[GS] Playing tall revisited

[nzcamel]

Err, happiness and housing are much more limiting factors to city size rather than the empire size Loyalty - right, it kind of pushes you towards having a populated core but not enough.

Well no. Each luxury only caters to 4 cities, and the majority of other amenities aren't shared at all. So happiness does limit the number of well functioning cities you can have; but certainly not to the degree that it was in V. Housing, sure. Loyalty may not be as strong as you'd like; though once those cities start to fall, it can be dominoes.

I say bringing back the +yield based on citizens in BNW from buildings would help! Wide already has its benefits but currently there is not much difference in a size 10 city VS a size 20 city.. things like war weariness and housing is already enough restrictions on tall play, IMO. It makes civs like Khmer rather weak.

Sounds good to me

I don't know, maybe...

Yes. People need to have a certain amount of respect for the genre they play. Many games put you in the role of people with moral choices who can be nasty or nice, or various shades of grey in between. If one doesn't like that, one shouldn't play those kinds of games; rather than demand that moral choice be removed.

Years ago, while playing Civ 4 I think it was, I had the notion of creating a mod that would specially reward peaceful play. It would be something like everyone playing as Bhutan, where Gross National Happiness counts for far more than a big economy or military strength. I've lost all the notes I wrote about it at the time, and anyway I'm neither a programmer nor a modder, so it was really just an idea. I suppose you could do it now, in Civ 6, by altering the relative values of certain things, though I doubt most people would enjoy that kind of play.

Cool. But I agree that for most the appeal would be limited.

 

[Victoria]

Where there is more people, it should be possible to open up more universities.

One may say that universities are based on population to a degree - London has 40 universities and 8 million, Birmingham has 5 universities and 1 million but the real discoveries are typically made at the best universities.
You are just thinking along population and while it does work like that a little bit it is not the real picture.
If you wish to encourage the best to attend your university you have a large spacious pretty campus in a surrounding that encourages the best tutors to also be employed there.
Then what you have is a University like Oxford which is not just one university but many. I guess that is why there is an Oxford university wonder. Cambridge is their twin really, another smaller university city with many universities in it. Then we look to the rest of the country and find universities in all large cities.
The largest cities also have huge numbers of poor people and a huge variety of jobs as population begets work to a degree, as long as the population has wealth.
I see where they are coming from with one Uni per city but it can be scaled by pop too I guess. My eldest just chose one , its not like you chose a local one to you, you want to get far away from your parents and also universities specialise

This picture is of Royal Holloway University just up the road from me in a town of maybe a population of 10,000. Originally a Womens only Uni. It is called a London university (one of the 40) but is outside the M25 and so is not even in greater london but Surrey.

My personal view is the more universities you have the less value they bring to the table and I think this is how wide should work personally

 

[AsH2]

..you want to get far away from your parents..

That's why going wide should give less happiness - longer road trip to relatives..

 

[Archon_Wing]

If you wish to encourage the best to attend your university you have a large spacious pretty campus in a surrounding that encourages the best tutors to also be employed there.

That explains the mountain adjacency bonus, sort of.

Although campus buildings being so cheap and easy to spam with 1 max per city is one of the issues. I think that's certainly more an argument than some generic "It's not like 5" thingy. National wonders would be nice, of course.

 

[Scaramanga]

A 10 pop campus w/ university can make more science than a 1 pop campus w/ university simply by assigning some citizens to that district's slots. More population will allow it to assign more citizens and make more science even without district adjacencies with each other.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

A 10 pop campus w/ university can make more science than a 1 pop campus w/ university simply by assigning some citizens to that district's slots. More population will allow it to assign more citizens and make more science even without district adjacencies with each other.

With just 3 pops you can fill a campus and its quite doable with 4 pops.

Since you pay more for each pop and you have houses and such to deal with it make sense that larger cities have similar or higher productivity per pop than small cities, especially since large cities encourage more specialization and some have very high gdp per capita in reality such as New York meaning that they are significant more productivity than the country on average.

Small cities should mostly be about controlling territory and resources and less about being productive because it can build a campus as good or nearly as good as your core cities.

Which is why civilization IV had the best city design because both V and VI have quite big flaws while IV had quite good balance.

 

[Scaramanga]

With just 3 pops you can fill a campus and its quite doable with 4 pops.

Since you pay more for each pop and you have houses and such to deal with it make sense that larger cities have similar or higher productivity per pop than small cities, especially since large cities encourage more specialization and some have very high gdp per capita in reality such as New York meaning that they are significant more productivity than the country on average.

Small cities should mostly be about controlling territory and resources and less about being productive because it can build a campus as good or nearly as good as your core cities.

Which is why civilization IV had the best city design because both V and VI have quite big flaws while IV had quite good balance.

Ok, then I'll just factor campus projects into it and say that a larger city can both run more citizens and finish research grants faster than a smaller city with only a Campus and campus buildings in both.

 

[acluewithout]

Although campus buildings being so cheap and easy to spam with 1 max per city is one of the issues. I think that's certainly more an argument than some generic "It's not like 5" thingy. National wonders would be nice, of course.

Campuses spam is not good for the game generally, and is the main thing that pushes the game to be a bit more “wide” than it should be.

To me, Culture (and Gold) should be the yields maximised by wide; and Science (and Hammers) should be the yields maximised by tall (with maybe some Science from Trade). But Campus Spam (and how it interacts with City States) makes both Culture and Science about wide.

There should be a break or limit on Campuses. I’d like to see empires only able to support so many globally, rather than automatically one per City, and each Campus and it’s buildings then also being very costly to maintain. I’m not sure what that “global campus capacity” should be based on though. Perhaps your overall empire wide Population, and then adjusted by other things like Government Tier, Wonders or Great People.

I think the +50% for 10 Pop type cards, particularly Rationalism, need a rethink. It really does just push you to have Campuses everywhere and every City at 10 Pop and no more. Although, if you couldn’t spam Campuses in every City, then Rationalism specifically might not be such a problem anymore.

 

[Rosty K]

There should be a break on Campuses. I’d like to see empires only able to support so many globally, rather than automatically one per City, and each Campus and it’s buildings being very costly to maintain. I’m not sure what that “global campus capacity” should be based on though. Perhaps your Government Tier and then maybe modified by other things.

'Population density' Further modified as eras and governments progress + wonders (finally some use for Great Library!) + GP (e.g. Newton increases the campus capacity instead of giving free buildings).

 

[steveg700]

Campuses spam is not good for the game generally, and is the main thing that pushes the game to be a bit more “wide” than it should be.

Well, I'd say that it's more of a symptom of a disease. Districts with adjacency bonuses were a cute idea lifted from another game, a game where city spam is well-checked. If you have game that lacks regulatory mechanisms for expansion, and then you set up winning conditions that reward specialization, what do you expect the player experience to be like? if you can rack up an adjacency bonus that eclipses the value of a library, you're definitely front-loading a low-pop city. Forget the library, go find another mountain range.

But then again, what do you expect a player to be doing with his turns if he can't work to progress his victory condition of choice? If I can't spam a campus, what am I settling a city for? If I'm not working on another city, what am I doing? Just clicking "next turn"? Need some way to actively develop.

I think the +50% for 10 Pop type cards, particularly Rationalism, need a rethink. It really does just push you to have Campuses everywhere and every City at 10 Pop and no more. Although, if you couldn’t spam Campuses in every City, then Rationalism specifically might not be such a problem anymore.

Right, those cards are a problem. Fix'em or ditch'em.

 

[Archon_Wing]

They could change Rationalism to....

+100% bonus to scientists if city is over pop 10
+100% bonus to scientists if city has +3 adjacency

Change Research Lab to give 3 specialist slots, and 1 more for every 10 pop.

Basing it on buildings is dull and also poorly balanced. Yes, Rationalism is good, but OTOH other cards like Free Market are pretty terrible since commercial hub buildings have lower yields to balance out trade routes and there are already many ways to boost universities. We don't need anymore.

Also btw, on that matter, "1 trade route per city" and the lack of incentive to build commercial hubs past market is another huge issue. If you have less cities, you have much less trade routes. I think trade routes should be based on city size of both origin and destination.

 

[Ownsya]

What if districts got modifiers to their yield based on the number of specialists working them? Rather than a hard cap on specialist slots, either remove it entirely or increase the cap, by default they can have a certain number of slots before adding buildings. Kind of like how certain buildings increase yield when they're powered. By simply giving specialists a stronger impact I think that would change the equation of tall v wide quite a bit.

 

[Scaramanga]

'Population density' Further modified as eras and governments progress + wonders (finally some use for Great Library!) + GP (e.g. Newton increases the campus capacity instead of giving free buildings).

Density would be higher district rate per city. Just having high population doesn't imply density because those people are still working the fields and mines. This is alluded to in the game concepts of insulae and medina quarter where more districts grant more housing.
I don't understand the campus capacity increase idea but paying more building maintenance sounds worse than supercharging existing libraries and universities.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I think the +50% for 10 Pop type cards, particularly Rationalism, need a rethink. It really does just push you to have Campuses everywhere and every City at 10 Pop and no more. Although, if you couldn’t spam Campuses in every City, then Rationalism specifically might not be such a problem anymore.

Right, those cards are a problem. Fix'em or ditch'em.

On/off switches at specific levels are often weak mechanics unless there's something special in game about hitting the threshold target. Otherwise it just makes for asymmetrical benefits that encourage non-intuitive tactics. A Pop 9 city getting no benefit while a Pop 10 city gets full benefit is an odd mechanic because there's nothing special you need to do in game to hit Pop 10 (versus 9 or 11, say). There's no particular reason why Rationalism couldn't have been written to give escalating bonuses as city size increases.

Getting to build one District at Pop 1 and then another every 3 Pop is another example of this. If the benefit of the district was balanced against it's cost, you wouldn't need this type of mechanic. Say, if you needed a Pop to work the district or it's buildings to get their benefits, as an example. That would provide a more natural limit on how many districts you'd want, where. Instead, the game recognizes that some districts are so valuable there needs to be a limit other than just their cost on how many you can build. Opening a new district slot every 3 Pop is a smooth enough scale that it isn't too bad, except that it makes new Pop more valuable in cities that don't have as many districts as you want yet (typically between 4 and 10 Pop). Once you have all the districts you want, the value of each additional Pop drops, creating another artificial-feeling threshold.

 

[steveg700]

They could change Rationalism to....

+100% bonus to scientists if city is over pop 10
+100% bonus to scientists if city has +3 adjacency

Change Research Lab to give 3 specialist slots, and 1 more for every 10 pop.

Basing it on buildings is dull and also poorly balanced. Yes, Rationalism is good, but OTOH other cards like Free Market are pretty terrible since commercial hub buildings have lower yields to balance out trade routes and there are already many ways to boost universities. We don't need anymore.

Also btw, on that matter, "1 trade route per city" and the lack of incentive to build commercial hubs past market is another huge issue. If you have less cities, you have much less trade routes. I think trade routes should be based on city size of both origin and destination.

Certainly boiling the discussion down to tall\wide is a false dichotomy. As long as every city is self-contained and operates independently of the rest, it's imposing a cookie-cutter approach of some kind. Wide offers the advantage of actually giving the player something to do.

Rather than a "balancing" that says either build high-pop cities *or* drop a district and move on to spamming the next settler, I would prefer a model where cities have interdependencies with other cities. High-pop cities contribute by providing a major hub (like Endless games have "capital" buildings). So, for science, high-pop cities have major universities while specialized cities feed them by setting up observatories by mountains and research stations in different biomes. You have a stock exchange or national bank in your financial capital, and then you have colonies sending in resources and providing trade hubs.

 

[Scaramanga]

Certainly boiling the discussion down to tall\wide is a false dichotomy. As long as every city is self-contained and operates independently of the rest, it's imposing a cookie-cutter approach of some kind. Wide offers the advantage of actually giving the player something to do.

Rather than a "balancing" that says either build high-pop cities *or* drop a district and move on to spamming the next settler, I would prefer a model where cities have interdependencies with other cities. High-pop cities contribute by providing a major hub (like Endless games have "capital" buildings). So, for science, high-pop cities have major universities while specialized cities feed them by setting up observatories by mountains and research stations in different biomes. You have a stock exchange or national bank in your financial capital, and then you have colonies sending in resources and providing trade hubs.

Doesn't Rise & Fall cover this with government plazas and government Plaza buildings and plopping Pingala in a science city and Reyna in a commerce city? In some ways governors are mobile personified national wonders.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

The difference between Civilization IV and VI is while both encourage having alot of cities, IV still encourage you to build them large and well developed while VI have turned into a game which is more about how many campuses or such you can have which mean the value of the cities have much less to do with size. There is a good reason why housing is considered so useless past like pop 10 (at which Point a city can already have built 4 districts) and neighbourhoods a liability, like buildable barbarian camps due to partisans and the fact the additional housing is not that valuable.

There are a few key differences:

• Building: % yields vs flat yields
• Great people Points: from specialists vs buildings

Both of these is a move from Citizens being the Engine in cities to buildings which favors alot of small cities due to limits on how many buildings a specific city can have since the districts are not even viewed as equals or balanced. Also this change while making buildings about equal everywhere mean growing Citizens have a decreasing return on investment since each additional cost more to grow while the return is less due to leftover tiles being poorer and unlock worse or no districts.

There is also stuff such as massive chopping and pillage yields introduced in civilization VI which mean you can get massive amount of resources in a short timespan which is hard to balance since resources now > resources later.

As have been said earlier, there is no need for number of cities to compete with number of Citizens, only civilization V did something like that. Civilization VI is kind of unique in its anti grow cities large mechanics, most other similar games tend to encourage growth but also expansion but civilization VI for some reason want you to mostly keep your cities small and look for instant yields from pillaging/chopping while getting as many districts of a specific type as possible. It seems they really wanted to get away from civilization V but simply made an inverse extreme which is not that much better than what Civilization V did even if it atleast encourage civilization to compete about the land.

Coming up with solutions to the Civ VI issues don't seems that hard but I doubt the development team have much interest in actually solving these issues or maybe even doing something about the neighbourhood.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

There are a few key differences:

• Building: % yields vs flat yields
• Great people Points: from specialists vs buildings

These are the main ones, not just between Civ 4 and 6, but also between Civ 5 and 6. Also, for clarity on the building flat yields comment, that also applies to districts, and the main economic impact in both cases is that you don't even need a Pop to get the yields. It's a tectonic shift from the economy of earlier Civ games which were based on allocating your people as efficiently as you can, spreading them out to control resources or concentrating them for greater efficiency, and in all cases striving for as large a population as you can support.

Coming up with solutions to the Civ VI issues don't seems that hard but I doubt the development team have much interest in actually solving these issues or maybe even doing something about the neighbourhood.

The thing is, this is only an issue for people like me. It's not an issue for the dev team, who clearly like this kind of economy (the first flat yields came in Civ 5 expansions, an indication the dev team was already thinking about moving in that direction). Nor is it an issue for players who enjoy Civ 6.

I honestly think it's better for Civ 6 to drive on with it's current vision. The core mechanics are baked in and would require a complete re-build, not a few tweaks here and there, which would likely just annoy people who enjoy Civ 6. I can wait for Civ 7 for a new take on the civ-experience.

 

[steveg700]

Doesn't Rise & Fall cover this with government plazas and government Plaza buildings and plopping Pingala in a science city and Reyna in a commerce city? In some ways governors are mobile personified national wonders.

Well, Governors, along with the seldom-seen-or-heard Audience Chamber, are a stab at rewarding what might designed as "quality cities", which are partially about population. Would be nice to see more of those promotions revamped to include more focus on populations and 2nd and 3rd tier buildings. That's sort of what Canuck was talking about I think.

But that is not tying into my comments about a holistic, interdependent civilization. Pingala's ability is still self-contained. The closed thing to interdependency ("pipelining" as it were) we have are regional-effect buildings, which themselves work in a pretty basic way (there's no interconnecting component on the recipient's side).

 

[kaspergm]

The difference between Civilization IV and VI is while both encourage having alot of cities, IV still encourage you to build them large and well developed while VI have turned into a game which is more about how many campuses or such you can have which mean the value of the cities have much less to do with size. There is a good reason why housing is considered so useless past like pop 10 (at which Point a city can already have built 4 districts) and neighbourhoods a liability, like buildable barbarian camps due to partisans and the fact the additional housing is not that valuable. (...) Civilization VI is kind of unique in its anti grow cities large mechanics, most other similar games tend to encourage growth but also expansion but civilization VI for some reason want you to mostly keep your cities small and look for instant yields from pillaging/chopping while getting as many districts of a specific type as possible. It seems they really wanted to get away from civilization V but simply made an inverse extreme which is not that much better than what Civilization V did even if it atleast encourage civilization to compete about the land.

I agree about many of your points, but I do feel some members here overemphasize the negative aspects of growing your cities large. Yes, there is the barb issue, which can be a nuisance, but really, apart from that it's not exactly like growing cities large is a negative thing, is there? Are people thinking about the happiness issues, or what? Personally I play my games a bit more roleplaying than optimizing, which means I don't chop everything, and I like to grow my empire both wide and tall, and I don't seem to have any problems with that. Maybe I could win faster by keeping my cities smaller, but it's not like growing my cities large kills me.