Urban Sprawl in Civ 5?

[Veristek]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if there's any way to make the cities bigger sprawl-wise? For example, I want a size 30 city to have its buildings sprawl over the first ring of hexes and start to spill over into the 2nd ring, and a size 50 city would fill the 1st and 2nd rings of hexes entirely.

This is a general idea of what I want my cities to be like above size 30...

Basically, double the current biggest urban sprawl in Civ 5, and make it 2 rings big instead of just one. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

 

[snipperrabbit!!]

Do you realize that this is only about 10 km² while a civ 5 tile is 10,000 to 100,000 km² !

 

[Veristek]

Do you realize that this is only about 10 km² while a civ 5 tile is 10,000 to 100,000 km² !

I thought it was 10,000 km. I covered a whole sizable continent in my latest game with borders and it was about 7 - 8 million km. Thats roughly 80 tiles if 100,000 km, If its 10,000 then thats 800 tiles which is much more in-line with how many hexes a big contient would have.

Although it is kind of weird seeing size 20 cities have the same sprawl as a size 40+ one. In Civ 3, there was a graphics mod that made for some nice urban sprawl and "extension" of the city proper. It used a graphic of different bunches of skyscrapers in place of different railroad tile configurations. I think it was Snoopy who made that mod.

Then in Civ 4, the cities had nice sprawl, it didn't max out until size 35+ I believe. And we had these dome improvements in the Next War mod which made the cities look even bigger.

Now with Civ 5, I feel the urban sprawl is kind of lacking, or is under-represented. As I've noticed most sprawls cap out when the city hits size 20, and its easily possible to have cities size 40+ with 3 ring hex cities + maritime city states. Consider that size 1 is generally considered to be 10,000 people in all Civ games, and size 20 is roughly 2 million people, size 30 = 5 million, and size 40 = 10 million (slight difference between Civ 1 - 3 and Civ 4 on this). So a size 40 city would have roughly 5 times the sprawl as a size 20 city.

That's the very reason why I feel the city sprawl is a little off in Civ 5. A size 20 city looks the exact same as a size 40 or even size 60 or 100 city (even if 60+ sizes were possible). So is there any way to expand the sprawl or at the very least make the cities appear more dense and look bigger at size 40 than at size 20?

 

[SamBC]

This is probably something that's too engine-deep to change without the DLL, and might not even be possible then, depending on their architecture. There are three graphics for each style/era, AFAICT, for each of small, medium and large sizes. It might be possible to add more sizes, with the DLL, and more graphics for them, but it doesn't look like the highly dynamic graphics of CivIV for cities is going to be possible without deep DLL work, if then. You will notice that wonders and other building graphics all appear outside the city, for example, unlike in CivIV.