Proposal: Cities Should Create Towns

[tman2000]

I was just thinking about how towns seem pointless and to justify including them you’d have to have times you’d prefer a town instead of a city. Then I thought, “Well in that case towns provide utility, and become auxiliary to cities. So why not have cities create towns?”

What happens then is settlers always create cities, but any city can pay gold now instead of upgrading, to plop down a 2-tile city within a 10 tile radius of the city center. These are then directly connected to the city unless they’re a trade hub, but otherwise specialize into a farming outpost, a fort.

In a way this combines Civ VII with Civ 6, where instead of one tile districts, you have entire towns that serve as specialized auxiliaries to cities.

And you can even have 5-tile radius cities in exploration and 10-tile cities in modern, so that cities can swallow up their towns so a merchant outpost turns into a financial district.

 

[evonannoredars]

I was just thinking about how towns seem pointless and to justify including them you’d have to have times you’d prefer a town instead of a city.

Which I very regularly do. Well-placed farming towns can grow city populations enormously, mining towns can be pretty powerful sources of gold income too.

 

[tman2000]

Which I very regularly do. Well-placed farming towns can grow city populations enormously, mining towns can be pretty powerful sources of gold income too.

Waste of settlement limit compared to having more build queues.

 

[Banazir864]

One idea might be to have towns only count as half a settlement for purposes of the settlement limit. Or, more realistically, have cities count as two settlements and then double the limit.

 

[protocol7]

What actually is the design goal of towns? They are meant to reduce micromanagement? Do something about preventing wide, or preventing tall? Or something else? Hard to say how to fix them without knowing. Right now it seems better in every case to spend gold to upgrade them, build gold buildings, and upgrade the rest. There isn’t any downside as far as I can tell, it’s just extra clicking and there’s always plenty of gold sitting around.

 

[sixty4half]

Waste of settlement limit compared to having more build queues.

Pumping out more stuff isn't always the answer. Everything costs 3-4 gold and happiness maintenance.

I've won games with 8 cities. I've won games with 3. I normally don't have more than 5 but I never felt like I needed "more build queues." But I normally have 30-40 pop in my cities so those towns are helping pump out Specialists and those Specialists only cost 1.3 food and happiness to maintain, no gold cost.

Sure you can put all those cities on Culture or Science but 25% of your production is peanuts compared to pumping out more Specialists.

 

[Taefin]

I was just thinking about how towns seem pointless and to justify including them you’d have to have times you’d prefer a town instead of a city.

Isn’t the change to the food curve going to make towns more useful, by making it less inefficient to send food to cities and grow specialists.

Didn’t you try lowering the food cost in your mod, what did that do to the town/city balance?

 

[tman2000]

Isn’t the change to the food curve going to make towns more useful, by making it less inefficient to send food to cities and grow specialists.

Didn’t you try lowering the food cost in your mod, what did that do to the town/city balance?

I did lower the food cost and it worked great. There was serious regret for avoiding food buildings but also trading off farming towns for growing or otherwise. I just wish we could control where food yields go

 

[Noble Zarkon]

They are meant to reduce micromanagement? Do something about preventing wide, or preventing tall?

Reduce micromanagement and redefine the wide vs tall debate both of which they have done. The changes to food will help as well.

I'd like to see towns cost less settlement limit than cities, I think that would be a helpful change.

 

[evonannoredars]

Waste of settlement limit compared to having more build queues.

more food for cities = more population for rural production tiles and production specialists in cities = more production = build queues are completed faster

 

[UWHabs]

One idea might be to have towns only count as half a settlement for purposes of the settlement limit. Or, more realistically, have cities count as two settlements and then double the limit.

To me that makes a lot of sense. Maybe the new growth changes will balance them out a little, and make towns feeding cities be a little more powerful. But it still feels like the fact that it doesn't really "cost" you anything outside of a one-time fee to convert a town to a city just makes there no real purpose to keeping too many towns around.

The fact that when you buy stuff, it's around a 3:1 or 4:1 balance between production and gold, even at 1000 gold to convert a town, if it gets even 20-30 production per turn, it will pay itself off pretty quickly. I don't convert everything because I'm lazy and don't want to micro every city, but I find as long as I have at least a couple usable tiles, it's pretty much always worth it.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

I don't convert everything because I'm lazy and don't want to micro every city

You are not alone - this is an important part of the concept!

 

[stealth_nsk]

You are not alone - this is an important part of the concept!

Yes. Civ5 has puppet state concept aiming at the same goal, but it works with conquered cities only. Civ7 tries to make it work for normal settlements as well, although they still need some tweaks.

 

[pmarc]

Pumping out more stuff isn't always the answer. Everything costs 3-4 gold and happiness maintenance.

I've won games with 8 cities. I've won games with 3. I normally don't have more than 5 but I never felt like I needed "more build queues." But I normally have 30-40 pop in my cities so those towns are helping pump out Specialists and those Specialists only cost 1.3 food and happiness to maintain, no gold cost.

Sure you can put all those cities on Culture or Science but 25% of your production is peanuts compared to pumping out more Specialists.

That's one of the tradeoffs I find interesting, at least until mid-exploration or so, when there starts being too much gold. You can add a specialist to a well-developed city and it is as productive as a good adjacency building in a new city. But with the diminishing returns on food and the specialist limit, you also want to convert other towns for the long-term, and you need to determine in how long they will pay off in terms of building the infrastructure to beat the yields of more population in the existing cities.

Taking the science golden age with a few good science cities with specialists really helps get through the early few techs in the next age, to actually have something to build in the cities. Of course, if you have something like the Maya unique quarter that's better than a golden age academy, then you probably want max. cities with the economic golden age, but it's not the plan for every civ, every game.

 

[pmarc]

What actually is the design goal of towns? They are meant to reduce micromanagement? Do something about preventing wide, or preventing tall? Or something else? Hard to say how to fix them without knowing. Right now it seems better in every case to spend gold to upgrade them, build gold buildings, and upgrade the rest. There isn’t any downside as far as I can tell, it’s just extra clicking and there’s always plenty of gold sitting around.

I doubt it's a good strategy to prioritize gold buildings in cities when you already get your gold from towns, vs. the other yields (production, science, culture) that need cities to get accumulated.

One of the big ideas in the game is that you need a balance between science/culture to unlock new things to build (and settlement limit or specialist limit increases), and gold/production to build them. So especially early on, sitting on gold or having nothing left to build might be a symptom of not progressing in techs/civics fast enough.

The downside is the opportunity cost of what you could have done with that gold, or what other yield you could have generated instead of that gold. It's good that there is an incentive to save gold to upgrade towns to cities, but if you always save your gold for that, you might miss opportunities such as getting one more settler early to get a good settlement location before the AI.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I doubt it's a good strategy to prioritize gold buildings in cities when you already get your gold from towns, vs. the other yields (production, science, culture) that need cities to get accumulated.

One of the big ideas in the game is that you need a balance between science/culture to unlock new things to build (and settlement limit or specialist limit increases), and gold/production to build them. So especially early on, sitting on gold or having nothing left to build might be a symptom of not progressing in techs/civics fast enough.

The downside is the opportunity cost of what you could have done with that gold, or what other yield you could have generated instead of that gold. It's good that there is an incentive to save gold to upgrade towns to cities, but if you always save your gold for that, you might miss opportunities such as getting one more settler early to get a good settlement location before the AI.

Gold buildings also provide resource slots, so they are quite useful.

 

[UWHabs]

Gold buildings also provide resource slots, so they are quite useful.

And secretly are better than expected, since they don't cost gold maintenance. The +6 Bazaar is actually more like a +9 building since you don't pay the gold maintenance on it. And because of that, when they roll over they're one of the better ratios. So the obsolete library you're getting 2 science for 2 gold+2 happiness, the obsolete market you're getting 2 gold for 2 happiness.

But yeah, if my choice is a +5 library or a +5 market, obviously take the library first. But especially if you have an island or river city where you can get big adjacency for gold, and don't really have any good resource adjacency, getting a gold building first can make sense.

 

[Serenya]

It might be a waste of the settlement limits - but I like to go very wide and do I honestly appreciate not having that many build queues to manage! I convert to cities when I have a cluster of towns ready to switch to support, or I want to build a wonder that needs a specific tile type. Early games I always pushed for the Econ golden age to keep my cities, now I never go because I have niche ones I’m happy to revert to towns

 

[tman2000]

more food for cities = more population for rural production tiles and production specialists in cities = more production = build queues are completed faster

Solved if the growth rates were changed.

 

[protocol7]

I've not done super concrete testing, but I notice the more towns I convert to cities the more money I have for more conversions and by mid-age I have over my settlement limit of all converted cities, and tons of gold spare. This is on Deity but I'm not getting my gold from other civs.