[R&F] Tall & Wide in Rise & Fall

[Martinus]

I thought it would be a good idea to start a separate thread dedicated to discussing how Rise and Fall will change strategies around tall vs. wide, given that a number of new features seem to be specifically designed to make tall empires more viable:

- Governors - this is clearly a feature aimed at favoring tall empires. The number of governors will be limited, and furthermore, you can either recruit new ones or make existing ones stronger. So tall empire with a few cities and high level governors is likely to produce at least as much (if not more) as a wide empire with few governors.

- Loyalty - it is stated that the farther a city from your capital, the lesser its loyalty will be. So clearly something favouring tall/small empires.

- Gold Ages/Dark Ages/Heroic Ages - it seems it is more beneficial (and easier) to ride a cycle of dark age/heroic age than just a sequence of golden ages, and dark ages are likely to be much less harmful to small/tall empires, due to Loyalty mechanics. However, depending on what the Historic Events are, this may be offset somewhat as it being easier for large empires to trigger them (it depends really on the nature of such events - if it is something like "Build 5 Universities", then big empires will get an advantage; if more of them are like "circumvent the globe" then the advantage will not be that big, so tall empires will come out better in the end).

- Government District - given that there can be only one, it probably going to make more of a difference than in tall empire.

- Emergencies - this will probably target bigger civs more than small ones, so seems like another measure against "blobbing".

Anything else?

 

[Uberfrog]

I think you've got it all. As it stands there really isn't a reason to stop expanding in Civ VI (except for the pain of new cities starting with very low production, which is manageable enough with chopping anyway). An intended consequence of the Loyalty system is, I believe, to add extra considerations when overextending or conquering great swathes of the map. Wide will still be super viable (unless they drastically rebalance the basic game mechanics), but now Tall will come back after a fashion by allowing you greater stacking of Governor bonuses, and much fewer Loyalty issues.

 

[stealth_nsk]

First of all, I believe Tall vs. Wide exists primary in Civ5 designers' heads, but somehow they've managed to transition this illusion elsewhere. Normal Civilization game involves having both large, developed cities and smaller "land grab" ones.
1. Governors play best for such setup - powering larger cities, which, in turn, spread area effects of their districts onto smaller ones.
2. We have very vague vision of things affecting loyalty. It's totally possible managing it for large empire will be quite easy.
3. Same for ages. Maybe it's easier to loose smaller undeveloped cities (which we don't know yet), but for small empire of large cities, losing even 1 of them could be a disaster.
4. It was speculated what Government district will have 3 variant of buildings at each level, tied to each government. This way it's totally possible some of them provide bonuses for each city in empire.
5. They seem to target civs rushing to victory, no matter their type. Holy city conversion emergency affect any religious victory run - whether you do it from tall or wide. And I bet there's culture-related emergencies too.

 

[Arent11]

- Loyalty - it is stated that the farther a city from your capital, the lesser its loyalty will be. So clearly something favouring tall/small empires.

Since I don't know the exact mechanic, I can't judge that yet. However, I hope that they remedy the weird/illogical/counterintuitive "more expensive settlers/builders" mechanic, that apparently is meant to hamper expansion. I would favor a loyalty/corruption mechanic much more than that.

 

[God of Kings]

Korea (tall) and Mongols (wide) would be perfect civs to demonstrate this new mechanic.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Tall vs wide is junk and its spread through strategy gaming is vexing. There's no reason to shackle value for growing cities or for attaining more of them. A lot more interesting is how the game makes choosing to do one, neither, or both interesting based on situation.

I could picture loyalty being fleeting to fringe conquests in large empires and requiring more resources or investment to make useful.

 

[iammaxhailme]

I like to have SOME reason to go tall, but I think Civ V made tall a bit too powerful compared to wide.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I like to have SOME reason to go tall, but I think Civ V made tall a bit too powerful compared to wide.

I think they were trying to rebalance the value of having a billion tiny hamlets vs. a few colossal cities, probably over-correcting. Obviously having cities both numerous AND large would be the best. "Wide vs. Tall" is probably a bad way to frame the conversation.

But I do think they over-corrected in back in the opposite way a bit this time.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Unless they make major changes to how amenities work, I don't think we're going to get a tall vs wide dynamic like in Civ 5. My impression is that they are going for trade-offs between risks, rewards and effort which will encourage either slower and gradual expansion, or successive waves of expansion and consolidation similar to Civ 4 where rapid expansion could heavily impact your economy and even bankrupt you if you don't build courthouses and grow your cottages first.
Going wide will be perfectly practical in Rise and Fall, you'll just need to manage your governors better and and build more entertainment districts.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I like to have SOME reason to go tall, but I think Civ V made tall a bit too powerful compared to wide.

If you're talking about incentive to grow cities vs incentive to found additional cities, then yes. Both need costs, and both need tradeoffs/break points whereby the other can become more attractive in optimized play.

Civ has hampered itself by making additional pop expensive in large cities, but not conferring a significant enough bonus for large cities compared to small ones. Civ 4 managed to some degree by creating % based multipliers, but even there food costs got large quickly so you had incentive to make junker whip cities. At least you had incentive for both types and would make them contingent on terrain and tech available though. I think Civ 6 could do it better than 4, but it's not there yet.

 

[Archon_Wing]

National Wonders that require x amount of buildings like in Civ IV, and would boost a % and also add yield based on pop.

Entertainment districts should be buffed.

Buildings in lesser used districts like encampments and theater districts could provide more housing.

Some kind of mechanic that negatively affects farway cities from the capital, probably loyalty.

Also I feel they should loosen up on amenities and housing a bit more. I don't even build aqueducts as it feels like a waste of river space just to get a little more housing.

 

[God of Kings]

I don't even build aqueducts as it feels like a waste of river space just to get a little more housing.

It's only worthwhile to construct aqueducts as the Romans or the Khmer.

 

[Vahnstad]

It's only worthwhile to construct aqueducts as the Romans or the Khmer.

or when you don't have a city with fresh water or when the ideal city location is not next to a fresh water source. But you don't have to build an aquaduct to only have 2 extra housing, that for sure.

 

[bbbt]

Wide is great. Infinite city sprawl (or city capture as it may be), which Vanilla VI approaches, is boring. The loyalty/free cities mechanic seems like the perfect counter to that - place too many 'junk' cities and you may end up losing those cities to another empire (or having to expend resources to recapture them). But it doesn't cause global unhappiness and science penalties across your entire empire.

There's also the question of how city flipping works - if they've used a mechanism similar to religious pressure, it might actually help some larger empires snag cities (probably from other large empires). If it's based primarily on distance to your capital vs an opponents, that definitely skews tall.

I'm not sure Governor's entirely favor tall empires. I get the impression the way they work is you can end up with like 1-2 full upgraded governors or 7 1-2 upgrade governors, something like that, that you could send throughout your empire. And top level governor ability we've gotten an example of - the financiers ability to buy districts with gold, definitely favors a wide empire imho, and will be a nice boon for settling cities more late game and getting them off the ground quickly.

 

[KayAU]

It will be interesting to see how all these changes impact the game with regards to tall play. The only mechanism which seems more or less certain to have an impact, is loyalty. Civ VI desperately needs some mechanism to pace and limit expansion, as it is currently, as bbbt pointed out, on the infinite city sprawl end of the scale now. I believe this both unrealistic, and to me at least, less fun.

I actually liked the way tall vs wide worked in Civ 5, although I will admit, it went a bit too far towards making wide unfeasible. What I liked most about it, is that it alleviated late game micromanagement boredom. I would typically end up with 4-7 cities, few enough that I could still pay proper attention to their management. In Civ 6 I will end up with what...20? 30? I will neither care nor be keeping proper track of all of them, but I will be forced to make a bunch of trivial decisions every turn. It is not made better by the lack of a production queue and the general state of the UI.

 

[Olleus]

We have to be careful when we talk about tall vs wide. What exactly do we mean by that? I believe that most people here dislike the Civ5 version of tall which involved huddling in a corner and ignoring most of the map.

In a 4x game, and one about building empires, you need certain things to be true. More population and more territory ought to always be good. I think the interesting choice is how cities are distributed. Do you have a few big cities with lots of population and territory, each well separated; or do you have lots of small cities crammed together? Maybe "Tall" and "Wide" are the wrong terms here, it might make more sense to call the first "mega cities" and the second "micro cities".

At the moment Civ6 massively encourages having tons of micro cities. I think that mega cities are more fun/immersive or, at the very least, are nice to play with occasionally. It would be good for game diversity to have both be reasonably balanced competitive methods of playing the game.

 

[UWHabs]

We have to be careful when we talk about tall vs wide. What exactly do we mean by that? I believe that most people here dislike the Civ5 version of tall which involved huddling in a corner and ignoring most of the map.

In a 4x game, and one about building empires, you need certain things to be true. More population and more territory ought to always be good. I think the interesting choice is how cities are distributed. Do you have a few big cities with lots of population and territory, each well separated; or do you have lots of small cities crammed together? Maybe "Tall" and "Wide" are the wrong terms here, it might make more sense to call the first "mega cities" and the second "micro cities".

At the moment Civ6 massively encourages having tons of micro cities. I think that mega cities are more fun/immersive or, at the very least, are nice to play with occasionally. It would be good for game diversity to have both be reasonably balanced competitive methods of playing the game.

Yeah, I don't think people want the 5 strategy of not settling new cities because they hurt your empire. But if I have, say, 5 cities and 40 population, it would be nice if there was specific reasons why it might be better (or easier) in some cases to have 2 size 20 cities, and the other 3 cities with only a couple pop points each, vs having all 5 cities at size 8, for example.

 

[UncivilizedGuy]

I stil don't understand this tall vs. wide debate. Civ is about empire building. They should add a play-as-City-State feature to make the Tall people happy.

 

[God of Kings]

I stil don't understand this tall vs. wide debate. Civ is about empire building. They should add a play-as-City-State feature to make the Tall people happy.

There should be a civ like Venice in Civ V.

 

[UncivilizedGuy]

Rise and Fall. In other words tall cities fall down eventually.