On the topic of City Package and Unpackage

[GeneralZift]

Late game fatigue been a problem for every version of Civ.

Well, some more than others, and it depends a lot on the load of the player at the end.

 

[disjointaccount]

A slightly different implementation from the Civ6 power though.

Power is something I actually really miss from Civ 6. I wouldn't need it to be like, a 1:1 implementation in 7 as it was in 6, but the feeling of unlocking electricity and immediately being able to bring cities onto the grid and get noticeable boosts to their yields felt like the kind of meaningful unlock electricity should be. I also just found making sure cities were powered to be a relatively fun task. It definitely wasn't a perfect system but I liked what it brought to the game a lot.

If we get an expansion adding climate change mechanics, as has been standard (and would fit with the rumoured 4th age), I really hope some form of power system comes with it.

 

[Head_North]

I played civ V the other day and although it is a really good game in its own right, the fact that all buildings ended up in the city center and I could keep all my tile improvements almost felt like "eat the cake and keep it"

This I really think speaks to the advantage that civ 7 could have over civ 5 when it comes to city developement. I think, if they limit the number of districts a city can have (either a hard limit or a soft limit) then we have to make, perhaps tough, choices as to which building to place in any city. We also have to make the choice as to which tiles imrovement to surrender to the city districts. This of course is already the case, but right now i think that the tile yields are to low. I almost always think its better to place a building then keeping the tile improvement.

Perhaps also limit the amount of wonder a city can have? Or maybe require that wonders are built in city districts. They will thus (if they limit the number of city districts) compete with ordinary building as to which to build.

I have thought before that they could increase the number of buildings in any city districts, but graphically that can perhaps be a problem? I mean I find it heard that they can squeeze in more buildings than two at the current state. And since I think the city districts looks so nice as they are, I´d rather not have them more crowded with buildings.

 

[kaspergm]

I think it would be better if most warehouse buildings were maybe the upgrades of simple improvements. Why shouldn't a sawmill be the final upgrade of a woodcutter improvement? In addition, the brickyard could be an upgraded clay pit etc.

I misread your post the first time, and I'm glad I re-read it because I was just about to propose this exact same idea.

To elaborate, I think this is a fantastic idea that can help address several common complaints, including premature urban sprawl, as well as one of my own.

With regards to urban sprawl, this change takes warehouses out of the building pool, which I think is a must if we want to impose a new restriction like "no buildings allowed outside the first ring". That rule is bound to severely restrict how many buildings you can have in a city, and it could make cities next to resources, mountains, navigable rivers and coastal tiles uncompetitive. Excluding Walls and City Centre buildings, there are currently 19 buildings in Antiquity, but if we exclude all the warehouses, that number drops to 14.

I would couple these changes with other changes like:

- Allow cities (but not towns) to construct districts on resource tiles at the expense of permanently removing the resources.
- Make the Bridge a special-function building, similar the Wall, that don't take up slots in districts.

Turning warehouses into improvements means that they're no longer permanent fixtures, and this is something that makes a lot of players hesitate to build these things. If a warehouse improvement is taking up valuable space for a wonder or a high-adjacency building, you can just remove it and re-build it elsewhere for a price.

I think Firaxis has been trying to incentivize players to overcome their dislike for warehouse buildings by adding more ways to improve warehouse yields (e.g. through city state bonuses and resources like turtles), but that's the exact opposite of what I would've liked to see. Warehouses, especially the production ones, were way too powerful to begin with, often even more powerful than many wonders. This is because of how early they unlock, how cheap they are, and the fact that it's so easy to increase their yields.

Here's what I would like to see instead. In addition to turning warehouses into improvements, we can introduce these rules:

- A settlement cannot have more than one copy of a warehouse improvement type. (This rule already applies to warehouse buildings. I'm just stating it explicitly since it doesn't apply to all improvements.)
- You can move a warehouse to a different tile without building over it, but you still have to pay the full price to re-build it elsewhere.
- A warehouse improvement can only be built on a pertinent improvement. (e.g. You can upgrade a farm to a Granary, but you can't upgrade a Camp to a granary. You already mentioned this.)
- A warehouse improvement adds yields only to the tile it's on and adjacent tiles with pertinent improvements that are in the same settlement.

This puts a hard cap of 7 on how much yield a warehouse can provide. In practice, it will be very difficult to reach this limit, partly because you don't want to put these in the first ring where your buildings need to go, and even in the second ring, you need to give up a district tile to even have a shot at a 7-yield warehouse. In addition, it'll be harder to place a district on a Mine and still be able to retain the same yields by immediately claiming a different Mine because the first Mine might've been within the warehouse radius but not the second one. As your settlement redevelops, you might find that most of its Mines, which used to be next to the Brickyard, are now in a different part of the settlement, and it might be advantageous to migrate the Brickyard to that side as well. At this point, you have to decide if re-building the Brickyard for 55 production for 1 or maybe 2 extra production per turn (until you decide to re-develop the new Mines as well) is a worthwhile investment.

The last little detail I wanted to mention is that I think only warehouse buildings in Antiquity should be converted to improvements. There are a couple reasons for this. One is that, since this change is partly motivated by the desire to limit urban sprawl in Antiquity, it makes sense to keep latter-age warehouses as buildings. If the one-ring rule goes away in Exploration, there's no reason to keep Exploration warehouses out of the building pool. Another reason for this is that Civ 7 has a pretty serious problem of buildings lacking individuality, and this gives us a way to distinguish Antiquity warehouses from their latter-age counterparts. I don't like how the Academy just feels like a second Library, and how the Observatory and University are just their direct replacements. Turning the Saw Pit into an improvement while keeping the Sawmill as a building can be a small step toward making Civ 7 Sim City interesting.

I just want to say I love everything about the Warehouse buildings being turned into upgrades of improvements. It makes so much sense, it solves so many of the district sprawl problems, and it makes for great placement-minigames and allows for nice features like upgrading the improvement each era, which gives the player something meaningful to do without being too excessive because it's not all tiles you need to do it on. Also, PLEASE let us choose which improvement to put on each tiles, at least after a certain tech or specialization. Why can farms only go on flatlands? Why can mines only go on hills? It doesn't make sense. And also bring back planting forests.

 

[rocksinmypath]

This I really think speaks to the advantage that civ 7 could have over civ 5 when it comes to city developement. I think, if they limit the number of districts a city can have (either a hard limit or a soft limit) then we have to make, perhaps tough, choices as to which building to place in any city. We also have to make the choice as to which tiles imrovement to surrender to the city districts. This of course is already the case, but right now i think that the tile yields are to low. I almost always think its better to place a building then keeping the tile improvement.

I don't think it's because rural tiles have bad yields. More often than not, when you kick out a citizen from a tile to re-develop it into a district, you get to immediately move that citizen to another tile that provides roughly the same amount of yields. If rural yields were boosted compared to urban yields, we'd still have the same problem.

I can think of two ways to solve this. One is to provide more ways to discriminate one rural tile from another. In principle, this makes sense because if, by placing a district, you were to force yourself to move a citizen to an inferior tile, you would have to think twice before you commit to the change. The thing, though, is that the game already includes factors that meaningfully discriminate two rural tiles, and yet this is clearly not sufficient. Resources meaningfully distinguish two tiles, but the meta around resources has always been to place a building (typically a warehouse since it's cheap) on a resource-less tile to then immediately re-allocate the displaced citizen to a tile with a resource. Once you take a resource, there's no further decision to be made because you can't re-develop an improvement with a resource. In other words, the game allows you to make the easy decision of replacing a naked Farm with a Cotton Plantation, but it never lets you make the hard decision of permanently losing a Cotton for a good district location (or maybe even the only available district location with some strict district placement restrictions like the one-ring rule). It might seem a little paradoxical, but allowing the player to build over and permanently delete resources can be an effective way to discourage premature urban sprawl.

A second solution is to make districts cost population. Make it so that a district can be created at growth events by adding a third option (options 1 & 2 being claim a rural tile and claim a specialist) of claiming a district, and don't refund a citizen when a rural tile is re-developed. A key detail here is that rural citizens don't "disappear" per se, but they transform into urban population. This distinction is important because the food required for growth increases with population, and in order to strongly discourage premature sprawl, we want to make it obvious that converting a rural improvement to an urban district is going to be a compromise. If you're re-developing a Farm into a district, you're effectively getting negative yields (e.g. -3 food per turn) until the first building in the district completes, and even after the building comes online, you're not guaranteed to be getting more yields than when you had the Farm. This rule could either be a substitute for or a complement to the one-ring rule or district limits, but in either case, it should go away once Antiquity ends.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

PLEASE let us choose which improvement to put on each tiles, at least after a certain tech or specialization. Why can farms only go on flatlands? Why can mines only go on hills? It doesn't make sense. And also bring back planting forests.

I want to amplify this a bit: Open up the possibilities to modify the terrain in general.

This is one of the most basic things people have been doing since they started gathering in one place in enough numbers to overwhelm the natural landscape, yet Civ VII has reduced it all to a basic formula of X Tile gets Y Improvement AND NO OTHER and there is no way anybody can change the tile into something else - which would come as something of a surprise to anybody since about 6 - 5000 BCE with an irrigation ditch shovel or an axe or firebrand eyeing some trees he had another use for . . .

Whether this is related to Uniques or Techs or Social Policies or Age Progression or all of the above, the option should be available to remove or add forests, irrigate deserts or plains into grasslands, extend navigable rivers with canals, drain marsh, swamp and other 'wet' tiles or use irrigation to turn plains into 'wet' tiles. People re-purpose the land - sometimes without meaning to. There is evidence that the Cucutani cities before and in the early Bronze Age chopped so many trees for firewood that they had to move the urban population to new sites - the growth of new trees couldn't keep up with the number of people wanting to cook or heat. Remember the Biblical Cedars of Lebanon? No, I don't either - they've been gone for numerous centuries - exploited to death.

The ability to (with effort) to change the tiles around a city into something More Useful would tie in neatly to both making more meaningful decisions per turn and also to limiting the size of a city more realistically: if you can change a tile to make it useable by more useful Improvements, the pressing desire now to urbanize the tile should become less, and still allow meaningful cities on a smaller map footprint. Then allow the Improvements to Improve/Upgrade, and upgrading the city becomes more than a simple spread out further and becomes a combination of new urban structures, suburban Improvements, and with separate Towns, building up local trade to feed the urban center.

Additionally, this is a mechanic that stays meaningful throughout the game. Newly available improvements and buildings in each Age (or by specific Techs/Social Policies et al) can keep you thinking about 'upgrading' the city right up to end of game and weighing the decisions about what to change: buildings, improvements, trade or terrain both to increase the traditional bonuses available and to access brand new ones. We already have intense interest in the Antiquity Age, as we spread over a blank map and grab resources for the first time. Modern Age could be the age of Open Pit mines for new and different resources, irrigating the deep desert for food, driving roads into the tropical jungle to access unique resources, bridging straits, extending rivers, filling in bays to make new terrain - and note that all of that could be done by some specific Civs in Exploration as well: one Age's Unique could/should be the next Age's Normal.

 

[kaspergm]

Again, I can only say I support everything written in above post.

The ages system would play perfectly into this: Some tiles should simply be completely unusable or require tech specialization or civ-unique abilities in Ancient era (tundra, desert, mountains) to give just minimal yields. In Exploration era, you get more options to improve both those barren terrains and to increase yields from the fertile lands used also in Ancient, and in Modern Era, you get even more radical tools, allowing you to settle areas that was previously not sustainable or could only sustain very small settlements.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Again, I can only say I support everything written in above post.

The ages system would play perfectly into this: Some tiles should simply be completely unusable or require tech specialization or civ-unique abilities in Ancient era (tundra, desert, mountains) to give just minimal yields. In Exploration era, you get more options to improve both those barren terrains and to increase yields from the fertile lands used also in Ancient, and in Modern Era, you get even more radical tools, allowing you to settle areas that was previously not sustainable or could only sustain very small settlements.

As an example:
Mine in Antiquity would represent the relatively shallow mines, both open tenches and closed but short shafts worked by Gauls, Romans and Greeks in the classical age. They wouldn't cost much to establish, but also wouldn't give huge bonuses.
Deep Mine in Exploration would represent trhe timber-reinforced deep shafts with pumps and carts to clear the mine and get the ores out. Much more expensive to establish, but allows access to more material and even material you could not get at earlier because it was just too much trouble.
Open Pit Mine in Modern Age would represent the use of mechanized machinery to practically remove the tops of mountains to get at the ore underneath. It would cause far more pollution and aggravation to the (populated) tiles around it but without this massive extraction process you could not feed the Factories of the mid to late Modern Age (20th century).

Each would be an Upgrade to the previous, and in keeping with an earlier post, Deep Mines and Open Pit excavations would not be required to be right on the tile with the (mineral) Resource: they can access the ore from an adjacent tile to keep your city-dwellers less aggravated by the industrial process going on next door, and make it easier to deal with more restricted placement of Urban tiles as discussed.

A similar 'three tier' selection of Improvements for rural tiles could be established for every type of terrain improvement, some including the current Warehouse-type structures.

 

[uppi]

The ability to (with effort) to change the tiles around a city into something More Useful would tie in neatly to both making more meaningful decisions per turn and also to limiting the size of a city more realistically: if you can change a tile to make it useable by more useful Improvements, the pressing desire now to urbanize the tile should become less, and still allow meaningful cities on a smaller map footprint. Then allow the Improvements to Improve/Upgrade, and upgrading the city becomes more than a simple spread out further and becomes a combination of new urban structures, suburban Improvements, and with separate Towns, building up local trade to feed the urban center.

I don't think that would happen. Early game there may be a bit of a difference, but by mid-game, I would end up pretty much with the same layout in my cities: I would choose the highest production yield tiles, put the best production improvement on it and use the other tiles for urban districts. So I would end up with a bunch of mines and woodcutters and urban districts - the same as I do now, but I would have to make more clicks to get there. Choosing between a woodcutter and a farm in a city would be a false choice: You would always go for the woodcutter once you got your first farming towns up.

With towns, there would be at least a choice which way to specialize (food or gold). But once you made that decision, every improvement you place is pretty much predetermined, as it should follow the town's specialization. Again, you would have to make a bunch of clicks for false choices, as the only really meaningful decision stays the town specialization.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I don't think that would happen. Early game there may be a bit of a difference, but by mid-game, I would end up pretty much with the same layout in my cities: I would choose the highest production yield tiles, put the best production improvement on it and use the other tiles for urban districts. So I would end up with a bunch of mines and woodcutters and urban districts - the same as I do now, but I would have to make more clicks to get there. Choosing between a woodcutter and a farm in a city would be a false choice: You would always go for the woodcutter once you got your first farming towns up.

With towns, there would be at least a choice which way to specialize (food or gold). But once you made that decision, every improvement you place is pretty much predetermined, as it should follow the town's specialization. Again, you would have to make a bunch of clicks for false choices, as the only really meaningful decision stays the town specialization.

You've accurately described the game as it is now. The whole point of this discussion is how to change that for the better.

Making a single decision and then having no other decision to make concerning the best yield from a tile or the best specialization from a town is precisely the sort of mechanic that should be changed, IMHO.

As in, suppose the town specialization is not just 'food' or 'gold'? As in the game now, the choice should be much broader, and changes from Age to Age should require you to rethink that choice. The town specializing in Food, as an example, might require you to add irrigation later to make use of the desert tiles within its workable radius - which weren't in the radius in Antiquity, but are in Exploration.

Or the Town that was specializing in extracting a Resource has the resource disappear in Exploration, but you can replace the extractive structure with a University and turn it into a 'college town' (Cambridge? Oxford? Urbana?) maximizing Science output. Or make it a Holy City with a set of Religious structures/Wonder in Exploration - assuming the game ever gets a religious mechanic worth diddly-squat.

 

[UWHabs]

You've accurately described the game as it is now. The whole point of this discussion is how to change that for the better.

Making a single decision and then having no other decision to make concerning the best yield from a tile or the best specialization from a town is precisely the sort of mechanic that should be changed, IMHO.

As in, suppose the town specialization is not just 'food' or 'gold'? As in the game now, the choice should be much broader, and changes from Age to Age should require you to rethink that choice. The town specializing in Food, as an example, might require you to add irrigation later to make use of the desert tiles within its workable radius - which weren't in the radius in Antiquity, but are in Exploration.

Or the Town that was specializing in extracting a Resource has the resource disappear in Exploration, but you can replace the extractive structure with a University and turn it into a 'college town' (Cambridge? Oxford? Urbana?) maximizing Science output. Or make it a Holy City with a set of Religious structures/Wonder in Exploration - assuming the game ever gets a religious mechanic worth diddly-squat.

I do think it would be nice to be able to move some rural tiles around between ages. Just because this town was harvesting lumber 2000 years ago doesn't mean that maybe it shouldn't shift to be a farming town now for some reason, and so it would be nice to be able to move a couple of those woodcutters over to be farms. I might do that sometimes right now by putting a random warehouse down to let me repurpose a tile, but it doesn't always work that easily.

Now, one thing they could do to help that is that maybe they could play with the growth algorithm a little more, and basically each age, ease up a little on the lower end. So basically plan the math so that in antiquity, a settlement can grow to, say, size 10, and after that point the cost for each additional person starts to shoot up exponentially. But then in exploration that "cheap" cap is more like 15, and then modern 20, for example. In that case, when I do the age transition, I should be expected to have these towns grow another 5 tiles. I find right now, when I hit the age transition and I see that it's going to be like 18 turns until the next pop growth in a town, I'm way too incentivized to specialize it immediately. And when I do that, it generally ends up just going back to whatever it was before. But if I get another few tiles that I know I can grow into, then maybe I might see the town in a different light by the time growth actually slows enough to specialize.

 

[uppi]

You've accurately described the game as it is now. The whole point of this discussion is how to change that for the better.

Making a single decision and then having no other decision to make concerning the best yield from a tile or the best specialization from a town is precisely the sort of mechanic that should be changed, IMHO.

As in, suppose the town specialization is not just 'food' or 'gold'? As in the game now, the choice should be much broader, and changes from Age to Age should require you to rethink that choice. The town specializing in Food, as an example, might require you to add irrigation later to make use of the desert tiles within its workable radius - which weren't in the radius in Antiquity, but are in Exploration.

Or the Town that was specializing in extracting a Resource has the resource disappear in Exploration, but you can replace the extractive structure with a University and turn it into a 'college town' (Cambridge? Oxford? Urbana?) maximizing Science output. Or make it a Holy City with a set of Religious structures/Wonder in Exploration - assuming the game ever gets a religious mechanic worth diddly-squat.

Yes, more options to specialize would certainly be welcome. But I don't think improvement choice will accomplish this. In the end you will want to work the tiles which provide the best yield for whatever you are going for. So if you want to maximize production, you will end up with a bunch of mines, one way or the other. And the other tiles are free for urbanization. If you were to make a Holy City, you would place different buildings on those urban tiles, but you still want the mines to build all the structures and wonders.

I do think it would be nice to be able to move some rural tiles around between ages. Just because this town was harvesting lumber 2000 years ago doesn't mean that maybe it shouldn't shift to be a farming town now for some reason, and so it would be nice to be able to move a couple of those woodcutters over to be farms. I might do that sometimes right now by putting a random warehouse down to let me repurpose a tile, but it doesn't always work that easily.

Fair point, changing specializations is a case for changing improvements as well. However, in most cases, you would not really want to change specialization, as you are working the tiles best for the old specialization (if you optimized correctly for that).