There are also plenty of examples where tooltips show two buildings AND walls on a tile. This is a question that was settled months ago.
Walls
- Thread starter Vitruvian Guar
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JNR13
Prince
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Walls snaking around is weird, but it's a symptom of a larger phenomenon: cities themselves snaking through the landscape. Was even worse in Humankind where you build a lot more districts. I'm not a fan of every 4X becoming an Ecumenopolis simulator where cities lose all structure of core and periphery and compactness and distances within a city no longer matter.
Without making any fundamental changes and sticking to the topic of walls, I think adjacencies and production cost could be used to soft-guide wall construction into being more compact. For example, the cost of walling a tile could be based on how many more wall edges you end up with. If you snake around, it gets expensive but if you fill-in some gaps, that will be rather cheap. Further, increase the cost with each ring. I'd also like to see stuff such as Barracks get adjacencies from walled districts instead of resources. this would also naturally lend itself to a more concentric wall layout.
Without making any fundamental changes and sticking to the topic of walls, I think adjacencies and production cost could be used to soft-guide wall construction into being more compact. For example, the cost of walling a tile could be based on how many more wall edges you end up with. If you snake around, it gets expensive but if you fill-in some gaps, that will be rather cheap. Further, increase the cost with each ring. I'd also like to see stuff such as Barracks get adjacencies from walled districts instead of resources. this would also naturally lend itself to a more concentric wall layout.
Lonecat Nekophrodite
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it doesn't yes. but city defense evolutions went this way in Modern Age. (18th Century onwards). Walls become less and less important, fortifications became evenmore gunny (I think Prussia invented 'Ring of Forts' systems as settlement defense systems, as they used ones in the mid 18th Century). London defense systems shifted away from fully enclosed city walls towards rings of detached forts. AFAIK at some point in London History, I THINK in 18th Century, London demolished its city walls to accomodate city expansions brought about by Industrial Revolution of the late Century. And even in North America, Settlements founded before 1800s were built with palisade walls with blockhouses and gun towers built, and maybe diamond bastions (if applicable). (Examples were Plymouth. MA, and Jamestown, VA). Anything built after. or by 18th Century itself however were less walled. Plans of Washington District of Columbia didn't even have walls from the beginning! the only defenses were coastal fortress systems and no land defense batteries, which exactly a temporary solutions built during the American Civil War and abandoned quickly after.
This is due to the increases in firepower due to increased numbers of cannons, and later, the inventions of rifled artillery of all kinds.
How post-Vauban city defense BEFORE WW1 should be represented in game actually? networks of casemates and blockhouses or what?
or an add on to an existing walls built from beforetimes?
ALSO i'm not really sure if Yorktown VA was built with walls enclosed. yet the fights for Yorktown in the War of American Indepndence became a siege. I've never been there before but I might guess the settlement is walled and had gun bastions.
EDIT: Age III building lists. there's Defensive Fortifications in the list (and this is Tier 2 now, equivalent to 'Modern Era' in Civ6. which back in previous game, steel gives free fortifications to every city with no graphical representations at all.
Seriously. is this what 'Defensive Fortifications' looks like? look at a quarter with simple logwood walls, abatises, and gabion tower surrounding it but this could also be a simple Field Fortifications built by foot soldiers. it doesnt' look neat nor permanent to me at all.
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Lazy sweeper
Mooooo Cra Chirp Fssss Miaouw is a game of words
Less micro, if AI can build walls, so in theory also Human cities could develop walls and generally autogrow autonomally, without player intervention.
An option to set building orders set to auto, maybe an auto that would exclude building wonders, and an auto that would exclude builing units, could do.
On another thread set cities to auto build instead only units or wonders or just grow borders, would dramatically decrease micromanagement.
Lazy sweeper
Mooooo Cra Chirp Fssss Miaouw is a game of words
Ara, HK, I played both, the amount of city management is so massive, that you lose focus completely on the units...
I really hope there is an Automatic option for choose not to have to enter into city management ever, if not for change the automatism focus,
for to build a new army, or wonder. I really hope this is addressed before launch otherwise it already seems to me overwhelmingly daunting
and unnecessary.
Just remember district placement and Iron... or the planning in advance and then you would like to change configuration because there is no
mor avail. land for a workshop... this was never a problem before civ 6... possibly a city automatism could take care of these things for us...
It would solve massive headeaches afterwards.
I really hope there is an Automatic option for choose not to have to enter into city management ever, if not for change the automatism focus,
for to build a new army, or wonder. I really hope this is addressed before launch otherwise it already seems to me overwhelmingly daunting
and unnecessary.
Just remember district placement and Iron... or the planning in advance and then you would like to change configuration because there is no
mor avail. land for a workshop... this was never a problem before civ 6... possibly a city automatism could take care of these things for us...
It would solve massive headeaches afterwards.
Lonecat Nekophrodite
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This is one of examples of a settlement built with stonewalls defense in North America. Yorktown
McSpank01
Prince
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I want to bump up this thread about Walls so that I can complain.. about walls.
Maybe something has changed, but I've noticed that the AI builds walls a lot earlier now, and builds a lot of them. That has really highlighted to me how annoying they are as well as just pure ugly.
Every time I see a city with walls, I groan. I know what taking it is just pure grind. It really makes the game so much slower. From moving your siege equipment tediously across the map, to inching through a city just to finally take it. Everything about it is yawn inducing.
And yes, it makes cities look grim and busy and ruins the aesthetic.
I wish they would get rid of them, place them on just your palace tile, but allow you upgrade them.
I genuinely believe this is one of the bigger issues in the game for me right now.
Maybe something has changed, but I've noticed that the AI builds walls a lot earlier now, and builds a lot of them. That has really highlighted to me how annoying they are as well as just pure ugly.
Every time I see a city with walls, I groan. I know what taking it is just pure grind. It really makes the game so much slower. From moving your siege equipment tediously across the map, to inching through a city just to finally take it. Everything about it is yawn inducing.
And yes, it makes cities look grim and busy and ruins the aesthetic.
I wish they would get rid of them, place them on just your palace tile, but allow you upgrade them.
I genuinely believe this is one of the bigger issues in the game for me right now.
queenpea
Emperor
I have spent too much time trying to locate the last walled tile that is preventing me from taking a city. I agree that the process is tiresome. Maybe change it so that if you capture 3/4 of a city's "walled" districts, you claim the city?
If you play on PC, there's a couple of mods that will highlight all of the fortified districts, i'm not sure if it also highlights Wonders that count as a fortification, but it may do.
MutilationWave
IDDQD
On the flip side, does anyone really bother building them in your own settlements? I'll put one in city centers because it feels right but that's not a priority at all.
Boris Gudenuf
Deity
Wally comments . . .
In many languages, the words for 'wall' and 'city' are related, because a city without a wall was simply unthinkable. Furthermore, stone city walls complete with towers and forts defending the city gates appear very, very early - before the nominal Start of Game in 4000 BCE, in fact.
And although Civ largely equates City Walls with Stone construction, in fact city walls and fortifications were built with whatever materials and technology were available: stone, rammed earth, earth and timber cribwork, stone-faced earthworks, and the American Old West vertical timber palisades, for which examples have been found in Europe and China dating back over 5000 years.
All of which indicates that the graphic element of City Walls could have a lot more variety than the game has ever allowed.
As to building them, I would just point out that in fact many older cities had 'layers' of city walls: the earliest city center might have a wall around it, then as the city grew new walls were built around the perimeter and the old walls torn down or became part of inner city buildings or part of a central Fortress. Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber in Germany shows this specifically, where many of the most iconic views of the medieval town show city gates that are now in the middle of the city and are part of existing buildings because the city outgrew them long ago.
And the defining elements of the 'Vauban' gunpowder-artillery-resistant fortifications were the huge amount of space they took up compared to earlier Walls, and their expense. While many cities in northern France and the 'cockpit of Europe' in Belgium and the Netherlands were so fortified, very few cities elsewhere were because it was so expensive - and it is no accident that 'modern' international banking became a thing about the same time as the new fortifications, because kings and city governments usually had to borrow heavily to afford them! And compared to the earlier single curtain wall with a moat the new fortifications had extensive extending ravelins, bastions, ramparts, scarps, counter-scarps, wet and dry moats, and cleared fields of fire so that the defensive structures stretched up to half a kilometer deep. If any wall in the game should take up Building Slots, these would be the ones.
So, on the one hand, we could justify building walls by hex-side, which would allow precise placement of the minimum amount of expensive wall to protect the innards of the city, but would also massively enlarge the dreaded Micromanagement unless one was allowed to place multiple 'sides' at once and, perhaps, allot a percentage of your Gold and/or Production per turn to their construction. - With the option to throw 'emergency' funds at them to rush a wall when an enemy army approaches, something that happened all too frequently all the way back to classical Greece.
And, as @JNR13 remarked, adjacencies and continuance factors could be used to make contiguous walls cheaper and keep a wally maze from proliferating, and as others have remarked, a separate Fort would be appropriate. That could, in fact, be related to Castles or Fortified Manor Houses that controlled the countryside as well as isolated Star Forts that provided distant protection to the approaches to a city and fortifications controlling strategic points like mountain passes, harbor mouths, river crossings, etc.
In many languages, the words for 'wall' and 'city' are related, because a city without a wall was simply unthinkable. Furthermore, stone city walls complete with towers and forts defending the city gates appear very, very early - before the nominal Start of Game in 4000 BCE, in fact.
And although Civ largely equates City Walls with Stone construction, in fact city walls and fortifications were built with whatever materials and technology were available: stone, rammed earth, earth and timber cribwork, stone-faced earthworks, and the American Old West vertical timber palisades, for which examples have been found in Europe and China dating back over 5000 years.
All of which indicates that the graphic element of City Walls could have a lot more variety than the game has ever allowed.
As to building them, I would just point out that in fact many older cities had 'layers' of city walls: the earliest city center might have a wall around it, then as the city grew new walls were built around the perimeter and the old walls torn down or became part of inner city buildings or part of a central Fortress. Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber in Germany shows this specifically, where many of the most iconic views of the medieval town show city gates that are now in the middle of the city and are part of existing buildings because the city outgrew them long ago.
And the defining elements of the 'Vauban' gunpowder-artillery-resistant fortifications were the huge amount of space they took up compared to earlier Walls, and their expense. While many cities in northern France and the 'cockpit of Europe' in Belgium and the Netherlands were so fortified, very few cities elsewhere were because it was so expensive - and it is no accident that 'modern' international banking became a thing about the same time as the new fortifications, because kings and city governments usually had to borrow heavily to afford them! And compared to the earlier single curtain wall with a moat the new fortifications had extensive extending ravelins, bastions, ramparts, scarps, counter-scarps, wet and dry moats, and cleared fields of fire so that the defensive structures stretched up to half a kilometer deep. If any wall in the game should take up Building Slots, these would be the ones.
So, on the one hand, we could justify building walls by hex-side, which would allow precise placement of the minimum amount of expensive wall to protect the innards of the city, but would also massively enlarge the dreaded Micromanagement unless one was allowed to place multiple 'sides' at once and, perhaps, allot a percentage of your Gold and/or Production per turn to their construction. - With the option to throw 'emergency' funds at them to rush a wall when an enemy army approaches, something that happened all too frequently all the way back to classical Greece.
And, as @JNR13 remarked, adjacencies and continuance factors could be used to make contiguous walls cheaper and keep a wally maze from proliferating, and as others have remarked, a separate Fort would be appropriate. That could, in fact, be related to Castles or Fortified Manor Houses that controlled the countryside as well as isolated Star Forts that provided distant protection to the approaches to a city and fortifications controlling strategic points like mountain passes, harbor mouths, river crossings, etc.
If you choose a Military Unit, Fortified Districts of any Settlement you are at war with should be highlighted,
The mods i'm using add it as a lens which is perfect for me as i don't want the extra clutter when i'm not at war.
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I try to have at least 3 districts with walls in cities, especially those near my borders and add more as needed, usually in a triangle shape rather than a straight line, i find it works well as my ranged units can cencentrate their firepower.
(that’s why it would only be settlements you are at war with)
ehecatzin
Emperor
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One of the nice things about playing Han and Ming is you can get the feeling of outer and inner walls. and while I don't want that for all civs we could use a bit more nuance. I think what we are missing are actual Fort buildings/districts, maybe it could provide strenght to adjacent walls or bring back ranged city attacks, era wise it could go Forts-Castles-Bastions
As for the look of walls... I just want 2 things: wonders inside city walls and maybe make them a tad smaller on Exploration? they turn into Attack on Titan sized walls, It's a bit much.
**tho talking about huge wall...now that we have the Great wall as an improvement for both Han and Ming, maybe they could bring back that "create a great wall" around a city for say, the Theodosian walls?
As for the look of walls... I just want 2 things: wonders inside city walls and maybe make them a tad smaller on Exploration? they turn into Attack on Titan sized walls, It's a bit much.
**tho talking about huge wall...now that we have the Great wall as an improvement for both Han and Ming, maybe they could bring back that "create a great wall" around a city for say, the Theodosian walls?
Having some “outer” unconnected defenses (ie forts) that don’t need to be attacked to take the city but give extra strength to units in them could be good. (and they could be on Rural tiles as well)
Boris Gudenuf
Deity
The specific 'ring forts' unconnected to the city walls but providing 'distant' defenses to the city are a modern invention, an outgrowth of the Vauban-type fortifications when artillery started having long enough range to hit the city from beyond the walls no matter how much ground the defensive structures covered. The separate forts served to keep enemy guns at a safe distance, in theory.
On the other hand, separate fortifications within or entirely separate from any city are much earlier.
Jericho had a separate interior defensive tower - a keep or bastion-type defense within its walls - as far back as 6500 BCE, so such 'last ditch' defenses within the city are just about as old as cities themselves.
Castles, fortified residences, separate hill forts date back to at least classical (Iron Age) times in Greece, Persia, the Middle East, Celtic Europe and other areas.
Which simply means that we could/should have such defensive structures in Antiquity Age, and then be able to 'upgrade' them to the classic Medieval Castles in Exploration and the 'early modern' Ring Forts in Modern Age. - And if you want to string together a bunch of such forts into a Maginot or Stalin LIne of fortifications, feel free - but done right, the building and maintaining of such a construction should make it very hard to build much of an army of Units at the same time!
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