Why such small empires?

[Magil]

I think most players probably do not enjoy managing dozens of cities.

The most common response to this I would give is "then play on a smaller map size". I don't feel like the game should try to enforce a particular ideal "empire size". At the very least allow larger empires to flourish on large and huge maps.

 

[stealth_nsk]

The most common response to this I would give is "then play on a smaller map size". I don't feel like the game should try to enforce a particular ideal "empire size". At the very least allow larger empires to flourish on large and huge maps.

Making large empires to be more effective than smaller ones is also enforcing an ideal empire size. There's no balance everyone will be happy with.

On the other hand, the perfect balance is not needed.

1. All restrictions to snowballing should scale with map.

2. All restrictions should be soft. Adding new cities shouldn't decrease any major output (like it did in Civ5 where adding more cities actually decreased culture and science), but the benefits on new cities should go down. So those who like managing huge empires should do so and those who want to stop at some point should be able to so too.

3. Different civs should be done with different approach for the problem - like Aztecs have everything to make big empire, while China is better on smaller ones.

 

[Magil]

Making large empires to be more effective than smaller ones is also enforcing an ideal empire size. There's no balance everyone will be happy with.

Not really. The mechanics behind the two don't have to be remotely even comparable. They can be, but they needn't be. You can do "more is always better" without relating at all to "X amount of cities is ideal".

The proper way to handle "more is always better" is to challenge the player in getting more. If it's difficult to expand past a certain point, then it won't always be better to expand outwards as circumstances change throughout the game. The trick is making the struggle to get large meaningful, and yet do so without feeling truly penalizing (and avoid having the hard wall of "cities settled past this point won't contribute fast enough" come too early). It's also done in a way that can make people of various play styles happy, as a peaceful player will be content to sit back once they've established their empire and the land is claimed, switching to a purely inward focus, while an aggressive player can expand their empire through conquest.

That's a totally different mindset than, say, providing freebies for X number of cities, encouraging a certain size.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Founding cities is an investment of production and thus it compete with building districts, wonders, buildings, workers, military units, projects and more so the question is if you have a better way to spend you production then founding cities.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Not really. The mechanics behind the two don't have to be remotely even comparable. They can be, but they needn't be. You can do "more is always better" without relating at all to "X amount of cities is ideal".

The proper way to handle "more is always better" is to challenge the player in getting more. If it's difficult to expand past a certain point, then it won't always be better to expand outwards as circumstances change throughout the game. The trick is making the struggle to get large meaningful, and yet do so without feeling truly penalizing (and avoid having the hard wall of "cities settled past this point won't contribute fast enough" come too early). It's also done in a way that can make people of various play styles happy, as a peaceful player will be content to sit back once they've established their empire and the land is claimed, switching to a purely inward focus, while an aggressive player can expand their empire through conquest.

That's a totally different mindset than, say, providing freebies for X number of cities, encouraging a certain size.

You're saying the same things as me.

The last sentence is interesting, however. As I understand, you're speaking about Amenities as all other game mechanics don't have limitation for fixed number of cities. We don' know how Luxury resources work exactly.
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From what we've seen, you start getting less amenities from Luxury resources at this point, but it's more to encourage expansion before 6 cities than to hard limit it afterwards. You get more luxury resources from expansion, compensating their decreased effectiveness.

 

[jjkrause84]

If you think the argument people are making is 'it's a beta/not finished' and not 'we haven't seen enough' then you aren't really looking for people to show you a countering view. You're here to trumpet your conclusion.

We're what....6 weeks out?

If they're still making radical changes 6 weeks out after years of production we are in serious trouble. Map and empire size are not small issues. They are are huge issues which bleed over into every other aspect of the game. There is no reason to expect drastic change from what we are seeing in gameplay videos with now.

 

[BrokenBokken]

We're what....6 weeks out?

If they're still making radical changes 6 weeks out after years of production we are in serious trouble. Map and empire size are not small issues. They are are huge issues which bleed over into every other aspect of the game. There is no reason to expect drastic change from what we are seeing in gameplay videos with now.

You still don't understand the argument. It has nothing to do with changes. It has to do with the limitations of what we've seen. This would be like me arguing tourism is pointless because we haven't seen a cultural victory in the LPs.

 

[elitetroops]

Making large empires to be more effective than smaller ones is also enforcing an ideal empire size. There's no balance everyone will be happy with.

Large empires shouldn't automatically be more effective than smaller ones. I think the ideal is if the large empire always has potential of being more effective, but requires more skill to effectively manage. And of course it should require skill to acquire the large empire in the first place. I think this is something Civ 4 does very well. The novice player expands too quickly to 8 cities only to find they have absolutely tanked their economy and don't know how to get out of the hole, while the more experienced player can expand to 20 cities in the same time and have a very strong economy.

While the large empire should have the best potential, it should not be required to have it but also be possible to win all victories with smaller empires (except maybe domination, which should require you to dominate).

 

[Amightymuffin]

We're what....6 weeks out?

If they're still making radical changes 6 weeks out after years of production we are in serious trouble. Map and empire size are not small issues. They are are huge issues which bleed over into every other aspect of the game. There is no reason to expect drastic change from what we are seeing in gameplay videos with now.

you do realise huge balance changes can take place 6 weeks out hell even features may be getting their final implementation at this point. 6 weeks is both a short and long time for a game, short as 'its only 6 weeks left' long as its plenty of time to finish balancing etc

 

[VicRatlhead5199]

Really I havent seen anything that truly limits expansion. Slow it down, sure, but nothing limiting it.

The LPs and demos we've seen have all been limited in time and they're generally geared towards exploring mechanics. Even the press/youtuber LPs were mostly about showcasing early gameplay, specifically war. I don't think we've seen anyone really go for an expansionist approach and that's why most of the LPs stayed pretty small.

No cause for alarm in my book yet.

 

[Manetheren]

In some of the videos I saw barb activity early hampered expansion, and gameplay wasn't optimal anyway because people were trying out the game for the first time. I think with bigger map sizes it will be possible to have empires with 20 cities, but obviously some will probably be city-states or cities captured from other civs.

 

[isau]

It's hard to tell the best strategies from the videos, but as I'm watching I keep thinking people aren't producing enough military and settlers early on. I'm not sure if this is just my perception. Early game looks very similar to Civ IV in a lot of ways. Maybe a bit less time will be needed for military, but certainly it's no longer smart to leave cities unguarded since they can't shoot back early on.

 

[Ebrim]

It's hard to tell the best strategies from the videos, but as I'm watching I keep thinking people aren't producing enough military and settlers early on. I'm not sure if this is just my perception. Early game looks very similar to Civ IV in a lot of ways. Maybe a bit less time will be needed for military, but certainly it's no longer smart to leave cities unguarded since they can't shoot back early on.

That depends how you want to play too. If say you're playing as Spain (as in the last let's play) and you have continental borders right next to your capital than by all means it makes sense to make a few cities of your own to trade with for bonuses in the very beginning. If, however, you're playing Spain and you're far from your continental boundary but on the coast it may make sense to have only a couple cities until you're able to use the sea to gain access to other continents.

 

[VicRatlhead5199]

Yeah, I think more often than not I'd invest much more into military and settlers early on. I think there's a lot of "ooh shiny!" going on in the LPs. I could be wrong though.

From what I see I think my starts would more closely resemble my starts in IV than in V. Work quickly to fend off barbs and establish my presence. Then focus on infrastructure.

 

[cazaderonus]

Yeah, I think more often than not I'd invest much more into military and settlers early on. I think there's a lot of "ooh shiny!" going on in the LPs. I could be wrong though.

From what I see I think my starts would more closely resemble my starts in IV than in V. Work quickly to fend off barbs and establish my presence. Then focus on infrastructure.

And expand some more then, once production compensates settler rising cost. Maybe for more tactial needs such as strategic resources or choke point cities.

 

[UWHabs]

Do we know what map size the demos have used? My guess is they may be playing on a small map, so a "normal" sized map would have more space.

Also wonder in general that managing more than 4-6 cities gets somewhat more challenging. To me, less than that, I can pretty much remember each city and what it needs. More than that, and I can't remember as well. I wonder if at some point, they're going to move the game to be less about micro in the cities, and switch more things to global. We've seen that somewhat play out over time (global happiness instead of local happiness, global maintenance cost for units instead of local maintenance back long ago). It won't happen in 6, but maybe a later civ game we'll see more stuff be global, where you simply click on your encampment and "hire" when you need units instead of slow-building them in cities. The less need to micro cities might make it more possible to easily manage a larger empire.

 

[dturtle1]

The last two DevPlays(Norway + Spain) looked like Small. The Spain one especially considering the continent only had 3 Civs on it, which compares with Civ5(small). It looked like a good size continent as long as it is a Small sized Map. I am not too concerned for map size. Civ5's were a little bit too small and i am pretty sure i saw read somewhere that Civ6 will be a bit bigger. In Civ 5 you can still build a decent Empire as long as you didn't mind getting your hands dirty once in a while .

In my Current Gandhi game on Standard, Continents, Epic(because that is just how i roll ) I self-founded 5 core excellent Cities whilst cutting off 3 more Cities available for later on at least average quality. So that is a 8 spread(at least 4 tile separation, mostly 5-6) city "empire" before the "acquiring" more. It required an aggressive Liberty Start( MY Mountain, River, 2 Lux City...GTH George Washington ) but it works. I currently own the continent save for 3 City States(16 spread Cities), you can fit more but they suck. All these 16 cities will probably hit 30 before i am done. Core 5 are already in the 30's with the Capital pushing 40 @ Turn 500.

 

[stealth_nsk]

The last two DevPlays(Norway + Spain) looked like Small. The Spain one especially considering the continent only had 3 Civs on it, which compares with Civ5(small). It looked like a good size continent as long as it is a Small sized Map. I am not too concerned for map size. Civ5's were a little bit too small and i am pretty sure i saw read somewhere that Civ6 will be a bit bigger. In Civ 5 you can still build a decent Empire as long as you didn't mind getting your hands dirty once in a while

There were 4 civs in Spain LP (France to the north) and I believe it's Standard size.

 

[dturtle1]

There were 4 civs in Spain LP (France to the north) and I believe it's Standard size.

Ahh Yeah, strange how Teddy expanded towards China rather than in his own continent .
Looking at the Mini Map it is clear that it is Standard with 4 civs. WTH is Catherine doing, that looks like a lot of space up there. It is easy to think the Maps are small when 3 Civs are fighting over only half the continent

 

[ClavisRa]

Yeah, I think more often than not I'd invest much more into military and settlers early on. I think there's a lot of "ooh shiny!" going on in the LPs. I could be wrong though.

From what I see I think my starts would more closely resemble my starts in IV than in V. Work quickly to fend off barbs and establish my presence. Then focus on infrastructure.

Right now early game units seem so much more valuable than anything else. I have a hard time imagining I'll build anything but units until I have at least 3 cities going. Scouts give tons of value from goody huts, city states, other civs and mapping. Military is essential for controlling Barbarians, expansion, keeping civs at bay, and even peaceful expansion, let alone opportunistic warmongering.

Units just pay off much quicker than buildings and districts early on.