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Haccoude

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Aug 20, 2010
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So, there have been a lot of discussion on here which uses the terms “Tall” and “Wide” taken from the Civ series, and yet there are some fundamental differences between Civ and Stellaris that should affect how easy it is to transplant “Tall/Wide” terminology to Stellaris from Civ. So, I’ve written some thoughts on how Tall/Wide could be understood in a more useful way within discussions on Stellaris’ design.

First, let’s start with Tall/Wide and Civ, to even understand where the terminology comes from. Let’s start with Wide, and more specifically the type of Wide that plagued Civ at a time: The Infinite City Sprawl, or ICS. Wide in general is a strategy where the player builds a lot of cities, and the ICS in specific is one where the player only builds tools to acquire more cities: settlers to found them, and soldiers to conquer them. While some wonders are built in ICS, no city improvements or buildings are. In contrast, in the games that allow for it, in ICS cities are built with only a single tile between them (…City-Tile-City-Tile-City…)

In contrast there is the Tall strategy, where the player limits themselves to a few cities. In CiV (Civ V), this generally meant limiting oneself to the number of cities you could get free buildings for through traditions, though there was a “Pure” Tall option in Venice that could not build settlers to settle new cities and was really suited for the One City Challenge (OCC).

Why do I believe this understanding of Tall/Wide can’t be directly transplanted from Civ to Stellaris?
Because it’s based on Civ’s victory focus. In Civ you pick a victory condition and gun for it, trying to accomplish it before other’s accomplish theirs. “Tall” play means that your victory condition doesn’t require many cities to accomplish, and such resources spent acquiring more cities than the necessary are “wasted” compared to resources spent on advancing your victory condition.
Same with “Wide”. In Civ terms, if your victory condition is made easier by acquiring more and more cities, then resources spent on internal development that doesn’t make it easier to acquire more cities are “wasted”.

While there might be people who play Stellaris with the same single-mindedness towards “victory” as Civ lends itself to, I know I at least don’t play it that way, and it seems like most players prefer a grand strategy “immersion/simulation” playstyle over 4X “competitive”. Within that playstyle, the Civ definitions of “Tall/Wide” simply don’t work, as you don’t base your gameplay decisions on how you’re going to achieve victory.

What do I believe will fit better? A very close, but slightly different definition: Tall/Wide doesn’t refer to victory strategies, but to small scale decisions. A “Tall” decision is one that puts resources into the internal development of what’s within your borders. A “wide” decision is one that puts resources into expanding your borders. Playing a “Tall” game refers to one where you make more Tall than Wide decisions, playing a “Wide” game means you make more Wide than Tall decisions.

In both cases it only refers either the decisions you’ve made so far within a game, or to the decisions you made in a finished game. You should not be locked into either “gameplan” any more than you should be locked into a specific government or ethos. Even if you’ve predominantly made Tall decisions in a game, you should be able to switch to predominantly Wide, and the same goes for the other way around.

Of course, there’s another reason Tall/Wide can’t just be directly transplanted without being easily misunderstood, and that’s the concept of Tall+Wide hybrids.

First off, what does a “hybrid” even mean in regard to Tall/Wide? Well, there’s important to remember one very important aspect of Tall/Wide in Civ that I’ve too often seen forgotten in discussions “using” the terminology in Stellaris: Wide means larger area and lower internal development than Tall. Tall means smaller area and higher internal development than Wide. The extreme of the Wide playstyle in Civ, is the ICS where most cities don’t have even a full ring of 8 tiles around them and none of them have any buildings built.

If a “Wide” empire has internal development rivalling a Tall one, it’s not Wide. It’s (one possible version of) a Tall+Wide hybrid. The fact that at least prior to Le Guin (don’t know enough about after to say if that’s still the case) this hybrid was so common that some people seem to mistakenly believe it’s “Wide”, is a prime example of the problems that arise from using “Tall/Wide” terminology in Stellaris without defining it.

There’s another way to envision a Tall+Wide hybrid, and it’s one I prefer to the “Jack of all trades, also Master of them all” version: the Kuriotates from the Fall from Heaven 2 Mod for CIV. The Kuriotates had a small selection of “Core Cities” limited by map size. These cities were individual powerhouses with the ability to work another ring of tiles around them (three in total), and they had an additional upgrade level to the Cottage tile improvement (a strong source of economy in CIV). This provided them a strong but limited core of cities individually better than any other civs’. All further cities however, could not build anything and served solely to grab resources that could be fed back to the core cities.

If Paradox removes the possibility to go for the “Master of All Trade” hybrid, we can get a “Tall/Wide” scale for possible playstyles:

Pure Tall: One fully developed planet only – Regular Tall: Small amount of highly developed planets – “Jack of All Trades, Master of None”: More planets than Tall, fewer than Wide. Lower development than Tall, higher than Wide – Regular Wide: Large amount of low development planets – Pure Wide: Extreme amount of no development planets.

In the interest of gameplay, both Pure Tall and Pure Wide should probably be niche playstyles, viable but not meta (Megacorps for Pure Tall. Maybe a Biological Hivemind naturally “growing” both districts and buildings for Pure Wide?). However, the three different playstyles of Regular Tall, Jack of All Trades and Regular Wide should offer a broad range of possible experiences. Even more if the game also allows for the “Imperial” Hybrid of consisting of Core Worlds fewer (and more highly developed) than Regular Tall plus numerous Frontier Worlds with less development than Regular Wide.

As this post turned monstrously long, here’s a TL;DR:
If you believe “Wide = many planets and Tall = few planets” is true, you’re wrong. You can read the actual post if you want more info, but the summary is that “Wide = many, low development planets and Tall = few, high development planets”. The second part of each description is core to the definitions. "Many, high development planets" is a Tall+Wide hybrid.
 
In the interest of further clarification, you need to understand there are two ways to count tall/wide: Planets and Systems. You could have many systems and many planets (colonies), or few systems and few colonies, but you could also have many systems and few colonies or few systems and many colonies.

I believe the large consensus among Stellaris players who pay attention to meta is that, in 2.1 rules, the best way to play Tall was to reduce the number of systems you controlled. That doesn't mean a low amount of colonies; in fact, often more. The player "developed" these systems to the heights of their abilities, using Habitats and Ringworlds.

Obviously 2.2 changes this up. But we need to consider what strategies are best for playing Tall/Wide in terms of colony count, and what is best for Tall/Wide in terms of system count.
 
In the interest of further clarification, you need to understand there are two ways to count tall/wide: Planets and Systems. You could have many systems and many planets (colonies), or few systems and few colonies, but you could also have many systems and few colonies or few systems and many colonies.
That's actually a really good point, and one I forgot to take into account. In Civ the Tall/Wide dichotomy is amount and development of cities, but Stellaris really has two possible City equivalents: Planet(oid)s (to include habitats and ringworlds), and Systems. With regards to CiVI, one could even say that the Systems are only City equivalent, while Planets are District equivalents. That would have reinforce the comparison to a Stellaris Tall that consists of few systems each with many inhabited planetoids.

Of course Le Guin seems to have added "Planet Tall", where you can have a small amount of highly developed planets, rather than systems. So Stellaris might end up with different Tall/Wide scales: Tall/Wide System-wise, and Tall/Wide Planet-wise. The design space even allows for these opening up these to be specifically combined into Tall Systems & Tall Planets, Tall Systems & Wide Planets, Wide Systems & Tall Planets and Wide Systems & Wide Planets.