Well much of it sure isn't pretty. It would be ok by me, though, if the game sugar coated history at least a little bit.
Plenty of games sugarcoat history. Civ already does to a degree, along with being a light hearted take... but no, more sugar coating would annoy me.
On a practical note, although domination requires one civilization to militarily conquer all other civilizations, in the real world, nothing even close to this has ever happened. The price of maintaining even a moderately big empire ended up being just too high. Another difference between Civ VI and reality is that, in Civ VI, conquered civilizations are permanently eliminated. In the real world, France, Germany, Japan, Greece, and Italy all have previously been conquered. And they are all in existence today.
Yes and no. A few empires have completely dominated their known world for a significant chunk of time. Of course they knew their was more beyond their knowledge, but that more wasn't a threat to them. Certainly the game takes liberties here; but it's hard to see how it avoids that unless it became more a simulator of localised areas.
Ok, for those who are saying 'a tall empire doesn't reflect history well enough' or 'lots of cities should always be best because it is realistic'
This is a game. It is not reality. There are many things in Civ (and all games) that are not realistic. Moving units around on a mechanical hex based grid is not realistic, but games are made up of many mechanics. In this case, those mechanics, I hope, are attempts to make a fun Strategy game at its core. So, first we have to answer what 'fun strategy' is...
I think that most people would agree that in Civ, 'fun' would involve a diverse range of strategic options. It is possible that I am wrong here, and perhaps strategic diversity isn't important at all, maybe things like immersion/pace/theme/controls/sound etc are more important. But I think we can all agree that Strategy is at least 'up there'.
If this is the case, then imo Civ6 struggles to achieve the same Strategic Diversity that other previous strategy games have offered in the past. To me Strategic Diversity is about having options, different ways to approach the game with grand strategy in mind. Now Civ6 does have lots of small tactical equations to solve, building small combos (think adjacency bonuses coupled with 100% adjacency policy cards) Where should I place this district to maximise my yields? What shall I prioritise building to maximise that eureka boost? This is enough to carry the game for some people, but for others we need more grand strategy options, simple tactics is not enough.
Wide vs tall is just one aspect of this, but it is an important player in this strategic depth discussion. I agree with the OP that it isn't present here, and I wish it was.
I have written another thread about all of this that got moved to the 'ideas and suggestions' forum:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/improving-civ6s-strategic-depth.650084/#post-15554355
This is a game. A
4X game. It's not that I don't want to have different options nor strategies - VI in particular has done very well to rid us of their being an optimal way through the tech tree; which I think is a wonderful addition, as always prioritsing a similar path is boring. But I do also want to play a 4X game where I can expand.
As others comment about further down this thread I still think that IV got the limiting best, where your new cities had a heavy investment cost upfront, meaning that if you expanded too big too soon, your economy (and by that we're usually mostly talking science) tanked. It encouraged people to not expand too quickly, and to invest in their cities, rather than just leaving them empty shells. At least for the early game anyway. By the time one had courthouses and markets everywhere, that was less of a problem.
V's global happiness just sucked the complete fun out of the eXpansion side of 4X; and it wasn't thematic as IV's growth limiter was.
Sorry, but what do you consider a "head to head"? Yes, if you have a country like the US versus a country like Denmark to compete in a Space Race, without any outside interference, the US would obviously win. But do a happiness poll in Sweden vs Nigeria (10 million vs 200 million), or a cancer research project in Norway vs North Korea (5 million vs 25 million), and then what?
In terms of Civ it feels like you are purely talking about war. But if you look at a real life situation comparing Nigeria vs Sweden, I'd say on production, amenities, science, culture, gold, Sweden is doing better.
So, to quote you again "the desire for a few cities to compete on an equal footing with lots isn't realistic". Yes it is. To compare smaller countries to larger countries of exact equal science, production, gold, culture, amenities, per capita, and then have them on equal footing; that's not realistic. But that's not the point here. The point is that in Civ VI, you can't be a small country that's much better off than a large country, purely because you have a ton of fossil fuels (Norway, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, vs Nigeria, North Korea, Afghanistan). And -that- is unrealistic.
When all other things are equal big will beat small. Clearly not all other things are equal between Sweden and Nigeria. Your U.S. vs Denmark comparison is closer to the mark.
That is how it
should be, but like pointed out also by Sostratus above, really it's not. Because all yields in Civ6 are
flat yields, in reality a tall city does not give you more of those yields. A pop 1 city with a fully developed Theatre district gives you the same yields - both actual yields and GPP - as a fully developed Theatre District in a pop 30 city. Clearly something is wrong here, both in terms of logic/realism and in terms of game design. Most likely they went down this design path to go away from the results of Civ5, where we were in the opposite boat and tall trumped wide, but by now it seems clear to me that the best approach probably lies somewhere in between: Either a mix of flat yields and percent/per population yields or an expansion of Civ6's idea of area coverage.
Personally, I'd like to see the AOE applied not only to IZ and EC, but also to things like Campus and Theatre District. The way this could work would be:
Campus District: Serves cities within a radius of 6 hexes (just to stick to that number for the sake of the thought experiment)
- Tier 1 buildings
- Library: Provides +1 science and +1 culture and increases science and culture pr. population by +0.1. Can hold one great work of writing. Can serve up to 10 citizens.
- Parochial School: Provides +1 science and +1 faith and increase science and faith pr. population by +0.1. Religious pressure from city doubles, foreign religious pressure halved. Can serve up to 10 citizens.
- Tier 2 buildings
- University: Provides +2 science and increases science pr. population by +0.2. Can hold two great works of writing and two specialists. Can serve up to 20 citizens.
- Observatory: Provides +1 science from each adjacent mountain and increases science from specialists by +1. Can hold two specialists.
- Tier 3 buildings
- Public School: Increases science pr. population by +0.2. Can serve up to 20 citizens. Additionally provides +1 amenities in local city.
- Research Lab: Provides +3 science and increases science from specialists by +2. Can hold three specialists.
Now these numbers are just thrown randomly down, but the idea here would be to create a system where you can't just spam tiny cities with campus districts for linear growth, and on the other hand, one campus district can't just serve an infinite number of citizens when cities grow big, so once your empire becomes sufficiently tall, you need to build more campus districts - possibly even more in the same city - to cover citizen numbers.
I like a lot of these ideas.
I remember feeling uneasy as well when I first began playing Civ 3 about 15 years ago. In fact, I told a friend, the guy who introduced me to Civ, that it felt wrong to have an optimal game-winning strategy of exploiting natural resources, building a huge military, and ruthlessly conquering all of my neighbors.
Of course, that's pretty much the story of human history, so "Civilization" truly is an appropriate name. And eventually I got over my discomfort. Now I just play for fun and to distract myself somewhat from the horrific reality of the outside world.
Do you feel more comfortable playing first person shooters out of interest?
It makes sense to me. Larger empires are harder to govern efficiently. Historically, there were limits on how the growth of empires, and it wasn't based on how much territory they could conquer. It was based on how much territory they could conquer and then administer efficiently afterwards. Whether you're talking growth by conquest or internal population growth, as political entities get bigger the tendencies of humans have been to split up again into smaller, more local governments that are more responsive to the needs/wants of their people. To me, that's why the bigger your empire gets, the harder you should need to work to keep your people happy.
Larger empires are harder to govern efficiently; and Civ could do more to address this; but the global happiness bandaid is unsatisfactory as is Civ III levels of corruption. I'll concede that throughout history this was the fall of many an empire, but we know that a game based on this experience isn't likely to incorporate that realistically as it wouldn't be fun for many players.
In Civ they'll win 9 times out of 10, in the real world that's not true at all. Innovation has not been concentrated amongst cultures that control the most territory or the most people. Innovation has been concentrated in compact cultural groups with the right social climate. Often that's aligned with large urban centres, not overall population.
The history of the world is a history of small groups innovating, and then taking over much larger and more populous groups. And then, typically, stagnating as they get larger and more ossified.
I agree and disagree. Ultimately if you look at where the inventions and innovations have come from, while overall they are spread out, it is the power houses of their day who have the lions share.
Tell me any civilization that was successful without building any tile improvements which is currently seen as optimal because a tile improvement cost possible 100+ production from a chop you could had instead. Civilization 3, 4 and 5 did not have this extreme short term explotation since these game did not have flat yield districts and buildings being so dominant.
Chopping should be watered down some how. I mean lumber mills is chopping! So you get to double chop? Sure, maybe there should be more (resources disappears sooner) or less intensive milling of resources, but yes, that too could be done better in game.
And that's exactly the issue in Civ6. It doesn't provide effective limit to how much can be administered (at least to a human player who knows how to play around loyalty). I think every previous installment had some mechanism that limited or slowed down the expansion (unhappiness, corruption, Civ5's national wonders, etc.)
In the current scheme, for example, later governor promotions (or even some governors, like Pingala) could be unlocked not by tech/civic progress, but by 'population density'...
VI has limits as much as any other version (happiness, housing, and loyalty). Have they got the balance right? Possibly not; but it is certainly better than III & V that were too hard on eXpansion.
To better or worse effect, depending on your tastes. The original corruption mechanic might have been the best of the lot, but it was tossed in the name of change, rather than being expanded into a more subtle system.
Not being able to settle a distant city that could produce anything in a meaningful time was not fun, nor realistic. And IV's happiness/health combo was much more subtle!
Civ 4's approach was more of a return-on-investment mechanic (up front cost for long term returns).
Which worked very well. At least early-mid in the game.
Civ 5's happiness system was either effective or horrible, depending on the type of player you are. My major problem with Civ 5's system was the late patch changes to the National Wonders, rather than the happiness system, but I also don't think that's the only (or even the best) way to represent the challenge of administering a growing empire.
The initial starting spot, I believe, is that this challenge has to be built into the core game, not tossed on later as an anti-snowballing mechanic. In other words, it should be part of the fun and the interest in playing the game, something that evolves and changes over time, and offers meaningful choices (where should I place my new governor in order to improve my control over that province? should I adopt a social policy to decentralize decision making, improving output but limiting my control over where it goes?, etc.)
But that's also part of a bigger picture issue of what type of game do you want Civ to be.
I like this later stuff you talk about
Obviously I was putting things on the edge, and I agree that there is some element of balance in Civ6 in the form of production costs. In my opinion it's a very bad way of doing it, because it's not a very fun game to play when you have to wait 30-50 turns for anything to be produced in a new city, but you can argue that it does put an effective block to the usefulness of new cities. That people didn't like it has been shown by the fact that governors now allow you to circumvent this restriction through faith and gold-buying districts. When that's said, all experience shows that the most effective way to win Civ6 still is to spam campuses, which goes to show there's still an issue (or at least can be, depending on your viewpoint of what's good and not).
Fair.
The government plaza buildings don't make a big enough impact to even consider talking about, I wish they did
Well if you are playing 3-7 tall cities, I can see where they give a significant advantage.
The loyalty system is an awful mechanic that should have never made it past playtesting. It’s incredibly restrictive, and just totally unfun.
Can't agree with this at all. Loyalty was the best addition in R&F; and certainly helped deal somewhat to ICS.
I don’t think the game needs to have any mechanism in place to slow down expansion at all (civ 5 had the culture/science negative modifiers) but instead just have positive effects to reward large cities, much in the same way 95% of the current civ 6 mechanics/buildings reward wide play.
But yes, that is the way I prefer to look at any favouring of tall play - it should be because of benefits, not because wide is unnaturally punished.
I think it would make sense if two civs, both with a population of 100 across their whole empire should be comparable in power level. One civ might have 4 cities that each have 25 population, and the other might be 10 cities each at 10 pop.
Perhaps this doesn’t make sense thematically or realistically, but damn does that sound like a fun strategy game I want to play!
Situationally yes. Every time? No.
Loyalty - right, it kind of pushes you towards having a populated core but not enough.
