The preferred # of cities in your empire in an average game of Civ VI?

[stiiknafuulia]

Jesus Christ what a skewed poll. Make OCC an option and break down the 1-5 bracket.
I prefer a small number of cities because more cities just turn into cumbersome micromanagement later on.

Oh dear, we have an unsatisfied customer. Well, in retrospect, since I did include the outlier case of 100+ cities, I should've included OCC as well. My bad, but as I said before, editing the poll after people have started voting is worse than it lacking in options, imo (and I'm not even sure if you can edit polls after their creation). Presumably those who play most games as OCC are a fairly rare type of player, so it's not the end of the world... If I'll make a similar poll in the future, I'll provide more granularity towards the lower end, then go by tens after 40 or so.

 

[spfun]

1-5 - Hit enter 250ish times or so not a lot happening in my games. Easy immortal/deity victories - all standard settings. The occasional defensive war can slow down the enter pressing sometimes... Consider me boring haha but that's how i like to play.

I think I'm in a minority for another thing here, I would finish 95%+ of my games. I had 3 Hall of Fames - Vanilla/G&K/BNW respectively and they were all huge lists heh. A lucky game would be over in 2hours for me on standard map/settings.

 

[Staal]

Oops ticked 100+ cities by accident. Meant to select 16-20, but 11-15 is also fine.

 

[stiiknafuulia]

Oops ticked 100+ cities by accident. Meant to select 16-20, but 11-15 is also fine.

Thanks for bumping the thread, at any rate. I will note your mishap and move your entry to the 16-20 category. Let's wait a while longer to tally the results... I think 100 votes is a nice, round number (although the more the better, obviously).

 

[Junuxx]

Who the hell has 100+ cities in the average game of civ

I'm not sure if I've ever had more than 15 cities Optimal for me is around 10, enough to feel imperial but not much enough to drown me in micromanagment.

100+ self-founded cities is entirely normal in a game of Civ 2.

 

[ldvhl]

Or a game on a Giant map if someone's smart about how they do it.

 

[Roxlimn]

I would ideally want a variety of options. I'd love for a very wide expansive, world-conquering Civ being something of a contender. In past Civs before V, these were called "runaways," and would almost always steamroll their enemies easily. V was the first where a small number of cities was actually better-performing.

So I'd like a situation where a Civ with a small number of Cities is good at one thing, but a Civ that's got a large number of Cities is good at other things.

The previewed systems gives easy suggestions for how that can happen. For instance, changing governments and policies is MUCH easier in smaller states and even in modern city states like Singapore. If they want to change a policy nation-wide, it's as easy as making it happen in one city. For very large Civs, it might be impossible to change into a new government type or policy without significant costs.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Putting the results in semi logarithmic categories (but merging the first few)

8: 1-5
35: 6-10
42: 11-20
12: 21-50
8: 50+

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Doesn't it depend on what is involved in running each city? If they're successful in using the new "district" concept to make each city unique that's one thing; but if they're still all basically the same where is the fun in doing the same exact thing 100 times? Not that I want every civ to be five cities but the maganormous civs tend to get old really quick too--would not want to go totally back to those days.

edit--still with what we have to go with now, I voted 11-15 (though I'm more of an 8-12 kind of guy)

 

[stiiknafuulia]

Doesn't it depend on what is involved in running each city? If they're successful in using the new "district" concept to make each city unique that's one thing; but if they're still all basically the same where is the fun in doing the same exact thing 100 times? Not that I want every civ to be five cities but the maganormous civs tend to get old really quick too--would not want to go totally back to those days.

Ofc it does, and that (among other reasons) is why a poll like this is always going to be imperfect. I tried to account for this somewhat by stating that in the case of someone preferring a large amount of cities, they can assume that the interface would make them easy enough to manage, as compared to smaller empires. Even so, it's going to be subjective what each voter considers this to mean; even with the best interface in the world, having more cities is always going to introduce *some* extra work into the game. As there are a wide variety of assumptions, it should all even out with enough voters... At least to an acceptable extent, so that the poll can be considered useful.

 

[historix69]

The number of cities to build/conquer to a large part depends on
- map size and map type (e.g. water map has less land)
- number of civs
- difficulty level
- game speed
- victory conditions

In Civ5 on larger maps, the penalties for additional cities are reduced like 2% Science penalty, 5% culture penalty on Giant Maps allowing bigger empires.

I think it is good to have all these options so everybody can play the game he enjoys. There hopefully won't be just a default game where empires are limited to a size which only one group of players favours. For small empires it is best to play on small maps and maybe fast, too. There are players enjoying Giant Games with 1.500 to 3.000 turns, while others prefer only 150 turns ...

 

[stiiknafuulia]

The number of cities to build/conquer to a large part depends on
- map size and map type (e.g. water map has less land)
- number of civs
- difficulty level
- game speed
- victory conditions

In Civ5 on larger maps, the penalties for additional cities are reduced like 2% Science penalty, 5% culture penalty on Giant Maps allowing bigger empires.

I think it is good to have all these options so everybody can play the game he enjoys. There hopefully won't be just a default game where empires are limited to a size which only one group of players favours. For small empires it is best to play on small maps and maybe fast, too. There are players enjoying Giant Games with 1.500 to 3.000 turns, while others prefer only 150 turns ...

For this poll though, it's assumed that the map is Standard sized and all the other settings are default/middle. So, medium landmass, medium aridity and so on. What these settings mean in Civ VI is another thing ofc, but it can be reasonably extrapolated based on the previous games. I'd welcome bigger maps (so that Civ VI's 'Standard' size would equal the 'Huge' of Civ V), but I doubt they'll be enlargened to a huge extent, as the district system demands considerable attention to detail in each individual city.

 

[m15a]

Interesting. I finally got around to voting. I chose 11-15 cities and thought I'd be on the low end, but I guess I am at the median. I will say that I wouldn't necessarily prefer to found that many cities, but in any victory condition, I'd expect some conquest (and I'd rather those not be puppets) or else the occasional mid-game city founding. Thinking back, I think both Civ V and earlier Civs allowed me to play with that number and do pretty well on the highest difficulties.

 

[bison21]

Oh dear, we have an unsatisfied customer. Well, in retrospect, since I did include the outlier case of 100+ cities, I should've included OCC as well. My bad, but as I said before, editing the poll after people have started voting is worse than it lacking in options, imo (and I'm not even sure if you can edit polls after their creation). Presumably those who play most games as OCC are a fairly rare type of player, so it's not the end of the world... If I'll make a similar poll in the future, I'll provide more granularity towards the lower end, then go by tens after 40 or so.

I certainly would think remaking the poll at a later stage (perhaps after E3 or when more info about district and empire scaling are available) makes a lot of sense.

 

[ftl]

I don't necessarily want to manage that many cities, but I do like the end-game feeling of having a huge empire just cranking out stuff. Like, when it's down to me and one other conqueror civ and we're duking it out, when it's time to stop investing in the future, no more improvements or buildings... setting all my cities to produce military units and just seeing that huge stream of armed forces pouring out towards the battlefield. You can't really get that feeling in a setup where you only want like 4-6 actual cities and the rest are puppets. Even though for most of the game, I don't really want to micromanage a huge empire, I do want to have one by the end of the game.

 

[Darth Tribble]

In the older games, I loved creating oversea empires that spanned continents. Civ 5 has taught me the benefits of playing a small empire, but I feel Civ 5 forces you to go tall.

Let's settle for a compromise and have medium sized empires.

 

[drubell]

I dunno man, I might build 45 cities but I'd never build 46. That's just nuts.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Depends too much on other factors. Even if you held everything equal the awful Civ V UI (yes, awful, AAA titles have no business having excessively shoddy UI that force selects wrong units, lags on orders, and requires tons of inputs beyond what is necessary to do basic tasks) would push the number down. If each marginal city increases your average mundane inputs per turn by 1 or less you can have heaps of cities without making the game a chore.

If it's adding 5 per turn on average or something and navigating them is effortful then my answer to OP question changes quickly.

You could queue a unit or building or add to the queue of a city in Civ IV with two inputs. Civ V is on the order of double, and does not share the ability to issue orders to multiple cities simultaneously. What if you need to micromanage these cities often? Civ V puts a tax on playing it then, lots of mundane actions with no thought involvement whatsoever just to reach time periods where you make a choice that matters.

So managing 50+ cities could be good fun, but not with the UI team that worked on Civ V. Without some grouping type logic lots of cities with 1 UPT is inviting a disastrous degree of rote micromanagement to move units. That is the largest danger of up-scaling maps for 64 bits (if they can get the game to run decently so it isn't moot). Moving 50 units similarly turn to turn without requiring much thought in how to move them because it stopped mattering wrt outcome of game 30 turns ago is a great way to drag down any sense of progress or enjoyment in the game.

The less fail mode they go with UI, the large number I'll pick. But poor UI is something that has existed consistently throughout every single civ title without exception. Civ IV had the least bad UI, and that's pretty depressing because you had moving order buttons, wrong interface displays, and comically bad selection issues (clicking on one unit should not select the stack when the entire stack is selected for example, alt and control clicking should work consistently etc). Even for those flaws IV was hands-down the best in the series at limiting rote basic inputs. That's weak.

If they break their longstanding UI track record, go ahead and add 25+ cities to my count, which is in the neighborhood of 12ish right now because simply put, Civ V UI with 1 UPT is awful. 1 UPT doesn't have to be bad, but Civ V UI holds the game back outright.

 

[x2Madda]

I disagree with your analysis that civ 6 is tending towards less cities. While the district system does make each city more detailed, doesn't the separation of happiness from the global to local allow for more cities?

Sent from my VS985 4G using Tapatalk

Possibly, but their is no denying that is systems from civ5 return, such as each city increasing policy and science costs then we do run into a prefferred number of cities.

If it does not however then we may run into the Civ:BE problem of "no balance on cities? Then lets go crazy!"

 

[stiiknafuulia]

@TheMeInTeam: Fair enough. I suppose I could remake the poll when we know more about the interface (and the game is closer to release so we know what we'll be getting), but ofc you can only really tell such things after some amount of playing.

I didn't think about the issue of moving more units with 1upt... Iirc, they've stated that there's now a 'move in formation' command that moves an entire 'carpet' of units at once, keeping their relative placement. With the way that terrain affects movements costs, enemy and/or friendly units getting in the way, and mountain ranges blocking movement altogether, I'm not sure if this can be much of a saving grace, but we shall see. In the past I've seen someone suggest a system where units could be moved in stacks in your own territory, but it's open to easy abuses and relentless trolling from the types who go 'lolololol NO stacks EVER 1upt 4 LYFE trolololol!!1'.