The problem:
Infinite colony spam.
The solution:
Each new colony after a certain point increases maintenance costs exponentially, up to a certain maximum level (logistic function). This will stop people like me from breaking the game by JUST BUILDING COLONY SHIPS FOR THE FIRST 40-50 TURNS.
Also, social production buildings SHOULD NOT cost maintenance. This is to encourage players to build up their worlds instead of just constantly spamming out colony ships like a robot.
I agree. While I've not gone to the same ludicrous extremes that marigoldran has (I don't fanny about min/maxing my ideology points, don't spam shipyards and I do produce some social production etc), I largely produce nothing by colony ships right up until First Contact with another race too. By the time I meet them, I've got comfortably double the next-highest race's worlds and population; rapidly producing a military large enough to defeat them is pretty easy by that point, even without cheesing the Pragmatic 50-turns-of-peace option.
LEP is weirdly both too weak and too strong - it's too powerful on large maps in that it makes the AI run into an approval wall, but at the same time it doesn't actually cause any significant problems. For all the negatives low approval brings, you're still better off having the extra planet than not (like corruption in Civ 1, 2 and 3 - no matter how harsh the penalty, it was still always worth having the extra city, even if it only produced 1 commerce and 1 production). Plus, it caps out at around 40 planets anyway; beyond that point even more LEP doesn't matter.
We have a system which punished you for being big but doesn't make it hard to get big. This is exactly the wrong way around - it should be hard to get big, but being big should be worth it in the end. A rising maintenance penalty per colony would do the trick; expanding too rapidly would bankrupt you, but having lots of highly developed worlds would make you powerful.
There is almost unlimited number of ways to hinder colony spam. Endless Space did it somewhat right. GC2 did it fine with economics limitations. Limiting range, more serious penalties for extra colonies, galaxy being a dangerous place in general, maintenance of colonies depending from their range from nearest planets (same for Starbases, btw, so no more spam), more planets types.... A lot of choices.
But i get a feeling that "superior" GC3 AI could handle nothing of it. So his strategy is colony spam only.
LEP is weirdly both too weak and too strong - it's too powerful on large maps in that it makes the AI run into an approval wall, but at the same time it doesn't actually cause any significant problems.
On huge map with gifted AI it has no problems with approval with around 80 planets each.
Tbh I think the game abstracts too much and tries to be a game, when in reality you cant just walk up to your populatio of 7 million people and force 2 million to step on a colony ship. Same goes for invasions.
Imagine someone built a giant ship and told you from now on you're a soldier, flying around in the universe with no escort ships, because your ship has 14 moves and could eventually never encounter any enemies on the way.
Who would board that carrier? noone.
And of the 7 million people on any given planet (lets say your economy world), how many would make fit soldiers? Maybe half a million.
Building a ship is easy, training soldiers to fight on a high gravity planet against aliens is not.
But thats what we have. A game where you can sent 99% of the population of your homeworld into pirate territory. And noone will complain. Hey approval will even increase.
Keeping that in mind, this game works only by putting restrictions on yourself, and by telling a story of a civilization in space (same as EUIV or crusader kings, albeit their systems work much better in doing so). The game is full of cheesy tactics, which anyone can use, but the AI won't.
A major problem I see is that planetary invasion is not enabled from the start, which - at the point of a space-faring civilization - is absolute ridiculous.
Especially when there are no dropships, but just ONE huge ship carrying 6 million soldiers. Oh yeah, that's how planetary invasions will be done.
"Hey guys, you see that giant ship with no armor coming at us? We're doomed."
Well since I wanted to post something helpful.
All colonies should have TWO different kinds of population: residents and colonists.
Colonists "grow" from population, and when you take them into your colony ship, they are gone and you can't take more people.
Or call them "adventurers" and they can be soldiers too... Just don't make them unlimited.
The simplest solution I think is to increase colony maintenance significantly once you grow past a certain point. Scale this to map size. That way you're forced to think: can I afford to get another colony, or should I build up my econ before trying to take more colonies (for fear of an economic crash?)?
Not only will this make the economics (revenue generation) much more important, it will also force the player to make difficult early choices.
Another problem right now is that it's too easy getting new colonies AND it's pointless to build revenue generating buildings (much better to build production and research buildings straight). Increasing new colony maintenance, but NOT increasing social productions maintenance will kill both birds with one fix.
Quite so. What annoys me is that GC2 released in much the same state but over the years the bonkers stuff was steadily evened out. Why those same lessons need to be learned again with GC3 I'll probably never know.
For me far too many of the fundamental ingredients of GC3 are ruining the pudding. IMO the prevalence of linear additive stacking of bonuses stand out as being the root of many of this game's woes: turn 1 sensor exploits that obsolete other parts of the game; mid to late game moves stacking that makes a mockery of having a turn bases moves system, and practically results in you being able to teleport doom fleets around the map at will; tech trees that are exhausted before you've even reached 1/4 of the way into the so-called 'turn limit'; planetay adjacency maths that all but force you to hyper-specialise, etc. The cherry on this particular unpleasant tasting pudding is that the AI doesn't know how to exploit any of that. (Not that the game would be any better to play if it did.)
I take no pleasure from putting such a downer on GC3. I wanted GC3 to be an improvement on GC2, and in many ways it is but the core mechanics of what makes a good 4X, in all phases of play, are, IMO, far weaker in GC3 than they are in GC2. (At the moment I can't help but feel the same way I did after having given CivV a jolly good seeing to; a nice looking and performing product but just mechanically not as good as the previous version.) I'm not giving up on GC3 because SD have a rep for fixing stuff like this over time; I'm just a bit miffed that I'm probably going to have to wait another year before GC3 earns pride of place in my 4X collection.
Well how about a Colony Logistic stat. When you start based on map size you will have a base number which can improve with Tech and special building or even better special Space Station modules. For example you could have a base Colony Logistic stat of 50 on a Gigantic. And each planets rating subtracts from this (example. 16 (paradise) would Colony Logistic stat of 16 on so on) Once your at the your max then any colonies above that could add penalties such as unhappiness, a step maintenance cost etc. So you would handle this just like the ship Logistics. No I just pulled 50 out of my butt but you get the idea.
It would be a simple and easy system and work off other systems already in the game.
i don't see a significant improvement in your system - the current LEP/approval system isn't much different (except for the adjustment by map size, which should have been included in the LEP system from the start, anyway), so you'd introduce a new stat that is going to make the game systems harder to understand (both for new players and the AI) when there really is no gain from doing so.
i've played lots of 4X games, many of which had some system to nerf REX (rapid early expansion) aka ICS (infinite city sprawl) strategies. the best anti-sprawl system i've seen so far was Civ 4 - they simply used money as the limiting factor. that's easy to understand and reasonably realistic. new cities are a drain for your civs economy until they develop enough to pay for their own upkeep. and the upkeep per city grows as the civ grows, representing the increasing cost of logistics and administration. at some point (based on map size) you'd reach an upper limit of city maintenance, so new cities would still start "in debt" until they were somehwat developed, but the system can't spiral out of control.
if you could pay for 30 cities, you could pay for all the cities on the planet. to get to that point, you'd need a strong economy and/or somewhat advanced tech. good commerce cities develop slowly, but once they are up and running, they can pay for lots of things. tech unlocks better governments that allow you to make more money (or spend less), more trade routes that pay for (some of) the per city upkeep etc.
i think that last paragraph is also very important for an "epic game" feel. at some point later in the game the initial limitations should be manageable. it's a good idea to throttle the initial REX, because it's a stupid strategy. it's uncool if that same mechanic scales infinitely and still holds me back in the "exterminate" phase of the 4x game.
translated into GC3, i imagine we could start with a relatively high colony maintenance (just put the maintenance on the "colony capital" building) that increases for every colony, much like LEP increments the approval penalty for every planet. you can pay for expansion with a strong economy and unlock techs that gradually reduce the colony cost (the government techs are already in the game, just change their effect). this will slow initial expansion down until your economy worlds are online and it will still be a drain until mid/late game. at some point you'll be an established interstellar empire with a solid income and some advanced administration techs, so you don't have to worry about the negative effects of additional planets any more and can happily colonize some leftover planets in a remote area, or conquer a rival or two.
I fully disagree. Each colony should be self sufficient and there should be no increased maintenance. If the imperium of man can have a million worlds, so can you. As for gameply perspective, if all you're doing is expanding than you're very vulnerable to being attacked and having your colonies stolen. I'd rather see Transports being unlocked from the start as a solution than increased maintenance, because as long as you make some wealth planets, the maintenance won't bother you at all.What needs to be addressed is Starbase spam.
In theory. In harsh reality, against gifted AI, after initial rush, while some of your new colonies grow up a bit to the point they can spam colonies themselves, you can start spamming military ships (you don't need them even to be effective) and AI get easily scared by your power rating. So they'll hate you due to "war frenzy" or something, but don't dare to attack even if you ship are somewhere else. And later due to your extremely talented colony management(in compassion to AI) you'll become much more powerful than AI. Later AI even help you out by colonizing extreme planets inside your ZoI and presenting them to you via cultural flip.
If the imperium of man can have a million worlds, why is starbase spam important?
I disagree. This is exactly the right way to do it. When it's done right that is...
It shouldn't be inherently easier to make a "taller" or "wider" empires. It's supposed to be a strategic choice. And the main point of "punishing for size" is making the management of the size a gameplay element.
Might as well emulate ship rebelions, separatist factions, elections, royal inheritance, civil wars and ruler marriage. Yeah right...
NOT happening. And that's a good thing.
If imperium of men doesn't exist neither should this. And it doesn't.
Besides the obviously missed fact that size management is a highly valued gameplay factor, empires of infinite sizes are simply unreasonable. The whole game is built around power struggle (so we can't rule out this factor from the civilizations in question), and power struggle is what makes empires fall apart.
That said, maintenance is a poor detrimental factor. I'd prefer a TM penalty. Possibly along with penalties to other things like influence or population growth or even combat efficiency. C5 had a perfectly working system for that... although they changed it so many times I can't say which exact version was perfectly working by now... Well, at least the concept was more or less the same all the time.
As for expansion vulnerability look at how ES did it. In there everyone starts in "cold war" state, which basically means you can attack anyone and anything as long as it's not within anyone else's borders. And borders didn't appear around a colony for about 30 turns after being founded. Not to mention the ability to kill the colony ships and scouts.
The difference from what we see here was in the fact that while such "hostilities" weren't exactly strengthening neighbourhood ties, they didn't require you to outright declare war on all those pesky neighbours.
Sigh... this is what I miss from ES the most... back in there you didn't stake territory with colony ships, you took it with war fleets and held it with war fleets.
And in here you can't even be sure about the land within your own borders. Honestly, we should be able to kill at least the vermin that have crept into our own territory.
It may look far from the topic, but it isn't. The amount of land you can "stake" is a huge factor, and with stronger AIs behaving as they do now you simply can't allow yourself NOT to grab as many colonies as you can reach.
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