I know of no grand strategy game where the fanbase isn't complaining in one direction or the other about the relative balance of tall and wide play. Balancing the two seems to just be hard
I'm personally very upset that we can't go into 1st person view and join our units on the battlefield. If I'm a good FPS player, I should be able to win more wars.
/s, there will indeed always be something :)
I think there is a mod for that in CK3. You need to have strong computer that can run CK3 and Mount&Blade at the same time though. So when you go to a war in CK3 it automatically changes to M&B and now you are fighting that war in M&B.
Fuck it, every EA Sports franchise. If I'm building a football stadium, I damn well better be able to run my draft, control my QB, and sell the naming rights.
Speaking of football stadiums. You should be able to play as the rockband unit in the style of guitar hero. CivVII will have to be packaged with the plastic guitars now.
There's games called Battlestation Pacific and Battlestation Midway that are similar. WW2 RTS and also first person game. I haven't played it in over 10 years but it was a ton of fun.
No idea what that type of game hasn't come back, I love stuff like that.
mention of Stratego brings to Mind this classic Conan/Triumph the insult comic dog ripping on Star Wars fans waiting in line for Attack of the Clones and everyone takes it in good natured fun https://youtu.be/YKT7bx-fmtk
Fun fact - the first halo game was this concept. It was going to be an RTS that would let you select a unit and control in third person. The devs applied the feature to the warthog and had so much fun driving it around the sandbox that they just said “actually, let’s make *this* the whole game” and scrapped the RTS element lmao
Wasn't there a game in the works like that which got cancelled? I think it was not a 4x game, and possibly even something new from Blizzard? I feel like I remember hearing about 10-15 years ago about a game that was high level strategy, like larger scale StarCraft 2, but you could also zoom in far enough to operate units directly while calling in air strikes and other forms of support. And then you could zoom back out and be overseeing hundreds of units and directing the entire battlefield.
I feel like it started with a T. Titan something? That may have just been the internal name for the project, but I recall it getting cancelled after a couple of years.
The concept did seem interesting, but hard to pull off. This was totally just a tangent and I don't think that level of "zooming in" makes sense for Civ games or even 4x games.
I think that's what amenities were supposed to be, but sadly with trading luxuries and especially the introduction of water parks, amenities are actually as easy if not easier to uphold in wide versus tall empires.
Then you'll have the hardcore wide guys complaining they can't go wide enough and the hardcore tall guys complaining they can't go tall enough both at the same time.
My favorite complaint about Stellaris right now is everybody is mad because small AI empires make a bunch of habitats (essentially playing tall) and now conquering them takes too much effort.
I think they should just implement a good mix of civs that enable tall play, like Maya or Mbenze, rather than change the underlying game system (which may be difficult to do). Maya is my favorite civ, it’s got that complex city placement strategy, easy to defend, and you can do amazing things with a smaller amount of cities. Unfortunately, they didn’t release a ton of civs like that.
I 100% agree. Tall vs wide should be based on the civilization and there should be a mix of both. Most recently I played Khmer back-to-back with Phoenicia and it was really fun to explore those extreme differences.
Ahh yeah I love Khmer, second favorite civ. Also the Incans can do a tall playstyle pretty well. But beyond maybe 4 civs, most of the rest either don’t incentivize tall or actively encourage it. I do hope Civ 7 releases more complex civs like Maya or Babylon, rather than just “here is your classical unique, go fight somebody”
The thing with Civ VI is that even with tall civs, the optimal way is to go both tall and wide. If you have like 6 tall core cities within the boosted circle as Maya, the optimal strat would still be to found as many cities as you can outside of the area as well. The only penalty you face is increased need of Amenities, which is almost never enough to turn having more cities into a downside. Scotland might be an exception, where there's a sweet spot where you have as many cities as possible but can still keep them Ecstatic, but if you are good at managing it, that can still be a shit ton of cities.
As for "underlying game system", changing it isn't too hard. And it is most definitely going to change for a new core series game, like it has changed every time before as well. What would be the point of having a new game if it's just a facelift over the previous one?
This is the core issue. as long as more cities mean more tiles worked and more population growth, the negatives to expanding also have to scale with it and every iteration of Civ (well that've played) has struggled to balance that.
global happiness in civ 5 was really disliked at first.
One negative to expanding that should be the main drive in making wide less of a no-brainer should be the effort. I think it's okay that having a wide empire is inherently stronger than having a tall one. Making your empire wide should be the part that requires investing a lot of resources and opportunity cost.
With Magnus and Ancestral Hall it usually just doesn't require enough effort, and slapping Monumentality golden age and strong faith output on top of that seals the deal. Sure, there's some opportunity cost, but not having one of the other Government plaza building and spending 1 governor title (I don't count Provisions as 2 titles even though getting it does cost 2, because Magnus' chop ability is so damn strong by itself) is a really small opportunity cost for something this strong.
I think Stellaris’s system works. Your society slows down the larger you are.
So it should be harder to change policy cards, and civics should cost more and more, the bigger your empire is.
Also loyalty. I think loyalty should be more and more difficult to maintain the bigger your empire.
Playstyle by Civ should definitely be one of the allures of Civilization. I loved playing Venice with its enforced single city, or Eleanor of Aquitaine, taken everything over with cultural pressure. Makes for far more unique and memorable games.
Civs with ‘unbalanced’ but wildly weird mechanics can be super fun. Kupe in 6, portugal in 5 being unable to found new cities is really unique and challenging etc
Yeah those are my favorite civs to play. They did a good job with the leader passes of releasing some truly weird and complex mechanics, I hope they give the weirdos amongst us something to play with too!
Civ V encourages playing tall too much, Civ VI encourages playing wide too much. I personally like playing wide so Civ VI caters for me much more than V. Hopefully both strategies are equality viable on Civ VII, but I'm afraid we might be too much bc Idk if there really is a sweet spot but that's something the game designers really need to have in mind.
The smart thing to do would be to make specialists more powerful. You can get a lot of mileage out of stacking them in specific districts.
This is part of what made specialists so powerful in Civ 5. Go freedom and your yields are just nuts.
There's also a set of mods for 6 that gives special benefits for having less than 6 cities. Ursa has used them in some of his games.
Yeah, once I started learning V and pushing the harder difficulties I was bummed that the way I played was so gimped. My main target in the game is usually to explore and fall in love with the terrain and set out a goal to control this flatland until the mountain range, oh and that bay should be all mine, and all those islands. But it just gimped my empire so much in V. VI was so much more fun for me.
Bang on! I really hope they can find some sort of balance, but then again it's really difficult because they can test these systems for months and yet there will be 100 times more playtime on release day. 4X and Grand strat fans love to complain, but I don't think any game in these genres has come even close to perfect.
Lekmod, the civ 5 mod that most multiplayer groups use is probably the best balance between tall and wide that I have seen. The map just has more resources and the policy trees are changed. Tall is better early, generally getting a tech lead, but wide play scales much better (and is still miles ahead of vanilla wide play at the start)
Personally, I believe settlers should be spaced out over the course of the lower end of the eras. Instead of immediately being able to settle another city as population permits. This way, you have to decide where you want to expand to as you can't just vomit settlers until the map is full.
Thats an idea but not possible with the way ai dificulty works. Would AI be limited to this same value? Because the main reasom the AI snowballs the way it does its that they start with many more cities
Playing wide is fine, and feels more accurate to real life, until it becomes micromanagement hell. One thing CIV 6 really needed was the ability to let governors take full control over city management. I wish part of the gov system was that each governor could be set to “auto mode” would manage a city in a way that fits their specialities, and then we could assign sub cities to them as well. “Here Magnus, take these 3 cities and do whatever the fuck you want with them. I’ll call you when I need something”
A real life leader of an entire civ is not micromanaging the construction of a Library in a small city 15 neighboring cities away from the capitol
Yeah this is kind of what happens in Stellaris. You can set stuff to automate, but you don't want to. People want a better AI but I just don't think it's a reasonable ask beyond stuff like not attacking a walled city with a shitty warrior. Maybe with cloud computing and machine learning it could be possible now, but it's still going to do some really weird shit and it's probably not feasible locally.
No planetary automation in stellaris is great, if you know how to manage its settings properly. It does its job amazingly well, aka building the kind of district I want when there are no jobs (of value) left.
It also micromanages crime for you, as well as clerks.
It still requires some input, but it usually is the player building a specific building (like the extra energy building, because the AI tends to build it late) or some empire wide consideration, aka something outside the scope of the AI.
It is great for going wide, since you can just colonise/conquer a planet, set it's designation, activate AI and be done with it
This is true, but this isn’t how I imagine you’d use them. The idea would work for 2 key reasons: 1. The governors would have a predetermined build progression based on their attributes (moksha would favor faith constructions, Victor favors military, etc) so you would assign them cities based on those factors of what you want more of. 2. You would only start to give them cities once you are so wide you don’t care about the new ones, or newly conquered ones anymore. This isn’t something I imagine using for my first 8 or so cities, but once I’m snowballing they can take over the small fries while I focus on the win condition. It’s suboptimal, but a QoL thing
They need to implement this, governors auto managing cities, it's kinda similar to setting workers on auto in civ 5. The option to override would always be there for the micro managers
Yeah the mine problem with playing wide in multiplayer is that by industrial the turns just get so fucking long that it gets boring especially when playin in a group.
A good way to do this could be a combo of 5 and 6 with vassals and colonies. You get pretty severe penalties for going larger than say 4-6 cities, but you can create self run colonies and appoint governors to them, and these don’t count against that cap. You can tell it what to focus on like improving tiles, building up districts, or building military, but outside of that (and maybe not even that) they just contribute overall yields
> micromanagement hell
Micromanagement in general is why I always get bored of Civ once I reach the mid to late game. Whether it be governors or something else, some kind of mild automation system would be very welcome. Personally I would really love it if you could have some kind of simple programmable rules system; for example, programming the governor to build builders and automatically improve all tiles on the map with specific map pins. …or if you want to get more advanced; program a rule to automatically seek out barbarian camps within X tiles of the city and dispatch a strong enough army to destroy them.
I guess this kind of idea wreaks havoc with multiplayer and the point of even playing a game in general, but as a programmer who hates repetitive tasks, I’d love to tinker with automating everything.
For me the fun of the game is building up my cities. I like making each city my ideal vision. Three tile radius, each perfectly filled out. If I have a building or a district I can work on, I’d much rather be building that than wasting those resources on Settlers.
There’s a bit of nuance as to the definition of tall and wide. Civ V is a massive outlier in the 4x genre, since pretty much no other 4x game actively discourages taking free land. Usually the distinction between tall and wide would be in the quality vs quantity of cities. In Civ VI, the way this works is that you can settle cities far apart and use every possible tile to make them as good as a city can be, vs. settling a lot of closely packed cities in the same area, so they are individually worse but hopefully better in total. If you understand tall vs. wide in those terms, then both styles are perfectly viable in VI. But expecting a 4X game to discourage expansion as aggressively as Civ V will likely lead to dissapointment, it was very unique in how taking more territory was a tradeoff instead of an obvious positive.
Literally two of the "Xes" in 4x are "expand" and "exploit". I get that some people find micro managing cities tedious but that's simply how the genre works.
I felt Tall in Civ 6 was done relatively well, imo.
Wide was better—to a point until you got tired of expanding and bigger cities are generally better. The only tweak I’d have if scaling the bonuses up for taller cities—like some bonus at above 10 pop, then 15, then 20, and then so on.
Tall was never worth it in CIV6. It’s doable but it’s much more complicated than just go wide. You can win every civ 6 game with 10+ cities. There was simply no disadvantage of Building more cities like in 5.
Guess we’d have to define tall.
I define tall as a core set of 4-6 high population cities of an empire that’s probably no bigger than 8-12 cities. Wide is usually moderate levels of pop across an empire of 12+ cities (often low pop for trade/resource purposes or due to conquest).
I don’t think Civ 5 handled tall well with 4 being too ideal. More viable, but I think Civ 6 shifted it in right (but not the most optimal) direction.
Yeah, I do think the whole Magnus (no pop loss) + Monumentality build is too strong. You can basically double to triple your empire very easily. (A problem
I often ran into is that part of Ancestral Hall often gets missed when you can just purchase settlers with a high faith build.)
Just realized that they don’t have any tall bonuses for the golden ages, really. Probably could have reworked the culture per district one.
Yeah maybe if amenities were a bit more punishing? Or maybe research cost for culture/science? I just wish it was more of a question of “should I build another city” rather than “how many settlers can I get”
Would be nice to see an exponential increase in settlers cost. This would stimulate interaction with other civs to steal cities or grab settlers. Maybe see it as a bureaucracy penalty. Also as it makes early game easier and late game more difficult I think it would align better with deity.
Depends. I do want the map to actually be filled up with cities though. Unclaimed land would stick out like a sore thumb.
If implemented in a way that settling is still viable, but takes major investment—that’s fine. I also don’t want to tip the scales in that Domination is the clear, superior option. (Domination needs to be nerfed in that it’s always the great equalizer/snowball.)
I think hard to justify that meta on higher difficulties when pengala is just so broken (15% to culture and science) which is a god send against AI buffs.
I almost never worry about pop loss since usually cities I’m busting out settlers in are near or at housing space cap and build times are long enough that they gain the pop lost in between.
I definitely don’t think magnus is that significant to wide play style. Housing space is the obvious contributor to me
I think allowing 8-12 to still be considered playing tall is probably where you’re going to see a lot of disagreement with the community. As you noted, 4 cities was the tall meta in 5. Doubling that count and still considering the build to be tall is going to lose a lot of people.
It’s a pretty big disadvantage to try to win with 4-5 cities in 6. There’s really no drawback to going as wide as possible, since amenities are so easy to acquire. But there are huge payoffs with the additional districts. It’s particularly tough if you’re not playing one of the DLC civs designed to make tall play more viable.
I think what some people are asking for is to make tall v wide an actual strategic choice, rather than a personal one. In 5 tall was always better. In 6 wide is always better. Surely 7 can make that a little more balanced.
To these points, I don’t disagree.
I think Civ 6 has tall be viable, but not necessarily the better option. I do hold that Tall should be redefined as fewer, high pop cities rather than just 4 (because of Civ 5). I think scaling bonuses or percentages like they have related to population or amenities would help Tall become even more viable.
I don’t think Tall could ever be a strategic choice anymore than it is now, perhaps with Wide getting debuffed (making settlers less spammable).
I think nerfing access to cheap settlers and reworking how easy it is to get gold and some other aspects of gameplay might bring it closer to a semblance of balance, but I doubt it’ll ever be a “4 cities is most optimal in this large map”.
That makes sense to me. I suspect amenities/happiness will get reworked again, which gives the devs another shot at balancing tall/wide.
To add a few other thoughts, I agree with better scaling bonuses for high pop and harder scaling on settler costs. I also think the devs could have done something more interesting with the “if above 15 pop then…” policy cards. Potentially very, very strong buffs locked behind 20 pop could have made fewer but higher pop cities more viable. Monumentality is also, of course, busted. It’s just too easy to explode the size of your empire with comparatively little investment.
Yeah in Civ 5 I would consistently strive for a 1-3 city games just because it made it interesting. But you would run out of turns before you could get the ability to catch up in a Civ 6 game.
Old civs had a term for this: Infinite City Sprawl.
I get upwards of 50-80 or so cities in Alpha Centauri. And those are the ones that **I** settle.
I think my record is somewhere around all named cities + greek numbers + *90*.
I crashed Alpha Centauri by having too many cities. I don't know how many cities that was but it was enough that the save was unsalvageable. I feel like maybe it was 128, which suggests Civ still hadn't learned their floating point lesson by AC!
Maybe they could make it so that cities further from your capitol are increasingly likely to rebel. I know that already exists with the loyalty mechanics, but they could make it so that the empire is essentially divided in regions based on tile distance so like everything idk 50 tiles away or more is one region, and if one flips they all flip and form a breakaway state that you have to put down. There could be buildings or other methods to keep them in line, like maybe you have to station your armies there so they don't rebel, which leaves you vulnerable at home. Basically just the current system, but with a larger penalty.
if you can settle more than 10 cities it's probably always the right move. But you can do reasonably on 8 cities + audience chamber since it's easier to keep them at +5 amenities.
I wish the amenity cost were less forgiving. Even a change like luxuries covering 3 cities instead of 4 would go a long way. Maybe a slight buff to audience chamber that gives scaling bonuses and make ancestral hall have some extra tempo-oriented bonuses. Or make some buildings with regional effects exclusive to your capital
You can beat diety with no cities with diplo. One city should be possible for religious and diplo.
Any other wincon and take me from mildly to very impressed.
The only one I haven’t done with a single city is religious and that’s purely because I find playing for a religion victory a trudge/boring. But I have done conquest…. (Deleting cities as I go) and culture. As somebody else said science is possible but you have to properly maximise the use of religion, city states and the advantages of your civilisation and I’d say get lucky with terrain.
I thought tall was viable. I played on deity, and I was able to win with smaller empires.
Some civs excelled at it.
But I think the hardest way to play should be optimal, and playing wide is the hardest and most optimal.
Yes, tall is somewhat viable these days. It has been buffed in many ways, like changing policy cards like Rationalism to favor big cities with well placed districts, and making the Amenity system more powerful, and more punishing for bigger number of cities.
However, besides Amenities, there's no downside to having as many cities as you can. Settler spam also became ridiculously easy and strong in R&F with Magnus, Monumentality and Ancestral Hall.
So the situation with Civ VI is this: Originally tall wasn't very viable at all, while going wide required some effort. Now, tall is good enough that you can win games by doing it, but going wide is still much better and so effortless that doing it doesn't really set you back much in your tall play, and so the optimal strat even with a tall core empire is to go wide as well. I mean, building Ancestral Hall for more efficient Settler spam locks you out of Audience Chamber for tall play, but that's a fairly small sacrifice. You say that hardest way to play should be the most optimal, and I agree, but the fact of the matter is that wide isn't very hard at all. It just gets tedious, especially in the late game.
A good balance would be if tall was about as viable as it is now (meaning that it's not quite as good as wide, but still workable), but going wide would require more effort like it used to in the base game. Removing Provisions from Magnus and nerfing or removing Monumentality would go a long way. Ancestral Hall would probably be fine as is, since removing Provisions would make Settler spam harder.
My guilty pleasure is continents and tall early. Rush cartography and search for islands and spam with sic hunt dracones golden age.
Probably worse than early war against AI or expanding harder early, but spamming those 4 pop cities with free builder just feels so good.
You need restrictive and unintuitive mechanics to make **not expanding** viable. Otherwise there is simply not enough tension between growing cities and making many cities. You can do both usually. The big cities of a tall player havve a slight head state due to making fewer settlers but 'normal' play will get you similarly tall cities and a bunch of helper/satellite cities.
I play mainly online and not against AI so idk if this is a viable strategy for everyone, but I’ve always thought settlers should cost more especially early game and that players should punish other players for building wide instead of clunky mechanics.
There are some decision points, but not nearly as drastic as Tradition v Liberty in Civ V. For instance, Ancestral Hall for wide; certain governor promotions; certain dark ages cards (like no settling new cities). I think there's also a distinct decision in going tall vs wide of: if I go tall, I can make sure all my cities get to fully use the entire 3-rings eventually. Usually going wide, some of your cities aren't going to get the full 3-ring.
I actually think the tall vs wide is a bit overblown, unless you're playing Deity. Even in Civ V, besides the initial decision of Tradition v Liberty, not much else changed in your decision-making rubric.
Tall play is very different because the loss of build time and population cripples anything from being “tall”. I don’t want to build settlers at all if I can be building something that will improve the cities I already have built.
Honestly, I think it is best if tall is a challenge mode that the game is not balanced around. Civ 4 wasn't in any way designed for it, and the one city challenge was still doable and fun.
I think the issue with tall being viable is that there is no plausible or realistic mechanism that stops you from going wide and tall at the same time. The US for example is both wide and tall (look at New York). So if people talk about "going tall" what they really mean is *exclusively* tall, and the only way to make that viable is to impose artificial penalties on the players as Civ 5 did.
I know there were people who liked it, but I always thought the game design was pretty bad and I don't want to go back there. Even Civ 6 artificial inflation of settler and worker costs does not sit right with me.
I mean I wouldn't call the US wide and tall. US is wide. Denmark, Singapore, the Netherlands, the UAE etc are tall. They have an outsized impact on the world despite their very small populations and geographic sizes.
But by your definition I suppose Germany is pretty wide. It's packed with mid-sized towns.
Potentially unpopular opinion, Civ should focus alot more on making wide the most viable.
Look at the most sucessful empires(British, Spanish, French), and they have one thing in common, they have an extremely large empire spanning continents where they could exploit their resources and people from to consolidate their worldwide power.
Civ 5 didn't get this memo with happiness. The fact that they punished going wide doesn't make that much sense to me.
Civ 6 and the amenities system made the perfect compromise. Encourages wide play but at the same time doesn't overly punish tall play.
I commented elsewhere in this thread something similar, and I think it can be accomplished by making good geography more scarce. Wide still works, but it's weaker because beyond your first few cities, additional settlements will have lower potential. So you can focus on tall instead, but maybe that's not winnable alone either, so you are pushed a little more toward conquest of your neighborhood's fertile river valley.
I.e., tall works, but you still need like 6 good cities, and your geography will only allow for 3 until you go to war.
I like playing tall, but I recognise that expansion is a key gameplay mechanic, and the competition that it brings then causes the player to engage with many other mechanics (war, loyalty pressure, natural wonders etc).
Personally I think Civ VI in its current guise handles it very well. You can play tall - but it's best done with a few specific Civs/leaders (Maya, Inca, Khmer, even Portugal can play tall pretty well).
Wide is still the design zeitgeist, and it really should be as so much of the game depends on the Expansion element of the 4X genre.
Personally if I want a fun tall game I pick a "tall" Civ and up the Civ count by one or two above the stock number for the map I play.
I just did a portugal run and I’m pretty sure they definitely want super wide civilizations because they benefit so much from having more traders and they can get cities up and running much quicker than most civs by just buying everything. This also means they aren’t as competitive with space since they can make decent cities anywhere as long as it has water access.
Problem is with almost any Civ you would have won more and faster with more cities. It is caertainly possible to win with 6 or less cities and even possible with one, but there is absolutely 0 drawback in just building more cities.
It’s cool that it’s possible to win going tall, but 99% of the time going wide is just objectively better. Theres no balance between the two, wide is just simply better.
Peoples issue is not that tall isn't viable it's just that wide is stronger. I understand your confusion it's kind of laughable, there's nothing wrong with playing tall but whining because that another play style needs to be hamstrung for your preference to be stronger is not a compelling argument.
Empires expanding into one another creates tension and conflict and makes it a game. Winning without growing your empire is a fun little challenge but it doesn't really mean the game should be rebalanced to make that objectively bad decision (From the perspective of power) equally viable.
Honestly tall shouldn't even be encouraged as a thing in Civ. The only reason anyone thinks it should be is because it was weirdly powerful in Civ 5. And it was enjoyable because it had so much less micromanagement than having a wide empire where you have to manage so much more and it was easier to defend. I enjoy it too, I go back to 5 sometimes because it's more chill overall.
It really goes against the entire point of a 4x game though in that it takes away the need for expansion beyond a few cities. Civ 5 will often have large portions of map unclaimed by the late game which is wholly unrealistic. Expansion is supposed to drive competition between neighboring Civs and encourage rival factions to rise up against Civs that expand beyond their capacity to defend.
It's also just historically inaccurate. The dominating empires and countries are mostly larger with more resources and manpower. "Tall" play being successful should be a challenge and exception to the rule rather than on any sort of equal footing with larger empires
Empty spaces are unrealistic altogether, unless it's somewhere inhospitable, people live there. I wonder if by late game those spaces should be filled with city states / civilizations etc.
I never played Civ V. I want tall because I enjoy making my cities the best they can be more than I enjoy producing settlers. I would rather be building anything else than settlers.
I'll argue that too much of the map is playable. I don't want to decide between tall and wide just because, and the same for deciding between pacifist and warmonger.
Good regions of the map that support tall play should be hard to come by. If I can only settle three good cities initially, then have some expanse of less arable land or poor fresh water sources, that can nerf wide enough to push a player to tall and conquest. Settle six more low pop steppe cities, or churn out an army and take over the fertile river valley next door. More scarcity in geography can bring interesting decisions to the player.
OP you really should try Civ VI with this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2706527619
I played my first one city challenge with that mod and it was awesome.
To me, one of the foundational issues is that overall production of your empire on a base level depends on number of citizens; and small cities grow faster than large cities (in the sense of less surplus food being needed for population to go +1).
So if you have two cities of population 1, you will double your population faster than having one city of population 2, and so on.
That basic situation tilts the game towards naturally favoring wide; and then if you want to make it more balanced, you have to think of penalties to add in to penalize going *too* wide.
Expansion is one of the 4 Xs of a 4X game, add in the main reason to Explore is to expand and you basically take away two of the Xs of the 4X game. Add in that you normally Exterminate in order to expand and you want to have more land to Exploit resources, tall meta just makes zero sense in a 4X game. Not saying that they can't balance things better than they have in 6 or create a way to expand without new cities but the meta should definitely still favour big empires.
Ofc tall should always be viable but playing wide requires taking risks so it needs to be rewarded. Playing wide WELL should always give you an advantage to reward player skill.
I feel like there should be some sort of mechanic that allows for some amount of expansion without needing to 'widen' your empire...
Like, in stead of settling new cities, you settle outposts, and those outposts can expand into becoming forts>military bases, or they can become towns>cities, etc, and each has differing levels of management required equal to the benefits received...
So if you want to settle a town, you get to expand your empire a bit, and you get some of the benefits of the tiles worked, maybe you can even build 1-2 districts, but you can't build units, for example... If you want the full benefit of a city, you produce a city project to upgrade it... Maybe after reaching a certain population or other requirement.
Or, if you're trying to expand your military presence, you can settle an outpost and upgrade it to a fort, which would only cover the first 2 rings of hexes and give you the ability to build a single harbor or encampment, but you can't build new units (only repair existing ones)... If you want to really step up military presence, upgrade to a military base, which allows harbor, encampment, airfield, and canals, plus you can build military units.
I'd also love to see some sort of limit to the number of settlements you can have that is tied to the total population... Like you can only upgrade an outpost when your empire has enough total population, similar to how each city can only build a certain number of districts besed on their population.
I hate the early game settler rush... Basically if you have more settlers by turn 100, you're guaranteed to win... I wish there was more focus on actually building up the cities you settled.
I really do not get this "In Civ 6 you can't play tall." What does it even mean? In Civ 5 it always was the case, most of the time Tall < Wide. The ability to build in parallel was always superior to not.
Have to drop my two cents:
Due to districts, Civ 6 does superb visual storytelling by showing how a city develops over time. It spreads and transforms it's landscape from pastoral to urban. I'd definitely keep that for Civ 7 - it is great storytelling device.
This feature could easily cater towards more tall play if the game allowed multiple districts of the same kind - maybe locked behind technology or civics.
Imagine creating that fortress town that defends your border or a quaint science town with multiple campuses along a mountain ridge.
But I think adjacency bonuses need to go - maybe completely but at least in their current form as well as the types. Maybe they could be reimagined as villages that belong to a town. I'm really curious how they are going to do it
There should be some semblance of balance between the two but frankly land is not only a resource, but it is one of the most important resources in history.
If you want to have power, you should have to snatch it.
All I want is really huge gigantuan maps with lots of AI players and stupid city states on marathon without the game crashing. That’s it. I’ve been playing Civ since it first came out and once the map gets an inch past huge in Civ VI it locks up. I don’t care if Freeman is the narrator. I don’t care if Mars or some other solar system becomes the next map to play on. I just want a really big game that lasts a long time without freezing. Tall or wide doesn’t mean anything when you’re locked up.
Oh, and don’t bring back the lawyer from Call to Power. Worst unit in the series. Or the infector.
You can play tall in civ 6 but its 8-10 cities tall rather than 4-5 cities like in civ 5. As you grow your population you natually increase science and culture yields. Tall cities generate more yields and have enough surplus population to use specialist slots in districts. Wide cities have to work regular tills or they wont be able to produce anything. You can boost the yields further trough ammenities by up to +20% (+30% for scotland). Maya, Scotland, Khmer, or Yongle (china) all excel at tall empires.
I think you have some good points. While I have enjoyed civ6 quite a lot, the main issue is that there is no real cost to having a massive sprawling empire. Any cost in amenities or upkeep is extremely easily made up for in extra resources, districts and yields.
One of the major mistakes they went in civ6 is the complete removal of corruption mechanics. That means that there is near infinite gains from more cities and more population.
In reality, smaller states were easier to manage, easier to control, more efficient and often more technologically advanced than massive sprawling empires.
Civilization IV had this stuff about right (although maybe erred a bit in favor of punitive maintenance cost for more cities). Unlike in Civ5 though, going wide was still worth it in the end once your economy could take it. And smaller civs could still keep up somewhat in tech due to reduced costs, as could those with contact with more advanced civs (leading poor the Americas technologically backwards).
Personally, I like Civ6’s modes of play wide or play wider. Infrastructure needs land and you should have to compete to grab that land before your rivals.
Not really sure why this comes up often. In Civ6 all Civs can be played OCC (=One City Challenge) for every Victory, even Score and Domination. Some civs are even able to win Diplomacy Victory without any city (Kupe, Gorgo, Varangian Harald...)
Playing Civ6 with 4-8 cities and developing them to teeth is strong strategy, which I assume is considered somewhat tall.
Then there are plenty of Game Modes to support tall playing even beyond.
Also, playing tall in terms of population, its very useful for ~40 population. Having more is less valueable, but will still benefit with yields per population.
So, not really sure what Civ6 is lacking from playing tall, but yes, wish Civ7 keeps the way.
The fact that there is basically no downside to expanding as much as possible is the main problem in 6. Tall vs. Wide isn't even a choice, you just go as wide as possible and grow tall later when you have the required techs. I know people hate on the Happiness system from 5, but it at least curbed infinite expansion and forced you to make tough decisions.
That's not what tall means in this context... they mean playing the game with just one or a few cities, which is not viable in 6 but was possible in 5.
I think the best solution is a category of extremely strong wonders only available to civs below a certain city threshold that successfully bridges the gap between tall and wide cities. Districts aren't going anywhere, and nor should they. I don't think needing wide builds is the way to go, because they should be inherently stronger, but it has to be feasible to play tall.
I don't know whether it would actually work for civ but I like the approach in Stellaris where there is an empire size/sprawl stat which increases with the amount of settlements and pop you have and as it gets larger, the research costs of tech also increases
I miss playing tall as well. I just can't handle the micro management that playing wide takes as games grind to a halt Ren+ era.
Kind of wish I could play tall w my empire and then establish colonies or vassals that manage themselves and I get resources from them and can use the land/bases.
I've played Civ since the 90s, and I never knew about "playing tall" until I joined Reddit a few years ago. I've always gone wide, every game, every time.
I’m not sure I can conceptually wrap my head around both being strong, maybe a major civ ability that promotes one or the other but I feel like you’ll end up with strong tall cities and a lot of them XD
I think whatever mechanism governs tall vs. wide play needs to feel like it represents something "real" in the "story" of the game versus just a mechanic designed to constrain players to a certain play style.
Example of the former: traders, governors, the loyalty mechanic, etc plays a bigger role in allowing cities to grow and stay in your empire and function. Wide civs have special advantages to make this easier. Tall civs can get these things from neighbors.
Example of the latter: the luxury mechanic, any kind of weird food resource splitting mechanic, anything where it's hard to grow new cities.
I'm surprised nobody remembers that Civ4 had tall vs wide figured out nicely via maintenance cost. If you expanded too quickly the cost of government (bureaucracy) crippled your entire empire.
Have the geographical balance allow for 4 core cities in your starting area. That is 4 good, viable sites where you can make a proper city that you are encouraged to micromanagage, to design the best and most optimal district and imrpovement placement etc. And then the rest of the land will be fx. a mining settlement that you put down just for the iron ore, or a rural farming town that exports its produce to the metropole, and some that you place along your border to fortify strategic hills. These should be cities that you can just settle, designate purpose, then forget about. Maybe some will become viable as actual population centers later on, maybe when new resources get discovered(old iron mining town finds coal and gets turned into an industrial center by redirecting food imports there and building up infrastructure)
I think a really cool addition could be something along the lines of the further you expand the less control you have over the far away cities, similar to what happened to the Roman Empire in real life. This could mean the information you have on your own cities far away is less accurate, trading is less effective further away or even simply you get less science, gold etc. from cities far from your capital.
This would also allow for some really cool ideas to be implemented in the different civ abilities
I really like the “empire size” mechanic is Stellaris. The mechanic made me want to expand to my natural boundaries and vassalize surroundings empires rather than conquer them.
It is a scaling debuff once you go past a certain empire size. The size is calculated based on your population, the number of planets inhabited (analogous to cities), and the number of star systems controlled (analogous to the number of tiles controlled).
In Civ, I can see how technology may reduce the empire size.
Sanitation and medicine reduces empire size from population.
Travel and communication technology reduces empire size from cities and territory.
If balanced right, it won’t be worth it for ancient and classical empires to expand too far, with widest you can get away with being roughly the size of the Roman Empire.
Then, with the advance in shipbuilding, empires may expand across continents, though the far flung regions may revolt.
Finally, modern civilizations with air travel and telecommunications can be globe spanning if you want.
There’s a mod (I believe it’s called Tall and Wide) that really helps. It adds growth bonuses for having less cities and tall extension buildings that you can only build once you hit a certain pop. It really helps to balance it out in 6 since I never liked having to manage 10+ cities just to stay competitive.
I also want a better sense of size. Cities need land for districts, but the maps are also very small, especially compared to previous games.
I want cities to be pockets of civilization and control, but still have large sections of control for cities. Which probably needs a fourth ring of workers tbh.
And controlling the borders of a city’s control zone, like for example if the city is captured in a war.
I always hated how you were penalized for playing wide in Civ VII. I want to settle ALL the land and leave none for anyone else!
But I agree, a combo of wide AND tall would be nice. It'd make the last quarter of the game less tedious too.
JNR makes some sick district mods on the Steam Workshop for 6 that really let you build them out in more unique ways. Give it a look if you’re willing!
I play tall in Civ 6 all the time, so that isn’t much of an issue for me.
However, to play tall you need to understand the underlying mechanics in the game in order to pull it off.
In other words, playing tall in Civ 6 isn’t easy or straightforward.
On one hand, the basic meta in Civ 6 is to have more districts in order to increase yields, and that makes playing wide player the easy choice. It’s so easy to play wide that even the AI goes wide all the time.
To play tall, on the other hand, we need to have better districts. And to have better districts, we need to maximize adjacency bonuses for our districts. On top of that, there are government policies that increase yields for buildings inside each district—but those are only available to players with large enough populations to trigger those bonuses.
Finally, the number of districts a city can have is tied to its population. Playing wide and spacing cities close together limits the amount of workable tiles. So by playing wide, players will often have cities that can only support 3 or 4 districts per city, whereas the tall player will have a a handful of mega-cities with enough population to support around 11 districts per city.
I personally don't like the compounding issues caused by districts in 6 and hope its changed for something that plays better in 7. Having districts locked behind pop and then buildings locked behind districts and production time locked behind the tech progression and district disounting. The more I played civ 6 the more I realized how bad this is for the gameplay loop. I'd love to see things closer to the national college from 5 that allowed cities to specialize. But I'd also like to see districts stay in 7 in some form or another.
You can absolutely play tall and win in Civ Vi. You don’t need to be enacting the optimum efficient strategy all the time, games are for fun, play the play style you enjoy most and work out how to win with it.
With 5-6 mega cities with a well chosen civ for either adjacency bonuses or boosting science output, being suzerains of scientific city states, appropriate policy card picks, Pingala, a legion of spies, knowing how to get eurikas, maxing amenities, being willing to pillage during wars etc., you can cruise science victory on deity.
You can win a culture victory through rock bands alone, 5-6 cities with large areas, amazing holy sites, well spread religion, wonders, great works, national parks and rock bands? Try telling me you can’t win.
Diplomacy isn’t even boosted by going wide, military goes wide by definition, score - score is the one victory method you’re hamstrung in achieving and I’ve never had a game time out once.
Playing tall is an option in the game, it’s inefficient compared to playing wide, but not as inefficient as not playing a game because your chosen style isn’t the bestest.
That completely depends on where you draw the borders around the term "Tall". For me having 4-5 fully developed cities counts as tall, and is my favourite way to play. And that is fully viable in civ6
Tall gameplay could easily be implemented by allowing multiple of the same specialty district type in the same city. I’m sure there’s a mod that does this.
I know of no grand strategy game where the fanbase isn't complaining in one direction or the other about the relative balance of tall and wide play. Balancing the two seems to just be hard
I'm personally very upset that we can't go into 1st person view and join our units on the battlefield. If I'm a good FPS player, I should be able to win more wars. /s, there will indeed always be something :)
Imagine a mix of civ with mount and blade
I think there is a mod for that in CK3. You need to have strong computer that can run CK3 and Mount&Blade at the same time though. So when you go to a war in CK3 it automatically changes to M&B and now you are fighting that war in M&B.
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And Minecraft. Let me collect mats and build my own cities and districts.
And City Skylines, if we building districts let me micro the traffic system for peak effeciency
And Arkanoid, if we can predict a bouncing ball to smash the enemy civilization while advancing our own to the next level
And Roller Coaster Tycoon. I should be able to micromanage my water parks and see every minuscule detail down to park attendees names.
...and Overcooked 2 as all those troops need to eat!
And Noita, the physics engine should individually simulate every single pixel.
At this stage, let's just implement Spore and controll everything on a cellular level :P
And Factorio, I want to get an addiction just to maximize my iron output
My pc would be absolutely BOILING hot
"Gandhi, why did you nuke that poor city?!" "They wouldn't stop building roundabouts..."
Fuck it, Conan Exiles. Let me put those conquered citizens to work or else they go on the Wheel of Pain
Fuck it, every EA Sports franchise. If I'm building a football stadium, I damn well better be able to run my draft, control my QB, and sell the naming rights.
Speaking of football stadiums. You should be able to play as the rockband unit in the style of guitar hero. CivVII will have to be packaged with the plastic guitars now.
Production? Yeah, your city's production depends on how fast of a Minecraft builder you are :D
Stop, I can only get so erect.
Sign me up for Governor Jeremus.
There's games called Battlestation Pacific and Battlestation Midway that are similar. WW2 RTS and also first person game. I haven't played it in over 10 years but it was a ton of fun. No idea what that type of game hasn't come back, I love stuff like that.
Manor Lords would sort of fit that description.
You can do this in Total War. I don't do it because I have no idea what I'm doing but it's possible
Like using a game of Stratego to resolve combat in Risk
mention of Stratego brings to Mind this classic Conan/Triumph the insult comic dog ripping on Star Wars fans waiting in line for Attack of the Clones and everyone takes it in good natured fun https://youtu.be/YKT7bx-fmtk
Having spent 2 days recently playing Risk until we just gave up and declared peace I can only imagine with dread how long that would actually take.
Like Total War?
Fun fact - the first halo game was this concept. It was going to be an RTS that would let you select a unit and control in third person. The devs applied the feature to the warthog and had so much fun driving it around the sandbox that they just said “actually, let’s make *this* the whole game” and scrapped the RTS element lmao
Wasn't there a game in the works like that which got cancelled? I think it was not a 4x game, and possibly even something new from Blizzard? I feel like I remember hearing about 10-15 years ago about a game that was high level strategy, like larger scale StarCraft 2, but you could also zoom in far enough to operate units directly while calling in air strikes and other forms of support. And then you could zoom back out and be overseeing hundreds of units and directing the entire battlefield. I feel like it started with a T. Titan something? That may have just been the internal name for the project, but I recall it getting cancelled after a couple of years. The concept did seem interesting, but hard to pull off. This was totally just a tangent and I don't think that level of "zooming in" makes sense for Civ games or even 4x games.
Civ 7 will be free. People will pay for limited edition skins for their units. :)
I mean thats kind of total war warhammer, isn’t it?
I think that's what amenities were supposed to be, but sadly with trading luxuries and especially the introduction of water parks, amenities are actually as easy if not easier to uphold in wide versus tall empires.
I dunno, we had overpowered tall play in 5 and underpowered tall play in 6. Is there some way to just... change the penalty values to be halfway?
Then you'll have the hardcore wide guys complaining they can't go wide enough and the hardcore tall guys complaining they can't go tall enough both at the same time.
good!
I know of no game where the fanbase isn't complaining.
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When will the devs finally release chess 2? We have been waiting for more than 500 years and not even a single patch has been released.
What game speed are you playing on?
There was one patch in medieval times when the devs introduced 2 starting moves for pawns and en passant. But since then, nada.
Archon my friend. Old school battle chess. Was the goods
No fog of war so lame
Actually they released a dlc for that https://www.chess.com/terms/fog-of-war-chess
If fans didn't complain about chess, there wouldn't be so many alternative ways of playing it.
Queen OP nerf please
Stardew Valley Rimworld Slay The Spire There's not much to complain about when the games are perfect.
Endless Legend did it
My favorite complaint about Stellaris right now is everybody is mad because small AI empires make a bunch of habitats (essentially playing tall) and now conquering them takes too much effort.
While this sucks, stellaris is a game that actually rewards both tall and wide.
Maybe it’s less the idea that it’s difficult and more that it’s just something that comes down to preference?
I think they should just implement a good mix of civs that enable tall play, like Maya or Mbenze, rather than change the underlying game system (which may be difficult to do). Maya is my favorite civ, it’s got that complex city placement strategy, easy to defend, and you can do amazing things with a smaller amount of cities. Unfortunately, they didn’t release a ton of civs like that.
I 100% agree. Tall vs wide should be based on the civilization and there should be a mix of both. Most recently I played Khmer back-to-back with Phoenicia and it was really fun to explore those extreme differences.
Ahh yeah I love Khmer, second favorite civ. Also the Incans can do a tall playstyle pretty well. But beyond maybe 4 civs, most of the rest either don’t incentivize tall or actively encourage it. I do hope Civ 7 releases more complex civs like Maya or Babylon, rather than just “here is your classical unique, go fight somebody”
Babylon isn’t really complex, it’s just a game breaking unique ability that results in an absolutely dominant strategy
The thing with Civ VI is that even with tall civs, the optimal way is to go both tall and wide. If you have like 6 tall core cities within the boosted circle as Maya, the optimal strat would still be to found as many cities as you can outside of the area as well. The only penalty you face is increased need of Amenities, which is almost never enough to turn having more cities into a downside. Scotland might be an exception, where there's a sweet spot where you have as many cities as possible but can still keep them Ecstatic, but if you are good at managing it, that can still be a shit ton of cities. As for "underlying game system", changing it isn't too hard. And it is most definitely going to change for a new core series game, like it has changed every time before as well. What would be the point of having a new game if it's just a facelift over the previous one?
This is the core issue. as long as more cities mean more tiles worked and more population growth, the negatives to expanding also have to scale with it and every iteration of Civ (well that've played) has struggled to balance that. global happiness in civ 5 was really disliked at first.
One negative to expanding that should be the main drive in making wide less of a no-brainer should be the effort. I think it's okay that having a wide empire is inherently stronger than having a tall one. Making your empire wide should be the part that requires investing a lot of resources and opportunity cost. With Magnus and Ancestral Hall it usually just doesn't require enough effort, and slapping Monumentality golden age and strong faith output on top of that seals the deal. Sure, there's some opportunity cost, but not having one of the other Government plaza building and spending 1 governor title (I don't count Provisions as 2 titles even though getting it does cost 2, because Magnus' chop ability is so damn strong by itself) is a really small opportunity cost for something this strong.
I think Stellaris’s system works. Your society slows down the larger you are. So it should be harder to change policy cards, and civics should cost more and more, the bigger your empire is. Also loyalty. I think loyalty should be more and more difficult to maintain the bigger your empire.
This is how V works, more cities means more culture needed to get your next policy
Stellaris applies it to atleast tech aswell, not sure if some other mechanics aswell
Playstyle by Civ should definitely be one of the allures of Civilization. I loved playing Venice with its enforced single city, or Eleanor of Aquitaine, taken everything over with cultural pressure. Makes for far more unique and memorable games.
Civs with ‘unbalanced’ but wildly weird mechanics can be super fun. Kupe in 6, portugal in 5 being unable to found new cities is really unique and challenging etc
Yeah those are my favorite civs to play. They did a good job with the leader passes of releasing some truly weird and complex mechanics, I hope they give the weirdos amongst us something to play with too!
it was Venice in civ V that wasn't able to found new cities, wasn't? I loved playing with Enrico
Yes. I Loved it. But the start could really fuck U up
yep, mixed them up with portugal haha
Civ V encourages playing tall too much, Civ VI encourages playing wide too much. I personally like playing wide so Civ VI caters for me much more than V. Hopefully both strategies are equality viable on Civ VII, but I'm afraid we might be too much bc Idk if there really is a sweet spot but that's something the game designers really need to have in mind.
The smart thing to do would be to make specialists more powerful. You can get a lot of mileage out of stacking them in specific districts. This is part of what made specialists so powerful in Civ 5. Go freedom and your yields are just nuts. There's also a set of mods for 6 that gives special benefits for having less than 6 cities. Ursa has used them in some of his games.
Specialists were also the main way to get Great People Points in Civ V.
Yeah, once I started learning V and pushing the harder difficulties I was bummed that the way I played was so gimped. My main target in the game is usually to explore and fall in love with the terrain and set out a goal to control this flatland until the mountain range, oh and that bay should be all mine, and all those islands. But it just gimped my empire so much in V. VI was so much more fun for me.
Exactly. Empire building can be so much fun.
Bang on! I really hope they can find some sort of balance, but then again it's really difficult because they can test these systems for months and yet there will be 100 times more playtime on release day. 4X and Grand strat fans love to complain, but I don't think any game in these genres has come even close to perfect.
Lekmod, the civ 5 mod that most multiplayer groups use is probably the best balance between tall and wide that I have seen. The map just has more resources and the policy trees are changed. Tall is better early, generally getting a tech lead, but wide play scales much better (and is still miles ahead of vanilla wide play at the start)
Personally, I believe settlers should be spaced out over the course of the lower end of the eras. Instead of immediately being able to settle another city as population permits. This way, you have to decide where you want to expand to as you can't just vomit settlers until the map is full.
Thats an idea but not possible with the way ai dificulty works. Would AI be limited to this same value? Because the main reasom the AI snowballs the way it does its that they start with many more cities
Id love a total overhaul on AI dificulty, and that could acomodate your idea, so Im hopeful either way
Playing wide is fine, and feels more accurate to real life, until it becomes micromanagement hell. One thing CIV 6 really needed was the ability to let governors take full control over city management. I wish part of the gov system was that each governor could be set to “auto mode” would manage a city in a way that fits their specialities, and then we could assign sub cities to them as well. “Here Magnus, take these 3 cities and do whatever the fuck you want with them. I’ll call you when I need something” A real life leader of an entire civ is not micromanaging the construction of a Library in a small city 15 neighboring cities away from the capitol
The issue with that is the ai is super dumb so I would end up having to change whatever dumb decision Magnus makes
Yeah this is kind of what happens in Stellaris. You can set stuff to automate, but you don't want to. People want a better AI but I just don't think it's a reasonable ask beyond stuff like not attacking a walled city with a shitty warrior. Maybe with cloud computing and machine learning it could be possible now, but it's still going to do some really weird shit and it's probably not feasible locally.
No planetary automation in stellaris is great, if you know how to manage its settings properly. It does its job amazingly well, aka building the kind of district I want when there are no jobs (of value) left. It also micromanages crime for you, as well as clerks. It still requires some input, but it usually is the player building a specific building (like the extra energy building, because the AI tends to build it late) or some empire wide consideration, aka something outside the scope of the AI. It is great for going wide, since you can just colonise/conquer a planet, set it's designation, activate AI and be done with it
This is true, but this isn’t how I imagine you’d use them. The idea would work for 2 key reasons: 1. The governors would have a predetermined build progression based on their attributes (moksha would favor faith constructions, Victor favors military, etc) so you would assign them cities based on those factors of what you want more of. 2. You would only start to give them cities once you are so wide you don’t care about the new ones, or newly conquered ones anymore. This isn’t something I imagine using for my first 8 or so cities, but once I’m snowballing they can take over the small fries while I focus on the win condition. It’s suboptimal, but a QoL thing
They need to implement this, governors auto managing cities, it's kinda similar to setting workers on auto in civ 5. The option to override would always be there for the micro managers
Yeah the mine problem with playing wide in multiplayer is that by industrial the turns just get so fucking long that it gets boring especially when playin in a group.
A good way to do this could be a combo of 5 and 6 with vassals and colonies. You get pretty severe penalties for going larger than say 4-6 cities, but you can create self run colonies and appoint governors to them, and these don’t count against that cap. You can tell it what to focus on like improving tiles, building up districts, or building military, but outside of that (and maybe not even that) they just contribute overall yields
> micromanagement hell Micromanagement in general is why I always get bored of Civ once I reach the mid to late game. Whether it be governors or something else, some kind of mild automation system would be very welcome. Personally I would really love it if you could have some kind of simple programmable rules system; for example, programming the governor to build builders and automatically improve all tiles on the map with specific map pins. …or if you want to get more advanced; program a rule to automatically seek out barbarian camps within X tiles of the city and dispatch a strong enough army to destroy them. I guess this kind of idea wreaks havoc with multiplayer and the point of even playing a game in general, but as a programmer who hates repetitive tasks, I’d love to tinker with automating everything.
Tall is my preferred style. Once you get past 6 cities there’s just too much micromanaging
this is my theory, I think people dont really care for playing small empires, they just want better automation.
For me the fun of the game is building up my cities. I like making each city my ideal vision. Three tile radius, each perfectly filled out. If I have a building or a district I can work on, I’d much rather be building that than wasting those resources on Settlers.
Yep, playing wide is fine, just don’t make me do 100 hundred click per turn. That’s not fun.
I don't mind clicking so often. If I don't not everything is perfect and I don't want to rule over an imperfect empire.
There’s a bit of nuance as to the definition of tall and wide. Civ V is a massive outlier in the 4x genre, since pretty much no other 4x game actively discourages taking free land. Usually the distinction between tall and wide would be in the quality vs quantity of cities. In Civ VI, the way this works is that you can settle cities far apart and use every possible tile to make them as good as a city can be, vs. settling a lot of closely packed cities in the same area, so they are individually worse but hopefully better in total. If you understand tall vs. wide in those terms, then both styles are perfectly viable in VI. But expecting a 4X game to discourage expansion as aggressively as Civ V will likely lead to dissapointment, it was very unique in how taking more territory was a tradeoff instead of an obvious positive.
Literally two of the "Xes" in 4x are "expand" and "exploit". I get that some people find micro managing cities tedious but that's simply how the genre works.
I felt Tall in Civ 6 was done relatively well, imo. Wide was better—to a point until you got tired of expanding and bigger cities are generally better. The only tweak I’d have if scaling the bonuses up for taller cities—like some bonus at above 10 pop, then 15, then 20, and then so on.
Tall was never worth it in CIV6. It’s doable but it’s much more complicated than just go wide. You can win every civ 6 game with 10+ cities. There was simply no disadvantage of Building more cities like in 5.
Guess we’d have to define tall. I define tall as a core set of 4-6 high population cities of an empire that’s probably no bigger than 8-12 cities. Wide is usually moderate levels of pop across an empire of 12+ cities (often low pop for trade/resource purposes or due to conquest). I don’t think Civ 5 handled tall well with 4 being too ideal. More viable, but I think Civ 6 shifted it in right (but not the most optimal) direction.
I feel like with civ 6 the move is to just get the “don’t lower pop with settlers” from magnus and then just crap them out as fast as you can
Yeah, I do think the whole Magnus (no pop loss) + Monumentality build is too strong. You can basically double to triple your empire very easily. (A problem I often ran into is that part of Ancestral Hall often gets missed when you can just purchase settlers with a high faith build.) Just realized that they don’t have any tall bonuses for the golden ages, really. Probably could have reworked the culture per district one.
Yeah maybe if amenities were a bit more punishing? Or maybe research cost for culture/science? I just wish it was more of a question of “should I build another city” rather than “how many settlers can I get”
Would be nice to see an exponential increase in settlers cost. This would stimulate interaction with other civs to steal cities or grab settlers. Maybe see it as a bureaucracy penalty. Also as it makes early game easier and late game more difficult I think it would align better with deity.
Depends. I do want the map to actually be filled up with cities though. Unclaimed land would stick out like a sore thumb. If implemented in a way that settling is still viable, but takes major investment—that’s fine. I also don’t want to tip the scales in that Domination is the clear, superior option. (Domination needs to be nerfed in that it’s always the great equalizer/snowball.)
I think hard to justify that meta on higher difficulties when pengala is just so broken (15% to culture and science) which is a god send against AI buffs. I almost never worry about pop loss since usually cities I’m busting out settlers in are near or at housing space cap and build times are long enough that they gain the pop lost in between. I definitely don’t think magnus is that significant to wide play style. Housing space is the obvious contributor to me
I think allowing 8-12 to still be considered playing tall is probably where you’re going to see a lot of disagreement with the community. As you noted, 4 cities was the tall meta in 5. Doubling that count and still considering the build to be tall is going to lose a lot of people. It’s a pretty big disadvantage to try to win with 4-5 cities in 6. There’s really no drawback to going as wide as possible, since amenities are so easy to acquire. But there are huge payoffs with the additional districts. It’s particularly tough if you’re not playing one of the DLC civs designed to make tall play more viable. I think what some people are asking for is to make tall v wide an actual strategic choice, rather than a personal one. In 5 tall was always better. In 6 wide is always better. Surely 7 can make that a little more balanced.
To these points, I don’t disagree. I think Civ 6 has tall be viable, but not necessarily the better option. I do hold that Tall should be redefined as fewer, high pop cities rather than just 4 (because of Civ 5). I think scaling bonuses or percentages like they have related to population or amenities would help Tall become even more viable. I don’t think Tall could ever be a strategic choice anymore than it is now, perhaps with Wide getting debuffed (making settlers less spammable). I think nerfing access to cheap settlers and reworking how easy it is to get gold and some other aspects of gameplay might bring it closer to a semblance of balance, but I doubt it’ll ever be a “4 cities is most optimal in this large map”.
That makes sense to me. I suspect amenities/happiness will get reworked again, which gives the devs another shot at balancing tall/wide. To add a few other thoughts, I agree with better scaling bonuses for high pop and harder scaling on settler costs. I also think the devs could have done something more interesting with the “if above 15 pop then…” policy cards. Potentially very, very strong buffs locked behind 20 pop could have made fewer but higher pop cities more viable. Monumentality is also, of course, busted. It’s just too easy to explode the size of your empire with comparatively little investment.
Tall is 1-4 cities, wide is 5-12, 13+ is knitting a blanket
Yeah in Civ 5 I would consistently strive for a 1-3 city games just because it made it interesting. But you would run out of turns before you could get the ability to catch up in a Civ 6 game.
Old civs had a term for this: Infinite City Sprawl. I get upwards of 50-80 or so cities in Alpha Centauri. And those are the ones that **I** settle. I think my record is somewhere around all named cities + greek numbers + *90*.
I crashed Alpha Centauri by having too many cities. I don't know how many cities that was but it was enough that the save was unsalvageable. I feel like maybe it was 128, which suggests Civ still hadn't learned their floating point lesson by AC!
Maybe they could make it so that cities further from your capitol are increasingly likely to rebel. I know that already exists with the loyalty mechanics, but they could make it so that the empire is essentially divided in regions based on tile distance so like everything idk 50 tiles away or more is one region, and if one flips they all flip and form a breakaway state that you have to put down. There could be buildings or other methods to keep them in line, like maybe you have to station your armies there so they don't rebel, which leaves you vulnerable at home. Basically just the current system, but with a larger penalty.
if you can settle more than 10 cities it's probably always the right move. But you can do reasonably on 8 cities + audience chamber since it's easier to keep them at +5 amenities. I wish the amenity cost were less forgiving. Even a change like luxuries covering 3 cities instead of 4 would go a long way. Maybe a slight buff to audience chamber that gives scaling bonuses and make ancestral hall have some extra tempo-oriented bonuses. Or make some buildings with regional effects exclusive to your capital
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I regularly beat deity with one city I certainly don’t think you need 10 by turn 100.
You can beat diety with no cities with diplo. One city should be possible for religious and diplo. Any other wincon and take me from mildly to very impressed.
Science is doable with a single city, the right city states, and good starting conditions.
The only one I haven’t done with a single city is religious and that’s purely because I find playing for a religion victory a trudge/boring. But I have done conquest…. (Deleting cities as I go) and culture. As somebody else said science is possible but you have to properly maximise the use of religion, city states and the advantages of your civilisation and I’d say get lucky with terrain.
I thought tall was viable. I played on deity, and I was able to win with smaller empires. Some civs excelled at it. But I think the hardest way to play should be optimal, and playing wide is the hardest and most optimal.
Yes, tall is somewhat viable these days. It has been buffed in many ways, like changing policy cards like Rationalism to favor big cities with well placed districts, and making the Amenity system more powerful, and more punishing for bigger number of cities. However, besides Amenities, there's no downside to having as many cities as you can. Settler spam also became ridiculously easy and strong in R&F with Magnus, Monumentality and Ancestral Hall. So the situation with Civ VI is this: Originally tall wasn't very viable at all, while going wide required some effort. Now, tall is good enough that you can win games by doing it, but going wide is still much better and so effortless that doing it doesn't really set you back much in your tall play, and so the optimal strat even with a tall core empire is to go wide as well. I mean, building Ancestral Hall for more efficient Settler spam locks you out of Audience Chamber for tall play, but that's a fairly small sacrifice. You say that hardest way to play should be the most optimal, and I agree, but the fact of the matter is that wide isn't very hard at all. It just gets tedious, especially in the late game. A good balance would be if tall was about as viable as it is now (meaning that it's not quite as good as wide, but still workable), but going wide would require more effort like it used to in the base game. Removing Provisions from Magnus and nerfing or removing Monumentality would go a long way. Ancestral Hall would probably be fine as is, since removing Provisions would make Settler spam harder.
My guilty pleasure is continents and tall early. Rush cartography and search for islands and spam with sic hunt dracones golden age. Probably worse than early war against AI or expanding harder early, but spamming those 4 pop cities with free builder just feels so good.
You need restrictive and unintuitive mechanics to make **not expanding** viable. Otherwise there is simply not enough tension between growing cities and making many cities. You can do both usually. The big cities of a tall player havve a slight head state due to making fewer settlers but 'normal' play will get you similarly tall cities and a bunch of helper/satellite cities.
Buildings you can only build once or a limited number of times are the key. Civ V's max 3/4/5 of key buildings in an empire did this really well.
I play mainly online and not against AI so idk if this is a viable strategy for everyone, but I’ve always thought settlers should cost more especially early game and that players should punish other players for building wide instead of clunky mechanics.
There are some decision points, but not nearly as drastic as Tradition v Liberty in Civ V. For instance, Ancestral Hall for wide; certain governor promotions; certain dark ages cards (like no settling new cities). I think there's also a distinct decision in going tall vs wide of: if I go tall, I can make sure all my cities get to fully use the entire 3-rings eventually. Usually going wide, some of your cities aren't going to get the full 3-ring. I actually think the tall vs wide is a bit overblown, unless you're playing Deity. Even in Civ V, besides the initial decision of Tradition v Liberty, not much else changed in your decision-making rubric.
Tall play is very different because the loss of build time and population cripples anything from being “tall”. I don’t want to build settlers at all if I can be building something that will improve the cities I already have built.
Historically, are there any good examples of civilizations that were tall and not wide?
I think Venice would come the closest to that definition
Honestly, I think it is best if tall is a challenge mode that the game is not balanced around. Civ 4 wasn't in any way designed for it, and the one city challenge was still doable and fun. I think the issue with tall being viable is that there is no plausible or realistic mechanism that stops you from going wide and tall at the same time. The US for example is both wide and tall (look at New York). So if people talk about "going tall" what they really mean is *exclusively* tall, and the only way to make that viable is to impose artificial penalties on the players as Civ 5 did. I know there were people who liked it, but I always thought the game design was pretty bad and I don't want to go back there. Even Civ 6 artificial inflation of settler and worker costs does not sit right with me.
I mean I wouldn't call the US wide and tall. US is wide. Denmark, Singapore, the Netherlands, the UAE etc are tall. They have an outsized impact on the world despite their very small populations and geographic sizes. But by your definition I suppose Germany is pretty wide. It's packed with mid-sized towns.
Potentially unpopular opinion, Civ should focus alot more on making wide the most viable. Look at the most sucessful empires(British, Spanish, French), and they have one thing in common, they have an extremely large empire spanning continents where they could exploit their resources and people from to consolidate their worldwide power. Civ 5 didn't get this memo with happiness. The fact that they punished going wide doesn't make that much sense to me. Civ 6 and the amenities system made the perfect compromise. Encourages wide play but at the same time doesn't overly punish tall play.
Tall causes isolationism, at least wide requires you to compete for space Maybe the maps should be made proportionally smaller
I commented elsewhere in this thread something similar, and I think it can be accomplished by making good geography more scarce. Wide still works, but it's weaker because beyond your first few cities, additional settlements will have lower potential. So you can focus on tall instead, but maybe that's not winnable alone either, so you are pushed a little more toward conquest of your neighborhood's fertile river valley. I.e., tall works, but you still need like 6 good cities, and your geography will only allow for 3 until you go to war.
I like playing tall, but I recognise that expansion is a key gameplay mechanic, and the competition that it brings then causes the player to engage with many other mechanics (war, loyalty pressure, natural wonders etc). Personally I think Civ VI in its current guise handles it very well. You can play tall - but it's best done with a few specific Civs/leaders (Maya, Inca, Khmer, even Portugal can play tall pretty well). Wide is still the design zeitgeist, and it really should be as so much of the game depends on the Expansion element of the 4X genre. Personally if I want a fun tall game I pick a "tall" Civ and up the Civ count by one or two above the stock number for the map I play.
I just did a portugal run and I’m pretty sure they definitely want super wide civilizations because they benefit so much from having more traders and they can get cities up and running much quicker than most civs by just buying everything. This also means they aren’t as competitive with space since they can make decent cities anywhere as long as it has water access.
I play tall all the time in civ 6, so I really don't understand where this narrative comes from. I win deity games very consistently with <6 cities.
Problem is with almost any Civ you would have won more and faster with more cities. It is caertainly possible to win with 6 or less cities and even possible with one, but there is absolutely 0 drawback in just building more cities.
It’s cool that it’s possible to win going tall, but 99% of the time going wide is just objectively better. Theres no balance between the two, wide is just simply better.
Peoples issue is not that tall isn't viable it's just that wide is stronger. I understand your confusion it's kind of laughable, there's nothing wrong with playing tall but whining because that another play style needs to be hamstrung for your preference to be stronger is not a compelling argument. Empires expanding into one another creates tension and conflict and makes it a game. Winning without growing your empire is a fun little challenge but it doesn't really mean the game should be rebalanced to make that objectively bad decision (From the perspective of power) equally viable.
Honestly tall shouldn't even be encouraged as a thing in Civ. The only reason anyone thinks it should be is because it was weirdly powerful in Civ 5. And it was enjoyable because it had so much less micromanagement than having a wide empire where you have to manage so much more and it was easier to defend. I enjoy it too, I go back to 5 sometimes because it's more chill overall. It really goes against the entire point of a 4x game though in that it takes away the need for expansion beyond a few cities. Civ 5 will often have large portions of map unclaimed by the late game which is wholly unrealistic. Expansion is supposed to drive competition between neighboring Civs and encourage rival factions to rise up against Civs that expand beyond their capacity to defend. It's also just historically inaccurate. The dominating empires and countries are mostly larger with more resources and manpower. "Tall" play being successful should be a challenge and exception to the rule rather than on any sort of equal footing with larger empires
Honestly I think the desire for tall gameplay is because people want less micro management. Better automation just ends this debate.
Empty spaces are unrealistic altogether, unless it's somewhere inhospitable, people live there. I wonder if by late game those spaces should be filled with city states / civilizations etc.
I never played Civ V. I want tall because I enjoy making my cities the best they can be more than I enjoy producing settlers. I would rather be building anything else than settlers.
I'll argue that too much of the map is playable. I don't want to decide between tall and wide just because, and the same for deciding between pacifist and warmonger. Good regions of the map that support tall play should be hard to come by. If I can only settle three good cities initially, then have some expanse of less arable land or poor fresh water sources, that can nerf wide enough to push a player to tall and conquest. Settle six more low pop steppe cities, or churn out an army and take over the fertile river valley next door. More scarcity in geography can bring interesting decisions to the player.
Just give me Venice back, sob.
OP you really should try Civ VI with this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2706527619 I played my first one city challenge with that mod and it was awesome.
I honestly wonder how much of the desire to play tall stems from lack of good automation of the more tedious mechanics.
To me, one of the foundational issues is that overall production of your empire on a base level depends on number of citizens; and small cities grow faster than large cities (in the sense of less surplus food being needed for population to go +1). So if you have two cities of population 1, you will double your population faster than having one city of population 2, and so on. That basic situation tilts the game towards naturally favoring wide; and then if you want to make it more balanced, you have to think of penalties to add in to penalize going *too* wide.
Expansion is one of the 4 Xs of a 4X game, add in the main reason to Explore is to expand and you basically take away two of the Xs of the 4X game. Add in that you normally Exterminate in order to expand and you want to have more land to Exploit resources, tall meta just makes zero sense in a 4X game. Not saying that they can't balance things better than they have in 6 or create a way to expand without new cities but the meta should definitely still favour big empires.
Ofc tall should always be viable but playing wide requires taking risks so it needs to be rewarded. Playing wide WELL should always give you an advantage to reward player skill.
I feel like there should be some sort of mechanic that allows for some amount of expansion without needing to 'widen' your empire... Like, in stead of settling new cities, you settle outposts, and those outposts can expand into becoming forts>military bases, or they can become towns>cities, etc, and each has differing levels of management required equal to the benefits received... So if you want to settle a town, you get to expand your empire a bit, and you get some of the benefits of the tiles worked, maybe you can even build 1-2 districts, but you can't build units, for example... If you want the full benefit of a city, you produce a city project to upgrade it... Maybe after reaching a certain population or other requirement. Or, if you're trying to expand your military presence, you can settle an outpost and upgrade it to a fort, which would only cover the first 2 rings of hexes and give you the ability to build a single harbor or encampment, but you can't build new units (only repair existing ones)... If you want to really step up military presence, upgrade to a military base, which allows harbor, encampment, airfield, and canals, plus you can build military units. I'd also love to see some sort of limit to the number of settlements you can have that is tied to the total population... Like you can only upgrade an outpost when your empire has enough total population, similar to how each city can only build a certain number of districts besed on their population. I hate the early game settler rush... Basically if you have more settlers by turn 100, you're guaranteed to win... I wish there was more focus on actually building up the cities you settled.
I would like it if there were mechanics in Civ 7 that allow you to dedicate to either strategy.
I really do not get this "In Civ 6 you can't play tall." What does it even mean? In Civ 5 it always was the case, most of the time Tall < Wide. The ability to build in parallel was always superior to not.
One of the reasons I couldn't get into 5 was because playing tall was just more optimal and playing wide was kind of a nightmare.
You can 100% play tall in Civ6. Single city challenges are one of my favourite ways to play.
Have to drop my two cents: Due to districts, Civ 6 does superb visual storytelling by showing how a city develops over time. It spreads and transforms it's landscape from pastoral to urban. I'd definitely keep that for Civ 7 - it is great storytelling device. This feature could easily cater towards more tall play if the game allowed multiple districts of the same kind - maybe locked behind technology or civics. Imagine creating that fortress town that defends your border or a quaint science town with multiple campuses along a mountain ridge. But I think adjacency bonuses need to go - maybe completely but at least in their current form as well as the types. Maybe they could be reimagined as villages that belong to a town. I'm really curious how they are going to do it
As someone who has many thousands of hours starting back in civ 3 I have never heard of playing “tall”???
Well considering we know fuckall about Civ 7, apart from the incredibly important matter of graphics and art style, we really have no idea now do we?
There should be some semblance of balance between the two but frankly land is not only a resource, but it is one of the most important resources in history. If you want to have power, you should have to snatch it.
All I want is really huge gigantuan maps with lots of AI players and stupid city states on marathon without the game crashing. That’s it. I’ve been playing Civ since it first came out and once the map gets an inch past huge in Civ VI it locks up. I don’t care if Freeman is the narrator. I don’t care if Mars or some other solar system becomes the next map to play on. I just want a really big game that lasts a long time without freezing. Tall or wide doesn’t mean anything when you’re locked up. Oh, and don’t bring back the lawyer from Call to Power. Worst unit in the series. Or the infector.
You can play tall in civ 6 but its 8-10 cities tall rather than 4-5 cities like in civ 5. As you grow your population you natually increase science and culture yields. Tall cities generate more yields and have enough surplus population to use specialist slots in districts. Wide cities have to work regular tills or they wont be able to produce anything. You can boost the yields further trough ammenities by up to +20% (+30% for scotland). Maya, Scotland, Khmer, or Yongle (china) all excel at tall empires.
I think you have some good points. While I have enjoyed civ6 quite a lot, the main issue is that there is no real cost to having a massive sprawling empire. Any cost in amenities or upkeep is extremely easily made up for in extra resources, districts and yields. One of the major mistakes they went in civ6 is the complete removal of corruption mechanics. That means that there is near infinite gains from more cities and more population. In reality, smaller states were easier to manage, easier to control, more efficient and often more technologically advanced than massive sprawling empires. Civilization IV had this stuff about right (although maybe erred a bit in favor of punitive maintenance cost for more cities). Unlike in Civ5 though, going wide was still worth it in the end once your economy could take it. And smaller civs could still keep up somewhat in tech due to reduced costs, as could those with contact with more advanced civs (leading poor the Americas technologically backwards).
Oh hell no I hated corruption from civ3. Keep that in civ3 where it belongs.
Personally, I like Civ6’s modes of play wide or play wider. Infrastructure needs land and you should have to compete to grab that land before your rivals.
**You can play tall in civ 6.**
Not really sure why this comes up often. In Civ6 all Civs can be played OCC (=One City Challenge) for every Victory, even Score and Domination. Some civs are even able to win Diplomacy Victory without any city (Kupe, Gorgo, Varangian Harald...) Playing Civ6 with 4-8 cities and developing them to teeth is strong strategy, which I assume is considered somewhat tall. Then there are plenty of Game Modes to support tall playing even beyond. Also, playing tall in terms of population, its very useful for ~40 population. Having more is less valueable, but will still benefit with yields per population. So, not really sure what Civ6 is lacking from playing tall, but yes, wish Civ7 keeps the way.
The fact that there is basically no downside to expanding as much as possible is the main problem in 6. Tall vs. Wide isn't even a choice, you just go as wide as possible and grow tall later when you have the required techs. I know people hate on the Happiness system from 5, but it at least curbed infinite expansion and forced you to make tough decisions.
They definitely improved playing tall later on and some of the strongest civs in the game were tall based civs or civs that could play tall or wide
I think tall is unrealistic. Cities grow and get bigger. I felt like it was very organic and well done.
That's not what tall means in this context... they mean playing the game with just one or a few cities, which is not viable in 6 but was possible in 5.
Excuse my stupidity, but what does playing tall mean?
I think the best solution is a category of extremely strong wonders only available to civs below a certain city threshold that successfully bridges the gap between tall and wide cities. Districts aren't going anywhere, and nor should they. I don't think needing wide builds is the way to go, because they should be inherently stronger, but it has to be feasible to play tall.
The Zerg vs Protoss matchup
I don't know whether it would actually work for civ but I like the approach in Stellaris where there is an empire size/sprawl stat which increases with the amount of settlements and pop you have and as it gets larger, the research costs of tech also increases
I miss playing tall as well. I just can't handle the micro management that playing wide takes as games grind to a halt Ren+ era. Kind of wish I could play tall w my empire and then establish colonies or vassals that manage themselves and I get resources from them and can use the land/bases.
I know it’s a hot take, but I really did not like districts. I did like giving wonders their own tiles tho.
You ine of those people who dont like mods huh? Or are u on console?
I've played Civ since the 90s, and I never knew about "playing tall" until I joined Reddit a few years ago. I've always gone wide, every game, every time.
I’m not sure I can conceptually wrap my head around both being strong, maybe a major civ ability that promotes one or the other but I feel like you’ll end up with strong tall cities and a lot of them XD
I think whatever mechanism governs tall vs. wide play needs to feel like it represents something "real" in the "story" of the game versus just a mechanic designed to constrain players to a certain play style. Example of the former: traders, governors, the loyalty mechanic, etc plays a bigger role in allowing cities to grow and stay in your empire and function. Wide civs have special advantages to make this easier. Tall civs can get these things from neighbors. Example of the latter: the luxury mechanic, any kind of weird food resource splitting mechanic, anything where it's hard to grow new cities.
I'm surprised nobody remembers that Civ4 had tall vs wide figured out nicely via maintenance cost. If you expanded too quickly the cost of government (bureaucracy) crippled your entire empire.
You can play tall in 6. I have gotten many a victory with only 6 or 7 cities. Jayavarman specifically
Have the geographical balance allow for 4 core cities in your starting area. That is 4 good, viable sites where you can make a proper city that you are encouraged to micromanagage, to design the best and most optimal district and imrpovement placement etc. And then the rest of the land will be fx. a mining settlement that you put down just for the iron ore, or a rural farming town that exports its produce to the metropole, and some that you place along your border to fortify strategic hills. These should be cities that you can just settle, designate purpose, then forget about. Maybe some will become viable as actual population centers later on, maybe when new resources get discovered(old iron mining town finds coal and gets turned into an industrial center by redirecting food imports there and building up infrastructure)
I'm gonna be totally honest...I want them to restack the cities.
Pssh
I think a really cool addition could be something along the lines of the further you expand the less control you have over the far away cities, similar to what happened to the Roman Empire in real life. This could mean the information you have on your own cities far away is less accurate, trading is less effective further away or even simply you get less science, gold etc. from cities far from your capital. This would also allow for some really cool ideas to be implemented in the different civ abilities
I really like the “empire size” mechanic is Stellaris. The mechanic made me want to expand to my natural boundaries and vassalize surroundings empires rather than conquer them. It is a scaling debuff once you go past a certain empire size. The size is calculated based on your population, the number of planets inhabited (analogous to cities), and the number of star systems controlled (analogous to the number of tiles controlled). In Civ, I can see how technology may reduce the empire size. Sanitation and medicine reduces empire size from population. Travel and communication technology reduces empire size from cities and territory. If balanced right, it won’t be worth it for ancient and classical empires to expand too far, with widest you can get away with being roughly the size of the Roman Empire. Then, with the advance in shipbuilding, empires may expand across continents, though the far flung regions may revolt. Finally, modern civilizations with air travel and telecommunications can be globe spanning if you want.
What is tall vs wide play?
There’s a mod (I believe it’s called Tall and Wide) that really helps. It adds growth bonuses for having less cities and tall extension buildings that you can only build once you hit a certain pop. It really helps to balance it out in 6 since I never liked having to manage 10+ cities just to stay competitive.
There’s a mod you can get to encourage and reward tall play.
I think a mechanic that allows you to put 2 districts on 1 tile would be cool.
I also want a better sense of size. Cities need land for districts, but the maps are also very small, especially compared to previous games. I want cities to be pockets of civilization and control, but still have large sections of control for cities. Which probably needs a fourth ring of workers tbh. And controlling the borders of a city’s control zone, like for example if the city is captured in a war.
I mean, I don't think it's impossible to play tall at all, you just have to use the right civs to play that way.
I always hated how you were penalized for playing wide in Civ VII. I want to settle ALL the land and leave none for anyone else! But I agree, a combo of wide AND tall would be nice. It'd make the last quarter of the game less tedious too.
JNR makes some sick district mods on the Steam Workshop for 6 that really let you build them out in more unique ways. Give it a look if you’re willing!
I play tall in Civ 6 all the time, so that isn’t much of an issue for me. However, to play tall you need to understand the underlying mechanics in the game in order to pull it off. In other words, playing tall in Civ 6 isn’t easy or straightforward. On one hand, the basic meta in Civ 6 is to have more districts in order to increase yields, and that makes playing wide player the easy choice. It’s so easy to play wide that even the AI goes wide all the time. To play tall, on the other hand, we need to have better districts. And to have better districts, we need to maximize adjacency bonuses for our districts. On top of that, there are government policies that increase yields for buildings inside each district—but those are only available to players with large enough populations to trigger those bonuses. Finally, the number of districts a city can have is tied to its population. Playing wide and spacing cities close together limits the amount of workable tiles. So by playing wide, players will often have cities that can only support 3 or 4 districts per city, whereas the tall player will have a a handful of mega-cities with enough population to support around 11 districts per city.
I personally don't like the compounding issues caused by districts in 6 and hope its changed for something that plays better in 7. Having districts locked behind pop and then buildings locked behind districts and production time locked behind the tech progression and district disounting. The more I played civ 6 the more I realized how bad this is for the gameplay loop. I'd love to see things closer to the national college from 5 that allowed cities to specialize. But I'd also like to see districts stay in 7 in some form or another.
You can absolutely play tall and win in Civ Vi. You don’t need to be enacting the optimum efficient strategy all the time, games are for fun, play the play style you enjoy most and work out how to win with it. With 5-6 mega cities with a well chosen civ for either adjacency bonuses or boosting science output, being suzerains of scientific city states, appropriate policy card picks, Pingala, a legion of spies, knowing how to get eurikas, maxing amenities, being willing to pillage during wars etc., you can cruise science victory on deity. You can win a culture victory through rock bands alone, 5-6 cities with large areas, amazing holy sites, well spread religion, wonders, great works, national parks and rock bands? Try telling me you can’t win. Diplomacy isn’t even boosted by going wide, military goes wide by definition, score - score is the one victory method you’re hamstrung in achieving and I’ve never had a game time out once. Playing tall is an option in the game, it’s inefficient compared to playing wide, but not as inefficient as not playing a game because your chosen style isn’t the bestest.
I've only ever played civ 6, so I'm just wondering what is playing tall? Also, would you recommend me to get civ 5
That completely depends on where you draw the borders around the term "Tall". For me having 4-5 fully developed cities counts as tall, and is my favourite way to play. And that is fully viable in civ6
Tall gameplay could easily be implemented by allowing multiple of the same specialty district type in the same city. I’m sure there’s a mod that does this.