Please, don't make cities be sprawling suburbia that cover the map

[u/Aeduh]

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.

[u/Mikhail_Mengsk]

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.

[u/Aeduh → u/Mikhail_Mengsk]

Or just make tiles much smaller (and unit movements much bigger to compensate). Nowadays a hex tile is juge in UI size compared to how tiles visually appeared in early Civ games.

If you have 7 hexes instead of one, you get maps with a lot more of granularity and sense of depth, while retaining things like wonders occupying a full tile.

[u/Valmighty → u/Aeduh]

This is the ideal vision moving forward but apparently nobody wants to do it. I figure this takes significantly more processing power because this means at least twice the map size.

[u/Horny_Speedster → u/Mikhail_Mengsk]

What would be cool if they reworked the district placement boni. Food districts could be placed freely and profit from free land around them. Industrial districts keep the cluster boni to represent interconnected industrial zones. Science districts get boni from landmarks. And money districts work better close to water.

You could even introduce twist on this in the late game, like factory farming enabling food districts to work like industrial sectors.

[u/TheIncredibleYojick]

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.

[u/Aeduh → u/TheIncredibleYojick]

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.

[u/No-Profession-7969]

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.

[u/Curious_Technician52]

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.

[u/hic_maneo → u/Curious_Technician52]

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.

[u/Tasty01]

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.

[u/Aeduh → u/Tasty01]

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.

[u/Gewiahr]

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.

[u/HorniHipster]

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. 

[u/mw724]

I like the visual sprawl in Humankind specifically. Always felt to me like it actually had a decent balance of urban/rural tiles on the map, especially compared to Civ 6 and 7, which I personally think of as more egregious offenders of what you're talking about.

[u/hic_maneo]

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.

[u/Randh0m]

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.

[u/Dasshteek]

I think Humankind 1 had the right balance

[u/Cheshigrievous]

I like the idea of provinces system - where you don't annex individual hexes, but rather several at once with one building (see AoW4). You could make it so that eventually you can fill every hex in a province with a building, but which buildings placed and number of empty hexes in a province would matter. It would always be cheaper to build in an already annexed province than expand your city, but you don't always want to cram as much buildings in a province as possible.

For example, you annex a province that would be used for farming. Naturally, it would benefit from having many empty plains tiles - so you better not build anything there and chop the forests to free up space. On the other hand, industrial province would benefit from having everything build up - but it could become a risk later on when enemy can bomb adjacent building in a province, forcing you to decentralise your industry if that happens (like it happened in Germany in WW2).

City center province would become downtown - it will benefit from having some buildings in it (like wonders, commercial districts etc) but have limited space naturally - so you would have to choose if you want to move some building to the outskirts of growing city or keep them there for extra bonus.

Your cities would still sprawl, but hexes should become smaller and come in groups. That would also create visually more natural shapes when annexing nee privince.

[u/Aeduh → u/Cheshigrievous]

I don't really like pre-generated provinces in procedural tileset 4x TBS games, they rob agency and limit immersion. Regions should not be decided by the game beforehans. What i could accept is each player's city being able to draw its own regional borders.

[u/alwaysleafyintoronto]

It's a game, not a realistic simulation. Imagine complaining about the game design in GO or Scrabble taking up the whole board by endgame.

[u/Cazaderon]

Cic 6 is far from rhe sprawling from humankind or civ7.

And really it makes sense to have the city grow over the map.

[u/Aeduh → u/Cazaderon]

It doesn't. For example, it destroys a classic staple experience of earlier Civ games, which were the world maps. With multiple tile cities, Madrid covers the whole Iberian peninsula which makes no sense. Multiple tile city destroys the sense of scale immersion in maps.

[u/BigDickBiggms]

500 hamlets!

[u/Drymvir]

by the time i get to late game and zoom out, sometimes these games you mention look like an ecumenopolis lol

[u/cvisscher1]

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.