Dynasties

Expansionist line

The Expansionist line raises your city cap. It is chosen at match setup and stands for the whole match (Getting started).

Its effect

• City cap +1

The base cap is 6; playing the Expansionist line it is 7. The effect is the cap and nothing else: the minimum distance between cities (4 hexes) does not change, the Pioneer costs the same, and the founding conditions stay as they are (Cities and population).

Why one cap step is this broad

A city opens several score items at once: the city itself, its region and its population (Territory and score). A region grows from radius 1 to 2 once population reaches 3, so even a late city still grows before the match closes. That is why a single cap step gives more than a single number.

Using the cap is your problem

The effect does not give you a city, it gives you permission to found one — and permission only helps if there is room. That extra city has to go on a plains or forest hex that is 4 hexes away from every city on the map; on a 480-hex board (Map and terrain) that room can be squeezed between rival regions by the late turns.

The practical consequence: the Expansionist line rewards you early. An opening that delays Settler production can reach the turn limit without ever filling the cap — and the moment the cap is full there is no reason left to produce Settlers at all (Pioneer).

The cap counts the cities you own, not the ones you founded: a captured city spends a slot, and so does a Neutral village you take. Taking a village can therefore hand back the step this line gave you — if the extra cap is permission to found a city, spending that permission on a village is a decision too. Once the cap is full, production still has a road to score: the Monument exists for exactly that gap.

Why the cap and not the distance

The effect had two arms — raising the cap, or lowering the minimum distance between cities — and the choice was made by measurement: the distance arm did not move the average city count at all, while the cap arm genuinely opened a seventh city. What was binding was the quota itself, not a lack of room on the board. The distance arm also lowered the score: cities packed closer have overlapping regions, and an overlapping tile scores once (Territory and score).

That is why the minimum distance does not change with this line; the measurement table and the numbers behind the rejected arm live at the top of packages/data/src/balance/dynasties.ts.

The numbers on this page are read from the game’s balance tables.