City Merging Mechanic

[dagriggstar]

The historical basis for a mechanic like this would be like the cities of Buda and Pest becoming Budapest, or Washington-Baltimore or Tokyo/Yokohama etc.

The gameplay basis is to reduce the amount of clicks needed to make decisions as the game goes on. I'd rather tell one city to make a tank than tell three cities to make tanks. It is also easier to keep track of what one city is doing than three.

The tactical basis would be that, we click three times to have three cities make one tank each (three total). Each city has say 25 production each and the tank costs 200 production. With three cities that is three tanks coming out after 8 turns. With one city that has 25+25+25=75 production, that is a tank on turns 3, 5 and 8.

Anyway as a proof of concept of how it might work
1) Start the game, cities can be founded two tiles away from existing cities
2) Discover tech or advance to new era, cities now have to be founded three tiles away from existing cities, cities two tiles from each other are merged
3) Discover tech or advance to new era, cities now have to be founded four tiles away from existing cities, cities three tiles from each other are merged
4) etc
Or
1) Unlock railroads, any two cities connected by railroads may be merged into one

 

[PiR]

You would have to decrease the cost of a settler, no?

 

[Buktu]

How do you want to integrate districts in this mechanic? If both cities have a campus for example you have to get away from 1 of ech district per city.
With cities beeing able to be settled 2 tiles away from each other you would like get another yield inflation since you can build even more districts of the same type.
It sounds like in the end you will just have 1 big mega city this way which would definitely kill the fun for me.
And even if you end up with a few mega cities you will likely have lots of lost production in the end once your cities have more production than they need to constantly one turning things.
Then again you dont even save clicks in some cases. If you dont use the queue you dont save a single click (1 city 3 times is the same as 3 cities 1 time). And if you use the queue you can just queue up things in three cities as well. 3 queues can hold more projects/prodcution than 1 though so you had to click the one big city more often to fill another queue and even have to click more.

 

[dagriggstar]

Districts either cities can build multiple copies of the same district type or we move to a system where buildings are built directly on the map. Possibly with some penalty for having copies of buildings/districts, depending on balance.

I'm not worried about production since you can just increase/decrease the cost of a unit to get the right effect. For example, if a tank costs 2,000 production and we expect each un-merged city at that stage of the game to contribute 50 production per turn, one city takes 50 turns to create the tank. If you merge 4 cities together, you get 200 production per turn, so the tank is made in 10 turns.

 

[Buktu]

I'm not worried about production since you can just increase/decrease the cost of a unit to get the right effect. For example, if a tank costs 2,000 production and we expect each un-merged city at that stage of the game to contribute 50 production per turn, one city takes 50 turns to create the tank. If you merge 4 cities together, you get 200 production per turn, so the tank is made in 10 turns.

I get the idea behind this but personally I would not like changes like this. Those high production costs kind of require you to let your cities merge to build anything later in the game. Who ever is going to produce a single unit in 40 turns otherwise? That's around 20% of the game! (Sure you can reduce the costs to reduce this issue but it will always force you into the direction of merging rather than letting you have a choice). So you need to spam even more settlers to get your cities merged. And then again as I already pointed out you dont even reach your goal of saving lots of clicks.
As side note this also has the sidenote of makeing the AI even worse at war since they will need even more turns to build reinforcements.

Districts either cities can build multiple copies of the same district type or we move to a system where buildings are built directly on the map. Possibly with some penalty for having copies of buildings/districts, depending on balance.

Considering this the merged city will even have less production than the single cities since you will loose some of the yields.




Also if you dont like too much micro in the late game you can already play tall as the game is. Settle further apart and just build like 8 to 10 cities instead of 20+. Since OCC is possible even on deity it should be possible to win with just a few good cities as well. It might not be the optimal way to play but you will for sure have less clicks this way

 

[Evie]

This doesn't really work at the scale of CIV maps - on a huge world map, even one that'S been modified to reduce the amount of water space, two tiles away away from Tokyo or Buda puts you around Vienna or Osaka - not around Yokohama or Pest. A single tile is a lot of territory.

You'd need a much bigger map for this city-merging to work, and CIV design is all about goin the other way with smaller maps (Sadly).