Bringing back the Height Advantage [Ideas for Tall play]

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After 4 years under Civ5 BNW's "4 city tradition" thumb, it seems Firaxis has pushed the pendulum too far back, making wide the only way to compete in Civ6. Even though I love wide, expansive empires, I sympathize with those who would like taller play to be at least a little less completely outgunned by wide. I think it is a worthy topic, since besides helping alternate strategies, this could create a strategic choice being growing your core vs your frontier in the midgame.

Now, there's a few big reasons why wide is so good in 6:
  • Removal of per-city penalties
  • Districts and buildings give +X yields, not modifiers
  • Trade Routes are per city (and much stronger)
  • City State 3/6 Envoy bonuses are per district
Civ6 is all about production: producing districts for your VC, settlers, builders, military units, and so on. The end result of the above points is that it's almost always better to invest production in getting more cities, which bring districts, land, etc.
Therefore, I think the pathway to making Tall viable (without hammering wide into the ground) is to make the decision of where to allocate production a competitive choice: between settling new cities vs improving what you have.

How can that be done? First, some potential tweaks. Then, perhaps a little red meat.
Tweaks:
-One avenue is to make the district buildings not quite so flat yield. To borrow from myself in another thread, here was an idea for the campus buildings:
  • Library can stay at +2 (cut the Ancient era some slack!)
  • University could be extra X% science from population (to make them viable only for the big cities. Could see Unis as more of an abstract, improving the general knowledge of the populace type deal)
  • Research lab could give +Y science to each specialized district in the city. (To really make them attractive in your largest cities, most developed cities. Labs are specialized places; colocation with other sectors is a boon!)
The theatre square could have some similar reworks, perhaps having stronger synergies with wonders in the city or something. In the same vein, we could change some of the CS envoy benefits. Perhaps the 3 envoy perk is sum lump sum towards your total rather than to the districts.

-We could adjust the populations at which districts unlock. Currently, the first few are unlocked at 1,4,7,10.
Four citizens is trivial to get, requires only one amenity, and lets you get two districts. That's all the gold from a CH, a trade route, and a victory district for the low low price of having zoo coverage. But I digress; spreading these unlocks out would help.

-Shifting gold from CH to international trade routes. When i have a wide empire, you darn well better bet I'm putting a CH in every city I can. The buildings alone (with Free Market policy) 30 gold, plus the whatever city states are giving you (8 per commercial CS. It adds up quick.) This makes large empires really overpower the little guys, because they swim in cash. There's just no way to specialize and compete. The summer patch buffs to plantations help a little- but if you want gold, you need CH's.

But no one likes just nerfing things all the time, so let me toss out some constructive ideas.

-City center buildings
Despite being the city center, it's in really bad shape right now. There are some 4 non-wall buildings available- monument, granary, sewer, and watermill. This is a big opportunity. The big limitation on tall is usually housing, rather than just food. Buildings like the Hospital and medical lab could make a return- but they might come too late in the game. This would be a good place to drop a couple extra midgame structures. We have a castles tech; perhaps we could throw in a Castle that a city could build, boosting its defense a little and adding some housing. A caravansery to buff trade routes to and from. Maybe an actual growth building, too. (While not necessarily a tall specific thing, it would be nice to see the Civ5 stable, forge, stoneworks, mint, etc make a comeback.) But if we want tall cities in particular to get some boosts, we can focus on their traditional differentiating factors: specialists and +% modifiers.

-specialist citizens
Right now, specialists are really hurting. They barely provide yield. I would like to think that a smaller city with an industrial zone would be a bit behind the efforts of a bustling metropolis devoting 3 citizens to it. Some ideas here include making each level of building improve specialist yield as well. Perhaps +1 from each. So a built out district's citizens will give 5 yields. That's huge for a city that can harness it (and gives us something to do with all these citizens!)

-National Wonders
Speaking of percent modifiers, these bad boys have been conspicuously absent. Ruhr valley kind of hits exactly what an ironworks could be, but it's a world wonder. NWs are perfect for making tall cities relevant- the ol' NC rush was a cornerstone of the tall strats in Civ5. As for what this would look like, I'm envisioning a large structure place right in the center of the district. Most of them have a gap in the middle when fully built out; we could always build over the center+required building anyways. Make them stand out, a bit like wonders (maybe not THAT big.)
Ideas on requirements include having the specialty district+select buildings, and perhaps building a national wonder counting as a district slot. As for benefits, bring back the +4, +50% type bonuses. These serve as force multipliers that wide empires will have a harder time taking advantage of.

-Policy cards
A lot of the above ideas can be taken further with policies. Have you ever noticed that of all the economic cards, they are all wide save the first one you get: God-King? Part of what made tradition so good in Civ5 was that it had some very powerful policies.
We could see more things targeted at large cities. As for what constitutes large at each stage of the game, we have some population and development milestones already in the game. Various civics get boosts from having a city of pop X, which rises over time. We could benchmark policies to that. Or the progression of insulae/medina/liberalism/new deal that is tracked to number of districts built. A card that gives an extra trade route to cities over size 15, or grants +25% of everything to your capital, or a 10% discount in building districts for each district already completed in the city, would be great flavour and help out in building a megalopolis.
For some of the ideas I threw out, we could boost specialists, bring back "universal healthcare" to add a little flavor to national wonders (+1 Amenity, +2 housing?), and even add in a little card to allow luxury amenities be able to stack on cities. So two cities could draw +2 each instead of wasting them.

TL;DR:
How would you like to see them bring a little balance between tall and wide?
 
I'd probably start by improving specialists, making them generate great person points and adding some wonders/policies that enhance them. They've been a really interesting strategic component in past games, and its disappointing to see them relegated to more or less the same status as city projects in Civ V. I'd also reduce the raw science and culture from population. This seems counterintuitive if the goal is to reward high populations, but it's much easier to get high total population if they're spread across many cities, and this would ensure that a civ that invests in settlers or in catapults and battering rams instead of in campuses and libraries really does fall behind in science, at least in the short/medium term.

More controversially (and with less certainty on my part), I do wonder whether per-city penalties should return. A city with 10 well developed cities should be better at science than one with 5, but I'm not sure I'm convinced it should be twice as good.
 
The thing is district should be industrial era or later things with the exception of holy sites as monastic orders of many faiths tended to build monasteries away from population centers and of course the harbor district. It wasn't until quick mass transportation ie railroads, trolleys, and automobiles that cities began to spread and specialized areas were made for industrial, entertainment, or commerce. Everything before that had to be in walking distance from where people lived as well that was the main mode of transportation.
 
A lot of the OP's suggestions seem like they would benefit tall empires and wide empires equally well. If we put in a bunch stuff that benefits tall cities, but which doesn't require any trade-offs with regard to how many cities you can build, or limitations to the productivity or efficiency of smaller cities, then we end up with a situation in which a civ can have very powerful tall cities, but still no reason to not just keep building more cities. And so the power balance still favors wide empires by a large margin.

I posted some ideas in a similar thread:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...crease-science-culture-per-population.621124/

Other (brainstormy) ways to make tall cities better could include:

- Add flat yields per population (as the OP suggested).

- Add additional build queues to cities that reach certain population thresholds. A very large city, therefore could hypothetically be as "productive" as multiple smaller cities, even if they both have the same number of hammers. For example (just brainstorming out loud here, haven't really thought this through much), the Factory could have a specialist slot that, when filled, grants a second build queue. Production is, by default, split between both items being produced. But, if you assign additional specialists to the factory, an increasing fraction of the production is shared between each queue. Alternatively (or in addition), Encampments could have a way of providing a build queue exclusively for units, with the productivity of that queue being based on population.

- Yield/benefit of specialists in districts scales up with the number of specialists assigned to that district. So cities with more population to spare can specialize even further.

- Raw population acts as a percent modifier towards the accumulation great people points in that city. The more populous your cities, the higher the likelihood that somebody will grow up to be a great person.

- Cost of civilian units (settlers, builders, archaeologists, naturalists, etc) scales down based on the population of the city that is producing it.

- Have mutually-exclusive building options in each district (similar to barracks vs stable or art museum vs archaeology museum), in which one line of buildings benefits tall cities (% modifiers), and the other line(s) benefits smaller cities (flat modifiers). I've pitched this idea on a couple other threads. I'll edit post with links to them if I can find them. For example, the Campus district could have the following building lineup:
Library : +2 science, +1 specialists slot
College : +4 science, +1 Housing, +1 specialist slot
Final building in district is one of the following options:
1.) University : +3 science, +X science per population, +1 specialist slot
2.) Research Center : +3 science, +Y% science in city, +2 specialist slot
3.) Observatory (req. adjacent mountain) : +1 science, increases mountain adjacency bonus, +1 specialist
4.) Apothecary / Pharmacist (req. adjacent jungle) : +1 science, increases jungle adjacency bonus, +1 specialist
5.) Another building that adds an additional adjacency bonus, or which improves the bonus for adjacent districts?

... Though, admittedly, very few of my own ideas are things that wouldn't also benefit wide empires that have large core cities.

Another idea that I've pitched in the past could possibly provide a solution to this issue. In the past, I've proposed some kind of demographics and public opinion system, in which cities or citizens have desires that the leader must meet in order to keep that city / citizen happy and healthy. I'm imagining a system in which individual citizens can offer "quests" (similar to "we love the king" demands in Civ V, or city state quests). Fulfilling that quest makes the citizen happier and more productive. Failure to fulfill the quest within a certain time period (or meeting some kind of explicit "fail" condition) would make the citizen unhappy and could lead to revolt. This could introduce a system in which very sprawling empires are simply harder to manage because there are more conflicting demands from your cities/citizens. This would provide a dynamic, systemic check on empire growth that isn't dependent on penalizing the civ for hitting some arbitrary threshold of cities or population. How effective the mechanic is would depend on how well it's presented to the player, and on the types and variety of "quests" that are offered.

Simple quest ideas could be things like "acquire [X] resource", or "build [X] infrastructure", or "build [X] unit". Other quest possibilities could include:
-enacting or maintaining certain policies,
-adopting or maintaining a certain government,
-founding or spreading a religion,
-enacting an inquisition,
-lowering/raising taxes (if taxation becomes a mechanic),
-making war/peace with another civ,
-sending trade routes to another civ,
-settling near a natural wonder,
-not having barbarians approach within [X] distance of the city,
-maintaining the appeal of nearby land tiles,
-putting a great work in the city,
-assigning the citizen as a specialist
-assigning the citizen to work a specific tile or improvement
-not letting amenity or housing surplus fall beyond a certain point
-not letting food surplus fall beyond a certain point

This sort of feature would create some pressure for the player to have to consider what your population actually wants you to do, rather than just doing what you want to do. My biggest worry is that the A.I. wouldn't be able to handle it. My second biggest worry is that it would feel too "RNG" (like the random events of Civ IV BtS)
 
I agree, megabearsfan- without introducing per-city penalties (a decidedly anti-fun measure,) any system that helps tall empires will also help wide empires with a tall core. But this is an issue that is hard to resolve: certainly, a player would expect that a wide empire with a tall core would beat a wide empire with a short core. And having additional developed, productive cities should always be a boon. (otherwise we'll end up in 2000AD with half the map unsettled!)

If a player manages to have a tall core in their wide empire, that is a feat above simply establishing a tall empire. After all, the wide player, at some point, had to divert resources from continued expansion to boost those core cities.

What I was trying to get at was that, in a given game of Civ6, we have a certain amount of production and other resources that we can use to further our goals. How do we allocate this production budget for empire expansion? We keep expanding until it isn't worth it. In Civ5, there were heavy penalties to expansion that made that return negative in all situations. In Civ6, I am suggesting that we consider how a player looks at his near term production (his marginal production): should he invest it in putting down new cities, or in building up what he has already? Right now, players should almost invariably choose to expand, since there are so few options to making the nth citizen in a tall city more useful than an extra citizen in a fresh city. A percentage modifier is the best example, since putting hammers towards that makes your citizens more efficient, whereas putting them towards a new settler will simply net you more citizens.

Wide vs Tall is a question of population distribution, so fair comparisons are empires with similar populations. Obviously, as I was alluding to in the first paragraph, an empire with lots of population that can support it should beat down smaller ones. This spans a huge range of empire types- and it's really about where to put that nth citizen/invest those next hammers.

But without any mechanisms like % modifiers or better specialists, there's no real reason to concentrate population other than high production potential to build a wonder or spaceport. This strategic gameplay decision is one that lies in the early and midgame- by the end, you can have a wide and tall empire anyways once stadiums and neighborhoods are online. I was only trying to think of ways to make the strategic choice viable without penalizing wide. (For the record, I like wide more, but I feel like it shouldn't be the only competitive way to play.)
 
I know this thread is a bit old but I got linked to it from the latest Polycast so here's my 2 cents:

I think specialists providing +% yields and not raw yields could be the way to go. That being said, I also think that a nerf might be required to make this work well.

Just spitballing -- if specialists gave +5%/+10%/+15% (for a max of +30%), I think it could be a huge boon to ICS by letting your cities grow 2 or 3 more pop points than normal (amenities might become a problem though -- again, just theorizing). So, if we went the specialists gave +% yields way, I think some kind of cap on raw yields via what buildings you can put in a district could be interesting.

At size 1-3, you can building your first district, but no buildings inside them.
At size 4, you can build your second district , but only one tier one building in one of those districts.
At size 7, you can build your third district, two tier 1 buildings, and one tier 2 building.
At size 10, you can build your fourth district, three tier 1 buildings, two tier 2 buildings, and a final tier three building.
At size 13, 5/4/3/2
At size 16, 6/5/4/3

This would have the effect of putting a soft-cap on yields to pop size. Sure, you can have 20 pop 7 cities, but they'll only have a market and a bank and if you want the +15% modifier, you'll have to work just five tiles (two of which will be anchored to primarily food). If you want stock exchanges or research labs or whatever, you'll have to go to pop 10. If you furthermore want the +30% modifier, you can only work 7 tiles (with 2-3 citizens primarily working food). Since a size 7 city can only have one tier 2 building, it becomes more specialized. A size 7 city would have mid-level of one yield, low-mid of a second yield, and low yield of a third. On the other hand, larger cities -- let's say a size sixteen city -- would have three high yields, one mid yield, one low-mid yield, and one low yield assuming you built all available districts and filled them with their buildings.

Attaching +% modifiers to specialists then allows a size twenty-six city to run three uber yields (three districts, full of buildings, with three specialists each). Being flexible on what it can produce would be a nice bonus. Smaller cities would be much more dependent on their local tiles as far as what they can switch production to.

This would still make ICS a viable strategy. Some strats and cities SHOULD only produce a single yield well. In fact, I think these changes would make it so that a variety of mixing of small, medium, and large cities could all be viable depending on your tiles and diplomatic situation. On the other hand, it could just move the goal posts as far as how many pops are ideal in ICS. Right now, 6-7 seems ideal. With this change, I think that number would get bumped up to 13 (allows two final tier buildings and possibly max +% yields from specialists depending on your food tiles). This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing though. ICS is still doable, it just takes longer to start the snowball rolling.
 
Replying to this quite an old thread because the ideas introduced in the original post to improve tall play feel fairly reasonable for me. In particular, tall play requires bonuses that exponentially increase with number of citizens, an effect that existed in Civ V because:
(i) Libraries yield bonus science per citizen -> (ii) Unis yield percentage bonus -> (iii) Public School yield bonus science per citizen -> (iv) Research lab yield percentage bonus
=> As a result, with all the science buildings, each citizen gives effectively gives (0.5+0.5+x)*(1.33+y)*1.5*z, where x = possible science yield from a worked tile (i.e., specialists mostly in Civ V), y = possible addition on 0.17 by Free Thought Policy), and z = Additional multipliers by other buildings, such as National College and Observatory. Thus, one building (in one city) can increase your whole civilizations science yield a remarkable amount, even multiply it by some factor. In contrast, in Civ VI you must build smaller buildings in all cities to get a similar boost, simply adding a University in your capital does not do much, but you must place Uni in as many cities as you can with the Rationalism card to really kick up some Science.

I love the percentage bonus of the second tier building and also the per district bonus for third tier building, and the boost to specialists in nice, too. However, I wonder if it is possible to make tall viable with no nerfs to wide play at all. Introducing back National Wonders would be a nice way to improve tall, but it would implicitly impose a penalty for existing cities, when founding new ones. They also force timing constraints in your build order: at certain point of tech tree, you must have certain buildings in all cities, and this would conflict the Civ VIs gameplay idea of being more adaptable and less fixed build order game than civ V.

I'd probably start by improving specialists, making them generate great person points and adding some wonders/policies that enhance them. They've been a really interesting strategic component in past games, and its disappointing to see them relegated to more or less the same status as city projects in Civ V. I'd also reduce the raw science and culture from population. This seems counterintuitive if the goal is to reward high populations, but it's much easier to get high total population if they're spread across many cities, and this would ensure that a civ that invests in settlers or in catapults and battering rams instead of in campuses and libraries really does fall behind in science, at least in the short/medium term.

More controversially (and with less certainty on my part), I do wonder whether per-city penalties should return. A city with 10 well developed cities should be better at science than one with 5, but I'm not sure I'm convinced it should be twice as good.

Having direct per-city penalties would be a somewhat discouraging mechanic in my opinion. However, the same effect could be created with a less discouraging implementation. I don't think a new city addition to an empire should be as effective in producing science and culture as a sprawling capital. Instead, each new city could produce slightly less of every yield than the existing ones. The reduction does not have to be massive, just an additional soft limit on the number of cities, such that each city you build costs more (with increasing settler cost) and produces less. This mechanic could also be added to captured cities and the penalty could be more severe, so that going avoid the increasing settler costs by just capturing the AI cities wouldn't be such a no brainer strategy either. As a result, every new city would strictly increase your yields, but the increases would decrease city by city.

Speculating here how the mechanic could actually be implemented.

Y = original yield from tiles, buildings, citizens, etc.
Your capital produces [1-f(0)]*Y of every yield (alternatively, [1-fs(0)]*S of science, [1-fc(0)]*C of culture, etc., differently for every yield).
Your second city produces [1-f(1)]*Y of every yield.
You capture a city for an enemy, it produces [1-f(2)-g(x)]*Y of every yield.
You found a city, which will be your fourth one. It produces [1-f(3)]*Y of every yield.
etc.

f(r) is a some function in the interval [0,1) such that f(0) = 0. It could be something like S(r)-0.5, where S(r) is the sigmoid function ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function ), or whatever would be balanced (S(r)-0.5 would be 0.5 at maximum, for example, and the slope could be adjusted with particular parameters). g could either be a flat penalty for captured cities, or preferable, a function with depends on (i) whether the city has been ceded, (ii) how long the city has been non-ceded, and (iii) your relationships with the original founder of the city.

The ranks in yields wouldn't necessary have to be fixed permanently. This could be one way of empire-wide planning to adjust which cities are higher priority. Your capital could be fixed to be the highest-yield city, but the rest of the cities could later be adjusted so that a city that has better chances to develop could be prioritized past some older city.
 
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Speculating here how the mechanic could actually be implemented.

Y = original yield from tiles, buildings, citizens, etc.
Your capital produces [1-f(0)]*Y of every yield (alternatively, [1-fs(0)]*S of science, [1-fc(0)]*C of culture, etc., differently for every yield).

The ranks in yields wouldn't necessary have to be fixed permanently. This could be one way of empire-wide planning to adjust which cities are higher priority.

Having different yield penalty rankings adjustable could be nicely merged with the city specialization ideas presented in this forum, for example here https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/city-policies-doing-city-specialication-via-policies.611146/ . The city specialization thread also nicely covers ideas on improving tall play.
 
Introducing back National Wonders would be a nice way to improve tall, but it would implicitly impose a penalty for existing cities, when founding new ones. They also force timing constraints in your build order: at certain point of tech tree, you must have certain buildings in all cities, and this would conflict the Civ VIs gameplay idea of being more adaptable and less fixed build order game than civ V.

Maybe Civ4 was less popular than I thought- most people seem to go to Civ5's implementation of the 'every city' requirement for national wonders. Certainly, we don't have to stick to that. (In Civ4, you had to have a certain number of a building emipire wide, but it wasn't per city at all.) The requirements don't need to be uniform anymore, either. Perhaps a national college requires a library and the lesser of 3 campus districts, or one in every city. (So you have wiggle room for rushing/being very small). A later wonder like the Ironworks might need more Industrial zones. Terrain requirements could even come into play.

The N Wonders themselves are a very fun mechanic in that they are optional benefits to work towards. Plus, we have so many levers to play with now that we have districts. Maybe some- like a national college- give that city extra science per citizen, or a % bonus. The Ironworks could act as a super factory, helping all the cities in 6 tiles. The culture wonder could be some big boost to all the works and artifacts housed in that city, making it a creative mecca.
Going on districts, we have
Science
Culture
Military
Production
Gold/Trade
Faith

Plus potential later game options for the harbor, espionage and tourism.

Whether they appear in the districts themselves, or in tiles like regular wonders, I'm not sure. There's even potential to add in a policy or two to affect them.
It's an easy solution to help tall cities, plus we all know how fun it is when we see a city site and get thinking "Wow, this spot would make for a great insert district/wonder!"
Having National Wonders could give many more of those moments per game.
 
Maybe Civ4 was less popular than I thought- most people seem to go to Civ5's implementation of the 'every city' requirement for national wonders. Certainly, we don't have to stick to that. (In Civ4, you had to have a certain number of a building emipire wide, but it wasn't per city at all.) The requirements don't need to be uniform anymore, either. Perhaps a national college requires a library and the lesser of 3 campus districts, or one in every city. (So you have wiggle room for rushing/being very small). A later wonder like the Ironworks might need more Industrial zones. Terrain requirements could even come into play.

The N Wonders themselves are a very fun mechanic in that they are optional benefits to work towards. Plus, we have so many levers to play with now that we have districts. Maybe some- like a national college- give that city extra science per citizen, or a % bonus. The Ironworks could act as a super factory, helping all the cities in 6 tiles. The culture wonder could be some big boost to all the works and artifacts housed in that city, making it a creative mecca.
Going on districts, we have
Science
Culture
Military
Production
Gold/Trade
Faith

Plus potential later game options for the harbor, espionage and tourism.

Whether they appear in the districts themselves, or in tiles like regular wonders, I'm not sure. There's even potential to add in a policy or two to affect them.
It's an easy solution to help tall cities, plus we all know how fun it is when we see a city site and get thinking "Wow, this spot would make for a great insert district/wonder!"
Having National Wonders could give many more of those moments per game.

Not quite familiar with Civ 4 myself. The description you gave of National Wonders in Civ 4 seems much more suitable to the kind of game that Civ 6 is. Although if the National Wonder requires, say 5 campuses, I am not sure how that improves tall play as opposed to wide. That said, Im still unfamiliar with Civ 4 and probably the implementation of NWs differ from this mechanic in some ways.
 
What if Neighborhoods had buildings that rewarded tall play? If there was a Subways/El Trains could boost city production by X per citizen, a Public Schools could do the same for science and Movie Theaters could do likewise for culture. There would need to be limitations to prevent Neighborhood spam exploiting this, so either a limit of one of each per city or diminishing returns for each after the first in a city.
 
What if Neighborhoods had buildings that rewarded tall play?
A number of people have had that idea.
One issue with per-neighborhood buildings is that the bonuses don't scale with city growth (since you have to build one in each neighborhood.) Plus the UI would be a mess.

That said, we could easily create some city center buildings to boost neighborhoods. For example, a Public School, could give all the city's neighborhoods a boost to science (flat or maybe linked to housing in some way.) A public transit could give all your neighborhoods an extra housing and 2 hammers. And so on- the nice thing being that such buildings have fixed cost, but scale as you build more neighborhoods. Large, core cities will have reason to build many neighborhoods, but the investment wouldn't be practical if you only wanted to build one in your backwater cities just to get more yield. So the return on continued investment into citizens grows, which is exactly what incentivizes big cities over many small ones.

The balancing factor is that by buffing neighborhood district tiles directly, rather than giving yields to your citizenry, you have to sacrifice the game's most precious resource -land- and consume hammers to build each one.
 
When we talk about going "tall" in civ 6, I think it's significantly different than going tall in Civ 5. Although housing does limit city size per-city, there are various ways to get around this.

As mentioned above, wide play had numerous disadvantages in Civ 5 because of science and culture cost scaling with number of cities but also because happiness was global. Ignoring that each city generated base unhappiness on it's own, in Civ 5 your happiness limited the number of citizens you could have in your empire. The amenity/housing system in Civ 6 is a lot better at limiting the number of citizens in each city. That means that at any given era, a wide player's cities could be roughly the same size as a "tall" player's. This creates a problem where "tall" is more like "small".

I'd like to compare tall vs wide to real world examples. High populations today are relative to physical space and inversely (mostly) to development. Poorer countries tend to have higher population densities because poorer communities tend to have more children and wealthier communities tend to have fewer. Birth rates are much, much higher in poor areas.

On the other hand, industrializing or modernizing is much easier for smaller nations in terms of infrastructure and costs. The larger your country is, the higher the cost per-person of elevating citizens to a higher standard of living and maintaining that standard, due to costs associated with management of so many people.

I think if we're looking for gameplay mechanics that could limit wide play, we would do well to look at how large empires fared in history. Rome ballooned massively, but problems with corruption, management and distance eventually fractured it. The colonial empires of the European powers in the late 18th century coincide with a great deal of autonomy for the colonies.

I think a political limitation would be well suited for this. If the absolute number of citizens you could have in your empire was limited by the infrastructure of your government, communication and connectivity of your empire, wide-style play would be limited to smaller cities than tall play.
 
These are great conversations. I have read this thread and the linked threads. It triggered some creative thinking on my part so here are some ideas I can contribute. I am also going to tinker with creating a mod for this, though fair warning I am not an expert modder and it would be my first time making one.

Take a combination of these modifications, some of which already exist in released mods:

- No science/culture generation by population
- Modify city center to inherently produce 1 culture, 2 science, 2 production
- Each copy of city center has a maintenance of 3 gold
- First district built allowed at pop 1, second district built allowed at pop 9, third at pop 11, fourth at pop 13, (progressively increase by 2)
- Universal districts that do not provide specialists (like aqueduct) not require pop
- Tier 3 buildings require multiple districts (optional)
- Agricultural district to boost food production
- Improve specialist yields to 3, maybe even 4
- Add more policies that encourage global tall play +x% increase
- Adjust buildings to encourage tall play by using +2 and +20% type combos.
- Adjust city state benefits by using +1 yield at 1st stage, followed by +10% / +20% yields at second and third stages.

Now what does this do?

Wide play: Improving the city center essentially boosts it to have similar effects (and maintenance costs) of tier 1 culture, science, and production buildings (ie. first building) without requiring the district. Allowing one district at pop 1 allows wide to have viable district strategies with enough cities. Think 5 cities at wide is 5 districts, which could be a combo of commercial/harbor/industrial for militaristic expansion strategy. At 6 pop each (6x5) = 30 pop. Making the tier 3 buildings require more than one district/building to be in the city will limit Wide's ability to construct 'tall' buildings in districts.

Tall play: With two cities at 15 pop (and buildings to help correct the growth challenges), would in comparison be able to have 10 districts total

Many refinements would be needed for balance. Denying most districts from being built until pop 9 would be a massive change in how the game is played. But it clearly defines a benefit for tall city play, as they will be the ones able to utilize specialists, adjacency bonuses, a concentration of buildings and the ability to construct wonders quickly. It would also be comparatively simple to implement and plays into the built-in strengths of the game.

A few buildings or projects might need to be added to address the production 'gap' until the tall city reaches the 9 pop threshold, but that is fairly simple to add. There are also interesting civilization leader interactions, like the impact of Germany's +1 to district limit would completely transform Germany's play and might need to be altered to balance.

As far as mods go, I've been influenced by the work of Magil's Expanded Economy mod, Quo's Combined Tweaks mod, and The Crazy Scotsman's Omnibus mod. They have some great stuff.

Magil for instance coded a way to make it progressively more expensive the more districts/cities you have. I found that approach made it extremely difficult to do a wide strategy. However, if the code was instead adjusted to impact maintenance costs of districts/buildings specifically intended for tall play it could work. There can even be a hard cap on the number of a certain type of district (and building?).

I also recently found a mod by TC who has developed a way to claim tiles adjacent to forts, which could benefit tall play, but his code is not available for public view best I can tell. It is encouraging that it can be done, though.
 
More controversially (and with less certainty on my part), I do wonder whether per-city penalties should return. A city with 10 well developed cities should be better at science than one with 5, but I'm not sure I'm convinced it should be twice as good.

They could give per-population % bonuses locally, instead of per-city % penalties globally. Bonuses are more fun, even when they are functionally the same as penalties.
 
Per city science penalties is mandatory IMHO. And logical. Especially in the earlier eras. I would like to see a penalty increasing faster and faster with the number of cities.
IE - 1% with 2 cities, 2%/3, 4%/4, 7%/5, 11%/6,16%/7,22%/8 cities,... And so on

We might have a few technologies which would lessen those penalties, like scientific theories having them and computer making them inexistant maybe.

My current game is so boring, on emperor with ai+, I have twentyish cities, my science output is around 1400 while the strongest major civ is at less than 200...:(
 
My current game is so boring, on emperor with ai+, I have twentyish cities, my science output is around 1400 while the strongest major civ is at less than 200...:(

I agree that the game pacing is way off- especially if you spam science- but this is a separate issue from the performance of wide vs tall empires.

Per city science penalties is mandatory IMHO. And logical. Especially in the earlier eras. I would like to see a penalty increasing faster and faster with the number of cities.
IE - 1% with 2 cities, 2%/3, 4%/4, 7%/5, 11%/6,16%/7,22%/8 cities,...

The problem with this is that it's incongruous with the rest of Civ6's mechanics. (Which are overwhelmingly about building up positives, rather than balancing positives and negatives.) It's also not very fun- and puts us in the same trap as Civ5. IE, much of the map will never be settled even if they are good spots. This in turn reduces neighbor friction, greatly reducing war and international trade- sidelining core game systems.
If one were to rebalance the game so that wide and tall empires could, if they specialized, get similar scientific output, then it would become pretty clear that there are two distinct issues right now: the level of science in the game, and the spread between specialized and "default" science strategies. The first is addressed by per city penalties, but only to wide civs; the second is due to how powerful campuses and their supporting buildings and policies are. It seems that this game was designed as one in which a "well rounded" civ would have a smattering of each district, and specialization would aid in victory. But, specialization is really really strong- especially in science and production.

The Industrial zone is the only district without a +100% building yield card, precisely because that would be completely overpowered. Rationalism is one of the best cards in the game. They should probably buff specialists (give them +3 yield, +2GPP) and make the cards double specialist output instead.

That said, there's also the prospect of pulling the lagging players closer to the leader via mechanisms of technological leaking, to reduce spread in a game.
 
Loyalty in Rise and Fall should for sure add complications to wide play, so playing less wide now will make your empire easier to hold together.
 
I would surely like to see return of a tall empire. It is just feeling unsafe to spam cities in a wide extent without proper improving them, as if I have left the door open before i go to bed.

One of the main problem is the housing limitation that restricts population growth. Take Khmer as an example, its kit attmepts to build tall. But it soon reach a cap due to the lack of housing, something that is scarce before Neighborhood comes into play.

I suggest we can have more ways to get housing in the earlier game. Like what you have suggested, bringing back castles is a nice idea. Or maybe we can make the different types of walls to provide housing, as I rarely consider building them when I have a dozen of districts and units to build.
 
I wonder how effective the district yield cards would be if instead of a straight multiplier, they instead applied a power curve to the science yield like x^1.2. There was something in a previous post in this thread about tall cities being most effective when effects applied exponentially.

Effectively, this would make the hypothetical situation happen, if each citizen gave 1 science (it scales for whatever yield per citizen).

4 pop city ^ 1.2 = 5.3 science yield
30 pop city ^ 1.2 = 60 science yield

I feel like the effort to grow cities would be more worth it in this scheme, and I think it’s fair because producing a mega-city in Civ VI takes about as much effort as settling several cities.

You could also have it apply so that it takes into account science earned in districts and buildings, so that it also scaled exponentially by population. After all, science progresses best when there is collaboration.
 
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