Reasons to stop expansion

[Haggbart]

And a campus will produce Great Scinetists and City Projects while a city will not. Also, they will be expansive late in the game, so the earlier you build them the better. Also, wide means less city area and so, less population. It might not be that detrimental for science, but it certainly is for culture. Referring to numbers in a press-build doesn't really tell us how the balance will be in the final product.

Yes the GP generation is a valid point.
I'm not really following you on the more cities equals less population, there was quite a lot of land late game in the LPs we saw on a large map. Why are more new cities detrimental to culture? To be clear, I'm not talking about minimum distance city spamming. I'm talking about mid/late game city spam and land grab because districts have become very expensive and all the good adjacencies are taken.

I think we all know that we are speculating in numbers that might not be final, if we didn't speculate there would be a lot fewer threads here

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Settlers are not free and you may have better options. Yes the long term goal may be to expand but that do not mean that the best short term option is to build a settler.

District cost do not have that much to do with expansion. The number one factor for district cost is simply the cost increase per turn. Also the district cost do eventually cap out.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Settlers are not free and you may have better options. Yes the long term goal may be to expand but that do not mean that the best short term option is to build a settler.

District cost do not have that much to do with expansion. The number one factor for district cost is simply the cost increase per turn. Also the district cost do eventually cap out.

We don't know that there is a cost increase per turn in districts...
There are factors besides numbers of districts, but it could be techs/civics/eras, etc.

It would be nice if those rules were in the civilopedia under "districts" and a youtuber would show us, but they haven't as far as I know.

 

[redwings1340]

I feel like there are a lot of reasons to stop expansion that are part of the game.

1) building a district or a building is just simply more valuable than building another city at the current time.

2) Creating another city makes you more likely to get in to a war where you can't defend your outlying cities.

3) You need more troops to deal with another civilization you are at war with, to keep up your military with other civs, or to fend off barbarians.

4) You need builders to connect resources and make your current cities better.

5) You need a trader/spy/wonder/etc/etc because those units are better.

It seems like wide is very good in civ, but it's not like building up your cities is a terrible idea, or that there's not an opportunity cost to building settlers. Finding new land is generally awesome, but I don't know if its right to say more land always wins, I imagine there will be strategies that will focus on a few very good cities. You'll probably get more districts and have more production per city that way. Wonders are also a huge incentive to going tall, if you go too wide and sacrifice too much pop from your first couple cities, you'll be at a disadvantage production wise for them.

 

[Danzo_87]

Harder AI would be another reason,expand too fast, you will be food for them to feast upon judging by the dev stream

 

[igorsrs]

I don't think it will be about Tall vs Wide.
I guess it will be about:

• Dense: with lots of smaller cities packed close together, making more adjacency and other "distance from" bonuses.
• Sparse: with bigger individual cities, more far apart, so each city have more room to build districts and still have tiles to work.

You will always want more land to get more resources.
I think the biggest reason to stop would be border disputes.
AIs (or even human players) will get angry if you look too expansive, and they will want to attack you.
Or you may simply run out of land.

 

[MooFreaky]

Having listened to Ed Beach talk previously, I feel quietly confident that there will be a good balance. Having one option be the best option constantly is a failure of game design. While expansion is one of the 4 X's and needs to be part of the game, it also needs to be a thoughtful process not just a spam settlers and win.

Expansion should have issues beyond increased cost. It should be balanced to ensure that there is a constant cost/benefit. I can expand now, but it means I won't have so much of an army, or will not be able to build an important structure.
But you don't want to make it such a barrier that it becomes pointless to expand again (ala Civ5... which I know I have heard Beach say he felt was a mistake somewhere).

Expansion, to me, should be something you do when you have put yourself at advantage. You have won a war, or put an opponent on the back foot... bang you expand, secure your new border and begin to exploit. If you over-expand early there should be potential consequences, such as the opponent seeing you as a juicy target to pick on.
The biggest thing with this isn't an increase in cost for districts (though that is a part of it), it is about an increasing and balanced settler cost (increasing with age more so than number of cities... to account for production increases). This way you keep the ability and desire to expand, while making it a thoughtful decision. There should always be opportunity cost.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Cities themself are not all that great. They take alot of investment before they actually contribute to your civilization, before that they are just a loss of production.

There is no tall vs wide in civilization VI as you are not locked into building few but big cities or building small but many cities. On civilization V had a tall vs wide dilemma due to competition around global happines and some other stuff.

 

[ClavisRa]

There are opportunity costs to any expansion, not just in cities, but in population. This is what will curtail expansion, but also what will make empires have a mix of big and little cities. The most obvious cost to expansion is of course the escalating cost of settlers and builders and districts.

Because Amenities give a percentage boost/cost to city growth and production, they will play a big role in both encouraging and limiting expansion. At some point the boost to a city of having an excess amenity will be bigger than the productivity of an extra citizen. So, it's easy to imagine an empire with some very large cities, and very small cities. The small cities might do things like hold a strategically important zone for defense, or control key amenities or strategic resources, or just have one key district like a holy site to maximize production of a key currency (faith). But adding more citizens than necessary to the small cities would cost you valuable bonus amenities in the big cities, so you would limit their number and their growth.

The basic design of the game seems well set up for creating very interesting empires with lots of choices throughout the history, and certainly not just "grow as big as you can as fast as you can".

 

[Haggbart]

Settlers are not free and you may have better options. Yes the long term goal may be to expand but that do not mean that the best short term option is to build a settler.

District cost do not have that much to do with expansion. The number one factor for district cost is simply the cost increase per turn. Also the district cost do eventually cap out.

I agree that IF district cost increase with turns/era rather than with the number of built districts it may encourage improving cities over building new ones. It's going to be interesting to see what the exact formula is at launch.

 

[Calcifer]

I agree that IF district cost increase with turns/era rather than with the number of built districts it may encourage improving cities over building new ones. It's going to be interesting to see what the exact formula is at launch.

Yup, factors for district costs will probably have an important role in limiting expansion. Unfortunately we know very little about that topic. Anyway, it looks like there is a cap at 600 hammers, so at least at that point founding new cities shouldn't be a problem

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Setters are cheap if you have not built many but they can get really expensive if you have allready built a number of them. Your ICS cities wont ever finish anything because they will lack the production and these cities could have an average cost of 500 production to found which is a 3 tier building which will be much better then such a city.

Now if you have factories then you can start to ICS but you should avoid ICS before factories.

 

[UncleJJ]

With proper support cities settled in the late game can grow very fast and have strong enough production to build 2 or 3 districts. Don't just send the settler on its own and wait for organic growth like you have to in the early game. Send 2 builders with it and buy some good tiles. Late game mines can give 2 food 4 hammers and woods, jungle and marsh can be harvested for lots of instant food and hammers, a group of farms can give insane food yields. Send a couple of traders from the city to the capital and another big city, they can give 5 food and 4 hammers each. Some buildings can be bough for gold and maybe faith.

The yields from a late game city compares very well with some late game wonders in terms of cost/ benefit if the tiles are good enough.

 

[Brianstorm]

The problem with "min-maxing" in a game like this is there are other strategies people are talking about like building a bunch of units early and then upgrading. So by this logic, people are just going to build settlers and warriors and slingers and not build anything until more substantial until the Classical era? Then you're losing out on Eurekas and Inspirations from scouts and builders and not generating a Pantheon either.

 

[rpgalon]

the fact that you are house capped in the early game is a huge bonus to building a lot of settlers so you do not lose 50%+ of your food.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

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The problem with "min-maxing" in a game like this is there are other strategies people are talking about like building a bunch of units early and then upgrading. So by this logic, people are just going to build settlers and warriors and slingers and not build anything until more substantial until the Classical era? Then you're losing out on Eurekas and Inspirations from scouts and builders and not generating a Pantheon either.

Well you can get a Pantheon with the God King policy, and you probably will get 1 scout.
Also, chances are you will run out of good spots before you hit classical anyways (if you focus on REX)

 

[ClavisRa]

But if you build a city and it stays small enough to not need luxuries to have sufficient amenities, it has basically no cost to your empire. Maybe raising the cost of districts a tiny bit (build few districts if you really worry about this) and a few builder charges to improve the land. Apart from the cost of a settler, building a new city has no detrimental impact on your civ. Settlers are cheap enough that - unless you're going to win in ~100 turns - it is always worth settling even the most marginal land. Remember, you get science and culture per pop. Science builds are *vastly* weaker than in previous civ games so growing your cities is just about the only way of getting a meaningful increase in science. And as it is hugely faster to grow a city from 1 to 2 population than from 21 to 22, many small cities are better. When you add in the fact that all campus bonuses are +x rather than +x%, small cities benefit proportionally more from them.

It's abundantly clear in the mechanics. The best way to maximise science is ICS fast, and ICS wide.

If that is true, that means you will be devoting a lot of production and food (settlers cost one population) to expansion, and not using that to build districts/buildings/units. There's a big opportunity cost in that.

Testing extreme strategies, like pursuing early expansion at the cost of everything else, will be an interesting way to see if the costs/mechanics of the game do strongly favor certain development paths that would become habitual. On first blush, it looks like there are costs to both growing cities larger, and growing the empire wider, and in different circumstances once will be more valuable than the other. Which is very good.