House rule: Limit on city number/with government

[Arent11]

Since domination is so easy I recently started to impose a house rule on myself to make the game more fun. Basically I limit the number of cities I "may" control dependent on my government. It goes something like this:

Chiefdom: 4 cities
Republic/oligarchy/autocracy: 8 cities
Merchant republic/monarchy/theocracy: 12 cities
Democracy/communism/fascism: 16 cities

This makes the game much more interesting. You actually have to pick your wars, build encampments on choke points, plan your cities carefully, grab the right wonders. It's a little bit of 'settlers' feeling. And you finally(!) have enough builder charges to actually improve all tiles you wanted.

 

[Victoria]

Bravo! Self imposed rules keep this game fresh for me.
One fun one I tried was make a neighbour a friend and try your best to keep them a friend and take their capital last

 

[Arent11]

Bravo! Self imposed rules keep this game fresh for me.
One fun one I tried was make a neighbour a friend and try your best to keep them a friend and take their capital last

Well, I thought about modding the game, but I don't have time to really delve into that.

However, in fact there *is* a "hidden" limit to the number of cities you can "control", it is just less obvious than in previous civ games (happiness, 5% science disadvantage per city, corruption etc.). In civ 6 it is the increase in builder costs. The point is simply that at a certain point it becomes more worthwhile to spend your builder charges on the larger, existing cities instead of developing the smaller cities. There are several reasons for this - discount of army production by military academies, the cost of space race projects, the general cost of high end units, district projects to speed up research/culture in the end game. The point is just that it is quite difficult to figure out the actual "optimal city number".

 

[Jarms48]

Easy!

The house rule I'm using is never declare war and only ever fight defensive wars. Capture cities if you need to force a peace, but give them back in the agreement. "Stealing tiles" and liberating city-states is acceptable.

 

[Arent11]

Easy!

The house rule I'm using is never declare war and only ever fight defensive wars. Capture cities if you need to force a peace, but give them back in the agreement. "Stealing tiles" and liberating city-states is acceptable.

Do you get lots of gold for giving them back their cities? If so, playing defensively might be worthwhile. You could use that money to buy great scientists

 

[Jarms48]

Do you get lots of gold for giving them back their cities? If so, playing defensively might be worthwhile. You could use that money to buy great scientists

The AI are often willing to give gold, resources, and relics/art. The hard part is eventually you're going to run out of room to expand, and on higher difficulties you can have wars on numerous fronts.