[R&F] Playing tall

[Archon_Wing]

Well, not a fan of heavy handed solutions.

Maintenance:
Cities on your continent cost 1 gold
Cities on continents adjacent to your home continent cost 2 gold
Cities on other continents cost 3 gold
(Spain and England only pay 1, here's a "buff" lulz)
+1 gold for cities that are >50 loyalty
+2 gold for cities that are occupied
You may not upgrade units in cities with >50 loyalty

So it wouldn't really be felt unless you really settled a bunch of useless cities.

Also...

Settler cost escalation reduced to 25% of what it is right now.,
Builder cost escalation reduced to 50% of what it is right now
District era scaling removed entirely, it only scales based on how many of a district you have built.

Maintenance is waved if within 6 tiles of a government plaza, palace, Potala Palace, or Forbidden Palace. This should eliminate issues if your capital spawns in between continents.


And the rest I think i've addressed often, so: https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...e-lack-production.635964/page-3#post-15209127

 

[kaltorak]

Maintenance:
Cities on your continent cost 1 gold
Cities on continents adjacent to your home continent cost 2 gold
...

Not bad, but I dont think that would change much. At the end, that sounds just like a bit of extra gold cost. I only have a small window of struggling with gold in my games.
I like the idea of district cost depending on how many you have, instead of era scaling tho.

I think buffing speacialists could be a good idea. Maybe nerfing food and production from internal traderoutes, or make them depend on city population.

 

[acluewithout]

Well, not a fan of heavy handed solutions.

Maintenance:
Cities on your continent cost 1 gold
Cities on continents adjacent to your home continent cost 2 gold
Cities on other continents cost 3 gold
(Spain and England only pay 1, here's a "buff" lulz)
+1 gold for cities that are >50 loyalty
+2 gold for cities that are occupied
You may not upgrade units in cities with >50 loyalty

So it wouldn't really be felt unless you really settled a bunch of useless cities.

Also...

Settler cost escalation reduced to 25% of what it is right now.,
Builder cost escalation reduced to 50% of what it is right now
District era scaling removed entirely, it only scales based on how many of a district you have built.

Maintenance is waved if within 6 tiles of a government plaza, palace, Potala Palace, or Forbidden Palace. This should eliminate issues if your capital spawns in between continents.


And the rest I think i've addressed often, so: https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...e-lack-production.635964/page-3#post-15209127

I think these ideas are in the Ballpark.

Maintenance and loyalty are underused mechanics in the game, as is tourism. I don’t think the goal should be to nerf wide and or war specifically, more just ensure these things are fun.

I think something else that might help is making cities with campuses and campus buildings more vulnerable to spying and or loyalty. It might be a fun trade off having more science district and buildings if it also ran the risk of actually breaking up your empire. Indeed, you could widen that out a bit, with more liberal government types giving you more science and great people (as they already do), but creating more risk of cities breaking away (eg war weariness or dark ages hurt more).

 

[Archon_Wing]

Not bad, but I dont think that would change much. At the end, that sounds just like a bit of extra gold cost. I only have a small window of struggling with gold in my games.

Well like I said, I don't intend to change the game itself in a major way, because I think it's more or less fine. It's just so that cities aren't inherently a positive without minimum effort.

The other thing is I think improvements need to be buffed. I played Civ 4 earlier this week and was like "wow improvements!" actually mattered, and here we are in Civ 6 where builder actions are even more valuable but most improvements are a waste of time and resources best gathered.

Maybe nerfing food and production from internal traderoutes, or make them depend on city population.

Internal Routes are sorta weak already. I also think that would go against building up a city.

 

[kaltorak]

The other thing is I think improvements need to be buffed. I played Civ 4 earlier this week and was like "wow improvements!" actually mattered, and here we are in Civ 6 where builder actions are even more valuable but most improvements are a waste of time and resources best gathered.

I do so much agree with this. I already thought that in civ5. Like I said, I love good land to matter a lot. In civ4 it was awesome how good resources+rivers made awesome cities, while land without much of those was terrible. In civ6, resources are totally meh. (even in civ5 they werent good enough)

Internal Routes are sorta weak already. I also think that would go against building up a city.

Really? I am playing a few games after not playing for several months, and they look so OP. I got 22 traderoutes right now, and each internal one gives me +3 to +5 production and food. That doesnt look weak at all

 

[Archon_Wing]

Really? I am playing a few games after not playing for several months, and they look so OP. I got 22 traderoutes right now, and each internal one gives me +3 to +5 production and food. That doesnt look weak at all

If you trade externally, you'd have a bit less production but 500-600 gpt which is going to do a lot more than some extra food, as well as potential culture/science. And of course it's also a lot of infrastructure and traders build as well.

I think something else that might help is making cities with campuses and campus buildings more vulnerable to spying and or loyalty. It might be a fun trade off having more science district and buildings if it also ran the risk of actually breaking up your empire.

That's probably a good point, since for some reason they decided to make commercial hubs the most vulnerable to spying.... and neighborhoods if we didn't need more reasons to not build them.

But at the same time, they'd also need to make counterspying less crappy. I think 1 spy should be able to cover a whole city. Even the Ai knows better than to keep sending a spy to the same district.... eventually.

 

[Uberfrog]

Did you prefer to own the city of Babylon or 4 other cities of that era that togeather had the population of babylon?

As the meme says: why not both?

The thing about Babylon is they quite famously didn't just stop with the one city. City states (not the in-game hobbled AI versions) with the power to take over others generally did so, and increased their power. The same is true in Civ. Deciding to limit your number of cities should be viewed as what it is, a deliberate player handicap like "no war" or a OCC. Which is fine, just don't expect the game to reward you for it.

Spoiler The "city state" of Babylon :

The thing is "tall" empires as people think of them in game just don't exist. Sure, some empires are bigger than others, and the scale on which they could operate depends on the logistics possible at the time. But the truth is, even a small modern nation like the Netherlands has way more than three cities in it, before you even begin to include their overseas colonies during the height of their empire. Even Venice had an empire (and of course more than one city in its heartland of Veneto), contrary to what Civ 5 would have you believe.

 

[TomKQT]

I personally can think of only 2 motivations for playing tall rather than wide in Civ6.
- The more cities you have, the more amenities you need. This is a real factor, but quite easily managable, so not a big deal at all...
- The more cities you have, the more micromanagement you'll be doing. This is a pseudo-factor, but for me it's a very important one. The late game with many cities is extremely boring. I really prefer babysitting 4 cities, playing with optimal placement of districts, improving the tiles etc. than managing 20 cities that I don't really care about and don't even rememeber their names, locations and focus.

I hate this aspect of Civ6, I really am rather a "tall" player.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

As the meme says: why not both?

The thing about Babylon is they quite famously didn't just stop with the one city. City states (not the in-game hobbled AI versions) with the power to take over others generally did so, and increased their power. The same is true in Civ. Deciding to limit your number of cities should be viewed as what it is, a deliberate player handicap like "no war" or a OCC. Which is fine, just don't expect the game to reward you for it.

Spoiler The "city state" of Babylon :

The thing is "tall" empires as people think of them in game just don't exist. Sure, some empires are bigger than others, and the scale on which they could operate depends on the logistics possible at the time. But the truth is, even a small modern nation like the Netherlands has way more than three cities in it, before you even begin to include their overseas colonies during the height of their empire. Even Venice had an empire (and of course more than one city in its heartland of Veneto), contrary to what Civ 5 would have you believe.

Depends on what you mean by "city." City radius in civ stretches out for hundreds of miles in every direction and I could very easily imagine smaller towns/cities abstractly represented by the people working those tiles. A mine would't take up an entire square.

I doubt they commute every day.

 

[KayAU]

@Uberfrog
Civilization isn't a 1-1 representation of nations and empires, though. If that were the case, major civs should have 100s or 1000s of cities. It is more of a board game representation.

I think the main thing which needs to be fixed is the usefullness of large cities. As it is now, it is neither realistic nor particularly fun. Having more cities should be useful as well, but I do think there should be some sort of tradeoff/pacing mechanism related to overextension.

I agree very much with TomKQT about the micromanagement issues related to very wide empires, it is probably the main reason why I like playing tall. I always find the early game fascinating, when every decision I make matters, and I am constantly making plans for what I want to do next. In the late game, however, I find myself doing mostly the same things, only there are a lot more cities to manage, and each decision is far less important. I also find it hard to keep track of what my plans and intentions are for each city at this point. This was less of a problem in Civ 5, where I could go with a smaller number of cities, and where there were other things to focus on in the late game.

 

[kaltorak]

I personally can think of only 2 motivations for playing tall rather than wide in Civ6.
...
- The more cities you have, the more micromanagement you'll be doing. This is a pseudo-factor, but for me it's a very important one. The late game with many cities is extremely boring. I really prefer babysitting 4 cities, playing with optimal placement of districts, improving the tiles etc. than managing 20 cities that I don't really care about and don't even rememeber their names, locations and focus.

...

That's not a bonus of going tall, that's the reason I want going tall to be also viable. I like micromanagement.... when I care about it. I mean, if I have a manageable amount of cities, I love to micromanage them. If I have 20, I sincerely dont care if one produces a bit more or less.

As the meme says: why not both?

The problem goes far beyond that. It's not only that new cities are always good. It's not only that even bad situated cities are bad. It's that big cities are bad. The best city size right now is 10. before the expansion Ive even read it was 4.

Not only are bad new cities encouraged, but making very big cities is bad. I dont know the math right now, but I read a post in this forum about it a few days ago, that showed how 10 was the ideal number.

Again, I dont want to prevent going wide. But I want to go wide, when good land is available, and I want to grow cities to big numb ers to also be very rewarding.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

They just need to add bonus for +pop or (and I like this more) give the higher level district buildings a + for every other district in the city.

Obviously that indirectly wants you to have high pop cities, and it makes more logical sense if a commercial district in London or Tokyo is much much more beneficial than one in a three pop town.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

@Uberfrog
Having more cities should be useful as well, but I do think there should be some sort of tradeoff/pacing mechanism related to overextension.

I think the secret is that the tradeoff/pacing shouldn't be a penalty to having more cities. That's what annoys a lot of players: "Why am I being penalized for doing well?"

Thinking about this issue over the past few days, I'm inclined to think the best solution (which will need to wait until Civ 7 at least, if ever), is to build a core game mechanic around the effectiveness of your government. So that over time, you get better and better at managing whatever type of empire you have, whether its a large sprawling empire or a compact, high population empire. Then you're never penalized for getting bigger (in any direction), but the marginal benefit of getting bigger is small until the capacity of your government catches up to the size of the population you govern.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Absolutly not. Is it impossible to have an empire of fewer cities more powerful than one with many cities? You can't think of any big third world country even nowadays with many cities which is less "powerful"/advanced/rich than much smaller first wolrd countries? Did you prefer to own the city of Babylon or 4 other cities of that era that togeather had the population of babylon? Well, and we are talking about population points, because higher points mean more population than lower points, so the big cities do even mean much more population than equal population number small cities.

Having few awesome cities is in not worse, even bringing up real life, which isn't even always good in games, if it damages gameplay variety.

And another point, if at least, settling many cities in good land was better than 1 big city in good land, well ok. But settling any crap city in the tundra is better than adding that population to your big city in an awesome land. And that sucks big time. I dont want few to always be better, I want it to depend on the land/civilization/rivals/and other details of each game.

In real life, you don't have civilization game victory conditions.

In a game, you're competing over something. Games have incentives based on their victory conditions. When you are deriving utility from game resources, players need to compete over those resources to win.

More land = more cities, and you can still grow the cities. In game terms, creating an incentive for players to not compete for resources and instead turtle is a degenerate implementation. Civ 5 did one worse. It actively penalized players for punishing those that teched at expense of their own defenses. Not only did captured cities not offer much value (flying in the face of actual history in most cases and an overt detriment to gameplay), they would harm progress above and beyond the asymmetric investment needed to capture them.

This is not a reasonable implementation in the context of a game that names a winner.

 

[Archon_Wing]

IRL?

Most of the most powerful countries and empires in the world's history are large, or at least not just 2 cities wide. A lot of empires also lost power because they lost land. There are exceptions, but by and far (usable) land is power.

From sea to shinning sea, on the empire that the sun never sets. Not many an empire is famous for being 2 stone's throws apart.

I mean if your empire is smaller than my Sim City region, then well....

I also try to grow up by building wonders and stuff, but really, if you want to roleplay as a small but advanced kingdom, that's fine, but why would you expect to be a world power? Not everyone can be a Venice.

And yea, ultimately being able to ignore 90% of the map should never really be a thing.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

IRL?

Most of the most powerful countries and empires in the world's history are large, or at least not just 2 cities wide. A lot of empires also lost power because they lost land. There are exceptions, but by and far land is power.

From sea to shinning sea, on the empire that the sun never sets. Not many an empire is famous for being 2 stone's throws apart.

I mean if your empire is smaller than my Sim City region, then well....

I also try to grow up by building wonders and stuff, but really, if you want to roleplay as a small but advanced kingdom, that's fine, but why would you expect to be a world power? Not everyone can be a Venice.

Many or few, big cities should provide more "stuff" than small cities and not be counterproductive. IMO a compact civ of a handful of well-developed cities should keep pace with or surpass a larger land area nation with small towns that are just there to host a campus. There should be a bigger choice to make between building/capturing a new town (which should always be a positive) and improving/growing your existing one.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Many or few, big cities should provide more "stuff" than small cities and not be counterproductive. IMO a compact civ of a handful of well-developed cities should keep pace with or surpass a larger land area nation with small towns that are just there to host a campus.

Sure, I think 7 well made cities should be better than 12 randomly settled cities. I just don't think a 3 city empire should be able to ever beat a 30 city one and that's what we're talking about. As TheMeinTeam suggested, it's degenerate gameplay. It's degenerate gameplay, because it would make land management and strategic map value moot if passive turtling were just as strong as being proactive.

The issue here with the campus only cities is that the other districts aren't worth their costs in a lot of cases, and not necessarily a factor of city growth.

There should be a bigger choice to make between building/capturing a new town (which should always be a positive) and improving/growing your existing one.

If they made towns harder to capture with in the first place, then it'd actually be a decision. It's often not.

If the AI could kill you at any turn during the game if you overextend yourself, you'd think twice about getting a new city. But you don't need to.

Basically, the current meta is based around the opponent not playing the game, and thus it's going to be broken either way.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

well yeah, 4 city Civ5 was clearly an over-reaction that should have been patched away had support for the game not stopped.

 

[Disgustipated]

Also, more cities -> more trade routes -> more gold.

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.

 

[Archon_Wing]

well yeah, 4 city Civ5 was clearly an over-reaction that should have been patched away had support for the game not stopped.

And then they might have gone the other way.... I still prefer it this way. To me, I like to build 10 wonders in the same city regardless of efficiency. But I still dislike the tall meta because when that happens, great cities aren't great anymore because they're just too typical. That just completely ruins any sense of accomplishment.

At this moment, I don't really care for a tall vs wide dichotomy but simply a cost vs value measure, and as the game is, 80% of it is not worth building and the changes I suggest in the thread would of course help people that want to play up, but it's more of a matter of me thinking that choices should be more impactful and people just aren't going to place improvements or build districts if they never pay back their value. There's no point in making novel ideas like districts and then end up not building most of them.

What i will say though is housing and amenities being tough is probably by design early on, since it means once you get to the industrial era and get neighborhoods and stuff that the world would change on a fundamental level. This makes sense both from a gameplay progression sense and also more realistic since cities weren't always that dense with some exceptions but in practice the game is often settled before that....It's a problem.