{"id":50278,"date":"2020-07-02T06:00:43","date_gmt":"2020-07-02T10:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=50278"},"modified":"2020-07-02T08:05:51","modified_gmt":"2020-07-02T12:05:51","slug":"civilization-part-4-tall-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=50278","title":{"rendered":"Civilization Part 4: Tall Play"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like I said at the start of this series<\/a>, Civilization VI frustrated me by deliberately working against my preferred playstyle. So let’s talk about where it all went wrong.<\/p>\n

Broadly speaking, there are two main approaches to building your empire in these games: You can build tall, or build wide. Building wide means expanding rapidly and covering as much of the map as possible with small cities. In contrast, building tall means focusing on a small number of cities and making them as large and as sophisticated as possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These two strategies can have an enormous impact on your power level, your city development, and even how long it takes to play the game.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Go Tall or Go Home<\/h3>\n

I've got just 6 cities in my half of the continent. The AI would probably cram about 15 cities into this same space.<\/div>
I've got just 6 cities in my half of the continent. The AI would probably cram about 15 cities into this same space.<\/div><\/p>\n

As many people already guessed in the comments, I am a huge fan of the tall playstyle. In fact, I think that’s the central appeal of the series for me. I obsess over making sure my cities are placed far apart so they have lots of breathing room and don’t crowd each other in the late game. I enjoy having lots of workers buzzing around my cities, improving tiles and laying down roads. I’ll obsess over tile improvements and look for ways to optimize land usage to make my cities flourish.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“Hm. This tile might be a fantastic place to grow food, but it also makes a perfect choke point. If I drop a fort here and place a unit in it, then I can keep my pesky rivals out of this peninsula entirely. I can make up for the lost food by developing this square of (some strategic resource) into a farm. I’ve already got another source of that resource in another city. Oh! But before I do that, I should put a mine on this hill so the city will have better production and let me finish my military unit that much sooner!”<\/p>\n

My plans are usually fairly complicated and they vary quite a bit depending on the terrain and the position of my enemies. However, this all falls apart when I find myself with a dozen cities. I can’t keep track of that many projects and plans at the same time. They all kinda blur together in my mind and I start worrying less about optimizing my cities and more about optimizing the use of my real-world time. The game will move my camera to a worker that needs new orders and I’ll stare at the city, trying to remember what I was trying to accomplish the last time I was here.<\/p>\n

“What was my plan for this city? Did I have one? I don’t remember. I don’t even remember when I got this one. Whatever. I’ll just do the next most obvious thing and move on. I’ve got two dozen of these decisions to make every turn, and I can’t linger over all of them.”<\/p>\n

It all starts to feel sort of random and haphazard after a while. Even if I’m winning, I’m not enjoying myself because I don’t get the satisfaction of making each city perfectUh, ignoring the fact that I’m not particularly good at this game and I’m probably making a dozen mistakes I don’t know about in these “perfect” cities.<\/span>. One of the reasons I liked Civilization V<\/i> was that it was very accommodating for players that preferred to go tall. As long as you didn’t try to play on a huge map, you could make a good showing with just 4 to 6 cities.<\/p>\n

Civilization VI seems to be designed to strongly reward wide play and punish tall cities. Once you get your city above a population of 10 or so, the mechanics start working against you. It becomes harder and harder to increase the population, and at the same time each additional pop is less useful than the one before in terms of outputting resourcesGold, productivity, religious faith, and culture.<\/span> that are useful to you. In this game, the optimal way to build is to blanket the map with tons of shitty little low-population towns, all crowded together. Maybe that makes it a more accurate simulation? I don’t know.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An aside for people who aren’t familiar with the series: The population numbers are pretty abstract. If a city has a population of “6”, does that mean 6 hundred thousand? Six million? Some N^6? A pop of 1 is supposed to represent a village. (Less than 1,000 people.) You usually hit a population of 10 somewhere around the mid-game, which should probably map to the size of ancient Rome. (A million or so.) The practical max size is probably around 30, which ought to correlate to something like Tokyo or Delhi. (~30 million.) Maybe you can come up with a function where 1=100, 10=1,000,000 and 30 = 30,000,000, but I think the formula they use in the game is:<\/p>\n

Yes, I used CamelCase here just to annoy the mathematicians.<\/div>
Yes, I used CamelCase here just to annoy the mathematicians.<\/div><\/p>\n

The point is: I HATE managing 20 generic cities. It’s not just that I don’t find it fun, it’s that I find it actively irritating.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Punishment For Tall Play<\/h3>\n

Like I said earlier in this series, I only played a few games of Civ VI. I jumped between the three rulesetsWhen starting a new game, you pick the ruleset you want to use. The base game, or either of the expansions.<\/span> and played games of varying map sizes. Through experimentation I can tell that wide empires are massively more powerful than tall ones, but I never bothered to drill down and identify the underlying mechanics that drive this.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a broad sense, it seems clear that there’s a sharp dropoff in usefulness as your city grows. A population of 20 isn’t nearly twice as powerful, productive, or useful as a population of 10. It seems like there’s some threshold where additional citizens become crazy expensive to care for while doing less work for the empire. This stands in stark contrast to Civilization V, which took the opposite approach. In the previous game, additional cities<\/b> would incur a penalty, thus encouraging you to make fewer cities overall and instead try to make the most of each one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another thing that hurts tall play is with how city districts are handled. In the previous game, a lot of your productivity came from the world map. If you wanted a city to have more factory output and less food, then you surrounded the city with mines instead of farms. In this game, your output comes from city districts, and each city can only have one of each district. This sort of takes away your ability to specialize. You can’t have one city that’s all factory production and another that’s all science. Instead, both cities will probably have a factory AND a research campus. If you want more factories, you need more cities.<\/p>\n

The Biggest Culture<\/h3>\n

Nice. Ludwig just created one of his B-sides for me. Too bad I don't have any more room in my massive cities to store additional songs.<\/div>
Nice. Ludwig just created one of his B-sides for me. Too bad I don't have any more room in my massive cities to store additional songs.<\/div><\/p>\n

The other thing that punishes tall play is that – as I found out the hard way – culture is REALLY strong in this game. Or rather if you’ve got a wealthy, technologically advanced, well-armed nation with few cities, you can be easily defeated by a backward, broke, ill-equipped empire with tons of bullshit little towns pumping out culture points. Culture is very strong when combined with a wide empire. Even if you’re going for some other win condition, you’ll need to build up some culture as a defensive measure. You can argue that this makes sense from a historical \/ balance perspective or whatever. That’s fine. My problem is, the bulk of your culture comes from famous works and rare artifacts you display in your cities. Which leads to this:<\/p>\n

Shamus:<\/b> I’ve unlocked the Great Person Sun Tzu here. He’s supposed to write the Art of War for me, which will generate culture points each turn. But he can’t. The little interface button is disabled.<\/p>\n

Civ 6:<\/b> You need a place to store that book before he can create it.<\/p>\n

Shamus:<\/b> No problem. I’ve got a museum here in Athens.<\/p>\n

Civ 6:<\/b> Wrong kind of museum. That one is for ancient artifacts, not books.<\/p>\n

Shamus:<\/b> Ok, I’ve got an art museum here in Sparta.<\/p>\n

Civ 6:<\/b> You can’t use that one. It’s full.<\/p>\n

Shamus:<\/b> It’s only got two items on display!<\/p>\n

Civ 6:<\/b> Yeah, like I said: Totally full.<\/p>\n

Shamus:<\/b> There’s a library here in my science district.<\/p>\n

Civ 6:<\/b> Certainly not. A library is no place to store books!<\/p>\n

Shamus:<\/b> Okay, so you’re telling me I need to build another entire museum if I want to store this book?<\/p>\n

Civ 6:<\/b> You can’t build another one in this district. The Theater District can only have one museum at a time.<\/p>\n

Shamus:<\/b> So I have to build another entire Theater District just so I can build a museum so I can put this one book in it?<\/p>\n

Civ 6: <\/b>No! You can’t have two Theater Districts in the same city! That would be madness. One district type per city.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Shamus:<\/b> You let me build more than one neighborhood in the same city.<\/p>\n

Civ 6: <\/b>Shut up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Shamus:<\/b> So what you’re telling me is that the ONLY WAY I can store this book is if I build ANOTHER ENTIRE CITY, just so I can build a Theater District, just so I can build a museum, just so I can put this book on display there?<\/p>\n

Civ 6: <\/b>Not necessarily. You don’t have to build the city from scratch. You could always build an army and conquer a city and use their bookshelf.<\/p>\n

Shamus:<\/b> I hate you.<\/p>\n

Civ 6: <\/b>I hate you too.<\/div>\n

This game makes me crazy. Anyway, that’s my central gripe. I can’t play the game in my playstyle, even with turning the difficulty downEh, maybe I could make it work if I played on a really tiny map, but I’m bored and annoyed with this game and I want to move on rather than fight with the game designer.<\/span>. I mean, expert players have done a one-city challenge on the hardest difficulty<\/a>, so it can<\/b> be done. But I’m not an expert player and I don’t feel like losing a few more nine-hour games to learn how to make tall play work in Civ VI. Even if I win, I’ll still be having a lousy time. I might as well go back to Civ VActually, I should probably just play Master of Orion II again.<\/span>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Correcting for Civilization V<\/h3>\n

It’s a shame for me, but I think this design choice makes a lot of sense. A lotI have no idea how many. I just know I read a lot of complaining.<\/span> of long-term fans disliked the previous game, so it makes sense to go in the opposite direction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Also, this design shift is true to the spirit of the series. The Civilization series is built on the 33\/33\/33 rule<\/a>. The aim is to have 33% of the game feature new material, 33% is iterating and improving on ideas from the previous version, and the remaining 33% sticks with the tried-and-true gameplay that people like. That’s a really bold approach in an industry where just slightly changing the DPS of rifles<\/a> is considered “controversial”. If shooters evolved as much as Civilization, then in one entry you’d level up your character, then in the next entry your character would be static but your guns would level up, then in the next one your character would work for some sort of military organization that would level up based on the performance of its members, and in the next one you’d go back to leveling up your character but now you earn XP based on how frugal you are with bullets.<\/p>\n

What I’m saying is: I don’t like playing this particular Civilization game, but that’s fine. I’m happy if the series keeps evolving and keeps recreating itself. This one isn’t for me, but it’s possible I’ll love the next one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have few more gripes regarding Civ VI, and a few more nitpicks on the series as a whole. We’ll get to those in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like I said at the start of this series, Civilization VI frustrated me by deliberately working against my preferred playstyle. So let’s talk about where it all went wrong. Broadly speaking, there are two main approaches to building your empire in these games: You can build tall, or build wide. Building wide means expanding rapidly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[612],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospectives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50278"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50290,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50278\/revisions\/50290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}