Limits to expansion?

[Biz_]

civ4 wasn't really that punishing though

civ4 had some pretty insane tile bonuses, and it was very easy for the first few settlers to pay for themselves

it worked in multiplayer because a human could read the graphs and hit you really hard at the right time, but single player was super easy to ICS

 

[Bandobras Took]

How is a city being a drain not a punishment? Both games reduce your gain from cities by having more. It's just how it feels.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

I may not have been sufficiently clear.

The difference is in what they were punishing.

Civ 4 didn't punish you for having cities. It punished you for having too many underdeveloped cities.

In other words, Civ 4 didn't worry about ICS so much as about REX. As opposed to Civ 3, where (as has been noted) you plopped down settlers in every single space you could simply to grab the land, you had to consider whether you could currently afford to do so.

As another has noted, the better you were at Civ 4, the more you could afford to do so.

 

[Bandobras Took]

Civ 4 punished rapid expansion and poor planning. New cities were a drain at first, but became a net gain once they and the cottages around them had grown, or they had enough population and buildings to have the right specialists.
In Civ 5 I almost always only got around four cities and my capital produced about half of all my culture and science. It was basically one city with a few outposts for access to resources and internal trade routes to the capital. The craziest thing was that it was sometimes more beneficial to let the AI found a city and then conquer it because you get fewer penalties -happiness, policy rate, national wonder cost- from puppets than from your own cities.

Very well said.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

In Civ 5 I almost always only got around four cities and my capital produced about half of all my culture and science. It was basically one city with a few outposts for access to resources and internal trade routes to the capital. The craziest thing was that it was sometimes more beneficial to let the AI found a city and then conquer it because you get fewer penalties -happiness, policy rate, national wonder cost- from puppets than from your own cities.

Which is one area that civ5 got 100% wrong IMO. Civ should be an empire building game, not a 4 city building game. If civ6 let's players expand more freely than in civ5, I will be one very happy civ player.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Empire building should not mean Civilization IV conquest simulator either.

 

[rastak]

Which is one area that civ5 got 100% wrong IMO. Civ should be an empire building game, not a 4 city building game. If civ6 let's players expand more freely than in civ5, I will be one very happy civ player.

I've always enjoyed a few grand cities as opposed to spreading out to cover every nook and cranny like cockroaches. Which is why I was never particularly good at 1-4.

 

[Haggbart]

Since buildings (and roads) won't cost maintenance in CiVI, there's a possibility that each new city will cost (as in CivIV). The cost might scale with number of cities, distance to capital etc. At least that will force you to develop your other cities before expanding and limit REX. That would also be in tune with the stated desire of making terrain more important, ie you might not want to grab that poor patch of land to make a city that will never become profitable.

 

[MIS]

I wouldn't mind REX. It seems to me the more cities, the better. I was always frustrated by being limited to 4 on CiV. They should do something to encourage optimal city placement, but apart from that, I'm OK. Sounds like you'll need more early defense than CiV, at least the later parts.

 

[Seek]

As long as tall and wide are still both viable I'm happy. I just don't want it to be that spamming cities in crap locations is always a no-brainer, or "take over your continent and sim-city" to be the dominant strategy.

Oh, BE, how you've scarred me

But I have faith in Ed Beach. Maybe it's a design goal to have the map filled in before the modern era

 

[UWHabs]

My impression is that ICS will essentially be "uncapped", however the fact is if you put your cities too close together, you won't have space to get the variety of districts. So while there might be nothing stopping you from putting a city every 3-4 tiles (or whatever the min spacing is), if each city only had, say, 1 usable district, it basically means each city needs to choose to build EITHER a library OR a bank. And if you're limited that way, it would naturally make it harder to endlessly sprawl out.

Whether there's a limitation to prevent REX, we'll have to see. Certainly it would suck if the strategy was "pump out 5 settlers off the bat, found cities everywhere, and watch them each become megapolises", but I imagine there will be something preventing that.

 

[kaspergm]

civ5 was fine with social policies becoming more expensive with more cities and culture victory being a real thing. the changes after launch to "discourage" ICS and get rid of culture victory were just silly

I liked the culture penalty with expanding in Civ5, that made sense - just not the science penalty. On the positive note, we might have a sort of balance (literally) feature here now that they have decoupled the technology tree from the civic/culture tree: Maybe wide empires will generally create more science (helping them proceed faster through the technology tree) but will receive culture penalty (making them proceed slower through the civic/culture tree), and vice versa for tall empires. That could work. Also, gold maintenance for cities growing with new cities might also be a good way to cut your incentive to spam those early cities, and again, this makes sense also realistically (more cities meaning more bureaucracy, corruption, etc.).

 

[bonafide11]

I may not have been sufficiently clear.

The difference is in what they were punishing.

Civ 4 didn't punish you for having cities. It punished you for having too many underdeveloped cities.

In other words, Civ 4 didn't worry about ICS so much as about REX. As opposed to Civ 3, where (as has been noted) you plopped down settlers in every single space you could simply to grab the land, you had to consider whether you could currently afford to do so.

As another has noted, the better you were at Civ 4, the more you could afford to do so.

Exactly. There were advantages in Civ IV to growing larger empires, but if you were not good at it, you would struggle to counter the limitations to it. In Civ V, there's just no real advantage to growing larger. You have an ideal way path to victory and it limits you to only have a few cities. There should be benefits to having a large empire.

 

[Nixalo]

I think the main limitation would be that making "bad cities" suck. The later the game goes, the more it takes a city to not be useless.

I think they might force later cities to need more amenities and housing than earlier ones. Who will want to stay in HickBordertown # 5 if the Capital has all the cool stuff.

 

[Bandobras Took]

I think the main limitation would be that making "bad cities" suck. The later the game goes, the more it takes a city to not be useless.

I think they might force later cities to need more amenities and housing than earlier ones. Who will want to stay in HickBordertown # 5 if the Capital has all the cool stuff.

I've never been a fan of game design that forces a player to choose between punishments.

From my point of view, it's far more engaging to choose between rewards.

 

[Louis XXIV]

I think it's important to distinguish between three terms:

ICS
REX
Expansion

ICS is Infinite City Sprawl. The premise of this is the idea of building lots of lots of cities and closely together as possible. Here is a good example. Firaxis has been trying to kill this forever. Global happiness worked, but it was too harsh. I think the District System kills this here since you need space to build buildings.

REX is Rapid Expansion. Basically, spamming settlers as quickly as possible to get as much territory as possible. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing as long as it isn't the only viable strategy. The best way to counter this is giving lots of other interesting things you'd rather do as well.

Then there's just simple Expansion. In my view, there's nothing wrong with encouraging expansion. It'll be limited by resources and map space. You can expand or you can build buildings. I think they do have to consider limiting warmongering expansion, particularly in a snowball effect, but that's my only concern.

 

[Acken]

Come on people you're not limited to 4 cities in civ5...

However yes I don't really like the fact that 1 city too many blocks your whole empire in civ5. Civ4 almost had it right. It should just emphasize a bit more on diminishing returns (tech penalty, social penalty).

All I know is that CivBE did it wrong.

 

[mitsho]

I can see the map (size) as the most limiting factor for ICS. Now that the buildings and bonuses seem more to be put onto the map itself, each city kinda needs some space to create the district. ICS works with a lot of cities as close together as possible and with bonuses "per city" - that doesn't seem to jive well with districts and "bonuses if you cluster three farms together".

That said, expansion by itself need not be bad, it just should come with a opportunity cost. Rapidly expanding to get the best city sites should mean you are exposed to attacks for example. So it's about the balancing factors and I do see the fear of the "strong core" pushes out units that conquer the rest city by city and you don't really need other cities at all. I am confident however that the devs are aware of this problem and have something else in mind for that particular thing.

 

[oddtail]

I was never crazy about the way Civ 4 handled things. I think Civ 5 went too far in the other direction, but I *like* big rewards coming from a tall strategy. I hope there is no arbitrary limit to the number of cities, but there are big benefits from high-quality cities that make investing too much in Settlers inefficient.

Ideally, I'd like a situation where it is beneficial to have just a few big, powerful cities that generate most of the science/production/military/culture, and smaller, peripheral cities are useful mostly for defense of the empire, snatching up resources, more money, and a small extra advantage in science. I *really* hope a "more cities are always better" strategy will not be viable.

As someone mentioned in the thread, a culture penalty without a science penalty might be the way to go. If you go for many cities, you're likely to have more science, but your empire is culturally stagnant and not that well governed (reflected by a different culture card dynamic). As long as there's an interesting trade-off, I'm all for such an approach.

 

[joncnunn]

I'm wanting to hear what they have to say myself.

Personally, I liked Civ IV Vanilla - post balance patches the best in this regards. (Before BTS added Corporations making totally junk cities productive with enough copies of strategic resources, but also before G&K added the extra penalty on different land masses.)

Under that model it was first send a few settlers out, but then improve their economy so that you could now support another city or two, rinse, repeat.

Civ III had the REX to all points and who cares if most of the cities are hopelessly corrupt until you can rush a courthouse, they aren't costing more than they take in. (In fact the lack of hammer production means there's very little building maintenance)

 

[The_Reckoning]

If I had to choose a system, what they have in place already sounds great for preventing runaway growth in existing cities. For a limit to expansion, I hope they just use something like this from SMAC:

It worked fine in SMAC except for the fact that you could cope with the extra drones way too easily using police units. Take that away and maybe add revolting cities which turn into city states and it could be perfect.