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

[Boris Gudenuf]

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.

Well, just to repeat an earlier Post (P7D, or Pre Civ VII Discussion), even Genghis and the Mongols at their peak never conquered anything in Africa, western Europe or the Americas, so 'World Conquest' in any game has always been a Fantasy. On the other hand, being so Bad-A***d that even those you cannot quite extend far enough to conquer still walk softly around you is not that uncommon historically: Imperial Rome, the Ottomans, Great Britain, China, Russia - there's quite a long list of states that Dominated their portion of the map and then some.

We really need to see not only Victory Types, but also the Victory Criteria, because there are a lot of ways a Domination or Extermination Victory could be measured . . .

 

[Razpor]

Hard capping no. Of cities would make a domination victory not fun.

 

[Thormodr]

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.

That stinks. I sincerely hope the hand slapping of 5 is not rearing it's ugly head again.

I am not usually a warmonger but I do like playing the Mongols and sometimes...things happen.

 

[Disgustipated]

I am not usually a warmonger but I do like playing the Mongols and sometimes...things happen.

I do believe some civs do have higher cap on cities. And I'm sure Mongols will have something in their civ specific culture tree to help with that. So hopefully we can get our rampage on.

 

[Thormodr]

I do believe some civs do have higher cap on cities. And I'm sure Mongols will have something in their civ specific culture tree to help with that. So hopefully we can get our rampage on.

Agreed. I think warmongers should be able to have their fun like peaceful builders.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

I'm totally fine with limited number of cities because the ever increasing tediousness of managing a lot of those is what prevented me from going for domination victory in Civ6 (the clunky interface if you didn't mod it didn't help)!
Hopefully this means you can "conquer" a civilization and then turn it into some sort of vassal controlled by the AI because otherwise it would be near impossible to win by conquest which has always been part of the game.
Also hopefully the many different "levels" of settlements will still allow us to play "wide" of some sort, just without the hassles of managing dozens of full fledged cities.

 

[wallacer]

The town versus city distinction reminds me of Millennia, which is a mechanic that seems to work well.

 

[Mr. Shadows]

The limit on cities was Civ V's biggest weakness, and I was thrilled when I realized I was free to expand in VI. City limits are no fun.

 

[Thormodr]

The limit on cities was Civ V's biggest weakness, and I was thrilled when I realized I was free to expand in VI. City limits are no fun.

Yep. 5's hand slapping with the horrendous global happiness mechanic was horrible. The only iteration that I didn't play 500+ hours on, for that very reason.

I hope 7 does not go back to that horrendous mechanic. We shall see in September when the gameplay videos come out.

 

[stealth_nsk]

There's a difficult balance thing. On one hand, if expansion is not limited, it tends to snowball quickly. On the other hand, if tall and wide become equally viable, tall instantly win, because wide requires a lot of investment. So, any Civ have some form of expansion limit with bigger or smaller degree.

Civ 7 mechanics is interesting. I'm not sure how punishing is the cost of going over the cap. We know it costs happiness, but how bad it is - we'll see. Even if it is too punishing, it still causes interesting strategic decisions. You need to rush to fill your initial 3 slots, when you need to plan getting cap increase in sync with settlers building and conquest. Also, the raiding war once you're at your cap could be interesting as well.

And finally, as usual, we've only seen first age. Some things may change in later ones.

 

[B0RDERL1NE]

The definitions of Wide and Tall play are different in Civ 7, but rest assured that both are viable strategies!

 

[Nikolai II]

Hard capping no. Of cities would make a domination victory not fun.

I don't think we have been told this is a hard cap.

 

[Krikkit1]

Each Age has significant differences in game mechanics…. so it probably

Ancient: impossible to conquer the World (you can’t reach the whole world) and probably impossible to Conquer the “Known World”…although you Might be able to raze all your opponents cities and towns.

Exploration: You can reach and possibly conquer the whole world, (this is the era of the biggest empires, mongol, british, etc.). However, your conquests will probably be a drain on your economy

Modern: It may be possible to conquer the World in Modern, but I doubt it. More likely is to Reduce opponent civ to Independent People vassals. Having a core civ that spans the world should be almost impossible to maintain without investing all resources over hundreds of turns,

 

[historix69]

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. ...

Just a side note :
Imho Civ 5 is better than many players remember ...
The (Un)Happiness system there was a bit complicated but it actually allowed the player to have unlimited number of cities if they had the right Social Policies and Wonders (Forbidden Palace) and cities were big enough (size 30). Religion also helped ...

see https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-to-get-rid-of-global-unhappiness-per-city.568530/
for further details.

 

[Thormodr]

Just a side note :
Imho Civ 5 is better than many players remember ...
The (Un)Happiness system there was a bit complicated but it actually allowed the player to have unlimited number of cities if they had the right Social Policies and Wonders (Forbidden Palace) and cities were big enough (size 30). Religion also helped ...

see https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-to-get-rid-of-global-unhappiness-per-city.568530/
for further details.

Was extremely boring. In order to get out from under the Global Crappiness system, you'd have to do the same boring formula over and over again.

Hard pass on that style of gameplay.

 

[GeneralZift]

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!

Its not that simple to be honest. 12 cities is fine if the city management is simplistic. But Civ6 city management is extremely over the top, where for that game, 7+ feels like wide.
In Civ5, the city management is far simpler than Civ6. So it feels like wide at 9+.

Long story short, since they've simplified city management in Civ7, in favour of empire management, I think Tall would fit well in 6 cities, Wide is about 10 cities.

Just that the Devs don't think so and they set settlement caps at about 3-5. So... Who knows how it will play in the end?

 

[historix69]

General problem with limiting the number of cities :
- the limit must somehow scale with map size and number of players or you risk that large parts of bigger maps stay empty from the start
- players tend to maximize their power, so many players will go for their city limit before further "expanding" ...
Once they start to conquer and eliminate rival civs, they either have to keep or raze all those additional cities beyond their city cap. This again has the chance to turn a bigger populated map into a largely empty wasteland if too many civs are eliminated and the global city cap (= number of living civs x city cap) is greatly reduced.
- there usually is no difference between cities and military bases in Civ games.
The U.S. for example has a lot of military bases world wide : see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_installations
Such a global network of bases would not be possible with a city cap.

I like to play on Giant Maps with 30+ civs and maybe 30-100 own cities/outposts/bases to control strategic regions of the world besides my starting region.
So any permanent hard city cap would make this impossible without further modding.

For those who like a city cap, best way to limit number of cities per player is to just play on a small map where only a few cities can be placed anyway.

 

[Krikkit1]

- there usually is no difference between cities and military bases in Civ games.
The U.S. for example has a lot of military bases world wide : see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_installations

Assuming there are some types of Vassals (from civs or Independent peoples) then you can model it.

There was a screen showing a city limit of 15 at one point in the game.

Assuming that
1. The base city limits are depending on map type (particularly Tiles/civ)
2. The penalties for going over are soft
and
3. There is a possibility to turn conquests to vassals / independent peoples where they don’t impact your city cap

 

[rocksinmypath]

I'm not against having a limit. There's a similar mechanism in Civ 6 (i.e. amenities), and it's the least problematic thing when it came to domination. I don't like domination victory in Civ 6 because:

- Conquering cities becomes repetitive after the first few cities. On a Standard map, you likely have to conquer ~20 cities to win the game.
- Having to manage anything more than a dozen cities is a pain. It's even worse when half of your cities are from the AI and are naturally terrible, especially with reduced population, unhappiness from occupation and all the broken infrastructure that needs to be fixed.
- You're forced to keep these terrible cities because you can't delete capitals and are obliged to hold onto them for victory, and the other ones are required for maintaining loyalty.

Civ 7 can improve on this with:

- Making units less tedious to move around with commanders.
- An overhaul of victory conditions. I don't think they told us much about how you can win in Civ 7, but it does look like it will be very different from Civ 6.
- Towns. Towns don't have production queues, and that should make managing a large empire less tedious. I'm guessing city limit doesn't apply to towns (somebody please confirm), so you can still probably have a large empire, but only a few cities will bug you about what to build.
- Ability to relegate conquered cities to towns. I have no idea if this will be a thing is Civ 7, but having this option could reduce the burden of having to manage too many cities.
- Better AI capable of building attractive cities.

Also, Civ 6 restricts city boundary to three rings from the city centre, but I think there's a possibility that Civ 7 cities are allowed to grow bigger than that. This could mean that there doesn't need to be so many cities in the world in the first place. We also know that certain civs, like Rome, will have higher city limits than others, and that city limits can be increased through unlocking civics. Plus, the limit is a soft cap, and we don't really know exactly how severe the penalty will be when this cap is breached. For all we know, it could be about as impactful as in Civ 6, and again, I don't think that's what made domination unpleasant in Civ 6. So far, I'm not seeing any reason that the city limit will be a problem, even in a domination game.

 

[Krikkit1]

Actually regarding city management, hopefully the placement of populations can be queued (I want pops 1-5 to get these tiles in this order, and not have to come back until pop 6) or
Food first
Food + X
pure X