On the topic of City Package and Unpackage

[McSpank01]

I’d also go as far as to say adjacency bonuses and planning out my cities was by far and away the best bit of Civ 6, it might be the only thing bringing me back to it.

 

[McSpank01]

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.

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Sure, but that always felt really artificial and detached from the game, like the throne room. I can’t say i would ever want a return to that

 

[stealth_nsk]

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 have unpacked settlements, output should be different depending on where you place the district, but adjacency bonuses in 6 and 7 has some significant problems. For example, I could imagine a system where the tile you built on has more effect than tiles which are nearby and only natural features of nearby tiles matter. That way planning settlements would be much easier, because it will be possible to display full bonuses of each tile right away. Whether it's good thing or not - hard to say.

 

[Evie]

Oh yes. To be clear, by "design of VI and VII" I mean having building placement be done on the actual main game map.

Not the specific balance and bonuses.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

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.

View attachment 748265

Sure, but that always felt really artificial and detached from the game, like the throne room. I can’t say i would ever want a return to that

If they brought back this city view and made it part of the gameplay, like choosing where to place the buildings/wonders, I think that would satisfy both camps of having city sprawl, but not on the main world map.

 

[GeneralZift]

If they brought back this city view and made it part of the gameplay, like choosing where to place the buildings/wonders, I think that would satisfy both camps of having city sprawl, but not on the main world map.

I think I would really enjoy this city view implementation as another alternative option for future Civ.

Especially if the city view somehow reflects the actual map too. There could be a very small element of randomisation in the visuals for it so a coastal city doesn't always look the same for example.

I'm only concerned for wide players as they have to concern themselves with 16 different city maps and where all the different buildings go. Perhaps a little convoluted.

 

[Evie]

If they brought back this city view and made it part of the gameplay, like choosing where to place the buildings/wonders, I think that would satisfy both camps of having city sprawl, but not on the main world map.

I think that would be the worst possible scenario for me. Having to go from one map to another that all matter to the game is not in any way, form, or shape my idea of fun.

Either placement matter, then it goes on the main map, or placement doesn't matter, and then the expanded city view is just a nice little bonus. Don't make a wishy washy mix of both at the cost of significantly increasing the number of maps and screens players are required to go through in order to play the game.

 

[CivKirk64]

I think I can't go back to unpacked, I just like laying out where things are.
I do think there is room to introduce density mechanics. Allow the center to have more buildings. Allow tiles to have maybe a warehouse or 2, along with a few specialist buildings.

I feel like they could play with things like density bonuses/maluses (Trading off bonuses for things working together with a health penalty for having people too close together. Diversity vs Efficiency bonuses (Synergies between differing types of buildings, vs economies of scale, vs penalties for complete miss matches)

Offer a lot of choice between when to sprawl vs when to be compact, various trade offs for health and happiness. Are towns specialized hubs , or are they just suburbs, do the only exist feeding the closest cities.

I feel like 2 buildings per tile is too limiting and contributes to the sprawl that makes the game look ugly at times. I'd even be for allowing building past the 3rd ring as the ages progress. Have large but not necessary dense cities, that can have hubs of specialty (over yonder in the mountains are our cultural hubs).
Also wouldn't mind getting rid of the contiguous quarter types, just let me put this district right out there without needing a warehouse to get there (A warehouse that will block a wonder site next age)

 

[stealth_nsk]

An interesting idea is to have district specialization with 1-2 unspecialized slots. For example, let's say you have a science district, where 5 science buildings could be built and only there, plus one additional building like warehouse. That way city center tile could also be specialized district with additional slot taken by the palace or magistrate.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I'm only concerned for wide players as they have to concern themselves with 16 different city maps and where all the different buildings go. Perhaps a little convoluted.

Considering settlements are now both divided into both cities and towns, I don't think that a separate map would be needed for towns. This is as long as towns don't produce buildings or wonders and there would at least be more towns than cities.

I think that would be the worst possible scenario for me. Having to go from one map to another that all matter to the game is not in any way, form, or shape my idea of fun.

Either placement matter, then it goes on the main map, or placement doesn't matter, and then the expanded city view is just a nice little bonus. Don't make a wishy washy mix of both at the cost of significantly increasing the number of maps and screens players are required to go through in order to play the game.

Well, the other option I thought of is restricting buildings/districts, at least in the first two ages, to be either in the first or second ring. That way city sprawl doesn't really happen until the Modern Age coinciding with the historical period of urbanization when the Industrial Age started.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Well, the other option I thought of is restricting buildings/districts, at least in the first two ages, to be either in the first or second ring. That way city sprawl doesn't really happen until the Modern Age coinciding with the historical period of urbanization when the Industrial Age started.

I think historical simulation is not that important factor, especially considering how abstract tiles and quarters are.

 

[Evie]

I call my facorite option with regard to district sprawl taking up too much of the map: Big map.

 

[McSpank01]

I think that would be the worst possible scenario for me. Having to go from one map to another that all matter to the game is not in any way, form, or shape my idea of fun.

Either placement matter, then it goes on the main map, or placement doesn't matter, and then the expanded city view is just a nice little bonus. Don't make a wishy washy mix of both at the cost of significantly increasing the number of maps and screens players are required to go through in order to play the game.

Yeah same for me. I would absolutely hate it as an idea. It destroys all immersion, and removing the need for any real city placement planning really just wrecks most of what I find enjoyable about the game.

Really, if there is any sort of problem with city sprawl it's because there are too many things to build and not enough incentive or guardrails to keep you overbuilding.

 

[pjotroos]

Specialists do have food maintenance costs.

Oh yeah, thought it's gold and happiness, for some reason, same as buildings.

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

I'm not sure I get what you meant by "we already have farms in the game". Are you saying towns shouldn't be able to transfer food to cities? Or that farm towns are already too powerful as things stand, so buffing them further would invalidate resorts, mines, forts, urban, etc?

 

[vorlon_mi]

I agree wth @Evie : either placement / adjacency matters, so buildings must be unpacked onto the main map (Civ6/Civ7), or

placement / adjacency doesn't matter, only the buildings themselves matter, so cities should stay packed (Civ3/Civ4/Civ5).

For those who haven't / didn't play the older games, the minimum distance between cities was smaller. The map would still end up being covered, by the time one reached the last age(s) -- but covered by roads/railroads, farms, windmills, workshops, mines, or cottages. Matter of personal taste which is more appealing.

The extra layer of complexity by including adjacencies is interesting to me, but not essential.

 

[disjointaccount]

I'll echo what I said in the other thread:
I absolutely love Civ 7's urban sprawl. City planning and maximising adjacencies were one of my favourite aspects of 6, and I'm glad it's returned for 7. Combine the inherent fun I find in that with how good the game looks now, and the fact that thanks to the connection requirements, cities look much more like cities (even if such extensive sprawl is a little unrealistic for early civilisations) rather than 6's weird central city block with outlying clusters of buildings at random distances (which did always bug me), and the whole system just adds up to be amazing for me.

I do see the complaint about readability, and objectively, it probably is a negative, but it doesn't affect me personally as I've no-lifed the game enough to be able to sight-read all the key buildings (and I'm not really bothered by having to spend half a second mouse-overing if I'm not sure). Definitely something that could be easily fixed with a lens regardless.

My personal nitpicks (and some very loose off-the-top ideas as to how they could be improved) are as follows:

- While I generally like the straightforwardness of 7's adjacency system, part of me does miss the more interesting synergies from 6 (Industrial Zone/green district fidget spinner my beloved). The resources/mountains/water system is nice and easy to remember and definitely good for new players, but I wouldn't mind a little more depth - just the occasional extra bonus a la aqueducts/IZs - to really hit that number-go-up dopamine. Correct me if I'm wrong, but nothing (aside from UQs) currently exists in terms of buildings benefitting from the building they share a district with, right? Maybe adding some pairs of synergies there could be interesting and create a bit more of an interesting choice rather than just always slapping buldings of the same yield type together. That might be overshooting "simple little bonus" in terms of complexity though lol.

- It does feel a little weird being able to just always build every building in a city, and there's no real reason not to, given that more yields is pretty much always better. There was something nice about the way cities kinda specialised themselves in 6. I do actually think we're getting warmer on this one with the introduction of the buildings cost scaling; the system just needs a little fine tuning as it currently stands to really make it meaningful which buildings you put down early (or at all) in your cities. Some way to allow towns to help with getting buildings down (or have food/pop influence the scaling of the cost) to prevent the scaling disproportionately punishing tall builds, and maybe something to differentiate between the capital/smaller cities? I quite like the idea of the capital being able to grow bigger and be more generalised, while outlying cities have to specialise a bit more. Fits with real life and adds a bit more meaning to the choice of moving capitals, which currently feels a little arbitrary.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

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.

That's my issue with it, when they unpacked cities the maps should really have grown by 2 or 3 times.

 

[UWHabs]

I definitely prefer the sprawling out and placement decisions instead of the old model. But I do agree too that sprawl is too bad. Tossing out some more ideas:

-Maybe base yields for buildings should be lower, but give more weight to adjacencies. Like a Dungeon being +6 production/+2 influence and the only cost is 3 gold and 3 happiness means it's very strong. If its base yield was brought down to maybe 4 production/2 influence, it would be strong. But then you have something else that causes that extra +2 to come back. Like maybe all the yields are dropped by that amount, but then they get that final +2 back by being in a quarter? Basically give you an extra reason to complete a quarter. Another option would be to give all buildings a generic +1 adjacency with neighbouring quarters.
-At the same time, I really think the warehouse buildings need to be moved away from the whole building/quarter model too. I really think they should act more like walls, where they don't take up regular building slots. I suggested it somewhere else, but you could even move them to be something you put on rural tiles too.
-If you do both of those, you lose a lot of buildings to sprawl out, but I don't think that's a problem. It means it's hard to sprawl to reach the further tiles in antiquity.
-I think what I'd consider adding on top is that any buildings that are 2 eras out should probably turn into ruins. So that old library built in 2000 BC should completely disappear from your settlement when you hit the modern era if you didn't overbuild it. Let us convert a tile back to nature
-At the same time, I think especially once you get towards the modern era, probably we should allow some level of "connector" buildings. I would greatly reduce the yields of the City Park, for example, but let you spam them as repeatable urban districts. Basically let me convert space to greenspace, give me like 2 happiness from them, but have them give a +1 adjacency to all neighbouring buildings.
-I do think the game could use a few other options on tiles. Not every hill IRL is something that can sustain a mining operation on there for 3000 years. Maybe each tile we get some sort of choice - either you can keep it natural, it gets a basic 1f/1g for like "normal rural activities", or you can choose to set up intense woodcutting/mining/farming operations. Those get bigger yields, but they can only sustain themselves for a number of turns before they expire, and the tile gets stuck as a less productive tile.

I think there's probably a few other things. But the game ends up looking too much like the Ruhr valley already in antiquity. It's okay to get there eventually, sort of, but it's definitely there too early.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

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.

Hard disagree with me, that would just make the map even less important which is a huige issue with Civ VII.

 

[McSpank01]

-If you do both of those, you lose a lot of buildings to sprawl out, but I don't think that's a problem. It means it's hard to sprawl to reach the further tiles in antiquity.

I think one of the issues with the game is the requirement to keep pushing your buildings out further from your capital to get good spots. This leads to ungainly sprawl, and placing down something like a granary just to reach a better spot at the edge of your city feels like it's not really how you'd want the game to work