Easy Way to Encourage "Tall"

[MarigoldRan]

District adjacency bonuses increase by 5% for each pop point above 5, and 10% for each pop point above 10. So a pop 15 city generates 50% more science, culture, faith, and commerce then a pop 10 city. And a pop 10 city generates 25% more then a pop 5 city.

There!

Logic: science, commerce, and culture are higher in population density urban areas then a bunch of rural hamlets. Should be easy to mod. Any mods like that?

 

[679x]

I think the problem is not necessarily that higher-population cities are too weak right now, but rather that having many cities is too powerful, to the point where there's no real good reason to not expand wherever possible. Remember, you can play wide/expansionist and still have multiple high-population cities. In fact, you could get even HIGHER pop cities, because being wide will give you more trade route slots (among many other benefits), which you can use for more food/production in specific cities. I think that's really the core of the issue.

I suppose one could argue that it's not exactly historically accurate for small nations to be just as powerful as large ones, but it would be much more fun ingame if playing tall was just as viable as playing wide.

 

[oSiyeza]

Also that you can't not add the cities you conquer to your territory. Puppet cities should totally be something.

 

[Disgustipated]

Also that you can't not add the cities you conquer to your territory.

Not particularly realistic since this has happened throughout history. Even relatively recent history (19th century).

Maybe it's time to bring back inefficiency Civ4 style or corruption Civ3 style. I'm kidding about Civ3 corruption, no one wants that... I think.

 

[MarigoldRan]

NO ONE WANTS THAT CIV 3 RUBBISH.

Moderator Action: Please do not troll the forums. leif
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[enKage]

The problem of civV and civVI is introducing tall and wide playstyles, one superior to the other. Civ3 with corruption and civ4 with maintanance cost didn't have the problem. You simply were forced to expand and develop the same time. Instead of billions threads how to make civVI cmpetitive at tall, just make up a mechanism reunitinng two paystyles

 

[Sostratus]

Every civ game including pre BNW versions of civ5 have struggled to contain a particularly virulent strain of wide called ICS. In a game where your empire is expressed through cities, it is extraordinarily difficult to prevent having city tiles be the best tiles in your empire. In civ5 they outright had the best tile yields under many strategies. In civ6 they are conduits to the best tiles in the game, districts.

thus, it is logical players will tend to want as many tiles as possible to be cities.

Public perception of Tall vs Wide was heavily damaged by the degenerate 4 city tradition meta from late BNW. Tall vs wide is supposed to be a question of population distribution.
Global happiness tried to make total empire population a soft limit on your power. Amenities are effectively unlimited at every stage of the game right now, so there is no reason not to have more cities that have lots of pops. You need to change that balance paradigm or it will eat up basically anything you throw at it. As an example, the OPs suggestion does nothing to encourage me to not spam cities, because it makes copies of districts better.
A new city’s district is worth a 100% adjacency boost in an existing one, and it means new copies of by buildings, instances of factory aura, more trade routes, etc.
So you can see this hydra is quite difficult to slay with one stroke of the sword.

 

[shaky]

I don't have a problem with the strength of having many cities, more that they are too easy to come by. I'd prefer if settlers were a lot more costly, in terms of both scaling production/purchasing costs and population loss from the source city. Mass producing them seems overpowered, and at very little cost, once you get Magnus with Provision combined with either Ancestral Hall & Colonisation or a good Monumentality golden age.

 

[Vincent_lacruz]

I don't have a problem with the strength of having many cities, more that they are too easy to come by. I'd prefer if settlers were a lot more costly, in terms of both scaling production/purchasing costs and population loss from the source city. Mass producing them seems overpowered, and at very little cost, once you get Magnus with Provision combined with either Ancestral Hall & Colonisation or a good Monumentality golden age.

They should have done the same thing than in civV (I think), with no growth in the city while producing a settler, along with the actual population cost.

 

[Ezerin]

District adjacency bonuses are very impactful only in first 2-3 eras, by the time your cities reach 15 population, most of respective yields will come from other sources.

The problem of wide empires (from my point of view) is that certain districts are so valuable by itself depending on your civ/playstyle/strategy, that first 2-3 district slots become the main value of each city, even more valuable than actual citizens. You only once invest production in district and each building in it (i don't count repairing cause it may not be required at all), and since that moment district start to generate unequaly high profit for a tiny maintanence cost (1-2 gold).

The sollution is to rebalance district/population relation of values. In my opinion specialist system is potentialy the best opportunity to resolve wide vs tall problem, big part of profit from district and its building should be transfered to specialist slots (GPP specifically) and CS standart bonuses shouldn't increase yield output from buildings, but from specialists.

 

[Kwami]

Why do we want to promote "tall" empires over "wide" ones? Why is that good for the game? Excepting Civ V: BNW, has there ever been a Civ game where getting more cities wasn't the correct strategy?

Anyway, since Amenities are generally very easy to get, and since adjacency bonuses are usually much weaker than building bonuses, the OP's idea doesn't work. The optimal play would still be to get as many cities as possible. The best cities would just be even better.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Why do we want to promote "tall" empires over "wide" ones? Why is that good for the game?

I don't get it, either. If you don't want to manage a lot of cities, all you have to do is play on a smaller and/or more crowded map. I always add more Civs and CSs than the default.

 

[Disgustipated]

Why do we want to promote "tall" empires over "wide" ones?

Because there were real world examples of this. Especially regarding European nations. Granted, some of these had overseas colonies, which is something I would like to see better represented in the game. And finally, because variety is good.

 

[Kwami]

Because there were real world examples of this. Especially regarding European nations. Granted, some of these had overseas colonies, which is something I would like to see better represented in the game. And finally, because variety is good.

Is there a good example that doesn't involve colonies and trade companies?

Anyway, realism doesn't always lead to good game play. One of the X's in 4X is expand. I'd like to keep that one.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Civ 4 got it right. Maintenance puts proper breaks on expansions so smaller empires can be more efficient,. Growing a large empire the wrong way was penalized, but it was still better if you did it right.

All this tall vs wide discussion convinces me that Civ 5 was a mistake. One should incentivize growing cities (having big cities), instead of incentivizing doing nothing (not expanding)

Also, colonies.

 

[Sostratus]

Is there a good example that doesn't involve colonies and trade companies?

Anyway, realism doesn't always lead to good game play. One of the X's in 4X is expand. I'd like to keep that one.

The efficiency advantages of large cities can be absolutely overwhelming.
For example, literally Venice.
After the industrial revolution this became even more extreme- the GDP of various mega cities around the world attests to that.
NYC by itself is roughly comparable to the entire russian economy. A bit extreme, because it’s part of the United States. But Hong Kong or Singapore or even Belgium, economically, are worth a lot more than their land area suggests.

I think the real itch that many tall players want scratched is that you can’t really grow and develop the City beyond throwing down districts. Like you can’t get that qualitative feel of “this is a true world leading city.”

 

[steveg700]

I suppose one could argue that it's not exactly historically accurate for small nations to be just as powerful as large ones, but it would be much more fun ingame if playing tall was just as viable as playing wide.

Well, conversely, we have many historical examples of civilizations that eventually grew too big and collapsed. Imperialism is how you get an empire, after all, and it is a form of governance that has challenges to sustainability.

Civ is rooted in the now somewhat-dated glorification of Roman imperialism as the pinnacle civilization to which all other civilizations take a backseat. There's an old-school way of perceiving history as little more than a series of wars. Rome was great at steamrolling its way across continents, which has that certain schoolboy appeal for history buffs. But leaning in closer, you find that at home there were long bread lines amidst steep unemployment, and a republic that turned into a tyranny because the armies that should have prevented that were all far away pillaging.

What I think is missing from this most conversations about expansion is the establishment of some kind of metric for governing optimal expansion. When you start thinking of expansion as something to constrain with hard caps or rigid controls like those we have suggested by the OP, you ultimately wind up with an optimal build template like Civ V's "Four-City Tradition". I'd rather that a civ have a more fluid central mechanism. Think of a civ as having a "stability" rating (or call it "authority", "identify", what have you), which is influenced by things like government type, policies, government plaza buildings, wonders, civics unlocked, etc. Your ratio of cities to stability could influence a variety of factors:

Settlers: Production cost bonus or penalty, and cities with a high stability-to-city ration can start cities with increased populations.
Espionage: Other civ's receive bonuses or penalties to missions.
Loyalty: The range that the capital extends loyal could shrink or grow up to 50%.
Districts: Strong stability ratios could allow a city's district capacity to increase by one, while very weak ratios would require a city to reach pop 3 before they could build their first district.

...And so on. In addition, I would tend to think the government plaza should not be a per-civ district, but rather per-continent. This is another way for civ's to differentiate their approaches, electing to take their time to expand smoothly and steadily rather than ISC-style spamming.

In general, it would be nice to see expansion be optimized into waves, rather than something that should be done whenever possible.

 

[Leucarum]

I'm ok with playing tall being possible but not optimal.

I don't enjoy super-wide games because of the micromanagement that progressively creeps in. So I don't play wide and just accept that I'm not using the best possible strategy because I enjoy Civ more that way...

 

[steveg700]

The efficiency advantages of large cities can be absolutely overwhelming.
For example, literally Venice.
After the industrial revolution this became even more extreme- the GDP of various mega cities around the world attests to that.
NYC by itself is roughly comparable to the entire russian economy. A bit extreme, because it’s part of the United States. But Hong Kong or Singapore or even Belgium, economically, are worth a lot more than their land area suggests.

I think the real itch that many tall players want scratched is that you can’t really grow and develop the City beyond throwing down districts. Like you can’t get that qualitative feel of “this is a true world leading city.”

Right, in a game like Galactic Civilizations 3, you can build various "capital" buildings in your empire--financial, entertainment, manufacturing, research, and so on. These lead to cities that stand out as the jewels of the empire.

Maybe they don't have these in Civ because they would steal the thunder from wonders. You have a financial capital by way of building Big Ben or Great Zimbabwe. You have an manufacturing capital by way of building Ruhr Valley. But these are competitive in nature, so only civ gets to have them. And while they require certain buildings or districts, they're not requiring players to have outstanding examples of these districts. Would make sense to me that at least late-game wonders like Broadway would require a high population or a theater district with at least a +3 adjacency bonus.

Governors are sort of a "tall" resource, since they only work their mojo on specific cities. The audience chamber is there to further enforce this, but who builds it? I think a good addition to governors would be the ability to construct a capital building, perhaps as a new promotion or after unlocking a later-game civic.

 

[UWHabs]

The efficiency advantages of large cities can be absolutely overwhelming.
For example, literally Venice.
After the industrial revolution this became even more extreme- the GDP of various mega cities around the world attests to that.
NYC by itself is roughly comparable to the entire russian economy. A bit extreme, because it’s part of the United States. But Hong Kong or Singapore or even Belgium, economically, are worth a lot more than their land area suggests.

I think the real itch that many tall players want scratched is that you can’t really grow and develop the City beyond throwing down districts. Like you can’t get that qualitative feel of “this is a true world leading city.”

To me, the biggest problem is that the marginal gains from growing a city from size 10 to 20 is pretty minimal. For example,at size 10 you can still get 4 district down. After those first 4 districts, I'm more or less just building districts because I can, and at a certain point, excess population points mean very little as they start to be forced into specialist spots, which again have pretty minimal returns. Sure, building every district in a city can be nice, but does throwing down a random encampment as your 7th district in a city actually help you? It's probably a negative, because you have to build the district over top of a farm triangle or a mine, which means that pop point is just working as a crappy specialist in a city.

The game is truly missing an opportunity to make specialists really relevant once you hit urbanization/industrialization. If at that stage of the game, it suddenly because more valuable for your citizens to work in a factory than to work a mine, then suddenly every building you build has an increased use to create a citizen, and every farm you place potentially lets your city grow bigger to make better use of all those districts that you place.