Let the player buy new tiles for a city by culture instead of randomly assign them

[historix69]

In many Civ5 games I see the game aquire nonsense tiles for a city forcing the player to spend the few pieces of gold he has to buy needed tiles at increasing rates.

Example :
A city has enough food and no production and the game aquires new food tiles in 3 tiles distance while many existant food tiles are unworked due to lack of population. Forest, hills and hills with Gold are mostly ignored, so the city has food but no production and also no income.

For Civ6 I would recommend a system where the player can buy tiles via local culture :
Culture produced in a city distributes to both a local and a global culture counter like in Civ5. All tiles around a city have a culture cost value depending on distance (in movement points), terrain, ressources with tiles yielding much food, production, gold being more attractive for people and therefore are slightly cheaper. The cost for a tile would also depend on the number of surrounding tiles owned by the player. When enough local culture is accumulated, the player decides which tile to buy or to wait to buy a more expensive tile (depending on his strategy.) In some situations it might be usefull to buy tiles strategically to reduce total costs or first build a road connection to make a tile more accessible.
Finally a city should only be able to buy tiles which directly connect to existing city territory to avoid typical Civ5 terrain fragmentation where cities control single unconnected tiles after ownership of cities has changed.

 

[SMcM]

In many Civ5 games I see the game aquire nonsense tiles for a city forcing the player to spend the few pieces of gold he has to buy needed tiles at increasing rates.

Example :
A city has enough food and no production and the game aquires new food tiles in 3 tiles distance while many existant food tiles are unworked due to lack of population. Forest, hills and hills with Gold are mostly ignored, so the city has food but no production and also no income.

For Civ6 I would recommend a system where the player can buy tiles via local culture :
Culture produced in a city distributes to both a local and a global culture counter like in Civ5. All tiles around a city have a culture cost value depending on distance (in movement points), terrain, ressources with tiles yielding much food, production, gold being more attractive for people and therefore are slightly cheaper. The cost for a tile would also depend on the number of surrounding tiles owned by the player. When enough local culture is accumulated, the player decides which tile to buy or to wait to buy a more expensive tile (depending on his strategy.) In some situations it might be usefull to buy tiles strategically to reduce total costs or first build a road connection to make a tile more accessible.
Finally a city should only be able to buy tiles which directly connect to existing city territory to avoid typical Civ5 terrain fragmentation where cities control single unconnected tiles after ownership of cities has changed.

That should be the UA of a particular civ I think.

 

[historix69]

You can compare the random tile acquisition with an automated worker. Imagine your workers were always fully automated and would build random improvements and you can't give them specific orders unless you pay an increasing amount of gold ... nobody wants to play such a game ... random tile acquisition is very similar.

The idea above was to improve the playability of the game for all players, not only for a certain civ. If it would be implemented as a UA for a single civ, I probably would mod the game so that all civs would get this UA to enjoy playing them ...

 

[KrikkitTwo]

You can compare the random tile acquisition with an automated worker. Imagine your workers were always fully automated and would build random improvements and you can't give them specific orders unless you pay an increasing amount of gold ... nobody wants to play such a game ... random tile acquisition is very similar.

The idea above was to improve the playability of the game for all players, not only for a certain civ. If it would be implemented as a UA for a single civ, I probably would mod the game so that all civs would get this UA to enjoy playing them ...

Except the automated workers are free, and they don't remove any improvements you have.

Think of the culture acquisition of tiles as "Free tiles" (after all you get the culture for your social policies regardless of if you use it for tiles)

I could see a case where you Only buy tiles (out of your money OR out of your culture.... so more territory means less social policies... or less civics in civ 6)

 

[historix69]

In Civ Games the tiles which are not occupied by a military unit or a city center are usually empty and can be worked by population of a nearby city ... the player can shift population inside a city at will ...

The tiles were free in Civ1 and Civ2 ... the culture system was introduced in Civ3 and Civ3 and Civ4 used the dynamic culture-flipping based on accumulated culture per city ... The random acquisition of single tiles is an invention of Civ5. The same applies to the exponentially increasing costs for culture (local) or when buying tiles with gold (global). With the district system in Civ6 it is unlikely to return to culture flipping.

I liked the idea of culture flipping in Civ3 and Civ4 since it was fun to take over your neighbour's cities by culture ... but I don't like the current Civ5 system ...

So when the unoccupied tiles are actually empty terrain, what is changed by culture or gold to make the tiles workable by a city? Invisible native inhabitants which do not interact with the player further for the rest of the game?
Acquiring sea-tiles per culture is even more nonsense ... invisible sea people?

These are unfunny unrealistic game design decisions ... in real life a nation would sent a (military) engineer corps and would build land/naval infrastructure in a region if necessary (= national interest) ... There is no logical reason why a worker/workboat should not acquire tiles for a city by simply working them, e.g. build a farm or a mine or by fishing ... we had such discussions for Civ5 mod ideas already ...

The ideas in the op were meant to make the tile acquisition per culture more attractive for the player by giving him more control like in Civ1-4 ...

 

[KrikkitTwo]

In Civ Games the tiles which are not occupied by a military unit or a city center are usually empty and can be worked by population of a nearby city ... the player can shift population inside a city at will ...

The tiles were free in Civ1 and Civ2 ... the culture system was introduced in Civ3 and Civ3 and Civ4 used the dynamic culture-flipping based on accumulated culture per city ... The random acquisition of single tiles is an invention of Civ5. The same applies to the exponentially increasing costs for culture (local) or when buying tiles with gold (global). With the district system in Civ6 it is unlikely to return to culture flipping.

I liked the idea of culture flipping in Civ3 and Civ4 since it was fun to take over your neighbour's cities by culture ... but I don't like the current Civ5 system ...

So when the unoccupied tiles are actually empty terrain, what is changed by culture or gold to make the tiles workable by a city? Invisible native inhabitants which do not interact with the player further for the rest of the game?
Acquiring sea-tiles per culture is even more nonsense ... invisible sea people?

These are unfunny unrealistic game design decisions ... in real life a nation would sent a (military) engineer corps and would build land/naval infrastructure in a region if necessary (= national interest) ... There is no logical reason why a worker/workboat should not acquire tiles for a city by simply working them, e.g. build a farm or a mine or by fishing ... we had such discussions for Civ5 mod ideas already ...

The ideas in the op were meant to make the tile acquisition per culture more attractive for the player by giving him more control like in Civ1-4 ...

You are manipulating your own population to get them to patrol (and possibly work) that tile on a permanent basis... you are making them think that the tile is part of their city.
(The same as you cannot just "declare a social change" you must have sufficient culture/technology to persuade your people to implement it.)

 

[Ryika]

I think being able to choose tiles has both, positive and negative aspects. On the one hand it's very useful to "perfect" your empire, on the other hand it would be a ton of micromanagement to handle that for all cities.

Not really sure which one I'd value more, but in general I'm probably okay with the current system. After all you can buy tiles with Gold if you think its benefits outweigh the costs.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Not really sure which one I'd value more, but in general I'm probably okay with the current system. After all you can buy tiles with Gold if you think its benefits outweigh the costs.

I think that we can all agree that the current prioritization system is dubious at best. Whether or not it's worthwhile to interrupt play in order to open a dialog box that permits choosing a tile is another question.

I would also tend to think that a better selection algorithm for which tile to pop with would reduce this complaint substantially. If top-tier players regularly force pops on tiles with relative to what the existing AI algorithm prioritizes for natural pops, there's a very strong chance that the algorithm is wrong.

 

[Ryika]

Well, it's an indicator that top-level strategies have different priorities than the algorithm was designed for. Which isn't ideal, I agree.

Maybe having a second city-focus that changes the priorities for Tile Acquisition would be a good middle ground, or even tying it to the general focus, assuming the production-exploit is fixed.

 

[m15a]

I don't think the city tile expansion algorithm is meant to choose the best tiles for your city. It's meant to seem somewhat natural while also favoring tiles with resources. So the fact that the algorithm doesn't match what you want doesn't mean it's bad. It's not really like worker automation which ideally should do what you would have done anyway, and it doesn't have to be because it uses a different yield than if you manually buy tiles.

Besides being tedious, I think choosing all your tiles could easily result in very unnatural gamey city areas - like 11 tiles in a straight line just to block off territory from your opponents. Messing with culture costs could help that somewhat, but since the game won't know what kind of gamey strategy you have, it won't charge enough to counterbalance it.

 

[historix69]

I think that we can all agree that the current prioritization system is dubious at best. Whether or not it's worthwhile to interrupt play in order to open a dialog box that permits choosing a tile is another question.

I would also tend to think that a better selection algorithm for which tile to pop with would reduce this complaint substantially. If top-tier players regularly force pops on tiles with relative to what the existing AI algorithm prioritizes for natural pops, there's a very strong chance that the algorithm is wrong.

To avoid a mass of micromanagement in the late game, there could be an option to automatically assign new tiles based on city governour logic and focus (Food, Production, Gold, Culture, ...). If the player is unhappy with the results he can switch the city back to manually choose tiles ...

There could also be the option to define a tile-acquisition-queue for a city ... since the cost for tiles would depend on terrain, distance as well as status of neighbouring tiles, the sequence in which tiles are acquired would matter ...

 

[TRoosevelt]

To avoid a mass of micromanagement in the late game, there could be an option to automatically assign new tiles based on city governour logic and focus (Food, Production, Gold, Culture, ...).

I like your idea - yes, you should have some say in the matter - but micromanagement would be a problem if you had a lot of cities. But this idea that you have here, having influence over each governor if not direct input, might be the best solution of all.


Obviously, you would want luxuries to have a high priority, but sometimes someone might want a particular tile because of its defensive advantages, or might want access to the sea (now that we don't actually have to build on the coast to gain sea access anymore), or maybe someone might want two of their cities to join up quickly. I don't see why you should be forced to spend ever higher amounts of gold just to get what a smarter algorithm would likely give you for free.


There should be several options you can order the governor to follow, just like you said: production, luxury resources, strategic resources, gold, sea access, connection, defensive boundary, etc. Maybe to make it more fair to the AI, we should let any of them with cities near our expanding city treat our direct influence over our governor's tile selection the same as if we bought the tile directly with gold. And we will then have to "defend" our governor's decisions - with diplomacy hopefully, but with arms if all else fails.

 

[Reboot]

I would like some control over where my borders expand even if it's at a natural pace (i.e. not buying the tiles). Maybe a tick-option can be included - those who want to automatically expand borders can leave this unchecked. Those that want to micromanage their border growth can check it.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I would like some control over where my borders expand even if it's at a natural pace (i.e. not buying the tiles). Maybe a tick-option can be included - those who want to automatically expand borders can leave this unchecked. Those that want to micromanage their border growth can check it.

Well then the 'check marks' should not be the places you expand to, but that you autobuy when you have sufficient gold.

(or perhaps if the next 'natural tile' has multiple options it will prioritize ones with a check mark)

 

[Reboot]

Well then the 'check marks' should not be the places you expand to, but that you autobuy when you have sufficient gold.

(or perhaps if the next 'natural tile' has multiple options it will prioritize ones with a check mark)

I mean a check option in the game settings. Check it if you want to manually handle border growth. Uncheck by default to leave it automated.

This manual selection is useful because there are times when the game doesn't choose the tile you want it to. e.g. - it favours unique resources and food. Sometimes it's more important to grab that hill overlooking the river crossing first, or the straits so that you're in control of the naval access at a gateway, etc. Or grabbing the land shared with another civ's city instead of a tile where there isn't any challenger. etc.

 

[Suho1004]

[First post since 2010! Hello again, Civ Fanatics!]

This is one thing (well, one of a number of things) that has always bugged me about Civ 5: I love how borders expand tile by tile, rather than just popping out in rings, but the fact that you have no control over this expansion can be frustrating.

In my current Civ 5 game I am playing Inca, and I settled my second city in a prime spot--I have a row of hills that snakes in between two mountain ranges, meaning that I'll have three 5/2 tiles right out of the gate once I get terrace farms on them. But when I finally researched Construction and was ready to start terrace farming, my borders had still not expanded in that direction. I ended up having to buy all three of those tiles because they were never prioritized. In fact, I've bought a ton of tiles in this game because my cities always want to expand toward tiles that are not as useful to me.

I know that there is an algorithm for expansion, although I'm not sure exactly how it works. I do know that, for one, resources are prioritized, which is generally a good thing. But when I already have two sugar online in my capital, do I really need to be expanding toward another sugar four tiles away when I still have unclaimed mountain-adjacent hills only two tiles away in the other direction? The problem with the algorithm is that it treats all situations as being equal, but they are not. The Inca are probably a bit of an extreme case, but in every game I play I find myself at some point wishing that my borders would expand to a certain tile that is not being prioritized.

Sure, tile buying saves the day here, but when you have control over everything else that happens in your cities, it's frustrating not to have control over this aspect. As far as I'm concerned, tile buying should be for if you want to expand faster, not to counter an algorithm that isn't doing what you want it to do. I realize that there are a lot of things wrong with the comparison, but imagine if you could not override the governor and instead had to bribe your citizens to work certain tiles over the ones they are assigned to.

It could be argued, I suppose, that cultural border expansion is a more natural or organic process than assigning citizen workers, and so it makes more sense that it would be out of the player's control, but that's a realism-over-gameplay argument, and I'm a gameplay-over-realism kind of guy.

So, now that we're looking forward to Civ 6, I'm wondering what border expansion will be like. From what I've seen from the videos, it looks like borders will continue to expand one tile at a time, but do we have any information beyond that? The devs have been talking about how they want players to "play the map," or make different choices based on their current geography/topography. It seems to me that giving players control over border expansion would be very much in line with that goal, so I'm cautiously hopeful at this point. I think one solution would be to retain the algorithm so that it would function similarly to the governor: you can let it do its thing without having to worry about it, but if you want finer-grained control over things, you can override it by choosing the next tile to expand to. That's what I would like to see.

(Oh, and since this is my first post on Civ 6, I do want to say that I love what I see so far! This is just one little niggling thing that I hope is addressed.)

 

[Ivan Hunger]

As far as I'm concerned, tile buying should be for if you want to expand faster, not to counter an algorithm that isn't doing what you want it to do.

This is a reasonable argument, but my one concern is that buying tiles is already generally considered to be a bad investment, and allowing the player to control culture expansion would make it an even worse one. Firaxis would need to drastically reduce the cost of buying tiles, or no one would ever have any reason to do so.

 

[Browd]

Moderator Action: Merged with existing thread in Ideas & Suggestions.

 

[King Jason]

There isn't any evidence to suggest that culture is still tied to border growth. There is no indicator of border growth anywhere in any of the shots of the U.I. that we've seen.

Given that Land-Surveyors is an earlier policy granting 20% reduction to tile purchases, I'd been operating under the assumption that we buy the tiles at all times... because really, Why would you actually run that policy over any of the other ones we've seen thus far if borders expanded on their own. It would be a very narrow policy if it were meant for stock-piling gold and mass-buying tiles while you adopt it for a few turns only to toss it out later.

This also jives well with Ed's anti-automation stance. Placing the control of your borders directly in the player's hands seems a prime place to enact this philosophy within the game's design.

 

[Suho1004]

@Browd: Ah, sorry. Didn't realize this thread existed--I've just been hanging out in the Civ 6 discussion forum. Not surprised to see that these ideas are not new.

This is a reasonable argument, but my one concern is that buying tiles is already generally considered to be a bad investment, and allowing the player to control culture expansion would make it an even worse one. Firaxis would need to drastically reduce the cost of buying tiles, or no one would ever have any reason to do so.

It is true that I would much rather spend my gold on other things, but buying tiles can be very powerful, especially when you are trying to snag certain tiles or set up favorable borders with nearby civs. I would imagine that, even if players are able to choose tiles, there would still be situations where you would want to buy tiles.

There isn't any evidence to suggest that culture is still tied to border growth. There is no indicator of border growth anywhere in any of the shots of the U.I. that we've seen.

Given that Land-Surveyors is an earlier policy granting 20% reduction to tile purchases, I'd been operating under the assumption that we buy the tiles at all times... because really, Why would you actually run that policy over any of the other ones we've seen thus far if borders expanded on their own. It would be a very narrow policy if it were meant for stock-piling gold and mass-buying tiles while you adopt it for a few turns only to toss it out later.

This also jives well with Ed's anti-automation stance. Placing the control of your borders directly in the player's hands seems a prime place to enact this philosophy within the game's design.

Well, that's something I had not considered. I agree that it jives well with Ed's anti-automation stance, but having to spend gold to buy every tile seems a little severe, no? The economy would have to be changed drastically to allow players to expand at all in the early game, and I could see this leading to imbalances elsewhere. The gold purchasing costs of units and buildings would have to be raised considerably to balance this out. Either that or tile costs would have to be lowered drastically in order to make this feasible--and if that is the case, then the Land Surveyors policy won't be nearly as useful.

Anyway, I kind of thought that the whole point of policies was that you could switch them in and out depending on your situation at that moment in the game. I imagine there would be some policies that would benefit you over the long term, while other policies might provide greater benefits but be more limited in how long they are useful.