[R&F] Playing tall

[Socrates99]

Just curious but does anybody play wide with just small cities? I read posts on this forum all the time and it seems like very few people actually stagnate much of their empire. I that's an illogical argument that tall players are making, sneering at expansionist players for spamming small cities. You need a couple big cities to spit out high cost workers and settlers long before the money train starts rolling. Personally I think wide with a tall center seems most typical and best.

That being said I wouldn't mind seeing high pop cities better rewarded. What about allowing cities with markets and lighthouses to get both trade routes if ttheres 20 population? Or maybe adding 100% adj yields for every ten pop in a city? Then a 20 pop city with a +3 campus would be getting 6 extra beakers. Imagine an IZ with 4adj in a city with 20 pop, 8 cogs is significant.

 

[Disgustipated]

ersonally I think wide with a tall center seems most typical and best.

This. I like to try to get a couple cities over pop 20. I also like to try to get 1 or 2 powerhouse cities that can really crank out production if need be. Even if I don't actually need that production to win, I like knowing it's there. And yes that means an industrial zone with all buildings.

 

[KayAU]

I that's an illogical argument that tall players are making, sneering at expansionist players for spamming small cities.

I don't think anyone is actually making such an argument. Of course there will be some larger and some smaller cities, you would probably have to intentionally prevent growth in order to avoid that. I think people are mostly criticizing the fact that a massive city, is so much worse than that same population spread out in numerous smaller cities.

I like your suggestions, though, or at least the general direction they point in. It reminds me a little bit of how cities develop in the criminally underappreciated Fallen Enchantress. There, cities literally level up when the population reaches certain thresholds, and as they do so, they gain bonuses which serve as yield multipliers, as well as bonus buildings only available to cities of that size and specialization.

 

[Falk]

I stopped playing Civ6 for the reasons mentioned in this thread: tall and peaceful play is discouraged. That's how I like to play Civ unfortunately.

With R&F I was looking forward to the governors which seemed like a good idea to boost tall play, but that didn't happen. Governors just add random bonuses with no strategic relevance at all (except for chopping).

I hope Firaxis will address this in an upcoming Expansion or Patch or DLC. Until that happens I guess I have to accept that Civ6 isn't for me. Which is sad, because I very much like the basic concepts and the graphics/atmosphere/immersion.

Regarding ways to make tall better, I'd like to mention Civ4's hamlets - in my opinion those were a very fun way to encourage focusing on some major cities as opposed to spamming new cities.

 

[Socrates99]

I'd just rather see rewards for large cities than penalties for many cities. I hated that dynamic in Civ V and it's what eventually made me uninterested in the game. It removes one of the "X"s in 4X. I don't think turtling up in a few large cities should actually be competitive with someone who puts the effort into expanding, protecting and managing a sprawling empire. I'm fine with it being tough but viable, just not on par.

 

[AmazonQueen]

I'd just rather see rewards for large cities than penalties for many cities. I hated that dynamic in Civ V and it's what eventually made me uninterested in the game. It removes one of the "X"s in 4X. I don't think turtling up in a few large cities should actually be competitive with someone who puts the effort into expanding, protecting and managing a sprawling empire. I'm fine with it being tough but viable, just not on par.

At least pre-modern large cities shouldn't be possible w/o small cities to support them. Rome depended on the grain from its territories to support its (for the time) massive size.
But small cities didn't support the artists and philosophers that give culture and science.

I'd remove science per citizen, add increased yield and GPP to specialists, and perhaps make it so you can't build a district until size 4.

 

[c4c6]

I also don't want back the traditional "pressure" to maximize the size of ALL cities (because of equal maintenance etc.) - I like the ability of having just some tiny "towns" ...

What if all (or a subset?) of the governors would provide limitless amenities for the cities in which they are stationed? Ie. those cities wouldn't consume any of the luxury resources and could give additionally increased yields to specialists.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I don't think turtling up in a few large cities should actually be competitive with someone who puts the effort into expanding, protecting and managing a sprawling empire.

The way Civ depicts this, though, there's no additional effort associated with protecting or managing a sprawling empire. It's the opposite. Larger empires are better at everything, including protecting and governing themselves.

Even in Risk, as simplistic an "expand your way to victory" game as there is, protecting your empire gets more difficult the bigger it gets. Civ isn't like that.

I agree, though, that it shouldn't be about penalizing empires for expansion. It should be about making the game more interesting. Big empires should have their interesting challenges, as should smaller empires.

Another issue I struggle with, to the idea that putting an effort into expansion should be rewarded over civs that have put their resources into internal growth: in a 2 player game, there's a symmetry between attack and defence, and putting effort into an attack that fails is a losing strategy that leaves your target now better off in relative terms for having fended off your attack. Once you get into a multi-player game, you get into the situation where attacking someone drags down both you and the player you attack, regardless of whether you succeed or fail. If you succeed, then you gain an advantage for your effort. But even if you don't, the player you attack is weakened vis-à-vis all of the other players by having to put resources into defence. So if you view war in Civ strictly from the lens of "it should be rewarding to people who put an effort into it", you also need to deal with the issue that your target is most likely going to lose, even if you weren't rewarded for your effort. I don't have a good solution for this, but I do think part of it is that there is too stark a distinction in Civ between resources devoted to war and resources devoted to your economy, and that another part of it is that war is too devasting.

 

[darkace77450]

This is actually a good point to bring up. Perhaps bigger cities should get more trade routes. Say at size 20 you automatically get a trade route from that city, but the trader cannot be moved. And at size 30 you get another one, though size 30 cities are hard to get in this game, at least for me.

That's an interesting approach. Naturally it makes sense for larger urban centers to be trade hubs, so extra trade routes for larger cities would be an organic way to reward players who put effort into growing their cities.

 

[mr_siika]

In my opinion the only thing that could "save" tall empires is that all district buildings depend on the size of the city. So for a library, you need 5 pop, university 10 pop, research lab 15 pop or something similar. That could also be the case for all other buildings (an opera house would never be built in a small city IRL)
Does anyone know if there's maybe a mod for this already?

 

[Uberfrog]

(an opera house would never be built in a small city IRL)

Bayreuth and Lewes would beg to differ, not to mention a dozen small Italian cities.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

In my opinion the only thing that could "save" tall empires is that all district buildings depend on the size of the city. So for a library, you need 5 pop, university 10 pop, research lab 15 pop or something similar. That could also be the case for all other buildings (an opera house would never be built in a small city IRL)

I think this is the most natural way to reward larger cities. It would only work, however, if the Tier 3 buildings were more powerful than the Tier 1 and Tier 2 buildings. Right now, they really aren't. To address this, I'd like to see:

• All Tier 2 and Tier 3 buildings have regional effects (but only for cities above a certain size: so if you need 15 Pop to build a Tier 3 building, have it only provide benefits to nearby cities of 7+ Pop, say, and if Tier 2 buildings require Pop 10, then nearby cities must have 4+ Pop to benefit).
• Specialist yields rise exponentially by the number of Specialists in the city. So if 1 specialist provides 2 Yield, the second provides 4 Yield, and the third provides 8 Yield, as an example.
• Either a cost decrease for Tier 3 buildings or an additional bonus to address that Tier 1 and Tier 2 buildings get City State bonuses (and sometimes Great People bonuses), but Tier 3 buildings don't and Tier 3 buildings have less time to provide a return on their investment as they come late in the game. Possibly the bonus could be related to a Policy Card, or maybe something more creative.

Bayreuth and Lewes would beg to differ, not to mention a dozen small Italian cities.

All of whom, in Civ scale terms, would be a Theatre Square district, not a city unto themselves.

 

[Disgustipated]

So for a library, you need 5 pop, university 10 pop, research lab 15 pop or something similar.

This sounds sensible except it would make the Admudsen research station wonder unbuildable. But perhaps they can change the requirements of that wonder. Almost no one builds it anyways.

 

[UWHabs]

I think this is the most natural way to reward larger cities. It would only work, however, if the Tier 3 buildings were more powerful than the Tier 1 and Tier 2 buildings. Right now, they really aren't. To address this, I'd like to see:

• All Tier 2 and Tier 3 buildings have regional effects (but only for cities above a certain size: so if you need 15 Pop to build a Tier 3 building, have it only provide benefits to nearby cities of 7+ Pop, say, and if Tier 2 buildings require Pop 10, then nearby cities must have 4+ Pop to benefit).
• Specialist yields rise exponentially by the number of Specialists in the city. So if 1 specialist provides 2 Yield, the second provides 4 Yield, and the third provides 8 Yield, as an example.
• Either a cost decrease for Tier 3 buildings or an additional bonus to address that Tier 1 and Tier 2 buildings get City State bonuses (and sometimes Great People bonuses), but Tier 3 buildings don't and Tier 3 buildings have less time to provide a return on their investment as they come late in the game. Possibly the bonus could be related to a Policy Card, or maybe something more creative.

All of whom, in Civ scale terms, would be a Theatre Square district, not a city unto themselves.

Yep, I've mentioned stuff like this before. Even a simple rule of saying that you need a population point to "work" a district or building in order to get the benefit from it, might be a way to force you to have a larger city. So maybe your size-10 city now needs 3-4 pop to work farms for food, 2-3 pop to work mines for production, and now essentially only has 4 population points left to work buildings. So maybe you build a library/university/market/amphitheatre, but if you want to build a bank, it's useless unless if you can pull in another worker from the fields to manage it. Of course, given that, you obviously then need to balance yields to make sure it is still valuable to industrialize and urbanize.

 

[Naeshar]

At least pre-modern large cities shouldn't be possible w/o small cities to support them. Rome depended on the grain from its territories to support its (for the time) massive size.
But small cities didn't support the artists and philosophers that give culture and science.

I'd remove science per citizen, add increased yield and GPP to specialists, and perhaps make it so you can't build a district until size 4.

Actually, this is simulated quite well in Civ6. You dont grow food in the city proper, but the farms around and you can use trade routes to transport food from/to another cities, which don't lose it, but like ... it gets gathered on the way there? Farms are hamlets, districts suburbs or small towns... Input your imagination, if want immersion.
I also don't fancy the defaut yields/pop (that stems from Civ2 times), but this is how the game is paced.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Actually, this is simulated quite well in Civ6. You dont grow food in the city proper, but the farms around and you can use trade routes to transport food from/to another cities, which don't lose it, but like ... it gets gathered on the way there? Farms are hamlets, districts suburbs or small towns... Input your imagination, if want immersion.

It is simulated in Civ, but with the exception of the "free" food from trade route (which really aren't free, as there's an opportunity cost to them), Civ still sticks the old mantra that "mayors don't share".

Not saying it would improve gameplay unless it was handled seamlessly in the background, but even as food transportation technology improves, food can't make it's way from one city to another. So the sprawling wheatfields of the mid West feeding the urban centres of the U.S. east coast never happens in this game (unless you think Kansas City is actually a Farm improvement on the outskirts of New York).

 

[Aristos]

I just won a game that would be considered a classic Tall game, at Immortal level, with Kongo, and with a SV mind you. I had 5 core cities almost the entire game, all of them big in size, and only captured 3 more from Nubia within the last 50 turns or so, so they had no effect whatsoever in the result. The only effect of playing such a classic Tall was that the game ended a little later (350 or so), and that it was a close call against a gigantic Poundmaker that ended the game with 22 cities but couldn't finish his CV before I went to Mars.

So, it can be done, and with the least likely of them civs (Kongo). I guess playstyle has a lot to do with it: a centralized Magnus-run industrial powerhouse that feeds from surrounding overlapping IZs to be able to feed just one SP, and superspies that work their behinds for your cause disrupting a piacere.

 

[acluewithout]

It is simulated in Civ, but with the exception of the "free" food from trade route (which really aren't free, as there's an opportunity cost to them), Civ still sticks the old mantra that "mayors don't share".

Not saying it would improve gameplay unless it was handled seamlessly in the background, but even as food transportation technology improves, food can't make it's way from one city to another. So the sprawling wheatfields of the mid West feeding the urban centres of the U.S. east coast never happens in this game (unless you think Kansas City is actually a Farm improvement on the outskirts of New York).

It’s one of those things that needs to be tweaked. All that’s needed is maybe the number of farms a city has boosts its food yield for trade, or maybe water mills boost food yields for trade based on bonus food resources.