Pioneer spam is the biggest problem of this game at current version. I really don't think forcing AI to build less pioneers is the solution to this problem; it will only makes game easier since spamming pioneer no tomorrow is literally only viable tactic for early to mid game.
I thought about it, and thought about solutions like making pioneers expensive (like 150 gold per pioneers), unkeep or hard-coded limit on the number of pioneers and other things.
Then, when I was searching for position for creating city (good food with prod/essence), I realized the real problem lies on population being completely irrelevant resource in this game.
Currently, this game defies common sense. Only because of based on tile yield and buildings, a city with population of 10 can make things and train units much faster than a city with population of 200. This happens because MAYBE (yes, big maybe here) other than gold, pretty much all resource generation is decided by largely tile yields and buildings.
And because resources are mostly generated by yields and buildings, having 'more' of them is only viable way to increase resource generation, that means... more cities to build more buildings and take tile yields.
Thus having 4 cities with 10 population each is FAR better than having just 1 city with, say, 400 population with exception of gold production. But alas, since things take SO MUCH TIME to build stuffs, players normally play this game with 'none' tax, completely eliminating the population advantage.
These facts above heavily favors pioneer/city spam, even more so than Civ 5 (the game witch I absolutely hate due to city spam and stupid 1tpu). This really needs to be fixed because the game is not fun at all to anyone trying to compete with AIs. Here are suggestions.
1.) Get rid of 'tile yield' and bring back population as primary resource. With magical(?) yield number, the game defiles common sense. We are talking about civ-game, so for basic stuff, the game at least to follow real-life example (like.... more people working things create in faster phase... just how easy to understand and implemented?)
2.) Improvements from buildings should be all percentage-based from populations except food and rare resources. Primary resources growth, production, research and gold should be completely percentage-based, not hard-coded number. So actually a city with 400 population can outproduce 4 cities with 10 population.
3.) Keep the prestige as main initial factor for growth and keep it as global. This means, a number of cities should not affect the overall population growth AT ALL. In 4x games, 'positioning' alone is a huge incentive for spamming multiple cities already, there is no more need for more advantages for having multiple cities.
4.) Other than min-distance requirement, players should be able to build cities anywhere. Finding a good position is really annoying/stressful and sway the game difficulty too much just based on starting position. With a game using randomly-generated map, this is just bad idea. That said, there should be some penalties for cities built on harsh terrain, but other than minimum-distance requirement, please bring back the flexibility. With three suggestions above, there would be not much incentive for making multiple cities other than positioning factor, which will be also diluted by outposts.
5.) And please, separate unit production and building production. With recent add-ons, cities are already chocking up with making buildings all the time.
Love the idea of monster ZOC. I don't know about implementation, but you are right on the money when it comes to the narratives/immerison aspect.
The idea of a monster lair ZOC (that grows with time and as the lair grows in difficulty) would be a great idea, and would make the expansion into new areas naturally more difficult. If all lairs started out easy, but aged with time, then you don't ever have to worry about placing hard lairs away from where players are; the hard lairs become hard simply because they're far away from players, and take a while to get to. I would say that a monster lair that falls within a player ZOC should go nuts spawning creatures (like one every 4 turns) until it's taken out, and it should ramp up its rate of "aging" to more difficult lairs if it's within a player's ZOC. Sure, you can leave it there, but you're creating a time bomb for yourself.
Great, great idea.
Thank you but I can't take all the credit sense the original idea was brought up by other players in another thread a while back. The thread had to do with the uselessness of the current wildlands. I just took the ideas that people came up there and ran with them.
I would disagree with you on one thing though. I would rather that you simply not be able to build a city or outpost within a monster lairs ZOC. However if a city or outpost was built within two or three tiles of a monster lairs ZOC that monster lair would see the city or outpost as a threat and would react much the same way you described above. But no building within the lair's ZOC.
This would stop the pioneer spamming issue since you and the AI could make as many pioneers as you liked but wouldn't be able to use any of them until the monster lairs where cleared out. You must first tame the land before settling it.
I always thought that the best way to deal with city spam is to tie in a Prestige based solution.
I would change the game so that founding or conquering a city requires at least 2 Prestige and that you gain prestige from city levels lose prestige when you occupy or control cities. So for every level a city advances, it cumulatively gains that amount in prestige in the formula of X (X) - 4. So for instance, a level 1 city gives a loss of two prestige, a level two city give no prestige, and a level three city gives five prestige, and a level four city gives eight prestige etc...
That way, in order to expand, you must have higher level cities in order to function. However, if you expand to quickly, you're cities will grow slowly and you'll be unable to conquer new cities. Also, researching technologies that improve prestige allow your empire/kingdom to grow faster as well. If you have a level five city in the late game, then this can allow you to expand to many cities as once, giving you what you want and speeding up the process!
Here's a chart to make it simple
Level of City= Total Gain
Level 1 City= -2Level 2 City= 0Level 3 City= 5Level 4 City= 8Level 5 City= 21
Let's say that you have one level three city, two level two cities, and one level one city, and six base prestige. In total, you would have at least nine prestige.
Now, you could conquer or found a bunch of small dopey cities (four to be exact), but your prestige would grind to a halt and they wouldn't be able to expand. Likewise, you would want to conquer a few large cities, so that you could control more cities in the long term!
THIS WAY, CITY LEVEL DETERMINES THE SIZE OF YOUR EMPIRE. YOU WANT LARGE CITIES TO CONTROL MORE SMALL CITIES AND LEADS TO REASONABLE AND BALANCED GROWTH.
At the very least, I hope this solution is read...
This is a thoughtful idea and I think it would work, but I fear it would take too much work to change and be too complicated for Noobs.
I'd like to see population costs for units, but I still think the solution to pioneer spam is danger. This is supposed to be a dangerous world. Sending out pioneers willy-nilly just shouldn't be a viable strategy. Pioneers should require an escort, and outpost should require a guard. If there was a need to protect pioneers and outposts, then spam would become unworkable, and the game world would feel more lifelike.
Nothing is really 'late'. Maybe I am crazy naive on the video gaming development industry, but I have seen so many projects proceeded unchanged because it was, for some reason, always 'late' to correct, only to witness expected total failure of the projects and/or inevitable changes had to be made eventually to function properly, even at further 'late' timing.
As few people actually liked WoM a bit, I say only things WoM lacked was amount of contents (which was fatal) and bug-free experience. In current FE system, all mechanics are screaming for city spamming (not just this game...which has been always problematic very since first appearance of first Civilization game) and there is very high chance people will be get tired off (like they did on Civ 5) and further discourage them from buying any future Stardock's games.
I think monster ZOC is amazing idea, yet a problem of such solutions (and other things like negative growth by cities and setting higher unrest.... actually those were already tried on Civilization 3 as corruption) is that they are arbitrary hard-handed 'punishments' toward players. In essence, they are about as rigid as 150-gold-per-pioneer solution, and they really do not eliminate the main cause of the problem (which is buildings being main resource of everything, thus bringing more need for more cities to be built for more buildings to be competitive against AIs)
Not handling the main cause, the 'punishments' may work for a while, but the weakness will be exposed when there will be new contents and new balance changes; those solutions can be altered very easily by outside changes and developers have to figure out again to find correct valve for the changes. If we rely on ZOC for controlling city spam, for instance, any contents that brings changes on monsters will bring drastic alternations on city spams. If developers decide to bring new set of monsters for new expansion, it may make creating city too hard for players (and vice verca), forcing developers to figure out the correct value for ZOC again. And it will happen every single time when there is a change on monsters behaviors/values, not to mention the forum will be full of whines every time the changes are done on monsters..... for city placement.
People seem overlook the 'common sense', but I believe this is just so fatal that it might cause FE to fail harder than WoM. It is Civ 5 all over again with common-sense-defiling encounter. Civilization-type games which are really casual-economic-simulators-with-chess, and while I like to have non-sense powerful magic for 'chess' side (which is that makes FE from other Civ type games), but I find huge problems when a city of 10 people makes things MUCH faster than a city of 400 people.
And it is actually a barrier to 'noobs' to the game contrary some say otherwise. If a person is new to the game, all he/she can use are manuals and.... guess what, common sense. It is such obvious common sense that big cities should do a lot more things than small cities... well... because they are big and a lot of people live there! The moment he/she finds out a small AI-controlled city outproduce his/her big city, this will be just the beginning of his/her confusions.
To be honest, it is not that I like the population-based economy. I really think it should be really mana-based economy, heavily influenced by sovereign abilities for the sake of 'magic'; but for that, I agree it is just too late to make experiment new things at this point. We can, however, go back to older ones which has been proven to be worked to a point, and do some improvements (which are already available, such as global capped prestige, etc)
Going back to game mechanics from WoM is in absolutely no possible way a good idea.
Do the mechanics as they stand right now in FE need a shit-ton of balancing and tweaking or even completely reworking to make choices more interesting and rewarding in various ways? Yes.
Does the game need WAY MORE content in virtually every aspect of the game? Yes.
Does the UI need a severe amount of work to make it more intuitive, accurate, and user-friendly? Yes.
This is why there will be a beta 5, 6, 7 etc. and there is also no set release date at this point.
Fallen Enchantress has a long way to go to become the masterpiece Brad envisions. Whether Stardock will deliver remains to be seen.
(btw I think a one army per tile limit would add a lot of strategic depth to this game, just as it does for civ V)
I think they're close to feature complete right now. That said, there are plenty of directions to go in the future with the 2nd expansion.
As for pioneer spam- how about pioneers stopping growth when they are being built, and time required to build them based on different rules, like 600/population turns, and no rushing allowed? I think that might help, though is probably too inelegant a solution.
The only reason it would be to "late" to add a needed something is because star dock has given up. But I see the problem is monster behavior. I like city spam, we are trying to build an empire after all. But what I don't like is the AI ignoring all the monster to get the good sites, then me the player getting attack because the AI triggered a roaming high powered monster. The "strategy" of ignoring monsters used by the AI is unworkable for the player leaving no space for the player.
I'm pretty sure feature lock-down doesn't mean balance/tweaking lock-down.
Agreed.
However, there won't be a beta 6. The beta 5 series IS where the balance/tweaking is occurring.
I very much enjoy reading theorycraft. It was brain storming with other forum (Usenet users in fact) over what a Space version of Civilization would be like that led to me writing Galactic Civilizations.
That said, we like the core game mechanics we have. What we have to now polish and iterate on is the balance and making sure that each player choice is meaningful and interesting.
Really? How long is beta 5 going to be? Without really changing the mechanics of the game itself, will there be several stages to this beta addressing the major things that people have been complaining about?
ex: major bugs, tool tips shortcomings, UI polish/addition, etc?
Depends on how you define "major" and of course, whether we agree with those complaints.
I'm not aware of "major" bugs in the game at this point. We have dozens of pages of bugs to fix. But none of them would be "major" in my view.
A major bug in my view would be saved game corruption, 3D models missing, repeatable crashing, etc.
The best thing anyone can do when reporting a bug is to not editorialize but be as specific as possible.
Beta 5 is about stability, balance, and polish. It'll last as long as it takes to bring the game to a satisfactory development conclusion.
I am not complaining of major bugs per se. I am just reiterating what I've seen. I'm curious how this will be addressed. I didn't participate in the beta for E:WoM because I guess I pre-ordered it too late in the build cycle, or who knows, I honestly don't remember anymore. I do remember reading the various complaints that people had and your initial responses then followed by your admissions afterwards.
I am curious to see how it turns out this time. You have my money and business, so don't think I am just trying to troll. I am sincerely curious. By the way, I really like E:FE, and I personally only see a few short comings (which I have brought up in other threads)that could be easily addressed, minus the Dynasty thing. That was one of my favorite features of E:WoM by the way.
@Nasarog,
You can still play with some level of dynasties. There is an on switch in the XML. I would bet that the expansion is going to be all about children of Sovs and whatnot.
I still get the headless/faceless/clothes-less custom units and sovereigns consistently. Or does this mean missing entirely?
@stein,
do you get them upon starting the game or from loading a game after already haven started one?
No, that would be considered a showstopper. How are you getting them?
I can crash the game repeatable by loading up any save where i am already near winning (as in having revealed most land) and then press cntrl n. (i always play large maps).
I'll post a separate thread for this so it has it's own title and easier to reference.
https://forums.elementalgame.com/430815
You mean, selecting a building to add to a city, but it doesn't show up when you hover over the city tiles for manual placement? And the only way you can get it in queue is to auto-build, by double-clicking on it?
That happens regularly to me in each game, with about a third of the buildings. When I click on one of the others and hover over the city, the building shows up under my mouse for easy placement.
You can't place "upgrade" sense they go in the spot you previously place the building
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm not discussing upgrades. I'm discussing 3D models of buildings, of things I haven't an early version, in my cities. Piers, for example. There's no 3D model for a pier, unless I auto-place it. And yes, I know it has to be put on a river.
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