Is the criticism correct: Is there no actual farm/rural-looking parts of the developed map? [Share your screenshots]

[Acken]

Typically you should be settling with some specialization in mind. If the terrain is mostly flat or coastal these make great food towns. If the terrain is more rough then this could be a better mining (gold) town.

Also consider what the town would be feeding. As mentioned above it's difficult to grow in antiquity at high pop counts if you don't have good growth bonuses (Khmer, Confucius etc). So if it's late in the age and the town would be feeding a high pop city (I wish you could direct where the food goes) ? Probably do another specialization and reconsider in the next age (you can switch at each age) or leave it on growth using the 50% bonus (which effectively double the food the town is receiving).

Similarly to growth bonuses, gold purchase bonuses make the value of gold rise up making mining towns more attractive if you have them.

By default (without much purchase bonuses), the production -> gold conversion of productive towns is a bad deal (You get a 1:1 conversion but you buy stuff at a 1:3/1:4 ratio) so I would always consider converting these highly productive towns when they are at high enough pops.

The jury is still out on what exactly is optimal, the above just puts down some things to consider.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Look at a large city like New York--how much rural space and farmland is there is New York City, including the boroughs? Basically none, unless you could parks. Any city in Civ VII that grows enough is going to eventually turn into to that sort of metropolis.

I haven't played Civ7, I'm only browsing to have an idea about the game. I'm only answering based on your real-world comparison here without judging the game in itself.

Transportation of both people and goods was way too difficult to make any city sprawl possible untill industrial revolution. People were living in the place where they were working in very packed cities, they didn't commute. The need for transit only appeared once industrial plants became too massive to be built in the city center or near the docks, which was only allowed with the development of rail (first for goods, later for people). But this mostly allowed cities to grow bigger, they remained pretty dense. It's only with the development of cars and freeways by the 1930's that you could really get massive low-density urban sprawl as it is the norm in the US today (but not necessarily in the rest of the world).

Now this being said, it's just a game, what matters is that it is fun.

 

[Leyrann]

There's some really good advice here. I've learnt a lot about how to utilize towns.

But what about the specializations? Does everyone just leave them on Food unless they are in a specific race/situation, e.g. needing more space for relics?

I find that in the vast majority of cases, food is the right option. The only alternatives (imo) are trade if you need the happiness (e.g. I settled in a crisis while I was already over my settlement limit and had to pivot) or range, urban center if you conquered a large city and don't plan on turning it back into a city and mining town if you've got a truly insane number of rough tiles. But most of the time, the food tiles are already the most appealing ones, and by the time you've claimed all resources and all food tiles the town will be big enough that there's no use growing it further anymore because it'd take too long. In fact you'll usually have a bunch of food tiles still unclaimed.

massive low-density urban sprawl as it is the norm in the US today (but not necessarily in the rest of the world).

And yeah this is also a thing. American cities are freaking huge from a European perspective (in the area they cover for their population). The greater New York metropolitan area is like half the size of the Netherlands, with a population comparable to the Netherlands (maybe a bit lower?), but like, it's all city. We're a very densely populated country over here, but we aren't just one big, New York sized city. (thank god)

 

[Leyrann]

I actually managed a pretty nice, mostly-contiguous area of farmland on the border of two cities and a somewhat cramped town. Although there's one woodcutter in the middle breaking things up...

Would love it if this just happened naturally all the time, rather than as an achievement to be proud of... Also, that it would be larger than a city, rather than smaller.

 

[icon41gimp]

It's weird that for most of human history up until the industrial revolution a high 90s % of people were involved in producing food largely via subsistence farming. Yet in the games you're easily able to get by without even looking for food (and the growth curve is so punishing it rarely pays off.)

 

[PauI]

farm adjacencies (think feudalism in civ6) and towns having visually clear less building/ city sprawl + maybe more rural details would help us rural enjoyers alot!
also it keeps the battlefield in wars more clean (warfare in urban areas can be visually exhausting sometimes)

 

[StargazingDog]

Having just completed a standard size map, I think the balance is fine. Cities fill with urban districts, like a city would. Towns fill with rural districts, like a town would.

 

[Leyrann]

farm adjacencies (think feudalism in civ6) and towns having visually clear less building/ city sprawl + maybe more rural details would help us rural enjoyers alot!
also it keeps the battlefield in wars more clean (warfare in urban areas can be visually exhausting sometimes)

Farm adjacencies aren't a good idea as the game is right now because you can only ever put one type of improvement on any specific tile. They'd have to introduce mechanisms to change which improvement can go on a tile in order to make that work.

 

[Elhoim]

Farm adjacencies aren't a good idea as the game is right now because you can only ever put one type of improvement on any specific tile. They'd have to introduce mechanisms to change which improvement can go on a tile in order to make that work.

Yeah, and a lot of the game code is actually based on improving the terrain type instead of the improvement. So when you see a "+1 of farms" is actually a +1 on all tiles that farms could be placed on. This is for keeping the warehouse yields for unique improvements, but makes everything a bit messy, IMO. I kinda dislike what they did with terrain yields in this game, they seem very detached from what they have in them (like having an oil field with +3 food because it's on a flat non-rough tile). I heavily doubt they'll change this, but I liked the improvement based yields way more.

I tried modding making all river tiles farms, no matter the type of terrain (rough/vegetated), but it became a never ending mess of code tweaks to avoid having them with high production and no food benefit.

 

[Elhoim]

I managed to make a nice farmland here.

Of course, not a single one in sight on the AI cities:

 

[Seek]

Farm adjacencies aren't a good idea as the game is right now because you can only ever put one type of improvement on any specific tile. They'd have to introduce mechanisms to change which improvement can go on a tile in order to make that work.

I'm not sure that's true - it would simply require an adjustment in settlement and improvement patterns.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Farm adjacencies aren't a good idea as the game is right now because you can only ever put one type of improvement on any specific tile. They'd have to introduce mechanisms to change which improvement can go on a tile in order to make that work.

Adjacencies also probably wouldn't balance well doubling up on the warehouse buildings giving bonuses to improvements, which is essentially what they're replaced the adjacencies with.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I find that in the vast majority of cases, food is the right option. The only alternatives (imo) are trade if you need the happiness (e.g. I settled in a crisis while I was already over my settlement limit and had to pivot) or range, urban center if you conquered a large city and don't plan on turning it back into a city and mining town if you've got a truly insane number of rough tiles. But most of the time, the food tiles are already the most appealing ones, and by the time you've claimed all resources and all food tiles the town will be big enough that there's no use growing it further anymore because it'd take too long. In fact you'll usually have a bunch of food tiles still unclaimed.

I haven't really played with them too much, but it seems like "Hub Town" would work out pretty well too considering how hard influence is to come by. Usually, yeah, I either make one of the food towns or procrastinate and don't change it to anything :/

 

[Leyrann]

I haven't really played with them too much, but it seems like "Hub Town" would work out pretty well too considering how hard influence is to come by. Usually, yeah, I either make one of the food towns or procrastinate and don't change it to anything :/

The issue is that towns don't innately connect to a lot of settlements. You can probably get a bunch of connections with merchants but that's quite a lot of effort (and gold/production) for not actually all that much influence.

 

[Krikkit1]

It's weird that for most of human history up until the industrial revolution a high 90s % of people were involved in producing food largely via subsistence farming. Yet in the games you're easily able to get by without even looking for food (and the growth curve is so punishing it rarely pays off.)

Those 90% of people doing subsistence farming are in the unimproved parts of the map