I find it really annoying to have the city cap too low. I like to play domination and the city cap kept me away from my goals because I was losing too much stability and having massive penalties. I think it would be great to have more than +1 city cup per tech or we could just have an option to disable it altogether.

There are other sources of city cap increases besides tech. I like picking the Achaemenid Persians for their +2 city cap, that might help you out. The Leadership Civic also provides a choice for +1 city cap, though I don't know what triggers that Civic to show up. And while it's not a way to add to city cap, the Military Architecture tech gives one the ability to merge cities, which reduces one's city count.

Overall though, while it's kind of annoying, the city cap is meant to limit both city spam and warmongering, so it's a key part of the way Humankind plays. Disabling the city cap would not be a good idea imo.

You dont ever have to take a city from your opponent ... if you conquered a city, you might ransack it, which will demote it to an outpost while the warscore of your enemy does not fall anymore or even rises.

That way you can snowball the whole area of an enemy, and only taking outposts in the end. The external infrastructure of the regions stay intact (quarters), but you lose all City Plaza buildings (of course). So you can essentially conquer the whole world with city cap of 2 and a lot of outposts.

You guys are not wrong, but you are giving me roundabouts instead of what should be done, which is increasing the city cap. If I wanted to take outposts I wouldn't be asking about city cap at all. The same goes when assimilating independent people, I always assimilate them.

I would agree maybe with tweaking the city absorption cost, but city cap needs to remain as a way to prevent snowballing. On release you could do almost twice as many cities as you can now while staying within city cap and that was just too many. As it is now, if you want to span over continents you need to either pay the upfront cost of merging cities or figure out how to deal with the upkeep of staying over the limit.

Imo, it's absolutely the way the main game balance should go, maybe I'd agree with shoving another +1 into a tech tree somewhere at mid-point.

kalaak wrote:

I find it really annoying to have the city cap too low. I like to play domination and the city cap kept me away from my goals because I was losing too much stability and having massive penalties. I think it would be great to have more than +1 city cup per tech or we could just have an option to disable it altogether.

I actually think city cap is something that makes sense. There should be something to make expansion a little more difficult, at least in the early eras (in civ5, happiness; in civ6 perhaps scaled districts with technology and amenity). Early empires are actually not very large (with the exception of Rome perhaps; but it does have more civil wars then Chinese in the east at the same time, where the later has less territories). It's the advance of administration and technology that enables the management of larger empires.

YichenZhu wrote:

kalaak wrote:

I actually think city cap is something that makes sense. There should be something to make expansion a little more difficult, at least in the early eras (in civ5, happiness; in civ6 perhaps scaled districts with technology and amenity). Early empires are actually not very large (with the exception of Rome perhaps; but it does have more civil wars then Chinese in the east at the same time, where the later has less territories). It's the advance of administration and technology that enables the management of larger empires.

I agree with this. Extra-large early empires are ridiculous for a good historical 4x game.  HK provides a lot of tools for you to deal with the stability issues and to increase your influence points, which I highly appreciate in terms of the freedom to exercise your own ways of empire building.

I do think they need to restore the 3 city cap techs that the patch removed.  1 in classical and 2 on early modern were lost, and those are perfect expansion times.

I see where you're coming from, OP, but, IMHO, the problem you're describing is fairly easy to get around with a bit of strategy and long term planning.

You don't *need* to attach every region. In my current game, after clearing the 3 opponents from my continent by early medieval, I secured the coastlines with cities + admin centers, and then simply used outposts on 14 internal regions to secure the luxury & strategic deposits. I did take Persians in Classical, because it's a huge map, but I am holding 35 regions with 7 cities (because the first -10 influence per turn is worth the extra city, IMHO), but most of those cities are only 3 regions, with a few being less and few being more.

My point being, a great deal of territory can be held with Outposts. That this is intended is obvious in the design of early war/conquest cultures, in that they buff outposts, some making them impossible to even attach, and also in the design of Expansionist cultures, in that their design allows them to peel away outposts and admin centers not behind walls. Trying to have an administrative center in *every* region is a mistake, and not how the game is designed to handled domination.

Remember, you can always detach regions, or rebuild to put the outpost in a highly defensible spot.

The game has many issues. the city-cap being low is not one of them IMO. If it is, it has to be low on the list.

I think it's perfectly fine right now. It's a bit restrictive but not too much. You can manage it by going slightly over limit and merging cities or ransacking conquered cities.

It might be nice to have a map size modifier on City Cap for the truly largest maps.  It could be a flat bonus at the start, a bonus of one per era, or maybe a bonus of an additional city on techs that award additional cities?

Alternately, it might be nice to do things with outposts in later game.  Maybe building one or two Garrisons starting in the medieval era, or even a Hamlet in the later game.