Continued from the derailed AI test Update Thread.
Feel free to repost your points and ideas about city spam balance.
-snip-
First of all: this was kinda hivemind. I didn't see your post when starting to type mine. So no reverences or disagreement intended.
When I think about the game and what makes it unique, I think about the feel of unconquered wildland, the feel of being a safe haven in a world of danger. The current state gives that feel for a while until it dimnishes in the mid game, when the map starts to be clogged up with cities and outposts. The world starts to feel conquered.
Another thought is about the games balance and it's current state of solemnly supporting larger empires. More is always better and this especially shows in the technological progress. More cities mean more research means faster power growth.
The third is the relative simplicity of the parts of the game. There is nothing overly complex anywhere and yet... it works.
So, after a second and more careful thought about the problems and feelings mentioned above I see two relative simple ways to deal with the problem of big empires while preserving the feel of the game and not adding too much complexity.
First: Pioneer cost
Adding a flat fee to pioneer costs just lenghtens the early game, which in my opinion belongs to the least interesting parts of the whole. This game starts to shine mid game onwards. So instead of a flat fee a growing cost for pioneers depending on how many outposts and cities you already own, may be the more appropriate way.
Implications:
1.
Early growth isn't hampered, instead mid and late game growth slows down, preserving the feel of unconquered wilds longer, keeping the map and game more interesting in the long run.
2.
A Player who suffered major losses through another player has the chance to recover, as his costs for pioneers go down again and he has another chance to expand more quickly again.
3.
No major AI coding needed. There are no new major concepts for the AI to understand, making implementation rather easy.
Second: Research cost
Increasing the cost of technologies for larger empires would be a countereffect for the power of large players. An empire can grow, gain power, but would slow down on the side of technological progress (or at least not speed up with every additional city). In fact, for a while a quickly expanding empire might even slow down due to the unrest of newly conquered cities and the increase of the research cost/research ratio. The optimal mode of research cost growth would be a logistical curve (Meaning it starts out flat, has it's largest growth in the middle and starts to grow slower in the end).
Conquest remains a viable option, but not the way to ensure steamrolling everyone once it starts. For a while a small empire might expand, grow, conquer but would ultimatly have trouble keeping up with the technological race, or even fall behind. Giving smaller players an edge in that area over time.
Once again, no addtional AI coding needed, so implementation is on the easy side.
Conclusion:
Both changes would result in a more interesting game. Keeping the distribution of power more dynamic, letting smaller players catch up again and hampering big ones from becoming an unstoppable power. Moreover, both wouldn't need overly complex AI coding and eat up valuable ressources better spent on other parts of the game and AI. Lastly, both additions are no complicated concepts but rather little changes with big implications.
My suggestion: a two-pronged approach
1) Make more buildings for higher level cities, or make the effects of certain buildings at least partially a function of city level or population. This will make growth mean more. The downside is , especially if based on population, this tends to go against Derek's design principles.
2) Have a logistics cap for how many cities you can control at once, that is based on map size, and increases with research of certain techs.
3) Restrict pioneers to level 2 cities to recruit.
I think doing it in a multi-pronged approach might be best. The city sites are going to filled as quickly as possible, because more cities= more stuff, but if you make fewer cities not much of a penalty (or even a bonus in some areas), then that mitigates the problem.
Right now my main use for city spam is grocers and bakeries for my main city.
I actually like this one. I don't know about the design principals though. Can you provide a link I can have a look into?
It is an interesting Idea, but I personally think of the cap you mention as too hard. Conquest needs to remain a viable strategy. Simply capping the Number of cities seems to me as if it would obsolete conquest as a strategy. A hard cap seems counterproductive and the power growth stages too aprupt.
I don't like the emphasis this puts on the starting location. A good starting location already gives an edge in expansion. This one would make things worse imo. Right now you have the option of rushing for a second city spot if your first one proves to be bad. With this a prestigious location or food ressource at your starting position would mean even more a kickstart than it already does.
Absolutely agreed. A single solution might not be there and few cities shouldn't be a sentence for a player to be a fruit ripe for the picking.
The design principle would be something like this
School know is +2 Research
School under my idea would be +1 Research per city level.
Markets could be +2 Gildar per City Level
You might have a few additional buildings that give +1's here and there that require a high level city.
Certain other buildings like command posts, might have their build times lowered, but require a lvl 3 fortress.
Masterwork Blacksmith: lvl 4 fortress, +10% attack and defense for all units stationed in the city. Stuff like that.
These bonuses can't be too high, or they'd encourage town spamming for the grocers. My suggestion there would be to make bakeries require lvl 3 town, and butcheries lvl 4, but again lower the build times needed.
You could do a lot of creative stuff here, there are just examples.
Wonders should require a lvl 3, and wonders in a city should be capped at (city lvl-2)
The cap idea wasn't a hard cap, but increased unrest per extra city. This one would be hard to scale, so I like it less than the other ideas.
On the lvl 2 city: as long as your starting city has 3 food, you'll get to lvl 2 pretty quickly. Sovereign's call or locations would help, maybe up the build time of those buildings. Tower would also help.
In principal I like the idea of certain buildings unlocked by city levels. Though, right now I don't see that city growth is ultimatly linked to empire size. In fact, under certain circumstances larger empires might have their cities grow even faster than smaller ones, given there are a lot of prestigious locations in reach of the cities.
So basically, nice idea, makes the game more interesting, but I don't think it really tackles the problem of city spam.
Daccord, but yet again I don't see where this tackles the city spam, as growth isn't necessarly tied to the number of cities.
The growing negative factor doesn't have to be unrest, so this might actually worth a second thought. Yes, it's hard to balance and there are a lot of things to be taken into conciderance. So I can't come up with a final thought on this one.
Granted, it's an approach. I like mine with increasing pioneer costs better though.... you know what people say about the smell of your own
You got some pretty good ideas Altein, but I don't particularly likes this one, as it would remove more viable starting locations feeding to the need of CTRL+N, a city should always be able to construct pioneers, no matter how much grain its placed upon, that said, grain boosting pioneer production wouldn't bother me.
Sincerely~ Kongdej
Even a city with 2 food would be able to pop out a settler, they'd just need a garden first. Also, food cap doesn't hurt growth rate, so what you are saying isn't a problem.
How about making good city locations guarded? Better locations heavily (lord of fire level to dragon level), 320 style locations only lightly guarded.
Or, make sure your unguarded cities get attacked, maybe with some kind of warning beforehand. If you spam cities you can't defend them all and you will get attacked.
My problem with the current system is that unguarded cities are mostly left alone, but they randomly get attacked by monsters you can't deal with. If you know they *will* get attacked by nearby monsters the randomness is no longer there and thus getting a city attacked doesn't feel like getting killed by bad luck.
Currently you can build a city 2 tiles away from a drake if you make sure you don't expand the city's zone of control. Maybe the system shouldn't be this way? Instead, you would build aggression. The monster shows different levels: relaxed, annoyed, angry... The level rises if your territory gets near the enemy, and rises even more if you don't have guards. Once the aggression is high enough the monster will likely attack you. No completely random attacks, you get what you bargained for.
Probably not the easiest things to implement... But I would really like to have the monsters behave more based on your actions and have less randomness.
No problem at all Vendetta187, I'm glad you took the initiative hehe.
My thing is, I don't see Pioneer's the issue whatsoever when it comes to city-spam. And I feel making any radical adjustment to the cost of Pioneer's would just overhaul the whole game negatively without any benefits to boot. I don't mind if there is a reasonable increase in the Production required to manufacture them, but to make it so expensive that there are so few, only ends up throwing off the balance of Research-oriented Improvements, Traits, etc.
Also, just giving them a higher price tag doesn't truly fix the issue being city-spam, because the strategy is to ALWAYS build many settlements, whether to simply cap resources, or future specialized centers. We mention what we know motivates us and the AI to pursue non-stop expansion, yet we are not tackling the underlining being the technology tree, the game mechanics area and such that influences factions to thus far simply expand, rather than "go tall" and focus on more manageable empires.
Research costs bloating for larger empires I'm iffy about, but it's an interesting idea to burden over-stretched nations with. We have many potential issues the more we try to "Fix" it.
Frogboy recently stated in the AI thread that monsters will no longer salt the land the first tile a City was settled upon, had he not been known of this, it would frustrate the strategy process of FE.
Our next issue is, we can instantly Raze cities as monsters do too. Factions and monsters should not be allowed to instantly burn an entire settlement down, but in a series of turns, to prevent outright loss in one instantaneous turn session, so we do not have to build an entire city over that took 50-to-100 turns.
I don't think we should try to revamp the reality that when one faction gets swiped by another, that Pioneer's should suddenly be easy to mass-produce to give them an advantage, especially so far in any game session. I don't think that's an issue to be honest, at all. Most importantly, what would we do with the placement of Outposts? Assigning Scout's to be Outpost-builders is another balance issue that shouldn't be discarded and brought upon another unit in my opinion.
We shouldn't add any restriction whatsoever to cities like the army system, foremost because they're both entirely different mechanics to compare and contrast, but the major aspect of the game is - city settling. I feel an entirely new mechanic at most is required to simply implement Civ-4's City Maintenance system that works exactly the same when it comes to increasing the amount of Gildar you're charged for every city you possess in terms of totality and distance from Capitol. The Unrest modifier should also play an important role in FE, that also operates similarly with the circumstances City Maintenance imparts too.
One perception/idea I agree the most with both you Vendetta187 and Drusus is the atmosphere of Wild Lands disappearing so rapidly. The idea of the game is that you are supposed to build a fledgling empire that conquers vast amounts of the world, brings back civilization and order to the chaotic charred lands, FE certainly needs more "Wilderness", more "danger" abroad. I'd strongly suggest FE having some sort of dynamic wilderness feature, that determines how civilized your game session is, and how advanced all the factions are, and begins randomly spawning new, harder, monsters around settlements based upon their type. Thus, 100-300 turns in any game, Cave Bears and their Den's will re-spawn near Outpost's, Hoarder Spider's and much harder mid-game bandits will spawn dens near your Town's and Conclave's, and much much more.
Player's shouldn't be punished in their city playstyle, it just needs balance when it comes to one faction gobbling so much territory versus another. We need some sort of mechanic, with series of Improvement's and effects added to current technologies that favor large and small empires. Technologies that reduce the cost to upkeep a softcap limit on cities, and technologies that give more bonuses to empires that maintain smaller, more potent settlements versus their larger variants. And when we begin to give the game some system that not only punishes them, but also rewards them incrementally on how many cities they have in a regulatory format, not in a restricted format, they'll take risks of expanding much more early on or later on. There is currently no reason to ever stop expanding with new cities and outposts so far, only 100% positives, no negatives to pro-and-con with.
less randomness.
Wildlands light. Another good one. Especially the part of the less random monster attacks.
Might not fix the problem per se (As it might further encourage the stack of doom, which is another problem), but it would make the world more dangerous and interesting.
I'm not sure what the whole implications of this are, but on first glance... yeah, I like it
For FE, I like a lot of these ideas.
In the upcoming expansion, the "Faction prestige" thing is going away. Instead, city growth will depend entirely on available food and unrest. The more cities you have, the more unrest you get.
Got to see it to comment on it.
Has a lot of potential into a good and bad direction. Whole thing is depending on what else is changed and how that unrest penalty is implemented.
You're the developer here though, so better trust in your skills
Really happy and surprised you would share that tidbit publicly.
Just, PLEASE make it so that Non-Champion's can also reduce Unrest in cities by occupying them rather then just heroes and Sovereign's, because it gives regular units another great reason to be used in the game, and complete common sense. Unless I'm wrong, no matter how much Unrest your cities achieve in FE, they won't break away from you? If so, should introduce that too...
I'm not going to miss Faction Prestige at all, yet it was an interesting feature that I didn't mind and did find particularly useful in the early phase of every session. Faction Prestige however, is the perfect example of being rewarded for delicately nurturing a small nest of cities rather than nearly a dozen with some falling far from the tree. Alongside an Unrest penalty that rises against the amount of cities we possess, if we could have some feature, Improvements or technologies that specifically yields factions immediate bonuses upon a flexible minimum-to-maximum amount of cities you can control at a time, that'd be excellent.
Or in a much more simpler adjustment, the Unrest penalty can go "positive". So for example, say with the current Civilization techs you possess in the early game, if you have 5 cities, you get hit with the first level of Unrest Penalty being "-5" (assuming it's global against all cities). If you have instead 4 cities, your Unrest Penalty is "0". But if you maintain having only 3 cities in the early phase, your Unrest Penalty goes backwards and provides "Happiness" that yields "+10" globally, giving a +10% boost to all three of those cities Outputs.
Lastly I want to state, is my fear of an Unrest Penalty getting out of hand in every game session when the player or AI focuses on Military techs and conquering cities. Factions that begin occupying enemy faction's cities should be penalized of course (again assuming it is a global effect), but to have the Unrest Penalty rise immediately and so dangerously, when foreign cities are being ransacked, razed, or garrisoned and in turn their homeland is raising pitchforks because of such, typically wouldn't make any sense. I'm boldly making an assumption this could be over-looked, or not seen as a balance issue, better now than never hehe.
When warmongers capture an enemy city, it shouldn't increase their Unrest Penalty instantaneously. What if through Civilization/Military tech's and Trait's can factions lessen the amount of Unrest they receive as occupiers on a city-by-city basis, and some sort of assimilation feature that Master of Orion 2 had. When you planetary invaded an enemy planet in MOO2, depending upon which government you began your game as, it would take between 2-10 turns to fully pacify the planets alien populace and use it.
The whole point behind an assimilation phase is being both technical and realistic. The warmonger has to deal with occupying an enemy settlement that is resisting its oncoming administrative and military forces taking control, thus for several turns the conqueror can't use the city at all. To balance an aggressor from immediately utilizing it's Output and connected Resources, the aggressor can't assign any training, any building, and receive none of its connected benefits till it's assimilation is complete. When a conquered city is assimilated, it is fully under the aggressors control and acts like any of his cities thus no longer exempted from adding to the Unrest Penalty, as this would "illustrate" it's normalcy in being apart of its new factions "network of immigrating, trading, interdependence", etc. I would go far as to suggest this extend to the switched cities Influence, and while the occupied city is in assimilation phase, the Influence still belongs to the defender to give them an advantage in bearing their magical might onto the attacker instead of anybody, and the attacker. And it wouldn't be burdensome if conquered cities naturally had on an individual-basis, their Unrest start higher to represent the fact the city isn't of the conqueror's culture.
Nooooooooooooo!
Granted, you are the dev, Frogboy, and also granted, I love the design of FE so far, but the one thing that really kills most Civ-style games for me is that they inevitably devolve into spending all your time trying (and usually failing) to manage unrest, which I find to be intensely un-fun. The lack of any "You have a lot of cities? Punish you with unrest! Cities are far from your capital? Punish you with unrest!" mechanics is one of the things I like most about FE.
Uuuuhm.... that didn't work that way. It took 2-10 turns to pacify a single unit of population. In the meantime the population unit was set as enslaved and had reduced yields. You could use the population from the moment you had the planet, but depending on the amount of population units, it took different amounts of time, to fully pacify the whole planet. Very nice system imo... but not usable here.
On another note:
Increasing global unrest per city basically reduces research efficiency. And production. And growth (In the coming addon). So, yeah, large empires will be penalized. Good enough. And in the end I think it's more dynamic than my approach of increasing research and pioneer costs. You can do something about it and it ties in with the existing mechanics.
So, instead of adding a new gear, connections between existing ones are made.
Touché
So to Naga:
First, apologies for not thinking through that very point to the end. It's very good when you take every implication into account.
Second, cut the mention of realism. It's a game, it shouldn't try to be realistic. Fun is the word and if it is realistic while being fun, it's a cherry on top.
Problem solved I think. City spam will still be an option, it's just not the only viable strategy anymore.
Only thing I still see here is the feel of a conquered world, but that's really up to taste and can be fixed with other means like a map stamp with less city locations.
I'm looking forward to the addon. You got my money if I have the time to play
That sounds much better as a concept. I still think there's a fundamental problem with city spam that I'd have concerns this won't address.
Also I can see map size issues.
Yet, it's a good solution to stop expansion from being the one and only top winning strategy. More won't be always better from there on. Which is a good thing.
Given, it's the usual approach. But is there another way to stop the biggest player from just becoming bigger without any chance for others?
You're a warmonger!
@Alstein:
What Problem is left?
Excellent.
I can live with that. Not the most exciting method, but it's proven. Just curious why we have to wait for the expansion for that though?
Except that's actually already in the game sort of. Cities that aren't contiguous with your empire suffer -15% or something unrest. It's more or less the same mechanic used by other games but handled a little differently, both discourage dropping cities all over the map before you have expanded to those areas.
Lol! Embarrassing. Attempting to describe how something else works as an example to make an inspiration from, total mistake, bah and I played that game too.
Still a horrid example to use especially now that I'm clearly wrong, but I brought it up in vain to come up with an idea for when you take over an enemy city, you shouldn't be able to immediately exploit it and all it's connected resources. There should be a grace period depending upon the size of the settlement that inhibits its conqueror to make conquests more valuable investments. I think this would merge nicely with a future Global Unrest Penalty mechanic. Hypothetical, but surely practical.
No reason to apologize at all mate, and technically as you posted here earlier research with the rest of a cities Output will be naturally penalized by Global Unrest as you've suggested. I like that a lot, just how its implemented is the key and I'd argue for my opinion as much as you.
You're correct about realism, I figure just explaining myself with a realistic representation of an idea will convince someone of its merit.
The problem still isn't solved though my friend, because as I mentioned earlier in my blog-long posts, what happens when you begin taking over other factions cities? They'll shoot-up your Global Unrest sky-high. It's entirely opinion, but its hard to argue that it doesn't ruin the game if you or the AI is going for the military victory.
Honestly, I feel like sometimes there's not enough city locations loll, but that's probably delving into personal choice... I feel though half the issue you're facing is, once you progress from the early-game, a substantial amount of the world you're playing is already settled and looted. I think it should be that way for the most part, but the fact it becomes "desolate", sucks.
I think Dungeons and Dragons should be the perfect example, in that despite there being all these badass cities like Neverwinters, Calamshan, Baldur's Gate, etc and with all these endless heroes and villains like Drizzt and Elminster, Faerun still has all these goblin tribes, dungeons, dragons, magical beasts lurking around still present. Fallen Enchantress needs to repeatedly, non-stop, replenish the world you're playing with new monsters, new monster lairs, etc. I guess I'll save this for another thread myself lol...
I agree with you 100% yo. Countless times I've ended up fighting with ceaseless unrest than dealing with domestic and foreign affairs of my kingdom. Serious pre-emptive strikes are going to be needed to make Global Unrest enjoyable, and a smooth regulatory system that can be played with, not strung with.
Agreed. This is the way to go. Forcing players to make serious strategic choices between growth/unrest, and to spend their time creating buildings that reduce unrest that they just ignored, before.
I suggested something like this in another thread but I'd like to see a sort of 'survival' mutator which means pioneers can't be built at all, instead they appear when you pass certain milestones. One milestone might be to clear out five monster lairs.
And yes, especially when monster density is initially set to sparse, it really does take a random event that spawns new monsters and lairs to liven things up, because the land quickly gets swallowed up by cities. Maybe an 'infestation' mutator to have monsters of any strength keep coming back even when you thought you'd stamped them all out?
Yeah to be honest I have a similar reaction. Sounds like the Civ3 response to city spam which was to hit the player with massive corruption which in turn made empire building unfun. Civ4 had it much better because the penalty for city spam was purely financial, but because finances also drove research you really couldn't afford to expand without having a plan. But if you did have a plan and built a really strong economy then the reward was you could expand quickly. In other words, it rewarded good play, which is the goal of most strategy games surely?
The only way I could see unrest working as a mechanic to control city spam is if there were lots of ways of controlling/reducing it (including global ways), but even then I struggle to see how it could work as smoothly as a Civ4 type system.
P.S. Getting off topic but the Civ5 system is a great example of how NOT to build an anti-city spam mechanic. The global happiness system is a disaster on many levels which have been well explained by others in other places (Sulla being one).
Yes. Yes, I am. Which leaves me shaking my head every time conquering an enemy city makes unrest go up in my capital. What are these people? A bunch of ultra-pacifist hippies? Have they no sense of national pride? Why are they angry with me for conquering the treacherous foe who launched unprovoked attacks against our people rather than reveling in our victory?
Not really the same thing at all, IMO. FE's non-contiguous penalty is a flat amount of unrest, regardless of whether the settlement is separated from the rest of your empire by one square or by half the map. In the more typical model, it's all too easy for a large empire to end up with outlying settlements which are fully-connected with both roads and contiguous territory all the way back to the capital that have +50% unrest for a large empire and +75% unrest for distance from capital, but you can only build -50% unrest worth of tech/improvements, leaving no way to keep them from revolting short of lowering the entire empire's tax rate to 0 and going bankrupt. (Made-up numbers, of course, but I've seen that general end result turn up in pretty much every game that has "large empire" penalties to unrest.)
I get that the idea is to prevent massive expansion from being the only viable strategy, but this particular solution, in my experience, invariably goes too far in the other direction, especially in long games on large maps, and makes expansion in general unviable. It is also generally not accompanied by sufficient other mechanics to make an expansion-free strategy fun. With five cities, I spend a lot of time just pushing "End Turn" and waiting for production to complete; with fifty, there are a couple things finished every turn. With five cities, the army I just build needs to spend 20 turns marching to the far side of the map (because the enemy hasn't expanded either) before they can do anything; with fifty, I can build the army on the border and have them immediately in the action or I can build them at a central fortress and have a much shorter march to the (much closer, because the enemy has been expanding) border. Plus it's just plain fun to see my empire's color spreading to cover the entire map.
What's the second "X" in "4X"? "Expand". Expansion should be encouraged. I agree that it shouldn't be the sole deciding factor, but a better solution would be one which still allows and encourages expansion while also requiring something more in order to dominate. If expansion is punished, then what's the point of Exploring, how do you Exploit the resources that are outside of your territory, and what creates the territorial conflict that ultimately drives you to Exterminate the opposition?
*In response to Mistwraithe
That's a strong valid point in that Unrest actually affects everything, being cities Outputs. Meaning, if you gain to much Unrest, you practically destroy your entire empire's efforts to do anything, instead of just your researching and revenue gaining capacities as Civ4.
Truth is there is plenty of ways to reduce Unrest currently, with many ways of reducing it via city Improvements, than the spells, Traits, can't think of anything else. When you come around and think about it further, we won't truly know how this all works out till we play with it - UNLESS you sat around all day thinking about it like I can
I actually forgot that I mentioned that when I was on my City Maintenance tirade in the AI thread, that City Maintenance of Civ4 didn't affect everything which I liked a bit.
The way I see it thus far in this upcoming expansion, is if you expand to much, you have to sit around researching Civilization technologies while badly handicapped by Global Unrest Penalty crippling all your cities Output's having to get superior Improvements to reduce Unrest, or from the Magic tree too. I'm actually more mind-boggled if with enough ways to reduce Output Unrest, will it to greatly reduce the features premise which I can see being balanced by availability of resources and technologies to reduce Unrest.
---edit--- I was typing this whole thing up last night and just posted it now, so I like completely forgot my trains of thought, will come around to it though***
A potential problem I see, -
Lets say we get 5% unrest per city we have.
I build the first 10 cities, and no problem, they still produce 50% production due to 50% unrest.
But after I constructed 20 cities, the number 20 city will not even be able to construct anti-unrest buildings, so we will hit some spot were new cities will just be dead-spots, were it cannot succeed with anything due to a 100% unrest, this might be circumvented or increased by empire wide unrest reduction (I personally never liked those), or you might be able to rush that first unrest reducing building in your new empire, but this system would not be friendly to having too many new cities, which is good in a way, but you also have to make sure that slow expansion is still possible after 19 cities. (take some dead-slow game, at some point in a humongous map you WILL settle number 20 city).
Either that, or each city will produce empire-wide unrest reducing buildings, making it just a race to build that 1 building for each city, so the next city can be popped...
Anyways, just a quick thought, I do want to see how you end up doing things ... unless its too expensive
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
