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

They aren't an effective way to play Tall now because they don't provide significant enough bonuses to the cities with the current specialist caps. This would really allow someone to play tall by allowing their city(ies) to be the driving engine of their yields with the towns playing a more specialized support role.
Nor do they really achieve their goal of minimizing mid to late game (age) micro management because they're generally so useless the meta strategy is to convert as many into cities as you possibly can.
 
Thoughts?

A bit too much added complexity for me.

I like the part with the specializations influencing costs and letting you buy "their" buildings (but not produce them). The buildings/units that fit the focus could be cheaper, everything else more expensive in towns (except basic food infrastructure).

But not the merchants please, let me spawn them at the spot where the routes will end anyway - don't want to shuffle them around more than necessary. (Though you could argue we don't need to move them at all, there's no gameplay purpose to it except the occasional bit of scouting)

Let the mine focus simply double the Production -> Gold conversion (but half the food maybe?). Or: let us shift the bonus production to their cities with it?

Maybe let towns count less towards the settlement limit. Whatever the math is - 0.5 for a town would be fine for me, sum rounded up (so: 1 and 2 towns = 1; 3 and 4 towns = 2 etc. ) - but lower the limit itself by 1. A higher limit will just make it easier.
 
A bit too much added complexity for me.

I like the part with the specializations influencing costs and letting you buy "their" buildings (but not produce them). The buildings/units that fit the focus could be cheaper, everything else more expensive in towns (except basic food infrastructure).

But not the merchants please, let me spawn them at the spot where the routes will end anyway - don't want to shuffle them around more than necessary. (Though you could argue we don't need to move them at all, there's no gameplay purpose to it except the occasional bit of scouting)

Let the mine focus simply double the Production -> Gold conversion (but half the food maybe?). Or: let us shift the bonus production to their cities with it?

Maybe let towns count less towards the settlement limit. Whatever the math is - 0.5 for a town would be fine for me, sum rounded up (so: 1 and 2 towns = 1; 3 and 4 towns = 2 etc. ) - but lower the limit itself by 1. A higher limit will just make it easier.
Good suggestions. I was just spitballing with the trade outposts.
 
I agree with the increased cost to cities improving the value of towns. I also agree with customizing where the food from towns goes. To make towns more useful, I'd change 3 more things:

1. I'd increase the settlement limit by about 50% in Antiquity and Exploration
2. I'd make food much harder to get in cities.
3. I'd make the town specializations much more focused and powerful. For example, I'd allow Fort Towns to spend production to build units (maybe at a decreased cost or at half cost, while the rest of the production is converted into gold) and trade towns to build merchants, fishing quays, and trade buildings, I'd allow Urban Centers to build/buy at least the tier 1 science and culture buildings, Hub towns to build/buy influence buildings (I'd also allow the hub town to generate influence based on foreign settlement connecitons, Farming and Mining towns to +3 their production on improvements rather than +2, etc... I'd also prohibit or increase the cost of buying units in the non corresponding town. Want to buy an Archer in the urban center town? That's going to be double the cost buying the archer is in the current build of the game. Same for buying a merchant in a fort town, etc.
Yeah great idea. I think all towns should produce militia, but maybe a fort town can produce ranged and infantry. And other specializations can produce other things. However, at less efficient rates than cities.

Also, as for food and cities, that's a good idea. Lately I've learned how worthless food buildings are in cities. Why not just have them provide adjacency and district boosts to other buildings? Farms should be half as productive in cities. The reason is that city people are fat and consume more and have fewer kids. This leaves room for civs that do have strong city growth rates.

Yeah, increased settlement limit but only with much much higher city costs. Maybe this will add a feature set (civ bonus, leader, memento, attribute, faith belief) where you can reduce the cost of purchasing cities. It would certainly make the economic victory much more lucrative. And I'd increase the urban center bonus for old cities you can't afford to convert yet.

I was thinking how the "large" map right now is called "standard". I believe Civ VII has the most potential at a massive scale of like 50-60 settlements but with less micromanagement via towns.
 
I like the part with the specializations influencing costs and letting you buy "their" buildings (but not produce them). The buildings/units that fit the focus could be cheaper, everything else more expensive in towns (except basic food infrastructure).
Oh you mean as a new feature. Like a science town or something?
 
Oh you mean as a new feature. Like a science town or something?
Sure - or just take the existing Urban Town focus with the sci/cul bonus and rework it a bit. The effect on quarters doesn't make a ton of sense to me anyway (especially when you can't build one that's not two warehouses)

You could buff a library by one yield or something (since some adjacencies would be missing).
Maybe even split the focus into two types - but wouldn't be necessary.
 
Sure - or just take the existing Urban Town focus with the sci/cul bonus and rework it a bit. The effect on quarters doesn't make a ton of sense to me anyway (especially when you can't build one that's not two warehouses)

You could buff a library by one yield or something (since some adjacencies would be missing).
Maybe even split the focus into two types - but wouldn't be necessary.
If you conquer a large enemy city the quarters count same age. That's the only real circumstance to do it. These types of cities are cheap to convert, so...
 
Has drongo gotten better since moving over to civ7?
I remember he was more technical at the very start of his aoe4 channel, but slowly devolved into clickbaiting and only having 10% substance in what he says in a video and going off on tangents vs other commentators that put me off of his stuff to this day.

Apparently not. He tried his hand at Deadlock as well and was called out on very quickly for posting what amounted to be one of the worst behaviors you can do in team games.

Also, if you look at his channel for Civ7 it's mostly clickbait.

Nor do they really achieve their goal of minimizing mid to late game (age) micro management because they're generally so useless the meta strategy is to convert as many into cities as you possibly can.
What meta? Determined by who? And under what settings?
 
What meta? Determined by who? And under what settings?
It's always better but you have to have the right resources available to pull it off. So, in a sense, circumstance may force you to stick with a few towns. This is also like saying "It's always better to get more yields and have more wonders and troops but sometimes it's not possible."

There is as of yet no particular reason to prefer using towns other than as a gimmick for a civ like Carthage.
 
It's always better but you have to have the right resources available to pull it off. So, in a sense, circumstance may force you to stick with a few towns. This is also like saying "It's always better to get more yields and have more wonders and troops but sometimes it's not possible."

There is as of yet no particular reason to prefer using towns other than as a gimmick for a civ like Carthage.


When I hear the term meta, I take it as a rule that it must always be adhered to. In that sense, because the game always allows you to convert to cities so long as you have the gold to do so then a city meta would mean that you always convert no matter what. If circumstances deems that you keep towns around then I would hesitate to call it a city meta since the phrase "right resources" can mean a lot of different things. I would strongly hesitate calling anything meta this early on especially when you have so many leader/civ combos plus three ages to go through -- there are still a lot of numbers to crunch through. I will concede that it feels like town specialization is a bit weak outside of things like influence and maybe bugged/unclear/weak in certain other cases like the trade route one (though honestly that one has some upsides to it too), but again there aren't that many people publishing their experiments.
 
When I hear the term meta, I take it as a rule that it must always be adhered to. In that sense, because the game always allows you to convert to cities so long as you have the gold to do so then a city meta would mean that you always convert no matter what. If circumstances deems that you keep towns around then I would hesitate to call it a city meta since the phrase "right resources" can mean a lot of different things. I would strongly hesitate calling anything meta this early on especially when you have so many leader/civ combos plus three ages to go through -- there are still a lot of numbers to crunch through. I will concede that it feels like town specialization is a bit weak outside of things like influence and maybe bugged/unclear/weak in certain other cases like the trade route one (though honestly that one has some upsides to it too), but again there aren't that many people publishing their experiments.
Effective meta then.

There will be times when you literally can convert a town to a city, but desperately need gold at the moment to build a unit or two. That's different from having some breathing room to convert to cities, but where you nevertheless are preferring to keep towns because they are performing a required function.

Right now the sense is to never keep towns as soon as you can reasonably afford to upgrade, even though you might not afford to.

I understand there's some nuance here, where you might purchase an altar in a city instead of converting a town, and you could argue that the preference for the altar is because you are choosing strategically to have that building over having a city. Still, you aren't preferring to have a town over having a city.

I think we were hoping or believing that there was going to be some kind of balanced eco-system between towns and cities, where specializations sometimes made a well placed town better than having a second city. The combination of "highly useful support of an existing city" + "additional special benefit" was supposed to be greater in whole than the benefits of having another city which you could use for things like more science and unit production.
 
Effective meta then.

There will be times when you literally can convert a town to a city, but desperately need gold at the moment to build a unit or two. That's different from having some breathing room to convert to cities, but where you nevertheless are preferring to keep towns because they are performing a required function.

Right now the sense is to never keep towns as soon as you can reasonably afford to upgrade, even though you might not afford to.

I understand there's some nuance here, where you might purchase an altar in a city instead of converting a town, and you could argue that the preference for the altar is because you are choosing strategically to have that building over having a city. Still, you aren't preferring to have a town over having a city.

I think we were hoping or believing that there was going to be some kind of balanced eco-system between towns and cities, where specializations sometimes made a well placed town better than having a second city. The combination of "highly useful support of an existing city" + "additional special benefit" was supposed to be greater in whole than the benefits of having another city which you could use for things like more science and unit production.

I don't even know about that. Let's say conversion is 1k and you have a bunch of gold resource and you're playing Xerxes with Chalcedony Seal or whatever as Han/Ming. Would you upgrade or would you buy that many extra Great Walls? You would need to also see what stage of the game you're in because buying a city and then building up everything after transferring resources over might not pay itself off or have negative impact because you're going into the next age and you don't want to eat the upkeep.

You could also extend that thought to something like going specialists as Confucius because you'll need growth, the right town set ups, to get as many specialists as you can without crippling yourself and converting into cities means you have less food to go around etc. and based on the timing of growth events and the turns remaining it might not be a good idea to convert. You could go for more cities but that's at the possible cost of specialists and next age you might start off weaker.

I think one of the issues is that you can't manually re-direct resources from a town to a city because at some point it makes no sense to split food with a city that is already, say, 28 total pop in Antiquity so if you want to keep towns around you have to put extra effort into figuring out trade route distance and also settlement placement but even then you'll eventually want to convert, but you'll do the conversion in a wave where the towns that no longer can/need to support a population will be converted but that most likely leaves you with remaining towns or cities that only have one or two key buildings if there are more ages to consider.

All this is to say that I think there is a balanced eco-system between towns and cities but that's only if there are later ages and the duration of the game. If the game had a "One More Turn" button then, everything would become cities at the end of the day and if you play longer ages then it skews more towards city conversion.
 
I really don’t see going full cities in antiquity as the meta. I think you could easily have 3 cities + 3 towns, have maybe slightly less yields at the end of the ancient era but a much better start of exploration (and, you know, an actual army to defend yourself throughout the game).
 
Apparently not. He tried his hand at Deadlock as well and was called out on very quickly for posting what amounted to be one of the worst behaviors you can do in team games.

Also, if you look at his channel for Civ7 it's mostly clickbait.


What meta? Determined by who? And under what settings?
The competitive civ community and the high level players. Normal settings, Normal speed, Deity.
 
Yeah, meta or whatever, I don't see the point. It doesn't even always work on higher levels, as in it might not be possible to execute, so I'm not sure what the value is in being fixated on this approach.

Having tried this out, I find that 3-4 cities and 2-4 towns seems the most practical on Immortal and Deity. Going out my way to convert the rest of the towns into cities means gimping myself in other ways, such as starting Exploration Age with no gold. And when you're in Exploration Age, you might want to stick to 3 cities anyway to maximise specialist yields and costs with the relevant attributes. Otherwise, you have to stretch yourself a lot more for the scientific legacy path and with low pop growth cities.
 
This "meta" also seems particularly dangerous in competitive play? I would have thought you need to buy early military to survive there? Isn't sinking your money into conversions a bit slow? (I don't do multiplayer, so I wouldn't mind getting corrected on that.)

such as starting Exploration Age with no gold

That seems to be the major blind spot of this (generally not clear about the implications for later ages, when you have to spend all that conversion gold - that you don't earn because of your expensive infrastructure - again)
 
This "meta" also seems particularly dangerous in competitive play? I would have thought you need to buy early military to survive there? Isn't sinking your money into conversions a bit slow? (I don't do multiplayer, so I wouldn't mind getting corrected on that.
This strat has been acknowledged as a no/low war strat. Mileage may vary, but there's generally no gold to buy emergency troops when needed. You'd have to hard build your army way before war starts, and that only makes sense when your production is online so you need time.
 
I would have thought you need to buy early military to survive there? Isn't sinking your money into conversions a bit slow? (I don't do multiplayer, so I wouldn't mind getting corrected on that.)



That seems to be the major blind spot of this
This strat has been acknowledged as a no/low war strat. Mileage may vary, but there's generally no gold to buy emergency troops when needed. You'd have to hard build your army way before war starts, and that only makes sense when your production is online so you need time.
This isn't really true. It's not that you convert towns into cities the minute you have enough gold banked to hit the conversion button. It's that in a binary, cities are superior to towns, so you want to convert as many towns into cities when you can afford to do so (taking into account other things like size of army, specialist placement, etc..). Making towns more specialized and better at specific things increases the opportunity cost of converting them into a city and makes the placement and purpose of a settlement more rewarding and enjoyable, rather than the current approach.
 
This isn't really true. It's not that you convert towns into cities the minute you have enough gold banked to hit the conversion button. It's that in a binary, cities are superior to towns, so you want to convert as many towns into cities when you can afford to do so (taking into account other things like size of army, specialist placement, etc..).
Then there's very little that differentiates this from regular play. Unless you pick certain combinations of leaders and civs and mementos, such a logical approach would usually result in what I said (3-4 cities with 2-4 towns). Some games may go differently, but they're very much the exception, in my experience.

If we're talking about the extreme of really converting 100% of towns into cities, that would be a different approach from the usual.
 
Going out my way to convert the rest of the towns into cities means gimping myself in other ways, such as starting Exploration Age with no gold. And when you're in Exploration Age, you might want to stick to 3 cities anyway to maximise specialist yields and costs with the relevant attributes. Otherwise, you have to stretch yourself a lot more for the scientific legacy path and with low pop growth cities.
I'm also not sure growing towns into cities gimps your gold production - especially if you're able to stockpile at the end of an age, which you should be able to do in antiquity and exploration. You can only carry over a limited amount. And then everything sets back to towns anyway.
 
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