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

[WillK96]

1: not having to choose production half’s your micro on town vs city. Also when you have gotten all the resources possible from that town, just set a specialisation and forget about it, it’ll be just fine

2: sure you CAN generate more food in cities vs towns, but then you are reducing the other yields in that city. Towns can’t really produce science or culture, and covering your farm tiles with buildings that fueled your initial city growth feels like a natural progression.

3: yes every town would be more efficient as a city. It’s also true upgrading my Warrior to Spearman is more efficient, it’s got more stats! But for both of them, there is a gold cost that might be better spent elsewhere. Sure I could convert my town to a city, then use to prod to make a +8 bazaar in twenty turns, or I could just buy a bazaar in my city, and get that bonus immediately.
Admittedly it’s hard to quantify which is better because of all of the purchase reduction modifiers.

1. It does not halve your micro unless you're growing at the same pace you're producing buildings. Which you wouldn't be since the towns grow quickly. Also with the buggy city connections not functioning properly, even a specialized town often grows. And the specializations are not that great, which prioritizes land/resource capture in towns. And if we're talking about the modern age, you wouldn't capture the necessary resources in towns before you specialized before you won the game. Which is the whole point...

2. A grocer can provide like 20+ food in a coastal city. It can provide some bonkers yields on a land locked city as well that was properly spaced out and developed from Antiquity (something like +15 for unimproved tiles). Cannerys and Tennements are also overpowered. They alone can produce more food than entire towns. And given the # of buildings and the strong emphasis on overbuilding, you're really not reducing any yields by building those, other than the opportunity cost of building the food building first.

3. In my experience, it would be better to have 4 cities with 4 bazaars than the gold produced from the towns. Given you could purchase the bazaar immediately. Even hard building the bazaar I think would be a better use of the production, though you'd be robbed of the global gold resource so the opportunity cost calculation becomes a bit more complex.

 

[chazzycat]

2. A grocer can provide like 20+ food in a coastal city. It can provide some bonkers yields on a land locked city as well that was properly spaced out and developed from Antiquity (something like +15 for unimproved tiles). Cannerys and Tennements are also overpowered. They alone can produce more food than entire towns

LMAO no. In modern age, properly developed towns are sending 200+ food.

 

[Smayo]

1. It does not halve your micro unless you're growing at the same pace you're producing buildings. Which you wouldn't be since the towns grow quickly. Also with the buggy city connections not functioning properly, even a specialized town often grows. And the specializations are not that great, which prioritizes land/resource capture in towns. And if we're talking about the modern age, you wouldn't capture the necessary resources in towns before you specialized before you won the game. Which is the whole point...

2. A grocer can provide like 20+ food in a coastal city. It can provide some bonkers yields on a land locked city as well that was properly spaced out and developed from Antiquity (something like +15 for unimproved tiles). Cannerys and Tennements are also overpowered. They alone can produce more food than entire towns. And given the # of buildings and the strong emphasis on overbuilding, you're really not reducing any yields by building those, other than the opportunity cost of building the food building first.

3. In my experience, it would be better to have 4 cities with 4 bazaars than the gold produced from the towns. Given you could purchase the bazaar immediately. Even hard building the bazaar I think would be a better use of the production, though you'd be robbed of the global gold resource so the opportunity cost calculation becomes a bit more complex.

1: Ok halfed is an overstatement, but clearly it does reduce some micro. It also helps that growth events are an easier decision than choosing a building. And your second part. Yeah it’s currently buggy so why suggest changes to workaround bugs? If I had a snooker table with a hole in the middle, I would want to repair the hole first, before installing ramps and jumps to shoot the ball over.

2: 20 food is like nothing though, have you seen the food cost for pops late game (which is another issue), and that’s a good thousand gold that could’ve been a Schoolhouse. If I have to choose between 12 science for a Schoolhouse or 20 food for a Grocery, I know which one I’m picking. 20 food only means something if you are using the mass fish Strat with their unchanged growth formula that can make 1 growth event per turn possible.

3: I can’t talk to which is better but early in Modern you don’t have the money to have 4 cities and 4 bazaars. We’re talking opportunity cost here, and just having a town costs far less than having a city, so unless the benefits are huge, it will win out

 

[Manpanzee]

Consider two scenarios:

A) I plant a settlement with the intention of keeping it as a forever town, because I know I’m going to plant more settlements than I can afford to develop into cities, so it makes sense to plan on some of them staying as towns.

B) I plant a settlement with the intention of keeping it as a forever town, because the game mechanics make towns in some sense inherently “better” than cities in some circumstances.

From a gameplay perspective, is there really a meaningful difference between these scenarios? It seems like either one leads you to the same place in a practical sense. I don’t think investing effort into moving from scenario A to scenario B makes any sense as a use of development resources.

(Personally I think the town/city balance is in a good place, with a lot of interesting tradeoffs that make “always save all money for town-->city upgrades above all else” far from the normal way to play.)

 

[Calcifer]

Some points that I didn't see already mentioned:

• While it's true that a city is better than a town in a vacuum, it's also true that a city supported by towns is better than a city without support. Analysing every single settlement on its own doesn't tell the whole story, you could find out that some well-placed farming towns are more useful for your empire economy than a couple more cities.
• Sometimes it's better to have fewer cities with higher production rather than more cities with lower production, especially for expensive stuff like wonders, projects, commanders, archaeologists...
• Gold and silver resources exist and they are pretty good in making gold (as a yield) more valuable compared to production.

In general, to me it doesn't make much sense to talk about "meta" in a single player environment where even at highest difficulty you can win using a lot of different approaches. I'm always staying between 1:1 and 1:2 city/town ratio and I have no problems at all beating deity. It would be way more difficult for me to play with only cities. I never feel like a specialized town is wasted, on the contrary I usually find myself planning for a good farming/mining/hub town as much as I'm planning for good cities with nice adjacencies.
The only way to prove for sure if a certain strategy is better than another would be to play multiplayer games, but I don't have time for that.

 

[chazzycat]

20 food only means something if you are using the mass fish Strat with their unchanged growth formula that can make 1 growth event per turn possible.

Yes, food and growth go hand in hand. They are two sides of the same equation...the better your growth rate, the more effective food is. So focusing on both at the same time is how you make it work. If you believe "food sucks" and never invest in it, of course it's not going to do much.

Big fan of the fish factory. Acquiring a good number of fish during the exploration age is usually one of my top goals if I'm going tall.

 

[tman2000]

My very first attempt at deity level, I used the Khmer (trash civ, food sucks, yawn) and had a blast. Were my antiquity yields amazing? Not really. But I set my foundation up to succeed in the later ages, and it worked to a tee. Easily sailed to victory comfortably ahead in every victory track and every output, with just 3 cities, and like 20 towns. Based on the power of food and specialists.

You're just sort of saying, "I can still play without prioritizing cities". That's different than saying that towns as a feature are any good.

If food was made more useful, then you could just get rid of towns altogether. You'd just trade off when you build a tier-2 food versus something else like every civ game before. Nerfing food to force towns is different, not different but better.

 

[tman2000]

Yes, food and growth go hand in hand. They are two sides of the same equation...the better your growth rate, the more effective food is. So focusing on both at the same time is how you make it work. If you believe "food sucks" and never invest in it, of course it's not going to do much.

Big fan of the fish factory. Acquiring a good number of fish during the exploration age is usually one of my top goals if I'm going tall.

Fish bonus applies empire wide. You can go wide and tall with a city strategy.

 

[tman2000]

FYI, I've written up my mod proposal to make town-as-towns better.

T

Thread 'Better City-Town Ecosystem Mod Proposal'

Mar 18, 2025

I will be working on this, but am new to modding, so I'm posting it in the open. Some elements of it become much more complicated than others.

Improved Town Utility

Purpose: To improve the utility of towns-as-towns, creating incentives to keep settlements as towns instead of converting to cities.
Other design intentions:

• To utilize the town-city dichotomy to achieve better game balance, with a more forgiving, less balanced, less restrained early game juxtaposed against a more nuanced, more skill rewarding city based late game.
• To lean into tactical gameplay, with more...

• tman2000
• Replies: 2
• Forum: Civ 7 - Creation & Customization

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[tman2000]

The central issue I have with the premise that cities are always better is this: how on earth do you keep them growing?

You don't in antiquity, unless you're doing so well you can afford to reach for Angkor Wat and apply it in time to matter, in which case you were doing well enough to not need to do this. Or, otherwise, you benefitted from a particular civ in which case the strategy isn't general, so in a general sense towns remain less relevant.

 

[tman2000]

Warrior to Spearman is more efficient, it’s got more stats! But for both of them, there is a gold cost that might be better spent elsewhere. Sure I could convert my town to a city, then use to prod to make a +8 bazaar in twenty turns, or I could just buy a bazaar in my city, and get that bonus immediately.

Yeah but imagine if you purposefully increased the upgrade cost to spearmen, and nerfed the strength of the spearmen, so that even after unlocking bronze working, you're incentivized to keep a ton of "support warriors" because "well I don't want to risk my spearmen charging ranged units and subject them to flanks, I need them here at the center to take the brunt of other spearmen". Imagine that instead of just "you unlocked better units, upgrade them all when you can afford it."

 

[chazzycat]

Fish bonus applies empire wide. You can go wide and tall with a city strategy.

I mean yes, but food and growth are just two sides of the same equation. Focusing on BOTH makes it vastly more effective, it's simple math. Doing this with no towns won't move the needle at all, unless you can get close to 20 fish. Whereas with a bunch of food towns, a much more reasonable fish factory of like ~8 fish will have your cities growing rapidly.

 

[tman2000]

I mean yes, but food and growth are just two sides of the same equation. Focusing on BOTH makes it vastly more effective, it's simple math. Doing this with no towns won't move the needle at all, unless you can get close to 20 fish. Whereas with a bunch of food towns, a much more reasonable fish factory of like ~8 fish will have your cities growing rapidly.

I mean, maybe. There are people disagreeing with you. They claim that food buildings with a few farms in cities can match what towns provide.

 

[chazzycat]

I mean, maybe. There are people disagreeing with you. They claim that food buildings with a few farms in cities can match what towns provide.

Anyone claiming this is flat our wrong. Playing tall, my megacities will have THOUSANDS of food. Food specialized towns just get a massive multiplier effect and it scales up each age. Each one is sending 200-250 food by endgame. The settlement limit is in the low 20s by that point so lets say 3 cities, 2 mining towns and ~16 food towns would be a fairly typical setup for me. That's four thousand food per turn getting spread among your cities.

Combined with fish factory, it's the only way to bust through the exponential growth requirements and keep cities growing into the fifties, sixties, etc.

For the record I am not saying this would be playing optimally. I don't like blanket statements like that. I just think it's cool that it is a viable strategy so I get annoyed when people say food and towns are garbage. They are not.

 

[tman2000]

Anyone claiming this is flat our wrong. Playing tall, my megacities will have THOUSANDS of food.

So what? Food scaling resets in modern age. It takes less food to scale up into the 30s-40s.

In my experience, I reach a happiness wall which prevents placing specialists prior to running out of growth. What's the benefit of so much food?

Again, if you would have made 10+ cities you'd see the benefits of having more cities over the apparent benefits of your few megacities relative to your towns.

 

[Smayo]

Anyone claiming this is flat our wrong. Playing tall, my megacities will have THOUSANDS of food. Food specialized towns just get a massive multiplier effect and it scales up each age. Each one is sending 200-250 food by endgame. The settlement limit is in the low 20s by that point so lets say 3 cities, 2 mining towns and ~16 food towns would be a fairly typical setup for me. That's four thousand food per turn getting spread among your cities.

Combined with fish factory, it's the only way to bust through the exponential growth requirements and keep cities growing into the fifties, sixties, etc.

For the record I am not saying this would be playing optimally. I don't like blanket statements like that. I just think it's cool that it is a viable strategy so I get annoyed when people say food and towns are garbage. They are not.

I won't jump into the whole Fish debate, although it felt like I barely needed any food to grow cities after acquiring enough fish, but then I wasn't converting every single town so . Another thing people maybe dont account for is Town modifiers like the Expansionist attribute for 15/30% yields. thats a big deal.

 

[chazzycat]

So what? Food scaling resets in modern age. It takes less food to scale up into the 30s-40s.

In my experience, I reach a happiness wall which prevents placing specialists prior to running out of growth. What's the benefit of so much food?

Again, if you would have made 10+ cities you'd see the benefits of having more cities over the apparent benefits of your few megacities relative to your towns.

man I was just responding to your previous comment where you said food buildings can compete with towns on food output. Now that I've put some numbers out there it's "so what"? I get a feeling you're not really engaging in good faith arguments and have already made up your mind. So it's not worth it to continue the conversation. Have a good day

 

[tman2000]

man I was just responding to your previous comment where you said food buildings can compete with towns on food output. Now that I've put some numbers out there it's "so what"? I get a feeling you're not really engaging in good faith arguments and have already made up your mind. So it's not worth it to continue the conversation. Have a good day

I don't need thousands of food when my cities hit a happiness wall from too many specialists. There's a point where growth doesn't help anymore. I'm sorry that has come off as me being disingenuous.

 

[Calcifer]

I don't need thousands of food when my cities hit a happiness wall from too many specialists. There's a point where growth doesn't help anymore. I'm sorry that has come off as me being disingenuous.

You're probably hitting a happiness wall because you have too many buildings, not because you have too many specialists. In the modern age a building will have a -4 happines maintenance and a specialist will cost -2 happiness. The Shipyards you spammed in all your cities in exploration age so you could have good production are now giving you a whopping +3 production and costing you -3 gold and -3 happiness. That's the main reason you're struggling with happiness, and that's one of the reasons that mindlessly spamming cities everywhere is not the best strategy.

 

[chazzycat]

Specialist maintenance can add up if you're going full ham on them without using any of the tools at your disposal to reduce their costs. There are multiple policy cards, traditions, and an expansionist node.