Nope. It's kill or be killed for most of history. The conquered are miserable; but my existing people are ecstatic! Their position in the world is safer for the next year-ish. Roman Triumphs eat ya heart out
Sorry, but this is simply false. For most developed societies through most of their history incentives for territorial conquest were relatively low - warfare was extremely widespread, but territorial boundaries were broadly stable. Expansionist empires like Rome were the exception rather than the norm, and even then for only parts of their history. Their disproportionate impact on regional history just gives a misleading impression that this was typical. People might well feel safer if they're aware enough of the broader context to sense a threat and see that it's been repelled - but that's when on the defence, not when conquering.
No, sorry. It was just a worse way of doing it than local happiness/unhappiness which was more immersive. Yes I should have issues in that newly conquered city (especially if I don't do things like station troops there); but no where near as much in my cities that weren't recently conquered.
That depends entirely on what you want to model. If you want to show empire management you need an empire-scale system. See, this is what I'm getting at - people couldn't get past conflating the older system with the Civ V one when they represented different things. That's like criticising the slider because it makes no real world sense/immersion to support cities from a central treasury and doesn't represent city maintenance as well as Civ V's gold maintenance.
Making happiness empire wide was unimmersive and unfun. It was all about the mechanic entirely disregarding theme which took most of us out of our game.
No moreso than the slider. You're busy arguing that Civ IV showed cities costing money to establish by abstracting the idea of city infrastructure ... while Civ V just has direct maintenance costs for infrastructure in the way that these things would actually work.
Obviously it did affect immersion for a lot of people because it didn't sit well with their pop culture understanding of the way history worked, even though it's not actually especially unrealistic. And the fact that it was dropped is a pretty compelling argument that the Civ designers recognised it wasn't ideal. But the primary purpose for a game mechanic is to play well, which global happiness (with fixes) broadly did. At its worst I never understood why people objected to it more than other counterimmersive mechanics like the slider that existed purely for game functionality and added nothing to immersion. This is, after all, a game that's full of nonsense mechanics like Great People Points and - in Civs V and VI - magic bonuses from religion. No one's going to praise Civ because it's deemed realistic that if you have faith you can buy Albert Einstein.
Well Civ IV had that down as I have already said. If you settled too many cities your economy tanked. That was immersive from the POV I mentioned that cities have costs behind them we can imagine, even in ancient times.
How is that any different from buildings in cities having maintenance costs and most of the income needed to support them coming from trade routes? Civ IV is just a cruder approach to the BNW system, the latter of which has both the immersive and functional advantage that you can limit the costs you incur buy building less infrastructure while the Civ IV system charged you more the more cities you have, even ones that are now capable of financing themselves.
Erm… so it didn't work even?
The point being, that global happiness was not the primary constraint on expansion it's imagined to be. Take a game with global expansion and none of the other limits on expansion and, no, it didn't work.
See...this is where we have a fundamental difference in view. I don't like handicapping the obvious in a 4X game, just because it is obvious.
If you want a strategy game, it has to have more than one strategy - and one can't be so far ahead of the others that it's always optimal no matter what. The major reason for going tall in Civ V had nothing to do with happiness, it had to do with the policy trees and the way they unlocked. You had to choose very early whether to go wide or go tall, and by that point in the game you simply couldn't have scouted far enough to identify whether wide was viable. Later in the game, because of the way Civ V worked, there just wasn't all that much incentive to settle or conquer new cities. If you wanted to go out and conquer, the game didn't make it unduly hard to do so - I had large late-game empires and domination victories on huge maps.
It's also over all realistic; and I don't like messing with that either.
Actually it leads to consequences that are utterly unrealistic, an issue throughout the series. There are nearly 200 modern nation states, most of which can trace their history to some independent predecessor state and many of which have been independent entities for centuries with little or no history of conquest. European states have existed in a condition of almost constant warfare, but while some territory changes hands many of the major protagonists in those wars have retained their existence as independent states, or are descendants of former independent states like Prussia or the Italian states that have merged into a modern country at least partially by non-military means.
By contrast Civ games traditionally end with one or two survivors from among as many as two dozen starting civs. In the real world territorial expansion is and always has been costly both economically and logistically and rarely with rewards that are worth the trouble. Even more incongruous, territorial expansion in Civ takes place for the sake of expansion - resources aren't valuable enough to fight over, and even natural wonders very rarely are. The main drivers of historical conquest simply don't exist in Civ, and yet the game in most versions strongly incentivises conquest.
Everything else being equal, if two countries clash the bigger one is usually going to win. Especially if it's much bigger. That is immersive.
And has happened in every version of Civ, Civ V included. 'Go tall' is the route of least resistance in Civ V and sufficient to beat the AI, but a big AI empire will outperform a small one and I'd expect the same to be true of human empires in multiplayer. Even if 'go tall' is a more efficient way to secure overall science or culture victory (a concept that doesn't apply to reality), it's not going to compete in warfare because it can't produce as many units.
I get that some people want to not do an empire proper, and they just want a few cities. Fine. I guess. I think they should just play another game myself. Instead devs have ended up jumping through some odd hoops too keep them happy. Fortunately VI recognised that most players want that 4X sandbox experience
I don't think either of these is quite correct. Civ V's designers had the idea that 'tall' vs. 'wide' was an interesting strategic dichotomy and so offered players the tools to do either. It was an interesting idea but failed (a) because they got the balance wrong (in ways that had nothing much to do with global happiness) and (b) it turns out that playing tall is intrinsically uninteresting in a game grounded in the idea that you have a lot of cities. With few production slots and relevant building options that run out more quickly with fewer cities, there is simply less to do.
As for Civ VI, I don't think it's
meant to be a sandbox. It's just far too easy. Being able to random walk your way to victory at the highest level without needing to know optimal tech paths and without even necessarily knowing quite how all the rules work (as I have, though in fairness the game's a lot better in that regard than it once was) is not sandboxing, it's a strategy game that isn't fit to be called a strategy game - "anything goes" is not a strategy.
In the late game sure. So it worked little better than IV to reign in city spread; and was just plain not fun.
Why did it need to work better than Civ IV? As you've been pointing out throughout, Civ IV did a good job of pacing expansion. But the maintenance system could hardly be described as fun - it was about as fun and immersive as corruption, it just did a better job mechanically.
Can't see why you'd want to do that. It's just not fun, and not immersive.
The main argument would be, because Civ is meant to be a game about managing an empire rather than one about managing individual cities one by one. Paradox games have pooled resources and you manage your empire as a unit (or as user-defined subunits such as duchies). Civ has never been good at representing your civ as a whole empire rather than as just discrete cities that operate more or less independently of one another and where none of the decisions you make about managing one city has any direct repercussions on any others.
You seem to be equating major wars with settling one or two new cities.
I was responding to a comment about expanding through wars.
