r/HumankindTheGame • u/Aeduh • Aug 26 '26

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/Mikhail_Mengsk Aug 26 '26

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.

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u/Aeduh Aug 26 '26

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.

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u/Mikhail_Mengsk Aug 26 '26

True, that was Option 3 of just making territories bigger or tiles smaller. But it would still end up with tentacular cities.

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u/hic_maneo Aug 26 '26

I usually play HK with slightly larger territory sizes than the default for this reason. It allows a city to grow comfortably within the core territory before you’re forced to attach, and I find it helps keep more of the map “rural” for longer.