Ed on districts in Civ7

[Stoic]

Not like classic civ
All tiles are worked

Each new pop gives you one permanent improvement (or is a specialist) which can’t be moved (and gives your city more territory)

So you can only change the output of a city by
1. building a new building
2. adding a new pop
3. changing policies/techs/religion/etc.

Not exactly sure how it will handle losing pop.

How does this new choice seem to you? It seems to make management easier this way

 

[UncivilizedGuy]

Frankly, i dislike civ going in the city builder genre direction, since civ6. If i wanted to play a city builder i will play skylines, against the storm, frost punk etc. I would much rather design my state rather than design my cities.

I partially agree with this. IMO, city building should be a mini game or limited to the capital. Something that can be optional in the Start menu. When managing an empire I feel like I should be concerned with decisions regarding the entire civilization, not localized management. I had always imagined the next iteration of Civ having a world map that looked more realistic but when clicking on a city you would zoom in and see a more detailed map of the city. Maybe even have specialized cities instead of districts to get adjacency bonuses. Although it sounds like they did this with Towns to a certain degree

 

[bv98132454]

Here from quill18 video about playing civ 7, showing that there is at least one open building slot on the city center.

To me there should be more slots in the city center than districts. For example, if a district can hold 3, the center can hold 5. The center would nearly always be the most dense zone of development, so this makes sense logically. From a gameplay perspective, this would push districts back to later in the game and would require the player to have fewer of them.

I really don't like districts and didn't like them in Civ 6 for reasons I stated earlier. Anything that mitigates them is a positive in my view.

 

[bv98132454]

Adding +1 building slot to the city centre per urban district could be pretty cool. It would model how a city expands out, it tends to also becomes denser (and more monumental in the inside). Strategically it could be fun too. It might be fun building an urban district and leaving it empty (sacrificing a rural district in the process) just to open up a lucrative spot in the city centre with greater adjacency / stacking bonuses.

I always thought in Civ 6 they should have let you specialize your city core, effectively building a district on it. Just doing that would have helped the wide/tall issue.

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

If I recall correctly, it was stated that the city ranged attack was removed in the Potato/Spiffing AMA

Ooh, interesting! Thank you!

 

[shaglio]

If I recall correctly, it was stated that the city ranged attack was removed in the Potato/Spiffing AMA

I wonder if city ranged attacks will be predicated upon building a specific . . . building, whether in the city center or in a district (similar to the Encampment District buildings in Civ 6). If so, that particular building might not come along until the Exploration Age, in which case the streamers would not have seen it.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I wonder if city ranged attacks will be predicated upon building a specific . . . building, whether in the city center or in a district (similar to the Encampment District buildings in Civ 6). If so, that particular building might not come along until the Exploration Age, in which case the streamers would not have seen it.

I was thinking the same thing. We've seen walls with and without ramparts. I suspect that may be what gives defensive fire.

 

[Big J Money]

The adjacency game in Civ6 was fun but super gamey and nonsensical, the fact that you got most of your yields from passive adjacency bonuses in early game was extremely bad for game balance.

I'm not sure we know that adjacency bonuses will be any less than before. I also feel that they were often overdone in Civ6, but that's not so much due to the implementation of the systems, but to the specific bonuses themselves. Many civs in 6 had unique improvements that added between 2 to 4(!) specialized adjacency bonuses. I believe there were some base civ/leader powers and wonders that added even more adjacency bonuses. They could still repeat this in Civ 7, and I hope they don't. In a way, it could be worse because we'll have each of 3 ages to solve the 'city puzzle' again... for each city.

 

[AriochIV]

Buildings still have adjacency bonuses, and it looks like they're as important as they were in Civ6, but they're more granular (and so fewer trade-offs) and you have to build your districts contiguously, so in that respect it feels less gamey and more practical.

 

[Big J Money]

My main concern is over how much that analysis-paralysis witll be better or worse than it is in Civ6. Once of my complaints with 6 is how long it takes me to complate a game compared to 5 (which was also longer than 4). While I enjoy the city puzzler aspect, I don't enjoy civ 6's version so much that I think it's worth significantly longer games. I didn't find districts to being "gamey" to be a problem, I think that was kaspergm's issue. I was just agreeing that adjacency bonuses were overused.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Tall vs Wide might not be a meaningful dichotomy in Civ7.

At PAX, Ed answered a question about tall vs wide. He said that city specialists are back in civ7. He said there are civics that increase the settlement cap to help with "wide" and also that some civs like Rome and Mongolia start with a higher settlement cap since historically, they were "wide" empires. So it seems that specialists will help with "tall" and higher settlement cap will help with "wide".

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

At PAX, Ed answered a question about tall vs wide. He said that city specialists are back in civ7. He said there are civics that increase the settlement cap to help with "wide" and also that some civs like Rome and Mongolia start with a higher settlement cap since historically, they were "wide" empires. So it seems that specialists will help with "tall" and higher settlement cap will help with "wide".

I wonder if Russia or Britain will also get higher ones in the Modern Age?

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I wonder if Russia or Britain will also get higher ones in the Modern Age?

That is very possible.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

So there's a settlement cap, which is different to a city cap? Do we know how that works? Is it hard or soft?

The city cap and the settlement cap are the same thing. It's a soft cap. If you go over the cap, all your cities experience inefficiencies in yields. You can raise your cap via civics.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

But which does it cap, the number of cities or the number of cities+towns?

It caps the number of cities + towns.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

It caps the number of cities + towns.

Correct. "Settlement" is a term that includes both cities and towns.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Not too happy to hear that to be honest. Seems like a ham fisted way to limit over-expansion. Hopefully it will play out better than it sounds.

The civ7 mechanic is maybe a bit ham fisted but it is simple and logical: just put a cap that penalizes you when you go over it and give players ways to increase it. My only concern is that it may limit expansion too much like civ5 did. I believe the cap starts at 3 at the start of the Antiquity Age. That's not a lot. But we don't know about the civics that raise the cap. It could be that it is possible to raise the cap pretty early in the game in which case it might not be that bad. And remember that you can exceed the cap as much as you want. It is a not hard cap. You will just lose yields if you do go over the cap. And we don't know how much the penalties are. It might be that going over the cap by 1 or 2 does not hurt that much. So in practice, players might exceed the cap by a little. But if going over the cap by a lot does hurt the player, then it might be an effective way against infinite expansion, without punishing a little over expansion. Also, civ7 does have global happiness too which I imagine will give you some penalties if you go into negative happiness. So there could be 2 mechanics that work together to limit over expansion.

 

[AriochIV]

Happiness penalties for increasing number of cities is not exactly a new mechanic for Civilization.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Yeah that's all true.

What I liked about towns as an idea is that it would let you cover a lot of territory without adding to the micromanagement of endless build queues. As cities are likely to be more powerful than towns (because of they'll have more buildings and more ability for players agency to improve them), there's likely to be a continuous pressure to convert towns to cities. Having a city cap would counter act that, and enable a "go wide with towns" approach to be both viable and fun. For example by having a "core" of strong cities in the heart of your empire, and a "periphery" of weaker towns feeding them - a very long standing economic model of empire. But a settlement cap doesn't do that at all. It just limits total growth. If towns contributed only 1/2 or 1/3 as much as cities towards the settlement cap it would be a halfway house. But if they both contribute equally, it takes away most of the point of separating settlements into cities and towns in the first place IMO.

Maybe I'm theorising too hard on too little data. But I can't help but feeling that a settlement cap is taking Civ7 towards a more boring and stale type of empire building than the more dynamic and varied options that would result from having a city cap. I hope I'm wrong.

But remember also that towns need to reach a pop of 7 before you can convert them to cities (and you need to spend gold or something to do it). So not all towns will be able to be cities. And towns have benefits. They convert production to gold and can send yields and resources to cities. So you could have towns that never reach pop 7, or towns that you want to keep as towns for the resources. The devs mentioned that cities will need towns to send yields to them since they will not generate enough yields on their own to grow super big. So there will be plenty of reasons to have towns. You will not want to have just cities everywhere.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

But I would like if the optimal number of cities was fairly constant between play throughs, somewhere around the 3-12 range. A "wide" empire would make up the rest of its size with towns, while a "tall" empire would have far fewer towns but about the same number of cities. This is because I want both tall and wide empires to be viable, AND to never have to micromanage dozens of dozens of cities. This is something that have a city cap could probably achieve this design goal, but a city+town cap seems incapable of.

A city only cap would would only limit city expansion but would still allow unlimited towns. So it would not prevent over expansion. The "wide" civ could still spam infinite towns. I don't think that would be good. And I too want wide and tall to be viable. But I think having both wide and tall have the same number of cities is weird. But let's wait and see how the mechanic works. It could be that the tall civ will have say 3 cities and 1 town while the wide player has 6 cities and 3 towns. I don't think you will have dozens and dozens of cities if you play wide since the settlement cap will prevent that. Remember that cities also count towards the cap.

But there are a lot of details we don't know, like what exactly are the penalties for each settlement over the cap. Hopefully, it works well in the game.