r/HumankindTheGame • u/Aeduh • 7d 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 7d 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 6d 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 6d 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 6d 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/Gewiahr 7d 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/HorniHipster 7d 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/hic_maneo 7d 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 6d 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/TheIncredibleYojick 6d 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 6d 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/cvisscher1 6d 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/No-Profession-7969 7d 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 7d ago edited 6d 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/zugzug2828 6d 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/Tasty01 7d 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 7d 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 6d 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 6d 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 6d 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 6d 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 6d 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 6d 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/Albert_Herring 5d ago
It's a very American 20th century idea of urbanism and zoning, though. Urban areas more than a century old never developed like that.
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u/Cheshigrievous 6d ago
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.
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u/alwaysleafyintoronto 5d ago
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.
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u/TolkienBlackKid 4d ago
Well realistically you do have mega sprawling cities. Have yall seen New York, Tokyo, or even Houston from above? looks very much like a HK city
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u/Aeduh 5d ago
That's probably the dumbest response in the whole thread. Strategy video games cover the whole spectrum from arcade to realistic. Only a small portion of strategy games actually try to emulate the aesthetics of a physical board game.
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u/alwaysleafyintoronto 5d ago
Would you care to try your response again in a civil manner? Humankind and civilization are effectively board games. Think about the mechanics of developing tiles and moving units around during combat. These are tabletop gaming elements. You are complaining that the map is fully claimed by the endgame.
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u/Aeduh 5d ago
Have you played civ4 and civ5? They are not at all what you say. Civ6 and 7 are lead designed by Ed Beach, a developer who is particularly interested by board games, and he brought the franchise in that direction, but this is not at all a staple of the subgenre.
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u/alwaysleafyintoronto 5d ago
Much better, thanks. Civ 4 and 5 are still about claiming the entire map and building your settlements large enough to work all of those tiles. The primary difference is that worked tiles are not visible on the map in the same way they are in humankind or civ 6 and 7. You can't see where all of the wonders and buildings are located in your capital as you an in civ 6 and 7 and humankind, but it's not like you've actually got untouched wilderness surrounding your city centers in civ 4 and 5.
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u/Aeduh 5d ago
The civ4 earth map was GREAT gameplay. Nowadays the capital city Madrid with the current system occupies the whole iberian peninsula LMAO and i have no patience for this.
If you reread the original post, you see natural and rural. There should be a proportion of several times the size of farms and villages vs cities. I personally consider the city bloat anti-aesthetic and anti-historic, and most visitors to this subreddit have seemed to agree. Cities shouldn't occupy half of the screen. Wonders having their own tile is passable, and a few districts like industry or ports maybe too, but to be fair i much prefer the pre-civ6 model of 1 tile per city.
Actually so what if buildings and wonders are not in their own tile? You can see it of the city info screen anyways. It's an aesthetic, not a gameplya conditioning game design decision.
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u/Cazaderon 3d ago
Cic 6 is far from rhe sprawling from humankind or civ7.
And really it makes sense to have the city grow over the map.
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u/Aeduh 3d ago
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.
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u/Cazaderon 3d ago
Yeah well it s more about scaling the map then. I like the mecanics that come with sprawling cities, such a adjacencies. It adds a layer of planning that i enjoy.
But yeah, it s hard to balance versus keeping urban/countryside style occupancy.
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u/Aeduh 3d ago
Making tiles smaller would definitely be cool, but no amount of map scaling can compensate a city occupying the equivalent of thousands of square kilometers.
Adjacencies mechanics are a totally arcade and boardgamey gameplay feature, it breaks the immersion of any game that aspires to be grand strategy. In that regard, the civilization series/genre during its first 25 years was always regarded as grand turn based strategy, these recent games are a deviation from that.
Gameplay depth in a civ like game should consist complex wide expansion through an intrincate geographical landscape with natural chokepoints and hard diplomatic choices, not in stacking balatro numbers.
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u/Cazaderon 3d ago
Civ 3/4/5 didnt have more gameplay depth than 6 despite cities not sprawling around. They had none of what you described. They re 4x, not grand strategy games. And any game is basically a numbers game.
So yeah, still disagreeing.
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u/Aeduh 3d ago
As i said in another comment, i have played Civ4 with BAT mod and making 256x124 maps (double the size of the setting for Huge in the vanilla game) + 18 civilizations. Every empire on that map could grow to the size of around 30-50 cities. That's 4X grand strategy.
Again, i couldn't care less about stacking balatro number stacks to minmax combo tilesets. Playing as France in the world map, and putting Paris' industrial district in Lyon, and its commercial district in Bordeaux, just because of little numbers go up, is immersion and scale breaking. This is really not a core experience of Civ. Returning to single tile cities would not be a problem.
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u/Cazaderon 3d ago
Meh. Bigger just means more of the same in civ... It doesnt make it more strategic, just duller and more boring and really..... A lot easier.
You want a sim, civ isnt one. It was never designed around placing Lyon in Lyon....
You do you, but dont pretend you have the right true vidion of what a civ game is as your optic is marginal at best
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u/Aeduh 3d ago
Nah, it's boring if you only have 5 types of tiles, like plains forest hill mountain and that's it. You can see that humnakind 2 is introducing elevation levels, and there's potential for much more.
And pretty manipulative for you to say that my stance is marginal when it has been the most upvoted discussion type post of the month. Really, if you want to consider civ like a geographical balatro, i would say that it's your position that's marginal.
Civs 3-4-5 absolutely had higes pushes to make, as you say, 'Lyon in Lyon'. Were you posting in civfanatics forums in 2008? You wouldn't know.
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u/Cazaderon 3d ago
I was actually. Probably earlier than that.
Doesnt change the fact that most people playing those games dont give a rat s ass about having cities in their natural spot and might never even play a TSL map.
Znd if you want to go down the 'i m more experienced' path. I used to olay civ 4 and 5 community challenges of the month for years. So yeah, i think i know what i m talking about. Game was never designed about faithfully reproducung history or geography.
But whatever floats your boat. Everyone plays the way he wants and has different expectations. But TSL remains marginal over the the playerbase. Doesnt change the fact that i too would love lore realistic terrains and map occupation even on random maps.
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u/Aeduh 3d ago
Game was never designed about faithfully reproducung history or geography.
Civ is a balance between realism and board game arcade gameplay. Civ6 and 7 have been lead designed by a man who is an expert board game designer, tilting the balance towards there (not only multiple tile cities, but also the use of cards as gameplay elements).
You probably remembered how Rhye's and fall was the most popular mod in Civ4, and not only it had TSL but also historic spawning points. As for Fall from Heaven, the other most popular mod, how would you ever make that mod and its harsh bleak landscape aesthetics with suburban cities that cover the map?
You keep saying the word marginal, but it really isn't. Most people agreed with my OP.
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u/NanaweBeeswax 7d 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 7d 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 7d 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 7d 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 7d 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 7d 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.