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

[tman2000]

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.

Interesting, so would you go farming towns at 7 pop? Lately I've been feeling how weak mining towns are.

 

[aelf]

Not strictly. I'd also want to grab resources unless there's no urgency to get certain ones in Antiquity.

 

[tman2000]

different types of specializations.

I really have trouble believing this. Like, you may be doing it in Deity games, but I have trouble believing you need to be doing it.

Mining towns are awful and might as well be farming towns, but are even better as just cities. Hub towns can be good, but it's hard to tell and they're better in later ages when your settlement cap is higher. Trading towns are useful until you unlock certain attributes, like maybe one of them. The happiness buff is nice but that would mean delaying specialization until you realize you need the happiness.

Other than farming towns, you might as well let towns grow so you can slowly increase their gold yields. And, with growth being so punishingly steep, I think there are really harsh diminishing returns even for farming towns. I think just at the onset of the game, capital pop 10-12, with four fresh new towns grown to 7-8, you can grow your capital to 15-18. Otherwise, I think there's literally no use for any towns other than just grow them to get more gold until you can afford to convert them.

 

[Taefin]

This has been an Interesting thread to catch up on.

I think at most I’d agree with the title in that towns might be “boring” as implemented, but I don’t think they are broken. Your mod seems to fix towns being boring, based on the concerns you raise, and to tip the balance more toward tall play. Since you cannot get by without cities, it still incentivizes making cities when you can. I suspect FXS will reduce the exponential growth of the growth curve to achieve some similar effects.

As the game currently is, I understand your frustration, but I think that saving 1000 gold by not converting a town into a strictly superior city is a balance that is in line with civ7 design philosophy. It a very simple mechanism (rising cost up to 1000) that creates interesting decisions about whether to convert a town to a city.

For instance, if 1000 gold worth of extra production is not going to be generated by the new city, and if you have any cities in which that gold could be spent directly on the needed infrastructure, then converting to a city would not be worth if. For instance, if you have 4 gold resources, 1000 gold would be equivalent to 450 production. For a mining town, which is most likely to make a good city, only about 65% of its original production can be counted toward this 450 (mining towns seem to get ~40% more gold than otherwise, not considering the +15% expansionist attribute). If a town has 25 production, that would take 28 turns to recoup the 1000 gold. One could produce (or buy) production buildings, but this just delays cashing in on the new production. At the very least, at some point in an era, it stops making sense to convert this town to a city.

On top of this, it will take quite a while for that first useful building to be produced, in which time that building purchased in another city with gold (assuming there is a city in which to do so) would begin having its effect already.

Now, the extra city does produce new specialists quite a bit faster, if it also has access to good food, and a few specialists may contribute toward paying back the 1000 gold investment. But I would strongly prioritize conveying a town that had some +4 or more adjacencies.

Altogether, converting towns to cities is one of many ways to spend gold. More fully developed cities only have a benefit if brought online early enough to effect the end-game.

For it to be meta to convert all cities, I’d say that it would need to categorically break out of the typical amount of yields one would have otherwise. Maybe it is possible for it to do this, but I don’t think the arguments articulated here support that it does. Moreover, it appears that no one on either side of this discussion regularly does this.

Perhaps something interesting to try is to aim to convert half of your towns to cities in antiquity, get the Econ golden age, and then buy all the other town up to cities before applying it, to get most/all of your antiquity settlements to cities.

But then the same limitations exist for converting new DL settlements into cities, but these are going to cost 1000 gold almost no matter how many HL cities you get turn 1. Moreover, I find that low-production cities feel very weak is modern, where they won’t get more than one building up before the game is all but decided. Perhaps one strong quarter in each small city would help. But that gold could probably be used toward getting an equivalent benefit online somewhere else.

 

[Mezmorizor]

The problem is that food is a de facto worthless yield between the curve and lack of upkeep. It's the curve that determines how many growth events you see. Not how much food your town or city has. You should still build the warehouse if resources mean you have the improvement anyway, sure, but to use antiquity as the benchmark, if you go really, really hard into food, prioritize food rural tiles, build food buildings, and build farming towns to feed it, you'll get about 7 growth events in your capital. If your food is just from resource improvements, resources, and towns that you can't afford to make cities quite yet, you'll get about 6 and might even hit the 7. Rural tiles being kind of weak causes similar problems, but it's a bit hard to disentangle "food is worthless" from rural tiles being overly weak without doing math I haven't done.

This growth curve is why towns feel so bad. Spending several thousand food to get another specialist is clearly terrible compared to spending some gold and building some buildings in a fresh city, and with a modicum of foresight, the vastly more efficient production will also outscale a gold economy. There's just no reason to ever purposefully make a town, well, a town. The real limiter to this strategy is that Civ 7 has a quite low ceiling on everything. It's not very hard to one turn things. It's not very hard to research multiple future techs/civics. If it's not modern, you're not going to be ahead enough economically to be at a unit advantage (and the ridiculous tier 3 vs tier 1 is just making things even with how big of bonuses the AI gets). Most legacy paths don't really care about how strong your empire is. Hell, most win conditions don't really care about how strong your empire is. Combine this all and you get this weird thing where it is very plausibly true that making your empire as strong as it can be (which is unequivocally as many cities as possible ASAP) is bad because a weaker empire will require less infrastructure and still be good enough to win with a big safety margin. It's simply weird and not strategically satisfying. Having 6000 beakers a turn should be good, and it's kind of just not and it's not because the opportunity cost of getting 6000 beakers a turn is too great. It's just because having 6000 beakers a turn doesn't really do anything besides make you unable to farm legacy paths because future tech/civic is a lot of age progress, and for actually winning you're production limited at much lower beakers per turn.

 

[tman2000]

This has been an Interesting thread to catch up on.

I think at most I’d agree with the title in that towns might be “boring” as implemented, but I don’t think they are broken. Your mod seems to fix towns being boring, based on the concerns you raise, and to tip the balance more toward tall play. Since you cannot get by without cities, it still incentivizes making cities when you can. I suspect FXS will reduce the exponential growth of the growth curve to achieve some similar effects.

As the game currently is, I understand your frustration, but I think that saving 1000 gold by not converting a town into a strictly superior city is a balance that is in line with civ7 design philosophy. It a very simple mechanism (rising cost up to 1000) that creates interesting decisions about whether to convert a town to a city.

This is still a forced design decision. They've made cities expensive enough to force a trade-off that can favor towns. There's nothing about the concept of towns themselves that's worthwhile. It's clear that there was an earlier design philosophy that combined streamlining with making use of an interesting specialization mechanic designed to reconfigure the tall v wide debate. However, to get their three ages to balanced, they throttled growth and have simply imposed balancing features to force towns.

That said, cities do become cheaper the more population towns have. The debate isn't whether to convert towns to cities immediately, just to convert them as soon as is economically feasible. In other words, there's no incentive to keep anything a town other than imposed balances. Having a system where there were times towns could be preferable would achieve the tall vs wide flexibility.

In my mod, there's no settlement cap, and settlers are cheap. More towns, all else equal, means more gold. I've made cities more expensive too. So there's very much a tall vs wide dichotomy. Eventually I'm going to try to give players control over where food distribution goes. You very much can go farming towns and send all food to one or two cities to grow them very tall. Or, go mining towns to save up gold to convert many cities. In this ecosystem it's not really about towns vs. cities, it's about tall v wide and if you're using towns to support one way or the other. That's my goal.

For it to be meta to convert all cities, I’d say that it would need to categorically break out of the typical amount of yields one would have otherwise. Maybe it is possible for it to do this, but I don’t think the arguments articulated here support that it does. Moreover, it appears that no one on either side of this discussion regularly does this.

Perhaps something interesting to try is to aim to convert half of your towns to cities in antiquity, get the Econ golden age, and then buy all the other town up to cities before applying it, to get most/all of your antiquity settlements to cities.

But then the same limitations exist for converting new DL settlements into cities, but these are going to cost 1000 gold almost no matter how many HL cities you get turn 1. Moreover, I find that low-production cities feel very weak is modern, where they won’t get more than one building up before the game is all but decided. Perhaps one strong quarter in each small city would help. But that gold could probably be used toward getting an equivalent benefit online somewhere else.

There are some interesting strategies out there, but I haven't seem many of them actually employed yet. One idea was to economic golden age a bunch of former 7 population farming towns into cities at the last moment in antiquity. These cities then can receive specialists very quickly in exploration for early high yields. I hope to see these kinds of strategies shown off more.

I kind of think the game is too tightly balanced, and a lot of these strategies are illusory. That there's more or less a meta decision tree that's pretty rigid, and people are getting massive yields from OP civ/leaders, or lucky start conditions with the right resources.

In my mind, the optimal fun strategy game reduces down to kind of arbitrary rock, paper, scissors where there's no particularly strict meta, but you have to react to emerging situations correctly, maybe anticipate ahead a little (Go style rather than Chess style), give yourself options. High growth rate provides that flexibility, especially if towns are more useful, because you can flex in real time between tall v wide strategies as you respond to your adversaries.

 

[Mezmorizor]

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.

Fish are bugged and it's not fair to bring them up. It's a single player game so abuse them if you want to I guess, but they're pretty clearly not intended to be a super special awesome multiplier that works differently from every other multiplier in the game to stack crazily. Especially because every food multiplier used to work like that but they changed it because it's silly and busted.

You also seem to not understand the growth curve. The meaningful quantity is "growth events". Not "population". Population doesn't really tell you much of anything because every single cities population is mostly fueled by buildings and not growth events. In computational fluid dynamics there's a joke called "simulations for executives" where you do some non representative at all simulation to get the people several layers above you in management off your case for not understanding how hard it is to get meaningful simulation results, and the population number is very much so that. You feel like food is really powerful because your city is like 50+, but it would also have been high 40s if you completely cut back on food entirely.

 

[tman2000]

This growth curve is why towns feel so bad

This is how my current growth setting is calibrated:

Green line is the standard, and blue line is growing town which is 200% the standard.

I had it more forgiving before, but tightened up the exponent a little. You can see the green curve starts to exponentialize right before 30 pop. The thing is antiquity is only around 130 turns long, so that in itself puts limits on growth. In the end, I don't mind calibrating this further, and indeed right now I have settlers pretty cheap. It seems like settlers need to be a little bit cheap but I may need to make them a touch more expensive. I also think that cities should max out at 3 tile radius and they should produce migrants if you're going tall, that seems appropriate.

I've looked into the populations of ancient cities, and Rome and Chang'an reached a population size that wasn't surpassed until the railroad was invented. In many ways, exploration age cities were smaller than antiquity capitals. Although, Rome was supported by numerous farming towns (all the way from Egypt). I haven't fully thought out how that should work strategically, but I do favor an age transition where exploration works in a radically different way. Right now I'm considering antiquity towns as having a 2-tile radius, and this expanding to 3 for exploration, with smaller initial cities for exploration (almost like ruins are left behind that become farms).

Regardless, with the above growth curve, you think it would make antiquity explosively expansionist and trivially easy. Even so, what actually happens is you run up against the end of the age anyway as a natural limit on expansion, maybe filling up a standard sized continent just in time, or at least in time for a final war over territory. Playing on the modded "large" and "huge" maps feels way way way better especially with these growth rates.

Another thing about these high growth rates is that they're very sensitive to food. Granaries matter now, and farming towns also really matter and it's a tough trade off to specialize since growing towns provide a lot of benefit by growing to capture more gold more quickly, but then farming towns can really push cities tall.

I'm not saying my calibration is exactly correct, but I'm already convinced that liberal growth rates and larger maps is the only way to really make town/city meaningful as a solution to the tall v wide debate.

My solution for Civ 7, what I'd literally recommend to devs, is to split the game in two modes. Call what we have now "vanilla Civ 7" which is always accessible by turning off DLC, but from the first expansion onwards, the game is split into campaign and online modes. For campaign, it's standard map minimum size with higher growth rates, more complex rules. Meanwhile, they should take vanilla and streamline it even more. I find that the only way I can even play vanilla Civ 7 anymore is with fast speed on tiny maps. It's unplayable to me now that I've done a few rounds, being repetitive and feeling stifling.

There are ways to streamline Civ 7 further. They can make commander upgrades universal, kind of overlapping the attributes tree, so there are fewer commander upgrades in the end. All commanders gain experience and all benefit once an upgrade occurs. This is one way to streamline further for a fast, tiny game.

I think 7 is hamstrung by trying to cater to different audiences with the classic result that it works for neither. Vanilla is a good foundation for a deeper campaign mode, and it can also be streamlined further for a more ideal fast mode.

 

[Melkus]

Perhaps something interesting to try is to aim to convert half of your towns to cities in antiquity, get the Econ golden age, and then buy all the other town up to cities before applying it, to get most/all of your antiquity settlements to cities.

That's a sort of funny exploit idea - but why would you even want this? I sounds like turning everything into cities for its own sake - there's almost nothing you can build early in Exploration (and some of those towns will have weak production anyway).

This is still a forced design decision.

I've made cities more expensive too.

Huh? Your ideas are interesting, but it would be more possible to digest it all if you'd slow down and solidify where you want to go. You're throwing too many things at the wall at once without collecting data to see where they lead. It's getting hard to engage with it.

 

[chazzycat]

You also seem to not understand the growth curve. The meaningful quantity is "growth events". Not "population". Population doesn't really tell you much of anything because every single cities population is mostly fueled by buildings and not growth events. In computational fluid dynamics there's a joke called "simulations for executives" where you do some non representative at all simulation to get the people several layers above you in management off your case for not understanding how hard it is to get meaningful simulation results, and the population number is very much so that. You feel like food is really powerful because your city is like 50+, but it would also have been high 40s if you completely cut back on food entirely.

I am aware that population numbers include buildings now. For the record, I am consistently adding 25-35 specialists to each city when I go tall.

 

[chazzycat]

Fish are bugged and it's not fair to bring them up.

Here is a screenshot from my most recent deity game (standard everything) right when I got my fish factory up. As you can see I am already winning the yield war vs deity AIs before it even kicks into gear. Fish factory is just a fun thing to make yields continue to skyrocket through the end game, it's not actually important to the overall success.

Spoiler image :

 

[Calcifer]

[...] Spending several thousand food to get another specialist is clearly terrible compared to spending some gold and building some buildings in a fresh city, and with a modicum of foresight, the vastly more efficient production will also outscale a gold economy. There's just no reason to ever purposefully make a town, well, a town. [...]

There's a flaw in this: you can't always decide if your settlement will yield more food or more gold/production, so you can't really say you'd rather spend gold+production than food. A town settled on flat grassland without vegetation or on a small island will naturally yield very high food and very low production, so there's really no point in turning that into a city and waste valuable production (from your limited pool of resources) or gold there. And no, you can't always choose to settle in spots with good production unless you're restarting every time you don't like your map. This game still requires you to play the map and optimize ALL your yields (yes, including food), it's not just a matter of choosing the most efficient yield and ignoring the others.

 

[tman2000]

Huh? Your ideas are interesting, but it would be more possible to digest it all if you'd slow down and solidify where you want to go. You're throwing too many things at the wall at once without collecting data to see where they lead. It's getting hard to engage with it.

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

• 

 

[tman2000]

There's a flaw in this: you can't always decide if your settlement will yield more food or more gold/production, so you can't really say you'd rather spend gold+production than food. A town settled on flat grassland without vegetation or on a small island will naturally yield very high food and very low production, so there's really no point in turning that into a city and waste valuable production (from your limited pool of resources) or gold there. And no, you can't always choose to settle in spots with good production unless you're restarting every time you don't like your map. This game still requires you to play the map and optimize ALL your yields (yes, including food), it's not just a matter of choosing the most efficient yield and ignoring the others.

Yes, island towns pretty much exist for fishing yields, but with God of the Sea and other buffs, they can produce gold. However, any other town can be settled closer to production tiles and there's really no such thing as a vast grasslands with no meaningful production. Gold yields are global.

The issue is, why ever specialize? Growing towns will end up getting you more gold in the end, and it's cheaper to get small cities with yield buildings then aggregate food through stopped-growth towns for specialists. At least, that's the theory. Growth is so tight that even growing towns stop growing before long.

 

[chazzycat]

Have you tried settling a cluster of islands with a city in the middle surrounded by fishing towns? Developing 1-2 of these clusters (ideally one each side) is typically my main goal during exploration if I'm trying to go tall. Homeland cities do slow down growing significantly, I won't dispute that. But you can just move the specialist-popping action offshore and keep it churning. You can buy a couple key buildings and start assigning a lot of specialists rather quickly this way, since the starting population of those settlements is low. The growth curve hasn't kicked into punishing gear yet.

Tall play is not simply waiting around for your cities to grow, you have to go out and make things happen on the map too.

 

[Calcifer]

The issue is, why ever specialize?

Growth is so tight that even growing towns stop growing before long.

Well, that's the whole point. You specialize your town because it wouldn't grow that much anyway over a certain point. This means you're taking full advantage of the first part of the curve that lets you grow quite cheaply, then you start sending your food elsewhere so you can keep growing your better settlements.
The point of farming towns is to have very low investment settlements (usually just buy a granary or fishing quay and expand to a few farm/fishing tile) that help your better cities to grow. This way you can completely ignore farms and food buildings in your cities and they will still grow because they are helped by towns. You can focus on maximising all other yields and still add some specialists on the tiles with better adjacencies.

 

[Melkus]

@tman2000 Ok, that is ... pretty ambitious for a base game that is still in flux - practically in Beta, let's face it (I just saw your actual mod before - which already does some wide-ranging changes). But by all means keep experimenting.

The FXS dev (Tim?, they don't name them in the description) in the video talked about adjusting growth curves btw (and proceeding very carefully because of the complexity), so they have this on the radar.

 

[Melkus]

@Calcifer That's how it's supposed to work, yes. But the limiting factor for this is the settlement limit, and you will start to bump up against that if you're ahead of the curve.

I think what happens is that people optimize their starting game, choosing strong combos, mementos etc. and then the optimal route becomes to upgrade everything into cities (in Antiquity at least, you may regret it later) - but at this point you have left the competition in the dust anyway. It's a "win harder in Antiquity" strategy. In a tight game (yes, better AI may be needed), you won't have the spare money to do that.

At least that's how the balance should be, but I don't think it's that far off.

 

[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.

Okay, I've played this game up to the first 20 turns of Exploration Age.

One weakness of choosing Carthage is not being able to convert any cities in Antiquity, so all I could do was buy Punic Quarters in coastal settlements, which meant the first few specialists outside the capital would likely go to them. In exchange, I was able to plop down settlements rapidly uncontested, up to 9 of them without going over the settlement cap. And I pretty much maxed out the amount of gold that I could carry into Exploration Age.

I interpreted this strategy as one that calls for the placing of specialists as soon as possible in Exploration. So apart from the old and new capitals, I left all other settlements as towns so they could grow as quickly as possible until the next growth event. Then I converted the settlements one by one as they hit their growth event and assigned the new population as a specialist. This is more expensive than converting all of them into cities before selecting legacies on turn 1, but I was making so much gold per turn, I could easily afford the extra cost.

I didn't stick to a 7-pop rule or anything for specialising towns in Antiquity, letting most grow past by a few to grab resources or important tiles.

So what's the verdict?

On turn 16 of Exploration, just before the first Observatory came online, I had converted 4 cities besides my new capital and ancient capital. I'd placed 1-2 specialists in them (only 1 city got 2 specialists).

On turn 1, after spending all attribute points, I was getting 57 science and 67 culture per turn. On turn 16, I was getting 79 science and 100 culture per turn. Punic Quarters also give food and production per specialist, but I didn't keep track of those yields.

I think it's a pretty good result this early.

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.

Yeah, well, I didn't manage to unlock Abbasids with the map I had. Unlocking Majapahit was easier.

 

[aelf]

Each specialist added to the Punic Docks seems to give +2 science, +2 culture, +2 food and +1 food production.

So a total of 6 added within the first 15 turns probably means +12 science, +12 culture, +12 food and +6 production? Not sure if that's an accurate total.