Why such small empires?

[ColtSeavers]

Eh, I'll have to see where I stand with this when the game comes out.

In CivIV and earlier, having 50 cities didn't mean doing more things: it meant doing more or less the same exact thing in the same order 50 or so times. I do that at work all day so I don't need it in my entertainment as well. So I didn't really miss that aspect in 5 (though the game was way too punishing for civs larger than 4 or so).

Now in the new Civ, it looks like the cities should be a bit more unique, so maybe it will be more interesting.

50 cities was mostly the case when you were about to achieve domination victory. Empires of 20+ cities provided enough "unique entertainment", at least for my taste!

 

[SammyKhalifa]

50 cities was mostly the case when you were about to achieve domination victory. Empires of 20+ cities provided enough "unique entertainment", at least for my taste!

I was probably about 8-12 in CivIV.

 

[ColtSeavers]

I was probably about 8-12 in CivIV.

matter of taste! I preferred it to be somewhat bigger!

 

[jjkrause84]

My original point wasn't about large empires for the sheer sake of large empires (although I do prefer the scale of having larger empires, and therefore feeling bigger/meaner/more advanced). If large empires are not strong (let alone feasible) then the player has no incentive to expand. If the player has no incentive to expand then s/he will plop down 4 cities and sit there hitting enter until the game ends.

Expansion, at least up to a certain point, should be all but mandatory for most victory conditions. In Civ 4 you could not be competitive with fewer than 6 cities. It just wasn't possible because it meant no Oxford and no Wall Street. Ideally you'd want to be a bit bigger than that, but 6 - 8 core cities does not strike me as unreasonable or unwieldy.

 

[ColtSeavers]

My original point wasn't about large empires for the sheer sake of large empires (although I do prefer the scale of having larger empires, and therefore feeling bigger/meaner/more advanced). If large empires are not strong (let alone feasible) then the player has no incentive to expand. If the player has no incentive to expand then s/he will plop down 4 cities and sit there hitting enter until the game ends.

Expansion, at least up to a certain point, should be all but mandatory for most victory conditions. In Civ 4 you could not be competitive with fewer than 6 cities. It just wasn't possible because it meant no Oxford and no Wall Street. Ideally you'd want to be a bit bigger than that, but 6 - 8 core cities does not strike me as unreasonable or unwieldy.

Expansion should be at least mandatory for the domination! victory, capturing a bunch of capitals is not sufficient for that matter, in my regard. The other victories are up for debate.

 

[BrokenBokken]

I don't have a strong opinion on which is a better game, civ IV or CiV. I just feel it is very clear that CiV has been more successful so it seems unlikely that they will try to revert much back to the way it was in IV. I do agree that more expansion than V would be nice. Personally I would enjoy nearly endless expansion and have the only limiter really be the map. That obviously won't be the case in VI and even though we haven't seen it happens, everything that we know about the game rules leads me to believe the ideal number of cities in VI will be greater than that of V even if not by a ton.

1) All the cost of cities (as far as we have seen) is up front. Settler costs increase, district costs increase... but once you complete these costs the cities always add maximum yields. This means having another city always increases your output and never hinders it. The only real cost is the opportunity cost. This is better than CiV.

2) Cities having overlapping tiles is actually beneficial. All districts get adjacency bonuses for other districts, and I would expect being next to a good mountain range or river is more important than working every single tile (With housing and amenities working the way they do I expect population totals to be lower end game... like they were pre-expansions in CiV). So if you have less pop, you need less good tiles to work, so good adjacency becomes more important... potentially. Also there are districts that effect every city within a certain range (Electronics factory). If cities are clumped closer together, and costs are upfront, you will see more cities in a smaller amount of area.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

It is possible that there are reasons to keep you cities separate as well such as:

*District cost increase per city center/settler (we do not know if that is true).
*Limited luxeries (easier to keep a few cities happy then massive amount of them)
*Strong late game specialist (it is possible that around the neighbourhood civic that specialist get more powerful yields and it is possible that neighbourhoods themself allow for more specialist to work in adjacent districts making it important to switch from a cottage economy into an industrial economy).
*Less resources spent of founding cities but the same amount of territory controlled.

 

[elitetroops]

I don't have a strong opinion on which is a better game, civ IV or CiV. I just feel it is very clear that CiV has been more successful so it seems unlikely that they will try to revert much back to the way it was in IV. I do agree that more expansion than V would be nice. Personally I would enjoy nearly endless expansion and have the only limiter really be the map. That obviously won't be the case in VI and even though we haven't seen it happens, everything that we know about the game rules leads me to believe the ideal number of cities in VI will be greater than that of V even if not by a ton.

1) All the cost of cities (as far as we have seen) is up front. Settler costs increase, district costs increase... but once you complete these costs the cities always add maximum yields. This means having another city always increases your output and never hinders it. The only real cost is the opportunity cost. This is better than CiV.

2) Cities having overlapping tiles is actually beneficial. All districts get adjacency bonuses for other districts, and I would expect being next to a good mountain range or river is more important than working every single tile (With housing and amenities working the way they do I expect population totals to be lower end game... like they were pre-expansions in CiV). So if you have less pop, you need less good tiles to work, so good adjacency becomes more important... potentially. Also there are districts that effect every city within a certain range (Electronics factory). If cities are clumped closer together, and costs are upfront, you will see more cities in a smaller amount of area.

So far it seems to me that packing cities as tightly as possible could be ideal. With the district system, it appears they want to make that an incentive to grow your cities big. But that's only to build more districts. The districts themselves don't seem to benefit from belonging to a larger city (unless you can assign multiple specialists, which we don't know much about yet). And you don't need large cities to build more districts if you instead have more cities.

4 cities at pop 6 can support as many districts as 2 cities at pop 12 (and if you are Germany, 4 cities come out ahead). The benefit is that when they are spread out over 4 cities, you have a lot more flexibility to choose which districts those are. You can for example have 4 campuses, if that's what you want. The large cities might even need to build some districts for the sole purpose of supporting their large size, which seems like a total waste if you instead can have that same pop in another city to build something more useful.

Other benefits include more trade routes and more simultaneous production items, which tends to result in faster army buildup. 4 smaller cities also have a lot more potential for growth than 2 large cities, since food cost to grow increase at larger sizes. Not to forget that the city center itself provides housing, which the large city has to acquire by other means. And while more cities are harder to keep happy in the long run, I'm sure for the most part of the game it will be easier to keep many small cities happy than a couple of very large cities.

While the settlers cost some production, you also get a bit back in the form of claimed land. When you pack your cities as tightly as possible, the settlers claim for free some tiles you otherwise might end up buying.

Though as you say, there might still be some mechanics we aren't aware of that change this equation. Or maybe I'm missing something that is already known. I just don't see any reason to ever have a pop 30 city if I instead can have two pop 15 cities.

 

[Paramecium]

I think the numbers of cities will highly depend on how exactly the amenities and their contribution is working and until now, we have no save information about it.

But we know, that the numbers of districts is capped to the population of a city so I think there will be many different approaches in that case.
Will you just found a few cities (maybe 4-8?) and try to max them as much as possible?
Or will you found a lot cities with just one or two districts in good positions? As it seems until now, amenities are not needed at low level population cities as much, I think to remember that starting with 3 population or sth like that you will need 1 amenity for your city.

So especially the Aztecs are in the position to spam a lot of cities and get their better positioned districts faster online because of their UA. And they seem to be able to let all their cities to grow bigger comparred to others because of their UB and LUA.

But I think that will be in general a viable strategy. Maybe there will be a way between it. Found a couple of core cities and then place some highly specialized cities here and there.

At the end, it all depends on map size. And Civ 5 already has proven, that there can be a lot of big maps and now with global happiness gone, you might be able to actually fill those maps easilier then before.
At least I hope those stupid city razing just for not getting to deep in unhappiness will be gone ...