What is going to be the breaking point of turning a town into a city ?

[tedhebert]

I don’t feel we’ve talked about this enough… if we have sorry for the unneeded thread

Seems to me that choosing to turn a town into a city will be a MAJOR decision, but I don’t feel
we know a lot about what the incentives for one or the other will exactly be.

Is it going to be population ? need for production queue ? some kind of legacy path goal ?

Your thoughts please, civfans

 

[Siptah]

Need for science and culture might be the first reasons to do it, but then you might want a lot of towns to feed your cities. So far, I have no clue without playing it myself

 

[Krikkit1]

The big advantages of city v town is in production, science and culture

Towns change all their production into gold. and that gold Can be used to buy certain things in towns But
Production->Gold->X is definitely less effective than Production->X
While the gold itself will be needed for some things, (unit, building maintenance), you can probably focus on that

Science and Culture are coming a lot from buildings or specialists. (both easiest to get in a City, specialists might be impossible for towns, like culture buildings are)

Towns seem to be good for grabbing resources and food and territory for your empire, but turning that into Units/Wonders/Techs/Civics/Influence that actually wins you the game seems to be the goal of cities.

 

[pokiehl]

Great question…

One thing, I don’t know how I feel about towns literally halting population growth once specialized.

That seems like a big penalty, and makes it seem like having perma-towns will be a big disadvantage.

Maybe I’m overreacting and it’s in fact an interesting decision to make. Curious to know others’ thoughts here.

 

[Krikkit1]

Great question…

One thing, I don’t know how I feel about towns literally halting population growth once specialized.

That seems like a big penalty, and makes it seem like having perma-towns will be a big disadvantage.

Maybe I’m overreacting and it’s in fact an interesting decision to make. Curious to know others’ thoughts here.

You can keep them on "Growth" specialization if you want as far as I can tell and then specialize them later.

 

[pokiehl]

You can keep them on "Growth" specialization if you want as far as I can tell and then specialize them later.

Right, but then they’re not doing anything except growing in population. Seems like a bad choice to stick with.

 

[TheSpaceCowboy]

I don’t think towns should count towards the City Cap

 

[Krikkit1]

Right, but then they’re not doing anything except growing in population. Seems like a bad choice to stick with.

I think they do still send food to your cities and produce gold... its just they lack the bonuses from when they specialize (and they have the bonus to growth)

 

[stealth_nsk]

As I understand, the mechanics is this:

1. Towns effectively produce double food - for each piece they have for themselves, they send one food to cities.
2. Cities are much better at building things, including Wonders

So, I expect some town to city ratio as a guide for the game. The bigger you want your city to be, more towns per city you need. And the rest should go from it.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I don’t think towns should count towards the City Cap

Towns are more effective in making food and gold, they are not "weaker cities". They sure should count towards settlement cap, otherwise the whole tall/wide system blows itself.

In the current system you need to decide, how many cities you need within the cap. If towns are not part of the cap, you'd just spam them.

 

[chaosprophet]

It is hard to have an idea when it would be good to do so, or the preferred ratio without actually playing the game. And many things may effect, like the current civ bonuses and previous civs legacy bonuses may result in a case where having more cities or towns would be better.

Also interesting to imagine what they mentioned, a humongous city where all the 36 hexes are all wonders or urban tiles, needing some towns to give food as it would barely produce any themselves.

Right, but then they’re not doing anything except growing in population. Seems like a bad choice to stick with.

I guess the text there is so far confusing: "Growing Town (default): Increases Town's Growth by 50%. (Towns without a Growing Town focus send all their Food to connected cities)"

The part in parenthesis give the impression that they specialized towns don't grow at all as they give all their food to the cities. But then it wouldn't make sense for Growing Town be "Increases Town's Growth by 50%" if there is no growth when not a growing town. So it may be the case that it probably still growth somehow even when specialized...

Considering all other focus/specialization means "they send all their Food to connected cities" than it seems like their main reason of existing / staying as towns is to provide food, with the specializations just being a way to also give it an extra bonus besides on where it is, like a border tall for defense.

But yeah, the town/city balance is really hard to predict and I can imagine myself playing the game many times before really get a good handle on it. Hopefully a future Dev Diary goes on it to gives us a better idea.

 

[rocksinmypath]

I believe towns don't have access to many buildings that cities do. I'm guessing these buildings are generally more powerful than what towns can build, or maybe they're not when a settlement is small but grow more powerful as the settlement grows. Buildings that either provide or receive adjacencies from other buildings would fall under that category. You'll have to weigh the benefits these buildings provide against the benefits of supporting another city. I'm guessing a lot of that will come down to how powerful specialists can be. Plus, there's the gold cost of converting a town into a city, which decreases as population increases, and that should make the conversion easier.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I believe towns don't have access to many buildings that cities do. I'm guessing these buildings are generally more powerful than what towns can build, or maybe they're not when a settlement is small but grow more powerful as the settlement grows. Buildings that either provide or receive adjacencies from other buildings would fall under that category. You'll have to weigh the benefits these buildings provide against the benefits of supporting another city. I'm guessing a lot of that will come down to how powerful specialists can be. Plus, there's the gold cost of converting a town into a city, which decreases as population increases, and that should make the conversion easier.

Throw Civ-specific bonuses into the mix and you have the potential for some nuanced and interesting choices. I'm hoping it doesn't devolve into a simple meta like "go pop 7 -> mining towns for the win", because on the surface this looks to be one of the better innovations in Civ 7.

 

[tedhebert]

we also don’t know how the relation town->city is established….is it regional/geographic ? will we be able to control by ourselves which towns support which cities ? Will there be an attrition by distance to this choice ?

with this and the town specialization, this town thing promises to be something crucial to the game and the development of your civ

 

[rocksinmypath]

By the way, one of the very interesting implications of the city/town dichotomy could be how the production/gold exchange rate will fluctuate throughout the game. In Civ 6, civilian units, especially builders, helped establish the rate to be around 2.5-3g to 1p (assuming you're able to reliably enter Monumentality golden ages). I believe this rate doesn't actually fluctuate much throughout a game (or at least not until late game where nothing really matters any more) in Civ 6, at least compared to food, which fluctuates severely due to housing penalties and how population growth affects a city's ability to build districts, etc. On the contrary, in Civ 7, there is potential for the production/gold rate to fluctuate greatly, and as a result, players who are great at adjusting to the dynamic rate. Purchasing buildings in towns and converting them to cities will probably be two of the most important things you can do exclusively with gold. As you run out of buildings worthwhile to purchase in your towns, gold will become drastically less useful to the point where, the potentially steep gold price of promoting a town won't seem like a big deal.

Edit: Emoji

 

[tedhebert]

By the way, one of the very interesting implications of the city/town dichotomy could be how the production/gold exchange rate will fluctuate throughout the game. In Civ 6, civilian units, especially builders, helped establish the rate to be around 2.5-3g to 1p (assuming you're able to reliably enter Monumentality golden ages). I believe this rate doesn't actually fluctuate much throughout a game (or at least not until late game where nothing really matters any more) in Civ 6, at least compared to food, which fluctuates severely due to housing penalties and how population growth affects a city's ability to build districts, etc. On the contrary, in Civ 7, there is potential for the production/gold rate to fluctuate greatly, and as a result, players who are great at adjusting to the dynamic rate. Purchasing buildings in towns and converting them to cities will probably be two of the most important things you can do exclusively with gold. As you run out of buildings worthwhile to purchase in your towns, gold will become drastically less useful to the point where, the potentially steep gold price of promoting a town won't seem like a big deal.

Edit: Emoji

yes but… you’ll still lose the food supply to the town it was connected with… so before making that decision, you’ll have to make sure you’re not crippling another town

 

[chaosprophet]

Throw Civ-specific bonuses into the mix and you have the potential for some nuanced and interesting choices. I'm hoping it doesn't devolve into a simple meta like "go pop 7 -> mining towns for the win", because on the surface this looks to be one of the better innovations in Civ 7.

Mining towns sounds so far to be one of the weakest because production in towns is converted in gold.

 

[greenOak]

I don't know why you'd ever want a mining town. Towns look like they'll be very inefficient at generating production. If any meta was to develop I'd imagine it would be spamming farming towns.

I'm not sure you'd even want to specialize towns and instead keep them as growth towns (so long as they still send food to your cities). I could easily see the yields you gain from growing faster quickly outscaling the immediate bonuses from other specializations.

 

[Ornen]

would have loved to see more detail on this kind of decision in yesterday's stream

 

[Acepox]

I don’t think towns should count towards the City Cap

I agree 100% and this is my main point of contention also.

For gameplay reasons, there should be a clear distinction between towns and cities. The current set-up doesn't seem to draw such a line.