settlement cap needs to go

[Pork_Chop]

been trying real hard to like this game but the settlement cap is just way too restrictive to make this game enjoyable. after a certain point in each age i am just sitting there hitting the next turn button with nothing to do because i am so far over the settlement limit that i am just waiting for the current age to end.

i cannot believe that this is not a bigger issue with players. in my opinion it's why i have been playing this game for years. i want to build a huge empire and crush my enemies!

[Chilidipped]

Settlement caps is just another of the numerous dumbed down design guardrails. There's no logic to having it. If a player can build and support 100 cities, why can't they? The game designers don't want them to.

[khalid1]

Publicado originalmente por Minnesota Ray:

I am only bothered by the settlement cap in one situation: I am at or near my settlement camp and I want to be able to create (or capture) settlements in distant lands. Then one of my homeland AI's declares war on me. I would like to be able to capture his settlements to reduce his capabilities, but that puts me in a no-win situation. If I raze his city, I get "warmonger" penalty for the rest of the game, but if I keep his city, I get settlement-cap problems. I think that in this situation, the settlement cap should be automatically raised (this is assuming the other civ, not I, started the war, or, probably better, I should be able to allow the captured settlement, that I do not want, to become a free state.

A "no-win" scenario... Lol. You can just pillage all the improvements. Pillaging reduces the population so leaving them with a 1 population city isn't really any different than razing, except there's absolutely no penalty to you either from war monger penalties or from happiness and you also gain all the benefits from pillaging. There are strategies more complex than "capture" if your aim is to reduce your opponent's capabilities. You should only capture a city if you actually want the city or you need the city for the military legacy path objectives. After all, a captured city has penalties and can't be productive during the occupation. Not only that, but the AI actually trades cities during peace agreements so you can get their cities without capturing them or you can swap an unproductive city for one of their productive ones and stay under the cap when the war is over.

[OmegaDestroyer]

The settlement cap only limits the player, so I don't see any point to it. I never see the AI suffering any penalties from owning large amounts of settlements, so why should I be penalized for it?

[DadouXIII]

Publicado originalmente por OmegaDestroyer:

The settlement cap only limits the player, so I don't see any point to it. I never see the AI suffering any penalties from owning large amounts of settlements, so why should I be penalized for it?

The AI rarely goes over the settlement limit, and they absolutely do suffer happiness penalties when they do it.
If the cap is removed, the AI will be even more expansion-crazy.

[TheGameHoarder]

Settlement Limit is good. Well for players that play it to totally dominate the game and be 100% efficient, so basically Play To Win types, clearly this would be a hindrance, and true it should be an option, even though it would change the gameplay-balance that they have going on right now too much.

[ArtSchool]

IMHO, The issue here is not the existence of a settlement cap: I find it really annoying that the AI too often spams new settlements disregarding (even doubling) the cap (which never seems to materially impact it whatsoever), which paired with the most useless military AI ever, it makes it stupidly simple to capture all these enemy settlements, many of them so close to the player limits that they are crying to be conquered. This, in turn, forces the player to either go raze-a-lot and suffer the penalties or to add settlements which are not wanted or needed, harming the cap. Lose/lose solution, guys at Firaxis. Please make the AI settle more reasonably and make their military units competent. Otherwise the game is just boring. Last time I preorder anything from you guys. I'd rather wait a few months, see where this goes, and maybe end up purchasing the game (hopefully much more polished) at a sale later on. I feel like I have been scammed by purchasing the Foounders' edition. I would gladly go for a refund if that were possible at this stage.

[Rhapsody]

Could be adjustable or add a couple more sources to increase the limit, but it shouldn't be removed altogether.