On the topic of City Package and Unpackage

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I found the whole idea of unstacking cities, but not towns, to be really weird:
1. The less consistent game design is, the harder it's to grasp the game.
2. What to do with buildings once town is upgraded to city? Why have specific mechanics for this if towns could just have same buildings as cities.
3. Having different methods of building in cities and towns means having more graphical assets and thus less readability.
4. But most importantly, I don't see a single value this system would bring to the game.

I think it's more about realism than gameplay, as in towns shouldn't be as big as cities, which I can understand.

I'm not quite sure that a single town tile should be comprised of 4 buildings. I think at most it would still require two buildings, one being the town hall and the other a tier 1 building based off of the town specialization.
If it's adjacent to the coast or on a river, then you could also have buildings related to the water.

 

[Civinator]

Civ2 was the last game which had a really strong ability to change the terrain. The player had a lot of options to transform terrain types

Yes, this was really great !

 

[kaspergm]

I found the whole idea of unstacking cities, but not towns, to be really weird:
1. The less consistent game design is, the harder it's to grasp the game.
2. What to do with buildings once town is upgraded to city? Why have specific mechanics for this if towns could just have same buildings as cities.
3. Having different methods of building in cities and towns means having more graphical assets and thus less readability.
4. But most importantly, I don't see a single value this system would bring to the game.

I agree with this, having different mechanics for towns and cities would probably just cause a(nother) wormhole of problems.

At the danger of repeating myself, I still think many of the problems here could be solved by a more regional approach to the map. If map was divided into regions that can hold one urban center (think Old World style) but then can have rural areas to bring resources and yields into that urban center, we would achieve many of the same things that Civ7 tries to achieve, but in a way I feel would be much more natural and easy to comprehend. It would also allow resources to be linked to the region rather than a very specific tile, which would give the player much better flexibility to plan layout of urban AND rural improvements in a way they find optimal.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

If towns had no urban sprawl at all, that woud make them more distinct from cities. It would work better visually as your cities would be the big metros with sprawl and the towns would just one tile. One possible solution to this would be to limit towns to only the center tile but up the number of buildings to say 4. This way towns would have no sprawl to differentiate them from cities but could still house a few more buildings to be useful.

To keep the visibility of buildings, which is already marginal for many people, how about keeping the 2 buildings per tile for everything but a Town could at most consist of of the settlement center and one adjacent tile. That would allow for the specialization of the town (adjacent tile could be a Resource, a coastal harbor/seaport, exploiting a Wonder tile, holding a pair of Unique structures, etc).

When the time comes that you want to expand the town, you have to expand it into a 'city' to get/exploit more tiles. Simple and clean and requiring no redesign of the various individual 'urban' tiles.

And, by the way, a single-tile or very limited sized Town pretty nearly matches the mechanic used for the auxiliary settlements in the Millenia game. Much as I thought that game was a bland mess, they did have some good ideas that could be adapted more generally in the 4x world.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I agree with this, having different mechanics for towns and cities would probably just cause a(nother) wormhole of problems.

At the danger of repeating myself, I still think many of the problems here could be solved by a more regional approach to the map. If map was divided into regions that can hold one urban center (think Old World style) but then can have rural areas to bring resources and yields into that urban center, we would achieve many of the same things that Civ7 tries to achieve, but in a way I feel would be much more natural and easy to comprehend. It would also allow resources to be linked to the region rather than a very specific tile, which would give the player much better flexibility to plan layout of urban AND rural improvements in a way they find optimal.

This is what I get for not reading all the posts before posting myself.

The regional approach was also the basis for the Humankind map system. but, IMHO, it makes the relationships between cities and towns and resources too rigid: it stretches comprehension to think that a region will remain the same size, shape, and encompassing the same resources from 4000 BCE to 2000 CE, regardless of all the changes in transportation technology in that time.

On the other hand, if we severely limit the size of subordinate settlements ('towns') and (like Millenia, whose toes we are treading on as well as Humankind here) and then specifically link them to a city as the destination for any resources or benefits those towns develop, and show that on the map with, say, a road graphic, it would seem to be as easy to comprehend than a more general Region boundary and allow more flexible relationships between towns and cities throughout the game.

As in, if the resources available in the area change with the Ages as Civ VII does now, the destination for them from town to city could also change, and possibly an earlier thriving town might be left behind comparatively when the 'new' resources are outside of its useful radius and a new town gets placed to exploit them.

 

[Skojardu]

After playing Catan and Terra Mystica and Civs 5 and 6, games on hex grids are very tired in my eyes. I bounced off of the Endless Legend 2 demo and other Civ-pretenders are also Hexed. I would welcome a Civ with a sort of chaotic mosiac sort of map generation, not only of hexes, but akin to the regions of Total War. Regions would have a certain number of workable tiles (8 to 16) and map movement would be organic like the movement on Medieval Total War 2. This would be a revolution, but I also hope it would allow the world to feel truly vast, like it did in Civ 4, not like you are fighting for control of Coruscant. (I now own 7 and the hexes are hexing me)

 

[kaspergm]

The regional approach was also the basis for the Humankind map system. but, IMHO, it makes the relationships between cities and towns and resources too rigid: it stretches comprehension to think that a region will remain the same size, shape, and encompassing the same resources from 4000 BCE to 2000 CE, regardless of all the changes in transportation technology in that time.

I'm not sure I fully agree. I actually think it makes good sense to have the regions the same size, but the development degree should increase over the ages. So in Civ7 terms, in Ancient era you'd have a small urban City (typically 1 ring radius*) and a limited number of surrounding improvements and rural towns, and a lot of wild nature/undeveloped land. In Medieval era, urban Cities would grown in size (up to 2 ring radius) and improvements and connected rural towns would increase in number of distance within the region. Finally in Modern era, your towns would reach Metropolis size (up to 3 ring radius), and the number of improvements and connected towns would be able to cover most if not all of the region.

Also, there should be a terrain link here. In Ancient era, you'd only want to place rural towns in very fertile areas with good food and/or production available depending on what type of settlement you place (farming town, mining town, lumber town, fishing village), whereas in Modern era, technologies makes it viable to have rural settlements in terrains like desert and tundra that would be hard pressed to sustain settlements in earlier ages.


* A small additional note about city radius: I really want the culture levels of a city from ... Civ 3 or 4? ... to return at some point. I think a city should have different culture levels, and on the lower levels, you can only work first ring, but on higher levels you unlock 2nd and 3rd ring. As such, I don't think it should be impossible to have big cities in Ancient Era, it should just be very unusual, whereas huge Metropolis style cities should only be the norm in Modern Era, and even then only the largest cities should reach this level.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I'm not sure I fully agree. I actually think it makes good sense to have the regions the same size, but the development degree should increase over the ages. So in Civ7 terms, in Ancient era you'd have a small urban City (typically 1 ring radius*) and a limited number of surrounding improvements and rural towns, and a lot of wild nature/undeveloped land. In Medieval era, urban Cities would grown in size (up to 2 ring radius) and improvements and connected rural towns would increase in number of distance within the region. Finally in Modern era, your towns would reach Metropolis size (up to 3 ring radius), and the number of improvements and connected towns would be able to cover most if not all of the region.

Also, there should be a terrain link here. In Ancient era, you'd only want to place rural towns in very fertile areas with good food and/or production available depending on what type of settlement you place (farming town, mining town, lumber town, fishing village), whereas in Modern era, technologies makes it viable to have rural settlements in terrains like desert and tundra that would be hard pressed to sustain settlements in earlier ages.


* A small additional note about city radius: I really want the culture levels of a city from ... Civ 3 or 4? ... to return at some point. I think a city should have different culture levels, and on the lower levels, you can only work first ring, but on higher levels you unlock 2nd and 3rd ring. As such, I don't think it should be impossible to have big cities in Ancient Era, it should just be very unusual, whereas huge Metropolis style cities should only be the norm in Modern Era, and even then only the largest cities should reach this level.

A nice presentation.

My only comment would be that regions are not needed.

Simply limit the distance from which towns and other 'rural' improvements can feed the city in Antiquity, and then limit it somewhat less in Exploration, and make it unlimited in Modern. Allow the graphic road indicators showing the linkages to only go over certain terrain in antiquity, less limited in Exploration, and tunnel through mountains, cross major rivers and swamps, and go practically anywhere in Modern, and the effects you describe can be had without adding another map-layer of regional boundaries.

While I agree that cities are the progenitors of culture, I disagree that culture has anything to do with the urban radius. That was limited by Technology. Specifically, most of the urban populations walked to their destinations for most of history. As late as the late 19th century, in fact, if you look at old photographs of European cities, there is as much space given to pedestrian paths and sidewalks as to streets, and the streets are filled with pedestrians: wagons, carriages and such were a distinct minority of the traffic. You can walk the circuit of most of classical Athens' walls in an afternoon. The reasons for all that are simple: if you couldn't walk to it and back in less than a day, parts of the city wpould be unreachable and worthless to its inhabitants. That severely limited the radius of any city, in any culture (there is not a major difference in walking pace from Paleolithic to the present day: this is one of the few constraints that applies Everywhere).

All of which means the early city radius can legitimately be very restricted, and expansion of city radius can either be linked to Ages (the easy way, the way Civ VII is designed) or could be linked to specific Technologies (which would be more 'accurate' but also much messier, so is probably not the best option)

 

[stealth_nsk]

I'm again with my boring gameplay considerations, but:

1. Regions, as implemented in HK are really bad, because they restrict how you play the land, which is the most part of the civilization game (here I mean together with combat, which is also part of playing the land since at least Civ5). The only reason why regions exist in HK is the same as why it has battles on small separate maps - it's easier for AI to handle it that way.

2. Calculating distances is in some aspects even worse, because that's really hard to communicate to players. Civ7 has its settlement connection mechanics based on distances and that's probably the weakest part of the game. It's something what needs to be removed, not multiplied.

3. As usual, for all those ideas, Civ7 abstraction level (what is a "city", what is a "town", what is a "tile"?) doesn't work for simulation well in any case.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I'm again with my boring gameplay considerations, but:

1. Regions, as implemented in HK are really bad, because they restrict how you play the land, which is the most part of the civilization game (here I mean together with combat, which is also part of playing the land since at least Civ5). The only reason why regions exist in HK is the same as why it has battles on small separate maps - it's easier for AI to handle it that way.

2. Calculating distances is in some aspects even worse, because that's really hard to communicate to players. Civ7 has its settlement connection mechanics based on distances and that's probably the weakest part of the game. It's something what needs to be removed, not multiplied.

3. As usual, for all those ideas, Civ7 abstraction level (what is a "city", what is a "town", what is a "tile"?) doesn't work for simulation well in any case.

I agree all of this would be a horrible mistake to implement in Civ, it’s just not “Civ”.

A lot of the discussion about Towns I am seeing here, is basically reinventing the wheel when it comes to Civ6 Districts.

 

[kaspergm]

My only comment would be that regions are not needed.

Simply limit the distance from which towns and other 'rural' improvements can feed the city in Antiquity, and then limit it somewhat less in Exploration, and make it unlimited in Modern. Allow the graphic road indicators showing the linkages to only go over certain terrain in antiquity, less limited in Exploration, and tunnel through mountains, cross major rivers and swamps, and go practically anywhere in Modern, and the effects you describe can be had without adding another map-layer of regional boundaries.

First off, let me say I think those are excellent ideas, and if they are not already in Civ7, I think they should be added. I also agree that if we focus only on the city/town aspect of the game, regions are not necessary.

When I favor the idea of regions and think it's worth pursuing, it's because it could tie into several other aspect of the game:

1. City vs. Town basis (yes, that is still on the topic of cities and towns): I think regions could be a good way to control the number of cities and the ratio of cities:towns that a player has. Unless balance is done really well, the city/town system of Civ7 will have a high likelyhood to favor one or the other, for instance my impression is early Civ7 has basically encouraged turning all your settlements into cities, which kills the whole idea of this feature.
2. City limits and loyalty: Instead of an artificial "settlement limit" (which feels very gamey), regions farther from your capital could suffer instability and corruption, which decreases with more advanced governments and civics. Yes, you can do this also without regions.
3. Map making and terrain: Dividing the map into regions might help making more interesting maps, and it would allow a biome mechanism that would have a lot of interesting potential instead of how terrains are currently created. Instead of the more or less random assignment of terrains and features, a regional map would allow to have each region have a well-defined environment: Plains, floodlands, forest, rainforest, hills, desert, tundra, lake, geothermal ... I'm sure one could come up with more. There was a Civ6 mod that played a bit with something similar to this and tried to add unique bonuses to some regions. It could also play well into civilization bonuses or even allow new features like your civ aquiring certain skills and specilizations if it starts in a certain hostile region (perhaps starting in desert, tundra or rainforest will give you certain bonuses to exploring or improving these tiles, think Inca with hills or Canada with tundra in Civ6).
4. Resources: I'd love a more regional approach to resources instead of the way they are tied to specific tiles/hexes in the current games. If a region has Iron Ore or Spices, perhaps you can decide for yourself where you will place your mine(s) or plantation(s), or at least have a certain sub-area of the region that allows extraction of the resource.

I understand the argument that regions goes against the nature of what Civ is. I know that the minigame of city placement has always been a core of Civ, and I think if regions were to succeed, that should still remain. So if a region can only hold one city, there needs to be some decision making with regard to where to place the city for the game to not go boring. Placement of districts and access to resources/terrains could help secure this.

And additional comment on how I envision towns: I would rather towns worked a bit like the rural districts of the Citylights mod from Civ6. So I don't think a town should be an entity in itself created by a settler. Rather I think the town should be created directly from the city as a sort of sattelite district or city project or whatever. The way I envision this is that when a settler forms a ... settlement ... it starts out as a small village, that will work basically as a town in Civ7 i.e. not have specialty districts, but will have the population work farms/mines/lumbermills etc. Once the village reaches a certain population - say, pop 5 just to pick a random number (or it could be a certain culture level for that matter) - it turns into a city and can start constructing specialty districts around the city centre. As the population in the town go from working rural improvements to working as specialists, the city can construct satelite "towns", for instance a farming town, mining town, lumber towns or fishing towns that collect food/production and resources from surrounding tiles and send to the city.

 

[UWHabs]

I don't necessarily hate having some sort of extended regions for civ, but it's more like an expanded city radius to me, rather than some sort of pre-defined map feature (like HK). If it's something that I can draw on the map, or gets organically created from expansion of cities and towns, that's more than fine. I definitely don't like anything which artificially limits where I can settle, or if an AI settles somewhere have it lock me out of a large region.

But if towns were a bit more flexible, maybe they were less strict on borders with cities, and so on, that wouldn't be a bad thing. I feel that I already sort of split my civ into regions based on connections, land, etc... Because things sprawl out a lot, I find that if a settlement is too close to a city, it just doesn't have enough tiles to be worth city-fying.

 

[Head_North]

I used to like that in Civ 6 I could potentially get an awful start, and that meant that I had to find ways to make it work, and there was a challenge to how I had to play the game. Isn't that part of what these games are about?

I've seen this similar argument on these boards before, where there are some who like the removal of resource requirements for units, because some people don't want to struggle to find the things they need to build their UU. I don't really agree with any of that. Not having access to resources, not being in ideal locations, that just makes the game more strategic and interesting. You can see how that has affected the game in Civ 7, because everything is too balanced, and there are just not enough strategic decisions the player needs to make any more.

I can think of some of my favourite play throughs in Civ 6 where I have had to move my civ in a certain direction to take the good land, often through pure violence. Then later on discovering my land has no oil or coal, and so I need to trade or fight to get it. That is when you have to actually think and do stuff. Without that, the game feels like you are playing it on rails.

Agree. I really dont like how the map has become less important with the yield of different tiles being less diverse. I mean the maps of civ is what lends different playthroughs alot of their flare.
As you said, a tundra start befor could be really difficult but it rendered a memorabel game.

I think removong all diversity to perfectly balance the game runs the risk of making it bland.

 

[MutilationWave]

@kaspergm

What you mention about turning every settlement into a city was the best strategy in antiquity, but that was before the patch that introduced the global +10% production cost to buildings per city.

Now I think everyone is playing more tall, if you consider tall to be less cities, more towns. I certainly am. In my last game that went extremely well I never went above three cities. This is probably not optimal, I think five more specialized cities in exploration would be better. With three cities I was able to build every building plus wonders in each while buying my units and bottom tier warehouse buildings.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

First off, let me say I think those are excellent ideas, and if they are not already in Civ7, I think they should be added. I also agree that if we focus only on the city/town aspect of the game, regions are not necessary.

When I favor the idea of regions and think it's worth pursuing, it's because it could tie into several other aspect of the game:

1. City vs. Town basis (yes, that is still on the topic of cities and towns): I think regions could be a good way to control the number of cities and the ratio of cities:towns that a player has. Unless balance is done really well, the city/town system of Civ7 will have a high likelyhood to favor one or the other, for instance my impression is early Civ7 has basically encouraged turning all your settlements into cities, which kills the whole idea of this feature.
2. City limits and loyalty: Instead of an artificial "settlement limit" (which feels very gamey), regions farther from your capital could suffer instability and corruption, which decreases with more advanced governments and civics. Yes, you can do this also without regions.
3. Map making and terrain: Dividing the map into regions might help making more interesting maps, and it would allow a biome mechanism that would have a lot of interesting potential instead of how terrains are currently created. Instead of the more or less random assignment of terrains and features, a regional map would allow to have each region have a well-defined environment: Plains, floodlands, forest, rainforest, hills, desert, tundra, lake, geothermal ... I'm sure one could come up with more. There was a Civ6 mod that played a bit with something similar to this and tried to add unique bonuses to some regions. It could also play well into civilization bonuses or even allow new features like your civ aquiring certain skills and specilizations if it starts in a certain hostile region (perhaps starting in desert, tundra or rainforest will give you certain bonuses to exploring or improving these tiles, think Inca with hills or Canada with tundra in Civ6).
4. Resources: I'd love a more regional approach to resources instead of the way they are tied to specific tiles/hexes in the current games. If a region has Iron Ore or Spices, perhaps you can decide for yourself where you will place your mine(s) or plantation(s), or at least have a certain sub-area of the region that allows extraction of the resource.

I understand the argument that regions goes against the nature of what Civ is. I know that the minigame of city placement has always been a core of Civ, and I think if regions were to succeed, that should still remain. So if a region can only hold one city, there needs to be some decision making with regard to where to place the city for the game to not go boring. Placement of districts and access to resources/terrains could help secure this.

And additional comment on how I envision towns: I would rather towns worked a bit like the rural districts of the Citylights mod from Civ6. So I don't think a town should be an entity in itself created by a settler. Rather I think the town should be created directly from the city as a sort of sattelite district or city project or whatever. The way I envision this is that when a settler forms a ... settlement ... it starts out as a small village, that will work basically as a town in Civ7 i.e. not have specialty districts, but will have the population work farms/mines/lumbermills etc. Once the village reaches a certain population - say, pop 5 just to pick a random number (or it could be a certain culture level for that matter) - it turns into a city and can start constructing specialty districts around the city centre. As the population in the town go from working rural improvements to working as specialists, the city can construct satelite "towns", for instance a farming town, mining town, lumber towns or fishing towns that collect food/production and resources from surrounding tiles and send to the city.

This clarifies things a bit, and I think we can start to synthesize a region/non-region system:

1. I fully agree that the Civ VII City-Town dichotomy is not at all well done. On the one hand, towns are founded just like cities and start with the same radius and aspects of a city, but have restrictions on how you can build things in them and, as the game is designed now, virtually require you to constantly consider whether to turn them into cities or get enough bonuses from them to make keeping them as towns worth it. I suggest that making a town Always derived from a given city and related to that city from the beginning solves some of that.

As in, a town is founded by a 'Party' from a city - and removes population from that city to form the Party, not 'building' it with production. The Party can place a town anywhere outside the immediate radius of the city, but the distance from which it can 'send' resources/bonuses back to the city is strictly limited, and changes by Age or Technology. A map graphic of a 'road' will show at a glance which city the town is 'feeding'. Towns are strictly limited in the tiles that can exploit: a center and one additional tile would be, I think, about right for Antiquity with, again, changes by Age or Tech or even by throwing Production/Population resources at the town until it can support an additional tile or two - but at that point, it would be cheaper in most cases to simply expand it into a City.
Towns could change the city they are feeding resources to. This might be required if, say, the original 'home city' gets conquered, or destroyed by a hostile IP. It could also be done at will - for a steep cost. The road graphic would change to the new city, and the requirements for distance limitation would remain in place so that the potential number of alternative home cities would be limited - but one reason to change might be that the distances have changed with the Age progression.

Bonus: in Exploration Age, a Colonist Party could place a town an extended distance away in Distant Lands (or Homelands from Distant Lands) with a tie to a specific City back home and feeding resources directly to it from 'overseas'. This could tie the entire City/Town system into the Exploration/Colonization system if desired, making on the one hand placing 'colonies' much faster, but on the other hand making early Town colonies very fragile in a hostile landscape.

2. Cities and Towns further from your capital should suffer from Loyalty issues (a concept in older Civs but sadly abandoned lately). Furthermore, while any City could support a single feeder Town, adding more Towns to that City would come with loyalty/efficiency penalties until 'break-away towns' becomes a very real possibility/threat. The loyalty of Colonists (towns OR cities) should never be a given in the game. This would place the 'settlement limit' squarely on the gamer's actions rather than an arbitrary game design function, which gamers have been merrily stretching to the limit anyway.

3. Do not get me started on the limitations and flat-out mistakes in Civ VII's maps and biomes: we'll be here all day and for page after page of rant. In respect to your suggestions, I'd only point out that special features like specialized resources or 'mini-biomes' can be done by tile as well as by region. Anybody here remember SMAC? Its maps each had about a half-dozen Special Regions/places covering several tiles that appeared randomly on every map. Something like that, that could even be given historical titles:
Cedars of Lebanon
Ruhr Valley (iron, coal)
Messabi Range (copper, iron)
Spice Islands
- there are potentially hundreds of them, which could be looked at as 'mini-Natural Wonders' giving specific bonuses like extra Iron, Coal, Copper, or other resources, or cultural/religious bonuses (I can make a case that Every Volcano on the planet that people lived near had a religious significance!)

4. I would love to have more 'flexibility' in Resources in a Civ game. In fact, I have been arguing and posting to that effect for at least 4 years now. Just for starters, many 'resources' cover much larger areas than others. Herd animals, for instance, require much, much larger areas of pasturage than the equivalent in food crops require. Latest estimates, in fact, are that 2/3 of the 'cultivated land' even today is to feed animals, not people, and that's after the great horse herds of antiquity and later were removed from the equation.
So, how about you can place a pasture adjacent to an animal resource as long as its the same type of terrain, and the resource will move to the pasture? Giving you more flexibility in how you exploit those resources. The same could also apply to any plant-based resource, to allow better organization of our now-limited city radii: rigid resource placement makes many city/town sites very hard to get the most out of because tiles are sequestered by immoveable resources.
Minerals are a bit more of a stretch, but not by much: many ore deposits cover wide areas (Messabi noted above, or the Ruhr Valley area, for instance) so that allowing exploitation of them from adjacent tiles is perfectly arguable and again, this makes both resources and city siting and organizing much more flexible for the gamer.
This would also limit (probably not completely eliminate) the problem of new resources appearing with Age change that require you to reorganize your cities. If any new placement allows you a choice of 2 - 6 'extraction tiles' limitations are greatly limited, and so the placement of new rseources also expands since their sites are not absolute prohibitions on placing anything else.

Summary: I like many of your ideas, just to point out that they can be implemented using the tile grid already on the map without stacking regions on top of it.

 

[kaspergm]

This clarifies things a bit, and I think we can start to synthesize a region/non-region system:
(...)
Summary: I like many of your ideas, just to point out that they can be implemented using the tile grid already on the map without stacking regions on top of it.

Yes I can see we very much agree, and I think with "towns" being a means for a city to extract yields from tiles further from the city center than just the normal workable radius, one would have a very nice and natural encouragement for players to build towns without resorting to regions, so I could definitely see that work.