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!

 

[jbavon]

Arise!

Couldn't find other threads for this and I don't think my comment warrants a new one.

Sprawl is starting to get on my nerves. I have entire continents that are just one massive megalopolis in the 1800's. This will get even more ridiculous when they eventually add the age after modern.

How would people feel if they increased the number of buildings in a tile from 2 to 3 or 4? You could keep the 'quarter' bonus at 2 buildings but still use that tile for other buildings (eg. ageless). That would reduce sprawl quite a bit but might give the devs some trouble fitting all the art assets in to one tile.

Another suggestion could be to let you place an infinite amount of (appropriate) ageless buildings into the city center.

What are your thought on this and do you have better suggestions?

 

[Siptah]

I think the sprawl of urban tiles is a bit too much. I can stand improvements on all tiles though, that‘s how I perceive the world around me, where untouched nature is very rare, and restricted to few special areas and high up in the mountains (with a Central European bias, but I also might have a trained eye for when landscapes and forests are manmade).

I‘m not convinced of increasing the density on tiles. On one hand, graphically, it would decrease the readability of urban tiles a lot (but admittedly, some of the buildings are already hard to read). On the other hand, mechanically, it would make the adjacency puzzle drastically much more trivial - and I like the planning and decision making. If I can get +6 adjacency on most buildings or remove the „blocking“ of ageless buildings, it would be less fun for me.

 

[UWHabs]

I think the sprawl of urban tiles is a bit too much. I can stand improvements on all tiles though, that‘s how I perceive the world around me, where untouched nature is very rare, and restricted to few special areas and high up in the mountains (with a Central European bias, but I also might have a trained eye for when landscapes and forests are manmade).

I‘m not convinced of increasing the density on tiles. On one hand, graphically, it would decrease the readability of urban tiles a lot (but admittedly, some of the buildings are already hard to read). On the other hand, mechanically, it would make the adjacency puzzle drastically much more trivial - and I like the planning and decision making. If I can get +6 adjacency on most buildings or remove the „blocking“ of ageless buildings, it would be less fun for me.

It's sadly a flaw with trying to mix scales. Like even if you mapped the entire Old World continent onto a map of France at the same scale, even a big city like Paris would maybe stretch to consider it as a central tile and one ring around it. But it doesn't sprawl much more than that, even now (never mind what "Paris in 600 AD" would have looked like).

I do wonder what things would look like if you allowed, say, 4 buildings per tile, but also allowed a tile to be "1/2 rural" for example. Like I wouldn't mind having one tile as like "Versailles", where half the tile is like a random urban building, but the other half of the tile was a big park with greenspace. The other option if you allowed more buildings per tile, although complicates things, would be to give a negative for being further from the centre. So If you allow 4 buildings per tile, but each building gets -2 adjacency for each ring out it is in antiquity, -1 in exploration, then in the antiquity basically the only thing that would matter would be the hexes around the city centre, exploration maybe you could justify spreading out a little more. That might help give you some separation between cities.

And of course, the fact that you "gamify" things will always lead to extra. Like if I settle a city to get some resources, I'll often give myself a chain of urban districts to be able to quickly pop my borders to the far ring, rather than be forced to pack more densely. The only way around that would be if you could only build buildings either on an urban tile or adjacent to a quarter, to force you to densify before sprawling.

 

[protocol7]

I wonder if in a future game they might make the city tile game something you zoom into, instead of happening on the same level as the world map. It seems like it might work better.

 

[queenpea]

I think the sprawl of urban tiles is a bit too much. I can stand improvements on all tiles though, that‘s how I perceive the world around me, where untouched nature is very rare, and restricted to few special areas and high up in the mountains (with a Central European bias, but I also might have a trained eye for when landscapes and forests are manmade).

I‘m not convinced of increasing the density on tiles. On one hand, graphically, it would decrease the readability of urban tiles a lot (but admittedly, some of the buildings are already hard to read). On the other hand, mechanically, it would make the adjacency puzzle drastically much more trivial - and I like the planning and decision making. If I can get +6 adjacency on most buildings or remove the „blocking“ of ageless buildings, it would be less fun for me.

I find adjacency to be a complete mess in Civ VII, and I wouldn’t mind if that entire system would be revised while increasing the number of buildings per urban tile. That along with a rework of the specialist system, and perhaps the introduction of rural buildings could go a long way in improving things.

 

[Siptah]

I find adjacency to be a complete mess in Civ VII, and I wouldn’t mind if that entire system would be revised while increasing the number of buildings per urban tile. That along with a rework of the specialist system, and perhaps the introduction of rural buildings could go a long way in improving things.

Rural buildings would mean that most of the now ageless ones would become that? I.e., no more quarter bonuses from these would be the main result of such a change? Or did you have something else in mind as well (e.g., the tile keeps its yields as with unique improvements)?

I like that adjacency is mostly simple and straightforward (except for unique improvements and quarters), and that different buildings compete for the same spot.

 

[queenpea]

Rural buildings would mean that most of the now ageless ones would become that? I.e., no more quarter bonuses from these would be the main result of such a change? Or did you have something else in mind as well (e.g., the tile keeps its yields as with unique improvements)?

I like that adjacency is mostly simple and straightforward (except for unique improvements and quarters), and that different buildings compete for the same spot.

I just think that some of the “mill” buildings could be placed on farm tiles, and the buildings related to lumber mills and mining could be placed on those tiles as well. Unique improvements also need a do over.

I just find it pretty uninspiring that tile that is sandwiched between wonders or a bunch of random resources is potentially good at everything.

 

[Bootstrapbilly]

I think the sprawl could be better managed by removing the settlement cap and going back to a district cap based on population. 1 district for every 5 pop. Cities could feel more specialised that way. Perhaps the ration changes each era too - at ancient it's 1 to 5, in modern its 1 to 4. I don't think it makes tall completely unviable as converting towns into cities gets quite expensive and the tradeoff of era ending means the cost of upgrading towns to cities gets even more expensive. Might mean having to adjust the yields of buildings though to be more impactful.

I feel it would make food more valuable, towns more valuable, reduce sprawl and make planning and prioritisation decisions feel more important and impactful. Might make the game feel more gamey to some though.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I believe HK has some form of district limit, but it's metric is overloaded with various ways to increase and spend.

 

[Buckets]

Part of the problem is that it's reasonable to build every building in every city. At least the first tier buildings. A form of city specialization could incentivize being more selective.

Another issue is that Towns can get pretty sprawled out with a total of 9 warehouse buildings. That's potentially 4 extra districts which is weird for a little fishing town.

And one more thing: some of the rural improvements, in particular unique improvements, look not so rural.