Expansion: What Happened to All the Cities?
Next to the One Unit Per Tile restriction, the other great change in Civ5's gameplay is the adoption of the global happiness mechanic. This is supposed to be the limiting factor on expansion, the system that holds empires in check and forces players to manage their economy. Unfortunately, global happiness as a gameplay mechanic has never worked, and by its very nature it's probably impossible to balance properly. This is a system that just does not function properly. Let's dig into a detailed explanation of why that holds true.
Past Civilization games used different methods to try and curb expansion. The first three games used corruption for this mechanic, the idea that cities further away from the capital would lose some of their production and commerce each turn to weaker government control at the fringes of the empire. Corruption had two major flaws as a system, however. First of all, the mechanic didn't really work to stop expansion, because even cities that were hopelessly corrupt and producing only 1 production and 1 commerce each turn were still worth having. You weren't losing anything by having them, and at the very least you were denying territory to AI rivals, setting up forward bases where units could be cash-rushed and that sort of thing. The optimal strategy was always to have as many cities as possible,
and indeed massive Infinite City Sprawl (ICS) empires dominated the gameplay of Civ1 / Civ2 / Civ3. Secondly, corruption as a mechanic was difficult to understand as a concept, and horribly unfun for players. You could never know just how much your cities would be losing to corruption, and planting new cities that proved to be worthless was not entertaining or interesting. In other words, corruption was a poor gameplay mechanic, and ripe for removal.
Civ4 eliminated corruption and replaced it with city maintenance. Instead of each city being free to plant and its buildings costing money each turn, Civ4 flipped the formula, making cities cost gold while their buildings were always free. The overall effect was that new cities were net losses when they were first established, and as they slowly gained infrastructure and population over time, they began to turn a profit and make a net gain. Having more cities was pretty much always a good thing, provided that you didn't plant them too quickly, and that they were supported with the right development over time. Adding too many weak cities too quickly would only result in bankruptcy and economic stagnation. This was a really smart system, and it was by far the best implementation of a limiting factor on expansion of any game in the series.
Civ5 replaces city maintenance with global happiness. The game strangely goes back to having buildings cost gold each turn, while cities themselves cost nothing, with your empire limited only by a global happiness counter. In short, each city costs a certain amount of happiness up front to settle, and each population point costs another point of unhappiness. When the global counter ticks below zero, growth begins to slow in all cities, and when it goes below negative ten, all population growth ceases (and your units gain a major combat penalty). The logic was that global happiness would reign in expansion and keep players establishing new cities at a constant pace throughout the game.
Now unfortunately this mechanic was a complete and utter failure at stopping mass expansion in Civ5. Expert players quickly realized that there were easy ways to manage global happiness, in particular by making use of a combination of the Liberty social policies and the Forbidden Palace, and then spamming colosseums. It was simple to make each city happiness-neutral up to about size 6, which meant that you could plant an infinite number of them across the landscape. Why not? Each city provided more gold, more science, and more production. There was no tradeoff between expansion and research as in past Civilization games. Because of the removal of the commerce slider and the new rule whereby population = science, mass spamming of tiny cities actually resulted in ridiculously high beaker output, along with massive supplies of gold and production. Fewer Golden Ages and slower social policies were irrelevant.
Covering the land in an endless sea of cities was the optimal way to play the game - the exact OPPOSITE of the intent of the designers!
The designers tried to fix this in the patching process. They nerfed the social policies that provided per-city happiness, and they nerfed the wonders that provided the same thing. They changed the rules of how happiness worked, so that buildings only provided "local happiness" for the population in their own cities, rather than true global happiness. (This was an attept to cut down on colosseum spam.) They changed the minimum distance between cities from two tiles to three tiles, in a brute force attempt to slow down the infinite city sprawl. All of this failed. Endless seas of cities remained a dominant strategy in Gods and Kings:
I'll let T-Hawk explain from his
Gods and Kings Infinite City Sprawl report: "So ICS lives, thrives, and excels in Gods & Kings. It's easy to see why. Civ 5 in its vanilla days after patch-stabilizing was balanced on the knife edge between expansion and happiness, where max ICS would require some throttling of city growth to stay out of anger. But Gods & Kings pushes that carefully balanced snowball awry. Religion can account for up to 6 happy per city, which is the difference between constricting growth at a medium size and going unfettered full-blast until the end of the game. (Remember 6 happy is more than 6 citizens thanks to Meritocracy and the Forbidden Palace. 6 / 0.85 = actually 7.06 more citizens per city.) And on top of that, considerably more global happiness is available too: all the new luxuries plus mercantile city-states can account for another 40. I had ample happy headroom all along in this game, never even pushing hard on Pagodas and Theaters which only got to about half the cities.
On one hand, it's liberating to see the happiness constraint lift so. Civilization is back to being the game of expansion that it's always been and should be. No more big empty swaths of land going unused for anger concerns. Daring to go conquering can actually be productive.
But on the other hand, now there is no predatory check on expansion. Every city no matter how crappy is worth building. This is true even if the new city ADDS NO LAND and merely cannibalizes existing tiles! It's always correct to add a new city to take advantage of the more efficient low-end costs for both food and buildings and freebies. Seriously, do you truly understand how brutal the math is for tall? Growing from size 14 to 19 takes over 1000 food, more than from size 1 to 14! And considering that a new city gets new instances of the constant food bonuses (granary, maritimes, Tradition finisher), growing a new city is literally FIVE TIMES more food efficient than growing a tall city. The restraining factor is supposed to be happiness, but that falls apart too when new cities even build happy more efficiently, getting a new 100H / 2 happiness colosseum instead of a ludicrous 500H / 4 happiness stadium.
Civ 4 had the same problem but masked it well, that every crappy city would turn positive. With the midgame trade routes from Corporation tech and Free Market civic, any new city becomes positively productive almost immediately, at worst after it grows onto a few coast tiles and whips a courthouse. But these cities could be neglected in the overall picture. A 6-pop fishing village would produce a tiny fraction of the multiplicative splendor of a core city with mature towns and economic multipliers, so could be skipped with no material difference in the outcome.
But in Civ 5 G&K you must build these cities, where every village gets showered in cheap efficient goodies and rapidly maritime-mushrooms to 12 population with a 75-hammer library and represents a significant fraction of a mature city foolishly trying to pay 200 food for another growth and 300 hammers for another science multiplier. And naturally, all these identical filler cities really kill the fun factor with the micromanagement. Civ 4 was about playing the terrain, Civ 5 about ignoring the terrain and exploiting everything else."
Needless to say, this was again not what the designers had intended. When there's this huge, incredibly sprawling empire that still has +40 happiness on the counter, you know that the intended gameplay system isn't working as intended. Global happiness was a total failure at preventing endless expansion and city spamming in the pre-Brave New World version of Civ5. For the second expansion, therefore, the designers made a radical change to the series:
EVERY ADDITIONAL CITY ADDS FIVE PERCENT TO THE COST OF ALL FUTURE TECHS. That includes cities settled, captured, puppet states, anything. I can't overstate how brutal this new mechanic is.
Building or capturing additional cities now carries a heavy penalty to science. It's far more efficient to grow additional population in existing cities rather than build new ones. In fact, after roughly 150 turns, there's virtually no reason EVER to build another city, since the game will be over before the new city will grow large enough to overcome the science penalty from founding it. The natural result of this mechanic is the four city empire. Why four cities? Because Tradition provides free monuments and free aqueducts in your first four cities. There also seems to be just enough happiness to support four cities in the first 100 to 150 turns of the game, as I experienced in my sample game. The result is a game dominated by "Tall" empires, civilizations comprised of 3-5 cities in game after game after game. (Don't believe me? I went and pulled some of the best results from recent Game of the Month competitions at CivFanatics.
Here's a Culture victory from Turn 232: three cities.
Diplomatic victory from Turn 262: three cities.
Spaceship victory from Turn 222: four cities. No matter what victory condition was the goal, the same pattern of 3-5 cities appeared in game after game.)
This has all manner of terrible effects on gameplay. The games in the Civilization series are empire-building games. It even said that right on the box for the first game: "Build an Empire to stand the test of time." All of the tension and life in the gameplay are based around building those empires. You need to compete with your rivals for scarce land and resources, and if you can't get your fair share of both, then you're in serious trouble. As I've stated many times, the basic rule of the Civilization series is thus: Expand or Die. But Brave New World completely upsets this mechanic. Since three or four cities are enough to win the game by going "Tall" with Tradition, there's little need to compete with other empires for land. The driving force that creates excitement and risk in the gameplay has been completely removed. Just make sure you get a couple of cities, then you'll be fine. No reason to care about the rest of the land. Furthermore, there is almost no point in expanding or going to war after the early stages of the game. Any additional cities you settle or capture will only end up hurting your science. So... what's the point of trying at all? Why bother? Just turtle on your four cities, sell resources, run food caravans, and you'll eventually win the game. Vast expanses of land go unclaimed by anyone in Civ5 now, unused and unwanted. (See above for an example.) This is not what the gameplay should look like!
Brave New World is an empire-building game where there is literally no reason to build an empire, and you are actively penalized for doing so.
The problem with global happiness is that it's not balanceable as a mechanic for limiting expansion. If the restrictions are too loose, then the gameplay quickly turns into the situation in the release version, where endless expansion is the best strategy. The happiness mechanic just isn't strong enough to prevent the nonstop city sprawl. If the screws are on too tight, however, then we wind up with the current situation in Brave New World. We get a game where expansion serves little purpose, competition over land is almost nonexistant, and turtling on a small handful of cities proves to be the best strategy. Vast expanses of the map wind up going completely unclaimed in game after game. It's bizarre to see fertile grassland regions untouched by anyone in 1950 AD! There isn't even a reason to go to war, since any captured cities will often LOWER your science output. In a game where competition over scarce land and resources is supposed to be the driving force behind the gameplay, this is a solution where the cure is worse than the disease. Brave New World's approach to global happiness is no better than the one in the release version of Civ5. I don't see any way that this can ever be balanced properly. The gameplay will always tilt towards infinite city sprawl or a tiny handful of cities, depending on where the designers set the numbers. Neither one works.