On the topic of City Package and Unpackage

[GeneralZift]

This was mentioned on the other thread and I thought it would be beneficial to host a topic just for it.

Where do you think the balance of packed to unpacked should stand?
By this I mean, how many things should be inside the city centre as opposed to being able to be placed outside the city centre?

What about the existence of improvements and districts?

How do you address the urban / rural divide, and how do you address readability?

 

[McSpank01]

This was mentioned on the other thread and I thought it would be beneficial to host a topic just for it.

Where do you think the balance of packed to unpacked should stand?
By this I mean, how many things should be inside the city centre as opposed to being able to be placed outside the city centre?

What about the existence of improvements and districts?

How do you address the urban / rural divide, and how do you address readability?

I think it is really a question of scale in comparison to the map. I have no problem with a city that is fully unpacked if it feels appropriate for the scale of the map overall. One issue I think Civ 7 has is that cities just take up too much space across the whole map. They do not look in proportion and it means that later game maps just look like someone vomited grey onto the landscape.

 

[Crashdummy]

I prefer packed cities, with improvements being on the map but buildings not being shown

I do realize the game has gone past that from Civ 6, but i think Civ 7 went too far and the impact it had on readability should have been a red sign for Developers.

Once the decision to unpack cities was done, readability should be the main factor to take into account when they have to decide how to do it

I think Civ 6 addresses all these issues very well, and Civ 7 did everything wrong on this subject

 

[GeneralZift]

My personal opinion below:

I would like a more condensed system than we've seen so far and with a bit more nuance.

I would do this by removing districts and allowing players to place structures directly onto tiles, with tiles allowing up to 3 structures.
This would essentially be an urban district.

The urban district can then become themed based on what 3 structures you put in. So 3 Science buildings becomes a Campus.
You could also build more than 1 of the same structure, with diminishing returns. So no more 1 magical library for the entire city.

You could place rural structures, but they consume the entire tile. This is not because of their size but because it will be 1 structure + an enormous plot of land to fit in the farm for example.

I miss the old improvements because it means you could pick what you wanted to put on the tile rather than just improving it without choice like Civ7.
In this system that choice comes back.

You have the capacity to raze the structures and restyle your urban districts, but it consumes money and production to do so (but you can get better bonuses with better urban planning).

Why is this better for visuals? Because it's more packed.

Why is it better for gameplay? I think it adds variety and allows you to freestyle. Save some space by throwing a Barracks and a Library on the same tile in a small village.

It would make little villages actually look little.

 

[Leucarum]

Does it help to present this as a binary choice? Civ6 had unpacked cities to a lesser extent than Civ7 and I think it worked really well.

The issues with it in Civ7 that are most often mentioned are endless sprawl and unreadability which I think are more an issue with thwre being too much stuff which was unpacked rather than unpacking being a binary good/bad choice.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Something that I've been thinking about is the idea of having a separate city map filled with districts, which is visible when you click on the city tile or when you start to produce a building or wonder and you need to pick the tile, so city sprawl itself won't be seen on the world map.

 

[WillK96]

I think unpacking is good, but Civ VII goes way too far. I don't have strong thoughts on how I'd change it, but something like 4 buildings per tile, and a maximum # of urban tiles linked to population growth (like Civ VI), would be a better balance.

 

[pjotroos]

I like what VII is trying to do in principle; settlements growing out organically from the centre, with some early decision-making about building in sub-optimal spot for immediate benefits, or delaying the building until we can reach the high-value adjacencies.

I don't mind the fact that the buildings are hard to read in the default view. It's not great for quick decision-making, but it makes for a stunning view, especially once zoomed in, and I don't need that at-a-glance information all the time. However, once you go into the city lens, there should be clear colour indicators, in the style of Civ VII (so science buildings go bright blue, and so does the whole district if it's a science quarter) - basically what @beezany does in the City Hall mod.

All of my major issues are with how the city-sprawl works. More specifically:
- there are no restrictions on how many districts you can place, so long as they are connected together
- there are no restrictions on how far from the center you can place the buildings at any point
- there is no incentive to cluster buildings in quarters together for towns
- you can only claim rural tile if it's connected to another claimed tile
- your rural districts can go up to third ring, your urban districts can go up to third ring, and your borders will only ever grow three tiles out
Combine all of the above with the fact that there's almost as many buildings available in antiquity as there is in exploration, or modern, and we end up with megacities in the year 2000 BCE. I'm someone that quite likes the mega-city look in the late game, as a result of development over the course of game. It absolutely shouldn't be something that starts happening 20% into the campaign.

There's few changes I'd love to see to address that. Values are placeholders:
- Each settlement can initally create two districts, in addition to the town centre. Every two rural population allows you to create another district. Specialists count as 0.5 rural population.
- Each settlement can initially create buildings only on the first ring. You need rural population of 6 to build on the second ring, and rural population of 15 to build on third ring.
- Wonders can be build at any time, and on any ring. However, each wonder "consumes" one rural population - pushing the requirement further for the next district to unlock.

That does a couple of things. It gives food more value, compared to production. It makes the city spread more gradual across the ages. It forces towns to be more compact - no more settling one down, and then immediately exploding it over the map by insta-buying the warehouse buildings onto separate tiles, getting to multiple third ring resources on the first turn, if you so wish.

You could then start doing some fun stuff with the quirky civilizations that could use some love. For example, specialists count double instead of half for Khmer. Carthage has no restrictions in the capital. Rome has fewer restrictions on towns.

And then, on the flipside, I'd want to make sure the gaps in between your settlements can eventually go away, even if you're not America or Nepal. Let the borders spread into the fourth ring in exploration if a third ring tile was claimed. Let us claim those tiles as rural in modern (base improvements only), and grow borders into the fifth ring if we so wish.

We have three distinct eras, with their own rulesets. It doesn't make sense that the rules for buildings and borders are identical across the three.

 

[GeneralZift]

Does it help to present this as a binary choice? Civ6 had unpacked cities to a lesser extent than Civ7 and I think it worked really well.

The issues with it in Civ7 that are most often mentioned are endless sprawl and unreadability which I think are more an issue with thwre being too much stuff which was unpacked rather than unpacking being a binary good/bad choice.

I don't think anyone presented it as binary.

 

[stealth_nsk]

From visual standpoint I think maximum number of buildings per district is 6. Hexagon could be split into 3 triangles which aren't much smaller than 1/4 in Civ6. Although that's borderline, because a district with a single building will look pretty empty. Probably it will need some filler, like default park zone. Whether districts should be specialized like in Civ6, or free-form like in Civ7, depends on many other game design decisions.

Overall I like concept of city sprawl and visually I like Civ7 approach of tile-by-tile expansion. But I think together with wonders it takes too much space. Increasing settlement radius is something which is long time on the table, but potential consequences and the amount of micromanagement is scary. But probably, with removal of workers it's time for the next game?

Districts with walls they could look pretty ugly. I believe from visual perspective it's best to have walls in central tile only and lower than they are in Civ7.

If settlements will keep having tile-by-tile sprawl like in Civ7 (unlike free district placement of Civ6), it would be interesting idea to let convert resource tiles into urban districts. Like it could be a remote mine to gather metal, but it also could be transformed into metal processing plant if settlement is close enough. I think it could make settlements look better than currently when plantation could be within city border. But this requires resources not going away (no age transition in Civ7 meaning).

One very interesting question is that both Civ6 and Civ7 consider district placement based on adjacency bonuses, but is this really a good thing? Calculating adjacency bonuses is a pretty tedious thing, especially when you can't reach the tile yet (Civ7) or didn't build the districts triggering adjacency bonuses (both games), with little strategic value. Maybe if the game keeps tile-by-tile sprawl it would be better to specialize settlements based on resources and biomes like in Civ1-5 and make district placement matter less?

A lot of interesting questions to gather together with other game mechanics...

 

[pjotroos]

Separate note, but I'm not convinced by how the city growth works right now. Each next population cost goes up expotentially, but the maintenance cost is forever set to zero. Growth slows down, but never stops, and famine is never a risk. Urban districts should have food mainenance costs. So should specialists. At some point a major city should not be able to sustain itself, and at least one connected town should be required to feed it, just to keep it from starving. The plague crisis we get at the end of antiquity already reads talks about withered crops; that should be a famine crisis instead.

But then, I think the fact that town is either using 150% of its food or 0% is also a mistake. We are discouraged from specialising them until very late - once all the natural wonders, resources and high yield tiles were claimed, at minimum, because otherwise we'll never get them. I'm not sure how their growth should work, but "not like this" has to be an answer. Maybe "farm", "fishing" and "mining" should be intermediate states, where they are sending half their food away, and still use the other half to grow, and they can then specialise further into urban, resort, fort, and so on, which stops the growth completely.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

This was mentioned on the other thread and I thought it would be beneficial to host a topic just for it.

Where do you think the balance of packed to unpacked should stand?
By this I mean, how many things should be inside the city centre as opposed to being able to be placed outside the city centre?

What about the existence of improvements and districts?

How do you address the urban / rural divide, and how do you address readability?

I don't think fully unpacking everything outside the city center fits with the scale of the map. By the Modern Age, you get an ugly urban sprawl everywhere. If you look at any map of the Earth, most land is actually empty or rural.

My approach:

• I would have the "city center tile" represent the entire city.
• I would put all "buildings" in the city center tile.
• In the Modern Age, I would have "neighborhood" districts that could only go adjacent to the city center and house some special buildings. you could specialize these districts as industrial, commercial, cultural, education or residential.
• Wonders would still go outside the city center.
• All tile improvements like farms, mines etc would go outside the city center.
• I would have a "village" tile improvement that would go outside the city center.
• I would have "military outpost", "air base", "missile silos" also go outside the city center.

 

[Krikkit1]

Separate note, but I'm not convinced by how the city growth works right now. Each next population cost goes up expotentially, but the maintenance cost is forever set to zero. Growth slows down, but never stops, and famine is never a risk. Urban districts should have food mainenance costs. So should specialists. At some point a major city should not be able to sustain itself, and at least one connected town should be required to feed it, just to keep it from starving. The plague crisis we get at the end of antiquity already reads talks about withered crops; that should be a famine crisis instead.

But then, I think the fact that town is either using 150% of its food or 0% is also a mistake. We are discouraged from specialising them until very late - once all the natural wonders, resources and high yield tiles were claimed, at minimum, because otherwise we'll never get them. I'm not sure how their growth should work, but "not like this" has to be an answer. Maybe "farm", "fishing" and "mining" should be intermediate states, where they are sending half their food away, and still use the other half to grow, and they can then specialise further into urban, resort, fort, and so on, which stops the growth completely.

Specialists do have food maintenance costs.

 

[Evie]

I am very open to packed or unpacked in terms of how the city is represented in the game. Both work very well.

But *if* you want building placement choice to matter in game terms, then the design of VI and VII is the only way to go. If the placement of a thing matter in the game, then you should be able to see where it is placed without having to access a separate screen or map to do so.

If we go back to packed city ( and we very well could) we should also move away from strategic building placement.

 

[Crashdummy]

Separate note, but I'm not convinced by how the city growth works right now. Each next population cost goes up expotentially, but the maintenance cost is forever set to zero. Growth slows down, but never stops, and famine is never a risk. Urban districts should have food mainenance costs. So should specialists. At some point a major city should not be able to sustain itself, and at least one connected town should be required to feed it, just to keep it from starving. The plague crisis we get at the end of antiquity already reads talks about withered crops; that should be a famine crisis instead.

I dont like this. This would kill any chance to get town variety and turn towns into Farm improvements since City growth will always be better than anything else

We already have Farms in the game, we dont need yet another thing to work like them. If Towns end up being a fancier improvement, then it will be a failed opportunity

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I don't think fully unpacking everything outside the city center fits with the scale of the map. By the Modern Age, you get an ugly urban sprawl everywhere. If you look at any map of the Earth, most land is actually empty or rural.

My approach:

• I would have the "city center tile" represent the entire city.
• I would put all "buildings" in the city center tile.
• In the Modern Age, I would have "neighborhood" districts that could only go adjacent to the city center and house some special buildings. you could specialize these districts as industrial, commercial, cultural, education or residential.
• Wonders would still go outside the city center.
• All tile improvements like farms, mines etc would go outside the city center.
• I would have a "village" tile improvement that would go outside the city center.
• I would have "military outpost", "air base", "missile silos" also go outside the city center.

I agree with all of this except the wonders. I could agree that some would need to be outside the city center, like the naval ones alongside harbor/naval buildings, but for the most part I'd still keep wonders in the city center.
Of course, my idea is that there would be a separate city view map with three rings around the palace/city hall tile where you could place the Wonders and other buildings.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I agree with all of this except the wonders. I could agree that some would need to be outside the city center, like the naval ones alongside harbor/naval buildings, but for the most part I'd still keep wonders in the city center.

Yeah. After I posted, I realized that there could be some Wonders that belong inside the city center. It would depend. I was thinking of wonders like Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids would go outside the city center. We could imagine other wonders like the Collosseum or Broadway that should go inside the city.

 

[McSpank01]

The problem with packed cities is that you just don't get the pleasure of seeing the things you are building and feel like you are having an effect on the overall map. I think that is a large part of why unpacked cities feel good, you are able to really change the map. That was always one of the things I really liked doing in Civ 6, changing the map in some way. It might be urban sprawl, nuclear devastation.. or just planting forests.

I'm sure there are are ways to have a packed city that also visually represents all the buildings that you create inside of it, but it would be hard. I do not want to go back to the old version of seeing my city as a spreadsheet.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Old arguments. I remember going over the packed/degree of packed/city sprawl discussions several years ago (Civ VI Era) an this thread could be inserted anywhere in those threads without any editing.
So I'll just summarize what I said back then:

1. City Sprawl past the first tier of tiles is only marginally possible IRL before improved roads and wagons or carriages in he late 18th century. It really takes off only after the railroad and automobile/truck in the late 19th - early 20th century, when it essentially becomes Infinite. Look at night satellite photos of parts of the earth: there are continuous streams of light representing urban areas for most of the Chinese coast, much of northwestern Europe, and the entire US east coast from Boston to Richmond. These all may be separate cities/civic entities, but on the ground they are contiguous urban areas. Ugly? Sure, but they also spawn the whole Green initiative to make them more liveable: civic parks, green belts, etc. Even a century ago or more many large cities had large 'rustic' areas within their borders (Berlin was 1/3 parkland/forest within its civic borders and it was not exceptional)
All of which means that city sprawl can be handled and managed in game with, for a change, not completely leaving the historical reality behind. Initial cities can have urban tiles next to the city center and nowhere else. Exploration Age ciies can go out one more ring. Modern Age (or at suitable Technologies) can spread as far as you have land area, and in the late game a tile or two farther with land reclamation (not just in the super-rich cities of the middle east, but also in Tokyo Bay, Oakland/San Francisco Bay and other littoral areas).

2, I suspect Civ VII's 2 buildings per tile was a nod to Visibility and clarity for the gamer as much as anything else. It only partially worked, because the sheer number of buildings and their regional, unique, ethnic and cultural variations makes it a hard slog to remember them all at a glance without Help, like Civ VI's color-coded roofs and aspects. I think that means that more than 3 buildings per tile is entirely possible with better graphic design, but I suspect that wat is possible from a playability standpoint will turn out to be less than 6 buildings per tile. Going to more buildings per tile than 2 makes the restrictions on city sprawl much more acceptable and probably much more playable in the first 2/3 of the game.

3. Adjacency bonuses, after years of Civ VI and now Civ VII, I am increasingly convinced need major re-thinking. Buildings of the same type (Production, Military, Gold, Religious, etc) may benefit from being grouped into a Specialized District, but many of the terrain adjacencies are purest game design drivel, and cities would be much more playable and customizable without them. IF the game must have adjacencies, make them among the buildings/districts, not because the game designer thinks a great university has to be next to a mountain.

4. Likewise, making every tile have only one or few specific possible Improvements was a major step backwards for Civ VII. It makes almost the entire rural development of your Civ brainless slapping down of whatever Improvement you can afford: which Improvement might be best has been removed from the thought and decision process entirely, yet entire economies were managed based on re-purposing the land as required. Among other things, note that between approximately 5000 BCE and the present day the arable land on the planet has gone from 55% forest and 45% wild grass/shrubland to 44% forest, 12% wild grass/shrubland, 12% farmland and 31% pasturage/grazing lands, and throughout recorded history people have modified the landscape to provide irrigation to plant deserts and other marginal lands, drain swampland, divert, dam or canalize rivers, and even create artificial coastlines and rivers as needed or wanted.

There is so much. much more that could be done with the map terrain and the civs' capabilities that neither Civ VII nor its predecessors have touched.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

The problem with packed cities is that you just don't get the pleasure of seeing the things you are building and feel like you are having an effect on the overall map. I think that is a large part of why unpacked cities feel good, you are able to really change the map. That was always one of the things I really liked doing in Civ 6, changing the map in some way. It might be urban sprawl, nuclear devastation.. or just planting forests.

I'm sure there are are ways to have a packed city that also visually represents all the buildings that you create inside of it, but it would be hard. I do not want to go back to the old version of seeing my city as a spreadsheet.

Civ3 had a city view where you could see all your buildings and wonders in a city. You could do something like that today with nicer graphics to let the player enjoy their city and still do packed cities.