Border expansion should be manual

[Nebular]

Your basically arguing that it is stupid of water to run to the see, if it can be used to irrigate a desert. The water couldn't care less. Usefulness does not enter into the equation for cultural expansion (or only as a small bias), the culture simply goes where it is easiest to go, like water.

By that logic then, it should always expand to the tile that offers the fewest resources which is not always the case (and would frequently result in cities with only a handful of workable tiles and a bunch outside of that 3-tile radius). I've had a number of times where the first tile a city expands to is a high-yield tile. Things like sheep generally don't resist culture anyways. I'm not against buying tiles in the worktable radius (I do it all of the time), I just think it should put emphasis on usable tiles first.

 

[ohioastronomy]

Just so I understand your reference to previous games, in what version of Civ did I previously have player choice on my expanding boundaries? That choice level seems to have been taken away so thoroughly that I don't remember its loss. Silly me, I thought I was given more choice and control with the buy tile option than I had before.

No, you got automatic access to all of your tiles before. Now you get them metered out by the border expansion, and you eventually get the ability to use more for a given city.

So this is yet another example of a more constricted form of gameplay than we used to have.

 

[civnoob13]

I agree with the OP. I'd really like to choose where to expand - yes, it would devalue the need for buying tiles, but so what? If an improvement makes a feature most people don't even use that often redundant, it doesn't really matter, does it? You'd just have to modify America's UA a bit (maybe culture expansion cost is 25% cheaper)

 

[ohioastronomy]

Uh, what?
Isn't it exactly the opposite?
The current system gives you a choice.
If it always picked the best tile (or if it expanded in a ring), than there would be no choice.
If you could pick the tile manually, you would always pick the best tile and that would be it. This isn't really a choice as far as game design goes.

But how it works currently, you have an actual choice, a decision to make: Let it expand normally and just that, or use a bit of gold to both expand it quickly and select where to.

It's good game design for strategy games to let the player makes decisions, and this is what the current system is all about. Expand slowly and suboptimal, but for free, or use gold to expand quickly and optimally.

The core of the entire series has been your ability to choose how to develop your cities. Sometimes I pick a location because I want production; in other places I want population; still others are resource based. We get to control everything else, except the way that the tiles become available. And the current algorithm funnels your cities into a very particular set of choices. Forcing people to pay unless they want to play the game in a particular way is poor design.

For instance, new players probably don't realize that the third ring is almost useless until late in the development of a city. Or that it will be very expensive to use those hills. So you're setting a subtle trap for the inexperienced, and an annoyance for people who want to min/max or explore different strategies.

And the infuriating thing is that this change appears to have been motivated primarily by aesthetics (based on reading discussions with the designer.)

Adding a choice for people to play the game differently doesn't hurt the advocates here; it's the same as having worker automation available for people who want it. The resistance to such an idea is actually odd for me, given that the programming is pretty simple (check an option box at the start, and you get a pop-up when expansion occurs, perhaps with some restrictions on which tiles you can choose, e.g all second tier before any third tier.)

 

[Ellye]

Yeah, I won't disagree that they could have added a pre-game option for manual border control, for those that want it. They have options for a lot of stuff, so they could have one for that too (perhaps they didn't expected it to be a polarizing issue).

Personally, I like the way it currently works, but I don't like the balancing of tile purchase prices. I believe purchase prices should be at least a bit lower, to make it more of an actual useful option.

 

[Peng Qi]

There's no point in arguing with these people. They don't care how rational the current system is, whether via realism or game balance. They just want what they want and won't take no for an answer. There's nothing wrong with that, but then there's no point in the discussion.