What would Civ VI be like if cities were spaced further apart?

[Trigan Emperor]

Regarding the lack of space to fit a city between city-states, there's some code that might be able to affect this.

        <Replace Name="START_DISTANCE_MAJOR_CIVILIZATION" Value="12" />
      
      
        <Replace Name="START_DISTANCE_MINOR_CIVILIZATION_START" Value="7" />
      
        <Replace Name="START_DISTANCE_MINOR_MAJOR_CIVILIZATION" Value="6" />
      
      
        <Replace Name="START_DISTANCE_RANGE_MAJOR" Value="2" />
      
        <Replace Name="START_DISTANCE_RANGE_MINOR" Value="3" />

I'm not sure what they all do, but I have a hunch that START_DISTANCE_MINOR_CIVILIZATION_START might be the minimum distance city-states can be from each other. Note that on vanilla city distance settings, 7 would be the exact distance needed to be able to fit a city between two city-states. So if this value was increased by 2, that would hopefully mean there'd always be space to fit a city in between, if using city distance settings increased by one.

 

[lotrmith]

It's not my capital.

It's an example of something developing naturally from the game's programming, such as Civ/city-state starting placement and AI city-settling behaviour.

Okay? What's the issue? Not every tile in the world is going to be workable and that makes sense from a greater 'civilization' perspective. Some may never become territory of a great civilization, others may fall within the territory of one but be so remote they provide little in the way of value to their owner (excepting the fact you can still improve them to gain strategic or luxury resources as well as housing and amenities, harvest them for food/production/gold, or tourism, or adjacency for tiles inside your workable radius).

 

[Trigan Emperor]

Here's a map of the world in 1941 in the Autoplay game.

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One can see Japan, in white, had a gap in its empire - it also had the city north of its northern city - because of two city-states. If the minimum distance between city-states had been one higher, then a city could have been built.

Here are some screenshots of the world.

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Different Civs seem quite varied in their approach to building in their empire and use of farms. There's quite a lot of undeveloped land, but then that's probably to be expected, as it would probably need high city populations to use all the tiles.