Serious Question: Why is there a city limit?

[Nem]

So, this is a city/world building simulator type of game but it severely limits your ability to build cities. Cities are the way you interact with the entire game and yet the developers decided to just tell you nope, you can't build any. This is like trying to play with Legos but the Lego factory tells you, "Nope, you can only use 3 blocks. Have fun!"
Does this make sense to anyone?

[The Doctor]

Originally posted by Nem:

So, this is a city/world building simulator type of game but it severely limits your ability to build cities. Cities are the way you interact with the entire game and yet the developers decided to just tell you nope, you can't build any. This is like trying to play with Legos but the Lego factory tells you, "Nope, you can only use 3 blocks. Have fun!"
Does this make sense to anyone?

It's really a 4X game and not a simulation at all. if it were, it would be an atrocious one. :D

Many 4X games have some mechanism to prevent the player from snowballing too hard, be they expansion penalties, happiness, corruption or whatever else the designer uses to restrict the player from plonking down cities whenever he likes. It's not always a popular mechanism though as you'll find if you read threads on their other Endless boards as well as other 4X games. But there are also some that don't have this (Old World, for example which manages it differently but comes with its own set of issues)

This game does not tell you 'Nope, you can't do that' - you can but each city you build over the limit costs you some influence per turn and the more you exceed the limit, the harsher the penalty. It does become prohibitively expensive after 3 or 4 over and you can easily find yourself trapped and not able to amalgamate two cities to reduce the number because you don't have enough influence.

So, yes, it does make sense from a 4X game perspective but that doesn't mean universally popular which it definitely is not. It's not remotely like Lego at all.

[Oaks]

It doesn't bother me in Humankind really since you can attach other regions to your cities. Cuts down on mircomanagement, at least in my eyes.

Most 4x games I can think of have some kind of mechanic to keep you from expanding too quickly, often in the form of happiness penalties.

[PenguinO]

City limit makes sense only for tiny size maps.
For huge maps, limit really needs to be scaled up.

[mo123567]

Originally posted by PenguinO:

City limit makes sense only for tiny size maps.
For huge maps, limit really needs to be scaled up.

I have only ever played huge maps so I didn't realize they used the same city limit from smaller maps. Scaling up for larger maps makes complete sense.

[Nem]

Originally posted by The Doctor:

Originally posted by Nem:

So, this is a city/world building simulator type of game but it severely limits your ability to build cities. Cities are the way you interact with the entire game and yet the developers decided to just tell you nope, you can't build any. This is like trying to play with Legos but the Lego factory tells you, "Nope, you can only use 3 blocks. Have fun!"
Does this make sense to anyone?

It's really a 4X game and not a simulation at all. if it were, it would be an atrocious one. :D

Many 4X games have some mechanism to prevent the player from snowballing too hard, be they expansion penalties, happiness, corruption or whatever else the designer uses to restrict the player from plonking down cities whenever he likes. It's not always a popular mechanism though as you'll find if you read threads on their other Endless boards as well as other 4X games. But there are also some that don't have this (Old World, for example which manages it differently but comes with its own set of issues)

This game does not tell you 'Nope, you can't do that' - you can but each city you build over the limit costs you some influence per turn and the more you exceed the limit, the harsher the penalty. It does become prohibitively expensive after 3 or 4 over and you can easily find yourself trapped and not able to amalgamate two cities to reduce the number because you don't have enough influence.

So, yes, it does make sense from a 4X game perspective but that doesn't mean universally popular which it definitely is not. It's not remotely like Lego at all.

We must be playing very different 4X games then because the ones I've played aren't nearly as punishing when it comes to city limits. Lets talking about Civ real quick, because its the easiest comparison. Civ has 3 ways to limit cities: happiness, loyalty, and production (of settlers). ALL OF THESE ARE COUNTER-ABLE ESPECIALLY IN THE LATE GAME. In other words, these work as a soft cap in the early game to prevent city spam, but once you enter the industrial era, they are mostly small inconveniences.

Okay, so what about Total War games? They use corruption to limit you expansion which limits you gold income from territory. But... CORRUPTION IS COMPLETELY COUNTER-ABLE ESPECIALLY IN THE LATE GAME. You see a pattern here? I hope you do, because limiting a player on literally the only way they have to interact with the game is pretty dumb. Another person commented on how the city limit is the same for large maps, and it makes this even a more stupid decision. It means you will reach the atomic era and have over half the map be empty, uncontrolled land. Outposts don't do much but say " I have some sort of weak claim over this land", since they can be pillaged without consequences.

I want to mention one more game which had a somewhat hard city limit: civ 5. In civ 5, every city you placed debuffed your total yields by 2% each (I believe it was 2%). Now this IS a hard cap because eventually your cities produce nothing. However, you notice how this mechanic didn't make it into civ 6? Yeah, because its a stupid mechanic.

I want to be clear, the way its implement in Humankind is 100% a hard cap. 1 city over cap costs 10 influence, 2 costs 120, and 3 costs somewhere around 600. So your hard cap is 3+current cap, which is absolutely insane.

I know you are just answering my question and I'm not trying to be angry or rude towards you but this decision to hard cap cities is extremely frustrating and has actually ruined my enjoyment of what could be a great game. Do you know if there are mods that remove it?

[Nem]

Originally posted by mo123567:

Originally posted by PenguinO:

City limit makes sense only for tiny size maps.
For huge maps, limit really needs to be scaled up.

I have only ever played huge maps so I didn't realize they used the same city limit from smaller maps. Scaling up for larger maps makes complete sense.

This is a huge issue I am having. I made a large earth with 70% land but... its going to be mostly empty. Literally impossible to fill it up when everyone can only have 6 cities.

[Elhoim]

Originally posted by Nem:

I want to be clear, the way its implement in Humankind is 100% a hard cap. 1 city over cap costs 10 influence, 2 costs 120, and 3 costs somewhere around 600. So your hard cap is 3+current cap, which is absolutely insane.

I know you are just answering my question and I'm not trying to be angry or rude towards you but this decision to hard cap cities is extremely frustrating and has actually ruined my enjoyment of what could be a great game. Do you know if there are mods that remove it?

I could argue that 600 is something you can afford in the late game, and even way more.

I don't know of any mod that removes it, but you can make the techs give more than 1.

TBH, I dread of the thought of having to manage so many cities, I prefer attaching territories and later merging to always manage just a few.

[Elhoim]

Originally posted by Nem:

Originally posted by mo123567:

I have only ever played huge maps so I didn't realize they used the same city limit from smaller maps. Scaling up for larger maps makes complete sense.

This is a huge issue I am having. I made a large earth with 70% land but... its going to be mostly empty. Literally impossible to fill it up when everyone can only have 6 cities.

Are you attaching territories? Or making just a city in each?

[chaney]

The game is designed as a competitive game.

Players with more capacity (Food, Industry, Money, Science, military, and/or Influence) will tend to be able to further increase that capacity faster than those without as much. This is thought of as "exponential growth" but there are curbs to keep that from being literally true here. Still, the rich get richer faster than the poor, that is the point.

For a game like this, the problem is that as soon as a player gets a bit ahead of the rest, they "snowball" meaning they will continue to grow faster than the rest. That leads to a systemic problem: the fastest runner out of the blocks will always win the race. That is terrible game design.

There are some random elements that can curb that runaway leader problem. Terrain, access to resources, etc. are passive curbs, but will generally be random and are not reliable in keeping the race interesting.

Other curbs come from the competitors: two smaller players might gang up on a larger player.

In multiplayer, that can sometimes work out. Lots of people play single player. The City cap, corruption, happiness, etc. are mechanics to slow down the breakaway leader problem. For gaming purposes, it is a perfectly sound general idea. There will be a range of opinions as to it being too strong, too weak, or just right.

As far as it being "realistic" you have to accept that this game has huge levels of abstraction. In the Neolithic, you probably don't really just have a handful of people, so a "unit" may represent 10-100 people, and a tile may be a km or a few. Later on, the scaling has changed. Near the end, a "City" and attached areas is no longer a literal single settlement; maybe a province, state, region, etc. A unit may represent a battalion, division, fleet, brigade, division, etc. rather than a literal squad.

With that idea, you may see that the idea of one player (nation) controlling all of a larger continent and a few bits of the others is not commonplace. (Apologies to Australia ... you're wonderful but not THAT big a continent and not a lot of people want to live in most of you.) Some have held very large areas for a while, but often those areas have very low population (Russia). The British Empire was at one time vast, but formally didn't last more than, maybe, an age in HK time. Why? As soon as you expand and expand ... you'll find some of "your" people start to have ideas that are not exactly "do what the boss says." Call it whatever sociology term you want ... happiness, stability, corruption, inefficiency, schism, partisanship, ........ the point remains that there will be some damping/negative feedback on unrestrained growth. Calling it "influence" would not have been my choice, but as far as abstractions go, the name is pretty arbitrary.

I would like to see ways to reduce the restriction a bit, but the basic notion is one answer to the game design problem.

[Nem]

Originally posted by chaney:

The game is designed as a competitive game.

Players with more capacity (Food, Industry, Money, Science, military, and/or Influence) will tend to be able to further increase that capacity faster than those without as much. This is thought of as "exponential growth" but there are curbs to keep that from being literally true here. Still, the rich get richer faster than the poor, that is the point.

For a game like this, the problem is that as soon as a player gets a bit ahead of the rest, they "snowball" meaning they will continue to grow faster than the rest. That leads to a systemic problem: the fastest runner out of the blocks will always win the race. That is terrible game design.

There are some random elements that can curb that runaway leader problem. Terrain, access to resources, etc. are passive curbs, but will generally be random and are not reliable in keeping the race interesting.

Other curbs come from the competitors: two smaller players might gang up on a larger player.

In multiplayer, that can sometimes work out. Lots of people play single player. The City cap, corruption, happiness, etc. are mechanics to slow down the breakaway leader problem. For gaming purposes, it is a perfectly sound general idea. There will be a range of opinions as to it being too strong, too weak, or just right.

As far as it being "realistic" you have to accept that this game has huge levels of abstraction. In the Neolithic, you probably don't really just have a handful of people, so a "unit" may represent 10-100 people, and a tile may be a km or a few. Later on, the scaling has changed. Near the end, a "City" and attached areas is no longer a literal single settlement; maybe a province, state, region, etc. A unit may represent a battalion, division, fleet, brigade, division, etc. rather than a literal squad.

With that idea, you may see that the idea of one player (nation) controlling all of a larger continent and a few bits of the others is not commonplace. (Apologies to Australia ... you're wonderful but not THAT big a continent and not a lot of people want to live in most of you.) Some have held very large areas for a while, but often those areas have very low population (Russia). The British Empire was at one time vast, but formally didn't last more than, maybe, an age in HK time. Why? As soon as you expand and expand ... you'll find some of "your" people start to have ideas that are not exactly "do what the boss says." Call it whatever sociology term you want ... happiness, stability, corruption, inefficiency, schism, partisanship, ........ the point remains that there will be some damping/negative feedback on unrestrained growth. Calling it "influence" would not have been my choice, but as far as abstractions go, the name is pretty arbitrary.

I would like to see ways to reduce the restriction a bit, but the basic notion is one answer to the game design problem.

You make a lot of good points that I think have done properly in other games. For example, Civ 6 and Total War: Three Kingdoms have systems that prevent city/territory spam. The major difference is that these games don't force a hard limit like humankind does. This is the root of the issue. Like I mentioned in a post above, the corruption/happiness system can be fully countered in the late game and forces players to change game play in the midgame if they choose to spam cities. Humankind takes the approach of simply banning it which is the worst way to handle it. Yes, I understand it has a "scaling influence" cost but its impossible to work around it.
1 city above cap ~ 10 influence/turn
2 cities above cap ~ 120 influence/turn
3 cities above cap ~ 650 influence/turn

Thats about as far as you can go realistically. Even if you force your entire playstyle to be around influence, you will not get much out of it. Thats really my issue with it. They already have a system in place that prevents city spam anyway but they just dumped a second ontop for no reason. I'm talking about the influence cost to go from outpost to city. This is already prohibitively expensive unless you form your entire empire around influence gain. Should you do so, you should be rewarded with the ability to make cities but that is still not the case.

[The Doctor]

Originally posted by Nem:

Originally posted by The Doctor:

It's really a 4X game and not a simulation at all. if it were, it would be an atrocious one. :D

Many 4X games have some mechanism to prevent the player from snowballing too hard, be they expansion penalties, happiness, corruption or whatever else the designer uses to restrict the player from plonking down cities whenever he likes. It's not always a popular mechanism though as you'll find if you read threads on their other Endless boards as well as other 4X games. But there are also some that don't have this (Old World, for example which manages it differently but comes with its own set of issues)

This game does not tell you 'Nope, you can't do that' - you can but each city you build over the limit costs you some influence per turn and the more you exceed the limit, the harsher the penalty. It does become prohibitively expensive after 3 or 4 over and you can easily find yourself trapped and not able to amalgamate two cities to reduce the number because you don't have enough influence.

So, yes, it does make sense from a 4X game perspective but that doesn't mean universally popular which it definitely is not. It's not remotely like Lego at all.

We must be playing very different 4X games then because the ones I've played aren't nearly as punishing when it comes to city limits. Lets talking about Civ real quick, because its the easiest comparison. Civ has 3 ways to limit cities: happiness, loyalty, and production (of settlers). ALL OF THESE ARE COUNTER-ABLE ESPECIALLY IN THE LATE GAME. In other words, these work as a soft cap in the early game to prevent city spam, but once you enter the industrial era, they are mostly small inconveniences.

Okay, so what about Total War games? They use corruption to limit you expansion which limits you gold income from territory. But... CORRUPTION IS COMPLETELY COUNTER-ABLE ESPECIALLY IN THE LATE GAME. You see a pattern here? I hope you do, because limiting a player on literally the only way they have to interact with the game is pretty dumb. Another person commented on how the city limit is the same for large maps, and it makes this even a more stupid decision. It means you will reach the atomic era and have over half the map be empty, uncontrolled land. Outposts don't do much but say " I have some sort of weak claim over this land", since they can be pillaged without consequences.

I want to mention one more game which had a somewhat hard city limit: civ 5. In civ 5, every city you placed debuffed your total yields by 2% each (I believe it was 2%). Now this IS a hard cap because eventually your cities produce nothing. However, you notice how this mechanic didn't make it into civ 6? Yeah, because its a stupid mechanic.

I want to be clear, the way its implement in Humankind is 100% a hard cap. 1 city over cap costs 10 influence, 2 costs 120, and 3 costs somewhere around 600. So your hard cap is 3+current cap, which is absolutely insane.

I know you are just answering my question and I'm not trying to be angry or rude towards you but this decision to hard cap cities is extremely frustrating and has actually ruined my enjoyment of what could be a great game. Do you know if there are mods that remove it?

No, we seem to be playing the same ones. We also seem to be in complete agreement about how other games do it and in spite of your denial, you demonstrate that you know that it is not a hard cap but exceeding it comes at a cost of influence. Hey, we even agree that it's not a universally popular design decision. The game also does offer you tools to manage it to an extent. In fact, no other 4X game I've played allows the player to annex so much territory to one city or to amalgamate two cities.

Where we differ is that I regard the influence costs you're complaining about for the first 3 to be trivial, at least by the mid game, and only becomes truly prohibitive when it climbs to the 1,000s per turn. I can take the cost for the first two in my stride even in the early game.

I also don't find the city limits to be frustrating at all. Of course, it could be done better but it's not the fun-killing issue for me that it is for you.

There are almost certainly going to be mods that remove it. You could even petition the developers to allow the player to adjust these settings in the game set-up and even to disable the feature entirely. I'm all in favour of settings like that because it allows us all to play the game the way we want but, once again, I understand the reasons for such mechanisms and I can work with them without getting stressed. It's just a game.

[universecreep]

Originally posted by Nem:

I want to mention one more game which had a somewhat hard city limit: civ 5. In civ 5, every city you placed debuffed your total yields by 2% each (I believe it was 2%). Now this IS a hard cap because eventually your cities produce nothing. However, you notice how this mechanic didn't make it into civ 6? Yeah, because its a stupid mechanic.

I understand your argument generally; however, I don't think limiting expansion is a bad mechanic. Without it, you lead to the opposite, where you have the entire globe covered in cities (Civ I was notorious for this). Civ VI certainly has that. You have to expand continually until there is no space to build anymore in order to keep up. Tall is a less viable strategy in Civ VI.

The problem is that in 4X games like Civ and HK, having more cities leads to more production which leads to more power and science and an eventual win.

What Devs need to do is provide a reason to only build a small number of cities. I always thought a good mechanic would be to allow you to build many small cities but allow a player with a few large cities to be able to compete with that. Specifically, you could have certain structures that could only be built by cities of a certain size. For example, you could have a megafactory that gives you %500 production but you need to have a city of 30 before you could build it. Similarly, you could do the same for science, religion, gold, etc. This allows viable tall and wide strategies without any specific cap or penalty.

[ourorboros]

Originally posted by Nem:

I made a large earth with 70% land

this is your problem... the game expects you play with 30-40% land...

arguably it should scale but realistically as someone who plays on large maps ive never encountered this problem... you can comfortably go 3 over the cap as others have pointed out and with 3-4 territories per city that should be more than enough to cover half the map(on 30-40%)

also dont forget theres nothing wrong with leaving territories with only an outpost, take the best territories for your cities and just leave the others as outposts, you can still extract resources and roads still build.

[SanityBasket]

Originally posted by ourorboros:

this is your problem... the game expects you play with 30-40% land...

If that were the case, then that would mean we got some seriously suck devs. Who wants to be on an earth clone when they are in a fame contest with a tech bro god king named xXx_360_xXx_Pro_xXx_Reaps_xXx_No_xXx_Scope_xXx?

The real answer is that going wide is almost always OP. So To balance it, devs started punishing people for going too wide.