Tall v. Wide???

[Mathias Rex]

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:

And Spain AI has a lot of unit, even on prince difficulty, which is good, although outdated.

 

[ExemplarVoss]

If there is no tall there can not be wide either as they need each other to exist.

How so? They seem completely independent. Tall in particular is completely dependent on available food and housing, not on having more cities. If you can stack farm adjacency or have other food bonuses, the city goes tall. Period. Everything else is just building districts the correct way and jamming out some builders.

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

There are... many? I'm coming up with three. Lumber mills on rivers, mines and industrial zones. After that, it is just a matter of boosting either currency or either research value, spotted with units and entertainment districts as needed.

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.

That isn't a choice. You can do both districts and settlers.
As for specific routes...I really disagree. Six seems to lend itself to a really precise build order, with an emphasis on early science and culture to get the snowball rolling. First district should be theatre or science, second should be the other and the tech tree should run pretty quickly to the industrial district (which is really easy).
Sometimes you might want to a specific wonder if they're good (particularly the ones that grant extra card slots), but a lot of wonders are junk and skippable.

 

[treadwin]

I would just be cautious with pronouncing conclusions too early.

1. Balancing is not complete.
2. Prince difficulty is not really a challenge anyway.
3. Most games have been "Over" before the end game. We don't know if Tall helps you in the late-game when city density is more possible.

A lot of these are combined as well. At Prince difficulty the AI isn't aggressively settling. Wide may get you into early wars with more aggressive Civ AIs that you can't handle. Builders also get more expensive the more you build. Build a lot in the early game, and builders may be prohibitively expensive when you need to develop your oil resources.

I really can't emphasize enough that I am sure nobody on here plays on Prince difficulty. Good players would have been slaughtering Civ5 using a wide strategy on Prince. It is only on higher difficulty levels that the anti-wide effects on Civ6 will really start to hurt, and creating expensive builders and settlers means that you are deferring production of other things that you need. Right now two archers and a warrior can fight off the barbarians and beat almost any early game opposition civ, I suspect that you are going to need a lot more, and the AI isn't going to roll over and die at emperor level!

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

How so? They seem completely independent. Tall in particular is completely dependent on available food and housing, not on having more cities. If you can stack farm adjacency or have other food bonuses, the city goes tall. Period. Everything else is just building districts the correct way and jamming out some builders.

In most cases tall and wide are used as each other's opposite which work very well in civilization V because global happines is used by both cities and population. Civilization VI may favor large civs but it is complicated.

There are... many? I'm coming up with three. Lumber mills on rivers, mines and industrial zones. After that, it is just a matter of boosting either currency or either research value, spotted with units and entertainment districts as needed.

I did not talk about ways to boost production.

That isn't a choice. You can do both districts and settlers.

Which order you do things have impact on the game. A tall build would go for districts early on and probably also finish some district projects to grab some great people which may give it a permament advantage while a wide focused build would be about getting alot of cities very early.

I really can't emphasize enough that I am sure nobody on here plays on Prince difficulty.

If you give it a 50-100 turn headstart + no big exploits it may not be so easy to beat.

 

[treadwin]

If you give it a 50-100 turn headstart + no big exploits it may not be so easy to beat.

I'm not sure what you mean here, but I don't know why you would come up with an arbitrary difficulty mechanism once the full game comes out. In any case, the Civ 5 penalties for Wide were too high. That was my biggest complaint about the game and the only reason I don't play it any more. 3 or 4 well-sited cities, careful building and the game was over at any difficulty setting that was enjoyable for me. Even if you found an island in mid-game with 2 luxuries and great build tiles, it was a disadvantage to settle it. That can't happen again, so i would much rather a wide problem than a tall problem this time around.

 

[ExemplarVoss]

In most cases tall and wide are used as each other's opposite which work very well in civilization V because global happines is used by both cities and population. Civilization VI may favor large civs but it is complicated.

It isn't. Larger gives more access to luxuries and strategic resources, produces more research, and it is fairly easy to overcome the minor increases in district and builder costs.

I did not talk about ways to boost production.

True, you talked about investing... which isn't a thing. Mostly you want to produce research, units enough to stop Ai aggression, and on the third tier, currencies.

Which order you do things have impact on the game. A tall build would go for districts early on and probably also finish some district projects to grab some great people which may give it a permament advantage while a wide focused build would be about getting alot of cities very early.

Eh. Starting with a district or building while you wait for the city to get big enough to produce that first settler isn't a problem. After one or two, you can design a city around cranking out settlers while the rest of the cities grow to whatever speciality they need to be. The Civ 6 snowball seems really easy to start, at least for wide. Tall looks like a recipe for losing, well. On higher difficulties maybe. It depends how bad the Ai spam from bonus resources is.

 

[mzprox]

I don't get why people so happy that tall is 'dead".. In civ5 wide empires had their advantages- While their social development was a bit slower, their science rate is not necessairly, and in production/resources they were stronger.
However it is not realistic that more cities=faster research all the time. There are big undeveleoped countries and small ones which are advanced. The problem is in the research point model. It's simple, but unrealistic. That's why civ5 had to have a built in science penalty/city, but it was still better than turning civ into a who can grow bigger game.

 

[Haggbart]

I don't get why people so happy that tall is 'dead".. In civ5 wide empires had their advantages- While their social development was a bit slower, thier science rate is not necessairly, and in production/resources they were stronger.
However it is not realistic that more cities=faster research all the time. There are bug undeveleoped countries and small ones which are advanced. The problem is in the research point model. It's simple, but unrealistic. That's why civ5 had to have a built in science penalty/city, but it was still better than turning civ into a who can grow bigger game.

Since each new city raised tech cost 5%, the problem with CiV was that building more cities late in the game didn't pay back since cities took time to grow (and science was tied to pop) and get the relevant buildings. And early in the game you wanted national college and had to consider happiness.
Also it was kinda dull to just copy-paste the culture mechanics.

The problem is in creating a game that encourages expansion, diplomatic tension and empire building AND allows for peaceful turtling at the same time. I think that will be rather difficult.

 

[treadwin]

Since each new city raised tech cost 5%, the problem with CiV was that building more cities late in the game didn't pay back since cities took time to grow (and science was tied to pop) and get the relevant buildings. And early in the game you wanted national college and had to consider happiness.
Also it was kinda dull to just copy-paste the culture mechanics.

The problem is in creating a game that encourages expansion, diplomatic tension and empire building AND allows for peaceful turtling at the same time. I think that will be rather difficult.

For me, at least if you err on the side of wide-is-good, you can combat that with aggressive AI Civs, so that everyone is competing for map-space. This is particularly true since ICS (minimum area cities) is less of a thing with real-estate and city placement, being important due to unstacked cities, and the need for water.

Despite how easy the streamers like filtyrobot are making the game look, on higher difficulties, I just don't think spamming settlers is going to be as viable as some people think it will.

 

[Cyrano1410]

TL;DR: tall is not viable because expansion is not penalized much. If there is space to expand, you need only answer two questions: is it worth the opportunity cost, and is it safe?

Allow me to try and theorize a bit. I am no expert, feel free to criticize this bit! Please back your criticism with facts and numbers if possible.

Is expansion good?
Global yield of all resources is a decisive factor in winning: more production, growth, science, culture, faith, etc, means better chances to win all 5 victory types. One should ask oneself: how do I get the best yield? More pop primarily (more buildings as well, but let's focus on pop for now). The more pop across any number of cities, the more yield.

You need to consider the increasing marginal cost of growing a pop in a city (the more pop in a city, the more expensive it is to grow to the next pop). ==> Therefore, it is good to found a new city because you'll eventually get more pop than you would have if you did not expand.

Besides, Housing and Amenities mechanics make it so that expansion is more or less the only way not to waste food yield. These are strong incentives towards expanding.

Is expansion bad?
Expansion can be mitigated in a number of ways. In Civ V, science & culture penalties, NW scaling cost, and the global happiness system were important factors that made expansion decreasingly interesting. Besides, there were a ton of buildings, wonders & policies that had a multiplicative effect on a given city's yield (for example, +33% Science from Universities): this sort of "bonus" makes the next pop in the city with the building yield more than one in a newly founded city.

What do we get in Civ VI as expansion impediment? As far as I can tell:

• increasing builders, settlers and districts costs
• pop drop when finishing a settler (meaning it's less expensive to make settlers in low populated cities?)
• some very rare multiplier effects. So far, I can only name two wonders, Oxford University and the Ruhr Valley, that have multiplicative effect on the city's yield.

So, no direct penalty, only an increasing opportunity cost of the settler vs. buildings or military. If building a settler will eventually yield more than building anything else, then do it. Otherwise, don't.

Therefore, I don't think "Tall vs. wide" is really a question is Civ VI. The game won't be won by a player with 4 cities when there is another player with 12 cities (in Civ V BNW, the player with 4 cities probably had his chances).

This is my hypothesis. Having not played the game yet, I would love for someone to try and contradict this in a convincing way

 

[ELRACj]

Why not both tall and wide

 

[Nixalo]

I don't thing it is a matter of Tall vs Wide

It's Forward Settle vs Friendly Neighbors.

You want to settle as many cities as you can afford. The uestion is if you ill forward settle opposing civs. As if an AI declares war, you actually need to put real production into defense of every border city.

 

[Haggbart]

For me, at least if you err on the side of wide-is-good, you can combat that with aggressive AI Civs, so that everyone is competing for map-space. This is particularly true since ICS (minimum area cities) is less of a thing with real-estate and city placement, being important due to unstacked cities, and the need for water.

Despite how easy the streamers like filtyrobot are making the game look, on higher difficulties, I just don't think spamming settlers is going to be as viable as some people think it will.

I think it will depend a lot on the AI, and AI bonuses. In CIV:BE, one of the major problems was that the AI was a complete pushover even on Apollo. So it's hard to really get how the eXpansion part of the game will work without knowing how the AI will expand, how border tension is, how much you must make border defence a priority etc. But I hope you're right. A good system encourages expansion at the right time, but something must also punish expansion done wrong or with bad timing.