Can I please get an update on this?
That's very interesting. It's too bad they couldn't have done that in SP as well.
We are going to have to agree to disagree. Spamming is a basic exploit in poorly designed 4x games. In MOO you colonized preset planets. That is not spam, that is taking over what is set. In MOM, you had to add cities. You actually had to think about where you were placing your cities to get the most resources because the cities had a minimum distance. That is two totally different types of play. MOM limited the city spam by setting up minimum distances. It made you actually think, because if you didn't do it right you could miss a resource.
As for Elemental, I am all for expanding my Kingdom/Empire. But plopping a city down on every resource is not expansion. That is a game flaw, which in my opinion, is one of the biggest flaws in the game. What would be more fun is to have resource units that can be "deployed" out of your zone of control that lets you access resources. A miner unit, wood cutter unit, or what ever the resource happens to be. Then we could decide how much we want to protect that resource. If you don't, some other Sovereign could come in a take it over. That is expansion and using the resources of the land. That way founding cities would actually be important because where you place them would actually be important. Right now it is irrelevant--just plop one more down.
The simple difference is that I don't think city spam is expansion and exploiting is supposed to be of the games resources, not flaws in the design.
As far exploring and exterminating--at least we are on the same page there.
I agree that we're going to have to "agree to disagree." Spamming is a valid, useful strategy in every well-designed 4x strategy game. In fact, it's a prerequisite as the second "x" in 4x.
In MOO you colonized preset planets. That is not spam, that is taking over what is set. In MOM, you had to add cities. You actually had to think about where you were placing your cities to get the most resources because the cities had a minimum distance. That is two totally different types of play. MOM limited the city spam by setting up minimum distances. It made you actually think, because if you didn't do it right you could miss a resource.
In MOO, I did exaclty the same thing as I do in this game, I colonized every planet I could. Those blue terra and green gaia planets were my #1 targets, roughly equivalent to crystal & shard locations in this game. The diffeence in MOO2 was that the AI was far superior and it was not so easy to take these planets. And, there was a huge decision in spending the resources to build a colony ship vs a useful building vs a combat ship. MOO2 had excellent "balance" there. The other "preset" planets whcih were not colonizable were colonizable later in the game with terreforming. Since this game is not a space game, it more or less has "preset" spam locations in the form of resource-rich areas. Other (non-resource) areas are available for spam (just like the gas giants in MOO), but why build there without having some other good reason (tactical, trade, control, etc)? I do build many cities in non-resource areas, but I have other reasons (typically trade & caravan). This is not a game problem, it's a strategy choice. And, this game has a minimum distance too, 5 I think it is ... although the large map is "huge" in comparison to MOO2.
As for Elemental, I am all for expanding my Kingdom/Empire. But plopping a city down on every resource is not expansion. That is a game flaw, which in my opinion, is one of the biggest flaws in the game. What would be more fun is to have resource units that can be "deployed" out of your zone of control that lets you access resources. The simple difference is that I don't think city spam is expansion and exploiting is supposed to be of the games resources, not flaws in the design.
Bulding a city near a resource is definitely expansion; that's why anyone would want to build the city there to begin with. Sorry, I completely disagree with this as a "flaw." It's a choice: build there and gather or "exploit" the available resource (just like you would get the resources of planets you colonize in 4x space games) and at the same time "expand" your empire' control via the city' influence .. or not. That's the choice. Presumably however, you don't want your enemies to get that resource? .. not if you're trying to win the game anyway. "Expansion" *is* through cities, and "Exploiting" *is* through gathering of resources. The two are locked in this game, as in many 4x games.
It works exactly the same way in civ: you only gather resources (i.e. exploit) those that are in the city' control zone (those 8 squares adjacent to the city), and you only "expand" influence from cities you build. The first and second xs in 4x are joined in the hip in this game just like many 4x games. It's only 4x space games that allow for "remote mining" and real-time strategy games which don't link the two, although typically you don't want your workers gathering that lumber too far from the city because it takes too long to walk back&forth and usually you end up losing when you run out (as in Age of Mythology) or AI "raids" against defenceless serfs.
Where do I start?
"When you take out the enemy sovereign, all their cities disappear so don't worry about the city spam." This is a bug/flaw in the game that I'm sure will soon be fixed. Great big cities that took hundreds of years to build don't disappear when you kill the enemy sovereign. Hopefully, this will be fixed as suggested numerous times in this forum with some combination of kingdom heirs, divided factions, neutral cities, etc.
"This is a 4x game and one of the Xs is for eXpand." If you want to expand with city spam, go play Civ 1, 2, 3, or 4. This is a fantasy strategy game and while we're not asking for static cities like HOMM or Age of Wonders, we are asking for some control over the city spam. Stardock has given us a unique ability to build the cities out in any direction we want. If you want to eXpand, then eXpand one of your big cities in any direction you want.
"But I want to secure and protect every resource out there and not let the opponent get it." If you want to protect a resource, then strategically place a city and build it out appropriately with influence and civic planning. Or place an army dude near it to protect it. We don't need that kind of spam in this game. Go play Civ 1, 2, 3, or 4.
Ha Ha, Boy, are we opinionated or what ???
Players must play with my toys as *I* say or get the hell out've my playpen
You have control; you want to build one huge, big, fat metropolis which is also a big, fat target then go for it. I'll build my four dozen spammed cities over half the map in the same time & take all the resources, and yours too, while doing it.
You have control: you can build one big city or 50 small ones, there's your control & choice, but you'll have no control over my choice.
the problem is not that players spam settlements to grab resources. it's that all of these settlements end up growing at the same rate, largely regardless of how many are built. everything ends up becoming a huge city eventually, which was not how the game was envisioned. there were supposed to be a few large cities with additional client farming villages or mining towns that did not end up becoming cities and sprawling over the map.
this was intended to be done with food. ie, you would only have enough food to build enough houses to expand in one or two large cities. unfortunately, the food limitation was largely eroded and food end up almost never being a limitation because of the ease with which food can be generated with enchantments and caravans (which largely allow a city to be food self sufficient without controlling a resource).
trouble is that because population grows at a fixed rate per city, it is far better for players to have their settlements all growing: if you build a house in all three of your cities you will get faster pop growth as a whole than if you built three in one city (because then only one grows). when specialist slots are added and pop becomes more important, it will become even more evident that more settlements = more faction pop growth is breaking the game, as pop will become more important.
the flaw in stardock's model is connecting food supply to the hard cap of population in a town, instead of to population growth itself.
instead of charging food for housing, divide faction food supply over faction population. the ratio of food:person should determine the rate of population growth. housing should just determine the hard cap, but have no maintenance cost. if you do this you never end up in a situation where a player is unable to build anything because of food supply, which is what lead to the current mess, where players kept demanding more food until it became redundant as a factor. consider extra buildings and prestige bonuses as free food. show the factors in a simple screen as in the total war games (one of the most dumbed down TBSs ever, which still managed to get pop growth right).
this way faction population grows at a decreasing rate until it stabilises at a limit determined by food supply (and any other factors such as prestige). it will grow at the same rate and stabilise at the same point regardless of how many settlements you have. however, it will be distributed depending on where you have built housing. so if you build a few houses in every settlement, they all stabilise at intermediate levels. if you just build them in your capital you get a large metropolis surrounded by small satellite farming/mining towns. the player has to choose between a large sprawling empire like russia, or a small developed nation like venice. of course, if you have enough food you can be both large and developed.
this will fix the game, i swear it by my mother's grave.
How come it seems like every poster who hates on city spam calls it an exploit like its a bad thing? Going back to the genre title, city spam itself is the 2nd part or the expand part, and the exploit part is literally the 3rd part. So if you are expanding your empire to exploit the resources, you are doing two of the four x's. Just because some of you want to sit back and detail each part of a few cities, it doesn't mean I want to do that. Ultimately the best solution is the one where your detailed management and my city spam are equally valid solutions. Yet, I find it wild how anyone who says "wait, city spam is probably ok", is immediately told to go find another game as this very valid strategy ( as it is the underlying philosophy of the 4x's) is somehow completely terrible. I completely agree that those of you who don't like city spam should not be forced to do it, but at the same time, I should not be forced to be limited in my expansion simply because someone doesn't like it conceptually. Personally, I don't like losing, but that doesn't mean I should force others to use a strategy where I always win. I think most of the opponents of city spam would find these debates more fulfilling if they would offer some solutions beyond setting arbitrary limitations to empire expansion.
What happens if I don't want a big city at all? Maybe I find them to be simply not worth the time/cost investment. Don't you think the real issue is the lack of disparity between lower level cities and higher level ones?
I agree with Trojasmic, there are better ways to expand. Building an entire city because one resource is somewhere is stupid. Developing a major city near several resources is a more strategic game. Exploiting available extra resources with units and buildings is also more strategic. Do I need to protect it or not, is it close enough that I can respond. It opens an entire world of attacks and counterattacks.
cpl_rk--I think your MOO example is a completely different scenario. I still play MOO and I build on all available planets as well. That is not spamming. But even MOO does a good job of putting in some systems that cannot be colonized. MOO is a completely different type of game. MOM would be a better example.
The fact that spamming becomes the only strategy is a flaw. Entire cities do not need to built for every resource. We are supposed to be rebuilding a shattered world. Concept wise spamming doesn't even make sense. It should be difficult to build a city in Elemental, because there are none. Now we come along and we build one every 100 yards because we are expanding and exploiting. Conceptually that is broken. Resource gathering (exploiting) fine. Lets go, I am all for it. Building an entire city because there is grove of trees that can be milled--stupid.
Trojasmic shows how irrelevant cities are in fact that they all disappear because one person dies. Cities need to be hard to start, and even harder to develop. There is no strategy in spamming, it is because the game is designed so that is the only thing that works. Which makes it a flaw.
There's a distinct difference, I believe, between "expansion" and "spam".
Expansion is indeed a key part of any 4x, and part of what makes the game fun. A large part of why it adds so much, however, is because expanding can typically be quite difficult, which makes expanding successfully much more of an accomplishment. The point at which expansion turns into spam is when expanding is so easy that you don't need to make significant trade-offs in order to accomplish it. When this happens, a large empire becomes significantly less special - and gameplay suffers, because there are fewer tough decisions to make if the answer to "Should I expand now?" is always "Well, duh."
A better question to answer than "Is spam bad?" is "What degree of difficulty should expansion have in order to make deciding whether or not to expand a complex decision?"
Well said, cheers to you
If you ask me, there is a huge disconnect between the "game as is" and the "theme" or "storyline" of the game, i.e: a post-apacolyptic radiation zone with just a small group of survivors & channelers being needed to "revive" the land. In this type of theme, there is not an "epic" scale because we're (realistically) just talking about small groups of survivors, clans, tribes, a very small kingdom at best like Monaco should be acheivable at end-game. The game should match the "theme" which matches the "scale." Right now, there's a 3-way disconnect.
Regardless of whether a player uses spam or hates the strategy, there is a problem with "food" in this game as it pertains to the storyline. It is as abundant as falling rain, which flies completely in the face of a "post apocalyptic" environment. In my opinion, "food" should be as valuable a resource as shards given the theme of the game. There should be a *very* minimal amount of food resources (again, given the game's theme), say 8 or 9 on a huge map at start, perhaps just one per faction. It should be the resposibility of "channelers" to improve the food supply (based upon stronger researchable spells) by casting spells, some of which must use up essence to create fertile areas that cities can be spammed into. In this scenario, there would be a need of a miner or prospector class to gather resources & bring them back to cities, which would risk wandering monster attack.
I think this was the intent of the dev based upon older videos which shown the channelers creating food resources & improving the land. For whatever reason, they discarded this approach and went off-theme (which was a mistake in my opnion), thus moving completely away from a "post apocalyptic" theme. Not only is the game not post-apocalyptic, but it's a garden of Eden, food wise that is.
Ultimately, "food" should the basis of how large your kingdom gets, in the form of how many people can feed off the supply before starvation takes place given the theme of the game. This should indirectly cap at how many cities a player can make.
"Food" is a rare resource in a post-apocalyptic environment. It should be treated as such through game-design/gameplay.
cpl-rk I couldn't agree with you more. In some other threads I have suggested a slider to control the amount of food available on the map. That way those who want to play a game with a lot of cities could crank it up and have more. Those who want to play the game with hardly any resources available and trudge through. Both sides could be satisfied.
The sliders could be for food and resources. I think food needs to be separated out because it is the glue that holds everything together. The ease at which you can develop cities because of the amount of food is completely out of whack with the concept of the game. I really want to rebuild a Kingdom/Empire, in the present game it is to easy. The amount of food and resources makes it too easy. I want to suffer through years of development, not be part of the Oklahoma land rush.
I disagree, colonizing a bunch of planets is no different from founding a bunch of cities. You're not going to tell me you got any more value from one of those little barren "tiny" planets that need a biodome (whatever it's called, can't remember now offhand) to increase its population cap to 4 any more than a "spammed" city in this game with a population of 1 and no buildings that's just there to support a caravan route? are you? If so, why is one better than the other?
Sorry, I disagree here too: "spam" is a form of "expansion". Expanding (by founding cities or colonizing planets) is no different from spamming. I can colonize over a hundred planets in some 4x space games, I typically have 100 cities by turn 300ish in this game (which is about endgame for me), through a combo of building directly & conquest. There's no difference here other than how hard it was to fight for those sites/resources/planets. And as of now, I'm sorry to say, the AI is extremely weak in this game compared to many other strategy games, especially MOO2, making it *too* easy to expand. Also, there is not an "infinite" number of city sites, they are limited by the magic 5-square range.
I'm not going to say that it's not easier to build cities in this game than any other, in fact I think it is extremely easy, but that's not a flaw in-and-of-itself .. this is due mostly to 1) weak AI and 2) essentially an unlimited food supply. And again I say, this is a game "strategy," i.e. player's choice or not.
I've read posts by players that build 5 cities and spend 900 turns building up their heroes to be "superman" and stomping the AI with armies of single-man guys. For you RPG guys that hate expansion & spam, why not do this? It's possible to win the game with a "spell of making" which certainly doesn't require city spam. For you RPG guys that hate expansion & spam, why not win the game this way? Good players can win the game faster with one strategy as opposed to another, so what? that doesn't mean you're forced to play this way, unless you're playing multiplayer ... and even then this would be a problem of game balance not strategy choice.
I'll just make one last comment that I think is important. It's not the spam in-an-of-itself that makes the current game so weak, but the unbelievably weak AI that allows a virtually unlimited expansion of wagon train settlers like the pioneer era of the wild west.
The weak AI "allows" the city spam strategy to be the most viable strategy in this game. It's not the strategy, but the *weak* AI that *allows* the strategy to go virtually unhindered.
The wierd thing is, more so in a fantasy game than any other genre game, even space games, you'd think it would be easy to cramp expansion given the concept of "wandering monsters." I can traverse half the map with one scout & pioneer to get that crystal resource without worry, even though I've went around a dozen wandering monsters to get there.
It's too bad they couldn't have utilized wandering monsters more optimally to "balance" spam vs the other strategies. Wandering monsters would be especially strong early game when your guys are most weak. Pioneers should require a strong escort in fantasy games.
I'm all for a "balanced" game, but frankly I mostly want the AI to give me a "challenging" game.
Well, here is why.
The random placement of planets and types of planets in MOO is designed for each planet to be taken over. That is literally the game. In order to win you have to control the planets. A couple times I was able to defeat all the opponents before the entire game was controlled but those were flukes. The game itself is to take control of each planet. In MOO, it would be like having the ability to build planets in between the planets that were randomized on the map. Elemental and MOO function completely different.
In your example, you population 1 cities that you dotted throughout the map are not to support a caravan route. It is to take advantage of a game design to increase food, resources, and gold income. Which is why you are plopping them down every five squares. It is to exploit the game mechanics not the resources inside the game. In MOO, it is impossible to exploit the mechanics, because you can only build where they have set the planets. So as far as your expand, exploit, explore, and exterminate. Granted you can call it expanding, but I would use that terminology very loosely. However, the exploiting you are referring to is not of the game features, but is really a cheat against the game mechanics. Again, this goes back to what I think is a flaw in the game design. You can say it is to support a caravan or exploit a resource, but you are getting the full advantage of the city and the army it can support to protect. It is not poorly defended outpost that is basically a mining camp, or a small hamlet in the cross roads of two major cities. It is the exact same thing as the two major cities, whether you have developed it or not. I think you are kidding yourself if you think you are simply "expanding" your kingdom with over 100 cities in 300 turns, and not "exploiting" a game flaw. That is even more of an example of how ridiculous city spamming is in the game. There shouldn't be 100 cities on a huge map after 1000 turns if the creation of a city actually mattered.
to you. This is bang on. Food makes perfect sense as the population growth limiter. It works that way in reality. Populations with a lot of food grow. Populations with no extra food don't. It also fits the game theme of trying to rebuild a ruined world, AND it works as a game mechanic.
Prestige as a growth mechanic was kind of odd as it leads to population coming out of nowhere (to quote I think psychoak). Why does building a pub cause my town to grow twice as fast? Why do three towns near each other grow faster then one, with the same space and food supply?
The other city spam issue is with just placing a city near every resource, and a combination of fixing food and being able to culture flip tiles would deal with that. Spamming rank 1 outposts to control resources might work okay early on, but they're not going to hold it against the influence of a level 5 city. Plus in a war, a city should have much stronger defensive bonuses then a hamlet (when the time comes to deal with combat, which won't be in 1.1 I know).
Ok, I can agree with what you're saying above. But the fact is, this is how the designers designed the game. I did not "hack" into the game or "replay/resave" the game or in any other way "cheat". There is no cheating or hacking on my part, I am playing the game as it was designed with no malicious intent, hence from my point of view it's a valid game strategy.
Now, it may be an unintended consequence that the designer had intended this, but this seems *extremely* unlikely to me. I woud've known after implementing this mechanism that 20 cities are are going to improve kingdom wide food supply by X amount, 40 will improve by Y amount, and 80 will improve by Z amount. This would be a very basic consequence that anyone "thinking up" a rule saying "caravans improve food production by 5% for connecting cities" would understand & predict beforehand. So, I find it hard to believe this is a "design flaw" since it's so easily forseeable.
No designer would be naive enough to "assume" that only 10/20 cities at most would be the "valid range" of kingdom food improvement. In fact, in the CS courses I took, it was taught that very large numbers and very small numbers including negative numbers should be used as test cases to "rigorously" test a function or class/method/whatnot. I just find it unbeleivable that whoever designed this mechanism would not have tested it on a wide range from 2 to XXX or so cities (where XXX is the upper limit as to how many cities would "fit" on a large map given a 5 square distance between cities ... this can certainly be calculated withing a plus/minus 10 or so with some algorithm ... hell, now that I'm thinking about it, just count the number of squares within a 5 square radius of any city (say it's 65 squares) and divide this by the number of squares on a large map excluding water, this would give the upper limit ... say a "typical" large map has 13000 squres, this would be 13000/65 = 200 as an upper limit as to what is possible as to # of cities on a large map for caravan & food production purposes). It just seems to me that this is extememly unlikely a "flaw" that was overlooked somehow in that it should've been easily tested & predicted beforehand: you create a function or method & you test it using some upper & lower range. 200 cities (for example) is an easily calculated limit as to what can be expected on large maps as to max number of cities.
There's only one place to settle this ... to the ARENA!
Unfortunately it is not hard to believe a design flaw could end up in 1.0. Which is why we have 9 patches and working on 10 in less than 3 months. I am confident that they will get it fixed through 1.1 or an expansion. I best hope is the slider that will let players customize the game. I certainly would like some options to condition the world different ways. Plus than both of us would be happy. It has been fun discussing it with you though. Have fun. Here's to better times.
****I thought about, better have two now*****
My math skills are nowhere near what I want them to be, but I believe you have tagged the heart of the word problem here.
Tridus is also sort of onto something with his psychoak paraphrase. Perhaps the most annoying of all the abstractions in GC and GC2 for me is the treatment of population as something that can simply be concentrated the way an air filter concentrates dirt. Elemental at least has a scrap of back story to justify the mechanic, although I've yet to see much in prose or game mechanics to reflect a world filled with a large, mobile population of refugee/nomads.
I seem to recall a mention of higher level cities having more prestige in 1.10.
For future updates to force a choice between # of cities and size of army ...
How about implementing the Command concept from SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE? Say the starting command points are 100. Founding the first city is free, but subsequent cities would cost 10 command points each. Hiring a hero would cost 5. Getting married, say 10. Each military unit would cost 1. Command points could increase through research. Cap can be exceeded by acquisition through conquest, as in SINS.
That way the decision to found a city presents interesting choices.
I also like the comments above on food to guide city growth.
I still don't think any additional systems are needed.
Tying city advantages to population, and then rewarding players who have fewer cities by giving them higher population growth rates will make both strategies (i.e. city-spamming and city-expanding) viable.
Absolutely. I never understood why food is so abundant in the game when the world is supposed to be so broken and shattered - and even less when my channeler didn't have to pour her Essence into the land to revive it - giving some of her very life/soul/power to the land to allow it to live.
I agree with your whole post.
If you were a tree hugging liberal oompa loompa, you'd fight for the right of fungii & cave rocks!! Ewwww...Shard drilling is detrimental to the environment
It is not the most intelligent or strongest of the species that survives but the one most adaptable to change....
We're into Plan B. Still breathing? Now we gotta make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it.
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