So wide play will clearly be viable... but will tall play?

[Sprenk]

Favoring Wide (compared to BNW):

1). # of trade routes now per city rather than per faction
2). internal trade routes often provide food AND production
3). soft health penalties

Limiting Wide:
4). Delay in turning outpost into city
5). Alien sniping of units and outposts (aka Maddjinn's 1st colony pod in his FI Let's Play)

Favoring Tall:
6). ?

Limiting Tall:
7). Relative lack of powerful National Wonder-type buildings (or maybe we haven't seen them yet? There's an Institute, but it's no National College)
8). Lackluster Wonders (of course, you only need a handful to be good)
9). No Virtue tree that's as strong as Tradition.

What am I forgetting or misinterpreting?

I actually don't mind if Tall is more of a challenge now--but I think balance is good. I'd hate to return to the dark days of ICS (Civ 2) where the game was a trivial challenge.

P.S. I personally suspect that factor #1 is the most important change from BNW--and needs to be rethought.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Two things that atleast favor tall:

Satalites due to limited resources.
Tech and culture cost increase due to number of cities.

 

[omniclast]

The only reason I worry about tall play is that sometimes you play a game where the AI aggressively expands and you really don't have anywhere to go past 4-5 cities. I like that in Civ 5, you still have options in that situation other than all-out warfare or re-rolling.

But I also agree Civ5 punished expansion way too severely. It will be fun to play a game without that.

 

[Sprenk]

Two things that atleast favor tall:

Satalites due to limited resources.
Tech and culture cost increase due to number of cities.

I'm not sure I understand your satellite point. Are you saying a tall player needs fewer satellites?

I was under the impression that the tech and culture penalties per new city were the same as in BNW. Is my assumption wrong?

 

[omniclast]

I'm not sure I understand your satellite point. Are you saying a tall player needs fewer satellites?

I was under the impression that the tech and culture penalties per new city were the same as in BNW. Is my assumption wrong?

I believe you're correct, but on the other hand there are no buildings like the Library and Public School that boost science from pop, so even without the tech penalty small empires won't be that much better for research. Meanwhile trade routes provide a lot more science so that will probably balance out the tech penalty from expanding.

 

[Sprenk]

I believe you're correct, but on the other hand there are no buildings like the Library and Public School that boost science from pop, so even without the tech penalty small empires won't be that much better for research. Meanwhile trade routes provide a lot more science so that will probably balance out the tech penalty from expanding.

Excellent point!

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

I'm not sure I understand your satellite point. Are you saying a tall player needs fewer satellites?

I was under the impression that the tech and culture penalties per new city were the same as in BNW. Is my assumption wrong?

Because satelites are limited based on your resources, a tall player that focus on getting these resources may likely have as many satellites as a wide player which would overall mean greater pop efficiency.

The per city penalty hurts wide in both games = an advantage for tall.

 

[ggmoyang]

To grow a high pop city, 'food carryover after city growth' bonus will be needed. In civ 5 tradition finisher gave aqueduct, which have 40% bonus. I'll list known bonus in BE.

Frugality(Vritue): 10%
Biospheres(T2 leaf tech): 10%
Cloning Plant(building, T2 tech): 10% via quest
CEL Cradle(building, T2 tech): 10% via quest
Nanopasture(building, T3 tech): 30%, +10% via quest

While you can go over civ 5 limit of 65%, these bonus comes quite late in BE. All these techs are scattered in the tech web.

 

[Asmodean]

So...just because I am not familiar with the terminology:

Tall = Few cities that are min maxed for highest efficiency/output

Wide = Large number of cities for the added bonuses from more cities

???

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

So...just because I am not familiar with the terminology:

Tall = Few cities that are min maxed for highest efficiency/output

Wide = Large number of cities for the added bonuses from more cities

???

Its more like:

Tall low C/P

Wide high C/P

C = Number of cities
P = Number of pop in your faction.

 

[Asmodean]

Its more like:

Tall low C/P

Wide high C/P

C = Number of cities
P = Number of pop in your faction.

Thanks

 

[GhostSalsa]

Favoring Wide (compared to BNW):

1). # of trade routes now per city rather than per faction

One thing I've been thinking that would balance wide and open up strats for tall, and improve the in game metaphors a lot*, is tying city trade route count to pop.

So, a new city needs a trade depot (or a depot plus 5 pop) to send out (not receive, to be fair obviously) one TR, but it needs 5 or 10 pop to send out a second. At 15 pop a city gets a third. At 20, 25, 30, it gets 1 more (we all know how food-to-next-pop cost skyrockets after 20 so these are diminishing returns for all but the most pumped-up city).

A tall empire, with cities 2 through 4 owning 4 routes each, looks a lot better now.

There also needs to be serious road requirements for internal TR hammer and food yields. Given worker slowness, road requirements would be very difficult for a wide empire to balance with other needs.

These two changes would return new city growth to being a slow challenge as was advertised with the advent of the outposts system in the first place.

*One of the most irksome things about the current TR system is, when I'm sending 16 or so hammers to my new 1 pop city from the capital, who is even unpacking these materials? How is a city with no population able to run a dock with the same throughput as my capital? And not just unload these 16 hammers, and somehow eat 8 food, but send off 8 hammers, and 4 food, and still build their own buildings? This is beyond abstraction, this is nonsense. New cities on an alien planet that don't even have roads built to them can't send out hammers or food. Meanwhile, why is my capital which on turn 200 is the New York of this new planet, only able to send out the same number of TRs as it was 15 population ago?

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Traderout limit based on city pop sound like a very good idea

Internal trade routes could be limited to only one recived per city so you can't send alot to create a supercity from nothing.
Internal trade routes could also cost energy alot of energy to make them more situational also their yield should be greatly nerfed overall.

 

[Zet]

To grow a high pop city, 'food carryover after city growth' bonus will be needed. In civ 5 tradition finisher gave aqueduct, which have 40% bonus. I'll 3list known bonus in BE.

Frugality(Vritue): 10%
Biospheres(T2 leaf tech): 10%
Cloning Plant(building, T2 tech): 10% via quest
CEL Cradle(building, T2 tech): 10% via quest
Nanopasture(building, T3 tech): 30%, +10% via quest

While you can go over civ 5 limit of 65%, these bonus comes quite late in BE. All these techs are scattered in the tech web.

Good info here. There are some key wonders too:

Gene Vault: +1 culture, +4 food, +10% growth in all cities.
Ectogenesis Pod: +3 food, +3 production, +1 food for farms.

And orbital units:

Wheater Controller: +1 food on tiles, generates new resources.
Deep Space Telescope: +25% science in city.

I'm not yet convinced that tall will be too hard / impossible. With the right approach it could be viable.

 

[Sprenk]

One thing I've been thinking that would balance wide and open up strats for tall, and improve the in game metaphors a lot*, is tying city trade route count to pop.

So, a new city needs a trade depot (or a depot plus 5 pop) to send out (not receive, to be fair obviously) one TR, but it needs 5 or 10 pop to send out a second. At 15 pop a city gets a third. At 20, 25, 30, it gets 1 more (we all know how food-to-next-pop cost skyrockets after 20 so these are diminishing returns for all but the most pumped-up city).

A tall empire, with cities 2 through 4 owning 4 routes each, looks a lot better now.

There also needs to be serious road requirements for internal TR hammer and food yields. Given worker slowness, road requirements would be very difficult for a wide empire to balance with other needs.

These two changes would return new city growth to being a slow challenge as was advertised with the advent of the outposts system in the first place.

I like this idea!

 

[thedrizzle02]

I really like the trade route tied to pop idea! That would really help balance the wide vs tall situation. I also think they need to increase negative health penalties for anything below -10 a bit to make it so sitting at very low health is slightly more detrimental.

With that being said it is a nice change to be able to play a wide empire, I also think Supremacy may be able to go tall with some good fireaxite deposits, they have a number of % based boost to science from buildings and fireaxite its self gives great science when worked. With deep space telescope, knowledge first virtue, and those techs/buildings in the supremacy line I think you could get close to % of NC and national wonders of CivV but that is just pure theorycrafting.

 

[Acken]

Yay! =D I welcome this change. Sorry, but settling a couple cities and clicking next turn makes for boring strategy game. I won't say both being viable shouldn't be an option, and that would be ideal, but BNW's tall play along with pacifist AI was too boring.

While Civ5 was too harsh on wide plays, the other way around doesn't look that more interesting and brings its fair share of problems. For example, it starts to make Prosperity and Industry look like your bread and butter virtues with something like Eudaimonia.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

I really hope that Tall will be viable in BE, but from what I have seen so far, Tall strategies in the sense of CIV5 (3-4 cities) seem pretty useless. The concept of trade routes, low penalites for negative health, the lack of CIV5-style natural wonders and the increased ressource demand for late game buildings definitely seem to points towards a "more cities is good" attitude.

I guess the question is still to find the balance between the culture and science penalties from # of cities and city yield (which will still rely on pop), but the sweet spot seems to have moved a lot further than in BNW (which I felt was pretty biased towards tall for most of the game).

The interesting question for me what role the penalty reducing knowledge virtues will play. In combination with Prosperity they certainly seem to point towards the possibility of ICS. I really hope it isn't too frontloaded towards wide - I really hated having to manage dozens of cities in CIV4 (and early CIV5). :/

 

[Lucius_]

After watching more of MD's KP game, I have to think, at least for harmony, tall really isn't viable. Nevermind the other bonuses of wide (trade routes namely), with a small empire, you simply will not have enough xenomass. The lack of this resource as harmony means you will not be able to put up some pretty powerful buildings in your cities and your military will be subpar in the late game.

What's also apparent is a nerf to negative health is also a nerf to wide. Because harmony clearly needs lots and lots of xenomass sources, a health nerf is also a direct nerf to the harmony affinity indirectly.

I'm curious how dependent supremacy and purity are to their resources in comparison. I think this game wasn't meant to be played with only a few large cities but as large an empire as possible, similar to older Civ's.

 

[s0nny80y]

IMHO going tall makes for a quicker game. Attention to detail, turn timers (especially due to AI combat/movement times) and seemingly endless options might be reason enough to go tall. However, I do feel I enjoy a richer sense of the game if I pursue wide empires, and with initial interest, going wide should put my previous record of 1700 hours with Civ V to shame in no time.