Very few sea resources (and reasons to settle on the coast)

[Depravo]

It's not a question of historical accuracy, it's question of strategic choices. If you never want to build a city on the coast, that's bad for a game. But I don't think that's the case based on what we've seen.

Point was when considering where to settle, rivers should be a draw, the coast should be a draw and both together should be a powerful draw, but river mouths shouldn't be OP.

 

[VicRatlhead5199]

There were hundred of ancient cities placed in the coast due to the food provided by nearby fish banks, greater possibilities for trade due to harbors, and better defensive position due to cliffs (see also: Ancient mediterranean cultures such as the phoenicians or the Minoics) with the mouths of rivers being the quinquaessential prime location for cities and were the first civilizations flourished (the Nile's delta, banks of the Euphrates, Yangtze's mouth, etc).

Also, do notice how the vast euroasian steppes of Mongolia, Turkmenistan and the likes are not exactly burstling with human megalopolises, not even nowadays. Extensive grassland plains are not a good place for locating a city in the real life.

Yup, on board with everything you said there. The problem is I did say the major coastal metropolises people use as examples of why coastal cities should be better which all primarily saw growth from being trade hubs. I have never said coast is bad in real life. Only that the big coastal cities grew because they are trade hubs.

Also straight plains tiles with no rivers or bonus resources that would represent the Mongolian Steppes don't generally create the best cities right away either. You usually need some wheat, grassland, or a river to grow those very big. In game they do get pretty decent later on. They won't grow any better than coast with fish at any rate.

The thing is, regardless of the complaints, coastal settling is very viable in the game. It will probably be very rare for any city to use every available tile inland or not. A city founded on straight coast will lose ~16 tiles of the 36 it can normally work unless you're founding on some snakey peninsula. Most of the time a coastal city will be settled near 2 or more sea resources (at least that was my rule of thumb in V). So 14 useless tiles, reduced to 13 by the harbor district. On average a coastal city will still have 23 useful tiles.

If you hit a pop of 23 (to use every tile) you'll have 7 districts and 16 tile improvements. Fish and the harbor both appear to be pretty good sources of food capable of supporting whatever Civ VI's version of specialists is. Its pretty reasonable to assume a coastal harbor city will be able to support 7 specialists.

They don't have the same top potential as an inland city but 23pop wasn't a shabby sized satellite city in CiV. With soft pop caps being added back in with housing and appeal I'd be surprised if that's a small city in VI. Speaking of appeal, inland cities have incentive through adjacency bonuses and the national park mechanics to not develop some land. Since coastal tiles add appeal you can assume that coast replaces the need to avoid development.

There are many, many possibilities, me thinks:

Fishery: Unlocks at sailing. +1 food to every sea tile

Drydocks: Unlocks at shipbuilding. X2 to the yields of workboats and atolls

Sea batteries: Unlocks at gunpowder. Your city gets a second extra ranged attack that can only target sea units.

Waterfront: Unlocks with urbanization. Increases appeal in all your beach and cliff tiles, +1 tourism on coast sea tiles.

Oceanographic institute: Unlocks with scientific method. +1 science in every ocean tile, +3 on natural sea wonders and atolls

Tidal powerplant: Unlocks with renewable energy. +1 production in every sea tile adyacent to your city districts

So in essence, a city built on coast rather than inland plus harbour would get far better benefits out of sea reasources in the early game (drydocks, fisheries), better defense on the mid game, just when sea trade becomes important (sea batteries) and increased late game science and production if you really planned ahead your city location.

Love the building suggestions!

Not to mention the whole idea of unstacking cities is that this whole sprawl is supposed to be a city. If a district or districts are on the coast... the city is on the coast. This idea that only the city center is the city seems to clash directly with the key concept that the whole sprawl is the city.

Yeah, the thing that worries people is that Navy won't have many targets to attack/defend. I think just giving incentives to trade by sea is plenty of impetus to build a navy.

 

[isau]

I think what people are just curious about is what would make the coast attractive, if settling there opens you to attack by sea. In past games what was attractive--after they tweaked it in expansions so it was attractive at all--was extra cashflow (trade routes) and the ability to build sea units which were in turn capable of capturing cities. But you can now build sea units without being vulnerable to attack, and if there is extra cashflow in Civ 6, we haven't seen it yet.

Ed Beach mentioned sieges as a possible advantage of coastal cities, but I'm skeptical, unless it's just literally not possible to surround a coastal city (the way he talked about it made it sound like you'd just bring a boat).

Anyway, I think people are just curious what the advantage will be.

 

[BrokenBokken]

Yup, on board with everything you said there. The problem is I did say the major coastal metropolises people use as examples of why coastal cities should be better which all primarily saw growth from being trade hubs. I have never said coast is bad in real life. Only that the big coastal cities grew because they are trade hubs.

Also straight plains tiles with no rivers or bonus resources that would represent the Mongolian Steppes don't generally create the best cities right away either. You usually need some wheat, grassland, or a river to grow those very big. In game they do get pretty decent later on. They won't grow any better than coast with fish at any rate.

The thing is, regardless of the complaints, coastal settling is very viable in the game. It will probably be very rare for any city to use every available tile inland or not. A city founded on straight coast will lose ~16 tiles of the 36 it can normally work unless you're founding on some snakey peninsula. Most of the time a coastal city will be settled near 2 or more sea resources (at least that was my rule of thumb in V). So 14 useless tiles, reduced to 13 by the harbor district. On average a coastal city will still have 23 useful tiles.

If you hit a pop of 23 (to use every tile) you'll have 7 districts and 16 tile improvements. Fish and the harbor both appear to be pretty good sources of food capable of supporting whatever Civ VI's version of specialists is. Its pretty reasonable to assume a coastal harbor city will be able to support 7 specialists.

They don't have the same top potential as an inland city but 23pop wasn't a shabby sized satellite city in CiV. With soft pop caps being added back in with housing and appeal I'd be surprised if that's a small city in VI. Speaking of appeal, inland cities have incentive through adjacency bonuses and the national park mechanics to not develop some land. Since coastal tiles add appeal you can assume that coast replaces the need to avoid development.

Love the building suggestions!


Yeah, the thing that worries people is that Navy won't have many targets to attack/defend. I think just giving incentives to trade by sea is plenty of impetus to build a navy.

They have said in the past that pillaging campuses would give you science, I wonder what pillaging a harbor would give you? Perhaps they could make that a rather large incentive as well.

 

[VicRatlhead5199]

I think what people are just curious about is what would make the coast attractive, if settling there opens you to attack by sea. In past games what was attractive--after they tweaked it in expansions so it was attractive at all--was extra cashflow (trade routes) and the ability to build sea units which were in turn capable of capturing cities. But you can now build sea units without being vulnerable to attack, and if there is extra cashflow in Civ 6, we haven't seen it yet.

Ed Beach mentioned sieges as a possible advantage of coastal cities, but I'm skeptical, unless it's just literally not possible to surround a coastal city (the way he talked about it made it sound like you'd just bring a boat).

Anyway, I think people are just curious what the advantage will be.

Eh, it was rather unattractive to settle one or two tiles from coast before but now that will be OK. IMO the worry about the attraction is like protesting a vaccination because of the needle. Three tile widths of land are now prime where before there was only one strip. Worrying about the top potential of one spot v another while you know you're unlikely to ever hit top potential is frivolous and not all that strategic.

 

[isau]

Eh, it was rather unattractive to settle one or two tiles from coast before but now that will be OK. IMO the worry about the attraction is like protesting a vaccination because of the needle. Three tile widths of land are now prime where before there was only one strip. Worrying about the top potential of one spot v another while you know you're unlikely to ever hit top potential is frivolous and not all that strategic.

Umm--it's NOT frivolous, because the entire point of avoiding the coast is that ships can't sail over land and attack you. If all of the cities are set back from the coast, ships, in turn, are poor options as a system. That is why people care--they want to know if navies are going to be a thing. It doesn't mean they are complaining (at least I am not). But we do want to know what incentives will exist to settle the coast, because in a game with ships that can attack you the default would be to avoid it.

 

[kaspergm]

Not to mention the whole idea of unstacking cities is that this whole sprawl is supposed to be a city. If a district or districts are on the coast... the city is on the coast. This idea that only the city center is the city seems to clash directly with the key concept that the whole sprawl is the city.

I will acknowledge this as being a good point. I think one of the things that breaks the immersion for me with regards to the unstacking of cities is that districts don't have to be next to each other (and in connection to the city centre). The fact that you can spread districts out with farms and mines between does (for me) kill the image of this being one large city. I would, personally, have preferred if you needed to fill first ring around city-centre with districts, at least to a good extent, before you could expand into the second ring. But of course, that would create a radically different gameplay.

 

[Abraxis]

I am in Ottawa right now and there is a farm ~7km from downtown, and when I was in Sudbury a couple weeks earlier, the city was spread out to envelop all the mines in the area. Ive seen hundres of cities and they are all very different. If you want yours as a centralized sprawl then do that, but that's not standards by any means

 

[VicRatlhead5199]

Umm--it's NOT frivolous, because the entire point of avoiding the coast is that ships can't sail over land and attack you. If all of the cities are set back from the coast, ships, in turn, are poor options as a system. That is why people care--they want to know if navies are going to be a thing. It doesn't mean they are complaining (at least I am not). But we do want to know what incentives will exist to settle the coast, because in a game with ships that can attack you the default would be to avoid it.

The sheer extra number of trade routes this time around is enough incentive to build a navy. Even if its as people fear, that sea trade won't be innately better, there will be quite a bit of sea trade. That's because trade will still most likely be influenced by the harbors, resource variety and maybe even distance.

Look, even before trade routes, people settled on the coast to snag resources but the number of coastal cities was not that high. Dom players still built navies to protect embarked land units. Protect them from what though? Defending fleets. If you didn't want to be in constant war you needed to counterattack and if you want to do that you need an invasion fleet of your own.

They were built prior to CiV. If you built fleets solely to attack cities you were already not playing very efficiently. Being able to bombard the coast was at best a side benefit because generally speaking there was maybe three or four coastal cities to take in any given conflict. After that your boats just floated around doing nothing while the army took the focus.

Trade routes are what truly ramped up the naval game and pulled conflicts away from being just coastal. The only maps where navy will be hopelessly inconsequential is Pangea maps and people don't play Pangea maps because they like navy.

 

[Abraxis]

I thought everyone around here played pangea

 

[BrokenBokken]

I will acknowledge this as being a good point. I think one of the things that breaks the immersion for me with regards to the unstacking of cities is that districts don't have to be next to each other (and in connection to the city centre). The fact that you can spread districts out with farms and mines between does (for me) kill the image of this being one large city. I would, personally, have preferred if you needed to fill first ring around city-centre with districts, at least to a good extent, before you could expand into the second ring. But of course, that would create a radically different gameplay.

What you describe is actually pretty typical. there are definitely areas with a small break between the main city and the suburbs by mines, farms, or other things we consider 'improvements.' Real life is usually rather chaotic

I think a good answer would be to make plundering harbors very rewarding for the attacked and painful for the defender, and maybe increase the range of navel units to 3. If the city is close enough to the water to build a harbor, a ranged naval unit can hit the city center.

 

[VicRatlhead5199]

I thought everyone around here played pangea

Almost never. Maybe that's why I'm less worried about it than others are.

What you describe is actually pretty typical. there are definitely areas with a small break between the main city and the suburbs by mines, farms, or other things we consider 'improvements.' Real life is usually rather chaotic

I think a good answer would be to make plundering harbors very rewarding for the attacked and painful for the defender, and maybe the range of navel units to 3. If the city is close enough to the water to build a harbor, a ranged naval unit can hit the city center.

It will be pretty painful if it instantly ends multiple trade routes...

 

[Calouste]

I will acknowledge this as being a good point. I think one of the things that breaks the immersion for me with regards to the unstacking of cities is that districts don't have to be next to each other (and in connection to the city centre). The fact that you can spread districts out with farms and mines between does (for me) kill the image of this being one large city. I would, personally, have preferred if you needed to fill first ring around city-centre with districts, at least to a good extent, before you could expand into the second ring. But of course, that would create a radically different gameplay.

Districts don't have to be next to each other, but districts get a minor adjacency bonus for each district, including the city center. Of course in some case the adjacency bonuses from other tiles will beat the adjacency bonuses from neighboring districts, but you can always backfill later. There is an incentive to put districts close to each other, but there are cases where it might be better to do things differently. Decisions, decisions, isn't that what this game is all about?

 

[qadams]

<snip>
There is an incentive to put districts close to each other, but there are cases where it might be better to do things differently. Decisions, decisions, isn't that what this game is all about?

I'll admit to being mostly uninterested in the topic of this thread at the start, and to becoming somewhat fatigued by all the wrangling about it, and yet... now that all the main points have been established, I appreciate the topic. It's been a useful discussion, and it makes me even more eager to begin playing the game!

 

[Tantor]

Umm--it's NOT frivolous, because the entire point of avoiding the coast is that ships can't sail over land and attack you. If all of the cities are set back from the coast, ships, in turn, are poor options as a system. That is why people care--they want to know if navies are going to be a thing. It doesn't mean they are complaining (at least I am not). But we do want to know what incentives will exist to settle the coast, because in a game with ships that can attack you the default would be to avoid it.

I want the sea to be more important than in previous CIV versions. I Believe movement and trade on land has been too good compared to movement and trade by sea. With the exception of the roman roads it was impossible to move large quantities of goods on land. Beeing in control of the sea and the supply/trade routes was vital throughout the ages.

That`s why I hope settling it will be good to settle the coast....

 

[isau]

They were built prior to CiV. If you built fleets solely to attack cities you were already not playing very efficiently.

The ability to attack cities was put into a Civ V expansion pack because the naval game in Vanilla was terrible. Now people are wondering what role the sea will play, because its most obvious role, allowing units to attack cities that were forced to be coastal to gain coastal benefits, is not viable if it is possible to set a city so that it is unattackable by sea but still gains all the same benefits. That is all.

 

[VicRatlhead5199]

The ability to attack cities was put into a Civ V expansion pack because the naval game in Vanilla was terrible. Now people are wondering what role the sea will play, because its most obvious role, allowing units to attack cities that were forced to be coastal to gain coastal benefits, is not viable if it is possible to set a city so that it is unattackable by sea but still gains all the same benefits. That is all.

I get that and appreciated the change but naval sieges didn't keep up with city defense very well. You got a short window in the Renaissance when frigates were introduced and another bump in the late game when longer ranged battleships came on board. Longer ranged battleships that will still be able to bombard harbor cities.

Melee ships couldn't fortify or take much of a hit from the city attack meaning they were in the same boat as an embarked land unit. They had to sit out of the siege until the ranged ships did their work. It did not truly change strategy much at all.

Its not like you couldn't bombard cities before the melee ships attacking cities was added. I used it often. You had a navy available after your land units landed, might as well use them. Even once the melee capability came on line you still needed land units to keep the city. It was a more minor change than people are making it out to be. In essence the only change to strategy was rather than bring an embarked melee unit and keeping it out of range until the kill shot, you got to bring a melee ship...that you kept out of range until the kill shot. Drawback? Now you don't have a land unit to help keep the city you just took.

Attacking cities did not improve naval relevance throughout the game. BNWs trade did. That was what created the need for a fleet bigger than half a dozen ships. Your navy needed to spread out more to protect trade routes. That was what gave navies an actual role in the game. Ships virtually paid for themselves because you could plunder enemies trade and protect your most lucrative trade routes. I honestly feel like allowing more cities, especially ones that can leverage higher production from inland tiles, will increase the number of ships you see in game.

 

[isau]

Attacking cities did not improve naval relevance throughout the game.

I feel like we were playing different games. The fact that cities were on the coast let multiple ranged Cruisers roll into view at once and blitz them down in 1-2 turns. Cities that are set back from the water might get hit by 1 ship per turn. This was probably the single most effective way to win Domination victory, at least for me. The possibility of this happening dictated end-game play and very much was relevant from the moment the game started.

There were reasons to take the risk of a coastal city. There may be reasons to take that risk in Civ 6. But if so we haven't seen them, other than a mention of sieges/surrounding cities.

The question stands. What is the incentive to build on the coast and make a city vulnerable to a navy if you can get the benefits without the risk? We're not saying there isn't a reason to do it. We're saying we want to know what it is, just like we want to know what Trajan looks like.

 

[Alphons Rodulfo]

I don't think this reason why you might want to settle cities on the coast has been brought up before: It leaves you more tiles for your inland cities. And that can be a huge benefit. It could mean the difference between being able to found a good extra city or not.

 

[isau]

I don't think this reason why you might want to settle cities on the coast has been brought up before: It leaves you more tiles for your inland cities. And that can be a huge benefit. It could mean the difference between being able to found a good extra city or not.

Well it does this only circumstantially. There is a maximum radius of 3 tiles around any city. There is overlap at distances of 4 and 5 tiles away. If that's the main reason to settle on coasts, it mainly means coastal cities are "pity cities" similar to when you drop one in the arctic to grab a resource.

I think we also can assume one-tile islands are now complete trash (if they exist at all) unless there is some mechanism we haven't seen yet to rescue them from obscurity. They operate on the same basic principal, as tile grabs.