The reason I make this distinction is I find it hard to justify the merging of territories when you have the option of having just more cities and that optimal game style might become a micro heavy play-though with little choice due to this. Allow me to make my case.

First of all on the population front, pop growth is largely influence by current pop and in my experience with good stability and abundance you can reach +1 pop per turn at 15-20 pops which is the cap. Population acquisition is a direct win condition which makes this a required consideration for all playstyles.

Lets do math for stability. With many cities administrators are in short supply lets pretend there are none. Each city has a base value plus 5 for every luxury variety plus 35 for the 2 era 1and 2 infrastructures. Adding territories give -20 as well as prevents that territory from being a city for you not to mention it increase the amount of districts serve 1 city reducing stability further. The only caveat is for less cities with merged territories admins would give a +30 to stab and help in pop growth if you cannot reach the 150 food for abundance.

As expressed at the top, a lot of the value is derive from the main plaza with the exception being districts and district dependent infrastructure the latter of which has an addition cost in a many cities strategy but in my opinion this is offset by districts getting more expensive with each additional one in the same city. Here are some off hand numbers to decide for yourself:

Your 6th district(standard industrial) costs 177 - without pyramids

Your 8th district(standard industrial) costs 237 - without pyramids
Your 10th district(standard industrial) costs 300 - without pyramids
Your 16th district(standard industrial) costs 500 - without pyramids
Your 25th district(standard industrial) costs 177 - without pyramids
Your 164th district(V.O.C Warehouse (dutch district)) costs 7059 <- this was a result of merging 3 cities into a 10+ territory city where all naval trade routes went to 1 city allowing me to proc + dust on naval trade route effects from districts. I regard this as overkill in terms of getting VPs and upsetting due to the lack of inflation, like ES2.

Meanwhile having an additional city gives cheaper repeatable infrastructure, the opportunity to build more job infrastructure and + 6 worker slots if you don't count food form the city itself.. I don't unless I'm playing agrarian.

What I haven't accounted for:

Some territories are full of worthless snow or lack a good balance of food/production in any settle location, though with excess dust, the balance isn't so important.

There is certainly an early game advantage to merging for double exploited land and cheaper consecutive outposts in addition to the lack of trade/available luxuries, but this still has to be weighed up against the loss of early civic points which yield influence and dust for those early VPs.

The availability and effectiveness of dust has been a considerable factor in making this play-style strong and in both play throughs I started as phonetician.

To conclude, I think the game currently leads to one optimal behavior by mid game and by not having extensions to cities it prevents the possibility of light border skirmishes with expansionist cultures or ransacking. I really like the whole pretext to war system but if players build cities everywhere instead of expanding existing ones, surprise wars will become unhealthily commonplace.

 A solution could look like changing mainplaza effect to per territory on mainplaza for civics and luxury resources, administrators whos stability effect scales with no. of districts. I considered having a negative stability effect per city on all cities, but I think the goal should be to encourage use of city expansion while leaving other methods as a reasonable option.

Having lots of cities is effective, but lots of micro isn't too fun.

I'd agree that districts are poorly balanced.

I hate the fuzzy 'inflationary' cost mechanics, as exemplified by Civ 6. I think games should be fully transparent at all times, so that we players can make informed decisions (not necessarily the right ones, but informed ones). In Civ 6, with district cost scaling, the math behind the scaling is hidden, so things just get weirdly harder as you play. Similarly with other games that have hidden math for scaling costs.

The idea of having a stability penalty for each new district, as in EL and Humankind, is much more transparent. For that reason, I think it's a much better concept. With better balancing, I think it could work well. There might be higher stability penalties per district, smaller stability bonuses for religion/luxuries/etc. Perhaps additional stability penalties per pop. There might also be higher production costs for advanced districts, forcing the player to upgrade districts from L1 production to L2, L3 etc, at a cost. That would have some of the same effect as the Civ6 district cost scaling, but be much more transparent to the player.

I hope Humankind will prioritize transparency in UI and in design.

TimBur wrote:

I'd agree that districts are poorly balanced.

I hate the fuzzy 'inflationary' cost mechanics, as exemplified by Civ 6. I think games should be fully transparent at all times, so that we players can make informed decisions (not necessarily the right ones, but informed ones). In Civ 6, with district cost scaling, the math behind the scaling is hidden, so things just get weirdly harder as you play. Similarly with other games that have hidden math for scaling costs.

The idea of having a stability penalty for each new district, as in EL and Humankind, is much more transparent. For that reason, I think it's a much better concept. With better balancing, I think it could work well. There might be higher stability penalties per district, smaller stability bonuses for religion/luxuries/etc. Perhaps additional stability penalties per pop. There might also be higher production costs for advanced districts, forcing the player to upgrade districts from L1 production to L2, L3 etc, at a cost. That would have some of the same effect as the Civ6 district cost scaling, but be much more transparent to the player.

I hope Humankind will prioritize transparency in UI and in design.

Agree Very Strongly.  Especially the last part.

Wolvski wrote:
Very interesting! I think the issue you bring light to stems mostly from how bad and broken the food economy is; its absurdly easy to reach abundant levels of food which I think in the early game should be the hardest thing to achieve realistically speaking

There's currently a bug in which luxuries that should add to districts add the yield to all tiles, like saffron, for example. So if you have 3 of them, which is common since it's in the starting area, all tiles have +3 food.

Yeah it's so much better to just spam a city per territory it's not even funny, the 1 pop per turn limit, the amount of on main plaza effects and the fact that administrative districts give so much fewer stats means I find myself rarely combining outposts and never combining cities. The +20% FIMS on capitalideology is cool though.