Came back after a few months, district cost formula still kills the game

[Depravo]

Yes. Tall is a construct that holds no base in reality.

Remove all scaling and we're back to ICS.

 

[Tomice]

In this game there is what I would consider a central city strategy and a central + wide. You can call that central tall very easily if you remove V from your mind. To me tall is up to about 10 cities

Would you care to elaborate to someone with little Civ6 experience?
Do you mean that you always need a central, well-devoleped city as lucrative anchor for your internal trade routes?
Or are you referring to the capital-boosts from the first city state envoy?

Yes. Tall is a construct that holds no base in reality.

Wouldn't say so.
During most of history, humans haven't used the available land at maximum efficiency for their tech level. There was always the decision between settling new lands and improving the lokal infrastructure (roads, irrigation, building dams, controlling the flow of rivers, improving labor organization or crop rotation,...).
The Netherlands are very densely populated, yet they could compete with many larger countries because they traditionally use their land very efficiently. If the german wikipedia doesn't lie, they are among the most important exporters of food, despite being tiny and overpopulated.

 

[MyOtherName]

Remove all scaling and we're back to ICS.

Civ 3 had the odd economic feature that, outside of the "core" cities, food was the only tile yield a city could use. So, the only useful infrastructure development you could in these cities do was to pump workers/settlers (at the slow rate of one shield per turn).

Without the corruption mechanic, things will never get to the same extremes that Civ 3 did, since at some point you'll want to be doing those other things that contribute towards your victory condition.

 

[Victoria]

Would you care to elaborate to someone with little Civ6 experience?

Sure, the way you are writing implies you play civ V, have a frame of reference is good.

In Civ V the size of the city matters more than it does in civ VI but size still helps.
Civ VI has less restriction on how wide you go, mostly around happiness still but that is based on population rather than cities with the first few in each city being free, so you could say more encouragement to go wider but with each new city time goes by and things sort of get more expensive and newer cities may not mature enough in size/districts.
There is a trade off between how wide you go, extra cities on luxuries or high production really help, extra huge population cities can help but also can hinder due to the amount of unhappiness they can bring, sure they produce a little science and culture but it's not to the level of civ V. Earlier cities can be grown large and afford entertainment districts in a large core set of cities while newer ones are for more strategic or just fun reasons.

You have to make a call at some stage, maybe around 10 cities , for science a little more, easy difficulty levels a little less. But that just my view, everyone has a different view which is great, good for discussion. VI does not seem so clear cut and linear as V. You can hunker down with the cities you have and concentrate on you victory condition or you can spread out some more to other parts of the world, this extra investment costs and has rewards, it is quite dependent on situation, like is there a snowballing civ being a good example.

Domination is completely different of course but I have found taking the capital and the good cities and giving back the bad is better than taking the lot, it also allows you to use diplomacy to your advantage more. Not what you asked though.

 

[agonistes]

I dunno, do we want to formally completely abandon tall play as a viable strategy?

I am unsure as to why an absence of scaling means, to you, an abandonment of tall. The presence of scaling certainly doesn't preclude wide.

However, to me, Civ is a game of empire building. Creating an environment that highly favored tall and made wide a goal instead of a process was a horrible mistake. If a change marginalizes tall, I am ok with that.

 

[gettingfat]

Yes. Tall is a construct that holds no base in reality.

That's not very true. Just a nation can't be tall without adequate width to draw resources. A good balance generally gives best return. Japan is a good example. It was the second largest economy for years even it has no width at all. If in WW2 the japanese chose to cease fire after taking Korea, northeast China and Taiwan instead of spreading the war, and focus on digesting and assimilating these lands and getting tall, the world will be quite different now.

 

[agonistes]

Singapore.

 

[Karmah]

Back to OP without much to contribute , just to say I'm torned. On one hand the concept of cost scaling with how good you fare is totally idiotic. On the other hand , it seem to work relatively well in practice in keeping the game interresting.

 

[Acken]

I don't think it kills the game but I maintain my position that it's idiotic because of how unintuitive and gamey it is.

It's not about it being an issue or not but more about you having to jump loops around the formula behind it. I've always been against that (for example keeping Great Scientist in civ5 because their formula is dynamic) and think this one is one of the worse kind.
It's just not elegant.

 

[Leyrann]

Remove all scaling and we're back to ICS.

Civ IV disagrees. Or maybe you call maintenance costs scaling, which is fine imo. If nothing else it makes much more sense than global happiness.

Wouldn't say so.
During most of history, humans haven't used the available land at maximum efficiency for their tech level. There was always the decision between settling new lands and improving the lokal infrastructure (roads, irrigation, building dams, controlling the flow of rivers, improving labor organization or crop rotation,...).
The Netherlands are very densely populated, yet they could compete with many larger countries because they traditionally use their land very efficiently. If the german wikipedia doesn't lie, they are among the most important exporters of food, despite being tiny and overpopulated.

For a very long time, most area's in the world have held the population they could with the tech level in the area. The population grew and grew, until it got so big that a disease broke out, and then it fell down again, hovering around a constant number corresponding to the average number the land could provide for. Crop rotation, for example, is something that was simply discovered at some point, and then improved yields, thereby improving the population the land could provide. It does not require additional work compared to standard working the land, however. Of course, there are parts where you have to choose, but if the land cannot provide enough food for both the farmers and the people improving the land with roads, dams, etc, then the maximum efficiency is just lower. Humans typically don't waste things (at least, not before modern times).

As for the real world examples, like the Netherlands and Japan, they're not advanced because they're tall. If anything, they're tall because they're advanced. For the Netherlands in particular the liberal government, which allowed a relative freedom of thought, speech and religion as early as the 1600s, has been very important in both attracting and raising great minds in all fields, from philosophy (Spinoza) to art (Rembrandt) to physics (Huygens). But in general, it is just counter-intuitive that, if you have a size 20 city and your neighbor has a size 20 city, that your neighbor's city would be better because you happen to have 10 other cities while he only has 3 others. And that's why tall has no base in reality. Just because you have less cities doesn't mean that the people living in those fewer cities are smarter or whatever. If you would limit empire growth with practical problems, like long distance cities being able to revolt, requiring more money to keep going, being generally harder to govern, then that makes sense. If, however, you penalize cities with "yeah, you got more cities so your cities all do this worse", which is really what spawned the idea of tall vs wide (the whole concept didn't exist before Civ V), then that just doesn't make sense.

And I hope my post does make sense as I rewrote several parts several times and it's also late. It should make more sense than arbitrarily punishing you for having more cities though.

 

[nzcamel]

That's not very true. Just a nation can't be tall without adequate width to draw resources. A good balance generally gives best return. Japan is a good example. It was the second largest economy for years even it has no width at all. If in WW2 the japanese chose to cease fire after taking Korea, northeast China and Taiwan instead of spreading the war, and focus on digesting and assimilating these lands and getting tall, the world will be quite different now.

The difference isn't that Japan would have been better off limiting itself because that limit in and of itself is inherently better. The difference is that had they limited themselves they may not have ended up in an unwinnable war.

Leyrann nails it here:

Civ IV disagrees. Or maybe you call maintenance costs scaling, which is fine imo. If nothing else it makes much more sense than global happiness.



For a very long time, most area's in the world have held the population they could with the tech level in the area. The population grew and grew, until it got so big that a disease broke out, and then it fell down again, hovering around a constant number corresponding to the average number the land could provide for. Crop rotation, for example, is something that was simply discovered at some point, and then improved yields, thereby improving the population the land could provide. It does not require additional work compared to standard working the land, however. Of course, there are parts where you have to choose, but if the land cannot provide enough food for both the farmers and the people improving the land with roads, dams, etc, then the maximum efficiency is just lower. Humans typically don't waste things (at least, not before modern times).

As for the real world examples, like the Netherlands and Japan, they're not advanced because they're tall. If anything, they're tall because they're advanced. For the Netherlands in particular the liberal government, which allowed a relative freedom of thought, speech and religion as early as the 1600s, has been very important in both attracting and raising great minds in all fields, from philosophy (Spinoza) to art (Rembrandt) to physics (Huygens). But in general, it is just counter-intuitive that, if you have a size 20 city and your neighbor has a size 20 city, that your neighbor's city would be better because you happen to have 10 other cities while he only has 3 others. And that's why tall has no base in reality. Just because you have less cities doesn't mean that the people living in those fewer cities are smarter or whatever. If you would limit empire growth with practical problems, like long distance cities being able to revolt, requiring more money to keep going, being generally harder to govern, then that makes sense. If, however, you penalize cities with "yeah, you got more cities so your cities all do this worse", which is really what spawned the idea of tall vs wide (the whole concept didn't exist before Civ V), then that just doesn't make sense.

And I hope my post does make sense as I rewrote several parts several times and it's also late. It should make more sense than arbitrarily punishing you for having more cities though.

 

[gettingfat]

The difference isn't that Japan would have been better off limiting itself because that limit in and of itself is inherently better. The difference is that had they limited themselves they may not have ended up in an unwinnable war.

In Civ 5 I almost always declared wars on AIs who went for ICS, so the real world is actually not too diffierent from the game in this aspect. One of the hidden cost of getting a nation wide is the increase in the risk of making enemies and over-stretching of your military force. I never said keeping tall is inherently better, at least not in every aspect, but keeping tall will minimize unnecessary enemies . In the case of Japan if they could be more patient and consolidated what they achieved, who knows what happened?

Civ IV disagrees. Or maybe you call maintenance costs scaling, which is fine imo. If nothing else it makes much more sense than global happiness.

As for the real world examples, like the Netherlands and Japan, they're not advanced because they're tall. If anything, they're tall because they're advanced. For the Netherlands in particular the liberal government, which allowed a relative freedom of thought, speech and religion as early as the 1600s, has been very important in both attracting and raising great minds in all fields, from philosophy (Spinoza) to art (Rembrandt) to physics (Huygens). But in general, it is just counter-intuitive that, if you have a size 20 city and your neighbor has a size 20 city, that your neighbor's city would be better because you happen to have 10 other cities while he only has 3 others. And that's why tall has no base in reality. Just because you have less cities doesn't mean that the people living in those fewer cities are smarter or whatever. If you would limit empire growth with practical problems, like long distance cities being able to revolt, requiring more money to keep going, being generally harder to govern, then that makes sense. If, however, you penalize cities with "yeah, you got more cities so your cities all do this worse", which is really what spawned the idea of tall vs wide (the whole concept didn't exist before Civ V), then that just doesn't make sense.

And I hope my post does make sense as I rewrote several parts several times and it's also late. It should make more sense than arbitrarily punishing you for having more cities though.

While I agree with some of what you said, you were not comparing tall vs wide, you were comparing tall vs tall+wide instead. In reality tall does have the merit of being more efficient when the population is more concentrated (as long as the tech for hygiene supports). When the experts in the same field concentrate and reach beyond a critical mass, they ususally feed off from one another and do better. So using the game terms, a pop 20 city most of the time is often more productive and valuable than four pop 4 cities from the perspective of cultural and technological advances. Getting wide definitely helps get your nation more resources, but then there are a lot of hidden cost such as defending wider lands, administration inefficiency, and risk of making more enemies...etc.

I'm not saying tall only is good. Expanding is in the heart of any empire. However, there are all sorts of cost in getting more cities; just the new cities won't get the old, established cities suddenly do worse. That's said, these new cities are generally more difficult and costly to control to the point it is counter-productive for the nation as a whole.

 

[MooFreaky]

For peaceful civs, and I do play a fair amount of peaceful, the tree scaling works perfectly. I can push out up to 10 cities by T100 and have very little tech/civic advance and then blossom faster. The mechanic works well for peaceful, I suspect a lot of steamrollers complain about the scaling.

I think this really is the key point. What I find is that people want to be able to do everything. I want to get all my technologies, cities AND pummel my neighbours into the ground and take their stuff too. OMG THERE ARE PENALTIES FOR THAT?!?!?!?!?!?! ALTQQ
If you are warmongering you won't be able to get all those districts up nicely like a peaceful player will, instead you get the benefit of being able to take other players' stuff. So you get the benefit of those districts AND of those cities etc etc, but you took the risk of going to war. If you can get all the benefits of a peaceful civ AND the benefits of a warmongerer then that is silly.

My theory is that most of the Civ 5 posters are gone. Do you see any in depth analysis like you saw in the golden days of BNW? It's mostly quiet here. So I think most of those who didn't like aspects of the game already shelved it and stopped caring or (like me) only check this forum occassionally every few weeks to see whether the game has gotten better.

Not true. I have been lurking around CivFanatics for ages and Civ6 is following the same path as previous games. All the articles (such as the Civ4 War Academy) don't come about early on, it takes years of precision playing before they become super common. You will get some stuff sure, but not to the level we saw of BNW or BtS. All previous titles have been relatively quiet until the first expansion comes out, and really blossoms when the second one arrives.
If anything Civ6 is busier than previous vanilla titles, having picked up a bit after the Fall Patch.

 

[nzcamel]

In Civ 5 I almost always declared wars on AIs who went for ICS, so the real world is actually not too diffierent from the game in this aspect. One of the hidden cost of getting a nation wide is the increase in the risk of making enemies and over-stretching of your military force. I never said keeping tall is inherently better, at least not in every aspect, but keeping tall will minimize unnecessary enemies . In the case of Japan if they could be more patient and consolidated what they achieved, who knows what happened?

Yeah...but that is natural justification for staying small and not getting big. You already have your reward, and you do not need the game giving you extra incentives to do so. The trade off that you are discussing is do I get the benefits of getting bigger, but also get more enemies...or don't I?

While I agree with some of what you said, you were not comparing tall vs wide, you were comparing tall vs tall+wide instead. In reality tall does have the merit of being more efficient when the population is more concentrated (as long as the tech for hygiene supports). When the experts in the same field concentrate and reach beyond a critical mass, they ususally feed off from one another and do better. So using the game terms, a pop 20 city most of the time is often more productive and valuable than four pop 4 cities from the perspective of cultural and technological advances. Getting wide definitely helps get your nation more resources, but then there are a lot of hidden cost such as defending wider lands, administration inefficiency, and risk of making more enemies...etc.

I'm not saying tall only is good. Expanding is in the heart of any empire. However, there are all sorts of cost in getting more cities; just the new cities won't get the old, established cities suddenly do worse. That's said, these new cities are generally more difficult and costly to control to the point it is counter-productive for the nation as a whole.

That'd be because notable civilisations don't do wide without tall. Whether you take over a lot of territory or not, if you are successful your cities are going to get huge. And, everything else being equal, a wide tall empire will beat a tall empire every time.

 

[Victoria]

And, everything else being equal, a wide tall empire will beat a tall empire every time.

In my CV guide I state a tall empire is most efficient in testing for a CV as long as the number of cities is neither too large or too small. I have no issue with this, a wide CIv may overtake me eventually but a tall one will get there sooner.

 

[Leyrann]

While I agree with some of what you said, you were not comparing tall vs wide, you were comparing tall vs tall+wide instead. In reality tall does have the merit of being more efficient when the population is more concentrated (as long as the tech for hygiene supports). When the experts in the same field concentrate and reach beyond a critical mass, they ususally feed off from one another and do better. So using the game terms, a pop 20 city most of the time is often more productive and valuable than four pop 4 cities from the perspective of cultural and technological advances. Getting wide definitely helps get your nation more resources, but then there are a lot of hidden cost such as defending wider lands, administration inefficiency, and risk of making more enemies...etc.

I'm not saying tall only is good. Expanding is in the heart of any empire. However, there are all sorts of cost in getting more cities; just the new cities won't get the old, established cities suddenly do worse. That's said, these new cities are generally more difficult and costly to control to the point it is counter-productive for the nation as a whole.

I'm comparing tall vs tall+wide, because just wide isn't a thing. You don't sit in size 4 cities all game. They naturally grow to bigger sizes, at least 10 and later on 15-20. Civ V (again, the game that introduced the whole discussion) made it impossible to have more than just a few big cities with the global happiness, and to add insult to injury it then also made it impossible to go wide as in having small cities, as every city increased tech costs, meaning you needed to have bigger cities to overcome that.

Of coures a pop 20 city is going to do more than four pop 4 cities. The pop 20 city has 4 more citizens, and can work farms to supply population to work mines and specialists, thereby allowing productivity. However, those pop 4 cities aren't naturally going to stay pop 4. If they have just 7 bonus food from their four worked tiles, which is less than you'll have on average except maybe unimproved plains, they will naturally grow to 5, to 6, etc.

If "wide" needs to be punished, it doesn't need to be punished through artificially making techs more expensive, artificially making people unhappy or whatever. It needs to be punished through leaving yourself weak to invasion (read: good AI that isn't afraid to take what it wants if given the opportunity), requiring more money to govern all those far away cities, and so on.

 

[MooFreaky]

I'm comparing tall vs tall+wide, because just wide isn't a thing. You don't sit in size 4 cities all game. They naturally grow to bigger sizes, at least 10 and later on 15-20. Civ V (again, the game that introduced the whole discussion) made it impossible to have more than just a few big cities with the global happiness, and to add insult to injury it then also made it impossible to go wide as in having small cities, as every city increased tech costs, meaning you needed to have bigger cities to overcome that.

I am 50-50 on this. While I disagree that it was impossible, or even inconvenient, to have a wide empire. I used to regularly play domination deity games and that actively encouraged getting multiple cities. My early game involved a quick series of expansions to get to at least 7, but often up to 10. The liberation opener allowed it, while making you a powerful military force.

However, I do agree whole heartedly that the limitations were too strict. In that such a move was only plausible for an offensive style of play and it needed to be decided very early on. Peaceful play had a strict "this is the most efficient build order and research order" and you would follow it with minimal deviation in every game. That is far from, there needs to be multiple ways to play both peacefully and militaristic. How wide/tall styles are balanced doesn't matter to me (whether it is science penalties or whatever) as long as it is balanced and there isn't a clear one is always better.

 

[nzcamel]

In my CV guide I state a tall empire is most efficient in testing for a CV as long as the number of cities is neither too large or too small. I have no issue with this, a wide CIv may overtake me eventually but a tall one will get there sooner.

I should clarify that in the sentence: "And, everything else being equal, a wide tall empire will beat a tall empire every time" I'm talking about the real world, not Civ.
And of course I want Civ to reflect that where possible. What Leyrann says here is key for immersion to me:

If "wide" needs to be punished, it doesn't need to be punished through artificially making techs more expensive, artificially making people unhappy or whatever. It needs to be punished through leaving yourself weak to invasion (read: good AI that isn't afraid to take what it wants if given the opportunity), requiring more money to govern all those far away cities, and so on.

Edit: Regarding what could be done for "tall" play - In this thread in Idea's and suggestions:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...s-wishlist-for-future-patches-and-dlc.614211/

MantaRevan said:

Tall and Wide Play

• Make tall play more competitive with rapid expansion. This could be done with the introduction of some modest percentage based bonuses, or by increasing the amount of and provided to a city per citizen from .7 to 1 and .3 to .5 respectively. Other options include policy cards that reward players who have fewer cities, or general penalties towards ICS.

And this was my response:

They have to tread carefully here. Over do it, and we are back at V. I don't think that adding policy cards that cannot be used in many empires is a good idea; unless, say, they massively expand the wildcards to include all sorts of different options to now, including what you are suggesting.
Given that districts are tied to population, giving districts the boost -rather than straight out population- could be a more subtle way of boosting bigger population cities. Like the second district you build in a city adds this other small bonus 'x' regardless of what type of districts you have there. The third district adds bonus 'y' no matter what districts you have there. And so on. Larger cities will have a strength over smaller ones, but it will be set a step further back from straight out population growth.

As I've noted here, I'm not a big fan of creating artificial advantages to make small countries more competitive with big ones; but I think something like this ^^^ can reflect the cross pollination of ideas and experience that can appear in big melting pot cities.
For the sake of the game it helps keep smaller countries in the game and may discourage the worse excesses of ICS; but without punishing the leader too hard.

MantaRevan added a version of it to their OP later, as you can see if you look at the thread.

 

[Karmah]

I should clarify that in the sentence: "And, everything else being equal, a wide tall empire will beat a tall empire every time" I'm talking about the real world, not Civ.
And of course I want Civ to reflect that where possible. What Leyrann says here is key for immersion to me:

And that's where it gets even more obscure to me. Beat ? at what ? In real life they are no simple metrics, care to explain how you evaluate 'to beat ' ?

 

[Felis Renidens]

Is increasing district cost that different than good old corruption and waste? Early in the game this isn't much of an issue and making it a matter of progress actually helps spreading around. Later expansions need either to be close enough to the center to benefit from AOE or get support in the form of trade-routes (both are better than having to buy a courthouse to make it possible to produce anything in your new oversees colony). I also think it can be justified in that building a modern district requires more work than a primitive one.
Also, it sometimes helps. Perhaps I just planted a city to get access to a resource. I don't care about managing it's production so I just let it build an harbor or a builder or something.