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

[tman2000]

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.

So that's not a city problem. It's a making all cities do all things problem. Even so, there's still a specialist wall after about 10 of them.

 

[tman2000]

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.

Yes, but by around 15 specialists you still hit a wall. You don't need thousands of food to get there.

 

[ehecatzin]

I think one way to make the town/city split more noticeable would be for rural tiles to be able to generate adjacencies to each other of the same type, but only on towns. It would for example: allow to food heavy regions to pump out food if you can chain enough farms together (besides the warehouse bonuses you could add). Same for sawmills, mines, and fishing. Maybe it could encourage hiper specialization of towns and actually be a tradeoff if you choose to switch a town for a city, maybe a mixed area with enough production would be a good candidate, but a heavily specialized one with a lot of rural adjacencies? maybe you'd want to keep that one (or even capture it)

 

[tman2000]

I think one way to make the town/city split more noticeable would be for rural tiles to be able to generate adjacencies to each other of the same type, but only on towns. It would for example: allow to food heavy regions to pump out food if you can chain enough farms together (besides the warehouse bonuses you could add). Same for sawmills, mines, and fishing. Maybe it could encourage hiper specialization of towns and actually be a tradeoff if you choose to switch a town for a city, maybe a mixed area with enough production would be a good candidate, but a heavily specialized one with a lot of rural adjacencies? maybe you'd want to keep that one (or even capture it)

I implemented this in my mod proposal for mines and woodcutters precisely to make mining towns have some purpose other than prime candidates to become cities.

For farming towns, I think as-is would work fine if you can customize how food is distributed. This permits a trade-off where you can grow one city at a time, or help a very large city produce specialists. Five towns supporting five cities has diminishing marginal returns, but five towns which can support one city at a time is a different story.

 

[Menocchio]

Yes, but by around 15 specialists you still hit a wall. You don't need thousands of food to get there.

It feels like you ended up in a specific situation where your had a happiness deficit and you're regarding it as a universal situation. It really is easy to get happiness even with many specialists, and you don't need to play a happiness-generating leader either. In the Modern age especially there's the Free Speech policy, unlocked with Political Theory, that halves your specialist maintenance costs (and a similar one with a reduced effect in Exploration). Certain buildings also have happiness adjacencies, which can effectively give you happiness-free specialists, so long as the adjacency bonus is +3 or +4.

As far as I can tell, most civs and leaders are geared toward a varied mix of cities and towns depending on the situation, and then there are some that tend to either extreme, with Augustus and Carthage preferring lots of towns, and Pachacuti and the Inca favouring mostly cities.

 

[Sagax]

I'm a bit confused by the signals sent between this thread and this one: https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...s-for-unfinished-poorly-balanced-game.696922/

You state that food buildings don't matter, yet have so much food with barely any towns that you fill up to 10-15 specialist slots per city.
You state that the city-spam strat is the way to go, yet also admit that you're running into happiness problems that seem hard to mitigate. To the point you're convinced that Ashoka and Angkor Wat are the only effective ways to solve them.

I think it's hard to discuss your strategy and challenges in-depth, unless we learn much more about how you play - spamming cities seems to be only part of the whole story. Without going as far as asking for your save files, maybe some of these questions could help:

1. How do you play around the settlement limit? Do you intentionally go above it, and if so - by how much?
2. What food buildings do you build in your cities?
3. What's your approach towards Independent Powers? If you actively suze them, what bonuses do you prioritize?
4. How do you approach the attribute tree? It's mostly dictated by the leader choice, but there is some room for investing into every tree. Which attributes do you prioritize whenever given a chance?
5. Do you use any UI mods? And if the answer is none, I recommend trying a game with these two mods and see how your experience changes:
- https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/leonardfactorys-policy-yield-previews.32012/
- https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/enhanced-town-focus-info.31969/
6. How does your empire look like at the start of Exploration and Modern? Some metrics that come to mind (approximations are ok):
- Number of settlements vs the settlement limit
- City/Town split
- Avg. number of obsolete districts per city
- Amount of specialists slotted per city
- Avg. local and global happiness at the start of the new age
- Gold carried over and GPT
- Influence carried over and IPT
- Your go-to legacy golden ages

 

[tman2000]

1. How do you play around the settlement limit? Do you intentionally go above it, and if so - by how much?
2. What food buildings do you build in your cities?
3. What's your approach towards Independent Powers? If you actively suze them, what bonuses do you prioritize?
4. How do you approach the attribute tree? It's mostly dictated by the leader choice, but there is some room for investing into every tree. Which attributes do you prioritize whenever given a chance?

In this playthrough I was Confucius as Han/Ming/Qing which certainly helped my food supply. I had 14 settlements. All the territory was taken up by late exploration and I spent half that age to take my neighbor's large, fully developed capital and a couple settlements. I'm allied with my continental neighbor who's the most powerful player in the game other than in science (that's me). The other continent is dominated by an oversettled Tecumseh. I have a single settlement over there with formerly 4 distant land resources. Almost no tiles otherwise so I left it a town. He attacked me and I used a stack of four battleships sailing up and down an adjacent navigable river which put them in range of 5 of his settlements. I could have sent armies over or converted to a city, but I just couldn't be bothered. I was going to win the science victory anyway and geopolitics were stable.

I had eight cities and six towns. Three towns were on islands, then the distant lands outpost, then two towns from antiquity that had 6-10 land tiles and I just didn't upgrade them since they "seemed" small but I could have. The last town was a 5 tile blank spot in the map I settled just because a stupid ally landed an army there.

Other than my capitals and former capitals, I had 5 "minor cities". These began modern age at 20 population, and since I was ignoring culture I didn't get the specialists happiness civic (free speech?) until later in the age.

Only by the end of the age, where they're at average pop of 35, has growth slowed. And, now happiness isn't a problem anymore. But somewhere around 28 pop it was. My three major cities are in the 50s and. The minor cities produce about 40-50 food per turn at the end of the age, except one is on a large island and has a lot of fish so it produces around 150 food, and the major ones are producing 150-200. One town I'm growing just to get more gold since that mattered more to me than food anymore. One is a mining town that can't grow anymore, and then I have three fishing towns doing 60 average food.

So 180/8 = 21 food per city which are producing 50-200 food, where the smaller cities are slowing in growth while the large cities are still growing.

My minor cities produce around 150 science and my major cities do around 200.

So you're telling me to do 5 more towns to feed three cities to grow past 600 science when the two science districts AND special quarter are stacked with specialists, instead of keeping my 5x150 = 750 science from the minor cities. So I'm gaining maybe 100 science and giving up 750 to get "thousands of food" to grow cities that don't need to grow?

No thanks.

In line with my post you reference, I already won modern when it started. I just had to milk science and build up until the rocket launch.

5. Do you use any UI mods? And if the answer is none, I recommend trying a game with these two mods and see how your experience changes:
- https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/leonardfactorys-policy-yield-previews.32012/
- https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/enhanced-town-focus-info.31969/

Nice mods, honestly. However, that information is simply not profound enough to sell the utility of towns versus a city preference strategy.

 

[Sagax]

Nice mods, honestly. However, that information is simply not profound enough to sell the utility of towns versus a city preference strategy.

These mods are specifically to address two issues in your other posts:

1. Challenges with Happiness. There are a lot of policies and attributes that deal with that.
2. Which towns can be kept as valuable Hub towns (influence generation)

 

[tman2000]

These mods are specifically to address two issues in your other posts:

1. Challenges with Happiness. There are a lot of policies and attributes that deal with that.
2. Which towns can be kept as valuable Hub towns (influence generation)

They're great. I'm adding them to my sukritact

 

[tman2000]

I've modded the game (after a double check, I'm releasing tomorrow) to vastly increase city growth rates, on top of a 200% rate for growing towns. I've made settlers cheaper, and cities more expensive. It feels very very good. Settlement caps are gone (though I want a distance from capital based system ultimately).

Nothing is immediate, but within the harsh time limits associated with the age system, growth rate doesn't feel overpowered. The high cost of cities means the quick founding and growth of many towns just gives a more relieving sense of progress. This is the fix, I believe. It's like Civ III cadence almost.

 

[Smayo]

Interested to see it. I do like the settlement limit though personally, it stops me building to a level of micromanagement I know is optimal, but I hate doing

 

[tman2000]

Interested to see it. I do like the settlement limit though personally, it stops me building to a level of micromanagement I know is optimal, but I hate doing

One feature of 7's design is to minimize micromanagement to one-click tile placement. It can get annoying to face constant interruption each turn start, since all other civs let you automate everything from citizen management to builders to exploration. However, it's still the absolute minimum level of micromanagement.

I'd say the best mitigation is to play on an epic or marathon speed so that you have a lot more moving units around in between growth or building events.

For me the worst are the constant diplomatic endeavors. 100% needing a mod to shuffle all those to the right side of the screen as silent notifications stacked in bars that can just be clicked away in an instant. Confronting leaders should be for alliances or wars or the first time you meet.

 

[Smayo]

One feature of 7's design is to minimize micromanagement to one-click tile placement. It can get annoying to face constant interruption each turn start, since all other civs let you automate everything from citizen management to builders to exploration. However, it's still the absolute minimum level of micromanagement.

I'd say the best mitigation is to play on an epic or marathon speed so that you have a lot more moving units around in between growth or building events.

For me the worst are the constant diplomatic endeavors. 100% needing a mod to shuffle all those to the right side of the screen as silent notifications stacked in bars that can just be clicked away in an instant. Confronting leaders should be for alliances or wars or the first time you meet.

I would actually like a mod that does that, just gives you a little summary of leader proposals made this turn, that you can do with what you like, without interruption.

Hmm I might have a go at doing that

 

[tman2000]

I would actually like a mod that does that, just gives you a little summary of leader proposals made this turn, that you can do with what you like, without interruption.

Hmm I might have a go at doing that

Yeah a stack of bars on the right with three buttons on the side for endeavors. Well, if you do it, do it before I do haha.

I think denouncing should summon up a leader screen because it's rather important. But constant endeavor proposals are so interrupting.

Buttons should be: thumbs up, tow hands together like when you bow, thumbs down. They should have the cost below them.

 

[tman2000]

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/1jhdnoh/some_charts_on_the_problem_of_food_vs_production

Interpretation: Curvy blue line is when it's more efficient to place a specialist for yield (which costs food), versus just paying to upgrade a town to a city and buying a library etc. It's a commentary on how big does a settlement population have to be until just making things cities is better than using towns.

Here is under the most town-favorable conditions (farming town, modern age growth rates):

 

[aelf]

I wonder if the data can be interpreted as suggesting that converting a new town into a specialist city, purchasing the needed infrastructure, is an efficient way to play with specialists.

 

[tman2000]

I wonder if the data can be interpreted as suggesting that converting a new town into a specialist city, purchasing the needed infrastructure, is an efficient way to play with specialists.

Yes, can you plant a settlement and immediately convert to city (which is expensive for low population cities), then build just a library or culture buildings, then add specialists? This is a strategy but I've never seen it used. The growth rates are so tight that basically, you don't worry about food, you worry about gold and convert to cities wherever you can.

 

[aelf]

Then there might be synergy between gold-oriented civ/leaders and a specialist-heavy strategy, especially in Exploration Age when gold income starts to take off and specialist limits increase. Specialist cities in distant lands, which can also take advantage of distant land-related bonuses and events?

 

[aelf]

I'm waiting for patch, but I'm thinking of trying Carthage > Majapahit with Xerxes KoK for tall but wide play in Antiquity. Max out settlement cap with more closely packed settlements, specialise towns early, and bank gold for Exploration Age. Once in Exploration Age, convert towns into cities and place specialists immediately once the new cities grow.

If I'm right, there should be an explosive growth in yields in early Exploration.

 

[Menocchio]

I'm waiting for patch, but I'm thinking of trying Carthage > Majapahit with Xerxes KoK for tall but wide play in Antiquity. Max out settlement cap with more closely packed settlements, specialise towns early, and bank gold for Exploration Age. Once in Exploration Age, convert towns into cities and place specialists immediately once the new cities grow.

If I'm right, there should be an explosive growth in yields in early Exploration.

You might have an even better time of it with Abbasids—their first tradition gives Science adjacency to all buildings with the city hall and palace, with all the implications therein.