Does anyone else think the map just looks really unpleasantly cluttered?

[chazzycat]

But how can people rationalize what we got in Civ VII? You can found a capital city. It's called, let's say, Paris (let's pretend it's classical civ and cities are French). Then you found Orleans next to it. Then Lyons. And so on. In 100 turns those cities grow and merge into one, huge city, at least visually.

So - should I consider that all my cities in the empire literally merged into one?
Because, visually, it looks like Paris merging with some nearby villages with them becoming its districts.

And if so - what my empire really is - a huge chunk of land full of cities, like the old Roman Empire, or just a capital city which swallowed nearby villages and spans 20 km across max?

Cities in Civ series were always abstract and out of scale, but Civ VII made it even worse.

What's to rationalize? Cities do this IRL all the time. The eastern seaboard of the USA is a good example. Buda & Pest started as two separate cities. Etc.

If you don't want your civ to look like that, you can settle your cities further apart.

 

[Aquila SPQR]

What's to rationalize? Cities do this IRL all the time. The eastern seaboard of the USA is a good example. Buda & Pest started as two separate cities. Etc.

Yes, they do that to nearby towns and villages. They don't usually merge with cities founded 500 km away. And they definitely don't do that in the ancient era.

If you don't want your civ to look like that, you can settle your cities further apart.

That only slows down the problem, doesn't eliminate it. Instead of merging into one megacity you'll get huge cities separated by tiny strips of... well definitely not farmland, because I haven't seen any farms in Civ VII so far.

 

[chazzycat]

You must be playing very differently to me...I only have a few urban districts in the antiquity age and lots of farms. I agree that level of sprawl doesn't seem quite right for early game.

 

[Lord Shadow]

I think a significant factor in the "Coruscant syndrome" is that the maps are on the small side. It's a bit funky that the largest one is Standard, which is even a self-acknowledgment that it's not large, and far from huge.

There's definitely a need for larger maps. Settlements should be more spread out once we get larger worlds, assuming (hopefully) that town/city limits remain the same and the player selects a lower civilization density. The latter's rather high by default, too.

 

[UWHabs]

"Where's my Building X? I need to put building Y there too so that I can get the unique whatever."

Map Pins should be like the first thing they add. My first age I didn't have any UB, but for the next one I do, I definitely need to be able to pin where I want those buildings to go so that I don't forget.

 

[Marla_Singer]

So - should I consider that all my cities in the empire literally merged into one?
Because, visually, it looks like Paris merging with some nearby villages with them becoming its districts.

And if so - what my empire really is - a huge chunk of land full of cities, like the old Roman Empire, or just a capital city which swallowed nearby villages and spans 20 km across max?

I assume the trend of unstacking everything was meant to make the game more visual and less abstract. Yet in the process, the scale that each tile represents has been significantly reduced, and it feels that you're much more limited in space with things more cramped and cluttered. Whereas in earlier more abstracted Civ games, there was a certain sense of vastness that felt like you were building the Roman Empire, the scope in Civ7 feels more like you're building the principality of Liechtenstein.

That could be an issue (at least for some players) in a game that aims at representing 6,000 years of human history on a global scale.

I understand that at the age of 4K graphics, players can no longer be satisfied with abstractions, that they need to visualize what they are building so that it feels "real", but the problem is that everything was kept at a unique scale, mixing so many different elements and therefore making things considerably messier. I think that's the core of the problem.

A more ordered solution may have been to make things zoomable on mouse roll: at a closer zoom, players could place detailed buildings at optimal spots within a city, while at a wider zoom, that city would still occupy just one tile. That would balance the level of details modern players expect with the sense of vastness we used to have and which made the game feel more open and more epic.

 

[StargazingDog]

assume the trend of unstacking everything was meant to make the game more visual and less abstract. Yet in the process, the scale that each tile represents has been significantly reduced, and it feels that you're much more limited in space with things more cramped and cluttered. Whereas in earlier more abstracted Civ games, there was a certain sense of vastness that felt like you were building the Roman Empire, the scope in Civ7 feels more like you're building the principality of Liechtenstein.

Strongly agree with this. For whatever reason, the hexes in Civ 7 feel gigantic. "Cities" can sometimes consume 1/3 of a continent. The scale is completely off. I've felt this way about Civ for a long time. This was there to an extent in Civ 6, but not to this extreme. Civ 5 was at the other end of the spectrum. Civ 4 was the goldilocks zone.

Standard size maps in Civ 4/5/6 felt big. I am playing standard size in Civ 7 and it feels cramped. I don't know if it is, but it feels that way. It doesn't help that all the land feels equally good. In earlier games, you avoided desert and desperately sought out specific resources (horses, iron, marble, etc). Now, resources are just boosts and not required, seem arbitrarily sprinkled around with no regard for biome. Other than fresh water, settling one spot is hardly different from settling another.

Think about Civ 4/5/6, exploring, and coming across a thick jungle. That was something to overcome. Settling next to a desert or tundra was not an easy choice. Here, it's all just one small, cramped, homogenous feeling land. You compete for land not because of its resources or strategic value, but because here seems to be so little of it.

 

[JNR13]

Here's a hexified city layout with real-world land use proportions. I'm not saying Civ games should have perfectly proportionate area representation, it was more just a matter of curiosity to do this. Obviously, the inner structures of a city make for interesting gameplay and therefore benefit from having quite a few tiles available to them, even if that blows cities out of proportion. But there's a balance to be struck somewhere between real proportions and the near-ecumenopolis we end up with ingame.

Black: Urban development and infrastructure
Yellow: Cropland
Orange: Pastures
Light Green: Shrubland
Dark Green: Forest
Beige: Desert
White: Ice
Light Blue: Lakes and rivers
Dark Blue: Ocean (not in proportion, a proportionate ocean area would be about a six-tile-wide ring around this "island")

What is interesting though and might be an interesting balance ingame is that agriculture, forests, and what in the context of the game would be other "unimproved" land roughly are roughly equal in size, each covering about a third.

 

[Blueskies1583]

The only time it feels cluttered is when I have a big battle with 20 units outside and inside of a city fighting it out and it makes it difficult to see what's really going on. A strategic map or something would probably help with that but for now I've just accepted that war is messy, nobody can see anything all that clearly and one does as best as one can, so I guess in the end, I think it works

 

[StargazingDog]

Here's a hexified city layout with real-world land use proportions

So, Civ 5 had it right!