Concern about districts

[cazaderonus]

It s not like civ v offered any real choice regarding constructing a building or not. Aside from the simple "is it even a little usefull ?" thought process. So yeah there was no choice there. Maintenace was a joke as a control system.

Civ vi may not add that much choice on that point. But district placement is already an interesting and thought consuming system that involves much more thinking than any civ on selecting hiw much you can afford to use and how much will actually be usefull depending on era and terrain

 

[isau]

It s not like civ v offered any real choice regarding constructing a building or not. Aside from the simple "is it even a little usefull ?" thought process. So yeah there was no choice there. Maintenace was a joke as a control system.

Civ vi may not add that much choice on that point. But district placement is already an interesting and thought consuming system that involves much more thinking than any civ on selecting hiw much you can afford to use and how much will actually be usefull depending on era and terrain

Not so sure about that. The cost of buildings is crushing if you try to go wide. It becomes more evident when you deploy mods to lower the cost of expansion.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Not so sure about that. The cost of buildings is crushing if you try to go wide. It becomes more evident when you deploy mods to lower the cost of expansion.

Mods make the game quite different. Without mods, building maintenance isn't a problem.

 

[isau]

Mods make the game quite different. Without mods, building maintenance isn't a problem.

I disagree. It's only "not a problem" if you think Civ V did a good job balancing tall vs wide. Building maintenance is a big part of why wide doesn't compete with tall. It's much better to build a few buildings in a couple of cities for huge benefits than build multiple copies of the building and end up paying more money for less benefit. Building cost is a big part of why the 4-city model beats going wider.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I disagree. It's only "not a problem" if you think Civ V did a good job balancing tall vs wide. Building maintenance is a big part of why wide doesn't compete with tall. It's much better to build a few buildings in a couple of cities for huge benefits than build multiple copies of the building and end up paying more money for less benefit. Building cost is a big part of why the 4-city model beats going wider.

Civ5 does a bad job balancing tall vs. wide, but it has nothing to do with the question. You can't tell some mechanics is working if it does only in modded version.

 

[Relinou]

im pretty sure the biggest problem with tall v wide is global happiness, not maintenance.

 

[stealth_nsk]

im pretty sure the biggest problem with tall v wide is global happiness, not maintenance.

I'd put science and culture penalties before global happiness. You could deal with happiness through religion, resources and buildings, but science penalties at some point make you decrease science output with each city added.

 

[Magil]

im pretty sure the biggest problem with tall v wide is global happiness, not maintenance.

It's been pointed out many times that ICS was the dominant strategy in vanilla/G&K despite the happiness penalty, it was the science penalty that made tall empires dominate.

 

[leedss]

At least, there are 2 district that requires you to choose building:

Encampment: Barrack or Stable
Theater Square: Art Museum or Archaeological Museum

Different power plants in industrial district.

 

[Amrunril]

It's been pointed out many times that ICS was the dominant strategy in vanilla/G&K despite the happiness penalty, it was the science penalty that made tall empires dominate.

It was the combination of a lot of factors. As you say, ICS was dominant in vanilla, despite global happiness, national wonders and culture penalties. The developers likely realized this and tried to address it with tuning changes in patches and G&K, including buffs to Tradition and nerfs to Liberty and happiness buildings (at release, a coliseum provided 5 happiness, and if I recall correctly, happiness from buildings was global) Finally, BNW introduced science penalties per city and moved most gold generation to trade routes, making it much harder to come by for wide civs in the early game. The science penalty was essentially the straw that broke the camel's back. It wasn't necessarily more impactful than any other factor, it just happened to come at the tipping point.

 

[Seek]

Civ5 does a bad job balancing tall vs. wide, but it has nothing to do with the question. You can't tell some mechanics is working if it does only in modded version.

It's not though. If you look at unmodded multiplayer games tall beats wide in large part because building maintenance is such a drain, especially early (and we all know that falling behind early can cripple an entire game). You will see players regularly working calendar luxes to keep their gold (and thus science) afloat. Later the wide empire has much more winning potential, but it requires the right terrain.

MP is a great way to see how mechanics really add up because everyone is (ideally) on an equal footing wrt intelligence and basic income. When I first came across good MP games it was quite a revelation - this is how the game is meant to be played, in a sense.

Without the broken ability to sell excess luxes (which in MP never happens, just trades) or, even worse, strategics (which *really* never happens) to the AI, building maintenance becomes quite a burden for the wide player. Also factoring in the fact that Tradition has multiple gold-boosting policies (two free buildings, gold from pop in cap, free unit maint for garrison) and Liberty barely any also clouds the issue because trad is so prevalent.

 

[Magil]

It was the combination of a lot of factors. As you say, ICS was dominant in vanilla, despite global happiness, national wonders and culture penalties. The developers likely realized this and tried to address it with tuning changes in patches and G&K, including buffs to Tradition and nerfs to Liberty and happiness buildings (at release, a coliseum provided 5 happiness, and if I recall correctly, happiness from buildings was global) Finally, BNW introduced science penalties per city and moved most gold generation to trade routes, making it much harder to come by for wide civs in the early game. The science penalty was essentially the straw that broke the camel's back. It wasn't necessarily more impactful than any other factor, it just happened to come at the tipping point.

You forgot to mention, however, that while Gods and Kings did the social policy buffs that were generally anti-expansion, it also introduced religion. Faith inherently favors large empires since it's a yield not tied to population and has no %-based modifiers, flat yields totaling to an output that can only (certain beliefs notwithstanding) be increased by making more cities. Not to mention it made happiness an even easier problem to solve. Faith has no real balancing factor when it comes to large vs. small, small empires don't get any more out of faith than large ones, and large empires can certainly spam more religious buildings.

Personally I've always interpreted BNW's science penalty as the developers throwing up their hands and giving up trying to balance wide and tall (they tried twice and ended up only encouraging ICS). It's a pointless and unattainable goal at any rate.

It really was the science penalty that crippled the idea of expanding continuously throughout the game--there were other factors, but they were largely things that you could deal with in the grand scheme of things. The changes to gold and trade routes are largely irrelevant since they affect all kinds of empires roughly equally.

 

[Amrunril]

The science penalty is just one factor on a scale. If you rebalanced some combination of happiness, building maintenance, policy trees and national wonders, it would be easy to return wide empires to dominance without touching the science penalty. I don't even think science penalties are the most important single factor favoring tall empires: if I had to remove or rebalance one factor to strengthen wide empires, it would be the National College.

Personally I've always interpreted BNW's science penalty as the developers throwing up their hands and giving up trying to balance wide and tall (they tried twice and ended up only encouraging ICS). It's a pointless and unattainable goal at any rate.

I don't think this is the case at all. If it was, the penalty would be far higher than 5%. And the fact that they nerfed Tradition in one of the post BNW patches shows that they recognized that they went a bit to far. They just stopped making balance changes too soon to do a good job of fixing it. Even so, the game is balanced between wide and tall much better now than it was early in its lifespan. Wide empires aren't by any means "crippled", they're just slightly suboptimal compared to tall ones.

 

[Magil]

The science penalty is just one factor on a scale. If you rebalanced some combination of happiness, building maintenance, policy trees and national wonders, it would be easy to return wide empires to dominance without touching the science penalty. I don't even think science penalties are the most important single factor favoring tall empires: if I had to remove or rebalance one factor to strengthen wide empires, it would be the National College.

I don't think this is the case at all. If it was, the penalty would be far higher than 5%. And the fact that they nerfed Tradition in one of the post BNW patches shows that they recognized that they went a bit to far. They just stopped making balance changes too soon to do a good job of fixing it. Even so, the game is balanced between wide and tall much better now than it was early in its lifespan. Wide empires aren't by any means "crippled", they're just slightly suboptimal compared to tall ones.

If by "slightly" you mean you need to play a much stricter and harder game when going "wide", then sure. And the penalty IS higher than 5% on smaller maps. If I recall right all the tradition "nerf" did was slow it down a bit, by putting the crappy policy in the tree up top and making all the other policies dependent on it (is this really a good solution? Is this something we should be praising them for? They identified the policy that people would take last and made it so you had to take it first).

I would prefer if they just gave up trying to balance "tall" versus "wide". It's a ridiculous dichotomy in the first place, as if you can't have a large empire that also grows its cities and builds infrastructure (that was kind of one of the big things the Roman empire was famous for, its architecture, if I recall right). There just needs to be tension in the design, but it should come naturally from the strains of managing a large empire, not in the form of arbitrary penalties. So far, the settler/builder/district cost increase seems like an okay solution. We'll see how it works in practice. I'd really prefer it if it didn't take 15 turns to build a district past a dozen or so. Hopefully there are policies and other things that can help ease that burden. And as for those who like to only manage a handful of cities, well, that's what the small/duel maps are for. I refuse to believe there's a need to cater to them specifically with game mechanics beyond that.

 

[Acken]

Remove global happiness and maintenance and I'd go wide every single game in civ5 without even thinking about it (with room to do so of course). Well admitting 8 cities could be considered wide. Hard to justify going above 8 in Civ5 due to game length.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

The science penalty was hardly the big change. In early version of Civ V libraries gave 2 scientists, coliseums gave like 4-5 global happines, trade post gave 2 gold and so on and all of these was probably more important why ICS was so common in early version of civilization V.

Even in the 100 turn limit demo people regularly produced over 100 science and had huge gold income so they could rushbuy the library and the coliseum and at that time a city with just a coliseum was net positive to your happines as not only did it give more but the happines it gave was global. Great scientists and research agreements researched whole techs during that time which allowed for some extreamly powerful beelines and the more liberies you had the quicker you could get the great scientists out which favored wide not to talk about all science whose library scientists themself produced.

 

[Magil]

Remove global happiness and maintenance and I'd go wide every single game in civ5 without even thinking about it (with room to do so of course). Well admitting 8 cities could be considered wide. Hard to justify going above 8 in Civ5 due to game length.

And that'd be perfectly viable going for domination, since the AI is so bad at combat you don't need higher-tier units to conquer them, even if they have more two to three times as many units. Or maybe culture, with sacred sites. If you were going for a science victory though (or wanted to wage modern era war), it'd be a snoozefest waiting for that last set of techs to finish.

Even more than usual, I mean.

Edit: I'm not trying to say that the science penalty is the only factor that limits expansion, and if you took away everything else, it'd still be better to go 4-city tiny "empire". I am saying it is the most significant factor and the one single factor that you could remove and suddenly city-spamming is back.

 

[Acken]

You realize people have got sub200 wins science going 6 to 8 cities right ? Hardly a snoozefest.

Standard speed.

Im not sure what is the point of balance discussions with players not aware where its at.

 

[Magil]

You realize people have got sub200 wins science going 6 to 8 cities right ? Hardly a snoozefest.

Standard speed.

Im not sure what is the point of balance discussions with players not aware where its at.

Of course, I am aware of the "Hall of Fame" achievements, which are not generally not indicative of standard play. There's no purpose in balance discussions with players using outliers as a basis for general balance either.

 

[Acken]

Neither are similarly timed Tradition play. Look, both get the same results in good condition. The point is that it's not slower in tech. Especially with hapiness outside the equation (since that is kind of the requirement to make it work right now).

This is not a outlier only thing dude. I have shown multiple times in civ5 that wide is viable and competitive with enough room and happiness. Other good players have done so. Look at tsg 111 or tsg 122 if you wish extra examples. Ribannah has won multiple first rank gotm always going wide.

If you still think it's slower in tech I'm not sure what to say.