Early tips and Theorycrafting

[Gehennas]

So, to speculate on the topic of wide vs tall.
There is no "tall" in the old sense, as it doesn't make much sense not to use your settlement limit, since settlers are quite cheap and return the investment very quickly. Of course, there is some wiggle space with + settlement limit bonuses and happiness penalties, but generally you want to expand as much as you can.

So, this would assume "tall" means going with a lower number of cities. Attribute trees have attributes that trigger with the number cities being less or equal to 3, so it seems like the idea of "tall" was designed with this number in mind. Wide on the other hand would probably mean having at least 50/50 distribution. Counter-intuitively, this means that going tall wins more from town bonuses and unique improvements, while wide actually wants to utilize more unique building/quarters.

Cities serve as a primary source of all resources except food and, weirdly, gold. Of course it still makes sense to put gold buildings in the cities as their income is quite high. I am still not sure about the food buildings, as they don't seem to scale that well. Towns serve as providers of food/gold (the latter comes from production to gold conversion).

Going tall is supposed to have better specialist scaling (will get back to this later). Bigger cities allow better city resource utilization (+%science and research) and generally benefit more from +% bonuses. High number of towns also provides more gold. This gold, obviously needs to be invested in cities in order to make more quarters, but on the other hands it provides a lot of flexibility.
The obvious downside is over-the-time scaling: city growth requirements curve is so steep that you barely getting new pops in modern age. Also it must be noted that cities should remain cities through all the eras, since they rely on external food to exist. With wide approach, it is possible to "retire" cities and grow new ones, increasing the food-to-pop conversion and potentially getting more population total. On the other hand, your old specialist pops lose their effectiveness.

Pop effectiveness scaling. This one is interesting. Rural pops scale quite effectively through the game, increasing their yields from passive effects as well as warehouse buildings. Specialists, on the other hand, scale quite badly. They even lose a portion of their yields on age transition: essentially overbuilding just reverts the old specialist yield to old values on top of some flat yield difference. The only way to scale specialists production over time is building wonders.
It must be noted though that city center specialists (and I think some of unique buildings specialists) scale much better. Not only they are the best specialists in the game, they also scale with surrounding quarters. City center specialists should be generally prioritized with some exceptions in the Exploration age due to science path.

Warehouse buildings. These ones scale well for the rural towns. They are also quite cheap in general. They lose their effectiveness in the big cities though. However, they do provide adjacency bonus to a city center. I would say that they should be bought for towns and completely skipped for cities when going tall. On the other hand, when going wide they might be useful in all settlements, because they will be useful in any case and will provide adjacency for a city center anyway.

Town specializations. Some of them are questionable. Also it is an open question when they should be chosen (stopping the town growth). I would say, "retired" cities should get their specialization immediately. Towns that are not going to be converted in this age, should get specialization as soon as possible but not earlier than you have at least a couple of this age specialist buildings are researched (to not make cities grow too fast):
- Farm/fishing - pretty much almost every town when going tall, because you need to send this food to your cities.
- Mining - Might be good for towns that need to be converted into cities at some point (and of course have enough production tiles worked)
- Fort - In a bottleneck on a border, I guess? But avoided generally
- Urban center - looks like it was designed specifically for retired cities
- Trade/religious/Factory - no idea when this can be useful.
- Hub - the number of hub towns probably depends on number of independents around. The more you have, the more hub towns you need.

So to summarize, this is how I would probably approach this:

Tall - pick civs with unique improvements. Make all towns farm/fishing with some occasional hubs (after growing a little bit in the start of the age). Keep just 3 cities. Try to build as many wonders in them as possible. Try to build/buy as much specialist buildings as possible, ignore warehouse buildings.
Wide - pick civs with unique buildings. Don't move capital at the beginning of an age. Try to build/buy a couple of warehouse buildings everywhere when possible (and put near the city center), build specialist buildings mostly based on city specialization opportunities. New towns should lean towards being mining when possible, old cities should become urban centers. Occasional wonders won't hurt, but in capital only.

Thoughts?

 

[magicq99]

Well from my point of view cities are supposed to be supported by towns. That is, the more towns there are connected to a city, the bigger the city can become.

Therefore, tall vs. wide in Civ VII is no longer about the absolute number of settlements, but rather the ratio between cities and towns.

So a "tall" playstyle means that you have a relatively low number of core cities, wich are supported by a larger number of connected towns. "Wide" on the hander means that you have a relative low number of towns but a larger number of cities, which won't be as large since they do not have that much support from connected towns. But both playstyles can still have the same absolte number of settlements, which is governed by the settlement cap.

So maybe a rule of thumb would be:
more than 1 town per city -> tall
less than 1 town per city -> wide
with parity (ratio of 1:1) kind of in-between

 

[Acken]

Thoughts?

Considering the game rewards you for cities <= 3 to me that's the definition that makes sense. Just like how civ5 tall was considered <=4 cities because that's the number the tradition tree was giving bonuses to.

Now for what is efficient and the right strategy to adopt is a more interesting question to me.
There are a few facts:
As you mention this is very true:

Cities serve as a primary source of all resources except food and, weirdly, gold. Of course it still makes sense to put gold buildings in the cities as their income is quite high. I am still not sure about the food buildings, as they don't seem to scale that well. Towns serve as providers of food/gold (the latter comes from production to gold conversion).

With a question mark on whether or not the gold buildings are truly worth it (beyond just having nothing else to produce). I would need to play a bit more for that. In my games the gold yield looked fairly low for these buildings especially compared to the town gold I was getting even from food towns.

Pop effectiveness scaling. This one is interesting. Rural pops scale quite effectively through the game, increasing their yields from passive effects as well as warehouse buildings. Specialists, on the other hand, scale quite badly. They even lose a portion of their yields on age transition: essentially overbuilding just reverts the old specialist yield to old values on top of some flat yield difference. The only way to scale specialists production over time is building wonders.
It must be noted though that city center specialists (and I think some of unique buildings specialists) scale much better. Not only they are the best specialists in the game, they also scale with surrounding quarters. City center specialists should be generally prioritized with some exceptions in the Exploration age due to science path.

True that specialists lose some value on age transitions but they are also the best way to get science and culture through population, they also get bonuses from policies.
The alternative is to get base yield buildings in more cities (wide). One important limiting factor here in early ages it's not very easy to buy all your towns to get these produce their culture/science yields.
The point about unique quarters is a very good one.

 

[Manpanzee]

- Farm/fishing - pretty much almost every town when going tall, because you need to send this food to your cities.
- Mining - Might be good for towns that need to be converted into cities at some point (and of course have enough production tiles worked)
- Fort - In a bottleneck on a border, I guess? But avoided generally
- Urban center - looks like it was designed specifically for retired cities
- Trade/religious/Factory - no idea when this can be useful.
- Hub - the number of hub towns probably depends on number of independents around. The more you have, the more hub towns you need.

Mining town seems severely underpowered with the current hammer/gold conversion. I don't see why you'd ever use this. I've been wondering if it could be balanced if it was adjusted to send hammers to your cities somehow.
The only circumstance where I've even had towns with enough hammer tiles to benefit much from Mining is when I've planted a town to soak up a bunch of resources that just happen to require Mining improvements. But in those cases, it seems like Trade Outpost gives you way more bang for your buck.
Urban Center I've found useful when warmongering, as an option for captured cities that I don't want to bother converting to my own city yet.

 

[Gehennas]

Mining town seems severely underpowered with the current hammer/gold conversion. I don't see why you'd ever use this.

If you want to make a town into a city, you want to make a lot of production fields. Doing farm specialization is not that useful in this case (since you won't have many farms), but getting additional gold from mining might be beneficial.
Edit: on the other hand, that's just up to 7 gold per era. Maybe just do a hub.

 

[Acken]

Your future cities should either be on growth to be bigger cities or on mining to pay faster for their conversion

 

[Fluffball]

I only tend to use mining town if a town in only connected to one city so all its food goes to that one city, it has few farms and lots of production tiles.

My last mining town would add 2 food for farm/fishing town but 14 gold for mining town or 2 influence as hub town.