Towns Are Broken, I Have A Fix (Higher Growth Rate, More Expensive Cities)

[tman2000]

Is it just me or do his science/culture yields at the end of exploration age seem...not great? Honest question. I just reached deity level a couple days back and don't have a frame of reference yet.

One Last Turn has been like only doing Antiquity Age and barely touched the other two.

 

[chazzycat]

One Last Turn has been like only doing Antiquity Age and barely touched the other two.

my bad. He showed a snapshot of exploration yields towards the end of the video, which I mistook for the end of the age. But it was only at 26% progress through the age so it makes way more sense.

 

[Steinernein]

my bad. He showed a snapshot of exploration yields towards the end of the video, which I mistook for the end of the age. But it was only at 26% progress through the age so it makes way more sense.

Starting with -35 gold instead of +200 or more and then having horsehockey production in all your cities and taking 25 turns to fix your deficit isn't a strong start either. You also kind of need camels.

 

[Melkus]

I sometimes don't like these very tight margins where there's a snails pace type feel and heavy need to minmax

Fair enough. But as long as production is converted at a 1:1 rate into gold, stacking production into towns is gonna be ineffective. Even with the mining boost, since you need strong production for that to make sense - and that turns the town into a city candidate immediately.

I know you talked about production capabilities too - but that feels unrealistic to me (as something FXS would do soon), because it would kill the whole purpose of reducing clicks.

More growth sounds fine to me though (or - surely there's some mathy formula to start at the same pace and then accelerate later )

 

[Acken]

Is it just me or do his science/culture yields at the end of exploration age seem...not great? Honest question. I just reached deity level a couple days back and don't have a frame of reference yet.

I was left largely unimpressed. Most of the antiquity age is on par to what I usually get with the exception of 100-130 turns where the extra academies etc. push his culture/science further... And it doesn't really matter that much at this stage of the age.
Then exploration begins and the empire sucks at a gold defficit and cities that don't grow. By turn 46 the yields aren't incredible either.
I wish people that talk about an imbalanced meta would come to actual community games and prove their ideas are so much better than the competition.

The premise is correct though, cities are what drives your progress and you want many cities. In that sense I think "playing tall" (like having 3 cities all game) is very much inferior to playing with more. What I disagree with is that you should convert everything to cities.

 

[cdstephens]

From watching the video, while it seems like generically cities are better than towns, his specific strategy of having only cities and no towns would not work if Gypsum/Camels were unavailable. So a sufficient nerf to either of them would kill this specific strategy.

It is also difficult to tell how good his hyper-specific meta strategies actually are when he almost never carries the results forward to the end of Exploration. After all, the point of a good Antiquity Age is to set yourself up for a successful Exploration Age, so that needs to be the metric.

Ofc hitting all the Legacy Paths is good too, but that’s partially a result of him always playing with Longer Age length. This makes it much easier to hit all Legacy Paths regardless of your specific strategy. Imo it also makes the game much easier if you want to sim city; there’s no opportunity cost in pursuing culture vs science when you can excel at both at the end of the age with high enough production (for example).

Broadly, I do think it’s true that food is too weak. The growth formula for cities probably should be tuned as well to make it more useful. That would make it much easier to get higher yields, though, so it’s not a simple fix.

 

[Kwami]

Anyway, the only thing you do is select growth tiles. It's the most minimal streamlined thing left to do, I can't imagine it's that annoying.

It's very annoying. If you leave your towns growing, then by the middle of any age, you'll spend more than half your turn just growing towns and clicking off the "town specialization available" notices. I much prefer to specialize towns so that they leave me alone.

 

[rocksinmypath]

When Firaxis decided to remove builders, there was a risk that it would remove some amount of strategic depth as builders played a crucial role in determining the relationship between gold and production. Even though the nominal exchange rate was 4:1, gold always felt much more valuable than 1/4 production because you could use it to buy builders in new cities that needed early injection of something to get off the ground quickly. Civ 7 maintains or even tries to improve on this interesting relationship between gold and production with towns and cities. Towns are intentionally designed to be inferior to cities. One of the main reasons why it's inferior is the terrible 4:1 exchange rate on production from towns. That creates an incentive to promote towns to cities as soon as possible. In turn, this drives up the effective exchange rate to something I believe is close to 2:1. That should make towns more valuable, dropping the exchange rate somewhat. But that doesn't happen. That's where the game fails. Because towns are not near-exclusive sources of gold, they're usually only interesting as city candidates.

Gold is currently much too easy to come by. Antiquity probably feels most balanced in this regard (disclaimer: I've so far only dabbled in Exploration and haven't played Modern), but even in Antiquity, you can feel that balancing regarding gold is quite clearly out of whack in a lot of places. There's a common narrative event that offers you a choice between 15 production and 75 gold. Why would you ever take the 15 production? Just looking at the nominal 4:1 rate, this is a bad deal. It's a far worse deal when you consider the effective rate of ~2:1. On top of that, the game even allows you to immediately finish an ongoing construction by paying the remaining cost in gold. Maybe if you were in the middle of building a Brickyard as Benjamin Franklin, it might be marginally better to take the production, but this is obviously a terrible choice in most cases. This sort of thing makes me think that the devs don't really have a grip on exactly how valuable gold is.

Gold city states also play a big role in making towns insignificant. In fact, pretty much every single bonus they provide is designed to make towns insignificant. +1 gold to buildings that towns can't build. A city resource. +5% to empire-wide gold yield, which includes city yield. +5 to trade route range, which makes trading outpost specialization almost useless. These should all be realigned to make towns better. Gold buildings like the Market should not get gold adjacency from water tiles. Instead, their yield should be determined by how many towns the host city is connected to. It can be something like +3 gold per connected town. The corresponding city state bonus can be adjusted to add 1 gold per city state per connected town. Lapis Lazuli can add to gold yield of towns that are connected to the city where the resource is. +5% to empire-wide gold should apply only to towns. +5 trade route range per city state should be changed to +1 trade route range per city state per trading outpost.

There are also some changes that can apply directly to towns to encourage players to consider keeping them around permanently. Some ideas I have for this:

- Bonus percentage to gold yield in specialized towns (similar to Carthage).
- Specialization yield bonus that scales with how long a town stays in specialization. For instance, an urban centre gets +5% science and culture per turn it stays in specialization up to +100%.
- Second-tier specialization that unlocks after required duration of specialization. This locks the town out of future city promotion. In future ages, these towns are eligible for "Heritage" status, which comes with more bonuses.

 

[Acken]

On top of that, the game even allows you to immediately finish an ongoing construction by paying the remaining cost in gold

The tooltip displays a partial amount but you will pay in full.

 

[Yzman]

1. We've discussed that specialized towns not growing could be a bug. If it is and if it will be fixed, towns will become much more useful.
2. There are areas where towns are already really useful, i.e. hub town could produce much more influence than a city and without any buildings.

Don't see how it is a bug, doesn't the game specifically say that all food and gold get sent to the city?

 

[Yzman]

Do people convert all of their towns? Maybe I am playing too low a difficulty but I never see the point. I get like 3 cities and usually just keep expanding the towns or specialize them if needed.

 

[chazzycat]

Do people convert all of their towns? Maybe I am playing too low a difficulty but I never see the point. I get like 3 cities and usually just keep expanding the towns or specialize them if needed.

I have also been playing with a lot of towns, for the most part. It just seems to me like if you don't, then your cities stop growing and stagnate really quickly. I like my cities to keep growing.

It works fine all the up way up through immortal. I even won with 1 city no problem at all. It was size 82 at the end. That ain't gonna happen with no towns.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Don't see how it is a bug, doesn't the game specifically say that all food and gold get sent to the city?

Actually it sends copies of the food (one copy per connected city) and growing town specifically says "increased growth", not just growth. Actually everything in the interface suggests it should continue growing, but maybe it's just interface not reflecting some changes.

 

[Taefin]

Actually it sends copies of the food (one copy per connected city) and growing town specifically says "increased growth", not just growth. Actually everything in the interface suggests it should continue growing, but maybe it's just interface not reflecting some changes.

I read it as unambiguously saying that specialization stops growth. The +50% growth is similar to all other growth bonuses, and it is applied to growing towns. It makes sense when you want a non-farming town to grow to grab a resource, without feeling like you are missing out on all bonuses of specialization.

I feel like longer ages and standard ages are almost two separate games, and that mechanics are pretty well balanced for standard games. I am currently playing modded at halfway between.

Along with comments about this not working with any real AI pressure, I think what is missed in “all cities all the time” is that there are many opportunity costs to putting all gold toward cities for a benefit that arises much later in the game (with the camels/gypsum being needed to offset this).

-Gold can speed up your existing cities, which will then also produce more the entire game. At higher difficulties you need fast culture to compete for wonders, not more culture later.
-Gold allows you to field an army and purchase buildings while producing wonders, which make specialists in core cities more valuable than having many more specialists in immature cities.
-Moving all production resources to smaller towns will cause you to lose wonder production races at higher difficulties.
-Mid-production cities in early explo/modern feel really slow, struggling to build half the infrastructure I have tech for, when what I need are a few cities that can get important stuff up fast.

Also, in a standard age length game it is non-trivial to secure the treasure fleet golden age and towns with a bunch of obsolete builds are often unhappy and have low yields even in science and culture. There is no way it is optimal to convert a bunch of cities in Modern, unless maybe going to science victory. All as early as possible, you need gold for explorers, gold and about 6-8 cities for factories, and everything but cities for military.

 

[Steinernein]

Do people convert all of their towns? Maybe I am playing too low a difficulty but I never see the point. I get like 3 cities and usually just keep expanding the towns or specialize them if needed.

I convert as much as I can after antiquity because it becomes easier and easier to plant specialists at a decent rate.

 

[tman2000]

It's very annoying. If you leave your towns growing, then by the middle of any age, you'll spend more than half your turn just growing towns and clicking off the "town specialization available" notices. I much prefer to specialize towns so that they leave me alone.

Other than the bad UI reminding you about specialization and requiring too much mouse movement, I don't see how this is annoying. The only time anything like this ever got annoying is if you are dealing with the Dogo Onsen bug.

 

[rocksinmypath]

The tooltip displays a partial amount but you will pay in full.

Really? I've been screwed all this time.

 

[tman2000]

There are also some changes that can apply directly to towns to encourage players to consider keeping them around permanently. Some ideas I have for this:

- Bonus percentage to gold yield in specialized towns (similar to Carthage).
- Specialization yield bonus that scales with how long a town stays in specialization. For instance, an urban centre gets +5% science and culture per turn it stays in specialization up to +100%.
- Second-tier specialization that unlocks after required duration of specialization. This locks the town out of future city promotion. In future ages, these towns are eligible for "Heritage" status, which comes with more bonuses.

Or, if towns grew really fast, you could spin up big mining towns and the main limitation would be settlement cap and territorial competition.

I like the "how long it's stayed specialized" idea, but only in a context where there's a reason to cycle between growing towns and specializing them which only works if you can customize food disbursement and are essentially leveling up on city at a time and swapping from purchasing buildings to placing specialists. In this case, keeping the specialization becomes a trade off.

Second tier specialization is brilliant and should be in the final expansion at a minimum. It would pair very well with hypothetical age 4 mechanics. For instance, I've wanted an age 4 specialist mechanic where they have to be educated into one of maybe four specializations (medical, engineering, energy). Having a "research town" like a Los Alamos type thing is thematically cool. But either way, even in the first 3 ages there would hopefully be towns you want to serve in the specialized function forever, and so upgrading it to tier-2 would be a nice ability.

 

[tman2000]

Do people convert all of their towns? Maybe I am playing too low a difficulty but I never see the point. I get like 3 cities and usually just keep expanding the towns or specialize them if needed.

In many cases, if you play optimally to be able to convert to cities and grow them in time to be useful, you're not going to want to keep towns. The video I posted involves a strategy of cycling a city's worth of resources into one city at a time to grow them out quickly.

 

[tman2000]

Also, in a standard age length game it is non-trivial to secure the treasure fleet golden age and towns with a bunch of obsolete builds are often unhappy and have low yields even in science and culture. There is no way it is optimal to convert a bunch of cities in Modern, unless maybe going to science victory. All as early as possible, you need gold for explorers, gold and about 6-8 cities for factories, and everything but cities for military.

Good point. One last turn has not played much outside the antiquity age yet.