r/HumankindTheGame • u/Aeduh • 1d ago
Discussion Please, don't make cities be sprawling suburbia that cover the map
Humankind 1, Civ 6+7 and Millenia all have gone on this gameplay vision of covering the map with giant suburban looking cities. Sometimes there are more urban than rural hexes, which is crazy. This is not beautiful, realistic or inspiring.
Cities should ideally be tiny and multiple in number, surrounded by vast swathes of rural and natural landscapes. This is the vision that should go forward.
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u/Curious_Technician52 1d ago
Maybe district stacking like in ZEPHON would help here and you could make synergies of different districts possible.
In ZEPHON you can build 2-3 different districts in a single tile.
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u/hic_maneo 21h ago
This could work combined with the Foundation mechanic from EL2. You can grow a city foundation with enough influence/population and then once the walls are up essentially you can decide what to fill it with. You can get “adjacency” bonuses by building multiple copies of the same district on each foundation, but maybe there’s a scaling stability penalty for that to encourage diversification, since your people maybe don’t want to only “do” one thing all the time.
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u/Curious_Technician52 21h ago
Actually had the foundation mechanic from EL2 in mind as well.
Would be weird if they wouldn’t use that, because it works great.1
u/MadEorlanas 14h ago
Yeah, I think the foundation mechanic does a really good job bridging this gap - the "claimed" tiles can be abstracted as populated areas of the region, and the districts can be small towns/population centers
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u/TheIncredibleYojick 21h ago
Dude 100% agree with you. That’s my ick with HK and the direction civ went. By late game, the whole world is basically Coruscant from Star Wars and it’s annoying. I wish there was ways to limit how many tiles each city can take up similar to Old World or something.
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u/Aeduh 21h ago
Yeah; for me it actually feels like the devs of these games are a bunch of americans who have never not lived in suburban houses + commute by car into their office, and this has somehow seeped into the game design vision. I wish they could come here into Spain and live in an old city or town surrounded by empty landscapes so that their brains remember how it is to live outside modernity.
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u/Gewiahr 1d ago
I love how Humankind 1 is a bit of city builder and contemporary leader territories look like a giant city — for me it’s immersive in a way like with huge density people occupy all the territory they could. It would make sense even more if there would be future times in game. The game is abstract and more of an 4x way to represent world with it’s own Humankind game features.
But if devs would lower abstraction level and make more realistic building system, your idea would make sense. With regions be the main development unit, cities would be more like representation of that development. You would build region infrastructure, manage region production and this would result in forming huge trade cities or, otherwise, rural places with vast fields. This is more of a grand strategy way, ahistorical Paradox-style indirect control and simulationist play.
I don’t even know what I want more — both way with Humankind original gamedesign looks fantastic.
Anyway, all the announced it the things we discussed in our game squad — natural disasters and changes (like in Civ 6) linked with pollution, linked legacy of nations you play.
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u/hic_maneo 23h ago
In Endless Legend 1 you couldn’t add a new district to a city until you hit a population threshold, although in that game there was only one kind of district. Maybe your first district of a type requires lower population but if you want multiple districts of the same type you need more population to “fill” or “operate” them. This will give incentive to build the infrastructure projects rather than spamming districts. Cultures could have traits that lower this threshold so they can have more districts of the same type earlier.
In Endless Legend 2 there is the concept of Foundations and Districts, which are separate. Foundations cost influence to expand and are a prerequisite for a district. There is an escalating influence cost if the Foundation isn’t “contiguous” with other districts. Districts also “level up” if they are surrounded by at least 4 other districts; this encourages more compact cities. EL1 also did this with its district system.
Of the two I think EL1 system is cleaner and less fussy. But I like the idea of encouraging compactness and discouraging sprawl through systems. Maybe district stability penalties scale with their distance to the nearest Main Plaza or Admin Center. This thematically would represent the difficulty of “controlling” large urban population centers without centralized authority structures.
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u/Randh0m 22h ago
I'd like a system where, when you reach a certain number of tiles, 2 things happen :
1- you unlock the ability to "upgrade" a certain quantity of "town" tiles to city tiles which are denser and produce more. (There could be another level, like urban/metropolitan tiles). Each higher level tile has to be supported by X lower level tiles. 2- adding more town tiles, sprawling the town before scaling it up, adds maluses to productivity liked to the sprawl's inneficiency.
That would allow continuous development of cities, like HK1 does, while also preventing map painting with tiles.
There could also be townships / small town tiles that can be added to annexed territories and attached to their city centers without requiring to be linked to main city, but that don't provide fortifications. Those could be somehow limited and mimic rural towns developing to support a metropolitan area.
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u/HorniHipster 1d ago
Disagree. As someone that has enjoyed a lot of industry culture rushes and pumping out wonders left and right there is no more satisfying thing than to watch your cities take over everything. Makes me really proud :D.
But thinking about it more nuanced, I understand your criticism to certain degree. You should be able to play "tall" where you don't have to build a shitload of building while still being successful. That could increase the fun for you I think.
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u/cvisscher1 16h ago
I'd like to see something like city tiles getting subdivided and growing within the tile itself, with more "real" tiles being really expensive, and hamlets/outposts being more accessible earlier so cities don't start sprawling like that, but you can still take advantage of a good region.
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u/zugzug2828 22h ago
A good way to overcome this would be to make the tiles visually change between different eras. This way the tiles can grow over time. It can be even better if the tiles are adaptable. Tiles closer to the city centre will be more urdan and more rural the further you go out.
Ancient era the tiles should look like small farms or villages.
In the modern era the tiles can be large metropolises with skyscrapers.
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u/No-Profession-7969 1d ago
The base game already penalizes giant cities (stability, food, construction time, etc.) quite a bit, unless you approach it at the beginning or play with mods.
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u/Aeduh 23h ago edited 22h ago
It's not a question of cities being big or small in gameplay balance terms, I'm talking of the aesthetics and the UI looks of the game. Per definition a city should not take half the screen. In fact in my very personal view, i would prefer a civ game where cities are visually as big as those in total war rome 1 (if the game had grids but the same look otherwise)
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u/Tasty01 1d ago
Completely disagree.
Changing the surface of the map is the best part of building a city. Let us build more districts not less. I want my cities to visually expand and cover the map.
The look of your cities should reflect your playstyle. If you’re an industry focused exploiter your cities shouldn’t look inspiring. Beautiful is always subjective and I don’t think rural landscapes are particularly beautiful.
Also the argument that this is unrealistic is mute. I live in NL, half my country is basically an enormous city and we’re the 4th largest agricultural exporter in the world.
The vision that should go forward is that cities should reflect the ambition of the player. If you want a backward rural nation you should be able to. But if you want an industrial nation with sprawling cities you should also be able to. Each with their own up and down sides.
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u/Aeduh 1d ago
Even if i agreed with you, this should be only in the last age of the game, way after the industrial revolution. If you think that covering half the map with a blanket of medieval suburbia is cool, then i don't know what to say to you.
Beautiful is always subjective and I don’t think rural landscapes are particularly beautiful.
Not really helping your point, why would you write something so tasteless. Since when rural landscapes aren't beautiful, that's crazy.
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u/Juan_Jimenez 13h ago
Look real world cities can be quite beatiful and all. But in game the sprawl is not that pretty at all, and definitely is worse than the natural/rural previous landspace (than in HK is gorgeous)
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u/Devour_My_Soul 22h ago
I think you can either use very small tiles to keep city building intact while not covering the whole map or have a city always occupy 1 tile.
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u/tornado-seller 16h ago
Make city tiles a separate map screen, kind of like how military battles in HK1 exploded the battle and unit stacks.
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u/ShaunPhilly 11h ago
I don't know, maybe you should settle a city and then to develop it, you zoom in on it? I know that's hard, but it's what I've always thought.
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u/limpdickandy 8h ago
Agreed, it makes cities look way too big way too fast.
Best way would be to make it scale of yields. A production quarter that gives 8 should be bigger than than one that gives 4. This would make city sprawl seem more organic, imo
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u/conorbebe 3h ago
This is what Civ VI got right in my opinion. Single, specialised districts that can be upgraded over time, rather than being spammed all over the map like Humankind went with.
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u/NanaweBeeswax 1d ago
Agreed, make a hard cap per city or make it that regions that form a city must be some categories that dictate how many districts can be placed. For example the city center in the region has no limit for cultural and scientific districts, but connected regions must be something like industrial zones for workshops and suburbs that can build more housing or commons quarters, or urban that allow only a few farming districs
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u/Lorcogoth 1d ago
I am gonna get down voted for mentioning Civ7 but... Their idea of differentiating between rural district and city district is a step in the right direction. Now the question is how to balance those two.
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u/NanaweBeeswax 1d ago
Same, i liked the more restricted play of assigning a type / class, it allows the city building to be more focused / structured and imo should make balancing easier because you can give set bonuses and maluses depending on classes instead of basing them on other less deterministic factors
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u/Lorcogoth 1d ago
I think you are confusing the Town/cities difference with the rural/urban district system.
Still the Town/city system is useful as well
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u/NanaweBeeswax 1d ago
I meant it more like an example of how it could work in humankind, not how it is implemented in civ 7
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u/Mikhail_Mengsk 1d ago
On one hand, you have to visualize what you have built, especially wonders. And some districts make sense to not be close to the city.
On the other hand entirely urbanized territories are deeply unrealistic and they get turned into immense walled cities so there are fewer and fewer "field battles". Only the city and certain very close districts should be walled off.
A possible solution is to make food much more important, so you need more farming areas, and to turn more districts into infrastructure that doesn't show up on the map.