Why are Trade route limits in VI ok but not Settlement limits in VII?

[Brutus2]

So why does a soft limit on Settlements feel worse than a hard limit on Trade routes?

I'm curious, how much have you played games going above the settlement limit? Because it really is a very soft cap. You can go well above the limit and be just fine. It does slow things down a bit which is the purpose of having it, so going over is not ideal but it's also not that big a deal if you do.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

You can go well above the limit and be just fine.

During the Age yes, what you say is true. But if you get hit with the happiness crisis, you will hurt a lot, probably lose 2-3 settlements.

 

[rocksinmypath]

I prefer the settlement limit mechanism to Civ 6’s amenities. The two are similar, but the latter is opaque and overly complicated in my opinion. There are all these different luxury resources in the game, and (without mods) you’re supposed to keep track of which ones you have and which ones you need to buy from other players. If you really cared about optimization, you would buy or improve luxuries after checking whether you need more, which means you would need to cycle through all your cities and check each one’s satisfaction status. In retrospect, it seems insane to me that the game expects the player to do this to play well.

I suspect complaints about the settlement limit partly stem from the fact that it makes the penalty of over-settlement more obvious. Returning players who didn’t pay attention to amenities, often inadvertently letting their cities suffer 10-20% penalty across all yields, are now upset as the game makes it really difficult for them to ignore this fact. The penalties aren’t greater than they used to be, at least not significantly under normal circumstances. For each excess settlement, you lose 5 happiness in each settlement, which amounts to a maximum of 10% all-yields penalty. In 6, dropping one level of satisfaction leads to a ~10% all-yields penalty (except food, which is 15%, when displeased). In addition to that, in 6, low amenities can cause your cities to rebel, which is something that doesn’t happen in 7 outside of crises.

Having said that, I don’t want to dismiss this concern as a skill issue nor am I suggesting that anyone who raises this concern should learn to play the game better. One similar complaint I’ve heard is that the term “settlement limit” is just sort of… naked? There’s no apparent attempt at dressing up the mechanism as something other than a balance maker. It’s as if they renamed the food yield to “population increment”. I know playing this game is about making one number go up by making another one go up, but the game should try to mask that as best as it can. In fact, I’m sure Sid Meier has talked about this very idea when he talked about how games are essentially gentlemen’s agreements, in which the game proposes a set of imaginary rules that only make sense if the player agrees to suspend their disbelief. In a way, Civ 7 isn’t holding up its end of the deal.

 

[Canadian Bluebeer]

At least in 7 it kinda makes sense, and you can see where you can send trade routes.
In 6 "you can make another trade route". That's it. No mention of from where.
(and don't get me started on trying to sort the routes by name. It's not that sorting
a list alphabetically is hard to do. 1st year compsci. jeebus!)

 

[Brutus2]

During the Age yes, what you say is true. But if you get hit with the happiness crisis, you will hurt a lot, probably lose 2-3 settlements.

Yeah, maybe. I mean it is supposed to be a crisis. I feel like if that didn't happen people would complain that the crisis was meaningless. Having said that, you can re-shuffle resources, quick buy happiness buildings, slot different polices, etc.. There are plenty of ways to manage the crisis without loosing cities.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Having said that, you can re-shuffle resources, quick buy happiness buildings, slot different polices, etc.. There are plenty of ways to manage the crisis without loosing cities.

Not always. In one of my games, even with happiness buildings, slotted resources and policies, I still lost 2 settlements. And yeah, I get that it is supposed to be a crisis. But my point is that if you stay under the settlement cap, you can get through the crisis more easily without losing any settlement. So it is a trade-off.

 

[UWHabs]

Not always. In one of my games, even with happiness buildings, slotted resources and policies, I still lost 2 settlements. And yeah, I get that it is supposed to be a crisis. But my point is that if you stay under the settlement cap, you can get through the crisis more easily without losing any settlement. So it is a trade-off.

Yeah, it's a hard balance. On the one hand, if it was easy to manage, then is it really a crisis? But on the flipside, if you're over the limit and there's not really anything you can do to control it, it feels like you're kind of out of agency.

Maybe they need to figure out some ways to like aggressively give you options. Like, give me the warning, give me the 5 or 10 turn countdown, but before flipping the city to my neighbour civ, let me like abandon all my policy cards for 5 turns, or throw my capital into anarchy for 10 turns, or something to prevent the flipping. Although I guess depending on where you are when it hits, even that might turn the crisis into a nothingburger. Like my last game where I lost 2 settlements on the last turn of the age to flipping.

 

[WillK96]

I will also add that it seems like the crisis targets the human player. Whenever I'm over the settlement limit I get hit with the happiness crisis. Every time without fail. If I'm under the limit or have a weak military, its the Barbarians crisis. So that make the settlement limit a ~harder~ cap than just the general run of play modifiers would lead the player to believe.

 

[UWHabs]

I will also add that it seems like the crisis targets the human player. Whenever I'm over the settlement limit I get hit with the happiness crisis. Every time without fail. If I'm under the limit or have a weak military, its the Barbarians crisis. So that make the settlement limit a ~harder~ cap than just the general run of play modifiers would lead the player to believe.

I think that might just be confirmation bias. I've had games with a strong military and still get the barbarian crisis. But obviously it might be something like there being a 50% chance of getting the one that might hurt you most, and like a 50% chance it's random, so it might seem like it targets you more than expected.

 

[WillK96]

I think that might just be confirmation bias. I've had games with a strong military and still get the barbarian crisis. But obviously it might be something like there being a 50% chance of getting the one that might hurt you most, and like a 50% chance it's random, so it might seem like it targets you more than expected.

I've also had games where I've had a strong military but was given the barbs crisis. But I have not had a game where I was significantly over the settlement limit (to where the happiness crisis would be a real threat) and not gotten the happiness crisis.