As a partisan for balancing realism and gameplay, I think it's worth pointing out that making "tall" nations more balanced against "wide" nations serves both masters. irl, there's no correlation between the big countries and the countries that are doing well in the metrics that Civ uses for its Victory Conditions (and, just to be clear, there's no negative correlation, either).
Wikipedia: List of countries by population
Wikipedia: List of countries by area
Glance down those two lists and take a quick tally in your head of which countries are leading in religion, science, culture, and military dominance. Of course population and area don't map exactly onto number of cities, but it's approximate. For a quick n' dirty comparison, China in Spring 2017 had 100 cities of 1,000,000+ people, and France had 7. Is China just curb-stomping France in religion, science, culture, and military strength? Not even a little bit. (If you drop the population count to 500,000, France has 17 such cities; I can't find how many Chinese cities of 500,000 there are, but I suppose it could be 300-400. The Chinese may not even consider a population of 500,000 to be a city at all.
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