Playing tall: how good/bad is it and how to do it?

[swooshswoosh]

So I am a fairly experience player with around 200 h and a few Diety wins under my belt. From what I understand playing optimally would traditionally include settling as many cities as possible, and conquering everything. But I find offensive wars a bit tedious and it to be more enjoyable to play tall and is how I have gotten most of my wins. However I don't really know what the meta is and how disadvantaged I am for not settling more than 7 cities. So what would you all say is the most important parts of playing tall and how disadvantaged am I for playing it? I.e. what win conditions are the best for playing tall and such.

 

[Buktu]

I don't think there is a best victory type or anything. More cities just speed up your wintime. So you still can win any victory (well apart from domination obviously) when you go tall just a little bit slower than with a wide empire.
In tall play amenities become more important imo. Larger cities will have bigger base yields so the % bonus (and ofc malus if you have to few amenities) from having a happy/ecstatic city are more relevant.

For tall play I suppose science or diplomatic victories. For science its easier to get the 15 pop and 4 adjacency for the rationalism card. Also big cities will have higher production so you can build either spaceports and spacerace projecets or aid requests faster.
Culture victories could be slowed down since you only have limited space for great works and national parks. You can still go mass rock bands though.
Religious victories are much like domination ones. So basically the more land you controll the less you have to conquer. It's easy to keep your religion in your empire with inquisitors but the less land you have the more you have to convert using more charges from your gurus and apostles. So in total you need more of them which means more faith in total.

 

[greenOak]

Seven or eight cities is enough to win any victory condition on any difficulty level. That being said, you're going to be at a significant disadvantage to someone who has 15 or 20+ cities. Yields scale close to linearly with the number of cities you have.

I also find war tedious AF in this game (actually 1upt warfare in general), but I still try to settle as many cities as possible. If its just war you want to avoid, maps like lakes, highlands, primordial, and seven seas tend to have lots of land so you can peacefully settle a lot of cities.

 

[Vargas1]

Agree with the posters above. Playing tall likely will just take longer than it would to go wide. Science is probably the best victory condition for tall play - you can get a pretty solid science output with a couple of big cities with good campuses and running projects. Cultural can be harder just because of the importance of getting GWAMs and having space to put them, but you could focus more on seaside resorts, unique improvements, rock bands, etc. Religion can be fine - the limitation will likely be faith output (more holy sites=better output), but if you have a good way of getting faith (high adjacencies, pantheon, etc.) you can still be successful. Also if you stock up on religious warfare - policy cards, debater apostles, etc. - you can get by with just a handful of religious units anyway. Diplomacy could work if you can get to and build the necessary diplo wonders and otherwise keep up with city states.