#Building tall is still not competitive

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jade leaf
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Time and time again, game after game, i see the same pattern emerge: the civs that are building over the settlement limit are considtently outperforming anyone building under the limit.

I distinctly remember when marketing for this game was ramping up and the dev diaries were coming out that the leads for this game specifically mentioned that building tall would be much more relevant and powerful. They lied.

This game is still dominated by whomever can micromanage the most amount or cities at once. I would really love to have an extremely successful empire the size of Switzerland, but considering that the community is more interested in punishing players in the city building than supporting the idea of allowing districts to have 3 building slots, i dont see tall empires ever being successful in this game.

Oh well, I guess they lied about less micromanagement too…

candid shuttle
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I think everyone is in favor of playing tall being viable but the challenge of implementing it correctly is probably too much as things currently stand

jade leaf
versed hatch
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The issue with going tall is the food scaling. For most of the game, it’s better to have a lot of cities than a few big ones.

They said they were looking at it, so I’d be interested to see where it goes

jade leaf
maiden osprey
flint kayak
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the problem with this kind of thing is that realistically, something resembling wide is always going to be successful. More land, more resources, more production, more people, more build queues. There's just no real way for smaller empires to be as good.

Now I would like to see some modifications that work to make say 2-3 cities and 5-10 towns be more valid but I don't really think there should be huge bonuses just for having a small empire.

Like if people want to play like switzerland, they should expect to perform like switzerland (no offence to the swiss!)

jade leaf
# flint kayak the problem with this kind of thing is that realistically, something resembling ...

Not if empires are properaly penalized for building wide. All that needs to be done is introducing an “empire size” stat that is more detailed than “settlement cap” and “happiness.”

The way it is now, it’s entirely too easy to build extremely high over the settlement cap without getting penalized at all. There needs to be percent yield penalties that you CANNOT avoid with happiness. They dont need to be as severe as the happiness penalties, but they should at least be like a 1% or 2% unavoidable penalty.

Historically, empires that expanded too much ALWAYS collapse in on themselves. Sometimes they disappear entirely, sometimes they shrink and morph into new empires, sometimes they fracture into multiple empires that go on to become their own powerhouses.

None of this is reflected in any capacity in Civ. The only thing you get is as Time increases Empire size increases without exception and without consequence. Youre talking about performing like Switzerland? If you want to bring up real world examples then how about bringing up performing like Rome. What happened to them? Collapsed. What about performing like the Soviets? Completely fractured. Great Britain? Rebellions upon rebellions from within.

You want to bring real world examples into a game like civ, then thats a two way street. And by that argument every single empire ive ever built in civ should be imploding and splitting into independent powers that span multiple continents.

calm sable
# jade leaf I made a different post about increasing district limit to 3 buildings. More peo...

The issue of having tall perks is that nothing prevents you from having that… BUT ALSO going wide. Being in the end one more cog in the wide machine.

Specialists and towns feeding cities is fundamentally structured for tall play, they just aren't strong enough at the moment. And as said before you can make these but also make more settlements at the same time… end up being wide.

jade leaf
# maiden osprey Increasing district limits to three buildings means you now need to build 3 buil...

Considering the definition of “quarter” is completely arbitrary/solely determined by the creators of the game, what youre saying is not necessarily true. 2 buildings can still constitute a completed quarter while the 3rd building could be tacked on with a slight penalty to its base yield. I see no problem with this. It introduces yet another layer of player choice baked into the city building: Do i want to build tall and try to rake in warehouse bonuses or unique civ rural improvements, or do i want to get max yields on all my buildings and not worry as much about rural? The only legitimate concern with a 3 building district system comes from unique quarters, and this is also easily solved: Just dont allow completed unique quarters to fit a third building. And then the only argument left there is “well what happens if i build the first unique building and then another random building onto it? I cant complete the unique quarter,” to which the response is so what? That’s how it is currently anyway. If you build a unique building with a regular building, you lost the unique quarter.

The only valid criticism of this idea is that it might be too difficult, time consuming, or complex for the devs to change the current system. This is something i can somewhat understand, until i look at a game like stellaris. Of course its been around for almost a decade, but the fact is that the current iteration of stellaris is unrecognizable compared to where it started. If the devs actually want to do something, theyll find a way to do it. Do i think theyre obligated to? Not necessarily. But then again, theyre not obligated to a diehard fanbase of loyal supporters either. But thats certainly something theyd get when they put genuine passion into their game.

flint kayak
# jade leaf Not if empires are properaly penalized for building wide. All that needs to be d...

Like no doubt, you could make up some artificial penalties to discourage wide. What i was talking about is the comparison with real life empires. If we think of the great empires of the world; rome, mongolia, britain etc, they all take signficicant chunks of the land and then they plunder that land and people for resources.

historically empires collapse, yes. Hence the game mechanics of empires collapsing and a new one forming. If you had a small empire, it would still collapse in this game.

I can understand the desire for wanting tall to be more viable. But the downside is you make the game less realistic and arguably less fun just for your own personal preferred playstyle.

edit: also, switzerland was your example in the OP - i didn't bring it up.

jade leaf
# calm sable The issue of having tall perks is that nothing prevents you from having that… BU...

I already addressed this. Wide empires should have small percent penalties that cannot be avoided. If thats not good enough then make a new Admin Tree akin to the culture tree that either gives bonuses to wide empires or bonuses to tall empires. Never both. Thats literally just something off the top of my head, so dont question me too much about that because i literally just started thinking about that 30 seconds ago

calm sable
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I think they told the truth that civ 7 is built for tall play to be viable. They just gotta keep adjusting specialists/towns/food/happiness stats. Structure is here, numbers are just flunking.

jade leaf
# flint kayak Like no doubt, you could make up some artificial penalties to discourage wide. W...

I brought up switzerland as an example of size of a tall empire. You used it to demonstrate that small empires equals non-optimized empires. You tied the mechanics of the game to concepts of the real world in a literal fashion. So i expanded upon that literality. And in a literal sense, if i were to “perform like Switzerland” that would also mean that my empire would have one of the highest rated economies in the world, the most defensible real estate, and diplomatic relations so strong i could freely trade with two factions that are literally murdering each other right next door to me without involving myself in the conflict. Sounds like one interesting game of civ to me…

This is not a post about want “my own personal preferred playstyle” to be in the game. This is a post about the fact that that the Lead designers and devs of this game told us that building tall would be much more attractive and that micromanagement would be very curtailed. None of that was true, yet it is something they said they wanted to have in their game. So where is it? Why isnt it here? Why is the game still designed to optimize the thing they said they were trying to get away from?

This is not a post about me. This is a post about the game. Dont make it about me.

maiden osprey
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I think the comment in question was trying to establish that what you believe to be objective truth is just an opinion, which I tend to agree with

calm sable
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Just have specialists give better yields, happiness over cap go further down, towns feed cities better, and cities scaling down on their food need.

It's a numbers game now. System is in place.

maiden osprey
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for what its worth I think towns are perfectly fine as they are

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I think the rest of that are good suggestions though

flint kayak
# jade leaf I brought up switzerland as an example of size of a tall empire. You used it to ...

Switzerland has 20th highest GDP in the world. Are you sure this is what you want to aim for? Yes it has a small, naturally defensible land. This is already very possible in the game. Settle near mountains and rivers and your land will be impossible to take.

You could also trade with 2 large threatening neighbours.

But this is not a win condition for a game like Civ. You could literally play like Switzerland right now and not win (well you probably would win because AI kinda bad). Its less optimal than playing wide, and for me that's realistic and hence reasonable to be implemented.

I think there will be some tweaks (they already mentioned the food yield curve) and i think food (or the lack of importance of it) is one of the main reasons that wide is so good right now. But that's not going to make the game something where playing under the settlement limit is ever optimal and for me nor should it

jade leaf
maiden osprey
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One of the X's stands for expansion

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you simply cannot make a game in this genre that makes generally not expansive gameplay fun/interesting/meta

jade leaf
maiden osprey
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you still do much better wide in stellaris than you do tall, and yes, I do play it

calm sable
# jade leaf Wide empires will always have more specialists than tall empires, so no that is ...

[Bot deleted my whole message after trying to edit]

• Specialists could scale exponentially instead of being flat bonus to incentivize tall cities instead of small wide ones.

• Happiness is the game penalty for going over the cap, logical enough for the entire dev team. They just gotta pump the numbers up a bit maybe.

• In civ7 context tall vs wide is having 3 cities with small towns around VS having 7 cities with no towns. Not having just 3 random settlements. (even irl this makes sense, england is great example of a small island with huge London being fed by colonies all around the globe). … it's hard to differentiate tall vs wide actually thinking about it now haha.

I am trying to solve the issue with already existing systems, this way it's likely to be implemented. Instead of trying to make them develop the game again. I thought of england as tall here but I guess the were the widest empire around.

flint kayak
# calm sable [Bot deleted my whole message after trying to edit] • Specialists could scale e...

They could just buff the existing policy/leader points that give bonuses to having 3 or fewer cities. That's what I consider tall to be in civ7. Few cities, lots of towns feeding them.

also, can i just say that this 5min slow mode is so annoying for conversations like this. Arvenstar is showing (by not having restrictions) how fast a discussion like this should look. Anyway i guess they dont want discussions here.

jade leaf
maiden osprey
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Yeah, except it suffers from the exact same problem you have here, which is that even in most of those strategies you still benefit more from going wide with them

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Which is the issue you have with this game

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You can play tall and be effective, however, if youre wanting to "maximize" as youve pointed out, you play wider

calm sable
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Stellaris is a completely different beast. With may I say vastly easier escapades. Civ has guidelines to follow, which is irl history, even if so lightly. Stellaris can just say "ok these worms get stronger by sticking together and eat themselves to grow" no questions asked.

Haven't played it I'll grant that but conceptually it's not much comparison.

jade leaf
# maiden osprey You can play tall and be effective, however, if youre wanting to "maximize" as y...

I have seen 15 star system empires tech rush and subjugate half a galaxy. Stellaris penalized wide empires. I watch rebellions constantly spring up. Youre just writing fiction over there. You can literally watch youtube timelapse videos of ai playing stellaris. The wider and empire gets, the faster it implodes. Where is that principle in this game? Its just all gas and no brakes.

edit: we’re really validating opinions about games from people who have never even played said games? Yea. I see what im dealing with here.

maiden osprey
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Personal anecdotes dont speak to objective truth

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Which is what I think has been pointed out already

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And Im speaking from my own experience

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Regardless, this thread and server is not about stellaris

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Refrain from making insulting comments like that in the future

calm sable
grand turtle
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I *loved * Civ5 and only *appreciated * Civ6, i guess it's telling a lot about how much i hate micro-managing a ton of cities. That being said i do think Civ7 is on the right track to balance both (because tall shouldn't be better than wide either, both should be viable).

Happiness penalty for going over-cap is good. It's an easily understandable concept and a powerful one. Negative happiness not only gives you % penalties to all your yields, positive one gives you celebrations to benefit from your government bonuses (those are quite large) and get more social policies. I don't think we need other penalties for going over the cap.

The issue with the settlement cap is that it's too easy to get a lot of happiness to ignore it (especially in later ages, not so much in Antiquity) and because the happiness penalty caps at 7 settlements over the cap, if you reach that point, nothing prevents you from having 50 settlements over the cap.

If they really want settlement cap to matter more they can add a revolt mechanism for settlement deep into unhappiness even outside the crises (the mechanisms already exist), just have it trigger with more unhappiness outside the crises but removing that penalty cap is the first step.

The food/growth curve makes it hard to grow really large cities which would make tall stronger but that can easily be addressed with simple numbers tweaking. If players need to stay within the settlement limit and can't have an unlimited number of town to feed their cities, then the choice of growing larger cities by concentrating the limited food supply or more smaller cities becomes more important.

Finally the gold cost of converting a town to a city is another number which can be tweaked if going wide is too strong/too easy.

No need to add more penalties for wide. Tweaking numbers is enough. The only real issue is infinite growth due to the cap in happiness penalties because mathematically you can't balance infinite with any number.

light canyon
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Increasing the penalty for going over the settlement limit from 35 to 40 and perhaps removing one of the +1 Settelement Limit in each age would be a nice first step.

If certain civs need more they can always be put in their dedicated civiv tree.

patent oxide
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there is already a solution in the game for going tall, its just super weak. There are attribvutes which give you extra stats, but even more stats when you have 3 or fewer cities.

wise wharf
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The issue with the building tall vs wide thing is that I very much don't think tall play should be "strong". Like ever.

Tall play should get some benefits to help it not fall excessively far behind wide, but that is it. Tall play is safe, we shouldn't be rewarding safe play. And I say this as someone who enjoys playing tall.

Winning while being tall is still very much possible in the single player aspect of the game, and that's the most important thing. If you think tall should be able to speed run victories or be competitive in multiplayer though? We're fundamentally going to disagree, sorry.

versed hatch
wise wharf
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That being said stuff like the games food scaling is currently too far out of wack and probably should be addressed

flint kayak
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Part of the problem with this is that Tall and Wide are not well defined and there's many different potential meanings. Does tall me only a few settlements, perhaps as many as 5 under the settlement limit. Does it mean only a few cities but lots of towns. Does wide mean lots of settlements or lots of cities? Does wide mean going over the settlement limit?

For me, Tall should be something like 2-3 (perhaps 5 in modern) cities, being fed by towns and playing at or near the settlement cap, and Wide is playing with probably 50% cities and being at or above the settlement cap most the time. And both of those 2 playstyles should be competitive and viable which currently they are not.

low raptor
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Happiness penalty for going over the settlement limit shouldn't cut off, perhaps. I would worry that it would frustrate military victories a bit, but by the time this is actually in play (modern) you don't even need to keep cities you capture to keep your legacy points. Antiquity has you going over by like 1-2 maybe, and you can fill the entire legacy path in explo with three settlements

thorny shoal
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Or more so that if you are below the limit you should get an advantage

flint kayak
thorny shoal
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To incentivize building a taller empire. It's an option they have to tweak it. You already get enough advantage for getting to the limit but none for trying to keep your empire small.

As of now, the only real reason to not settle as much as possible is because you might want to reserve some settlement limit for your opponent settlements you'll capture. It would give more interesting gameplay.

flint kayak
spring plume
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Tall in this game does mean something different, and can easily be fixed with good scaling. Going up to the settlement limit is basically mandatory

thorny shoal
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I guess I'm thinking of something that would provide an alternative to what the game's meta currently is which is spam settlements and cities. But yeah tall is less cities in this game I just want their to do be something of a bonus for playing more compact lending to something like Nepal's civic.

Tradition - Maitri Sanadhi: Increased Influence towards initiating Endeavors by a set percentage if you have the fewest Settlements; if you don't have the fewest Settlements, increase Influence by a smaller percentage.

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That being said, if taller is to be effective specialists need to be stronger before you get to ideologies in the modern age and maybe less punishing or better offset by having towns.

spring plume
hard leaf
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The settlement limit also offers some good levers for tall-specific play. I'd like to see policy cards or leader attributes along the lines of "+5% science for each settlement you are below your settlement limit". This makes it so settlement limit increases are still a good reward for tall empires!

There are the two leader attributes that empower specialists, and doubly so under 3 cities, but I think that's too specific of a setpoint.

I do agree that Civ7 has systems that should support tall well in the long term. But food scaling needs buffs and some more tall-focused support options need to be added.

wise wharf
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Just make sure that you're only supporting tall and not accidentally making it the dominant strategy

light canyon
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Dont we all pretty much play tall at the modern age? I dont think you reach the Settlement Limit unless you are actively conquering

flint kayak
analog falcon
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iirc civ 5 did a lot to artificially gate players from expanding and it's... not a lot of fun. being penalized for expanding seems at odds with a game about building an empire

feral tinsel
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Honestly I think the biggest issue with tall not feeling as rewarding is that the system that is in place to reward tall -> Happiness and celebrations and in that the policies; just doesn't actually reward enough. Like I really love playing tall and playing happiness oriented civs. But I still can't use all my unlocked policies - not even close - and I am in perma celebration mode but since my initial goal pivoted or I just build all available wonders I am (especially in the Antiquity age) just stuck with a useless culture boost. (Same is true for all other types of celebration).
I think one of the best things to do here is just change celebrations to a "whenever a new celebration would be triggered due to happiness extend current celebration by 10 turns and reward the policy slot." That way happiness would make you stack policy buffs like crazy and not doing that and going over the settlement limit is actually a tradeoff.

quasi pebble
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How bad is war weariness for wide vs tall? It seems like war weariness could be used to punish wide? Maybe going wide should be bad at gaining influence?
Maybe over settlement cap could incur an influence tax as well as a happiness tax

flint kayak
quasi pebble
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Oh so you just don't like the current implementation, but assuming they keep war weariness (negative war support) as is, my argument is that it would be a good lever for them to pull to balance wide vs tall.
I also like that peaceful wide is harder to stop than warmonger wide.

flint kayak
# quasi pebble Oh so you just don't like the current implementation, but assuming they keep war...

I don't like my cities getting massive unhappiness just because my enemy pumped in some influence into something. It doesn't make sense. My people should be sad because, for example, we're losing the war. So for me those things should be separated.

As for your point, i dont think war weariness would affect wide empires more than tall. Perhaps its easier to keep some of your tall settlements in positive happiness but having more settlements still means more yields even if they are reduced by some %.

quasi pebble
# flint kayak I don't like my cities getting massive unhappiness just because my enemy pumped ...

But more settlements also means the absolute cost of the war is higher for the bigger empire.

And also the happiness tax SHOULD hurt more because you should be on thinner ice in terms of happiness surplus.

If this isn't the case then that's a problem that should be looked at. As OP stated it might just be too easy for Wide to just out scale any problem with more yields.

As for your suggestion..I think your idea goes in the wrong direction in terms of lowering the complexity budget of mechanics in the game, the amount of extra rules and things to account for is not worth the added realism. This isn't EU4.

flint kayak
quasi pebble
# flint kayak "But more settlements also means the absolute cost of the war is higher for the ...

Civ 7 is more complicated in some areas so to avoid the total complexity budget of the game going up they have tuned down other areas. I think they have also tried to decrease the total complexity budget of the game because of the analysis paralysis in late game.

I also think 6 should not be a benchmark for design approach or what's the point in designing a new game. They can approach systems and mechanics in novel ways. I like they have toned down all the number crunching and integrated a bunch of fiddly mechanics with some load bearing mechanics that do a lot of the game work with way less unneeded complexity.

flint kayak
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I dont think 7 is more complicated than 6. Possibly its more complicated than vanilla 6 but if we include the DLC i dont think its close. Players can take complicated mechanics, especially if its under the hood and the general concepts like "too many cities = sad", "Too many war deaths = sad" are simple.

quasi pebble
flint kayak
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Getting a bit off track so perhaps lets leave it there. For me, simple is good when it makes sense. But simple for the sake of simple that also doesn't make a lot of sense is prime for a more complex rework.

low raptor
spring plume
# flint kayak war weariness is not really implemented. Its just war score I actually made a f...

i like the realism here in a sense but it makes the conqueror snowball too hard so it might be bad to include. The thing that the game should include for the sake of realism is making conquered settlements so much harder to control. Its to easy to keep a settlement you steal, and in real life that included constant rebellions and rarely would give anything equivalent to science and culture. these settlements should generate tons of rebellions. if we did this we could add the war score i think and it would be more fair

flint kayak
quasi pebble
# flint kayak i've had lots of comments like this (back in the original reddit thread as well)...

War weariness hits you harder if you have more settlements (the happiness penalty is PER settlement, and it hits your non founded settlements even harder) so I'm not sure what you mean by it does "absolutely nothing". Maybe you mean it doesn't do enough to outscale the bigger empire having more yeilds? But in a vacuum, the mechanic definitely...100%.. hurts bigger/warmonger empires more. That's how the penalty is designed.

Or in other words -- If I'm doing the same yeilds as you in half as many settlements, war weariness will knock you harder than it knocks me.

I don't think war weariness is meant to make big empires prohibitively expensive to do war with but it just costs them more in absolute terms than a smaller empire. That's in of itself kinda of a catch up mechanic for smaller empires (especially those not wrapped up in the war) to close the gap.

floral ibex
flint kayak
# quasi pebble War weariness hits you harder if you have more settlements (the happiness penalt...

It’s ‘absolutely nothing’ because it’s very easy to negate the opponents war score and as I said War score is the only source of weariness. Larger empires are hit with more unhappiness but it’s relative to the number of settlements so proportionally it’s the same and in reality wide empires do not suffer more. Tall may even suffer more as specialists have happiness maintenance . It doesn’t behave how you have described in real games.

I would encourage you to test these things because it sounds like you would be surprised!

quasi pebble
# flint kayak It’s ‘absolutely nothing’ because it’s very easy to negate the opponents war sco...

  1. In terms of "absolute cost" (total amount of resources you are losing) - war weariness costs larger empires more. Fact. The happiness penaly applies "per settlement". I'm talking "apples to apples" comparisons. Not taking into account different ways you might feel obligated to plan your empire because you've gone over the cap. That requirement to adapt is in of itself a cost.

  2. You are correct, in terms of the current game balance, you can out-scale this. That is what I'm suggesting is looked at. I'm not talking about current game balance I'm talking about the ideal outcome @low raptor put it well - "influence being inversely related to empire size". I was directly talking about War Weariness but really it could just touch the entire influence system as a whole.

  3. Your comment about cities getting hurt more, that applies whether you're going over your settlement cap or not. But a "Tall" player that is under their settlement cap and doesn't also have up to 35 happiness worth of penalities to deal with has more of a "buffer" to use to deploy specialists, versus a "Wide" player that might ALSO want to be placin specialists. It's not like a player who is massively over their settlement cap doesn't also want to place specialists.

flint kayak
# quasi pebble 1. In terms of "absolute cost" (total amount of resources you are losing) - war ...

"In terms of "absolute cost" (total amount of resources you are losing) - war weariness costs larger empires more. Fact."

this is incorrect. You don't "Lose more", you "gain less", which is distinctly different. Happiness below 0 is a negative yield modifier. But getting 'some yields' is still more than getting '0 yields' which you would get if you didnt have the settlement in the first place.

quasi pebble
# flint kayak "In terms of "absolute cost" (total amount of resources you are losing) - war we...

If I converted the amount of income that a wide player lost due to having war weariness, vs not having war weariness, into Gold. That Gold amount would be higher than if I did the same for a tall player would it not?

Not as a % of their total income. Just as an absolute value.

  • oh and also not assuming the wide player is massively compensating for their happiness needs by having a massive happiness surplus that the tall player might not have (because they don't need to pay an extra 35 per turn). Basically an apples to apples comparison between "more settlements" vs "less settlements" without adding a bunch of other variables.
flint kayak
# quasi pebble If I converted the amount of income that a wide player lost due to having war we...

in your very specific example, maybe. But if one player is losing 50/1000 gold and the other is losing 25/100 gold, surely % matters more than absolute. I would encourage you to test the question you ask.

It seems you are defining wide as playing 5+ settlements over the settlement cap which is a bit odd.

In ANY CASE, the whole point i'm making is that war weariness doesnt make sense, doesnt really do anything in most situations (because its trivially easy to negate) and certainly doesn't stop warmongering the way that some suggest that it might (probably based on playing Civ6 and thinking its the same).

quasi pebble
# flint kayak in your very specific example, maybe. But if one player is losing 50/1000 gold a...

Well... if you're under your settlement limit then you're basically playing "bad" like there's no mechanic that rewards you for being below the cap. (I suppose you didn't have to pay for a settler...? lol)
So I would think "wide" is over the limit, maybe not 5+ over, sure, you could be 1/2/3/4 over and that would be the same logic, just a lower tax.

The fact it's trivially easy to negate is, I can't believe how many times I have to say this, is the whole point of my argument.
It would be less trivial if "influence was inversely related to empire size" - aka perhaps you have less influence income than a tall player.
I appreciate this is currently not the case.

Is that not an idea worth looking at?

flint kayak
quasi pebble
# flint kayak "The fact it's trivially easy to negate is, I can't believe how many times I hav...

I think I might not understand what you mean by it being trivial...?

Say you have -4 war weariness as a wide empire, does this matter to you or not?
I figured it would...?? Upwards of 12 hapiness penalty per settlement, not even taking into account the combat penalty

When you say it's trivial to negate, do you mean because you can just "war support back" to cancel out the penalty? or do you mean you don't care how much war weariness you have?

flint kayak
quasi pebble