Border growth is horribly slow

[CaiusDrewart]

On slowness of cultural growth: On the videos I've seen (Quill's) he didn't build a single district that could support culture until quite late. All he had was the free Monument in each city he built from being Rome. Of course cultural tile expansion is going to suck doing that.

Fair enough. It would be nice if there was an early economic policy that gave faster passive border growth, like that Tradition opener used to. I think there's already one that takes 20% off buying tiles.

 

[Krajzen]

On slowness of cultural growth: On the videos I've seen (Quill's) he didn't build a single district that could support culture until quite late. All he had was the free Monument in each city he built from being Rome. Of course cultural tile expansion is going to suck doing that.

While this is an explanation, I don't think that's a good justification of the way system works. Civ6 districts are far bigger deal than civ5 city buildings, they have population restrictions, opportunity cost and limited space, so most of cities aren't going to have a cultural district, yet in the current system it seems as if those cities were doomed to have very bad border growth. I'd call than a design's downside.

To be honest, personally I'd be fine with removing any connection between border growth and culture - it doesn't exactly make any sense from realistic perspective past ancient/classical era (where cultures could be describd as spreading out), as national borders across history were obviously based on military control, administration and governance, not some ethereal "cultural spread" - I have been always wondering why exactly some random uninhabited tundra or desert wastelands are acquired by culture.
I think borders should expand based on some other rate, for example simply gradually with time (with rate of that growth impacted by a few factors such as an era).

 

[Jaybe]

personally I'd be fine with removing any connection between border growth and culture

2 tiles/population including the initial 6 tiles (so a 10 pop city would have 20 tiles).
Up until the maximum tile spread.

 

[Krajzen]

2 tiles/population including the initial 6 tiles (so a 10 pop city would have 20 tiles).

That would be one of interesting solutions, my only problem with it is that it would make impossible to model overpopulation (like in bangladesh) or underpopulation (like in siberia or canada) in the game, as population would directly corelate with the area

 

[daft]

One of three main negative observations I had from recent gameplays, next to way too fast techs and AI, was horribly low speed of tile cultural growth. Players buy a lot of tiles and even by the late game most cities have not very impressive borders, and even by late eras a lot of land is unclaimed. That both looks bad and feels unbalanced.

On a related note, it irritated me how apparently some players are able to easily dominate the game with really bad "infrastructure development" of their lands, with a lot of non upgraded tiles, resources, wild features remaining until absurdly late eras, often even in capital city.

Those two things combined made "empires" in this game look very underdeveloped and not feeling impressive for me. Civ5 empires maybe were small because of tall bias, but they felt very developed with huge borders "per city" and most tiles upgraded.

Am I wrong? Does anybody share those feelings?

I think you might be on to something, well pointed out, my well educated, Polish fellow civ-fanatic.

 

[thecrazyscot]

I rather like the idea of the slower growth...it will give me a more active role in choosing where to grow because I'll probably end up spending gold more often.

 

[Louis XXIV]

2 tiles/population including the initial 6 tiles (so a 10 pop city would have 20 tiles).
Up until the maximum tile spread.

I would like a combination of ideas. I was going to suggest automatic expansion based on the age of the city, but the population could work too.

I would speed that expansion with "government buildings" - the more efficient the city administration, the better it is able to exert control over its countryside - things like Courthouses, police stations, and the Palace would help improve border expansion. Cities with high populations but without government buildings would have that overcrowding problem.

Really, though, once they went to Social Policies in Civ5, I no longer saw the need to tie borders and culture.

 

[Ryika]

I very much like the border growth that I've seen in Marbozir's stream. He seems to find himself in the situation of wanting to buy often enough, without it being a constant money drain. To me they've found a good middle-ground between natural growth and incentivizing spending money for better tiles. Much better than Civ 5s "mostly passive" growth.

 

[Tinker]

There's generally less places to spend your gold this time around (city-states don't require it, no diplomatic victory), so I kind of like it. Gotta make good culture OR have a good goldflow to keep your borders expanding.