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

[AW Arcaeca]

I'm watching some gameplay footage by reviewers, and once the urban sprawl gets into full swing and cities start spreadout two or three tiles away, it just gets kind of... exhausting to continue to look at. It's hard to tell what any tile is, it's hard to tell where one tile ends and another begins, and honestly it kind of breaks the immersion for me that such a large population can be sustained off of seemingly little to no farms.

I vastly prefer the farm sprawl I produce in Civ5 and CivBE - since 90% of the model is at terrain-level it adds minimal clutter to the skyline and makes it more easy by contrast to pick out the fewer things that do rise above the skyline. Or even just keeping forests around that I never chopped down.

I have never really liked the concept of wonders having to take up a whole tile, as we see in Civ6 and Civ7, and I think that definitely adds to the visual noise. It was tolerable in CivBE when it only applied to endgame wonders that were not only few in number, but kind of had to be as large as they were because of the enormity of the undertaking they represented - not just literal game enders, not just the expense all of the energy your civilization produces in the case of the Beacon, but literally the end of humanity as we know it in the case of the Mind Flower. I see no analogous compelling reason why, say, the Eiffel Tower or the Hagia Sofia, which manifestly fit entirely inside a city (source: Paris, Constantinople), would need not only be placed outside the city, but take up as much space as a farm.

So I'm eager to see if it will be technically possible to make a mod to replace all the wonder tile improvements with wonder buildings instead - less in line with Civ6 and a return to Civ4/Civ5 roots. Urban tiles and districts, though, also significantly add to the visual clutter of the map, and I don't know that those are going to be able to be eliminated. I can't quite articulate why they look cluttered, and so I don't know what I should expect to edit about them. Is it the scale of the buildings? Is it the number of buildings? Is the color contrast of the textures?

I think a quick and easy improvements, though not a complete solution, will be to simply significantly increase the number of buildings per urban tile (which I imagine will be an editable global setting, surely it won't be hardcoded), perhaps as many as 4 or 5, so as to cut down on the number of urban tiles that need to be built in the first place.

 

[UWHabs]

I do think the 2 building limit feels prone to massive sprawl. Sure, you can overbuild some, but there's still enough ageless buildings, even in the ancient and exploration era cities look pretty sprawling. 3 buildings per tile would help, or even going to 4. Even if you want wonders to be more wonderful, you could have a regular building take 1 slot of 4, and a wonder take 2 slots. So you could fit 2 wonders on the same tile, or a wonder+2 buildings.

Some of that might be relatively easily editable in config scripts, but I don't know what it would do for the art. Or other game balance, if you had twice as many buildings how much the exploration era science goal would have to shift to.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I think reviewers settle more compact than Firaxis employees. On official streams the map looks different - I already made a post discussing it.

Speaking about aesthetics, I'm totally fine with how it looks. Transforming the map visual as your civilization progresses is actually cool.

 

[pokiehl]

No, I think everything about the map looks beautiful. The sprawl makes the world feel alive and lived in. When I look back at Civ 5, cities feel like extremely unimpressive dots amid boring waves of farms and mines.

And I think putting wonders on their own tiles is one of the best ideas the series has ever had. They look so good.

I doubt that simply editing the number of buildings per tile will be an “easy” alternative for whatever you’re thinking of trying to achieve. For one thing, it will probably break the graphics (assuming tile models are set up in the backend similarly to how they are in 6). Second, it will totally upend balance.

 

[queenpea]

I'm watching some gameplay footage by reviewers, and once the urban sprawl gets into full swing and cities start spreadout two or three tiles away, it just gets kind of... exhausting to continue to look at. It's hard to tell what any tile is, it's hard to tell where one tile ends and another begins, and honestly it kind of breaks the immersion for me that such a large population can be sustained off of seemingly little to no farms.

I vastly prefer the farm sprawl I produce in Civ5 and CivBE - since 90% of the model is at terrain-level it adds minimal clutter to the skyline and makes it more easy by contrast to pick out the fewer things that do rise above the skyline. Or even just keeping forests around that I never chopped down.

I have never really liked the concept of wonders having to take up a whole tile, as we see in Civ6 and Civ7, and I think that definitely adds to the visual noise. It was tolerable in CivBE when it only applied to endgame wonders that were not only few in number, but kind of had to be as large as they were because of the enormity of the undertaking they represented - not just literal game enders, not just the expense all of the energy your civilization produces in the case of the Beacon, but literally the end of humanity as we know it in the case of the Mind Flower. I see no analogous compelling reason why, say, the Eiffel Tower or the Hagia Sofia, which manifestly fit entirely inside a city (source: Paris, Constantinople), would need not only be placed outside the city, but take up as much space as a farm.

So I'm eager to see if it will be technically possible to make a mod to replace all the wonder tile improvements with wonder buildings instead - less in line with Civ6 and a return to Civ4/Civ5 roots. Urban tiles and districts, though, also significantly add to the visual clutter of the map, and I don't know that those are going to be able to be eliminated. I can't quite articulate why they look cluttered, and so I don't know what I should expect to edit about them. Is it the scale of the buildings? Is it the number of buildings? Is the color contrast of the textures?

I think a quick and easy improvements, though not a complete solution, will be to simply significantly increase the number of buildings per urban tile (which I imagine will be an editable global setting, surely it won't be hardcoded), perhaps as many as 4 or 5, so as to cut down on the number of urban tiles that need to be built in the first place.

I think it’s a valid concern, especially as this was such a common critique with games like Millenia towards the end of the game. Not only did it look insane, but it also affected performance.

I love one wonder per tile, though. It’s much more satisfying this way.

We will see how it all goes very shortly!

 

[VanCrayden]

Return to the Civ 5 system, with an empty map and 40 farms per city? No, thanks! Everything looks nice

 

[GrayingGamer]

On a side-note, I've been thinking lately about how Civ games in general create a skewed vision of reality as it relates to human development. I can imagine some poor basement kid who has genuinely been locked up for 20 years (but allowed to play all the Civ they want) finally being allowed on a plane for the first time and flying a good 1000 miles somewhere, just looking out the window, and being amazed at how much empty space and farmland is out there, and how relatively tiny even the biggest cities are.

Obviously it's fundamentally a board game, and as VanCrayden says no one wants to just see farmland everywhere, but continuous city sprawl can be a little jarring, immersion-wise.
In reality the earth's landmass, with all 8 billion or so of us, is about 3% city... or just 1% if you go by total surface area.

 

[queenpea]

In reality the earth's landmass, with all 8 billion or so of us, is about 3% city... or just 1% if you go by total surface area.

Irrelevant because Civ VII takes place on Coruscant so the landmass and surface area are completely unrelated to our planet and timeline.

 

[sonicmyst]

I love city sprawl but I want buildings to be easily distinguishable.

 

[evonannoredars]

I love city sprawl but I want buildings to be easily distinguishable.

Agreed, I'm unsure how well I'll be able to spot all the specific buildings when city planning.

 

[UWHabs]

On a side-note, I've been thinking lately about how Civ games in general create a skewed vision of reality as it relates to human development. I can imagine some poor basement kid who has genuinely been locked up for 20 years (but allowed to play all the Civ they want) finally being allowed on a plane for the first time and flying a good 1000 miles somewhere, just looking out the window, and being amazed at how much empty space and farmland is out there, and how relatively tiny even the biggest cities are.

Obviously it's fundamentally a board game, and as VanCrayden says no one wants to just see farmland everywhere, but continuous city sprawl can be a little jarring, immersion-wise.
In reality the earth's landmass, with all 8 billion or so of us, is about 3% city... or just 1% if you go by total surface area.

I mean, on the civ map scale, even a city like Paris or New York wouldn't even fill a tile. If Paris was actually 3 tiles wide in each direction, the Atlantic Ocean would have to be like 150-200 tiles wide to fit on the same scale.

 

[Evolena]

honestly it kind of breaks the immersion for me that such a large population can be sustained off of seemingly little to no farms.

That's what Towns are for now, they feed your big urban Cities.

 

[Professor Phobo]

Yes, I've thought this since Six came out.

I think I'd prefer the current rural district system, but for urban districts to stack into the city tile rather than sprawl. It wouldn't be represented this way visually, but the way I think about it is like a board game, and a rural district would be a hex token you put on top of a hex on the map board, and city centers would be the same way, but urban districts would instead stack on top of the city center.

That is, urban districts would be "vertical growth" and rural districts "horizontal spread." Ballooning cities just doesn't look right to me, IMO. Not like, a dealbreaker or a major complaint, I just feel like it throws off the sense of scale and visual cleanliness too much.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I mean, on the civ map scale, even a city like Paris or New York wouldn't even fill a tile. If Paris was actually 3 tiles wide in each direction, the Atlantic Ocean would have to be like 150-200 tiles wide to fit on the same scale.

To be fair, civ maps have never been true to scale. But before civ5, I think it was less egregious. Cities were one tile. Stacked combat was also on one tile. You could nitpick that distances between cities were not "realistic". But starting with civ5, I think maps got even more out of scale because of 1upt. It created this weird disconnect where maps are both strategic and tactical. It is why we get silly things like archers that can shoot the equivalent of hundreds of miles. Civ6 arguably made this disconnect worse with adding districts on maps. You could get your city's campus district several hexes from your industrial complex but still the same "city". But civ7 takes it even further with fully unpacking cities. Now we get city sprawl that should only cover a few miles in reality, overlaid on hundreds of miles of hexes. I guess the question is can you live with it or not? I guess it is one the things that players have to suspend disbelief on, like accepting immortal leaders. For good or ill, modern civ games have become much more tactical in their scope. Maps are smaller. Our sprawling empire is only 2 cities and 3 towns. Cities are sprawled out across half of our continent and we fight tactical combat unit by unit. A big reason for this is because I think devs believe that tactical choices are more interesting. Hence why we hear phrases like "playing the map". Devs want players to make more tactical choices like what tile to put a building on for a given adjacency bonus or what tile to move a unit to for the optimal combat bonus. Civ still has strategic choices of course but modern civs do seem to have put more of an emphasis on adding more tactical choices as well.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I don't agree entirely, especially not with the solution, but I do think that cities sprawl too much too early. The ratio of rural tiles to urban should lean heavily rural. And only deviate from that well into the Modern Age.

I wish that building density could be increased, especially for warehouse buildings.

Part of the problem from deriving judgment the streamers is that they are placing buildings 1 per district for quite a while in order to pick up more tiles. This may or may not be optimized, but you are not obliged to play that way.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Part of the problem from deriving judgment the streamers is that they are placing buildings 1 per district for quite a while in order to pick up more tiles.

This is because adding a tile improvement or building is how you expand your borders now. This is one of the things I dislike the most in civ7. I really dislike that borders are 1 tile away from your worked tiles. It makes your empire feel small and also forces the player to do wide city sprawl or settle cities close to each just to connect your empire.

 

[queenpea]

I don't agree entirely, especially not with the solution, but I do think that cities sprawl too much too early. The ratio of rural tiles to urban should lean heavily rural. And only deviate from that well into the Modern Age.

I wish that building density could be increased, especially for warehouse buildings.

Part of the problem from deriving judgment the streamers is that they are placing buildings 1 per district for quite a while in order to pick up more tiles. This may or may not be optimized, but you are not obliged to play that way.

I wish they would bring back another yield, like culture, to temper border growth. Food seems pretty overpowered to me at the moment (without having played the game myself).

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

This is because adding a tile improvement or building is how you expand your borders now. This is one of the things I dislike the most in civ7. I really dislike that borders are 1 tile away from your worked tiles. It makes your empire feel small and also forces the player to do wide city sprawl or settle cities close to each just to connect your empire.

There's just too much incentive to use districts (and displaced rural population) to grab more tiles for the city.

I wish there was some way to incentivize density, like having urban yields decay the farther from a city center they are, and the decay reduces in later Ages.

 

[evonannoredars]

Part of the problem from deriving judgment the streamers is that they are placing buildings 1 per district for quite a while in order to pick up more tiles. This may or may not be optimized, but you are not obliged to play that way.

I wonder whether a (perhaps somewhat overly artificial) solution would be to restrict building placement to the first tile ring initially, locking city sprawlability to further rings behind certain techs or population sizes or something. That being said, I also think it'd be appropriate to increase the maximum settlement size to a 4-tile radius given how much more important space is than in any previous game.

 

[kaspergm]

It's a concern I've voiced several times before, so obviously I agree. Between the two-building-per-"district" limit and large increase in overall number of buildings, urban towns seem to sprawl way too much way too quickly, and the fact that the rural improvements don't look very rural and generally take up too little space between urban towns doesn't help at all.