Anyone has a good reason to play tall in CiVI ?

[TurboJ]

Well, at launch I did win a science victory on deity with 5 cities (standard map size). I don't know if that would be possible after all the patches. Might have to give it a try one day.

Anyhow, my definition of tall in Civ VI is that you really focus only on 2-4 cities and the rest of the cities are mere satellites who exist only because of a local luxury or to provide trade routes, food or production to the main cities. If you develope many, fully functional cities, then that's wide. But that's just me.

 

[DanaLea]

I played another 1 city challenge the other day. Pericles on settler only owning 1 city you have to win a CV.
Try it

So what other conditions? Map size? The number of AI players, city-state's? This sounds interesting.

 

[Victoria]

Standard size, speed, continents no advanced settings.
With another civ like Kongo you can do it on cheftain, you can probably do it with Pericles too but 1 is challenging enough.
It really hones your CV

 

[antimony]

Yeah, Kongo is easy on cheftain, but there's probably a difficulty cliff for every civ, in that if you can't win shortly after your museum is filled, tourism stalls until modern-era techs, at which point a good culture AI like Russia will catch up

Just with two cities you could probably get the difficulty up to Prince, because two cities gives you access to a lot more Eurekas (build two campuses, two banks, etc.).

 

[Victoria]

Of course a one city challenge is do-able is you can wipe the others off the map fast enough too I guess, probably not easy either

 

[joncnunn]

Of course a one city challenge is do-able is you can wipe the others off the map fast enough too I guess, probably not easy either

If something is easy, it shouldn't be called a challenge.
The OCC dates back to Civ II (if not Civ I ) for players who had already beaten Deity with standard play wanting a greater challenge. Both of the victory conditions were allowed, but most of the successful attempts ended in conquest victory. And even those that won a OCC by science on Deity then would have done something like conquer all the world except for one city first.
Note that in both of those games that if you were running either Democracy or Communism there was no corruption at all plus even if restarts used until on the river there was a hard cap of 12 until Hospitals; the challenge really was going against what designers intended. (Loop hole for hard cap then : whenever a city about to fill up the basket at size 12 produce a settler / engineer; the turn that a hospital completes have the stack rejoin the city.)
Civ III is perhaps the first to include a victory condition that was kind of geared towards of (cultural victory : one city version). However it was still a challenge to do that.
Civ IV in addition to including an advanced option for OCC also had an informal 5 city challenge; (5 being the number of copies of buildings within your empire you needed in order to build national wonders when OCC wasn't selected.)
Civ V is the only one in the franchise in which the Challenge part was missing from OCC when going one city; especially the case when going either Vanilla or G&K cultural victory.

 

[Leyrann]

If something is easy, it shouldn't be called a challenge.
The OCC dates back to Civ II (if not Civ I ) for players who had already beaten Deity with standard play wanting a greater challenge. Both of the victory conditions were allowed, but most of the successful attempts ended in conquest victory. And even those that won a OCC by science on Deity then would have done something like conquer all the world except for one city first.
Note that in both of those games that if you were running either Democracy or Communism there was no corruption at all plus even if restarts used until on the river there was a hard cap of 12 until Hospitals; the challenge really was going against what designers intended. (Loop hole for hard cap then : whenever a city about to fill up the basket at size 12 produce a settler / engineer; the turn that a hospital completes have the stack rejoin the city.)
Civ III is perhaps the first to include a victory condition that was kind of geared towards of (cultural victory : one city version). However it was still a challenge to do that.
Civ IV in addition to including an advanced option for OCC also had an informal 5 city challenge; (5 being the number of copies of buildings within your empire you needed in order to build national wonders when OCC wasn't selected.)
Civ V is the only one in the franchise in which the Challenge part was missing from OCC when going one city; especially the case when going either Vanilla or G&K cultural victory.

Number of copies in IV was dependant on map size too, or at least it is in the final version of the game.

 

[DanaLea]

I did the OCC... Greece on standard size continent map, 6 AI's. I won in turn 347 and I did not have a religion. And I was annoyed by Egypt's refusal to convert my city.. so all I had was my pantheon for the entire game (save the last like 10 turns when Athens finally converted on its own from nearby city pressure).

I usually win with culture though, even when I'm shooting for something else. Played once (remember no details) and was working toward science, getting the right great people, getting close in the tech tree, when I got blindsided with a culture win. Wasn't even paying attention to that.

 

[Silver 00]

There is only one scenario where I go tall , but it is extremely rare. An in land city (no fresh water supply) with little production. The reason I have settled such a city is to get luxury and strategic resources. The city had a few good tiles the rest where plains, grassland for the most part. In order to grow the city I had to create lots of farms (which can be risky against attack). I had to set up trade routes to grow it faster and get production which it lacked. The first things I built besides granary was a industrial district. After growing the city a bit I assigned specialists to the district for the extra production. Then I grew it even larger making campus and assigned specialists there aswell. I think the city size at the end was 25.

 

[japanesesamurai]

Perfect @Japper007 just what I was meaning.
I feel that tall can win you a cultural game faster but not the other types

How would this work? Because having fewer cities means having fewer opportunities to showcase great works, relics and archeological stuff you dig up. Because you are limited in the amount of theater squares you can build. Doing a wonder race on immortal or deity is pretty much useless too. Having fewer districts and wonder will also decrease the amount of great people points per turn
+ having more land = more archeologic sites tiles within your borders.
If you don’t take land early, the AI will grab anything it can, even if it means them losing it due to loyalty pressure.
Having a ton of cities seems to be the best (only) way to win, unless you aim for a domination or diplomatic victory.

 

[Victoria]

How would this work?

A culture victory and to a degree an RV(RV tails off later) are fighting the strength of another civ while an SV is a race, a dipV has a minimum finish limit and a score V is a slog.
In a CV you are competing primarily against the civ with the strongest culture as in it provides the highest domestic tourists which is your finish line. This finish line rises over time and a good CV player will stop expanding and start pushing tourism at the right stage. Typically around T100 civs are still not producing a lot of culture but by T150 they are. So basically getting enough tourism really early is the key. If you try to expand to 10 cities you spent too much energy expanding that could have been placed into tourism
To push the point with empirical evidence, look at GOTM’s. They have nerfed great writers as CV’s around T100 were common place with 5 cities but certainly sub T150 is easily doable. Even with bad CV civs. Good CV civs get nearer to T100. Last GOTM CV was Hungary and I was not pushing hard (Did not explore early enough by a long shot) but finished around T150 with 8 cities, it could have been a lot faster. The key thing is to get known by all civs ASAP, then open borders and trade routes and not getting a T3 government all significantly help.
As an aside, RV’s are won with 3-4 cities earlier, so even less cities.
So “best(only)” are a little inaccurate for these 2 victory types if you are talking about speed. It is about knowing the difficulty and the competition and CS’s and judging what you need to get before the AI starts curving a bit.

 

[acluewithout]

Tall v Wide is dead. Long live Tall v Wide.

Civ VI just doesn’t have the equivalent of a 4 City Tradition Meta, so Tall v Wide in a Civ V sense is meaningless. And because of Districts and other things, the conversation is more complicated than just replacing TvW with “lots of cities or not too many”. Instead, you have multiple decisions like lots of cities v not too many; a few big high pop cities and lots of small ones, or just lots of pop 4 cities or lots of pop 10 cities; settle or capture cities etc.

The game looks like it was designed for players to have a few really big cities (providing lots of production) and lots of small ones (providing trade routes and gold). If you play according to that design, then your “few big cities” can be very powerful indeed. Build IZs and Aqueducts / Dams, run trade routes from those Cities to Allies using Wisselbank, and build Wonders with +% modifiers and or place high level Governors, and you’ll have a few Cities with heaps of production and growth (and growth means more pop to work more tiles for even more production), and potentially also lots of culture, science, gold and or faith depending on Wonders and Governors. (You’re also probably better having those small Cities being Coastals, because Coastals have more gold overall, and you can get +% discount building Harbours.)

The problem is that, by the time you grow these Big Core Cities and have all the Districts and Wonders and Governors and Trade Routes, there’s not a lot of time left in the game (YMMV) and so little opportunity for ROI. There’s also only so much stuff to build with Production, although there are late game Wonders, the GDR, Scored Competitions and - if all else fails - projects.

However, because of Rationalism, regardless of the original design intention, you’re quite violently pushed to general have just lots of Pop 10 Cities. You don’t even then need any high pop cities, because all your 10 Pop Cities already give you all the Science you need, you get tonnes of gold from Trade (direct and trade routes), so can buy any buildings you need in all your Cities, and anything else you need you can just chop in. So, no “per turn production” required beyond the early turns in a few initial Cities.

So. Are Big Cities viable and or useful? Yes. A few Big Cities and no other Cities works okay; but a few Big Cities and lots of small Cities providing Trade Routes and Gold works much better.

Can you just have (say) Four Big Cities and win? Yes, you can, in the sense that it’s viable. If you do that, there are some advantages of sorts - you can focus on getting Wonders and levelling Governors, you won’t need to move Governors as much, you can take Audience Chambers, and you can focus sooner on just rocketing towards your Victory Condition. But these upsides generally aren’t as good as what you’re giving up by having more Cities.

Are Big Cities optimal? No, lots of Pop 10 Cities and Choppity-Chop is optimal. Just Four Cities, or even just one City, is the least optimal approach, although (1) I guess it’s conceivable that four cities is optimal if you couldn’t expand for some reason (ie because it’s your only option), but you can always expand providing you’re willing to war or travel far enough, and (2) I haven’t experimented with this much myself, but it seems for the reasons others have mentioned you maybe don’t need as many Cities for CV or RV (ie the additional Cities aren’t a negative and or a small empire isn’t inherently better per se, instead you just maybe don’t need so many Cities for these victories and so might be better not spending resources getting more Cities instead of just prosecuting your RV or earning Tourism for you CV).

Should Cities be close or spread out? Depends on how you’re playing the game. If you’re going “a few big cities, lots of small cities”, then ideally the big Cities should be close so they can get better District Adjacencies, particularly from Aqueducts, Dams and Gov Plaza. For your other Cities, I don’t think it much matters. If you’re playing lots of Pop 10 Cities, then again I don’t think it much matters - you just need them to have a Campus and maybe Holy Site and get them to Pop 10; you also need resources to Chop. But I guess in principle closer is better because you can fit in even more Cities, and more Cities is the name of the game.

Hopefully that’s helpful and I haven’t just re-hashed other people’s stuff. I’m sure others will point out if my knowledge is out of date or wrong headed.