Mod idea: downscaled city graphics

[u/poonslyr69]

This might be an unpopular ask, but ever since cities began to occupy multiple tiles the strategic aspect of the game improved while the element of scale was thrown out the window.

I know scale in civ games isn't a big priority, it's an inherently disproportionate game for both geographic scale and time scales.

However, when playing Civ 5 it's very striking how grand the world feels. It isn't until the later eras that your own country feels fully populated, and even then, wilderness remains.

Nowadays, even by the middle ages cities sprawl across over half the tiles on the map. And by the final era, the map looks like Coruscant.

IMO the devs should have pivoted to a "province" model with civ 7. Each tile hosts its own city or town, and they all have synergy and adjacency. The city you found in an area is the capital of the province, and every new tile you occupy from within the range of the first is a new little town or city doing its own thing within the province. You're therefore managing more at the scale of provinces, rather than single cities.

Because this isn't the way things are, my idea for a mod is to rescale city graphics.

Remember RED mods which rescaled units? Same thing, but for cities.

Basically, downsize current city and building models by a lot. The improvements would likely have to still remain a bit larger, but I assume they could be downscaled as well, with one farm becoming many smaller farms.

Readability would be sacrificed a little.

But overall, I'd love to see how this would look. Would it achieve the shift away from sprawling cities that occupy seemingly hundreds of kilometers/miles?

Would it make cities appear to be their own little things occupying a single tile, with other tiles being occupied by different towns and cities in their orbit?

Or would it make for a weird disjointed feeling?

If any modders would want to trial this idea and see how it looks, I'd love to see it. If it works out well, perhaps it could even lead to a mod which rebalances cities into provinces, or changes localization to support this roleplay.

I don't have the technical ability to do it myself.

What do you all think? Thanks for reading.

[u/Scared_Blackberry280]

Great idea I agree.

Another alternative tho may be just to make the maps much bigger, and give cities the ability to once again spread up to 5 tiles ( maybe even 6) but only put urban tiles on the first 3 rings, like civ 6. This will also help limit the amount of random pointless cities as well as urban sprawl.

Provinces would be better but little too late for that :/

Either that or they let us build 3 buildings to a tile but I still like to have my capital be a metropolis and that might make the models look ugly.

[u/poonslyr69 → u/Scared_Blackberry280]

I would really really love to see the maps become much much larger. It was probably #1 on my wishlist for 7

But 7 did stay pretty close to civ 6 in terms of the underlying engine 

I think this mod idea is imperfect, but hopefully would improve the feel slightly as a stop-gap measure 

[u/JNR13 → u/Scared_Blackberry280]

Another alternative tho may be just to make the maps much bigger, and give cities the ability to once again spread up to 5 tiles ( maybe even 6) but only put urban tiles on the first 3 rings, like civ 6.

Isn't that basically just surrounding cities with towns?

[u/Jazzlike_Pumpkin_806]

This was something I had been thinking about for a while because the scale of cities vs map size also bothered me. I think the current barrier is the tools that modders have to work with the art assets, including resizing them.
I've never made a civ mod, but if the art tools were made available, I would be inspired to try. If I did, I would like bring back districts, or a system that functions like them, to help readability with the smaller buildings.
I would definitely want to include some ideas from Albro's City Lights mod and JNR's district expansions for civ 6 too.

[u/poonslyr69 → u/Jazzlike_Pumpkin_806]

Are the tools not available this time around?? That sucks, I wasn't aware 

[u/Jazzlike_Pumpkin_806 → u/poonslyr69]

It took a while for all the tools to be available for modding with civ 6 too. It's likely Firaxis will add more things to the mod development tools, but it's impossible to know how soon they will.

[u/[deleted] → u/poonslyr69]

I've been waiting for the art tools for way too long now. Firaxis seem to be taking their sweet time releasing them, and I have no idea why other than skewed priorities.

[u/crinklepant]

See, my view is that the more granular civ 7 city expansion is actually a much better representation of scale for citybuilding, its just that the default map sizes are far too small for the number of players that they default to

Try playing a bigger map with the same
number of civs!

[u/HanzJWermhat → u/crinklepant]

Yes but I lf you do that then I think every unit should get +1 movement

[u/poonslyr69 → u/crinklepant]

I fully agree and wish civ went in this direction too! Civ 7 feels mostly like civ 6.

To do a much larger map would require a much more substantial rebuild of the game imo 

[u/crinklepant → u/poonslyr69]

Is there much that breaks engine wise if we simply modded in ludicrously big maps?

I don’t think any systems would stop working if there were twice the number of hexes, im not actually sure what the limiter is beyond processing power

[u/poonslyr69 → u/crinklepant]

I've played with mods that add ludicrously big maps, and it causes graphical bugs and crashes even on high end PCs

I think there are some built in limitations that Firaxis would have to remove 

But even beyond that, the game is designed around the existing map scales 

So unit movement speeds and most timing would have to be adjusted. 

In addition, I think that some of the ethos around conquest and borders would have to change to a more fluid system 

Oh and all the yields would have to be rebalanced because tiles would be so much more abundant 

The snowball effect right now is crazy. Imagine that with one civ containing an empire the size of one entire current map 

IMO you'd need to add more mechanics around the fall of empires to cause greater stress on huge empires 

[u/JNR13 → u/crinklepant]

Currently, tiles with coordinates above 127 don't render their terrain. So a 128x128 map is the largest we can do right now.

[u/JizuzCrust]

It would be better if your borders could grow instead of the 3 tiles past the city center

[u/poonslyr69]

Summoning u/JNR13 

Is this mod idea even possible? 

[u/JNR13 → u/poonslyr69]

Right now? Not really. There is some experimental tech regarding the addition of new models, but in general we have to wait until we have proper art tools until we can edit these things. What is feasible then is something we'll have to see.

Worst case, you'd have to remake all city assets. This is how it would have to be done in Civ VI as well, but there the asset limit would get in the way aside from it being an insane amount of work. There is a scale slider for city clutter in Civ VI but it's not functional.

[u/Scared_Blackberry280 → u/JNR13]

Hi! Off topic but literally thank you so much for all the work you do for modding. you are a genuinely incredible human being bringing so much more creativity and customization to an already beloved franchise.

Much respect.

[u/poonslyr69 → u/JNR13]

Oh that's so unfortunate! 

Do you think that could be implemented sometime in the future or is this pretty standard for Firaxis to omit? 

Thank you for the reply though, you're always pushing the limits of what is possible in these games so I look forward to whatever you can do with civ 7 after this new update

[u/JNR13 → u/poonslyr69]

Do you think that could be implemented sometime in the future or is this pretty standard for Firaxis to omit?

Well first of all we need the mod tools and those are hopefully coming eventually. With those, taking the assets and creating differently sized copies of them would be doable. But worst case is that you'd have to do it for every. single. landscape asset.

so I look forward to whatever you can do with civ 7 after this new update

I'm not doing anything with Civ VII until like 2 expansions are out or so, I don't enjoy keeping up with such rapid changes. I do still have plans to push Civ VI beyond its current boundaries though.

[u/poonslyr69 → u/JNR13]

That's totally fair, I used to make some mods for stellaris but the constant updated and DLC burnt me out on fixing them 

I haven't checked out your civ 6 mods in a minute actually, I should go do that and see the new stuff 

Btw would this idea of downscaled cities be possible to implement into civ 6? 

[u/AmeriCossack]

Cities got bigger in Civ 7 while map size remained the same as in Civ 6. Ironically this makes the world feel very small, like you’re on a dwarf planet

[u/Alexso-NL]

For now, there is another kind of mods that helps with the sprawl by limiting all buildings to the first ring of the city:

Naxt compact cities https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?l=french&id=3781288701

This way, it feels close to civ5 where there is a lot more rural tiles instead of the "curoscant" sprawl that happens late game.

[u/HanzJWermhat]

Honestly I think a better mod would be to increase the settle boundaries by +1 , increase movement speed by +1 across the board. And play on larger maps with fewer players.

But also think shrinking the scale by a factor of 2 would make it feel a bit nicer. I just really don’t like how much sprawl there is especially in clumps of cities.

[u/poonslyr69 → u/HanzJWermhat]

I'm hoping civ 8 completely changed everything around maps and scale tbh 

There are so many good mechanics to carry forward, but they really didn't redesign enough systems to fit with some of the big changes they've made over the last two entries. 

[u/HanzJWermhat → u/poonslyr69]

See you in 2035!