This seems to me a silly misunderstanding of the game. I disagree with your thesis about as hard as I can.
First off there is no such thing as thick. That's not a thing. If you have 4-6 cities you're tall, if you've got 9+ cities you're wide. If you've got 7-8 cities you tried to go wide and screwed up, now declare war.
Yet you always have a game playstyle with a mix of tall and wide. If you feel like you're doing nothing as a tall, then you start expanding and thickening your civilization(removing some of the height of your empire and add it toward the length of your empire. If you feel like you're doing nothing as a wide (with further constant expansion) then you feel like you should start stagnating your expansion and build up your cities which is thickening. Tall, Thick, and Wide isn't about the number of cities you want to have. It's about the quality of the cities you want to have. Tall desires a majority of their cities to be robust with citizens and infrastructure which requires the landscape to have a diverse amount of yields(since those that aren't specialists will be working tiles and you don't want laborers). Thick desires a majority of their cities to be mediocre enough to not fall behind which means the landscape has to be plentiful with yields(this means you want to have tiles overlapped as you're not forced to improve two tiles instead of one while allowing specialists to take over an overlapped slot). Wide, however, wants a majority of their cities to be just cities with a huge amount of potential territories claimed which usually means wide civilizations can take better advantage of a snow city with only 5 iron than others can. Mainly as an empire begin to age, the distinguishing differences are lost as wars take place, but its history still lies within.
Gazebo has stated that WLTKD is intended to be better for wide. Tall is clearly best suited to take advantage of it. Golden ages are good for everyone, but tall probably still likes it best.
Since WLTKD is easier to get as a wide empire than a tall empire, it's intended to be better in the early game. I'm not exactly clear, but the emphasis is more leaning on the early game. You would rather have WLTKD as a tall empire to quickly make it grow taller (whereas later game it seems meh) while Golden Ages in the early game can make extremely good work of wide cities with an impactful double gold generation on gold tiles and an overall production boom. Thick cities start overlapping on these same and may not find enough tiles nor resources to boom the golden age off and would prefer to hold it off until much later(not raising the threshold).
Are you saying that tall should grow past unhappiness? This is silly. Tall doesn't grow continuously because it's tall, it does it because it has less happiness concerns. You might as well have written:
Growth Priority: Grow as much as happiness can hold | Grow as much as happiness can hold | Grow as much as happiness can hold
It's because it gets harder to grow more citizens taller, so you grow as much as you can for tall since you have fewer happiness concerns. If you want to be more wide-oriented, then you want to make sure you can start balancing in your urbanization slots and rural slots and especially if you want to keep constantly widening then you start using the Avoid Growth button limited by your happiness.
Growth is basically always good if you can deal with the happiness.
Which the unhappiness formula punishes you hard for trying to grow tall as thick or wide.
If anyone is going to capture a religion it's wide. Tall is best suited towards religion.
Not necessarily, if you don't want to capture a religion. It is much easier to found a religion as a wide civ than a tall civ. It's only that we have few religious civs that can play wide, that tall civs just become better suited to religion as they don't have to naturally compete with 7 possible wide civs building shrines.
What? That's the most insane thing I've read yet. You think wide should plant late? That makes no sense at all. Planting is better for tall, and the strategy is always "Plant Early, Bulb late or when you need to peak your power RIGHT NOW." I literally have no idea how you can justify this section.
I should specify on that vagueness. It's not early game, mid game, late game, but early importance(you should probably do this more), mid importance(you could care only on whichever was more beneficial), late importance(probably do this less). As a wide civ, you may prefer to bulb your great engineer for a wonder to deny a tall civ his or her wonder. In return the tall would usually either bulb denying other wonders or start planting to make a stronger bulb for wonders in the later era.
I could keep going, but I have a bigger issue with this: You're conflating victory condition with size. Claiming that tall wants food and science doesn't make sense if they're going to a CV. Claiming that wide wants to go Fealty is stupid if they're going for a diplomatic victory.
Sure tall is better suited for a culture or science victory, but we've seen plenty of examples of tall diplo victories and wide science victories. The path you play depends more on your victory condition than your size. You just generally pick whatever gives you the best yields or contributes to your goal the best.
It is a preferred policy tree. If you think you want to go wide, but changed your mind in wanting to pursue a diplomatic victory(and stop expanding), then you'll go Artistry or Statecraft.
And seriously: Thick isn't a thing. Every tall civ builds builds units. Every wide civ builds buildings. The fact that you claim "No matter what playstyle you do, in the CTD era, you'll reach the great tall wide thickening with either playstyles(where empires grow tall and suddenly yearn to grow wide which in doing so thicken their empires among the world stage)." proves both that your idea of wide and thick are the same thing with slightly different priorities early game and that you don't understand tall. Tall empires don't make more cities later. They never do. Look at literally any of the deity photo-journals of tall games. None of them "suddenly yearn to grow wide". That's not a thing. You just made that up.
Because all humans are inherently biased negatively on micromanagement(even historically without a game to relate it to). If a human was asked, "hey we have the army to basically turn our 10 cities into 40 cities, but you can't start neglecting them which means you must restore all of the razed improvements, micromanage your army more, treat them like they're your own cities. The human would likely have said no for wanting to preserve his or her time in a single game. That's why in these photojournals, the human players only start capturing cities that are more beneficial(in their mind) than their cost to micromanage. The human players would sometime (as this was a case in the early vox populi's playthroughs) capture all the AI's cities, give the rest of the more useless cities all back upon the AI's capitulation. The AI when being asked the same question to the human instead says "when do we start?"
Lastly I know this all sounds really harsh and I don't want to come off badly. I respect you. I respect all the work you've done for this community. I know you're trying to help. But this idea is stupid flawed garbage and I'm going to do my best to tear it to pieces because it endlessly annoy
Any feedback is better than no feedback.
Well this table is a huge oversimlification and it contains major mistakes pretty much in every line.
When at its peak strength: Wide's power is early game (when you are actually you are not wide yet. This is the whole point.
Medieval Preferred Policy Tree: Thick is for sure Fealty and Wide is for sure Statecraft
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Military Priority: Tall - Medium and Wide - low? Seriously?
Diplomacy Preference: what does that even mean? Does it have any sense?
City-State Preference: Tall - bully nearby City-States? So you need army for that, i guess Tall hase excess of production? (it does not)
Fair point, it's an oversimplification since not all games are equal.
You are perhaps right the fealty and statecraft are ambigious now since its last change. :thinking:
Wide is not low on military preference.
Tall would like mutual borders to compensate for their lack of possible dig sites/map vision while wanting their tourism to spread easily to other borders. Wide would rather have their units be granted open border, but restricting it off to everybody else for they want their own dig sites to use and restrict vision to everybody else(espionage and the such).
The Bullying Formula isn't as harsh anymore nowadays with tall cities having nothing to build beside hitting the supply cap with units. They can easily bully city-states that are nearby. Wide cities just can't group up around city-states in fear that barbarians near their vast territory might start smashing pottery.
