Hopefully this thread doesn't get lost in all the other posts. A fairly significant balancing issue (IMO) with the game as it stands is that small kingdoms are almost impossible to play as. There are a couple reasons for this, as far as I can tell:
1. Resources in your territory don't always link to your cities. This may or may not be a bug; I'm not really sure if it's intended or not. My impression was that if a resource is in your territory, you can build on it and use it. The building part certainly works. But if you have a level 5 city and a resource that is toward the edge of your area of influence, it will be too far away from your city for you to use it. I noticed this when I researched the "Pariden's Ally" tech that lets you recruit Shrills. The shrill hive appeared close to the edge of my border, I built on it, but I couldn't train and shrills. I clicked on the hive and it said that it wasn't linked to a city, and when I moused over that it said it needed to be 4 tiles (or something like that) closer to my city for me to use it.
If this is a bug, then it will get fixed and problem solved. If it's intentional, it makes having a few high leveled cities spaced far apart pretty much useless, as it occurs with all resources, not just the unit recruitment ones (ie, gold mines, farms, etc). What's the point of expanding my city when I need to spam a bunch of cities to make use of all of my resources?
2. Smaller kingdoms can't compete militarily with the larger ones. Now, this isn't a problem by itself. It makes perfect sense that a larger kingdom can field a larger army. Because of that, you would expect a smaller kingdom to pursue an alternate path to victory, like diplomacy or the master quest or something. What is a problem is how diplomacy works related to army size. If your army isn't close in size to your opponents, you end up with a huge negative to your relations that can't really be undone. As a small kingdom will almost always have a smaller army, you very quickly run out of diplomatic options.
I was playing a game on a large map and got a bad start. I was on a little peninsula, with a decent amout of resources, but I had two opponents blocking my expansion farther inland. So I ended up with two cities, and tried to go the diplomatic route to make allies with at least one of my opponents (expansion over sea was pretty much out of the question for various other reasons). I got a cease-fire with one of them early on when we were close to the same size, but he quickly expanded while I was stuck to my two cities. Soon his army got big, I got a huge negative multiplier, and I couldn't do anything about it. Eventually he hated my guts, but couldn't declare war on me because of the cease-fire. As soon as it expired, though, he declared war.
Now again, a small kingdom shouldn't be able to compete militarily with a large one. But diplomacy should still be an option. The military size penalty shouldn't be so large as to completely prevent diplomacy from ever happening (in the above game my opponent had values of 20000+ for things like trade treaties because that was how much he didn't like me).
What are the benefits of founding cities? I think you can sum it up on increasing influence (less monsters and more targets for teleport spell), gaining resources and training armies.
How about decreasing the number of resources or centralizing them, so that you don't have to build a new city for every one or two resources you find?
For the influence thing... outposts? Or some kind of influence-generating magic tower/rod/stone/building?
And traning armies may depend on a city's tech lvl... let's say units with metal weapons/armor can only be trained in cities with a blacksmith, which can be build on lvl 3+, leather with a leatherworker on lvl 2 etc.
That would drastically decrease the number of cities, make each of them bigger and more important, wouldn't stop you from increasing your sphere of influence and stop an early spam/rush of lord hammer units. How about that?
Until there are better UI tools to manage a large empire, I'd also like to see some of the emphasis moved away from rapid expansion. My pet idea is to increase the civilian cost of pioneers, tie city productivity more closely to population, and move prestige to a global stat that limits the overall growth of your entire empire.
About small empires (i mean generally 1 city with ... ogres .. ), why not implementing an option to make them the possibility to be your vassal.
This would enlarge your domination area let him try to grow and why not in this case :
1- possibility to have some kind of tax from him ?
2- possibility to find a spouse ?
3- possibility if he decides to be a vassal, admiting he can build troops to send him on missions to kill X monter bothering you (near your caravans for example), this would be enjoyable to have an allied sent to do it in your place.Maybe with a warning from him if his troups are too low to do it ?
Well just ideas.
Why should they be expensive? Once you have enough money, the costs are meaningless and you will dominate others, who cannot afford those pioneers, even more.
The problem lies within the huge benefits of possessing many small/medicore cities, apart from the crappy management of large empires. A lvl 5 city without resources generates one gildar - about as much as a lvl 1 city without resources. The same goes for arcane/tech knowledge and material etc. If you add the + x% gildar on every lvl up, you may get even 1,x gildar per turn.
I think that is just wrong and an invitation to spam cities. Making them very expensive may solve the problem, but not the cause.
Perhaps you missed a word in my original post or I worded it poorly. I wanted pioneers to cost more than 1 point of population to make. In general, I think population needs to carry more meaning. A large city needs to have an enourmous productive advantage over a small one. Once that's the case, if it costs more population to build a new settlement, and those people are already happily at work increasing the productive power of your current settlement, you would have to carefully consider where to send them. To me it doesn't make sense to have 2 settlements of 20 people be more powerful than 1 of 40.
The purpose of a settlement should be to grab resources and land, not to increase your production. Gaining population (or employing buildings that empower that population) should be the only means of increasing production.
In general i agree with the OP - i'm a bit sick of an automatic -4 because I happen to have smaller military force. All that leads to is a very shallow game which turns into a slug fest. It would make more sense to me as a person to befriend someone who is smaller than me and therefore is no threat to me. I am not sure how caravans work - is there a better bonus in tech or something for trading between different civilizations compared to a city in your own kingdom? if not there should be.
the AI doesn't seem to take into account my magical might - silly in a magical game.
but the crux of it for me is the simple idea that all sovereigns are power hungry megalomaniacs! and that is what the -4 diplomacy based on military might translates to. "I'm bigger than you therefore I should wipe you out".
it would make sense if the Sovereign in question is a bit of a power hungry military expansionist and some sovereigns should be - but not all. i think that if you are at a diplomatic neutral state - the minus 4 should not apply. if you are in a positive diplomatic state it should become a bonus. in that - why attack someone who is weaker when they are no threat? - When i have other bigger more threatening problems to work on. if you are in a negative state then and only then should the negative 4 due to military size come into affect. Which means it would be really silly to attack a bigger kingdom as the -4 would switch on and you might never get it off.
The diplomatic state should be positive - neutral - or negative based on the choices you make with the AI Sovereign - the AI Sovereign's personality type - and the NEED of that AI Sovereign to have what you have. Expansion for resources is a powerful motivator. But if there are other unclaimed resources in the area and you are being friendly why attack and waste resources in a meaningless war. Particularly if the other kingdom is prepared to trade what you have too much off for what you need.
When it comes to the creating of too many cities. I personally think that a return to a city only being able to be built on "fertile" land is needed, (maybe right next to the tile for game play) and then a return to the Sovereign or a Channeller having the power to create "fertile" land by permanently expending essence. The Sovereign could add fertile land where needed to create more cities or not (the pioneer unit would still be needed to build cities on random fertile land on created fertile land). or the Sovereign could just create fertile land to add to the ability to create food. which would give the game another option on creating powerful city states as that food could be traded or used to feed a powerful army etc...
This was the original concept in beta and in the story of the game and I think it was a mistake to move away from it. Channelers are the saviors of the civilization. They alone can bring life to the waste and re create a kingdom. This would balance the problem with spamming lots of low cities and allow for the original concept that a sovereign could either spend there essence to create a huge civilization and have a military power base. Or, like Sauron in lord of the rings, hoard there essence and become so powerfully magical that no one would want to mess with them. Which in its own way may attract allies to you or help you form alliances with powerful kingdoms etc.
The problem with using essence to build a city is that, at least with the current mechanics, weakening your sovereign doesn't really matter. By the mid game, the generic units are good enought that no matter how much you level up your sovereign, he/she can probably be one-shotted with arrows/catapults/other magic users. And because of that, the only time your sovereign is likely to see combat is when the city he/she is stationed in is under attack, because going on the offensive with your sovereign is pretty much suicide. That is of course a whole other problem that already has threads devoted to it.
If weakening your sovereign actually mattered, I would agree that going back to requiring essence to build a city would be a good idea. Plus, essence has come a long way from the original plans for it (not necissarily good). I'm still waiting for the ability to imbue fortresses, regular units, etc to make them stronger (similar to the Sauron mechanic you mentioned). Essense isn't really significant enough anymore for it to be a good limiting factor on growth, but again, that is a topic for another discussion.
Other people brought up how your battle rating is calculated, and that is definetly something contributing to the problems of small kingdoms. Magical ability is completely ignored. Someone can have 100 essence, 200 intelligence, and chain lightning and whatever, and still have "0" for their combat rating, which is just wrong.
The problem isn't starting with few resources, it's starting where expansion is severely limited. Spamming a bunch of small towns to get resources is impossible (not to mention the fact that city spam should be discouraged). Getting the population up isn't the issue either (I was royalty, anyway). It's that a kingdom consisting of a handful of high level, large cities can't compete with a kingdom of a bunch of low level, small cities.
A small kingdom can't compete militarily with a large one, but that makes sense and I don't have a problem with that. But the small kingdom can't compete with a large one on any level. Diplomacy *should* make sense as an option, but it doesn't. If the other options are impossible, then diplomacy makes the best sense. Ally yourself with someone bigger and stronger. But it doesn't work that way.
About resources, in the preview videos and such that Brad did, he mentioned a lot that it would be better to focus on expanding a few of your cities to encompass as much land as possible. In fact, a level 5 city casts influence over a huge amount of territory. But because of the resource linkage bug/feature, most of that territory is worthless. Sure, you can build on the resources in it, but you can't use it. Yes, you can snake your city until it looks like a spider web to get it close enough to your resources, but I was under the impression that the whole point of being able to build on anything in your territory was to avoid city snaking. Even with snaking, there will still probably be resources at the edges that you can't get close enough to.
Plus the 'overland' spells could use some love, and if so, that would give Sovs more of a non-combat use, which would give more importance to essence (via 'overland' spells) and thus making the essence loss from city building more of a cost.
In addition, more uses for essence would also add more to the 'cost' of requiring essence for city founding.
Piecemeal attempts won't suffice for this, I fear. The whole needs addressing.
I like the system where to found a new city you take X amount of population from an existing city and send them over as pioneers. The new city will start with X population. You can also transfer people between cities at any time like this.
I mentioned this somewhere else, but I think that each city should have a unique attribute, bonuses to resources or units buiilt, or technology... something to make having lots of different cities valuable but not a requirement for success. As for small kingdoms being able to compete against big kingdoms, I think that there should be alliance options where large nations can hire small nations to be their minions... basically in exchange for peace/money/trade the smaller nation will attack enemies, hunt bandits, pay a tribute of a particular resource that the larger nation needs.
Also, I am not sure how territories work in this game, but it seems to me that once your territory is a certain size, your opponents can't steal that territory from you. I think that you should be able to steal territory from other cities somehow. If you have to capture the city in order to gain that territory and there is no other way that forces you into a military position just to capture more resources. Diplomacy and magic and maybe quest rewards should allow you to gain territory without having a bigger city and getting there first.
You last sentence sums up a lot. The whole essence system has issues, and I think it needs pretty much a complete overhall.
If new cities cosumed 1 food, city spam would be much smaller.
Currently, you can get +1materials/gold/tech/arcane for just cost of single pioneer. Even if city had no access to any resource, you are at gain.
This is the silly part of it, in my opinion, and why city spam is as viable and desirable as it is. All of the base production buildings (both merchants and mines for gildar, for instance) are available at 0 population. If I have 10 people in my empire, the most productive way to employ them is in 10 different cities all loaded to the gills with base production and resource gathering buildings. Multiplier buildings end up being okay eventually, but are more dependent upon the presence of natural resources than the size of the city. Even an extra food cost would be insufficient, in my opinion, as all of those cities can have a caravan back to the capital to provide the neccessary food.
Any up-front additional cost that is placed on pioneers (food/essence) is only a hurdle getting in the way, in my opinion. Instead of a one step process of simply city spam, it's a two step process of 1) increase essence, 2) city spam. It's slowing the process without eliminating the root desirability. To make city spam less attractive, you have to limit empire wide population growth (a 2-city empire shouldn't grow twice as fast as a 1-city empire) and make population, not number of cities, the core metric to determine your empire's resource production.
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