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

[Noble Zarkon]

12 cities is fine if the city management is simplistic.

I don't know if simplistic is the word I would use, city management in Civ IV is very efficient.

 

[greenOak]

I don't get why people think city management is so much more complicated in civ 6 than previous games. Aside from choosing district locations you're basically doing the same thing as you did in every other game. I'd actually argue that city management in civ 4 and certainly civ 3 was more micro-intensive than civ 6.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

I don't get why people think city management is so much more complicated in civ 6 than previous games. Aside from choosing district locations you're basically doing the same thing as you did in every other game. I'd actually argue that city management in civ 4 and certainly civ 3 was more micro-intensive than civ 6.

In Civ IV you could have 3 different queues saved, found a city and hit the key combo and it would go away and build what you had lined up. The information screens were much better as well (some of this might have been BUG). Managing dozens of cities in Civ IV was really easy whereas managing a dozen in Civ VI is painstakingly slow.

 

[greenOak]

In Civ IV you could have 3 different queues saved, found a city and hit the key combo and it would go away and build what you had lined up. The information screens were much better as well (some of this might have been BUG). Managing dozens of cities in Civ IV was really easy whereas managing a dozen in Civ VI is painstakingly slow.

Yeah I'm not buying the difference between "really easy" and "painstakingly slow" can be explained by not having a hotkey for specific build queues (it takes no more than 10 seconds to create the queue), and better information screens which is quite subjective and may or may not be the result of UI mods. It's far more likely you're just used to civ IV and can therefore playthrough the game faster.

 

[Krikkit1]

To discuss how we feel about limits to expansion, we need to first consider what we want end goal we want to see in the game. What I see as important design goals for mechanics related to city caps, settlement caps, global happiness, corruption, and all of that are:

• Allow for a broad range of strategies.
• Don't create a situation where the player needs to micromanage an excessive number of things (aka, handle the building queue for scores of cities).
• Encourage expansion such that there's no reason not to use up all the "good", nearby land by the end of the Ancient Era. Extending this to both all "good" land anywhere and all nearby "marginal" land by the end of Exploration. Eventually all but the very worse land by the middle of the Modern age.
• Punish rapid overexpansion.

These might seem in tension, but I don't think they are incompatible. Crucially, Civ7 splitting up settlements into towns and cities allows expansion without tedious repetitive micromanagement.

Encouraging expansion while discouraging rapid overexpansion could be done by having an opportunity / temporary cost for expansion which is eventually paid back (with interest) once the settlement has developed. This same opportunity cost could, in the right circumstance, even discourage expansion strongly enough to make going "tall", and ignoring all but the closest and most productive land, completely viable. Opportunity costs to expansion have existed in past Civs. The exponentially growing settler cost of Civ6 is one. The maintenance cost of Civ4 is another - a city would be a drain on gold until it grew enough and could produce more than it consumed (dozens of turns at least). This is different to corruption in Civ3, which took a fraction of the cities production but never made a city be a net negative to the empire's economy. Growing by conquering your enemies is another opportunity cost in terms of the resources that went into building the conquering army and recovering any losses.

Conversely, the global happiness of Civ5 was a permanent cost to expansion. A city would always be a net drain on global happiness from the turn it was founded until the end of the game (with a handful of ways of reducing this cost substantially). The settlement cap in Civ7 appears to be another such permanent cost. Note that both in Civ5 and Civ7 the limit is a soft cap rather than a hard cap, which is very important, and also one that increases during the game. But that doesn't stop those costs from being permanent rather temporary ones.

Putting all this together, how do I think the design goals above could be reached with the mechanics of Civ7? By having only an opportunity cost for new Towns (thereby encouraging the whole map to eventually be settled, though not too quickly), and having an AI and combat system that makes expansion-by-conquest expensive, while having a permanent cost to Cities (to discourage the player from upgrading all towns to cities and having to manage them all). By adjusting the size of those costs with policies, governments, civ abilities, wonders, techs, era etc... the game can allow a very broad range of expansion strategies to all be viable, and viable at different states of the game. Do I think Civ7 is going to reach this dream? I'm not sure. The fact that the cap is a settlement cap rather than a city cap means that towns also suffer from the same permanent cost and, to me, this is a big disappointment. I don't know enough about this version of happiness to know if Cities and Towns will be impacted equally under it. Not sure what opportunity costs there are (if there are any beyond the cost of a settler) to discourage the player from rapidly expanding right up to the permanent-cost limits.

I disagree with simple opportunity cost for towns, because territory is EVERYTHING in civ, all resources are based in territories.

Including Food/Hammers which is key to the population +buildings needed for those tall cities.

Opportunity costs just aren’t enough, because of the snowball

Now the Age /Crisis may help that, but that probably won’t be enough.

 

[GeneralZift]

I don't get why people think city management is so much more complicated in civ 6 than previous games. Aside from choosing district locations you're basically doing the same thing as you did in every other game. I'd actually argue that city management in civ 4 and certainly civ 3 was more micro-intensive than civ 6.

It's more mentally taxing. First of all, you need to consider District adjacency bonuses.
You need to settle cities where you can make use of the best possible District adjacencies in those lands. (eg triangles of industrial zones and aqueducts etc)
District adjacency is at odds with Tile improvement adjacency bonuses.

Don't forget special leader perks and civ perks and great person perks for all the various adjacencies!

Oh you're doing okay for now? Well, actually you forgot that you need to change your policies such that your Builders have extra charges so that you're playing efficiently!!
Now change them back for optimal play!!

Don't forget the Governors!!! Magnus needs to be in the right spot at the right time for you to cut out this single tile!!!

---

What a mad headache, and for one I am glad they're toning it down for Civ7.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

It's far more likely you're just used to civ IV and can therefore playthrough the game faster.

I have 4,000+ hours in Civ VI so I think I'm pretty used to it as well lol.

 

[greenOak]

It's more mentally taxing. First of all, you need to consider District adjacency bonuses.
You need to settle cities where you can make use of the best possible District adjacencies in those lands. (eg triangles of industrial zones and aqueducts etc)
District adjacency is at odds with Tile improvement adjacency bonuses.

Don't forget special leader perks and civ perks and great person perks for all the various adjacencies!

Oh you're doing okay for now? Well, actually you forgot that you need to change your policies such that your Builders have extra charges so that you're playing efficiently!!
Now change them back for optimal play!!

Don't forget the Governors!!! Magnus needs to be in the right spot at the right time for you to cut out this single tile!!!

---

What a mad headache, and for one I am glad they're toning it down for Civ7.

Fair points, but I'd argue that a strategy game being mentally taxing is a good sign. I'd hate to play a strategy game where I didn't have to think much.

 

[GeneralZift]

Fair points, but I'd argue that a strategy game being mentally taxing is a good sign. I'd hate to play a strategy game where I didn't have to think much.

Not necessarily. This type of mentally taxing is called Busywork. The developers themselves actually point it out in one of their latest interviews.

Choices that mean nothing (or little) but are taxing because there is so many are boring to make.
Similarly work which you have to do for no reason is called Busywork in game design. This makes it feel like a chore.

You know, accounting is pretty mentally taxing but probably makes for an awful strategy game

 

[greenOak]

Not necessarily. This type of mentally taxing is called Busywork. The developers themselves actually point it out in one of their latest interviews.

Choices that mean nothing (or little) but are taxing because there is so many are boring to make.
Similarly work which you have to do for no reason is called Busywork in game design. This makes it feel like a chore.

You know, accounting is pretty mentally taxing but probably makes for an awful strategy game

The choices mean a lot though. If they didn't people wouldn't complain so much that they needed to do these things to play efficiently. I just can't get on board with the part of the fanbase that wants there to be only macro-level strategy in civ.

 

[Mezmorizor]

I guess I'm glad that we're not just running back global happiness from civ V wholesale after civ V itself proved that it is either devastating and you can't play wide or it does nothing to stop expansion and it's optimal to just make your empire a minimum distance grid depending on the exact numbers chosen, but it's the answer to a question that 14 years later I still don't understand why it's a question. Why are we trying to curb expansion in an empire building game? Is it really a problem that a 12 city empire has more yields and is generally more productive than a 3 city empire?

If you understandably just want city placement to actually matter and not have civ I-III and early V/VI style ICS where city quantity is all that matters, just look at civ IV's maintenance which got abandoned immediately for confusing reasons. It did the job flawlessly. You can't afford more than ~4-5 cities until your cities are sufficiently large and you have prerequisite techs/civics, and it's always punishing enough that only lategame "colony" cities pay for themselves immediately which is such a small gain that it's not really worth doing. On a standard map you'll get like 0.3% more commerce at the cost of not growing as you build settlers when you do it. While not nothing, you can safely ignore it in non HOF games. The flavor of it is also pretty good. The bigger your empire, the bigger the bureaucracy you need to pay for to govern.

I guess to more directly answer the question, I did not enjoy this cap in humankind even though it didn't really succeed at doing what it was supposed to do there. I doubt I'm going to enjoy it in civ either. Especially if it's more successful at being a real strategic consideration. It's very blatantly gamey, and like I said before, it's a problem this same series has solved in a much less gamey way. Make expanding expensive so you can't do it too fast/hard. Don't just say "uh oh you're at 7 cities that's very naughty here's your civil unrest" or whatever penalty they decide to attach to being over the soft cap.

And for a final note, why are we running back what is quite literally the worst mechanic in civ history, global happiness? It was quite literally a completely broken mechanic. It didn't do what it was supposed to do, and it became a horrific kluge that still didn't do what it was supposed to do as the game was patched and rebalanced post release.

 

[acluewithout]

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

I feel like ‘I want to know more about how it works’.

Basically, if it’s a soft cap, and it increases based on Age and Techs, and you have other options to change it up or down, then I’m probably pretty happy with it.

I loved Civ 6’s ‘loyalty’ mechanic. I hope we get something like that back in Civ 7. Loyalty on Civ 6 was a good stop on wild expansion early game, and created interesting dynamics later in the game (eg impact of Religion or conquest on loyalty, wide + loyalty making it harder to specialise governors / cities or requiring valuable card clots or spending gold to buy monument / entertainment). But loyalty didn’t quite capture the challenges of wide empires and did little to make conquest hard at a certain point.

I think the current Civ 7 soft settlement cap will do a better job of slowing conquest snowball and making wide more challenging. The risk is it feels arbitrary or creates ‘train track’ play style, but I think that will be OK provided there are ways to play around with the cap (which it looks like there will be).

 

[greenOak]

If you understandably just want city placement to actually matter and not have civ I-III and early V/VI style ICS where city quantity is all that matters, just look at civ IV's maintenance which got abandoned immediately for confusing reasons. It did the job flawlessly.

IMO from a practical standpoint, civ 4's scaling maintenance costs did very little to slow down expansion. In my experience, on higher difficulty levels (say Monarch+), you still settled to take as much land as you could since all the city spots would get taken before maintenance costs became a serious issue. Then, you'd still eat an AI civ as soon as possible since their cities already provided more yields than their maintenance costs would add. The end result was still trying to expand as quickly as possible - which isn't necessarily a bad thing but I think it's important to realize that 99% of the time civ 4's maintenance costs didn't actually discourage you from expanding.

Despite hating the mechanic when I was kid playing the game, I actually think civ 3's corruption mechanic was the best anti-expansion mechanic in any version of civ. First we should ask ourselves why should we even have penalties for expanding? You'll probably get a lot of different answers, but the most common one I hear (and the one I agree with) is that helps prevent snowballing throughout the game. Despite expanding never hurting you in civ 3, it does a good job at reigning in snowballing because eventually adding a ton of corrupt cities will only provide you minimal yields. Maybe it's different on the largest civ 4 maps, but in civ 4 conquering AI cities will pretty much always provide you with a significant boost to empire wide yields. The fact that maintenance costs didn't scale by era resulting in a situation where your empire could support more and more cities the further you got in the game. This likely was intended, but it did create the situation where continual conquest would scale your economy massively. The maintenance costs would eventually make settling cities unappealing but in terms of snowballing, conquest has always been a much bigger offender than settler spam. Finally, civ 4's maintenance costs did help with civ I-III's ICS, but I don't see ICS as a fundamental problem unlike unchecked snowballing.

 

[Thormodr]

I guess I'm glad that we're not just running back global happiness from civ V wholesale after civ V itself proved that it is either devastating and you can't play wide or it does nothing to stop expansion and it's optimal to just make your empire a minimum distance grid depending on the exact numbers chosen, but it's the answer to a question that 14 years later I still don't understand why it's a question. Why are we trying to curb expansion in an empire building game? Is it really a problem that a 12 city empire has more yields and is generally more productive than a 3 city empire?

If you understandably just want city placement to actually matter and not have civ I-III and early V/VI style ICS where city quantity is all that matters, just look at civ IV's maintenance which got abandoned immediately for confusing reasons. It did the job flawlessly. You can't afford more than ~4-5 cities until your cities are sufficiently large and you have prerequisite techs/civics, and it's always punishing enough that only lategame "colony" cities pay for themselves immediately which is such a small gain that it's not really worth doing. On a standard map you'll get like 0.3% more commerce at the cost of not growing as you build settlers when you do it. While not nothing, you can safely ignore it in non HOF games. The flavor of it is also pretty good. The bigger your empire, the bigger the bureaucracy you need to pay for to govern.

I guess to more directly answer the question, I did not enjoy this cap in humankind even though it didn't really succeed at doing what it was supposed to do there. I doubt I'm going to enjoy it in civ either. Especially if it's more successful at being a real strategic consideration. It's very blatantly gamey, and like I said before, it's a problem this same series has solved in a much less gamey way. Make expanding expensive so you can't do it too fast/hard. Don't just say "uh oh you're at 7 cities that's very naughty here's your civil unrest" or whatever penalty they decide to attach to being over the soft cap.

And for a final note, why are we running back what is quite literally the worst mechanic in civ history, global happiness? It was quite literally a completely broken mechanic. It didn't do what it was supposed to do, and it became a horrific kluge that still didn't do what it was supposed to do as the game was patched and rebalanced post release.

Agreed. Global Crappiness was a terrible mechanic.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

Mechanically I hope it's not like Civ 6 loyalty in the sense that there was a standard list of counter-measures you had to memorize.

 

[Mr. Shadows]

Don't tell me how many cities I can have. I'm watching this mechanic closely, if it's too restrictive it's going to be a problem.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

I HATE City caps.
but what holds empire together is how good the Capitol orders outlying cities it rules over. and it is not simply because junior city is founded by son of the reigning King and Loyalty is guaranteed. there has to be measures to ensure that the Capitol could boss around those cities indefinitely. Over time new civic innovations came out to solve problems, such as 'Governors rule over a city or province only for a certain amount of year and will be subjected to mandatory transfers'. this to deny a governor's opportunity to raise an army against the Central Government. .

 

[Patine]

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 . . .

To be fair, every Civ victory condition is, "fantasy," in the real world, and none of them have ever been achieved.

 

[historix69]

Expanding and settling every fertile spot of land and every resource is part of human nature and quite natural. (Plants and animals would do the same unless they are kept in check by natural obstacles and adversaries.) So limiting number of settlements on the map seems unnatural and will always lead to problems, especially if there are different map sizes and map types (eg land vs water percentage).

It is a mistake of the series that we start with a mostly "empty" map and founding new cities is a player privilege. If an empty location on the map had higher attraction due to food and trade resources, in real life some people would go there and start a new settlement and add those resources to the international trade network.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonisation

In ancient times these human settlements were often independant, trading and waring with neighbouring settlements and also exchanging population. (Since Civ 1 the series actually fails to simulate Emmigration / Immigration and Trade of Resources, Food, Workforce between cities in detail.) Settlements were often conquered, plundered, razed and resettled.
It was often the Trade, local resources, power, strategic position but also amenities which decided if a city would grow or not. Ancient City Rome went up to around 1 million inhabitants but later (after loosing the Empire) went down to 30.000 in the early Middle Ages. Without Trade and Food from the Empire, Rome would have never been able to grow that much.

Roman Empire - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Rome - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Civ starts in 4000 BC.
Early known empires like Ancient Egypt started around 3000 BC. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egypt
Conquering Empires (and loosing them later) was a common aspect of human history. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire
Limiting the number of cities a player can control always bears the danger to remove the option for (ancient) empires and so exclude large parts of human history.
(Why play a Civ game if you cannot build your own Empire?)

So it shouldn't be too easy to start an empire in ancient times but it also should not be prohibited by game rules.

 

[Krikkit1]

Expanding and settling every fertile spot of land and every resource is part of human nature and quite natural. (Plants and animals would do the same unless they are kept in check by natural obstacles and adversaries.) So limiting number of settlements on the map seems unnatural and will always lead to problems, especially if there are different map sizes and map types (eg land vs water percentage).

It is a mistake of the series that we start with a mostly "empty" map and founding new cities is a player privilege. If an empty location on the map had higher attraction due to food and trade resources, in real life some people would go there and start a new settlement and add those resources to the international trade network.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonisation

In ancient times these human settlements were often independant, trading and waring with neighbouring settlements and also exchanging population. (Since Civ 1 the series actually fails to simulate Emmigration / Immigration and Trade of Resources, Food, Workforce between cities in detail.) Settlements were often conquered, plundered, razed and resettled.
It was often the Trade, local resources, power, strategic position but also amenities which decided if a city would grow or not. Ancient City Rome went up to around 1 million inhabitants but later (after loosing the Empire) went down to 30.000 in the early Middle Ages. Without Trade and Food from the Empire, Rome would have never been able to grow that much.

Roman Empire - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Rome - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Civ starts in 4000 BC.
Early known empires like Ancient Egypt started around 3000 BC. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egypt
Conquering Empires (and loosing them later) was a common aspect of human history. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire
Limiting the number of cities a player can control always bears the danger to remove the option for (ancient) empires and so exclude large parts of human history.
(Why play a Civ game if you cannot build your own Empire?)

So it shouldn't be too easy to start an empire in ancient times but it also should not be prohibited by game rules.

Humans settle every bit of fertile land. Empires don’t. The map should be full, but it should be full of Independent People. (every bit of land should realistically be “claimed” at the beginning of the game… but having it be completely full can probably be put off for the late Second or Third Age)

If you try to hold a bunch of settlements in your empire, it should be hard. (With ways that make it easier or harder)