Civilization VII devs promise that wide and tall playstyles will be supported
Firaxis says you can play wide or tall in Civ VII, but is that actually the case?
With Civilization VII, Firaxis promises that the game will support both wide and tall playstyles – a big departure from Civilization VI.
While you can technically win with only a few cities in Civ VI, expansion is definitely the winning strategy, especially at higher difficulties. Even if you’re going for a peaceful Culture or Science victory, getting Settlers out ASAP is still key if you want to set yourself up for victory.
In a way, Civ VI’s emphasis on wide play is a reaction to Civ V which rewarded a tall playstyle of only having a couple of cities. After all, with the way Happiness worked in V, there’s a big penalty for expanding early.
For Civ VII, the developers at Firaxis aim to make both wide and tall playstyles work. That’s through Towns and Cities. Instead of instantly founding Cities, Settlers now initially found Towns that act automatically.
During a recent Civ VII media preview we attended, Lead Game Designer Edward Zhang explained this new addition to support both playstyles:
“Tall versus wide has always been a debate internally. In Civilization VII, we want to enable both styles simultaneously.
Tall, by definition, is having a few strong cities with a lot of yields, while wide, for a lot of players, is expanding your empire as far as your eyes can see. In Civilization VII, you can do both because of the new Towns and Cities system.
Towns are essentially cities on autopilot. You don’t really need to pay much attention to it. You can assign a specialty to it. For Cities, they are going to be like traditional Cities in previous games as you can do all the productions and build units.
With these two working in conjunction, you can have a vast empire where you don’t need to manage every single City. You don’t need to manage every single Town. You just manage the core ones that you want to turn into Cities. But if your playstyle style is to have a lot of micromanagement and you want to play a lot of cities, you can also do that.
In this way, you can play both tall and wide together. You can even change your style down the line as you can change Towns into Cities by upgrading them.”
Zhang explained this during a Q&A before we got to try the game out. As someone who first played Civ V over a decade ago, I was excited to see if Towns and Cities make a tall playstyle more viable.
While I can’t definitively say yet given I only got to try the game out for three hours, what I can tell is that the game still rewards getting Settlers out ASAP. If you don’t, you’ll quickly find yourself losing out on territory given that the other Civs expand fast, much like in Civ VI.
In that sense, it would likely be difficult to turtle as you would in Civ V, though on the flip side, having Towns and Cities does make only having a few cities you directly manage a viable strategy. This is especially the case with some Leaders like Augustus who gets Production bonuses in the capital for every Town. With this, the best strategy seems to be expansion with many towns.
Given this, Civilization VII does seem to support a tall playstyle, just not as extreme as Civ V given that there are still plenty of benefits to getting Settlers out fast in the first 100 turns like you would with a wide style.
Civilization VII will launch on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, and macOS on February 11, 2025.