[GS] Will Gathering Storm give a reason to go Tall, or provide a new Civ that would be good at it?

A way to promote tall cities and specialists would be to give the population multiplier boosts to specialists, with larger multipliers for the specialists in higher tier buildings.

 

while i agree with your point that playing tall should be moree viable in Civ 6 and is more representative of real life, i just want to say that education indeces are quite dubious and dont control for many variables. The happiness index is absolute malarkey. Not only are many variables not accounted for, but these studies are often conducted with a political agenda in mind.

 

You could even build on the current "area of effect" system and make the boosts based on the total population within 6/9 tiles.

 

One other fix here would be to change the late game policies to give bonuses to specialists rather than adjacencies of multiple districts.

 

I would be careful with that. I'm already not a fan of cramming cities together at the minimum distance. It might be a good idea for a set of policy cards, one for each type of yield.

 

Can we mod this and the GP points? I don't know if that's the direction the franchise wants to go, but I'd like to play with it.

 

Ed will curse you. We are supposed to play the map not... people...

 

There is a mod that does that, but I have no idea if AI can handle that. I mean looking for GPPs in specialists not buildings. Fact is: there is a table in DB for GPPs from specialists which means that to some extent that could have been the original plan, but it was abandoned along the way somehow.

 

Yeah, the AI handling it is kind of key. I wonder if there's a way to encourage them to use specialists whenever it doesn't limit them too much in gold or food. That can work as a kludge, forcing the human to do the same if he/she wants great people.

 

What if we removed the ability to build a district until your city reached, say, pop 4 or 5? This could help avoid ICS (yes I used that term, flame shield on!)

 

A little, but that would just delay the issue.

 

I don’t think they should restrict settling more cities so much but should make conquered cities more difficult to get online, as many suggestions above try to do. Greater post-war loyalty penalty for X turns to be reduced over time, automatic (half?) pillaging of all districts upon conquering, no loyalty impact on neighboring civs from conquered cities until X turns have passed etc

Having said this, steamrolling is so much fun

 

I think that might be a fairly impactful change, actually. Not only would you have to grow a new city larger before it became truly productive, but every city you owned would have one less district slot. It would also nerf late game expansion, which doesn't need a nerf.

I think it's an interesting idea, and would make population growth more important, but maybe isn't the best approach, on balance, at least not in isolation.

 

You can go tall right now and do very well in Civ VI. It just requires playing in a way that isn't 100% min-maxy.

People are just upset it isn't the one true strategy anymore. To which I say, thank god.

 

You can always add a district back in at a tech or civic in the Industrial or Modern Era.

 

Loyalty system is far from perfect, i don't like current version, same as religion mechanism. Can someone explain me please how it is ok to get same pressure from cities you share same flat land and exact same pressure from city behind impassible mountains? Why tarrain doesn't count in that system? Instead we have some layers etc.

Also the logic itself behind loyalty is wrong.. when i send settlers originating from my empire close to enemy boardes, with many troops, why they want to flip from turn one after settling? Also why cities revolt but not troops..? Why nearby troops don't influence loyalty except one in city center?

I liked civ4 in that regard, you had information of what nationality your citizens are.. and they were fine even if they were less than 50% but still major force in the city.

 

It is not that large cities are bad but the fact you don't need to go large to get the needed infrastructure. With chops you can build up the campus or whatever you need for your victory condition and after that you can more or less ignore that city. Using builder charges to build improvements such as farms compete with spending builder charges on chopping and it is common knowledge that production now is Worth more than production at a later stage.

Some stuff that would encourage growing cities:

• Reduce the amount of district slots and space them further between, like one district at every 5 pops with first district at 5 pops
• Allow building several districts of the same type
• Slow down the pace of the game so that early chopping is not as effective
• Reduce the value from chopping and increase its cost
• Make buildings and pop have a relationship instead of being two parallell ways of producing raw resources
• Reduce the cost of growing pops and use housing to slow down growth rather than huge food cost

Currently the main advantage large cities have is they concentrate production which mean they can actually build stuff in a resonable amount of time but the time to set them up is long and the resources spent could be used to simply build more units and conquer more cities and such. The fact that a city can only have one district of each type discourage city growth because a major reason to growth a city is to build districts and not being able to build a second district that directly help towards the victory you aiming for is one reason to ignore further growth. Pop growth have three cost, you have the food cost which growths large as city population grow large, you have the amenity cost which go up the larger the city become and you have the housing cost. Earlier civ games generally have two cost to growth, food and happiness and in a less punishing way.

 

I would simply be happy with a civ that benefits from going tall rather than wide (or more likely, has really good bonuses but is greatly penalized from going wide). Maybe even a couple civs this way for variety. Think like Venice in Civ V, for example.

I should mention that I'm excited that they're bringing back the diplomatic victory, but if I have to go wide in order to achieve it then I'm not likely to bother playing. And no, it's not because I'm "lazy", I would just rather have 4 huge cities and defend them really well and not worry about building settlers all game and focus on buildings and military instead, rather than have 20-30 small cities that are just boring repeats of each other spamming more settlers and slowly building the same buildings/districts/whatever that all the other cities have.

My favorite Civ V civs to play were England (Diplomatic), Babylon (Science or pre-BNW culture), Brazil (post-BNW culture), Aztecs (pre-BNW culture), and the Mongols (Domination....yeah, Keshiks and Khans were fun). Nothing in Civ VI feels like ANY of that.

By the way, does anybody know if we will be able to buy and play Gathering Storm without Rise and Fall DLC? I have no interest in Rise and Fall, unless it's in a hugely discounted bundle package. I already threw ~$70 or so at the game and don't want to spend a dime more than what Gathering Storm will cost me until I'm sure I'll love it. But yeah, if GS is fun, then I might buy RF, but I'd prefer not to, at first.

 

Rather than a system than encourages tall vs. wide as an either or I'd rather have an incentive to grow larger cities and a system that didn't make conquest the best method of expansion.
Large cities should probably be better at large projects like building wonders and produce considerably more science and culture, many small cities has an obvious benefit in terms of access to resources which looks like it will be even more important with GS.