Anyone familiar with 4x games knows that the more cities you conquer/found the more powerful you become in a linear fashion. Therefore once you have a few more cities than the opponent it becomes a boring mopping-up exercise. In real life having an enormous empire presents many problems. Here is how to address this in game terms.
All military units should require monetary upkeep. Each additional city you hold should offer you slightly less income due to "empire upkeep" costs or whatever. The second city you found should have 90% of the gold income potential of the first, the third city should have 80%, the fourth 70%, until you get to your 12th city which will give NO NET INCOME. Static structures like city walls and barracks would have no upkeep, only armies will have upkeep. This way there is a hard limit on the power level of your army. If you have 20 cities you can only field the same size army as a player with 12 cities.
This way the war remains challenging until the end. Other games have used this concept but where they stumble is when they offer ways to mitigate or eliminate the penalty for having many cities. After your empire reaches a certain size your army should no longer grow. Holding territory and denying it to your enemy should be its own reqard at this point.
Wes
I like turtling, too. I don't want a game feature that essentially forces me to stop turtling, or even one that forces me to turtle. Yeah you can always ignore it but then you're penalized for it.
But I think the idea of having magic use affect Elemental balance, and thus having an effect on the world, is different from the Armageddon counter. For one, magic can be peformed by anyone, even a turtler. But what it does do is encourage players to take an active role beyond their own boarders without necessarily having to leave those boarders, or to directly interact with other players. Elemental balance could affect things like weather, random events, terrain. It could even affect the effectiveness of magic; maybe the more unbalanced the elements are, the more unpredictable or inefficient magic becomes.
Although I guess one potential problem with this is that if too many people choose to focus on the same Element, this feature would kind of ruin the game. Oh oh, maybe there is a naturally tendency for the elements to balance out. Every event or consequence of the magic unbalance could act to rebalance things. And if things get too far the result could be a massive, global magical event - maybe even on par with the endgame debalancing spells. There could be floods, fire storms, earthquakes, massive storms, plagues, whatever; and once its over the elements would be balanced again.
Armageddon Clock talk aside, now I think you're on to a good idea for a major Game Goal for folks who don't care about winning: work that map until the Wheel of the Elements hums like newly-balanced radials on fresh asphalt. I could *really* get into something like that, almost perzactly because it sounds like a swell way to enable folks to become some sort of Active Turtler.
I think I understand your dislike, but i'm not sure you've understood me right.
I mean to differentiate between channeler power and what I'll now rebrand as "mana reserver". With Channeler Power I mean to express the maximum amount of magical power you may expand in one turn / time slot /whatever. Say the "bandwidth" of your ability to channel. With power hording in my previous post i meant the build-up of raw magical hoardes that (still) needs to be channeled to become effective.
Therefore I do not see what I proposed as a "power cap" because that has more to do with your channelers "bandwidth". It merely prevents the abilitiy to gather supplies that facilitate "year-long-sieges" because both sides have enough "supplies" to last forever. So it really IS strictly meant as a (late-game?) stalemate-prevention device.
As Swicord said I would expect that some researchable tech/buidalbe items/etc etc To allow for catering to your channelers need for a little more bandwidth or a little more supply-hoarding (at some cost ofcourse). I am sure the devs can figure out a way to scale the maximum possible adaptation range from base (being your channeler) through tech/magic research...
Although I like your idea of the 5-point-star (a bit like magic-the-gathering?) bacause of a certain "beauty" within the system I think for large-scale multiplayer it would not necessarily work (because the numebrs arent large enough to have balancing on that account I think). I think most of the recent posters don't like being forces into one direction. With your idea if at the start a serious disbalance in elements occurs how will you fix it? I would extremely dislike to be forced to play either an inherently disbalanced game or forced to completely rework my channeler /start a new channeler. (or if they try balancing before gamestart -not to be allowed to play a certain kind of channelers because others clicked a bit faster and the max crystal channelers for this map has been reached). This would be especially irksome because there is very little one player can do in that case to mend the situation when it occurs.
(to elaborate: what happens to me if I chose to play a "Red" channeler in the very beginning but from the start or over the course of the game "Red" got overdeveloped mostly at the cost of "Green". This is so bad you get balancing "bursts" of "green" effects, potentially hitting my lands over and over simply because I am red. Since I am completely unable (I go from the point its a rather large-scale-many player environment) to fix this I'm shafted for that game. Geing shafted is only fun if you can -in the end- can come up with something to counter it.
I imagine in my proposal each player can (to a certain extent) and must mend the situation (since if he is the hoarder he will be hardest hit / hit first by blowouts). Also when a seriously beleagered channelers goes the "death-curse" way to players beleagering him are in a position to either force him to expend energy on defense or try and kill him of quickly before he goed critical.
As for other side-effects: I might be able to think of some, but it seems to me you have some on your mind...so if you would care to elaborate
Again: I really dislike armageddon counter type things (like global warming in CIV) because unless you are a strongly sominating player already there is really nothing you can do about it.
enough typing for now
If SD can pull off this sort of thing then it would be quite an achievement, because there is a very fine balance between a) giving smaller empires a chance, not doing this in such a way as to make it pointless to attack so nobody does anything the whole game and c) not making it too much a game of luck, which can be spectacularly frustrating.
Ah, yeah I did misunderstand you. I'll have to reserve judgement regarding your idea until we no more (or rather, anything at all ) about the magic system. But now that I actually understand what you meant it's definitely intriguing.
Yeah the problem posed by actually having magic be balanced is probably the biggest flaw with my idea. One partial solution is to give players the ability to meaningfully evolve our channelers throughout the course of the game, including being able to tailor their skills in the different elemental schools within the game, rather than defining our channeler via pre-game options. That would only partially solve the problem though. Another partial solution is the one I mentioned before: having magic naturally balance itself out by causing either local or global effects. So if for some reason certain elements are completely dominating and no one wants to or can do anything about it, it'll balance itself out anyway; the result would be a game with more and somewhat predictable game events than normal. This whole feature would obviously have to be optional - it would piss off anyone who doesn't like random events.
Well I never proposed that the effects would mostly affect the players that are mostly responsible for the unbalance. That could work, and would thus encourage people to use multiple schools of magic or to take a temporary break from major magic use until things are more under control. And in your example, if you're a red channeler but are a relatively small player, you might still be spared many of the effects because there are stronger 'red' channelers that are much larger offenders than you.
But that's just one option; another is that the effects could be totally random in who they affect, and in severe enough situations they could be global. Either way it would have to be balanced so that balancing out magic doesn't become the dominating factor in games; it should be a secondary factor that adds flavor and a way for the cumulation of all players' actions to affect the actual world. If every player decides to focus on a single element, that game should still be playable without the world or individual players being wracked by massive magic balancing events every other turn.
Other ways that individuals could try to bring magic back into balance could be through quests. It could even be a global quest that everybody gets if the magic balance gets bad enough. It can provide a way for channelers to help bring magic back into balance without having to cast magic of the opposing elements, even (maybe you could 'pay' raw mana or something), although explicitly using magic to rebalance magic could still be more effective. If players manage to rebalance the elements, each player could receive some sort of reward proportional to their efforts.
Well the problem there is that there's nothing an average player can do about it, not the feature itself. One reason why global warming sucks in Civ is because there isn't really anything you can do to directly reduce global warming, all you can do is limit how much of it you cause. As a result all you can do as an individual is somewhat slow it down, but you can't ever actually reverse it alone.
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