I may have this wrong but it appears that grain is basically pointless until the end-game. And researching grain techs is a waste of time until you need them. The main problem being that most of the food research techs are at the start of the tree right when you don't need them.
If grain's role in the game is to simply provide population potential and you generate about 1 population counter per turn you don't need enhancements until hundreds of turns into the game.
It would be better if grain also boosted population growth so cities with high grain factors also grew faster.
Perhaps cities could grow at grain/2.
I disagree with the OP. Grain raises the population cap of your cities. How is this useless at any point in the game?
And as far as growth goes...you need to *choose* whether you focus on growth or not, by limiting the amount of cities you control and the improvements you build in those cities...I think it's a nice mechanic overall.
Grated it could use some balancing and some more love on the improvement side of things.
But food providing growth is not the mechanic they have set up, nor ought it be that way.
One thing I would like is some one per faction buildings that increase prestige in the early game. City spam is slightly overpowered and this would be a nice counter to that.
Do you mean growth Sean? Prestige will be spread across all cities. Growth bonus is for the city the building is in. There is already the Tower of Dominion but maybe it is not powerful enough and/or we could have another?
Yes.
It would be nice to be able to affect your prestige more actively, so that the Prestige/#of cities is a real choice between one super city and city spam.
He definately doesn't mean growth as that would encourage city spam, since building new cities would have no effect on the static growth that building provides. The tower of dominion might actually better with a prestige bonus.
Faction Prestige buildings should be available at the first tier of the tech tree, and faction prestige research should come in larger benefits or more frequently than they do currently (They should at least be doubled or tripled). One of the reasons city spam is so functional is that the difference between the total prestige divded by your number of cities is often less than .5 or 1 (the base bonus you get for growth buildings).
I was talking about City Prestige, sorry for the confusion. Getting +5 to City Prestige from a building with high labor costs and a tier 2 tech requirement would allow one city to rocket past expansionist nations. Building it would not be ideal for an expansionist, who needs to build lots of units. Call it Refuge District and either make it a dead end tech or add it to Administration. Of course it would be nice to have Tower of Dominion and Beacon of Hope add +3 Prestige to a capital.
That way:
A one city strategy would get [(5 FactionPrestige)+(5 From RefugeDistrict)+(3 Tower of Dominion)+(.5 Inn)= 13.5] prestige in the capital in about 50 turns.
A two city strategy would get [(5 FactionPrestige)*(.5 HavingTwoCities)+(3 Tower of Dominion)+(.5 Inn)= 6] prestige in capital in about 50 turns. The minor city would have 3.
A three city strategy would get [(5 FactionPrestige)*(.33 HavingThreeCities)+(3 Tower of Dominion)+(.5 Inn)= 5.17] prestige in capital in about 50 turns. The minor city would have 2.17.
The prestige advantage goes to the small nation, while the larger ones have the ability to train many units. The small nation has fewer upkeep costs per population and can afford more of them due to the high population. This also means more research and thus better technology. From just one Study you would get +20% research to all your research power at only one maintenance.
That is how i would balance it.
I mostly agree with this. Would love to see something like this in the next beta.
-> certainly would spice up the Economic choices for the early game
-> and people trapped in a corner (due to monsters, peninsula, etc) would have at least one chance to recover
Thanks for the clarification, probably my confusion as I never think of city prestige, only faction prestige and city growth.
The one city growth problem is a real one and as much as I like the goal of incentivising less spam one problem I see arising is getting enough food quick enough to make it viable (assuming its growth is boosted somehow). Already a low production city can have trouble building/teching fast enough to keep up with population growth.
The major problem though is unfortunately that the adverse effects of additional cities are currently greater to start with. That is you suffer a greater penalty going from one to two than from twenty-one to twenty-two. More spam and less proportionately your major city suffers. Thus the downside is not suffered currently by pursuing spammed cities with vigour but rather by trying to maintain some sort of moderation.
I usually have 6-9 food in my only city. With granary and the civics techs that boost grain, I never have a food problem.
You are right about moderation being pointless though. 3 cites has the same negative effects as 12. If monsters and other factions are not preventing getting that many cities, they need to balance this out. On a large map, you should not be able to expand more than 4 cities without meeting some high level monster lairs that are blocking your path. The problem with using game mechanics to add unrest is that people who play on larger maps get screwed. I would rather the world offer a deterrent to many many cities.
Monsters are not much of a deterrent to city expansion. I've setup camp right in the middle of an ogre and a bone ogre and it took them 5+ turns just to attack and destroy the helpless city. When I create a city two steps from monsters, it's almost never an issue.
To make the world a deterrent to expansion, you'd need Slag/Forest Drake level monsters with some frequency who aggressively seek to kill you. Like Civ barbarians, who take any opportunity to kill the weak. There should only be a small chance that a monster doesn't pursue a stack with lesser power.
Definitely like the big +growth building in the capital with lesser +growth from # of cities total.
That's right. At the moment it is pretty well balanced. But if we add in buildings to take it to 13.5 growth a turn?
(My comments come from a game in 0.77 where I got two prestige heroes in the first couple of turns and levelled my sovereign very quickly. I also teched for all the growth buildings and prestige you can get early. It was a 5/2 starting city which became 6/2, and on a river. I was stuggling to keep up. )
I guess what I would like to see is a mechanism, unlike the current prestige sharing one, which promotes sustainable growth rather than either a sit tight and climb or madly rush as quickly as possible. Right now the spam rush IS the beta, while turtling has been given some love although perhaps not enough.
As city level increases, so will research into techs that boost food. There might be some waiting, but you will get to level 4 before waiting is an issue. Anyhow, they can balance that after they get the basics implemented.
Cast the +20% food spell, no waiting required.
While the faction prestiege growth makes fewer cities the quickest path to higher level buildings, if you have more than one city, the return for limiting your cities diminishes rapidly. The hit you take for building a second city is the largest. If you build a second city, the growth of your capitol drops by 50%. When you build a third city, the growth of your capitol drops another 33% or 17% of your total prestiege growth. This doesn't make fewer cities best for growth, it makes one city the best for focused growth. If you build more than a few cities, you can make up for the drop in prestiege growth with buildings. And since there is no cost for most of the +growth buildings, there isn't really a disadvantage to going that way. As has been pointed out already, total production is higher in a multi-city kingdom than in the monolothic ones. So the only apparent advantage to having only one city is earlier access to higher level bonus buildings and a more concentrated defense, where having multiple cities gives you better production and greatly increases your area of influence, and will eventually allow you to have a much higher population. As long as you only build buildings that have no upkeep until your economy can support them (or you sell loot, different issue), spam away.
I play medium map with 5 opponents. YOu can only get 1-2 cities before you bump into other civs. For that reason grain is critical or you can't build or maintain a big economy or research base.
I must also be doing something "wrong". I go for a few big cities with level 4 & 5 bonus buildings and food works about right. I research food early on and keep barely ahead of demand, with "gentle rain" as a fallback in case of shortages. Current system works ok for me.
Is this a life spell?
The food spell is "gentle rain". Takes Air & Water (unsurprisingly). Need level 2 or 3 of each, I forget.
@Sean3w Now I am confused.
What is 'City Prestige'? And how is this different from regular prestige or growth?
Also unrest won't hurt larger maps more if it is implemented properly. That is to say, you could recieve more unrest for addtional cities on smaller maps and less unrest for addtional cities on larger maps. Personally I find the biggest issue not being that having multiple cities is the best strat, it's the expanding as quickly as possible is the most effective way to grow your empire. If there was some restriction based on technology to how effective multiple cities were, or if there was a way to transfer some prestige to newly constructed cities away from those that have already finished their growth period, it wouldn't bother me so much.
So much of this game is based on luck it can make playing frustrating.
and to clarify
Gentle Rain: (Air II & Water II): Increase city food total by 20%. Costs 2 mana upkeep per turn. Stacks additively with the contruction wonder.
I think that he means the city growth, which is based in part on prestige.
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