Theorycrafting - Early General Strategies - Bonus Content: The Death of Tall v Wide

[chaotoroboto]

chaotoroboto submitted a new resource:

Theorycrafting - Early General Strategies - Bonus Content: The Death of Tall v Wide - Theorycrafting - Early General Strategies - Bonus Content: The Death of Tall v Wide

While I hope that everything I'm writing is an educated guess and not just baseless speculation, we're obviously missing enough information to take everything I say and make it utterly meaningless. So this theorycraft is subject to revision or abandonment depending on just how incorrect it is; and in any case will be outstripped by players who are better than I am.

We've seen enough early gameplay to start crafting general strategies for the early game. The limit of our knowledge,...

Read more about this resource...

 

[Lucius_]

I wasn't aware that projects gave GPP points. I wonder if there will be an industrial district project. How cool would it be if you could "build" great engineers! I love the idea of pre-building wonders, and being able to produce engineers someway would satisfy that for me.

 

[chaotoroboto]

I wasn't aware that projects gave GPP points. I wonder if there will be an industrial district project. How cool would it be if you could "build" great engineers! I love the idea of pre-building wonders, and being able to produce engineers someway would satisfy that for me.

Yeah, basically no one went that route in the videos, so I think it got missed.

There's no confirmation that all districts' projects produce GPP. However, the ones you see people mouse over produce GPP and then provide a Gold Rebate - which softens the blow of hyperfocusing like that for however many turns.

 

[joncnunn]

On a history note; most of the penalties against Wideness were added during the first eighteen months of Vanilla (play balance patches, each round of which decreased happiness sources). One of these patches is the one that increased minimum allowed distance between cities.

By the time they started work on G&K they realized they'd gone too far reducing happiness sources and started adding some back (in the form of religion in G&K and ideological tenets for BNW)
G&K though moved the primary source of science from RAs into your own resource (via requiring DOF for RA), but doing your own research well requires early NC (so few cities founded very early) in addition to the core cities of your empire having all allowed tech buildings.
The 100% requirement for national wonders (many of which were very powerful) acted as a permanent stop on city founding.

BNW actually reduced the culture penalty per city. It did add a new science penalty; but it was really minor as long as a library was built in the conquests; happiness penalties would eat you alive trying to retain too many of the AIs too tightly packed cities (under the human rules) well before a conquest would be a net drain on science rate.

Back to Civ VI:
The video I saw reported that the cost of the 4th settler he built was double the cost of the very 1st. (With the 2nd & 3rd falling between these) So this appears to be linear increase in settler cost. I recall seeing a civic that decreased settler costs though.

Brakes on the "project economy", but I think "district economy" would be a better phrase:
1. Population requirements for most districts. (With a note that at least in the current build unique districts don't count towards the escalation of population requirements.)
2. Each district (in a given city? in your empire?) increases the cost of the next. (With a note that unique districts are half cost)

In addition I note that Brazil's unique district has a 3 tile adjacency range, so it might cause bigger bonuses if placed on the edge of a city so that multiple cities districts benefit.

In addition, I'd like to propose the "tile improvement economy":
Here you get most of your benefits from building tile improvements, and have the tile improvements clumped together so they get adjacency benefit (such as 3 farms that touch all get bonus food)
Feudalism is a great civic for this while building the builders (but it's a mid game civic)
The break on this is that each builder built increases the cost of the next (in a given city? in your empire?)

Overall, I'm also noting that it appears that in Civ VI, all district & buildings provide flat bonuses instead of percentage bonuses. This is quite huge; in Civ V, to get science you basically ensured you got NC early, prioritized the techs unlocking science buildings, and ensured all core cities grew rapidly to increase base science and quickly built all science bonuses to multiply it.
In Civ VI, a city building a campus without native science bonuses is going to get very little benefit. (It would only get 1 science after two adjoining districts built; and just the flat later on from library and university; chances off the empire as a whole would be better off if this particular city prioritized a different district that it got terriagn based adjacency bonuses from.)

 

[chaotoroboto]

In addition, I'd like to propose the "tile improvement economy":
Here you get most of your benefits from building tile improvements, and have the tile improvements clumped together so they get adjacency benefit (such as 3 farms that touch all get bonus food)
Feudalism is a great civic for this while building the builders (but it's a mid game civic)
The break on this is that each builder built increases the cost of the next (in a given city? in your empire?)

I think that's primarily going to be part of optimizing the Generalist strategies. We'll also have to see if there are comparable civics for other improvements in the mid-game, if so that could simply be what the Trade Economy morphs into in the mid-game. Especially since in the Trade Economy you can buy the builders instead of hammering them out, so you have access to make more changes in that regard.

I expect in any typical game you'll spend some portion of the mid-game with Civics giving builders extra charges regardless of strategy. If you're trade, you need to optimize your tile yields; if you're districts you'll be harvesting resources before placing districts.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

Now what do you think about taking advantage of the lack of early game warmonger penalties and maybe picking off a few city-states in the ancient era to pad out your burgeoning empire?

 

[spfun]

Go Brazil, Pangaea. Start in heavy jungle. Build early campus surrounded by jungle. Spit out some settlers with 50% production policy, build more jungle campus and theatres, snowball. Tech or Culture victory. This is what I'm going to do first game.

 

[chaotoroboto]

Now what do you think about taking advantage of the lack of early game warmonger penalties and maybe picking off a few city-states in the ancient era to pad out your burgeoning empire?

The unique bonuses from City-States means there really is a trade-off between Conquest and Suzerainty, and each time will be played by ear. If the bonus plays to your strategy, then Suze that state. Otherwise, bring it into the fold and get the benefits of managing the city yourself. Like if you're running a ton of trade routes, then Zimbabwe I think gave like +4 gold? But if you're not running trade routes, then well...

I'd like to see more mid-game policies, more diplomatic policies, and more city-states before I try and make any overall statements. The biggest benefit to suzerainty might be getting the city state to pay your unit maintenance on your behalf.

Go Brazil, Pangaea. Start in heavy jungle. Build early campus surrounded by jungle. Spit out some settlers with 50% production policy, build more jungle campus and theatres, snowball. Tech or Culture victory. This is what I'm going to do first game.

I think that's a solid strategy. Part of what makes Brazil appear so solid for a district strategy is that you can basically use the rainforests as basically placeholder districts until you have the tech/production/population to put in the one you eventually want there.

 

[MIS]

IMHO, the OP (and many others) are wrong. Guess how many cities the quickest HoF Deity Science victory had.

4? No.
3? No.

11 with Attila (by vadalaz).

It seems obvious to me, based on what we know, that at least on Deity the optimum strategy will be to take as many cities from the AI as possible, and then build them up. This will be true for any victory type:

Domination (obvious)
Religion (more faith generation + only one civ left to convert)
Tourism (more tourism generation + only one civ left to "convert")
Science (more science/ gpp generation)
Diplomacy: OK not sure about this one (I don't think we know enough).

 

[Cyon]

I think it's hard to find a situation where not prioritizing districts are the best strategy. If you want many cities with low pop a district that doesn't take a citizen to work is very appealing. To work more than three tiles you need to grow and then a new district can be built and why would you not build that then?

So a building improvements instead of districts strategy seems a bit hard to pull off. Remember that whitout districts = no buildings (except monument, granary and walls). The only strategy that I can think of that is improvement > districts would be a pure military one where you build monuments, builders and military units but that will net you very little science.

 

[chaotoroboto]

I think it's hard to find a situation where not prioritizing districts are the best strategy. If you want many cities with low pop a district that doesn't take a citizen to work is very appealing. To work more than three tiles you need to grow and then a new district can be built and why would you not build that then?

So a building improvements instead of districts strategy seems a bit hard to pull off. Remember that whitout districts = no buildings (except monument, granary and walls). The only strategy that I can think of that is improvement > districts would be a pure military one where you build monuments, builders and military units but that will net you very little science.

There'll have to be districts in every city. My concept for the non-district strategy involves only settling spots that immediately support a harbor and a hub. But that's different than squishing your cities together so you can have 3 campuses butting up to each other, and even more different from spending your city's hammers on projects to get great people instead of other production goals.

 

[qadams]

Thanks for this analysis, chaotoroboto. Looks like I'll mostly be using your Generalist Strategy, since expansion is my preferred play style. But it will be lots of fun to try all the various approaches with different civs and on different maps. Is it October yet?

 

[stealth_nsk]

I finally had time to read through. So, my comments in not to structured way:

1. Complexity itself is a bad thing. Good thing is strategic choice. For example, sliders were complexity without real strategic choices behind. Depending on the implementation they either add nothing or add micromanagement. It's good thing they are gone and having gold/science/culture/happiness output from separate sources allowed much more interesting gameplay even in Civ5.

2. If the game forces you to choose one economic model for the whole civilization, that's bad as it limits the number of choices. Tall vs. Wide was bad concept in this regard, but so was Specialist vs. Cottage as those economies depend on sliders positions and you were unable to specialize parts of your empire differently.

With Civ6 so far we've seen a lot of options to specialize individual cities, but no hard rails for specializing civilization globally. Yes, if you produce more gold, you buy more things with gold, if you produce more faith you buy more things in faith, etc. but you could easily go back and forth in this balance.

 

[isau]

I don't think it's possible to talk about this without seeing actual numbers. Making Wide play less viable was never something that was done intentionally. It happened as a result of a not making enough balance passes after the release of a very complicated game.

In any case, the issue has always been that Wide is not technically bad. It's just that Tall play isbetter. If the Tall option hadn't been there and we all played Wide instead--or if Tall was just the weaker option--no one would have anything to say. The only reason the Tall flaw even was a thing is that it was the best option for play. It was never the only option. Tall is basically like the "best class" in an MMO. The fact that it exists doesn't mean the other options don't exist. There is some gaming philosophical debate to be had here about whether the other classes are "worth playing." But like Wide/Tall the intention of the developers is never to make one overrule the other. It's just how things came together due to a variety of factors, including stuff that isn't immediately obvious like map scripts, where city states are placed, and how hard it is to trade resources if they happen to not be in your borders. None of these are things we know right now.

With Civ 6, without seeing the actual game and playing thru it numerous times, figuring out the best path is nearly impossible. Wide play was totally viable in Civ V, and the only reason people knock it is because Wide was better. However Tall was only better due to poor balancing, and modifying the values even slightly to make Wide better can easily shift the entire game so that Wide > Tall.

 

[cazaderonus]

I agree with the OP about projects. They seem very interesting in order to rapidly claim some early GPs. And considering GPs now have various effect, it might be enough to justify spending the hammers to focus on them. I especially think of Great Prophets in order to secure a religion quickly if you cannot focus on stonehenge either due to not having the appropriate terrain (stones) or because the difficulty level makes it a risky bet.

Same thing applies if you think about the importance of districts and adjacency bonus. Take the LP of quill18. he complains the entire time how bad the surrounding land is to build an interesting campus (no mountains, no rainforest). he could have decided to focus on a few projects to grab Great Scientist and boosts its science via the various bonus they offer (either eurekas, flat science or else).

I really hope one of the future LPs from YTbers will take the time to experiment with those projects.


On the discussion regarding wide\tall in CiV, or cottage\specialist in Civ IV, i feel so far like CiVI has the potential to disregard such big definitions of how you build your empire. We havent seen much of the late game, but as someone already pointed out, science output seems to be made purely of flat numbers, and not % modifiers. Which means that the notion of being science leader or science last might not create such huge difference as it did in CiV, especially with how raw science (through specialist) doesnt seem to synergies with GS generation.

Basically, i feel that the known limitations (housing, district cap tied to population, amenities) and the lack of global happiness is gonna push players to specializing cities, independantly of how they strategize their games.

And it probably makes for a more interesting game to play long term. I know i just cannot play anymore CiV now as i'm pretty much stuck playing the same game over and over.

 

[Martinus]

It seems to me that Civ6 has some more subtle ways of hindering Wide strategies. For example, as others already pointed out, you can build your first district only when the city reaches 3 pop and then a new one at another 3 pop. This means that having 10 cities with 2 pop each generates virtually no science.

Also, luxury resources now only "serve" a limited number of cities - so clearly it is better to have fewer bigger cities than more smaller ones.

Happiness is also city-based.

And so on.

 

[indradiva]

It seems to me that Civ6 has some more subtle ways of hindering Wide strategies. For example, as others already pointed out, you can build your first district only when the city reaches 3 pop and then a new one at another 3 pop. This means that having 10 cities with 2 pop each generates virtually no science.

Also, luxury resources now only "serve" a limited number of cities - so clearly it is better to have fewer bigger cities than more smaller ones.

Happiness is also city-based.

And so on.

it also seems that the costs of the districts of the same type increase the more you build them in your empire, so building a Campus in every city is not really an option. The game really emphasizes city specialization.

 

[isau]

Civ IV also had a cost associated with building cities. It's there to prevent the best strategy being to simply spam as many Settlers as possible.

If you took Civ IV and increase that penalty tremendously, then made it easier to have high populations in cities (you don't need much--1 or 2 or very powerful policies in the Policy trees) you'd basically have Civ V's situation. Global Happiness in Civ V contributed somewhat by being too low/finicky, but this is just as easily fixed by tweaking the policies in that game so the Happy cost per city is reduced.

In short, entire gameplans emerge largely from a couple of overpowered policies. Players pick those policies, ignore everything else, and you get Civ V.

That's why we can't guess how it will work in 6. It depends on how they tuned it. And Civ 5's issues were largely a mistake in tuning, and largely fixed in mods.

 

[Olleus]

I agree with isau.

But let's not forget the echo-chamber effect that forums like this one have. You hear a strategy is optimal, so you spend more time playing and perfecting it, before then coming back here and praising it some more.

How many years after Civ4's last patch did it take for people to take wonder economy seriously? Before then it was always considered a trap for bad players to fall to

 

[agonistes]

If wide vs. tall is dead, its because in VI you will have neither (I suspect). You won't have 6 40+ cities and you won't have 100+ cities either. Neither will be doable. The gameplay is okay, but the age of empire building looks to have died with IV, and won't br coming back.