I just played my first tiny/fast game. It felt a lot better in some ways compared to my other play throughs. I don't have a fully coherent explanation for this, so some things that seemed better at tiny/fast:
In contrast to this, the design paradigm calls for massive scope. The management streamlining is designed for scale. There are massive commander upgrade trees, and the commanders themselves, are suggestive of large, complicated military campaigns. The railroad tycoon system requires you to really stack resources to reach parity with the kinds of massive yields you can get through specialists. The thematic immersion of the age system as a thematic, not a streamlining premise requires sprawling territory that is slowly filled in distinct chunks from age to age. Exploration age should see you settling mainly the coasts of distant lands. Modern age should still have very large interiors to pioneer, to plant "pop up" cities where you can purchase powerful buildings to grow large cities very quickly. On large maps, this works pretty well.
The depth of feature variety lends towards a large scope. Towns vs. cities. Civ bonuses, for example Russia's tundra warfare civic, are tailored to very specific situations that don't work on small maps. All the navigable river bonuses work far far better on very large maps with actually long navigable rivers. Only a large map, for instance, will have enough lakes for Buganda's lake bonuses to really come into effect (although this is partly what Kabaka's lake is designed to mitigate, still the point is to find real lakes to settle). There are just way to many niche elements to the wide diversity of bonuses for these to work very well on a small map.
Finally, Civ 7's streamlining permits more military tactics, which favors a slower cadence so you can actually position, maneuver and employ armies within a tech upgrade window, instead of tech constantly upgrading while you're in the middle of war.
Ultimately, the medium map ("small") tries to compromise the clippy cadence with just enough breathing room for the niche features to come into play. While this partly works, it also partly fails. The optimization paradigm clashes with the design paradigm. You're chasing a legacy path, constrained by harsh balancing elements (like the god-awful culture paths), while also trying to make use of niche bonuses, and developing an empire. Within this box you can do some of all of it, but the more you embrace one side, the more the other side ruins your experience. The more you try to enjoy it as a streamlined victory rusher, the more you ignore a lot of the wider features and the more repetitive and annoying some things get. The more you try to build a vast empire and develop a niche, the more you're undermined by the constraints of legacy paths, or frustrated by how limited they are.
I recommend a vast unbalacing overhaul to make Civ 7 BIG. For example, instead of treasure fleets, I've proposed treasure and supply fleets. With colonial warehouses that receive supplies from the homelands, which function like factories a little, where the resources can be assigned to colonial outposts to help them grow in certain ways so you can colonize the interior. This would represent a twice as long exploration age. Or, with religion, two distinct phases: evangelizing and religious wars. Where religion is a thing that happens around you for you to reckon with, not some set of hyper-balanced bonuses that you engage with in a repetitive and frustrating way.
Then, in contrast to these almost "totally new game" changes, I'd create an "online mode" which takes the tiny/fast model and streamlines things even more.
- Resource chasing, military and diplomacy decisions are very clear on a tiny map, and very well scaled to Antiquity's pace and settlement cap.
- Wonder chasing and tech progression match the cadence of the age concept better. It feels more like trading off doing a wonder or a unit or a building, rather than waiting a while for a city to build a wonder. It feels like you're filling up points to get that winning score at the impending age end.
- Exploration age feels much better, because even with the rough seas barrier before shipbuilding, the small map size still allows you to reasonably explore most of the map and decide what you want to do. In contrast, on large maps in long games, rough seas is a massive impediment to actually feeling like you're exploring the map.
- Missionaries are less painful on small maps, since it's simply easier to get them anywhere they need to be.
- Modern age works better because even if you do achieve massive yields (or another player does), you can fight over just a couple of cities and knock out their yields, focusing your tactical gameplay to that narrow circumstance.
In contrast to this, the design paradigm calls for massive scope. The management streamlining is designed for scale. There are massive commander upgrade trees, and the commanders themselves, are suggestive of large, complicated military campaigns. The railroad tycoon system requires you to really stack resources to reach parity with the kinds of massive yields you can get through specialists. The thematic immersion of the age system as a thematic, not a streamlining premise requires sprawling territory that is slowly filled in distinct chunks from age to age. Exploration age should see you settling mainly the coasts of distant lands. Modern age should still have very large interiors to pioneer, to plant "pop up" cities where you can purchase powerful buildings to grow large cities very quickly. On large maps, this works pretty well.
The depth of feature variety lends towards a large scope. Towns vs. cities. Civ bonuses, for example Russia's tundra warfare civic, are tailored to very specific situations that don't work on small maps. All the navigable river bonuses work far far better on very large maps with actually long navigable rivers. Only a large map, for instance, will have enough lakes for Buganda's lake bonuses to really come into effect (although this is partly what Kabaka's lake is designed to mitigate, still the point is to find real lakes to settle). There are just way to many niche elements to the wide diversity of bonuses for these to work very well on a small map.
Finally, Civ 7's streamlining permits more military tactics, which favors a slower cadence so you can actually position, maneuver and employ armies within a tech upgrade window, instead of tech constantly upgrading while you're in the middle of war.
Ultimately, the medium map ("small") tries to compromise the clippy cadence with just enough breathing room for the niche features to come into play. While this partly works, it also partly fails. The optimization paradigm clashes with the design paradigm. You're chasing a legacy path, constrained by harsh balancing elements (like the god-awful culture paths), while also trying to make use of niche bonuses, and developing an empire. Within this box you can do some of all of it, but the more you embrace one side, the more the other side ruins your experience. The more you try to enjoy it as a streamlined victory rusher, the more you ignore a lot of the wider features and the more repetitive and annoying some things get. The more you try to build a vast empire and develop a niche, the more you're undermined by the constraints of legacy paths, or frustrated by how limited they are.
I recommend a vast unbalacing overhaul to make Civ 7 BIG. For example, instead of treasure fleets, I've proposed treasure and supply fleets. With colonial warehouses that receive supplies from the homelands, which function like factories a little, where the resources can be assigned to colonial outposts to help them grow in certain ways so you can colonize the interior. This would represent a twice as long exploration age. Or, with religion, two distinct phases: evangelizing and religious wars. Where religion is a thing that happens around you for you to reckon with, not some set of hyper-balanced bonuses that you engage with in a repetitive and frustrating way.
Then, in contrast to these almost "totally new game" changes, I'd create an "online mode" which takes the tiny/fast model and streamlines things even more.
- Reduce commander upgrades to a single tree with basic specialization into unit type (make 6 units and initiative global upgrades).
- Attributes are purchased with yields, and now incorporate things like your universalized commander upgrades.
- Remove all tile type bonuses for civs and leaders, reducing it to one time yield drops rather than a recurring bonus.
- Make missionaries and explorers go way way faster, then reduce their relevance. So it's a spam at the onset of an age then move on thing.
