[R&F] Rise and Fall General Discussion Thread

[Leyrann]

In the late game, Civ V India can have a wide empire filled with populous cities with a very healthy happiness level.

It would be very interesting to have that too in R&F.

Yup. Shame that you can only do that with a unique ability though. (or a loooooooooooooot of trouble and annoyances)

 

[Guandao]

I need to wash my eyes after reading some of the Youtube comments. I saw one saying hurray for more irrelevant female leaders, and that had over 200 likes. They really want most of the Civ leaders to be male? Boring!

 

[ferretbacon]

I need to wash my eyes after reading some of the Youtube comments. I saw one saying hurray for more irrelevant female leaders, and that had over 200 likes. They really want most of the Civ leaders to be male? Boring!

I'm fine with justifiable female leaders. What I don't want is another "Italian born queen mother of France" leader. Not naming any names.

 

[God of Kings]

I need to wash my eyes after reading some of the Youtube comments. I saw one saying hurray for more irrelevant female leaders, and that had over 200 likes. They really want most of the Civ leaders to be male? Boring!

YouTube Restricted Mode is your friend. It blocks all YouTube comments (at the cost of some videos being unviewable).

 

[darkace77450]

YouTube Restricted Mode is your friend. It blocks all YouTube comments (at the cost of some videos being unviewable).

You have to go out of your way to see the Youtube comments though, so why are preventative measures needed in the first place?

 

[Guandao]

Catherine de Medici seems to be the female leader people are unhappy about. I actually didn't want Napoleon to return, and someone like Louis XIV to be the French leader.
But too bad, I have to accept Catherine de Medici as the French leader. Maybe the alternate leader in this expansion is for France? Either that or Egypt or India. I'm hoping it's not an American leader. Compared to the three countries I mentioned, America's history is rather short and Teddy Roosevelt was a good choice for a leader. People seem to criticize de Medici, Cleopatra or Gandhi the most, so hopefully Firaxis listened and will give one of them an alt leader.

 

[Rosty K]

Gandhi is a damn mascot of the whole series, hands off!

 

[Leyrann]

I kinda want Jeanne d'Arc as leader, but I very much understand that people want Louis XIV or Napoleon...

 

[Xandinho]

There are better choices for the French leader rather than Catherine de Medici, although I have learned to like her in my games. She sounds to me like some kind of Cersei Lannister. While India is really missing a leader, Gandhi has never ruled India, so we can say that India is without leadership. I can wait a bit for a second French leader, since India urgently needs a leader.

However, I have a slight suspicion that the alternative leader will be Spanish.

 

[nzcamel]

Exactly.

(I hope I'm gonna be able to keep this short... God knows I haven't always been able to in the past)

There are two different ways to 'balance' wide vs tall against one another. Assuming wide is better without balancing, as it means more cities, one way to balance is to penalize wide, while the other is to give bonuses to tall.

In Civilization V, we saw the balancing done by penalizing wide. To be precise, global happiness slowed down any expansion to a trickle - if you were to build one city too much in the early game, all your cities would basically stop growing. Additionally, if you happened to conquer like, two cities while you were doing fine in happiness, you took a hit of sometimes as much as thirty happiness to your balance - enough that you'd immediately have to stop conquering due to happiness problems. Might be fine on a standard map size still, but if you're looking to conquer the world on a huge map, you'll probably need to conquer sixty, seventy cities if not more - a very daunting task if happiness problems already arise at two cities.

And that's the minor of the two main penalties. The bigger one is every city owned artificially increasing the costs of any technologies or social policies you're researching. There's not much more to be said about this.

These mechanics combined created a kind of a scale of the total usefulness of your empire. If you have very few cities, then an additional city is an improvement (as you get twice as many yields from two cities as you do from one, ignoring any additional mechanics). If you have a lot of cities, however, a new city costs you more than it gets you - yes, you may gain a few culture per turn, but less than you need to compensate for that 5% increase in social policy cost. In fact, fewer cities might allow you to advance faster. This together makes for a sweet spot - less cities is worse, but so is more cities. In the case of Civ 5, which also had a bunch of social policies affecting four cities only, this sweet spot was at 4 cities - it was better than having 3, and it was also better than having 5.

The other mechanic, however, is giving bonuses to tall. First of all, bonuses to tall mean that you don't give up anything by building a new city. This means that there is never a number of cities after which a new city is a bad thing, as long as it is free; it may only give you two science, one culture and enough gold to pay it's own maintenance costs, but it still gives you two science and one culture. However, there is still a minor cost to expanding, one that is intrinsically related to Civilization's gameplay - you have to either build a settler and settle the city (worth the cost in the vast majority of the cases, which is a good thing as it means the map will fill fully) or you have to build an army, declare war, suffer a diplomatic (and happiness) penalty and go ahead and conquer a city - in quite a few more cases not worth it (assuming proper balance, let that be clear). This means that, while it is never a bad idea to expand, it may be a worse idea than doing something else - like build a wonder from that production you'd pour into your army otherwise.

Additionally, there can be bonuses specifically linked to tall. A bonus for reaching a certain size for example, or city-size depending trade route yields (sadly absent from Civ VI for the most part). These bonuses may only be accessible when building a few big cities and not spending food and production on expanding, but you're making a tradeoff - either you build a settler or you let the city grow for a size bonus - instead of getting punished for one of the decisions.

Basically, penalties are bad, bonuses and choices/tradeoffs are good.

CIV did the only logical punishment to wide I can think of - i.e. shift the cost of infrastructure from the construction of individual buildings that improve your city, to the city their-selves initial founding; making it hard to slap out a tonne of useless cities without your economy tanking.

I still to this day have no idea why that was moved away from.

In the late game, Civ V India can have a wide empire filled with populous cities with a very healthy happiness level.

It would be very interesting to have that too in R&F.

Why would you only want to be able to play 4X with one Civ?

I need to wash my eyes after reading some of the Youtube comments. I saw one saying hurray for more irrelevant female leaders, and that had over 200 likes. They really want most of the Civ leaders to be male? Boring!

If Civ is a historically based game...yep.

I'm fine with justifiable female leaders. What I don't want is another "Italian born queen mother of France" leader. Not naming any names.

I don't mind rulers behind the throne per say. You could debate she's more worthy than Victoria who was a head of state in name only.

 

[DJ_Tanner]

Catherine de Medici seems to be the female leader people are unhappy about. I actually didn't want Napoleon to return, and someone like Louis XIV to be the French leader.
But too bad, I have to accept Catherine de Medici as the French leader. Maybe the alternate leader in this expansion is for France? Either that or Egypt or India. I'm hoping it's not an American leader. Compared to the three countries I mentioned, America's history is rather short and Teddy Roosevelt was a good choice for a leader. People seem to criticize de Medici, Cleopatra or Gandhi the most, so hopefully Firaxis listened and will give one of them an alt leader.

Well some people would complain no matter what, if Napoleon returned then there would be some that are mad its not X,Y, or Z. The REAL problem with Catherine de Medici is that she was chosen to highlight and be built around diplomatic levels and spying, and the way that is implemented into the game just isn't very useful/effective. Had her bonuses been more effective/fun to use then the majority of the complaints would be nothing but fluff. (Remember too, that this site is has very passionate players but represents a very small portion of the actual base, therefore complaints are frequent and of the "sky is falling" variety, but not always that representative of the actual playerbase.)

 

[bbbt]

CIV did the only logical punishment to wide I can think of - i.e. shift the cost of infrastructure from the construction of individual buildings that improve your city, to the city their-selves initial founding; making it hard to slap out a tonne of useless cities without your economy tanking.

If I understand correctly, in the expansion slapping out tons of useless cities means they basically end up leaving your empire (and become free for the plucking by other civs), which seems perfect to me (it's more or less exactly what I'd want the mechanic to be, though I wouldn't mind if some of them actually turned barbarian as well).

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Was Civiii the one with corruption, where anything far away from your capital could never build anything ever unless you build the Forbidden Palace? That was terrible.

 

[DJ_Tanner]

Granted, and I think VI has done a great job of incorporating many interesting choices when compared with previous editions. But... Civilization is a 4X game. V went away from that somewhat, which was a huge disappointment for long time players of Civ. V also had way less interesting choices in it than VI does. So a game can remain 4X and be mentally challenging.

Well, to be fair, just because its 4x doesn't mean all of those Xs should not have consequence. CiV tried to incorporate some repercussions, and granted they went a bit too far. However, the idea there needs to be a cost and a benefit to each of the Xs is a very good one. So while always [insert X here] should be available to the player, there should also be consequences to that action so you are forced to say yes the benefits to doing that are better than the current, or future, costs of that action.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I don't know if we're getting it in this expansion, but I too want a medical district. Because health isn't a mechanic in this game, I think it's buildings should boost housing and its specialists should boost food. The tricky part is balancing it so that it doesn't obsolete the Neighborhood.

They said two new districts so it's just speculation since the Government district is confirmed. It could deal with how fast a city or units heal. Maybe the closer to the city center, the faster it heals. Also Medics could spawn there.

 

[nzcamel]

If I understand correctly, in the expansion slapping out tons of useless cities means they basically end up leaving your empire (and become free for the plucking by other civs), which seems perfect to me (it's more or less exactly what I'd want the mechanic to be, though I wouldn't mind if some of them actually turned barbarian as well).

Here's hoping

Well, to be fair, just because its 4x doesn't mean all of those Xs should not have consequence. CiV tried to incorporate some repercussions, and granted they went a bit too far. However, the idea there needs to be a cost and a benefit to each of the Xs is a very good one. So while always [insert X here] should be available to the player, there should also be consequences to that action so you are forced to say yes the benefits to doing that are better than the current, or future, costs of that action.

Agreed, but V went too far. IV had it fine already.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

They said two new districts so it's just speculation since the Government district is confirmed. It could deal with how fast a city or units heal. Maybe the closer to the city center, the faster it heals. Also Medics could spawn there.

If they did that I'd rather they rename the "aquaduct district" and have that as one of the buildings there.

 

[DJ_Tanner]

Agreed, but V went too far. IV had it fine already.

I agree that V went too far, but I like the innovation we are seeing. sometimes they will miss but I think, as a whole, we get a better game.

 

[Rosty K]

Speaking of city spamming, probably the district cost should be a mechanism to control that (and it probably was intended to be so as well, just doesn't work properly). Maybe if it worked not like currently (increasing with tech level, or whatever it is), but as settlers and religious units work (cost of say Campus increases with each Campus you already have), it would make us think more of specializing cities and not spamming certain districts everywhere. Also could give more meaning to adjacency bonuses.

Or should this go to another thread, I'm confused at this point.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

If they did that I'd rather they rename the "aquaduct district" and have that as one of the buildings there.

I wouldn't mind that, but based on the screenshots I don't believe that is likely.