Wide vs Tall--Balance?

[Magil]

That's a pretty bold claim. Tall vs. wide is a dichotomy that has existed in games for a long time and was certainly not "invented" by Firaxis. It is true that Civ 5 was the first game to push it that far in terms of 4X gameplay, but that's why I've been saying that I do not mean the same thing that you mean.

In fact, I've been saying that I'm not using "tall vs. wide" in the sense that it is used in Civ 5 since my very first post in this thread, have explained what I mean by "tall" and by "wide". I think I've done more than enough to explain what I'm saying, you've simply ignored my explanations.

The tension between developing inward and developing outward has certainly always existed, but "tall vs wide" being used to describe it was rather specific to Civ V, when it comes to the Civilization series.

I think you're being unduly hostile. I actually agree with fair amount of your points, even if I disagree on the details. The only parts I ignored were the suggestions of mechanic that aren't a part of Civilization and I don't really care to see added to the game. We already largely know what the mechanics are of the game they're releasing, and in that game, I don't think trying to balance "wide" versus "tall" is a good thing.

Small decision points scattered throughout the game that force you to choose to prioritize inward or outward growth? Absolutely. A set strategy that favors one set of choices over another? I don't think so.

Except in maybe the very late game, I doubt the small increase of production cost from the previous settler to the current one is enough to offset the economic gain of a new city over time. Especially since they announced the increase in cost, didn't they say 10%?

In Civ V, tall cities have a direct advantage over wide because the amount of culture and science produced per capita grows higher and higher with comparatively fewer cities. And those are stats that affect the entire empire, whereas production only affects one city.

In fact, to circumvent your argument, I could still have a very tall city, then build a second city purely for the construction of Settlers. Now my tall city is unaffected by any such production loss. I am effectively able to go Wide while maintaining any bonuses for being Tall.

It's not just settler costs that increase, it's also builder and district costs. A larger empire will need to continually focus more on development to make its satellite cities as productive as its core. There also seems to be something related to amenities not affecting all of your cities at once, but exactly how that mechanic works has yet to be determined, last I checked.

 

[Big J Money]

It's not just settler costs that increase, it's also builder and district costs.

That's still not Tall vs Wide.

If I want to build a tall city with 24 people, 8 districts and 8 improved tiles, and the cost of subsequent builders goes up; it's the same as if I have 2 cities, each with 12 people and 4 districts and 4 improved tiles.

But yes it's clear there are mechanics to slow down steam-rolling from several angles, which is great.

 

[Magil]

That's still not Tall vs Wide.

If I want to build a tall city with 24 people, 8 districts and 8 improved tiles, and the cost of subsequent builders goes up; it's the same as if I have 2 cities, each with 12 people and 4 districts and 4 improved tiles.

But yes it's clear there are mechanics to slow down steam-rolling from several angles, which is great.

I agree, this feels more natural (and it's not tall versus wide, which makes me happy). But more to the point, the videos never showed anything that resembled a tech or civic penalty for settling cities. So unless that's something they sneak into a later build, it seems unlikely.

 

[Calouste]

I agree, this feels more natural (and it's not tall versus wide, which makes me happy). But more to the point, the videos never showed anything that resembled a tech or civic penalty for settling cities. So unless that's something they sneak into a later build, it seems unlikely.

There doesn't need to be an explicit tech or civic penalty for settling cities. The number of tiles where you can get great bonuses for districts is probably quite limited, so implicitly most new cities you found won't have as great an output.

 

[CaiusDrewart]

I'm going to bet a nickel that there will still be a science and/or culture tax for having more cities. To offset all the intangible advantages to have more territory.

I'm terrified that the BNW science penalty is coming back. I can't think of a mechanic that goes more against the spirit of Civ than that one, but this is almost the same design team that did BNW, so evidently they do not agree with me.

 

[Amrunril]

There doesn't need to be an explicit tech or civic penalty for settling cities. The number of tiles where you can get great bonuses for districts is probably quite limited, so implicitly most new cities you found won't have as great an output.

This would be true only if adjacency bonuses were the primary source of their respective yields. They do seem like they'll be important, especially in the early game, but buildings, city state bonuses and other factors will also boost city yields, and they'll do so independently of terrain.

 

[Maximus_Light]

So, just to summarize the basic idea everyone has:

1. You should be able to go develop internally or externally at your discretion
2. These should not be doable (or at least effective) to do at the same time or at least very difficult

The tension in the debate seems to be coming from how to go about this more than anything, I think there is a general consensus that it doesn't feel right in some way in the previous games but nailing that down is the hard part.

So, I'll give my idea on what I thought about the games I've played to try and identify that part.

From Civ5 before Brave New World and Beyond Earth:
You're goal was to just get as much land and resources as possible and if you just didn't do that as well you lost. Having really good technology or a developed culture was more about how you used your resources not you size but size directly equated into power provided you stayed on top of developing.
I actually didn't enjoy this despite enjoying and wanting to develop internally and externally, that was because it became tedious. Sure I could do it but there was no good way to manage everything and developing internally across the entire "empire" just happen faster when going wide, which in retrospect doesn't make a lot of sense historically. In history gaining resources didn't have an automatic global benefit until communication and transportation across the vast distances became viable. This lack of logistic ability is what kept nations or empires from getting really big without issues, see Rome and China's history for reference. This logistic analog is notably lacking from Civ5 before Brave New World and Beyond Earth, instead it's all put on the player, which while painful (and I would argue not fun) is doable for us.

From Brave New World:
In this version you didn't want to expand all the time because happiness and gold became an issue along with having a diminishing returns for the same internal development. That said when I built 4 or 5 cities and did not try to claim more resources beyond that I can beat the game on Deity (it's painful with resting but I've done it) and on Emperor difficulty at least I was able to switch to going stupidly wide after hitting a point where things would snowball, specifically when world congress projects started popping up as I could just complete those and start building whatever wonder I wanted and no one was able to stop me. It was really just a matter of time to build up enough military to enforce victory with superior tech. This was fun when I got to the later points but it was always the same before that and frankly if I where playing the most effective I could I would never expand, it was just too costly. Interestingly when I think about it gaining more resources was kind of useless especially at that point.

Whenever I've tried to develop externally it always seems like I have to hit a point where I can make my military or culture snowball for it to work. I was never able to do that on deity (and oh boy did I try, a lot more than I did trying to stay out of everyone's way when developing internally). Mind you that was without trying to exploit the infinite city spam tourism buildings strategy (it just seems too... exploit-y? (or should I say explode-y).
These games where always doubly painful for me because it was both tedious logistically on me and I just could never make it work as well as focusing internally. Sure you have a lot of cities and production but YOU MUST BUILD ALL THE THINGS EVER.... EVERYWHERE
The games that where the most fun playing way where again when I went back and forth between external and internal development but it was never ideal efficiency. The game did do a good forcing you to focus on some internal development when expanding and it was necessary but it always took so long to get ready for war to make it worthwhile that I felt like it was always either or for half the game.

Hmm... so after re-reading all of that it seems like the issue comes down not to play style but lack of good logistics representation and being forced into mainly either internal or external development to play well because switching between the two takes too long to do effectively. Also, while it's good that you can forsake aggressive expansion it seems to be a bit overboard as ANY aggressive expansion has little draw to it after obtaining enough resources to play effectively.
This seems to be inline with what everyone is saying on both "sides" of the discussion but what are other people's thoughts?
I think being able to play focusing more on internal development is a good and enjoyable thing but not being able to switch between the two quickly does leave me feeling unsatisfied.
(and I like doing the crazy things Liberty>Religion>Science>Freedom by expanding a lot early then later going tall I just wish I didn't do one or the other for half the game)

 

[Magil]

Older Civ games had city governors which you could use to automate city production in individual cities if you didn't want to micromanage the entire empire. It was a strictly sub-optimal choice, of course (much like automated workers), but for certain people it was certainly a good addition to the game. I don't think those ever made it into V (I played BE very briefly so I cannot concretely comment on that). And no, puppet states are not the same mechanic.

With that said, Civilization has always been about the leader being an omnipotent god-being controlling the entire civilization for thousands of years. There are other games which focus more on delegating power and the related internal politics. As such, Civilization's empire management is hardly historically accurate and has never really striven to be so.

 

[Haggbart]

I'm terrified that the BNW science penalty is coming back. I can't think of a mechanic that goes more against the spirit of Civ than that one, but this is almost the same design team that did BNW, so evidently they do not agree with me.

I'm not sure. Remember that the G&K/BNW team had to work with the basic CiV mechanics that included global happiness. And even vanilla CiV had A LOT of patches that tried to fix the system, which was completely insane at launch (the global happiness didn't even have a local part, so a colo in one city could provide happiness far above the city's pop). They probably could've changed it into a more flexible system with more time (like som mods have), but the mods have had the advantage of years of tweaking and feedback after BNW released.

Also I remember a lot of people on this board criticized CiV for ICS in vanilla (as well as AI that would go to war in unpredictable manners, in a lot of people's vocal opinion). So in the end they went completely the opposite way with both things, which actually quite a few people on the forums preferred.

 

[Maximus_Light]

Older Civ games had city governors which you could use to automate city production in individual cities if you didn't want to micromanage the entire empire. It was a strictly sub-optimal choice, of course (much like automated workers), but for certain people it was certainly a good addition to the game. I don't think those ever made it into V (I played BE very briefly so I cannot concretely comment on that). And no, puppet states are not the same mechanic.

With that said, Civilization has always been about the leader being an omnipotent god-being controlling the entire civilization for thousands of years. There are other games which focus more on delegating power and the related internal politics. As such, Civilization's empire management is hardly historically accurate and has never really striven to be so.

But my point is that rather than the logistics being something you have to overcome in gameplay (or a poor representation of it) it's offloaded onto the player. As in, they tried to use happiness and other such things to denote the logistical challenges but they didn't scale well and didn't change over history like they should.
For instance I don't think the culture or science penalty for more cities or people is necessarily bad just not the best way of going about it. Say you start the game with some pretty severe penalties in terms of "happiness" and culture and science needed, but as the game progresses and you get better civics they are lessened or on the other hand say you had other civics that give some bonus to internal development. This way you could be able to go tall or wide but not at the same time and you would be able to change them at critical points in the game.

So my point is that "in universe" logistics are represented well and they should do something about that.
(although some automation once you have 30 plus cities doesn't sound like a bad idea, even if it's just you do this for a while and I'll come back to you later at the end game)

 

[CaiusDrewart]

I'm not sure. Remember that the G&K/BNW team had to work with the basic CiV mechanics that included global happiness. And even vanilla CiV had A LOT of patches that tried to fix the system, which was completely insane at launch (the global happiness didn't even have a local part, so a colo in one city could provide happiness far above the city's pop). They probably could've changed it into a more flexible system with more time (like som mods have), but the mods have had the advantage of years of tweaking and feedback after BNW released.

Also I remember a lot of people on this board criticized CiV for ICS in vanilla (as well as AI that would go to war in unpredictable manners, in a lot of people's vocal opinion). So in the end they went completely the opposite way with both things, which actually quite a few people on the forums preferred.

I hope you're right, and they saw the science penalty as something unfortunate but necessary to salvage a broken global happiness system. I really dread seeing the science penalty in Civ VI. Nothing kills the fun of Civ faster than having expansion be detrimental to one's empire...

 

[qwerty25]

I've seen discussion of Wide vs. Tall in Civ VI in several threads, and I find myself wondering--maybe there's something for both play styles? Without Civ V's severe happiness mechanic, there's not much to stop you from carpeting the map with small cities, a la Civ II. But building up cities which can produce enough of any of the yields to be competitive looks like it's going to take more time and attention. There are "housing" limits which require extra buildings to surpass, and without that housing the number of districts in any city will be severely limited. In other words, there seem to be perks for going tall.

Will the benefits of each play style really be roughly balanced? Who knows, but it least the developers seem to be using the carrot of districts, not the stick of happiness penalties.

The main change in civ 6 that could mitigate wide vs tall isnt margianlly decreasingly benefits from more buildings/cities. Its the split in the tech tree. Theyve said that tall will be scorne focused while wide will be culture focused. (Illl try to find it)

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Instead of punishing economical investment, they instead use a system that make it more and more expensive to make futher economical investment.

It is worth to mention that districts may be the main way to produce some of the resources such as science, culture and faith as there may not be a tile improvement for these and while population do produce a little science and culture just by existing the specialist may produce much more of these resources.

A 30 city empire may not have more district then a 10 city empire, it could actually have less due to each city you have increase the price of districts which mean that the 10 city empire could compete or even be futher ahead then the 30 city empire even though the 30 city empire most likely have a larger population.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

If you don't want screwed incentives, more land should always be > less land, all else equal.

It's the costs of acquiring and developing it (time, growth, investment in military, etc) that make the tradeoff of when to attempt to expand more interesting.

Civ 4 is the closest to getting it right so far. Eventually, the marginal value of an additional city would always be attractive, but you could have a heck of a time getting there and could easily lose the game from overexpanding early.

5's incentives are too skewed. A 4 city nation conquering another 6 cities can easily be worse off than previously in every way, even if doing it mid-late game, and even if spending an entire tree on otherwise sub-optimal social policies to manage it. 5's expansion model is broken by design, unfortunately. 6 will either follow or not follow based on the specifics of the numbers in the mechanics so it's too early to judge how that goes.

 

[need my speed]

Why is everyone saying that all Civilization games had ICS as the wide strategy, and then Civilization V had the four city limit as the tall strategy, so to say?

Civilization III had ICS. And the games before that as well.
Civilization V had a four city limit, and VI will probably have this as well, considering how science works.

But Civilization IV was 'perfect'.

EDIT: Ha, ninja'd.

The eventual not-really-a-problem-but-still, however, is found in terrain yields being the same and all adding up; snowballing.

 

[Magil]

Civilization III had ICS. And the games before that as well.
Civilization V had a four city limit, and VI will have this as well, considering how science works.

Gonna have to explain that one to me. I mean, the science penalty is, by all appearances, nonexistent. I don't understand why VI would have a "four city limit" as a result (even in V it wasn't necessarily a hard limit, just a good point of reference, and Tradition in particular encouraged that number).

 

[need my speed]

Gonna have to explain that one to me. I mean, the science penalty is, by all appearances, nonexistent. I don't understand why VI would have a "four city limit" as a result (even in V it wasn't necessarily a hard limit, just a good point of reference, and Tradition in particular encouraged that number).

Really? I could have sworn I saw something like that in one of the earliest YouTube videos... I'll perhaps look at this tonight, to see if I can find what I meant.

Well, if that isn't the case, that gives some hope.

 

[ProMeTheus112]

Really? I could have sworn I saw something like that in one of the earliest YouTube videos... I'll perhaps look at this tonight, to see if I can find what I meant.

Well, if that isn't the case, that gives some hope.

Yes frankly so far it seems like Civ 6 will be in a good spot regarding this, just how good depends on many things but there is hope for something really nice. As in no ICS, no 4 city, varying degrees of tall and wide open to different strategies, maps, events and style of the players, no snowballing or limited.

 

[megabearsfan]

It seems to me that with the inclusion of districts and builders, Civ VI is much more a game about building things. In that context, it kind of doesn't even make sense to me for the devs to put restrictions on the number of cities that you can/should control. More cities means more to build. So it might just be that "tall v wide" was decided by a Firaxis design philosophy rather than something to be left up to individual players. After all, Civ is a "4x" strategy game, and one of those x's is supposed to mean "expand" .

The problem with Civ V's ICS was that there weren't any meaningful decisions to make with all those extra cities. You just plopped them down, got the free gold and science (in vanilla game), rushed the happiness buildings to make your empire happiness-positive, and then didn't care about them for the rest of the game. With the districts and so forth in VI, it looks like deciding what to build, where to build it, and how much of it to build, might remain a meaningful decision throughout the game. Personally, I'd be thrilled to see a Civ game in which continuing to expand and settle new cities past the medieval period is a viable strategy. Perhaps colonialism will actually be a thing in this game?

 

[Haggbart]

It seems to me that with the inclusion of districts and builders, Civ VI is much more a game about building things. In that context, it kind of doesn't even make sense to me for the devs to put restrictions on the number of cities that you can/should control. More cities means more to build. So it might just be that "tall v wide" was decided by a Firaxis design philosophy rather than something to be left up to individual players. After all, Civ is a "4x" strategy game, and one of those x's is supposed to mean "expand" .

The problem with Civ V's ICS was that there weren't any meaningful decisions to make with all those extra cities. You just plopped them down, got the free gold and science (in vanilla game), rushed the happiness buildings to make your empire happiness-positive, and then didn't care about them for the rest of the game. With the districts and so forth in VI, it looks like deciding what to build, where to build it, and how much of it to build, might remain a meaningful decision throughout the game. Personally, I'd be thrilled to see a Civ game in which continuing to expand and settle new cities past the medieval period is a viable strategy. Perhaps colonialism will actually be a thing in this game?

Sure, but still there need to be mechanisms in place to limit snowballing. If there is no penalty to expansion, the 19th city that you plonk down in poor terrain just to grab land and don't even bother to expand properly with districts and improvements will STILL be a net gain to your empire. And quite frankly that's just as boring as CiV vanilla's ICS. So I hope there will be cases where if you settle a city in bad terrain and do bad choices with buildings and improvements, it will actually be a net drain to your empire (as in cIV and indeed IRL), and that should be more than the opportunity cost of building a settler.