Balancing: City rush (& later Modding discussion)

2Coats said:

It doesnt... but you have the option to. I think you're missing the point. The game has many open mechanics to allow players to play how they want.

If you dont want to manage so many cities, do not build them. Place them strategically. You can disband cities you capture. Or any settlers you receive from doing so. You can choose not to build any cities other than the first one. You will of course be restricted in the number and variety of units you can build and the speed at which you can do so. You can choose to build only three cities, one of each racial type. There are no restrictions in terms of buildings in a city other than race & the special resource nodes that come under the cities territorial borders. IIRC.

In short you can choose what you want to do and for the most part, not be forced into doing anything you dont want to.

The openness of the mechanics is one of the aspects I find appealing. Im sure between the neutral and AI factions, any weak cities will be eaten up and used by them to attack your other cities.

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I can do all these things, but they will make me lose the game, due to the AI expanding without limitations.

The entire point of this thread is to have an option to change the rules for both the human player and the AI, not to create some self-imposed rules.

Which I acknowledge. Id like the option too, but as it is the game does allow you to attempt to restrict your opponents from overwhelming you - though on impossible setting, this will be harder still.

Lets hope the devs consider this addition.

2Coats said:

In short you can choose what you want to do and for the most part, not be forced into doing anything you dont want to.

The openness of the mechanics is one of the aspects I find appealing. Im sure between the neutral and AI factions, any weak cities will be eaten up and used by them to attack your other cities.

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That's one thing I've noticed that is very interesting. I've had some strange discussions with people where they could have been playing an entirely different game to me! Presuming the balancing allows varying play techniques to be effect this can't help but give the game broader appeal!

I suspect it probably won't when battling for top multiplayer spots when that's an option and you'll need a fairly optimal play style. But its interesting on the single player front.

Thats sound about right. About play techniques. Ive played several myself. i.e unit heavy army/lack of spells, select army with multiple buffs per unit, many cities with mixed capabilities, few cities with spells to enhance growth, making them mega productive and able to span large area of land.

Ive played mixed race kindgoms and/or single race with special units. I have found how you play the game is dependent on the style you wish to adapt, though in some regard it some of what you do is dependent on what you must face to win.

I.e. forget about science & mana if not going for undead army and not really needing many spells or going for a unity spell win. Just create enough of both to have a few good spells when you really need them. Then focus on gold/food to build your army of conquest. Alternatively, go for an undead army + magic and focus on Sci and Mana to overpower your rivals.

Its what really drew me to the game and kept me playing.

2Coats, you don't seem to understand. The people complaining about ICS are doing so because they want a diversity of strategies to be viable, so that building as many cities as fast as possible in the most tightly packed grid isn't always better than not. Also, I believe "don't do it / use it" is not a valid response to a play balance concern.

Removing upkeep cost from those multiplier buildings like granary would make few large cities a whole lot more appealing.

Zagys said:

2Coats, you don't seem to understand. The people complaining about ICS are doing so because they want a diversity of strategies to be viable, so that building as many cities as fast as possible in the most tightly packed grid isn't always better than not. Also, I believe "don't do it / use it" is not a valid response to a play balance concern.

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Well I accept your point as Ive accepted the request for a more rigid mechanic to stop ICS. Perhaps the dev's will give us the best of both worlds - some way of configuring either. With a game option that can be selected/deselected at the start of a game.

But this is just because you need all these scattered resources.

Actually I have just 1 city which provides me with money, 1 to provide with mana, 1 to feed all my army, and 1 to provide me with troops. So why I need others? Due they small gold/food/mana output? Absolutely not. They provide me with good spots of rare resources.

I think the way cities are handled in this game is not a lot of fun. It's basically a situation where you either cover as much terrain as possible in cities or seriously gimp yourself. Currently this isn't much of a problem because the AI is dumb as bricks and doesn't pose a threat even if you give it a big advantage, but if the AI gets improved or multiplayer gets added, it basically becomes build or die. The issue here is twofold: First of all, it eliminates choice of playstyle. You can't choose between making a few super efficient cities or lots and lots of maybe not super efficient cities, because the second choice is better in every way, and the first choice will make you lose. People who say "Oh you can just choose to stop building cities and destroy any you conquer" really confine themselves to dumb AI and no multiplayer (or only multiplayer against equally bad players). In a game like Civ4 there was always a choice. Building more cities gives serious advantages, but also increases problems like corruption. So you have to choose a balance that works for you between having the power of extra cities and losing income because of increasing corruption. Second, there's the matter of gameplay flow. Having 25+ cities to take care of really slows down the pace of the game and creates a boring tedium of maintaining them all and deciding which ones are more important for production etc. In a game focused on combat and having a very streamlined gameplay compared to bigger 4X titles, having such a tedious gameplay element becomes counterproductive to the natural flow of the game.

It's really funny to me to see so many people say "Well if you don't like it go play Civilisation", because they are simply missing the point. It's not about making this game into Civilisation, it's about seeing a problem and suggesting that the Civilisation franchise has encountered that same problem as well and has (sort of) fixed it already.

I don't think that city spam is a problem per sa. The city spam is simply part of how the game seems to be need to be played. Unlike civ, cities aren't there to only placed on rich resource areas since the buildings that add food, good and mana don't need to be placed on certain tiles.

There are two approaches to solve the problem:

1) apply global #n_cities dependent modifier like Civ-style corruption increase --> cost/benefit of founding city goes down after so and so cities

2) modify city-based gains such way that it a city will truly be useful only after it is big and developed enough --> building cities from scratch would be too slow, and giving too much time for "perfectionist" enemies to get high-tier army. In this method, sending settlers away should slow down sender city growth&building more so it would be choice between building existing cities vs. found new ones, no best of both worlds (no pun intended).

Method 1 feels more artificial than method 2, but method 2 is less intuituitive to design...

I have only played demo, but I have impression that city building and growing is extremely fast! everything takes just few turns to complete. Should building and pop growth be slowed down?

I have to agree, ICS is still the best tactic. Maybe some kind of resource gathering outpost would fix the major issue, but I'm not sure it ICS wouldn't still be needed/a huge advantage.

Sforzesco said:

There are two approaches to solve the problem:
I have only played demo, but I have impression that city building and growing is extremely fast! everything takes just few turns to complete. Should building and pop growth be slowed down?

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I hope not, in my opinion this would ruin the game. I want to build everything as fast as possible and then go to war. I see this game more as a wargame with lite empire management. If something like this could be modded, then I have no issue with that as I won't use the mod. I'm really not interested in playing a Civ style game, hence why I really like this game as is. Just my 2 cents.

When I say Civ style I mean long drawn out city management with slow population growth.

I would prefer to see limitations on ICS. It's no fun knowing that if you don't build and cover ground that the AIs will. Large empires tend to become a pain to manage and cities end up being generic and less meaningful.

I don't care for the "taxing" kinds of systems like corruption from civ or even happiness from civ 5, although they do open the door on more buildings/spells/buff effects.

I would much see a fixed cost kind of system where it costs progressively more to settle (slows ICS and makes acquiring and keeping cities via conquest more attractive). You could either go by total cities or by total cities settled (to not punish conquest). You could just make settlers cost more and more, or better yet, keep settlers cheap but make actually building the city cost gold + food + mana in increasing amounts.

I don't see a problem with city spam really. Bigger cities are more efficient at resource production as it is. Several 14 hex cities will produce more gold/food/mana than a bigger number of 7 hex ones. Nobody is forcing you to produce as many cities as you can. The AI certainly does not do that. Well, at least when it's playing smart and has freedom to expand. I've seen big AI empires with +10 only cities powered by growth blessings.
What we need is automation, really. A way to designate a city as a gold production or mana production spot and forget about it for the rest of the game, while it happily churns out commerse/market/mint/bank or mana farm/vault/crypt/soul mill. A way to designate colonization spots, which would make the nearest city of the chosen race to produce and sent a settler, would not hurt either.
The strategy in this game is all about how you use your units. The AI loses because it is bad and that, even if decent at building. So what we need is a good interface to make resource production less tedious, not some artificial restriction that gimps expansion.

Fhoenix said:

What we need is automation, really. A way to designate a city as a gold production or mana production spot and forget about it for the rest of the game, while it happily churns out commerse/market/mint/bank or mana farm/vault/crypt/soul mill.

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I strongly agree with that. Enough automation to make endgame comfortable. Also, one thing to slowing down expansion is to have MORE HORRIBLE AND NASTY MONSTERS protecting their ancient lands. So you need high end units to get rid of them first.

Here is the thing.

This game is not Civilization, and by design lots of things work that way, that there is no benefit of not building new cities.

First, units and buildings are built in parallel, no settler vs building aspect.

Second, buildings are free, again, no develop city vs new one aspect.

Third, city growth doesn't depend from other factors, exempt time (diminishes over time). Again, no choice between big cities vs many cities.


So anyway, the whole economy aspect of this game doesn't support two play styles "tall vs wide", but only one (more cities).

Still, expansion is checked in this game by having need to clear our area of monsters, before you can put cities, so it's not just spam spam spam cities. And sometimes is just more effective to conquer neutral cities, then clear some of those monster areas.

I agree that ICS is a problem, but trying to fix it by introducing new mechanics is risky and more prone to failure than modifying existing values to address the issue. For example, if you increased the size of city borders and increased the minimum distance at which you could build another city, you could still have decent territory coverage and access to resources while cutting down on the number of cities that you or the AI could build in a given area. You wouldn't have to teach the AI to work with some new tax/corruption/growth mechanic, and it's easy to understand from the player's end as well.

While I'd be interested in a mod that changes growth rates based on the number of cities you control to allow for the tall vs wide decision that player1 fanatic mentioned, I'd rather just get a working mod that increases borders and minimum city distance. If you were comparing a grid of maximum city density, then doubling the distance between cities cuts the total city count by 75%.