Preventing city spamming?

[JediOmen]

I was just watching some commentary by Quill18 on his pre-release version and it occurred to me that we may have a problem with a lack of global happiness mechanics resulting in runaway city spamming. To some extent in civ6, local city happiness and housing space should limit city sizes, but with Civ5's "global happiness (-) population generated unhappiness (=) expansion limit" formula now gone, what prevents city spammers?

Now, user based choices will still have major effect as buildings, wonders, and military are definitely important. And no matter how easy it is, if you get stuck on a border with Montezuma, city expansion takes a back seat to the military. There's also apparently an exponential increase for each subsequent settler, but even so, its concerning. One would hope there's still a degree of limitation in playing wide.

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

It's likely that numebr of cities will increase something (like Science increased with number of cities in Civ 5).

Another limit in Civ 6, is that not every city will actually be a "good" city, and you could have severeal bad ones, and you can't have everything in every city. unlike in Civ 5, that even the worst placement could end up yielding decent yields.

 

[LDiCesare]

In IV, city numbers increased city maintenance and it worked very well imo.
In V, we know additional settlers and builders cost more, so the opportunity cost of building more cities will increase. But the cost of capturing them won't.
I don't know how they tackle this issue in V. Just increasing settlers cost won't cut it. Improved city maintenance would work just fine.

 

[Acken]

If when you are close to montezuma or a warmonger your reflex is to expand rather than making units then there is something wrong with the game.

If the ai is too bad at taking cities down or cities too easy to defend then this should be fixed first.

 

[Olleus]

Don't the cost of districts increase with the number you've already built too?

I suspect that that (and the cost of builders) will ICS undesirable. Not sure there are any mechanisms to prevent REXing though

 

[JediOmen]

Improved city maintenance would work just fine.

But maintenance from what specifically? All the buildings will be on the map, more or less, and as i understand it dont have maintenance cost...

 

[apocalypse105]

IF you ever played into the renaissance scenario you know that settlers cost more then they usally do its usally not worth it to spam a lot of them its better to built other things and units to increase youre score..

as the cost of settlers goes up... Its pretty much a hammer waste to keep spamming cities because youre cities arent building improvement or units

 

[VicRatlhead5199]

Don't the cost of districts increase with the number you've already built too?

I suspect that that (and the cost of builders) will ICS undesirable. Not sure there are any mechanisms to prevent REXing though

I'm hoping that means specializing will be more important rather than preventing REX. Since science trumped everything in V usually you built for science and growth with the other yields coming in third place in your priorities. It'd be cool if it really creates that situation where each city is designed by the player for specific yields.

I can see larger empires having many specialized cities. They'd be able to do a little of everything while smaller empires focus on a VC but don't necessarily fall behind the big guys.

Crossing my fingers and hoping for this at least...

 

[Cyon]

Sharp increase in cost of settler (the forth is twice as expensive as the first), moderate increase in cost of builders and districts mean that it is hat to have like 30 well developed cities.

Increasing district cost if it is power type of district encourages us to specialize the cities and build different districts in different cities.

Builder and settler cost are the only prohibitions towards building small undeveloped cities to grab strategic resources which I think is good.

Luxes that probably only gives Amenities to four cities each is a big cap of the number of large cities you can have.

I think this is enough for balance things and still give the players flexibility in different strategies.

 

[indradiva]

The devs said buildings would cost maintenance but not all of them and all of the mentioned factors are enough to stop city spam, I think

 

[KrikkitTwo]

mechanics to prevent city spamming

1. Settlers/Builders/Districts get more expensive the more of them you build
2. Buildings have maintenance cost, there is no "trade post" improvement or "city connection" that gives you gold just for having population.. you actually have to have luxury improvements or commercial/harbors districts for base gold+trade routes
3. Luxuries only give amenities (happiness) to a limited # of cities, so additional pop in a new city needs an additional copy of a luxury

Its conceivable that
1. City Center Districts (ie cities) you found also increase the cost of districts
2. Cities/districts you gain through war also factor into the cost of settlers/districts

 

[chaotoroboto]

There's definitely a line. You want there to be costs for building new cities - in some term or another, it should be expensive, both in upfront cost and ongoing costs. However, you don't want to make new cities so punitive to your existing empire that there's a cut off where it's generally worth avoiding them regardless of the strategy or the game.

In 1-3, this was done by piling additional maintenance, production penalties, and unhappiness into new cities.

In 4, the key was global maintenance, which could be alleviated with certain buildings, wonders and civics; and local culture production, which left your farflung cities vulnerable to joining other empires.

In 5, there's global unhappiness, global research penalties, global policy cost increases, etc. Because all these costs are global and exponential, they create a solid cap on the number of cities you can meaningfully manage, depending on tech, policies, and difficulty level. For cockroaching players like myself, this feels like the wrong side of the line.

Other people have already laid out all the various brakes on expansionism in 6, but I think it's interesting that the goal appears to be to end up on the Civ 4 side of the line using some new tools. So far I like the concept of exponential upfront costs - settlers, builders, and districts getting x% more expensive each time - and static ongoing costs - like increasing needs for amenities, or city maintenance - that the designers seem to be pursuing.

I want to know that if I plan to build or conquer another city, I can take steps before or after to be able to do so without crippling my empire for the rest of the game.

 

[LDiCesare]

But maintenance from what specifically? All the buildings will be on the map, more or less, and as i understand it dont have maintenance cost...

From the cities themselves, as in Civ IV.
In IV, buildings had zero maintenance cost precisely for this reason: Prevent ICS.
By making all maintenance tied to the number of cities and not what you built inside, you made improved cities way more attractive than they were in civ I-III. (In Civ 2, the optimal city was size 1. It produced 1 shield, which was used to sustain one military unit, and the other shield could be used to build a settler hen the city reached size 2, so that you could build another city, which supported 1 unit. You didn't build any building because they were a waste of time if you were using ICS. Terrain was also mostly irrelevant, as the city center always produced the same and it was actually all that mattered).

Increased production costs is rather irrelevant. If you build cities just to spam units and secure resources, you need exactly zero building in each new city. It doesn't even have to grow. So new cities will come slower becaue of slower production, but since you can also conquer cities, you may alternate settlers and military units in terms of growth.
If extra cities bring negatives, such as less science, culture or gold, then you have an incentive not to build recklessly. Imo only a gold penalty makes sense, but they used science penalty in V (and Paradox did the same in Stellaris recently).

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Civilization VI use a system which increase cost on economical development the more you build of them.

This is done to slowdown or even stop the economy acceleration that is commonly known as snowballing. If economy development have a static cost (like in all previous civs) then snowballing will happen. In civilization III you could literally double the numbers of cities in each expension intervall. Civilization IV system did not stop snowballing, at best it just delayed snowballing and made the problem worse in late game because corruption actually did more to limit the acceleration then maintenance.

If I can invest one economy point per turn to get another economy point, I can double my economy each turn. First I have one point, next turn I have two points, then four and so on and that was what happended in previous civs and as you can see a slight better start can greatly effect the mid and late game.

In civilization VI each time I invest into a economy point the next one cost increase by 0.5 half point so in that case I invest one point, next turn I have two points but now I need to pay 1.5 points to get the next one so next turn I have three points and need to pay 2 points to get the next one. As you can see it is a double slowdown system, I both have less points and need to pay more and that will at least greatly slow down the economy acceleration.

I think Civilization VI system is far superior to all others civ games because it actually seems to tackle the actuall problem (economy acceleration) even science (with other designs not science penalty). Some civs are actually designed to be city spammers such as England.

 

[cairnsy44]

It certainly could lend itself to a rebellion feature if large empires have maintenance and happiness issues. With multiple leaders apparently available, I am hoping to see that in an expansion...or actually a mod first.
That might be the best thing to curb a spammed empire: if you get too big, you run the risk of rebellion.

 

[alireza1354]

I dont want 1 to 5 city civs leaving huge empty swaths of the map so city spamming is ok!

I even looked for a city spam mod just to fill up the map!

Hope it is fixed now.

 

[LDiCesare]

The increased prices won't make anything against conquest. So, at some point,you're just going to make settlers more expensive than units. If you can crank out more units than other people, then you'll just take their cities and snowball in a military way.
It doesn't hurt large empires, it only hurts peaceful growth, so I think theCiv VI solution misses the target.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

The increased prices won't make anything against conquest. So, at some point,you're just going to make settlers more expensive than units. If you can crank out more units than other people, then you'll just take their cities and snowball in a military way.
It doesn't hurt large empires, it only hurts peaceful growth, so I think theCiv VI solution misses the target.

Well if the cost of new districts depends on the number of districts you Have, then military conquest of undeveloped cities can be a drag on your development.

That's good, because you don't want penalties for late game conquest (need to end the game)... but you do want penalties for early game conquest.

(also the expense of units to take a city goes up over time as well)

 

[joncnunn]

The primary mechanic for too big an early REX appears to be fighting the barbs in early game.

The second one is each settler built increases the cost of the next one.

 

[Olleus]

I'll believe that fighting barbarians is an effective method to slow growth when I see it