/cries in spanish
This is so sad. Goes far beyond wide vs tall. Even with wide beeing better, they could make city placement important. Sure, do 20 cities, but not crap cities.
Finding good land and chosing awesome spots for my cities has been one of the most fun things for me since civ1. In civ6 I just count how many cities I can place in the room I have
To be fair to the development team, Infinite City Spam (ICS) has been something the game has struggled with since the beginning, and is every bit as powerful in Civ 1 & 2 as it is in Civ 6.
The problem starts right with the most fundamental aspect of the Civ production system: the Population as worker-in-the-field. For each new city, the first Population is actually 2 Population, one in the city centre, one in the field. Civ 6 exacerbates the issue by giving each city an effective +1 Amenity, which in effect means 3 Population generating yields (counting the extra Population working th city centre) without needing to invest in Amenities. It doubles down on this issue by giving the first Population in the city it's own district. And to top it all off, Population both grows more quickly in small cities (smaller food basket to fill before the next baby) and has access to free housing if there's a water source (although you shouldn't let the lack of water prevent you from placing a city due to all it's other benefits). Oh, one more thing: more cities equals more territory, making it more likely that you have easy access to a hidden resource that shows up later in the game.
I think the development team expected that the district placing system and adjacency bonuses would encourage you to find the best city sites, but it doesn't work after your first couple of cities for the following reasons. First, any great natural adjacency site, say a campus with 4 mountains, will provide the same adjacency bonus no matter what city it falls into (pre Rationalism, but by the time you get that card even a desert city can be grown to Pop 10) (exception: Harbour adjacency bonus for being next to the city centre). So as long as you've covered your territory with cities, at least one city will be able to place a district in that space. Second, other than the first tier, tiles can be swapped amongst cities, so if you have a great production tile, say a grassland hill with Iron, if you have densely packed cities, you can swap it ack and forth between the cities based on which one needs the production most at any given time. That's better than having a single city hogging all the good tiles. Finally, more cities = more districts and the closer together those cities are, the more district adjacency bonuses you get.
The only offset provided by Civ 6 against ICS is the escalating Settler cost. But that doesn't offset all ICS, just peaceful ICS.
To my mind, the population as worker-in-the-field system needs to go. It's outlived its usefulness and could be made irrelevant in an economic system that uses scarce Builder charges to create Improvements . Farms, Mines, etc. can work themselves (bump up the Builder charge cost to lay them, of course), and Population can represent solely the population of the city core. Then buildings could be capped by population (so a pop 3 city gets only three buildings to place between the centre district and the other districts) while still being arranged in tiers as they are now (Market -> Bank -> Stock Exchange for example) so you have to lay a foundation building before higher level buildings.
