Why can't I choose which tile my city will expand to next?

[Lukey_Jangs]

I understand that each city has a "governor", but honestly he/she often chooses a different tile to expand to than I would have liked.

I can control literally every other aspect of the game except where my cities will expand to next (unless I buy a tile)

Does anyone know the reasoning for having a governor in each city?

 

[Lukey_Jangs]

Additionally, the governors in this game seem to be much more indecisive about which tile they are going to expand to. I'll open up my city view it'll tell me where they're going to expand, so I plan accordingly, but then when I open up the city view a few turns later they have chosen a different tile. It's frustrating

 

[darkace77450]

Why would you want to? Are you not satisfied when your city borders expand into a useless mountain or empty desert tile instead of a luxury or bonus resource?

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

In V they would show you several tiles and all you knew is that one of them would be where you expanded next. At least this time there's no confusion.

 

[Lukey_Jangs]

Why would you want to? Are you not satisfied when your city borders expand into a useless mountain or empty desert tile instead of a luxury or bonus resource?

I'll give you an example

In my current game I open the city view and it says they're going to expand to a jungle tile with 2 woods next to it. I don't have a holy site yet so I decided to build something in my city that will take exactly as much time to build as my city will take to expand. However, about halfway through building whatever I was building in my city I open the city view again, just to check and make sure that my building and expansion are still in line to finish at the same time, and now the governor has decided to expand to a desert tile with no surrounding woods, so I have to buy the jungle tile that they had originally said they were going to expand to.

I'm not always satisfied with my governor's choices, and as I said earlier, why is it that I can control literally every aspect of the game except that?

 

[Lukey_Jangs]

In V they would show you several tiles and all you knew is that one of them would be where you expanded next. At least this time there's no confusion.

I don't recall that. I only remember them showing one tile. Do you have a screenshot that you could share to perhaps refresh my memory?

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I don't recall that. I only remember them showing one tile. Do you have a screenshot that you could share to perhaps refresh my memory?

The ones in Magenta are the tiles that the governor might pick.

I think the randomness of it exists to force you to spend gold if you are in a hurry.

 

[Lukey_Jangs]

The ones in Magenta are the tiles that the governor might pick.

I think the randomness of it exists to force you to spend gold if you are in a hurry.

I thought it only looked like that when you were choosing to purchase a tile, and when you just opened up the city view there was only one purple highlighted tile. Perhaps I'm misremembering though

 

[Yzman]

Yeah I understand the reason for it to be not something you can choose, but I do wish that it prioritized tiles. I believe it did that in the old game. There is far too many times when I could be expanding to a resource and it is taking a useless tile.

I mean, not letting me choose is fine, but don't slap me in the face and have him literally choose a tile I would NEVER pick.

 

[kaspergm]

This is yet another aspect where the developers didn't learn from their mistakes in Civ5. Not the most important one, but still a good example. On of my favorite small mods in Civ5 was whowards border expansion mod, which would let you pick the tile when border was ready to expand. The cost of the tile would be its normal cost minus the cost of the cheapest tile - so you could still pick the default tile at 0 gold, or you could buy a higher priority tile and the surplus cost.

 

[Art Morte]

Up to two tiles from the city center the expansion works fine, imo, but when there's a resource three tiles away I do wish the city got there faster, chose the resource tile three tiles away rather than empty tiles two tiles away.

However, if we had complete freedom to choose the expansion tiles, it could be abused. Say you want to block a 7-tile stretch of land with your borders, you could just found a city in the middle and then use the first four tile expansions to go two tiles to the left and two tiles to the right. That would be a pretty unnatural shape for city's borders.

 

[Gorbles]

This is yet another aspect where the developers didn't learn from their mistakes in Civ5. Not the most important one, but still a good example. On of my favorite small mods in Civ5 was whowards border expansion mod, which would let you pick the tile when border was ready to expand. The cost of the tile would be its normal cost minus the cost of the cheapest tile - so you could still pick the default tile at 0 gold, or you could buy a higher priority tile and the surplus cost.

So, what you're saying is you like less risk, and more reward, in your games?

The risk to auto-managing your Cities is that sometimes the AI will make sub-optimal choices that you yourself would not make. This is a necessary risk, in my opinion, because otherwise there is no downside to making the strategic choice to allow your Cities to govern themselves.

It's like setting a Military focus in SMAC and complaining when your Governer nerve-staples all your Drones. Goes with the territory.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I understand that each city has a "governor", but honestly he/she often chooses a different tile to expand to than I would have liked.

I can control literally every other aspect of the game except where my cities will expand to next (unless I buy a tile)

Does anyone know the reasoning for having a governor in each city?

You can choose. You said so yourself. You can buy tiles. Is the issue is that you don't have enough gold? (Well, I guess we can never have enough gold, or we could just buy everything, all the time, and then there wouldn't be much strategy and we'd all quit playing. )

Incidentally, I don't think of the organic border growth as a governor making decisions. I think of it as my population growing and settling new land. Which of course makes me pull my hair out - Why can't you morons see the big picture? - but that's people for you. That's when I adopt Land Surveyors and buy some tiles and forcibly resettle them.

 

[Art Morte]

Incidentally, I don't think of the organic border growth as a governor making decisions. I think of it as my population growing and settling new land. Which of course makes me pull my hair out - Why can't you morons see the big picture? - but that's people for you. That's when I adopt Land Surveyors and buy some tiles and forcibly resettle them.

"But, sir, *cough cough* the coal mines are giving us all cancer *cough cough*, couldn't we just chill out on that nice little grass tile *cough cough*?"

"Shut up and dig deeper!!"

 

[EgonSpengler]

"But, sir, *cough cough* the coal mines are giving us all cancer *cough cough*, couldn't we just chill out on that nice little grass tile *cough cough*?"

"Shut up and dig deeper!!"

"Just do it."

 

[Lukey_Jangs]

You can choose. You said so yourself. You can buy tiles. Is the issue is that you don't have enough gold? (Well, I guess we can never have enough gold, or we could just buy everything, all the time, and then there wouldn't be much strategy and we'd all quit playing. )

Incidentally, I don't think of the organic border growth as a governor making decisions. I think of it as my population growing and settling new land. Which of course makes me pull my hair out - Why can't you morons see the big picture? - but that's people for you. That's when I adopt Land Surveyors and buy some tiles and forcibly resettle them.

I would like to choose without paying. I wish that when it became time for you to expand you would get a notification and then you could choose which tile to expand to

 

[greygamer]

Has anyone figured out how the expansion tile is selected?

 

[kaspergm]

So, what you're saying is you like less risk, and more reward, in your games?

The risk to auto-managing your Cities is that sometimes the AI will make sub-optimal choices that you yourself would not make. This is a necessary risk, in my opinion, because otherwise there is no downside to making the strategic choice to allow your Cities to govern themselves.

Eh, it has nothing to do with risk. It has something to do with controlling the game. In a strategy game like this, having a governor that makes sub-optimal decisions just doesn't make sense. And even worse, having the game tell you that the governor will do one thing and then he does something else is completely unacceptable. I have multiple times experienced the game tell me it will expand to a certain tile, and then held off on buying it, only to have it expand to another tile which is extremely annoying. And don't start me on the cases where a city expand to a tile in 4th or 5th ring (which it's unable to work) but which still keeps a city that has the same tile in 2nd or 3rd ring from working the tile until you discover it's blocked by the other city and manually switches it over.

 

[Lukey_Jangs]

Has anyone figured out how the expansion tile is selected?

I don't know how it works, but I would imagine it takes into account the number of yields each tile has.

It would make sense to expand to a tile with 2 production and 2 food instead of a tile with 1 production and 2 food

 

[Ryika]

Eh, it has nothing to do with risk. It has something to do with controlling the game. In a strategy game like this, having a governor that makes sub-optimal decisions just doesn't make sense.

Of course it "makes sense", it just depends on the goals, and the design philosophy.

Do you want players to micromanage the system for maximum strategic control? -> Then it makes sense to allow players to choose where cities expand to.
Do you think having to constantly choose tiles would be too annoying for most players? -> Then it makes sense to force an automated system onto players.

It really boils down to "Does the additional strategic depth outweigh the additional micromanagement required?" - I personally would also prefer being able to choose tiles myself (within reasonable parameters at least - a player should not be able to expand outwards 5 tiles before even getting a second ring-2 tiles), but it's pretty obvious that there's arguments to be made for both systems.