquaducts, ect.

My concept is that Cities need Water. Settlements, or smaller-than-city groups manning some kind of Improvement that extracts resources or provides a 'service' to a nearby city, like a Trading Post, Fort/Castle, Harbor, Pasture, Plantation, Farm, etc would not require a dedicated on-map water supply but couldn't be 'Upgraded' into a city without one eventually.
Settlements would act a lot like a separate District, but ideally would be graphically distinct from in-city Districts an so could represent smaller towns, villages, etc.
The use of 'satellite' smaller groups sometimes quite a distance from the Urban Center dates back to the first cities: Uruk as early as 3700 BCE had copper mining, smelting and working complexes at Hacinebi and Arslantepe (modern names) far away in the Anatolian hills 'feeding' metal tools and artifacts to the city of Uruk.

Something like this has multiple advantages: it allows you to potentially grab territory without 'forward settling' cities, it allows the exploitation of Resources potentially outside your 'core' territory around the city, and it provides more population on the map and terrain without a clutter of cities everywhere: by definition, I would make Settlements one-tile Only and require some specific actions to turn them into a multi-tile City.