The Symbiotic Nation: a Civ 'goal'

[MrBaggins]

Its quite apparent that there is a particular area of Civ that has very little choice associated with it:

City Size: Bigger is always better.

The 'trick' is finding a way to grow your cities faster, and keep the minor annoyances and costs in check. Generally speaking, however, there are always internal solutions; you can fix what ills the city by building the temple, courthouse, hospital, aqueduct... or whatever. Governments are usually a limiting factor... but these affect the nation as a whole.

Bigger is paper and smaller is the stone, and there are no scissors.

Given the right order of tile improvements, city improvements and so on, a city can be all things... productive in food, science, gold and 'shields'... and happy too. Improvements generally have flat 'costs' and exponential 'rewards'.

Its true that the terrain can make certain cities more growth, production or commercially useful, and make the market place or mill a more beneficial improvement, for that city. That never takes away from the beneficiality of other city components, however...

Given the choice between ultimately having science, gold and production improvements, its almost *ALWAYS* a good idea to have all, at least ultimately. There is the 'sense' of choice within the game, but its really only a question of when, not if...

My contention is that the game would be markedly improved if:

* There were Specialization of cities... 'Generally balanced', Production, Gold or Science.

* That specialization would be costly, and require that the city 'sacrifice' in some other area.

* That ultimately multiple specializations in a single city would be counter productive.

* That these specialized cities should be symbiotic- thus although Gold is the overriding improvement support currency, Gold specialization towns should require other resources or deal with other limiting factors to be productive and/or viable. Production and science towns should require (mucho) Gold... perhaps.

* Specializations should become more costly as the city increases in size, requiring an even growth and support policy to maintain cohesion.

* That the AI would be aware of these concept, and use them to its benefit.

Thoughts? Comments?

MrBaggins

[J Bytheway]

It's not too hard to implement a method of promoting specialization in cities, you use improvements with benefits and costs, e.g. Trade Union +2 happiness, -20% production,

[MrBaggins]

That specific case, would require a need for more happiness... by some method... of course...

The big issue... is with Gold improvements... they 'pay for themselves' and hence you can have them without 'downside', as it stands...

[Sandman]

Hmm. I'd say that historically, cities started out with specialisations (military base, natural harbour, trade routes, manufacturing) but get those specialisations get less and less important as the city grows. All the world's biggest cities have many different roles.

Why not impose some sort of cap on the number of improvements that can be built, based on say, population?

I'd also suggest that cultural level have an effect on the performance of a building, so that if you want a really effective temple, then you should build it as early as possible. This is already in civ3 to a small extent, given that 1000 year old buildings produce double culture.

[Nikolai]

The idea looks interesting. However, it could lead to imbalance of the game if not implemented carefully... Of course, so can any idea.

Originally posted by MrBaggins
* That specialization would be costly, and require that the city 'sacrifice' in some other area.

* Specializations should become more costly as the city increases in size, requiring an even growth and support policy to maintain cohesion.

I was instantly thinking of this when reading this part:
One city produces loots of food, and therefore exports to the sorrounding cities. (Here we could use demand and production as a factor BTW.) But, the city has neglected the production of other important things, and becomes dependant of other cities to fill this demand.

On the contrary(sp?), another city has neglected food producing, but is a huge producer of something just as important for the community, which it, of course, has to trade for food. These two cities has therefore become dependant of each other. But, what if the crop is destroyed one year, or a disaster occurs?

I like it!

[MrBaggins]

Sandman>

In modern times, I'd agree with you... still... in gameplay terms... do we want this, is the question?

Bad idea to cap number of improvements based on population... it all gets back to the 'bigger=better' problem

Consider comparing India and the UK... should Indian cities be more 'powerful' than UK cities?

The culture idea is interesting, but I don't think ultimately its a 'solution' to the core 'richer get richer' issue.

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by MrBaggins
Sandman>

In modern times, I'd agree with you... still... in gameplay terms... do we want this, is the question?

Bad idea to cap number of improvements based on population... it all gets back to the 'bigger=better' problem

Consider comparing India and the UK... should Indian cities be more 'powerful' than UK cities?

The culture idea is interesting, but I don't think ultimately its a 'solution' to the core 'richer get richer' issue.

Of course, the bigger the city, the more capable is it to maintain several improvements, but I think we should add something balancing the "big city" versus "small city" issue you mentions.

[Lemmy]

One way to make bigger not always better is by rising upkeep costs for buildings, bigger cities pay more upkeep.
Or go even further, make the upkeep adjustable.
So you could raise the upkeep of buildings for small cities, making them relatively more effective then in bigger cities.

[MrBaggins]

I think I have the solution:

crime/corruption

The first couple of improvements are 'freebies' but subsequently each adds percentage to crime.

There are a limited number of 'corruption fighting' improvements, and you can deal with the amount of crime that one 'set' of improvements; science, gold or production add... but not all... You could still build others, but then the gains start to become increasingly counter productive.

Happiness and government effects the amount of corruption... so given a very 'happy' city or a less corrupt government form, you could have a mix of specializations: allowing for late game metropolii(sp?)...

MrBaggins

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Originally posted by Lemmy
One way to make bigger not always better is by rising upkeep costs for buildings, bigger cities pay more upkeep.
Or go even further, make the upkeep adjustable.
So you could raise the upkeep of buildings for small cities, making them relatively more effective then in bigger cities.

or you can give all improvements some backdraw, what comes to my mind is e.g.: arena adds happiness, but reduces population (remember, those lions have to be fed somehow )

[Sandman]

Originally posted by MrBaggins
Sandman>

In modern times, I'd agree with you... still... in gameplay terms... do we want this, is the question?

Bad idea to cap number of improvements based on population... it all gets back to the 'bigger=better' problem

Consider comparing India and the UK... should Indian cities be more 'powerful' than UK cities?

The culture idea is interesting, but I don't think ultimately its a 'solution' to the core 'richer get richer' issue.

Bigger is better. Instead of punishing sucessful players, it should be more difficult to be successful.

Suggestions to check city growth:

A hell of a lot fewer grassland squares. Forest and jungle should yield plains, not grassland. In fact, I'd suggest scrapping grassland altogether. It should certainly be impossible to 'mine' grassland.

Desert and Tundra should be utterly, utterly useless.

Change the irrigation system. It's not very logical, and invites silly activities like irrigating an entire continent from one tiny lake. Drainage of wetlands is just as important historically, include that.

Get rid of luxuries, or change their effect. It's too easy to keep a population happy as it stands.

Soil erosion and salinisation should be included as further checks on growth.

Bring back the exponential food box, and prevent population booms from happening.

Make disease more important.

Regarding Indian cities being more powerful than UK cities, well, it's clear that Indian cities have yet to build all the improvements that UK cities have. Plus their cities are not a big as you might think, they are still a primarily agricultural economy. They only have four very large cities, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Calcutta.

[MrBaggins]

Bigger is better, but returns never diminish, only multiply. *THAT* is the problem.

I.E. A size 21 city is 20% more productive and rich than a size 20 city, even though it only works 5% more land.

A player, being ahead, only increases his lead, turn in, turn out. If you don't solve this... the AI will always be screwed, since it can never catch up.

Returns should diminish. Going from size 20 to size 21 a city shouldn't gain as much as it did going from size 19 to 20. If you make the bigger city less happy, via increased 'pollution'/disease, perhaps, and link happiness to corruption, then as a city grows its corruption rate slowly grows too... inevitably diminishing returns.

Crime/corruption/waste affects growth/production/commerce equally via a %, and can be controlled, but only up to a point via improvements. It works as a diminishing agent. Happiness and cr/co/wa improvements can keep this in check. Empire size should not affect corruption, but happiness instead, indirectly affecting it. Larger production improvements should increase corruption, as the surplus gives more opportunities for waste, crime and corruption. Different governments give different base crime rates.

I do agree that growth should be slowed in other ways. I had a concept for hidden resources in another thread: that a separate map would be kept with resources that were not visible or useful to ancient peoples... like oil... and that these resources could be discovered and exploited when appropriate technology, and survey units were found and created. The non-renewable resources should have a 'quantity'. Water could be an 'invisible' resource below rivers, wetlands and so on... and be used... although to some degree, it is renewable.

MrBaggins

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by MrBaggins

Bigger is paper and smaller is the stone, and there are no scissors.

My compliments, it's a fantastic line. However it's not entirely true. In fact if I had to choose one strategy that dominates civ based games its constant expansion, often referred to an infinite city sleaze (ICS). A good player can beat any of the main civ games without having more than 1 or 2 big cities.....not only can they do it in many circumstances it is the best strategy.

At higher difficulty levels happiness problems require a lot of resources to contain........if you aren't facing this constraint enough just play at deity or equivalent and you will.

I would also maintain that good players do not just build everything in one city, but have specific roles for each city, and hence specialise in the manner which you want. This comes out more in MP than SP.

[MrBaggins]

DrSpike

Yep... i'm aware of ICS... but its massively reduced in recent games, given empire size caps. 'REX'ing is valuable, but you could actually negate the benefit by making government types with improved empire size caps have trade-offs... such as lower growth...

The ICS problem is due to the center square producing, effectively. This isn't an issue for the bigger=better problem because its a diminishing return... that center square bonus is static, and becomes less and less of a percentage of base city production. Improvements, however, beget larger values, as the city size grows, due to being percentage bonuses.

Whilst there are happiness 'problems' for bigger cities, and those problems are magnified at higher difficulty levels, every city can still be 'solved', and its only ever a minor setback. Bigger sometimes equates to another problem to solve, but these problems never amount to a diminishing return.

As I mentioned, terrain can make different improvements more or less useful. This is 'why' cities 'specialize' in the game, as it stands. Consider a city with a lot of mountains and a mixture of other terrain. This might be a good candidate for a 'production city'. Its base production numbers will be good, and hence multiplication of those will be more valuable, through production improvements. However... its also true that commercial and science improvements can also be built, are not, as it stands, counter productive and do contribute, if only lower amounts. This is not specialization... this is a side effect of terrain.

MrBaggins

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by MrBaggins
DrSpike

Yep... i'm aware of ICS... but its massively reduced in recent games, given empire size caps.

Nah, they tried in civ3 admittedly, but one look at the games of players like Aeson shows why ICS is very much alive and kicking should a player choose to use it.

Far from presenting diminishing returns it is expansion that yields exponential long term resources, whereas it is in improving your city in fact you experience diminishing returns.

Amongst experienced civvers I guarantee you the power of expansion will bother them more than the 'bigger is better' problem you are discussing.

[Sandman]

But returns do multiply historically. I'm not very comfortable with a civ game that slows down the rate of advancement as the centuries progress, with ever greater artificial penalties on growth. Multiplication of rewards is very important in order to encourage large cities, whilst diminishing rewards will ultimately encourage hordes of small cities.

A game which artificially caps growth rates for leading civilizations loses some of the 'thrill of the chase' in catching up with rivals, or keeping your lead. I noticed a lack of this in civ3, with the minimum four turns tech advancement, and the reduced cost of techs for those behind in the tech tree.

A more realistic way of keeping growth in check would be to limit the opportunities for extremely large cities by reducing the amounts of arable land in the game, and making certain resources finite.

[Maquiladora]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Nah, they tried in civ3 admittedly, but one look at the games of players like Aeson shows why ICS is very much alive and kicking should a player choose to use it.

I think Mr Baggins is referring to CtP2, where ICS is not possible, done by Government restrictions on no. of cities, monarchy 20, fascism/communism 35 etc and increasing city radius.

[LDiCesare]

CtP2's city limits is pretty annoying and unrealistic in my opinion, however. The best way to prevent people from ICSing is to make it extremely hard to keep territory far from the capital (not just unhappiness: rioting, civil war, spawning of a new civ which spans more than one city -think USA breaking from the UK).
City size is not a linear function of food, so growth has diminishing returns. The fact that once you have grown you no longer have diminishing returns doesn't matter much. You'd obtain exactly the same results by slowing growth even more.
I think MOO3 has settings for planets to behave as mixed, autarcic (is that an English word? looks so ugly in English) or specialized, each leading to its own strengths and weaknesses (read -or just scan- Dan's review).

[moomin]

I too wouldn't like hard limits on city growth - given that MM grows linearly with the number of cities you own in a Civ game, I'd very much like to be able to pursue a vertical, as opposed to horisontal, expansion strategy - crank your city size up as fast a possible and cram every single bit of synergy out of that as soon as possible.

I agree, however, that there should be diminishing returns for pop once the land the city controls is fully expoited.

[MrBaggins]

Originally posted by DrSpike


Nah, they tried in civ3 admittedly, but one look at the games of players like Aeson shows why ICS is very much alive and kicking should a player choose to use it.

Far from presenting diminishing returns it is expansion that yields exponential long term resources, whereas it is in improving your city in fact you experience diminishing returns.

Amongst experienced civvers I guarantee you the power of expansion will bother them more than the 'bigger is better' problem you are discussing.

Well, thats a serious shame... I heard ICS'ing wasn't viable and had been replaced by REX'ing.

CtP & CtP2 don't have the ICS problem:

Empire expansion is limited in two ways...

Empire size

Capitol distance

Both are modifiable, by government, for both starting value and severity.

The penalty for exceeding either is unhappiness, and by proxy crime/corruption and waste.

For Empire size, the penalty is civ wide... so say you have a empire size cap of 10, with a penalty of 1 for each city thereafter, and you expand to 13 cities. You'll be faced with a -3 happiness in each of your cities.

The Capitol distance penalty is based on shortest travelled distance... including terrain and travel improvements (roads, rails etc.) The penalty applies to just that city.

For a given difficulty level, you can set riot and revolt levels... of unhappiness... you start off with a base happiness level, and the penalties can put you in defecit.

When the cities happiness dips into riot level, it no longer is productive, until it raises above riot level. Riots left too long can become revolts.

When a city reaches revolt level, it can split off and form another civ. When a revolt occurs, nearby unhappy cities can join the revolting city, in a chain reaction.

To see the best current happiness model in CtP2, look at the Cradle of Civilization mod.

MrBaggins

[MrBaggins]

Originally posted by Sandman
But returns do multiply historically. I'm not very comfortable with a civ game that slows down the rate of advancement as the centuries progress, with ever greater artificial penalties on growth. Multiplication of rewards is very important in order to encourage large cities, whilst diminishing rewards will ultimately encourage hordes of small cities.

A game which artificially caps growth rates for leading civilizations loses some of the 'thrill of the chase' in catching up with rivals, or keeping your lead. I noticed a lack of this in civ3, with the minimum four turns tech advancement, and the reduced cost of techs for those behind in the tech tree.

A more realistic way of keeping growth in check would be to limit the opportunities for extremely large cities by reducing the amounts of arable land in the game, and making certain resources finite.

Well... thats one way to look at it, but I think Brian Reynolds view is a better one...

In his article "The Poor Get Richer: The Ancient Art of Game Balance"

in the section

"Turn Offs" -- Negative Game Experiences

Brian writes
The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Poorer. Similarly (though perhaps more surprisingly), it is dull to have to keep playing after you know you've "won." Players lose interest the moment the game ceases to be a competition and merely becomes a mopping up operation. Both of these first two problems are classic symptoms of what I call the "Rich get Richer" syndrome: the farther ahead a player is the easier it becomes to get further ahead, and the farther behind a player falls the harder it is for him to catch up. This is one of the easiest traps for a game system to fall into and one of the hardest to correct for. In "rich get richer" games, players may start on even ground, but once one-layer gains a slight advantage, the game system enters a positive feedback loop which compounds that advantage until the player is unstoppable.

The problem with bigger cities not having diminishing returns is that success begets too much success. A player who's gotten into a 'winning situation' in terms of getting to larger cities first is automatically guaranteed success. Often this 'victory' happens somewhere between 20% and 40% along the tech tree, given what I've seen.

You say that it is somehow unfulfilling to have an elastic effect, pulling the leader back... either in catching the leader, or staying ahead.

Brian Reynolds disagrees with this viewpoint in this article Help The Poor Get Richer

My contention is, that given a better challenge, that you won't care that there is an elastic property to competition, just that there is more competition when you're the leader (which is, lets face it, just about the default situation in civ) and that in the event that you are behind, that the civs ahead will not be in a position to run away with it, at the same degree.

Globally reducing the amount of growth resources DOES NOTHING: every player is in the same boat. The human player is (probably) in an advantageous position, since he will likely find the (more difficult to exploit) extra growth and get ahead... and hence, stay ahead.

MrBaggins

[MrBaggins]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
CtP2's city limits is pretty annoying and unrealistic in my opinion, however. The best way to prevent people from ICSing is to make it extremely hard to keep territory far from the capital (not just unhappiness: rioting, civil war, spawning of a new civ which spans more than one city -think USA breaking from the UK).
City size is not a linear function of food, so growth has diminishing returns. The fact that once you have grown you no longer have diminishing returns doesn't matter much. You'd obtain exactly the same results by slowing growth even more.
I think MOO3 has settings for planets to behave as mixed, autarcic (is that an English word? looks so ugly in English) or specialized, each leading to its own strengths and weaknesses (read -or just scan- Dan's review).

It doesn't seem like you've, in fact, looked too hard at CtP2. There *ARE* capitol distance penalties, and they *CAN AND DO* cause rioting and revolts (spawning of new civs that span more than one city.) Play Cradle 1.35 on a 200x100 gigantic map... and see for yourself.

City size and growth is a diminishing return, but the associated rewards are not. The growth system is also tied into the rewards that larger cities produce in multiplying quanties... Bigger cities can build the improvements necessary for growth, or produce the resources necessary to improve the surroundings quicker... growth is self-perpetuating, and not necessarily diminishing in the manner which you describe: the science advantage that bigger cities produce must be considered too.

MrBaggins

[MrBaggins]

Originally posted by moomin
I too wouldn't like hard limits on city growth - given that MM grows linearly with the number of cities you own in a Civ game, I'd very much like to be able to pursue a vertical, as opposed to horisontal, expansion strategy - crank your city size up as fast a possible and cram every single bit of synergy out of that as soon as possible.

I agree, however, that there should be diminishing returns for pop once the land the city controls is fully expoited.

Its a great concept... it could be achieved by having a separate 'path' of government types that, instead of allowing for yet bigger empire sizes, keeps tight empire size controls but gives more production and growth bonuses.

A choice for a peaceful builder. Choice is always good.

MrBaggins

[MrBaggins]

Thought for the day: Civ... Simulation or Simulacrum?

First and foremost, its a game... and by definition needs to adhere to the 'fun first' motif. Historical accuracy is impossible to achieve, and undesirable: we want to be able to make *our* history. Handicapping trailing civs almost certainly ensures that 'history' is remarkably short.

MrBaggins

[LDiCesare]

Originally posted by MrBaggins


It doesn't seem like you've, in fact, looked too hard at CtP2. There *ARE* capitol distance penalties, and they *CAN AND DO* cause rioting and revolts (spawning of new civs that span more than one city.) Play Cradle 1.35 on a 200x100 gigantic map... and see for yourself.

City size and growth is a diminishing return, but the associated rewards are not. The growth system is also tied into the rewards that larger cities produce in multiplying quanties... Bigger cities can build the improvements necessary for growth, or produce the resources necessary to improve the surroundings quicker... growth is self-perpetuating, and not necessarily diminishing in the manner which you describe: the science advantage that bigger cities produce must be considered too.

MrBaggins

I did look a lot at CtP2, and played Cradle too (until it crashes my computer). I definitely do not like CtP2 on huge maps because the city number limits per government prevents you from using the space effectively. That is truly horrible in the Diamond Age, when building a single undersea city will make your whole empire riot despite being in Ecotopia or Virtual Democracy. It effectively puts a cap on the number of cities you can have and strongly encourages nasty warfare (destroying all opponents' cities). I don't like that.
The distance from capitol effect exists, and exists as in civ. Its effect, however, is poor. I get more riots out of poorly managed slaver cities than from far away outposts. There should be no way to maintain a far away colony unless you have appropriate media/travel techs. When a city riots, they either become barbs or a new civ, but won't join an existing civ (barring one wonder effect). At least I never saw that happen to me, and I did play a lot of CtP2 games. I contend that several cities together should split and declare themselves a new civ, not just a single one. Something more among the lines of what happens in civ when a capital is taken and an empire splits in two (except that the trigger shouldn't be capital lost but accumulated weariness from the colony due to big distance and whatever social problems can be modelled). If they do in CtP2, it is fine, but, again, I never saw it happen.

[MrBaggins]

Originally posted by LDiCesare

I did look a lot at CtP2, and played Cradle too (until it crashes my computer). I definitely do not like CtP2 on huge maps because the city number limits per government prevents you from using the space effectively. That is truly horrible in the Diamond Age, when building a single undersea city will make your whole empire riot despite being in Ecotopia or Virtual Democracy. It effectively puts a cap on the number of cities you can have and strongly encourages nasty warfare (destroying all opponents' cities). I don't like that.
The distance from capitol effect exists, and exists as in civ. Its effect, however, is poor. I get more riots out of poorly managed slaver cities than from far away outposts. There should be no way to maintain a far away colony unless you have appropriate media/travel techs. When a city riots, they either become barbs or a new civ, but won't join an existing civ (barring one wonder effect). At least I never saw that happen to me, and I did play a lot of CtP2 games. I contend that several cities together should split and declare themselves a new civ, not just a single one. Something more among the lines of what happens in civ when a capital is taken and an empire splits in two (except that the trigger shouldn't be capital lost but accumulated weariness from the colony due to big distance and whatever social problems can be modelled). If they do in CtP2, it is fine, but, again, I never saw it happen.

I was using the 200x100 cradle example as a situation where revolts in the AI would be most likely. Your game (and milage) might vary. I have save where two civs are having multiple cities revolt, due to unhappiness after overextention.

The government cap settings in Cradle were actually designed for the huge(large) map.

I find your stand against semi-hard limits on empire size to be amusing.

ICS has long (and rightly so) been declared an enemy to game balance. The only way to combat them... is to attack the issue directly: empire size and capitol distance caps.

Capitol Distance Penalties alone are insufficient... all you need to do is pack your cities closer together in that case...

I view it as incredibly realistic to have an empire size cap, representing the limits of the government's capability to bureaucratically deal with an empire. The limit is only semi-hard, anyway; you can alter the sliders to reduce the workday, or increase rations or wages... to offset the unhappiness gained by empire size abuse.

Speaking of it encouraging brutal warfare... perhaps so, but in my viewpoint in pre-modern era's, need to give the city defender the advantage, in the interest of game balance, and game extention.

If you are too poor a planner to reserve some bureaucratic capacity to deal with conquered cities, then perhaps you deserve the riots that you incur. Its a very simple matter to code conditions for the AI to 'reserve future city capacity' when it is fighting, and is confident of success or knows war is imminent with a weaker opponent.

MrBaggins

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by DrSpike


My compliments, it's a fantastic line. However it's not entirely true. In fact if I had to choose one strategy that dominates civ based games its constant expansion, often referred to an infinite city sleaze (ICS). A good player can beat any of the main civ games without having more than 1 or 2 big cities.....not only can they do it in many circumstances it is the best strategy.

The same basic problem is still there. More is better. If you attempt ICS but only have as many cities as your rivals it will not work.

[DrSpike]

But my point was that, contrary to what Baggins posted, true increasing returns comes from expansion, and decreasing returns from improving your existing cities. I think this is pretty critical for the discussion.

[MrBaggins]

DrSpike... you have just ignored the comments regarding empire size capping and empire distance capping, in CtP2. The downsides are radically less avoidable than in Civ3, apparently.

The empire size capacity increases at a slower rate than the quickest players ability to expand, ergo your ability to expand is limited, ergo improvement by growth of existing cities is paramount.

Your 'point' is that 50 size 1 cities are more productive than 1 size 50 city. Thats true in Civ2.

CtP2 has a slightly different city model, which means that this isn't necessarily so: improvements *can* have flat support costs with multiplied benefits, so to break even you have to be a certain size... this can mean that an improvement has to be built in a city a particular size to break even, and the 50 size 1's will never receive them. If improvements in general require city size for viable gain is significant enough; particularly if it relates to science, then delaying growth by 'settler horde' is a useless tactic.

Because a Civ2 centric world says 'expansionism is always better', doesn't mean every game engine is plagued with the flaw.

Personally... I think a choice is a good addition to the game: give a government path for both the builders and the expansionists... it can be done by having different respective governments, one with tight city caps and generous bonuses, and one with generous city caps and tight bonuses. Players would choose, but not be better off (necessarily) by choosing one path over another.

MrBaggins

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by MrBaggins
Personally... I think a choice is a good addition to the game: give a government path for both the builders and the expansionists... it can be done by having different respective governments, one with tight city caps and generous bonuses, and one with generous city caps and tight bonuses. Players would choose, but not be better off (necessarily) by choosing one path over another.

MrBaggins

Every civ game I have played already does this. Whilst the increasing returns I speak of from expansion exist there is usually a balance in the form of we love the king day, or something similar. The key is to pick a strategy and use it to the best of its capabilities.

I don't think there is a bigger is better problem. You can either expand a lot and go that route or have fewer built up cities......both are viable in all civ games I have played. You would expect your empire to grow and get more productive over time either way........if you can't expand due to game restrictions then you improve existing cities, which will hence become more productive...........I am having trouble making your gripe reasonable.