Tall v. Wide???

I am a bit scared of the lacking size penalties like to tech and culture.

If it turns up the guy with the most cities and/or who can grab the most land early always wins that might be a bit too boring.
 
If it wasn't for Tradition, incredible food trade routes, aqueducts food reduction, playing tall and small wouldn't be really effective in Civ5. Without any kind of similar policies/bonuses I'm not sure how it can even be argued that a similar strategy is going to be good in civ6 (which is not the same as saying it's impossible, OCC might be possible for all we know) when you add housing on top of it.
 
Cyberian said:
I am a bit scared of the lacking size penalties like to tech and culture.

If it turns up the guy with the most cities and/or who can grab the most land early always wins that might be a bit too boring.
Click to expand...

You would want the AI to be punishing enough for overexpansion to start with. But I agree that catching up mecanics are required to make sure you can still have a chance (of winning if you're behind, or losing if you're leading). Or have the AI good at expanding/conquering. That's basically the approach I've taken for my civ5 mod. Expanding/conquering is stricly better but it's also very likely one of the AI will also have become large to be your late game challenger.
 
Acken said:
But I agree that catching up mecanics are required to make sure you can still have a chance (of winning if you're behind, or losing if you're leading).
Click to expand...

Usually the "catch" up mechanics are diplomacy, gang up or spy on the runaway. Still looks like you have all the usual options.
 
Acken said:
When was the last time the AI was able to use those efficiently ? Yeah.
Click to expand...

Well I imagine the concern was having tools to deal with a runaway AI or player in Multiplayer, I think the tools are there.

The AI seems to know how to ask a friend to join a war, but so far we've only seen Prince difficulty by mostly players who can play at least on Emperor in 5, so we haven't exactly seen these joint efforts come to any result.
 
Civ 1-4 was about empires and going wide as far as I recall - and it was fun. I always play wide in singleplayer civ5 too, but always felt like going tall was "better" - the game got built around few cities and you couldn't really use national wonders if you went wide. Most of the games I played in multiplayer had a tall winner. I didn't play a lot of multiplayer because it has sucked since day 1 and at some point it just didn't show any games in the lobby anymore :S

The tall vs wide is a terrible design if you do it like civ5 did. You end up having 2 set paths that you follow and the game suffers from it. I like the soft caps where there isn't a "magic" number of 4 cities that are optimal. If you wan't tall, then adjust the mapsize to limit the space.

Civ5 did some great things, but also did some of the worst things - magic number of 4 cities was one of the worst.
 
I agree that they need to remove the contrived restrictions. Hopefully they have found a way to make it so that if you're out of space you can commit resources to developing upward, and if you have space you can commit to growing outward.
  • Each is mutually exclusive in terms of limited resources to commit to development.
  • each offers different sets of challenges, weaknesses, strengths, decisions.
  • Neither is overwhelmingly more powerful than the other.
I have no idea how they will achieve this, and things seem a bit skewed in favour of wide from what I've seen, but it's so hard to say. I suspect Amenities may play a much larger roll in higher level play, and holding onto the growth and yield bonus their excess provides may be of vital importance in keeping pace. If that's the case it would certainly force a tight balance between the two -depending on how exactly the distribution logic works. Which would also be okay by me.
 
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The only wide penalty they have is the cost increase for builders, settlers and districts right? But its not really a penalty if your later cities produce slower because for the tall guy they just produce nothing instead it does not really hurt your first cities so your doing as good as the tall guy in them.

I would probably prefer some soft penalty to wide. Else I fear it will be too much cumulative snowballing and expansion being the only objective of the game. But lets see how it goes when we get to play.
 
It take time for each city to pay back its cost which mean that building cities may put you behind at first but eventually you should pull ahead.
 
Fortunately no more of this Tall vs Wide (aka CV) concept!
Made little sense historically, otherwise the Brits, Romans or Mongols (among quite a few other Imperials) would have never built empires as impressive as they factually were.
 
Yeah, i Think Acken is saying that founding more cities will on average give you the amenities required to look after them, which is true to an extent. You still have to Found cities that add to your amenity pile, you cant just keep founding cities wherever you want. I dont think the settler and builder increase in costs will significantly slow down wide expansion either though. If you Settle on good land that has a 1 or 2 luxuries and dont try and pack as many cities in as possible you should be fine on all counts, Settler and Builder Costs as well as amenities.

If you have lots of copies but few unique's you definitely can go pretty wide. If you have lots of unique's but few copies than you can go Tall or Wide. If you have lots of both then you can grow Tall and Wide :). I also think that it won't be enough just to be content. You are going to want to hit the +3 Amenities for the % based yield increases especially as you grow taller and progress further through the game.
 
It's far not the first thread discussing this. To sum it up:

1. "Tall" is artificial construct of Civ5. Ignoring expansion and conquest shouldn't be as effective as playing all aspects of the game.
2. Overall, one strategy per empire is weak approach. Whether it's wide vs. tall or specialists vs. cottages. More subtle differences, like specializing particular cities, having lower-level cities and so on gives more strategic variety.
3. While being wide shouldn't be punished, mindless expansion shouldn't be the only viable strategy, it should depend on conditions, so some restraints have to be put.

Civ6 seems to be doing all this about right/
 
stealth_nsk said:
It's far not the first thread discussing this. To sum it up:

1. "Tall" is artificial construct of Civ5. Ignoring expansion and conquest shouldn't be as effective as playing all aspects of the game.
2. Overall, one strategy per empire is weak approach. Whether it's wide vs. tall or specialists vs. cottages. More subtle differences, like specializing particular cities, having lower-level cities and so on gives more strategic variety.
3. While being wide shouldn't be punished, mindless expansion shouldn't be the only viable strategy, it should depend on conditions, so some restraints have to be put.

Civ6 seems to be doing all this about right/
Click to expand...
Its definitely better than previous versions. Luxury resources appear to work just right to make us want to make sure we expand in a way to get more luxuries or spend the production and space on entertainment districts. The entertainment districts come soon enough that they can actually be used effectively as well.
 
If there is no tall there can not be wide either as they need each other to exist.

In civilization VI there are many ways to invest production so the goal is to find the best way to invest your production.

Tall and Wide could still be said to exist because you have to do choices such as building districts or settlers it is just more like civilization VI do not look you down into a specific route from the start.
 
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I found this video. If you look at the minimap, the player has about 17 cities as England. Civ6 definitely lets you go a lot wider than civ5:
 
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