On the other hand:boulugre wrote:I agree with most of the points of your analysis, however you are omitting a very important point since the latest patches which are the new advancement tiles and the ability for former to crawl back resources, which clearly put a bigger pressure on a faction to expand further their territory in order to grab more resources.Stalker0 wrote:
1) Tall (small expansion)
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2) Wide (large expansion)
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New advancement such as research lab and manufacturing bay means that each worker and scientists now compete with miners and farmers for the use of tile. A city having only 6 usable tile up to 7 pop, you do have an incentive to create more city for more space in order to maximize the output of your population. (+ you can build + credit tile upgrade / pollution cleaner / habitat on the unused tile)
As for the former, sending former far away from your cities in order to crawl resources is dangerous as they have no way to hide in case of sudden aggression from alien or other factions, whereas if you develop a network of small towns you can quickly fall back in case of problem and defend your formers in your neighboring cities.
1) Former crawl means I know longer need to build other cities to get that noxium patch or the gaia forest. I can just former it up.
Further, expanding less means more resources can go to building formers = more resources. And the production efficiency of larger cities means I can generate formers faster.
While cities can protect formers, so can forts.
The suburb improvement also reduces the habitation limit, one of the only real disadvantages of playing tall.
Honestly the only improvement that I feel really helps wide is the Economy Park...you don't need workers to work them they just operate. So you can park all six tiles of a new city and get a decent economy return.