How do you feel about being limited in number of cities and can we conquer the world?

[Disgustipated]

I don't know a whole lot about the limit, but I know it's not a hard cap. You can go over that, but with penalties. I just hope they don't go too extreme Civ 5 style. There's a reason why I'm not a big fan of Civ 5, that being the biggest one. I also see this as yet another attempt to "even the playing field" by limiting player's options. And I have to say, I'm just not a big fan of all these rules changes punishing the player because they are "too good". But it remains to be seen how this works in game. I'm sure we'll find other ways to exploit over the AI. But taking their cities was always a good one.

It sure seems to me this game is having a much bigger focus of diplomacy over combat. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes you wonder if it will even be worth it to declare wars. With you being penalized for doing so. Hopefully they can get the balance right on that.

And will it even be possible to conquer the whole world? It's kind of ridiculous, but it's sometimes fun to do in games.

edit: And the other reason for limiting cities and the size of maps might be for performance reasons. I have a feeling this game is going to be tough for many people's systems to run.

 

[Leefizzy]

The cap has me hopeful for raiding/aggressive play once people people hit the cap instead of just mega building com hubs since there's only a few civs that feasibly can fight earlyish. From the MP side.
The military Milestone also states that conquered cities and towns count as 2 points over the usual 1.

As for the AI, I have accepted long ago that we probably won't be alive long enough to have human peer ai, for games it's too expensive for what's essentially a prestige project and lord knows the can of worms our successors will open up with the silicon children of humanity being essentially slaves, even if we cut the incentives inventing them by preemptively giving rights to something that doesn't exist yet.
The best way to get 'good' ai is to make the game complex enough for a person to like, simple enough for the ai to give a decent fight, but not win too much, similar to chess or something easier I think?

 

[Quintillus]

Not a hard cap? That's good. I'm with you on the city limit in V being one of the big reasons I went back to III and IV; it just isn't fun to have a Settler queued up and be enjoying the "eXpand" phase of a 4X and not be able to partake in that phase anymore because of an arbitrary limit. IMO, VI did the best job of soft-discouraging infinite city sprawl, with settler costs increasing the more you built.

IV did a decent job too, with city maintenance that was exponential for the number of cities. Probably a bit too exponential for my tastes, as sometimes I nearly went bankrupt as a result, but it was still a soft limit so long as you remembered to build a few cottages. III's corruption never prevented you from expanding, but presented an opportunity-cost tradeoff like VI does, albeit with more fun-decreasing side effects.

I think the only Civ game I've actually conquered the world in is III. It would probably have happened in other iterations if I didn't prefer large maps. So I wouldn't care much if it's very difficult to conquer the whole world. It's just too much effort, y'know? I started a Civ IV game as the HRE a couple years ago with a specific goal of conquering the world with the help of their maintenance-decreasing Rathaus, and never finished conquering the world. Though I agree it probably shouldn't be functionally impossible.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

It's jarring to see people who came to the game in Civ V think 8 is a lot of cities! To me anything under 10/12 is playing tall!

 

[Krikkit1]

I think
1. The towns v cities distinction
and
2. The Era mechanic

Means
1… plenty of expansion/conquest possibilities
but
2… Probably no conquering the world in Ancient Era…Alexander can get Egypt, Persia and Part of India, but his units/cities would al be dead/rebelled before China.


(hoping your units in Ancient era are distance limited from cities …ie lose hp; and your settlements distance limited from capital…ie lose happiness/gold…in addition to a limit in their number)

 

[DukeSammael]

Civ 6 also had a soft cap through Amenities, I think this was the right approach and could easily be instated again since we now have global happiness. I dislike hard caps.

However, I think cities/towns you conquer should have an option to become your vassals (don't remember which previous Civ had this, 5?) instead of being fully integrated into the empire. Both for realism and manageability.

 

[Thormodr]

Yeah, IMHO, Civ IV did pretty well in handling Rexing. (Rapid early expansion)
You could bankrupt yourself if you were not careful.

I hated corruption in Civ III. Super unfun.
5 was the worst, though. I HATED global happiness. It's the only iteration of the series that I literally quit playing. I gave it about 150 hours and then gave up.

Civ VI struck a pretty good balance with increased settler costs. I loved the loyalty mechanic. I really hope that comes back and punishes forward settling.

7 seems to have happiness returning. *Ugh* Hopefully it is the Vox Populi mod for 5 version rather than global happiness. I am a bit concerned but we'll see how it plays out.

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

I think
1. The towns v cities distinction
and
2. The Era mechanic

Means
1… plenty of expansion/conquest possibilities
but
2… Probably no conquering the world in Ancient Era…

That makes sense. Modern will probably be the Age of mass destruction and global conquest, heh.

 

[greenOak]

1. I have some trepidation because it sounds similar to civ 5's global happiness which was the worst mechanic in any version of civ - that is a hill I'm willing to die on.
2. I think such a mechanic could work as a method of reigning in (but not shutting down) expansion. It just depends on how severe the penalties are.

Building on point 2, here is what I think needs to be true for such a system to work:

They mention the cap is a soft cap but it must be the case that is frequently optimal to run over the cap. If it is rarely optimal to run over the cap, you effectively just have a hard cap. This is situation we found ourselves in with Civ V. Moreover, it can't slow down expansion to the point where you don't need to compete with AI empires for territory. If civs are generally better off sitting on their small amount of controlled land there's no reason to wage any wars unless you are specifically pursuing a domination victory.

The naval cap in Stellaris is an example of a soft cap done well in my opinion. It's ends up being a significant deterrent to just endlessly spamming out ships during peacetime, but a strong economy is able to support running at double or triple the naval cap and there are times in the game (eg when facing a strong end game crisis) where it becomes necessary to do so.

 

[AriochIV]

There has always been a "soft cap" on number of cities. Never stopped us before.

 

[pokiehl]

I’m excited. This plus the town vs city distinction seems like a great, organic way to limit city spam and make settling more thoughtful and strategic.

 

[TreVor_ish]

It's jarring to see people who came to the game in Civ V think 8 is a lot of cities! To me anything under 10/12 is playing tall!

Yeah...that's why my first question about the new game is always - what's the scale of the game?
I don't mind playing a city builder, if I can build, or conquer like at least 20 of them.

 

[Arent11]

It's jarring to see people who came to the game in Civ V think 8 is a lot of cities! To me anything under 10/12 is playing tall!

*Looks at his 46 cities in huge Alpha Centauri game*

 

[DSYoungEsq]

*Looks at his 46 cities in huge Alpha Centauri game*

46? Piker. Conquer Miriam and be done with it!!

 

[Roald Amundsen]

I'm pretty sure Firaxis won't ever remake Civ V's mistake again, and making empire building something undesireable. However, going away from the Civ 6 model makes me very optimistic. Building huge empires should be hard but not impossible or sub-par strategy.

 

[Disgustipated]

Going off the Ursa video, I learned that the penalty is -5 happiness per city over the cap, assuming I heard him correctly. It sounds pretty steep, but that of course depends on how easy it is to get happiness.

 

[Siptah]

Going off the Ursa video, I learned that the penalty is -5 happiness per city over the cap, assuming I heard him correctly. It sounds pretty steep, but that of course depends on how easy it is to get happiness.

Yeah, the same number as given by others. I think, if the game is properly balanced, you would want to have more towns than cities.

 

[Disgustipated]

And it seems when you conquer a city it becomes a town if I understand that correctly. This could be good in a way for those of us who like to go on conquering kicks every now and then.

 

[greenOak]

We don't have any idea how severe of a penalty -5 happiness per city actually is. It depends on how hard happiness is to get and what the effects of happiness actually are.

 

[Disgustipated]

I am hearing cities can revolt permanently, but the streamer I watched said they couldn't test that mechanic. Presumably that's later in the game. Otherwise what I'm hearing is negative happiness does the usual negative percentage on yields like production, gold, etc.

I should clarify above. I was thinking towns didn't count towards the cap, but it appears they do count towards the cap. Which means hardcore conquest of entire conquests might be out. So much for my Mongolian horde fantasies.