Time to retire "Tall vs Wide" for "Peace vs War"?

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Time for a Terminology Change?
I think the gameplay decisions from Civ 5 about "tall versus wide" have morphed in Civ 6 into "peace versus war". It may be time to drop the old terminology, too, in order to better assess how the existing game mechanics (and future changes) impact the real game decisions you face in Civ 6.

There's no reason in Civ 6 not to fill up all of your available space with cities. Under normal map rolls, without attacking anyone that's likely going to give you room for 5 to 10 cities in your starting area on higher difficulty levels, and a few extra cities on lower difficulty levels. Later game you may find room to place a few more on islands, or on tundra if you have a map edge. Rarely will you exceed 15 cities total under this game approach, and expansion is slow due to the escalating costs of new Settlers and the cost of 1 Population each. This, I think, is the "new tall", or perhaps I should say, "Peace is the new Tall". But it's not a 1:1 term swap, because peaceful isn't just fewer cities, it's also slower expansion.

Expanding to more than about 15 cities in Civ 6 isn't something that can be done (at least on higher levels) without taking cities from the AI. Once you start warmongering, you can quickly grow up to 50 cities, although the "most efficient" play in terms of speed of victory likely caps out at maybe half that. Equally important, you can get to your first 15 cities a lot faster, because there's no escalating cost for conquest the way there is for Settlers, and it adds Population rather than subtracting. "War is the new Wide". But again, it's not just that, war is also faster expansion.

Right now, there are a host of game mechanics that combine to make war far superior to peace in Civ 6. Discussions about balancing these two approaches on the forums are often couched in the old terms of "making tall play more efficient without penalizing wide play", but I think that's somewhat off the mark for Civ 6.

If you think there should be some relative balance between these two approaches (and one needn't necessarily think so - perhaps warmongering should be the easiest way to victory), I think the real question is more about "how do you balance the relative cost/benefits of going to war versus the cost/benefits of staying at peace"?

In that context, here are some initial thoughts:

Mechanics that Benefit Peace​

• Warmonger points
• Military maintenance costs
• Builder cost escalation
• Governors (except for Magnus)

Mechanics that Benefit War​

• Settler cost escalation
• Settlers subtracting 1 Population when built
• Military Upgrade System: build early >> build late
• Military Promotions: an active military gets stronger and stronger
• Districts/Buildings give flat bonuses: the more the better, regardless of the state of the city
• City States: bonuses are per district building
• Great Persons: arrive in proportion to the number of districts/buildings you have
• Era Scores/Ages: so easy to accumulate era score when at war
• Strategic Resources: 1 is good enough for your whole empire, the bigger your empire, the more likely you are to have 1
• Chopping: the more woods/stone/etc you get access to, the more you can chop
• Amenities: each unique Luxury supports 8 Population and broader empires can access more Luxuries; also, each city gets 2 Population that don't require Amenities, so the more cities the better; finally, Policy cards that provide +1/X Amenities per city provide a greater benefit to large empires [Edit: added]

Neutral Mechanics​

• Envoys​
• Eurekas/Inspirations​
• Loyalty: cramps space for peaceful expansion at least as much as it hampers war

 

[Rosty K]

I can't manage 15 cities, how do you cope with 50?

I'm not sure that warmongering (meaning all the time) is the easiest path. Early conquest is massively OP, that's true, but once you've conquered whoever was too close you can do whatever you want basically So I think early conquest should be re-balanced first of all to make it less beneficial. Like lose all districts and buildings in cities conquered in the first 2 eras (ok, keep the wonders if any), or something. Maybe even auto-raze everything except original capitals. Or at least there should be some diplomatic penalty with your neighbors if you completely wipe out one of them.

 

[Victoria]

Mechanics that Benefit Peace​

• Warmonger points
• Military maintenance costs
• Builder cost escalation
• Governors (except for Magnus)

That's a small list I cannot rationalize much against peace benefits - you are scraping the barrel.

The simple fact is
You create units to defend yourself or you are dead... do you just leave those units hanging around doing nothing? Its just efficient to create war

Additional Mechanics that Benefit War
Being able to abuse city flipping
More chance of successful military emergencies (even if against you)
More eureka's and inspirations through conquering cities.
More Amenities
Higher score
Gaining districts for free when you conquer them
Loads from pillaging... (pillage an early holy site with a scout for a free pantheon)
More population = more science and culture but its spread out more so does not cost so many amenities.
More wonders
Loads of gold from peace deals that only last 10 turns.
Easier to win any victory condition.

Forcing yourself not to war is stupid and unnatural. I feel there is a middle ground... war until medi

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

So I think early conquest should be re-balanced first of all to make it less beneficial. Like lose all districts and buildings in cities conquered in the first 2 eras (ok, keep the wonders if any), or something.

Auto-razing districts is interesting. Would be really rough if you lose a city and recapture it a couple of turns later, though.

The simple fact is
You create units to defend yourself or you are dead... do you just leave those units hanging around doing nothing? Its just efficient to create war

Yup, that's a big problem. The cost to build an army capable of attacking isn't much different than the cost to build an army sufficient for defending yourself, especially against the early Deity Warrior rush. Regardless of what you think about war vs peace, from a game design perspective, defending should be less costly than attacking. Right now, it isn't particularly.

 

[acluewithout]

I don’t want to rock this meta before it gets started but, to be clear, there’s a difference between “war” and “conquest”. You can of course do lots of warmongering without capturing cities, instead just enjoying the benefits of pillaging and favourable peace settlements.

That said, if war is better than peace, then conquest is better than just plain war, because usually after you’ve smashed your opponent there’s very little downside then taking most or all of their cities.

I agree with the OPs initial position, and with Victoria’s comments. I’m just suggesting that war without conquest needs to be fitted into one of these two buckets.

On the relative advantages of war (or perhaps “conquest”) versus peace, I’d add two points.

First, because units take production, and production takes cities, conquest just gets easier and easier. Often when you crush your opponents initial army, there’s nothing left to fight back and they can’t build more troops. So, it’s easier to keep pushing toward. The original civ can no longer fight, the other civs don’t seem to really band together to stop you, the cities you capture aren’t that hard to hold (loyalty doesn’t matter), and while you’re warring you can usually have your core cities doing more productive things like campus projects etc.

Second, I find it weird you can capture so many cities, and yet this never causes your empire to become unstable. Once you’ve captured enough cities, loyalty isn’t an issue, and your cities all just get subsumed into your empire like you’re the borg.

On that second point, you know, perhaps part of what makes warmonger so attractive is how easy it is, because there are so few hurdles. Warmongering could be made harder by hitting warmongering with more negative diplomatic consequences, eg coalitions forming against you, so other Civs don’t let you get away with murder. But I think the big piece that’s missing is having conquest creating more instability,
so that warmongering is less profitable. You should never be sure of captors cities’ loyalty. They should always be unhappy to some extent. And that instability should be contagious.

Making war harder is one solution. But making war less desirable is a better one.

 

[Kyro]

Did somebody just say peace vs war?

Civilization isn't solely a war game and the only way it can stay true to what it claims to be is to portray war like it its, not as the highly lucrative, infrastructure saving, science advancing, gold producing, city creating, culture growing, faith boosting force it currently is.

The problem isn't only that warmongering has so many things going for it, there's too many things against peaceful play as well. I'll list some mechanics too, pardon if I repeat:

Additional Additional Benefits of War:
Free Districts
Free Loyal Population
Removal of Competition
Loyalty not really a problem (I commend the Devs for attempting to address warmongering through this but sadly they failed to solve the problem from its root which was really how profitable it was.)
Warmongering Penalties don't really matter
War Weariness doesn't really matter
Quantity of cities etc. > Quality.
Take advantage of AI 75% production boosts to build stuff for you
Free claimed tiles for neighbourhood gold spam
Production Policy cards for units make them too cheap, i.e warmongers don't need to pay the opportunity cost.
Zero restriction against City Spam, warmongers don't have issues maintaining amenities in huge empires
Benefits of conquering are near immediate, no downtime, rebellion, penalty of yields etc.


Mechanics that make Peaceful Play weak
Tall Play useless, Quality pointless.
Wonders relatively weak when number of cities matter much more
Everything is about short-term benefits, long-term investments pointless
Alliances take too long to build up
Allies can attack your city state allies with impunity
AI tends to hate you for factors beyond your control at a time when it is most crucial
Cannot bribe players to go to war/make peace
Cannot declare liberation wars for conquered city state allies
AI addicted to conquering city states, peace not an option when you want to keep them in the game.
Close Proximity of starting locations (About 2 times closer compared with Civ 5)
Smaller Map Size (About a 30% smaller than Civ 5)


What happened to the Roman Empire that fractured? What happened to the Mongol Empire that fractured? The British? Spanish?

Imperialism and Colonialism has it costs, it's high time these are reflected in Civ 6 as well.

Also, the Tall vs Wide issue is directly linked with the profitability of warmongering as many of the pros and cons overlap; predominantly the fact that getting more cities faster is the current meta and warmongering is the best way to it.

Tldr: Warmongering provides instantaneous benefits that a player would only have gotten after many turns of investments and that is further exacerbated by Civ 6's anti-long-term approach to player rewards.

 

[Victoria]

Having finally managed to get most of the way through understanding war weariness I can say without a doubt that the mechanic is too weak. It is currently designed around combat rather than length of war and we all know that maintaining a field army is draining in so many ways. I have no idea why WW degrades during war, why making peace with each city state also reduces WW so much and why multiple wars do not aggravate WW in any way whatsoever. Only the worst war value counts.
If you cleared this area up a bit and also made vaguely unhappy cities punished a bit more then its likely your production would suffer more through being at war. The main issue around fixing this is chopping ignores city happiness. I can have a non growing city about to revolt, chop a couple of cows and wheat and all is well, just feels wrong.
Looting is about right.... they reduced unit heal from farms and that's sorted that out a bit.

 

[UWHabs]

I've played some "peaceful" games (although even in them, I will often counter an attack and take a couple cities as a buffer), and agreed that things are not very fairly balanced. A few more factors that also come into play:
-Wonders are immediately useful to the new user. Always nice to capture the potato palace and get a new diplo spot right away
-Loyalty penalties encourage more conquest, and do not benefit stopping
-Way too easy to carry on a world war without any help from back home

But to me, the biggest factors are that units, once built, are fairly cheap to maintain, are very cheap to upgrade, and provide virtually no benefit when they're not fighting. I do think there are a few things that can be done to help make war harder:
-Upgrading units should cost the same as building a new unit. Seriously, why is it roughly 4X cheaper to upgrade a knight to learn to use a tank rather than just producing a tank from scratch? The benefit of upgrading should be that you retain experience, and that's it
-Cities are too immediately productive. While under occupation, cities should provide NO loyalty benefit to you (in terms of bonus from pop), and should only get to max 50% loyalty unless if they have been ceded in a peace deal. This means that if a city is not ceded, it will at most be 50% productive.
-Any combat in a district should pillage it, and pillaged districts should be expensive to repair for a captor (although should be cheap to repair if you built it originally) You could even apply this to all terrain tiles too. But you also obviously shouldn't get a yield from these auto-pillaged tiles. The only way you should get pillage yields is if you can move to a tile and use the pillage command before someone else battles you there.
-I also think that units "heal" too much while at war. Once I have my army, if I plan it correctly, I never have to replace troops from back home. Heck, most of the time as I move through I just buy units in new cities to help me out. Probably all purchases should be disallowed in occupied cities.

Basically, the only benefit of settling cities yourself is that you pick the city location. But when it's going to take you 78 turns to build the first district in the city, not sure if that really ever matters that much...

 

[Archon_Wing]

I would suggest the following

- Revert Settler Scaling before they nerfed it
- Remove district Scaling
- Reduce Unit and Building cost past the medieval era
- When a city is captured. It should be completely inoperable for 8 turns (cannot rebel either), but you can't use the city for anything.
- Start CS with walls
- Reduce Warmongering and War Weariness penalties for the defender.

All these things just encourage war. Things later on in the game should not take that long to build; it needs to come faster because the game's going to end and that makes developing cities past the early game often a bad idea because they'll never pay for themselves. This applies to the grand majority of t3 buildings. The only reason why we can even develop cities later on is because chopping is currently extremely broken and thus tedium is held back by this pretty broken design. As a result, you might as well paint the map with a bunch of crappy cities instead of growing your own, or just capturing developed cities for yourself.

Also production costs were made when IZ stacking was a thing. Now that IZs are so marginal (I think they need a buff), they should scale everything down as well.

Unit costs past the medieval era is also really bad and thus nobody can really build units to defend themselves in a reactionary manner. It's just buying at this point. Nobody hard builds units since it's better to make a bunch of warriors and chariots to make the entirety of the army you need and upgrade them. This is pretty stupid if you ask me.

 

[MrRadar]

One of the main reasons that makes war so beneficial is its great cheapness and immediate benefits after conquest. There's no unit support limit like in Civ V (although it was so generous there that it rarely was any restriction at all), no increased unit maintenance for moving your units across hostile territory, like in Civ IV, no totally unproductive turns while a conquered city is in revolt, like in Civ IV and V, some OP units/unit combinations, making blitzkrieg a thing almost right from the start.

Make war costly. Make units cost more when outside your home territory. Perhaps, even make every attack with a unit cost some gold in proportion of its strength. It is not that gold is lacking in the game, make us truly decide what we want to use it for - buying our infrastructure peacefully or buying a military chance to capture it. There might be an interesting new choice - some are better at planning infrastructure, some are better at planning troop movements.

That alone would put some natural speedbump for warmongers, without the need to resort to somewhat artificial things, like obligatory district razing on conquest or more warmongering points shenanigans.

I'd also like culture to become a factor of loyalty as well, something along Civ IV lines. The exact replication isn't possible or necessary, but now with the religious and loyalty pressure lenses, why not another lens for cultural influence, adding to loyalty, like religion? While moving borders due to culture pressure in Civ IV perhaps wasn't the greatest thing, the feeling of enemy influence slowly receding under your pressure, when at war, was wonderful: you take city, first it's influence on the neighbouring tiles was gone, then, after some pacification turns, the conquered city used to come online on your side and already your culture emanated slowly from it and took over the surrounding territory. That was close to perfect. After that, the sudden simple change of loyalty in the entire region in Civ V felt so jarring and unnatural.

Barring re-introduction of culturally distinct citizens like in Civ III, at least make production and economy and growth a function of your cultural influence in the city. There might even be new policy cards geared towards pro- and anti-minority policies (ouch!).

And get rid of that Professional Army card or give it some serious malus, because now it is just plain ridiculous. Swap it in for one turn, upgrade all your army for half-the price, swap it out. Why suddenly half the price? What is this - happy hour at the gun shop? There must be some price for that. Either it should be kept in deck for some minimum number of 'run-in' turns before it takes effect, or it should take effect gradually, or there at least (better on top of the previous) should be amenities penalty for making use of it. You ask your population to sacrifice something to upgrade your army quicker, after all.

 

[Victoria]

But when it's going to take you 78 turns to build the first district in the city,

Youi have to chop, its clearly a feature of the game, place the district and 2-3 chops will do it or wait a while and its 1-2

 

[UWHabs]

Youi have to chop, its clearly a feature of the game, place the district and 2-3 chops will do it or wait a while and its 1-2

Yeah, I understand that, but obviously there's another cost to setting up a new city. Even if I chop in the district and spend the 1000 gold to buy a monument/granary/water mill/library/market/etc... it's still taking me forever to build the next thing. And there are ways to help - harvesting a food resource to quickly get a city to size 4 while throwing up a couple mines and a trade route and suddenly you can build granary/monument in 5-6 turns each, which is at least starting to get to be a city that can pay for itself.

But otherwise, there's a lot of great suggestions in the thread for how to make sure that war is still a useful tool, while also making sure it's not the only tool. Like, for example, in my current game, I had a natural border with the AI. It was a bit like if I started in Europe, got my Istanbul city settled, but there were city-states in Poland and Ukraine so I had an area that I could settle peacefully. And then there were a couple other areas that I could fit 3-4 cities in each that were also essentially isolated by city-states as well. All in all, I have settled 14 cities "peacefully". Of course, I have gone to war - once to "liberate" Amsterdam after the English took it (although stupidly, you can still win the emergency if you capture the city and keep it yourself!) and then for spite and Loyalty purposes I grabbed Bristol as well. And now I'm going to war with Genghis to try to liberate Jerusalem.

But in reality, the only reason I didn't conquer more was because I was looking for a game without going on a killing spree. If I was playing "optimally", I could have very easily taken over the rest of both the Dutch and English, and at that point, it would be a joke to run over everyone else too. Or at the very least, I could have stayed at war with the English and slowly capture the rest of their empire, while the rest of my empire happily kept building theatres and commerce hubs and temples.

 

[Rosty K]

Auto-razing districts is interesting. Would be really rough if you lose a city and recapture it a couple of turns later, though.

Well, don't lose it then War is hell, as the in-game quote says

 

[EgonSpengler]

I'm not sure that warmongering (meaning all the time) is the easiest path. Early conquest is massively OP, that's true, but once you've conquered whoever was too close you can do whatever you want basically So I think early conquest should be re-balanced first of all to make it less beneficial.

This is my issue, too. Early war is decisive, because the AI is incapable of adjusting. And the AI's (in)ability to wage war intelligently is so decisive early in the game because its advantages in production and trade haven't matured enough to make a difference.

Let's face it, though, the AI's inability to fight wars is crippling throughout the length of the game. Until the devs fix it, there's almost nothing else to be said or done about the game. They can tinker with other stuff all they want, and I'll still render their updates moot by clubbing the AI upside the head and taking its stuff. "Peace vs. War" is essentially asking, "Do you want to take the express lane to victory, or do you want to make the game artificially harder on yourself?"

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Let's face it, though, the AI's inability to fight wars is crippling throughout the length of the game. Until the devs fix it, there's almost nothing else to be said or done about the game. They can tinker with other stuff all they want, and I'll still render their updates moot by clubbing the AI upside the head and taking its stuff. "Peace vs. War" is essentially asking, "Do you want to take the express lane to victory, or do you want to make the game artificially harder on yourself?"

Or, said otherwise, as many of the above posts explore: "Why is this the case? and what could be changed to make this an interesting decision?"

The AI's competence at war is a factor, to be sure. There's been a lot of interesting suggestions, however, of small game changes that could have a big cumulative effect on the profitability of war, even with the existing AI. Not that I don't want to see the AI improved - I do, critically with respect to the use of air units. But I'm personally in the camp that in addition, conquered cities should be harder to retain / less productive / more problematic to govern than cities you found yourself. For game balance reasons, if nothing else.

 

[BTSeven7]

"Do you want to take the express lane to victory, or do you want to make the game artificially harder on yourself?"

That’s why when I do a Rubik’s cube I just take the stickers off. Why would I make the cube harder? Clearly it’s a design flaw that I can just take the stickers off.

Also, Couldn’t you say the same for Diety vs Prince? Diety is just handicapping you and making it artificially harder.

I do agree with the OP that it would be interesting to see the two conversations and hear more strategies around the two bc they do seem to be the two “philosophies” of CIV6.

But the whole I conquered 80% of the map with knights, stole a bunch of settlers, and won space victory on turn 140 after selling all my great works on the first turn and spamming builder chargers into the space port or culture victory in the same way with GW and two relics or faith victory converting their last 3 cities to your religion.

We all get it and can do it. It’s just played out at this point and it’s not all that smart or interesting anymore. If you have 700+ hours in the game you have to find more interesting ways to play and I like a peaceful discussion.

 

[Karpius]

Historically, force of arms has been the quickest path to expansion for any polity so long as they had the power. Until "national identity" became a real and broad-based factor, loyalty of the "people" mattered much less. Loyalty of the nobility and/or administrative officials mattered more and it was often their opportunism that fostered the more fracturous wars within a polity or empire. So while warfare was most often the tool of expansion, maintaining that expansion could sometimes be more difficult.

The reasons for a large empire to break apart were as varied as the reasons for smaller kingdoms to rise, fall and be absorbed into something else. The Han Dynasty and the Roman Empire suffered from internal corruption and an inability to adapt to new dynamics as much as external pressure from nomadic forces slipping through their borders. Empires created by great men such as Alexander and Charlemagne simply could not survive the death of their founders because of opportunism by their heirs. (Charlemagne himself divided his empire among his three sons). The Mongols never achieved a truly cohesive central government and always remained a collection of steppe peoples who lived mostly as raiders and mercenaries until the rise of the Russian Empire and the Ming Dynasty essentially squeezed them and removed the "Old World Exchange" as the major barrier between the Eastern and Western cores of civilization.

In Civ6, it seems only natural that war offers such a fast track to expansionism (unless someone can offer an example of expansion that involved the gleeful joining of many territories into one peacefully formed nation.) What Civ6 fails to provide, however, are the variables that afflicted so many nations and empires through the ages. Not only are many of these factors difficult to implement in our "game", I believe they would be largely unwelcome.

Civ players want to be able to plan. They want to be able to plan far, far, far further in advance than other leader or government in history ever could. They would be livid if their population were decimated by a sudden plague that they COULD NOT plan for. Imagine how different European history would be if the Romans had been able to foresee and prepare for that first plague brought about by the increased interaction between the Eastern and Western cores which exposed various populations to new diseases they had not faced before and had little natural immunity to. Likewise, Civ players would hate a game mechanic that might shift the economic power based on climate change (which would shift agriculture), trade routes and resources. Forget about the possibility of having "officials" in your empire who might back make terrible decisions that could take years to recover from. Suppose Magnus decided to go rogue and ally with Reyna to break off a sizable portion of the player's empire? The solution to bringing them in line? War!

There is one more major factor which might be tantamount to all...the Civ player is virtually omniscient and immortal in the context of the Civ world. The player knows the research tree inside and out. The player knows the game mechanics and their values in ways that Alexander or Augustus or Qin Shi Huang never could. One wonders if the Eastern core had foreseen the eventual importance of gunpowder, would they have invested more into its development hundreds of years earlier rather than leaving it to the Europeans to go nuts with? If the Aztecs knew they would eventually face 'visitors' from across the sea, would they have been better prepared? Also, each player runs a government without intrigue and corruption. There is no one to assassinate the player. Despite the various 'names' we give our governments through the civics tree, the player *is* the government. The player has all that prescient knowledge and all that absolute power, and the player is constantly amazed how well they do against the AI.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Or, said otherwise, as many of the above posts explore: "Why is this the case? and what could be changed to make this an interesting decision?"

The AI's competence at war is a factor, to be sure. There's been a lot of interesting suggestions, however, of small game changes that could have a big cumulative effect on the profitability of war, even with the existing AI. Not that I don't want to see the AI improved - I do, critically with respect to the use of air units. But I'm personally in the camp that in addition, conquered cities should be harder to retain / less productive / more problematic to govern than cities you found yourself. For game balance reasons, if nothing else.

I think that's a good idea, and would "+1" it, provided there were more costs (or any cost at all, really) to burning cities down instead of occupying them. On occasion I'll burn a city rather than occupy it because I didn't like where the AI placed it, but if captured cities are less efficient than fresh-built cities, I would burn them more than I do. Cities are the source of all power in the game, so having another city is always better than not having another city (besides the tedium of managing an enormous nation, I suppose), and taking a city away from your competition is the best way to reduce their capabilities (actually, I think it's the only way). The Loyalty system slows conquest down a little and makes me more likely to burn a city, because I might not be able to keep it. I'm not sure if the latter is a good thing or not, but for the purposes of making peaceful play more effective, I'd say not. It's still incredibly useful to take a city away from the AI, even if you don't keep it yourself. If you fall behind the AI in your respective Victory Conditions, there aren't many tools at your disposal for undercutting their capabilities, besides attacking their cities. That's why the peaceful route is harder; there's just not much you can do to the other Civs. Adding some other tools for directly interfering with the other Civs might help promote peaceful play.

What if you could deliberately spawn a Barbarian Camp near, or inside, the borders of another Civ? Pirates, drug cartels, religious fanatics, violent separatists.
What if you could swap another Civ's Policy Cards? Meddling in internal politics, backing one faction over another, 'removing' a popular figure or promoting another.
What if you could influence another Civ's Loyalty or Era Score? Drive them into a Dark Age or help them achieve a Golden Age? You would do the latter for your adversary's neighbor, obviously, not your adversary.
Right now, Religion is fairly divorced from everything else. I ignore it most of the time, to no detriment. What if having multiple religions in your Civ - not just in one city - created social friction that impacted your economy, culture and science, unless you had a Policy Card that represented multiculturalism or freedom of religion (which your enemies could then swap out, just to screw with you )?

(Keep in mind that "peaceful" in this context has a different meaning than it does in the real world. Funding pirates or revolutionaries, promoting nationalism or religious intolerance, or meddling in another country's internal politics could be grounds for war.)

There's also not a lot that I would call "soft power" in this game. I've noted in other threads how underdeveloped trade is; international, maritime trade in particular. Making international trade more robust, lucrative, and dynamic could have the secondary effect of making peaceful play more effective. A dive into Culture, Religion, Tourism and Loyalty might yield something too, although I don't have any specific ideas on those off the top of my head.

 

[eleven11]

I would suggest the following

- Revert Settler Scaling before they nerfed it
- Remove district Scaling
- Reduce Unit and Building cost past the medieval era
- When a city is captured. It should be completely inoperable for 8 turns (cannot rebel either), but you can't use the city for anything.
- Start CS with walls
- Reduce Warmongering and War Weariness penalties for the defender.

All these things just encourage war. Things later on in the game should not take that long to build; it needs to come faster because the game's going to end and that makes developing cities past the early game often a bad idea because they'll never pay for themselves. This applies to the grand majority of t3 buildings. The only reason why we can even develop cities later on is because chopping is currently extremely broken and thus tedium is held back by this pretty broken design. As a result, you might as well paint the map with a bunch of crappy cities instead of growing your own, or just capturing developed cities for yourself.

Also production costs were made when IZ stacking was a thing. Now that IZs are so marginal (I think they need a buff), they should scale everything down as well.

Unit costs past the medieval era is also really bad and thus nobody can really build units to defend themselves in a reactionary manner. It's just buying at this point. Nobody hard builds units since it's better to make a bunch of warriors and chariots to make the entirety of the army you need and upgrade them. This is pretty stupid if you ask me.

I would also say that if you War past X turns, start increasing unit maintenance. Or.. have it increase the further you are from an uncontested encampment district. Or tie it to trade routes. That way it makes continuous war an option, but one with it's own balance to seek. Long wars will rely on pillaging to continue. It may lead to some interesting game play decisions.. slash and burn your own tiles to sputter an advancing army, for example

And I agree with Victoria that war weariness should be increased.. maybe even causing a bonus loss to loyalty in addition to the happiness drop. War weariness should be almost non-existent for defenders. In fact, if they are loyal, the defenders should be at least a little patriotic.. save their families and such.

Alliances need to be buffed and they should be more reliable. I've said it once and I'll say it again - I do not like most of the leader agendas. While it can lead to some (weak) emergent play and interesting combos, most of the time they are an annoying hurdle to peaceful play.

Why do we need to wait until Renaissance to build forts? Did the medieval age not have feudal castles? Unlock them at Defensive Tactics or Divine Right on the culture tree and let builders create them. Let Military engineers enhance them. Give forts bonuses if adjacent to encampment districts or favorable terrain... and fix the anti-cavalry line so they are a good,cheap option for defense.

 

[UWHabs]

One thing I will say, the government plaza buildings I do think help a little with this. The Tier-1 buildings are literally Tall vs Wide vs War, and even the tier-2 buildings have some new balances (more spying vs faith units). Being able to place a city and have it immediately spawn a builder does help a lot in getting the new city working faster (and at least mentally takes away the need to just immediately buy a new builder in a city, which you obviously could have done before). It's a start, at least.