"Building tall" as opposed to "building wide" is a bad meme

[mudcrabmerchant]

I think somewhere in between is what I prefer. There should always be an incentive to expand, but it should not feel like time at peace is entirely wasted either. That makes sense to me both in terms of realism (because while bigger is generally better, war is very expensive) and gameplay (because it gives the player more to think about). It should feel like less of a choice between tall and wide and more of a choice between which is better when and where.

If you're always focusing on getting both wider and taller, then peace isn't entirely wasted, because during peace you'll be making investments to grow taller.

Thanks @Magil for putting the argument much better than I've been able to.

 

[Jamoid]

If you're always focusing on getting both wider and taller, then peace isn't entirely wasted, because during peace you'll be making investments to grow taller.

That's pretty much what I meant, just worded differently. It should not be one or the other, but both. The choice should be which is more suitable when and where, not a case of the two being mutually exclusive choices.

In essence I agree with your post, but the way you worded it threw me off a little at first. What I don't want is Stellaris to be yet another 4X that feels like a convoluted map painter. All Paradox games feel like that at times of course, but I feel like they at least strive not to. Those games to me feel less like grand strategy and more like complex build order puzzles.

 

[TheAtreides84]

I understand the allure of keeping a small, focused empire, without the hassle of a large unwieldy empire. I love to play that way myself.

However, I do not think that this style of gameplay should be a competitive alternative to expansionism. The idea that building tall should be just as viable as (and stands in contrast with) building wide seems to be very prevalent in this community, but it's a bad idea.

There is no reason that a large empire should not be able to develop itself, per capita, as much as a small empire, and if you design game mechanics around letting small empires with small fleets (in terms of fleet power, so this includes tech) reliably stand up to large empires with large fleets, you will end up with a military system that is full of arbitrary limitations, because there isn't any good reason why a small fleet should consistently be able to stand up to fleets that are significantly larger.

Design philosophy-wise, reward should usually be commensurate with risk, and an empire that constantly risks its own security by initiating wars should see greater rewards than one that just sits on its ass looking inward. Small (not tall, because there isn't good reason for a large empire to be significantly "shorter" than a small one) empires should be viable, but not in the same way as large empires.

A small empire should always be less secure than one which has a large competitive fleet of its own. You should either have to ally with other empires to pool your might into your own large fleets (i.e. federations), or you should have to find some way to make yourself useful to the large empires that could easily conquer you (i.e. subject status or frequent bribes). You might survive, and with allies you may even conquer the big boys. But your security will always rely on others.

I agree. The challenge should be in keeping together a large empire, but once you can bring your full power to bear there is no way a small nation will be able to resist you indefinitely. The examples of this happening in history are very few.

 

[TheAtreides84]

See this isn't totally true. Please compare and contrast Singapore versus China. China is far wider, but if you look at how much influence it wields compared to Singapore it's actually surprisingly similar. Singapore is an economic powerhouse that controls trade through most of South-east asia despite it's size, using diplomacy, finance, and connections to punch far outside of it's weight class in terms of both population and military.

Should a small nation be able to stand against a large one by itself militarily? No. But it should be able to leverage it's unique position, technologies, and similar to at least compete in the same field as the larger nation.

Come on, mate. That's not true. Singapore is no geopolitical superpower, you don't see the singaporean government sparring vis-a-vis with the US...

 

[Archam]

The solution to this problem is simply factions. Internal strifes are fun to deal with, they offer mid and late game content and all the infrastuctures to make them work already exists (there are different pops, with different ethos, they form conflicting factions, there are elections, possible government changes etc.) right now the system just needs tweaking.

I played a game with xenophobe slavers recently and purposely "messed up". I kept my slaved pops as unhappy as possible, made sure they diverged as much as possible, and only maintained small garrisons on slave worlds. I never delt with the rebellious slave faction either. Eventualy there was a huge slave revolt and it was great, they managed to otherthrow the garrisons almost everywhere and took controls of vast swaths of my empire. Crushing the rebellion kept me busy for months, it was a great story and actualy the most fun I had in this game.

Now the problem is, if you don't do it on purpose, there is almost no chance of that happening, or happening to any threatening scale. The system needs tweaking, it should be made much harder to deal with internal dissent, more options to deal with factions should be implemented perhaps, but right now, all the tools are ready to balance growth through internal strife. This is the fun and interesting way to do it and it's there. The features in the latest dev diares hint that the devs are actualy improving this part of the game a lot so I am confident. Maybe we will actualy see xenophones/xenophils civil wars, spiritualists/materialists conflicts, huge slave revolts etc. If they implement that, the bigger the empire, the harder to deal with it, and not only will growth become more balanced, but the mid to late game will be more fun.

 

[zanaikin]

See this isn't totally true. Please compare and contrast Singapore versus China. China is far wider, but if you look at how much influence it wields compared to Singapore it's actually surprisingly similar. Singapore is an economic powerhouse that controls trade through most of South-east asia despite it's size, using diplomacy, finance, and connections to punch far outside of it's weight class in terms of both population and military.

I have to say that this is a terrible example.
Does Singapore punch far above its weight class? Yes. It's certainly much more important in the Geopolitical arena than its MUCH larger Indonesian cousin.

But... compared to China? The nation that has used its huge market potential to make nations (like the UK) bend over backwards to meet its economic interests? Uh... no.

-----

The advantages of playing tall should be in less apparent fields that requires more cooperation and conflict by proxy. Like the ability to lead a lead a Federation to victory using superior research, or able to juggle many strong allies/vassals (i.e. how the Better Subjects mod allows a relatively small empire to control more vassals than their military strength can deal with thanks to the ability to raise relations through subsidizing). But even then, you're likely to lose a direct engagement against a much larger power. The only way victory can be achievable is by using superior strategy, born out of the fact that smaller empires are easier to manage while your larger opponent is... distracted ^^

Seriously, even Frederick the Great -- the poster child of playing "tall" in EU4 -- required not one, but TWO "Miracle of the House of Brandenburg" to save his butt.

 

[Foefaller]

I think wide vs. tall is often more of proxy argument about if there are enough ways to expand your sphere of influence beyond military conquest and expanding borders. Things like becoming an economic powerhouse or center of trade, making and supporting allies to advance your own interests vs. simply making sure they don't attack you until you're ready, and the capability to win what wars you must fight quickly before your larger opponent can mobilize and overwhelm you with sheer numbers and manufacturing capabilities.

1 city wonder playthroughs of Civ V were fun in their own way, but depended a lot on very artificial rules (yes, I know, it was a game) to make that possible, like how culture worked; the civilizations that have the biggest influence of culture today were not small insular countries that did their best to avoid notice from larger neighbors, they were massive empires during their zenith, or peoples who were conquered and/or integrated by said empires, who then took the parts of the culture that they liked and made it a part of their own.

 

[GamerSteve]

Well I dunno, Vatican City has for centuries been one single city with absolutely zero military capability which has had a large and sometimes dominant impact on world events. In fact it is a really good example of how a single city can control billions of people without a single armored car or military unit.

 

[TheAtreides84]

Well I dunno, Vatican City has for centuries been one single city with absolutely zero military capability which has had a large and sometimes dominant impact on world events. In fact it is a really good example of how a single city can control billions of people without a single armored car or military unit.

But Stellaris does not model the kind of soft power the Vatican projected in history.

 

[GamerSteve]

But Stellaris does not model the kind of soft power the Vatican projected in history.

Correct.

And as I and others have said on this thread and elsewhere, it's hard to see how they get to a viable "Tall" strategy without modeling soft power in some way.

In the Civ One City Challenge that has been mentioned several times including a couple of posts up, that is how you win -- with soft power. Not by conquest.

 

[Robotkiller]

Well I dunno, Vatican City has for centuries been one single city with absolutely zero military capability which has had a large and sometimes dominant impact on world events. In fact it is a really good example of how a single city can control billions of people without a single armored car or military unit.

If playing EU3 and Victoria 2 has taught me anything, it is that the Vatican City was not just a city until Italian Unification. You had the Papal States, which controlled much of central Italy.

 

[GamerSteve]

If playing EU3 and Victoria 2 has taught me anything, it is that the Vatican City was not just a city until Italian Unification. You had the Papal States, which controlled much of central Italy.

And?

It's still a tiny region relatively speaking, that wielded a might way out of proportion with its size.

 

[CraftyApe]

Do you play MP at all OP? "Playing wide", to the point of eschewing all internal development other than keeping your conquests passive is the obvious best choice. There are builds you wouldn't believe. The MP community of this game died, in part, because of how obvious it is that playing basically half of this game is all you need to win. The same goes for single player. Going insanely wide is just the most efficient way to play this game. So that does need some adjustment. Simply going FEM/Collectivist + Industrialist/Thrifty and being wildly aggressive is so much more effective than any more passive build (there are variants of that build, but they all have the insane aggression + slavery in common) that there's little point in playing them. I like this game, but I've stopped playing it because single player is so stupidly easy and MP is a race to see who can gobble up and enslave the galaxy with corvettes (and maybe, MAYBE destroyers in a long game) first.

Colonizing 5 planets and then sweeping out to conquer a filled galaxy shouldn't happen. You're right about that. Tall shouldn't be as good as going wide as a strategy, but SOME level of internal development should be necessary, and right now it just isn't.

 

[Magil]

Do you play MP at all OP? "Playing wide", to the point of eschewing all internal development other than keeping your conquests passive is the obvious best choice. There are builds you wouldn't believe. The MP community of this game died, in part, because of how obvious it is that playing basically half of this game is all you need to win. The same goes for single player. Going insanely wide is just the most efficient way to play this game. So that does need some adjustment. Simply going FEM/Collectivist + Industrialist/Thrifty and being wildly aggressive is so much more effective than any more passive build (there are variants of that build, but they all have the insane aggression + slavery in common) that there's little point in playing them. I like this game, but I've stopped playing it because single player is so stupidly easy and MP is a race to see who can gobble up and enslave the galaxy with corvettes (and maybe, MAYBE destroyers in a long game) first.

Colonizing 5 planets and then sweeping out to conquer a filled galaxy shouldn't happen. You're right about that. Tall shouldn't be as good as going wide as a strategy, but SOME level of internal development should be necessary, and right now it just isn't.

I don't think this is what the OP is getting at--and I know it's not my concern. In Civ, there was a style of play called ICS--Infinite City Sprawl. It has much in common with the style of play you describe as problematic in Stellaris--grabbing as much territory as possible and eschewing development to the extreme. But I do feel like perhaps when transitioning from describing something the developers focused on in Civ V, "wide empires and tall empires", something is being lost in translation (and indeed, many members of the community had their own ideas about what exactly that meant). I would never put forth the position that the optimal style of play should be to aggressively pursue expansion to the exclusion of all else, particularly at the expense of infrastructure, since I am a builder at heart. My preferred style of play is to have richly developed worlds (or cities as the case may be from game to game), carefully managed to give my empire a strong economy. I simply like having a lot of worlds to build in, not just a handful. Heck, when I'm playing Stellaris for fun my typical approach is to hand off my highly developed planets to sectors so that I can develop new additions personally. I wouldn't claim it to be an optimal strategy, it's just what I like doing.

My own objection (I would not presume to speak for the OP on this matter) stems from the use of the terms "wide" and "tall" and the implications they carry with them. Without going on a long-winded rant about Civ, I'll just summarize and say that I was a bit miffed they took a very good economic model in Civ IV which encouraged a measured approach to expansion and neatly curtailed ICS (which was prevalent in Civ III and earlier version of the game), and in the name of creating two styles of play called "wide" and "tall", discarded the old approach the series in a new direction that just didn't really work out. And I've explained why I thought it didn't work out, the short answer being that if more isn't always better then it creates severe problems for an empire-building game.

To use one quick example, it's quite difficult to both make resources a valuable commodity yet encourage a style of play where one eschews claiming said resources in favor of sitting back and building monuments. If a player does not want to colonize a planet, that says that the planet is not valuable to the player, and we need to make sure that's for the right reasons. Generally, my stance on it is that the player should want to expand to that planet, but maybe they're being held back temporarily because claiming the planet could lead to the collapse of their empire's economy (or stability as the case may be). This creates tension in building infrastructure to expand the player's economy before the planet is claimed by a rival. The problem arises when the very act of claiming the planet boosts the player's economy in too short a term, and that is what leads to ICS-style play, which is always a matter to be careful of. This is also reflected in the Stellaris example of conquest + enslavement, where a newly conquered colony becomes productive too quickly.

When I said I think I had Stellaris had the right general idea, I was referring to the drain that colony ships had on energy credits, as 8 credits per turn is quite a large sum early on. It's a nice soft drain that hurts you early on but can be overcome eventually when your economy becomes robust enough to support it. My concern is that it disappears too quickly, and there are of course ways around it (conquering and enslaving as you point out). My preferred approach to the problem as you put it--and I do not deny that there is a problem with rapid expansion at the expense of infrastructure being too prevalent, though I do not feel I've been playing the game long enough to thoroughly detail the specifics--would be to make sure that the ongoing costs of running an undeveloped colony were too high to be sustainable for multiple new settlements early on, whether they were acquired via colonization or conquest. But I would also make sure to keep the costs fixed and not scaling too hard to make sure that an economic "breakthrough" point exists somewhere in the midgame where a strong economy can support rapid expansion. This creates tension in a sort of race to reach that point before your rivals so you can grab more resources and planets. It's also generally the spark for true territorial conflicts, border friction, and the need for a military build-up. While I would never seek to eliminate the early-game rush strategies altogether, I feel it's healthier for the game if the majority of the wars that establish who the big fish in the pond are occur in the midgame, with the lategame conflicts being those that establish galactic dominance. That's my ideal, at any rate. Whether or not it can be achieved or is even, indeed, what the developers wish to achieve remains to be seen.

But that's a lot of text, so here's a tl;dr. Personally, I'm just spooked by the talk of "wide versus tall" because of the (what I perceive to be) negative effects it had on economic management in Civ V and the complete failure of the game to actually succeed in what it set out to do in creating two distinct play styles. To the perceived problem of rapid expansion being too powerful, I would propose making undeveloped colonies more draining on an empire's economy/stability rather than giving seemingly "arbitrary" bonuses to smaller empires.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

On the bright side, the inclusion of consumer goods in 1.5 (*) is a great first step to make REXing in the early game less powerful.
...turns out if you have to pay X minerals for each pop, there is a pretty strong incentive to develop your colonies.

(*) See: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-57-species-rights.995302/

 

[Madzai]

On the bright side, the inclusion of consumer goods in 1.5 (*) is a great first step to make REXing in the early game less powerful.
...turns out if you have to pay X minerals for each pop, there is a pretty strong incentive to develop your colonies.

Yeah, a step in right direction. But i think the road to balance it out will be a long one. And the intended result isn't clear yet. If general goods intended to delay the phase before player could start rapid expansion for X years (10-20-30....), it's one things. If general goods are intended to make minerals a constant demand thought the whole party it's another thing. And it shift balance greatly - making slaves and other mineral bonuses important. But it also lead to less energy and science (because POPs are working on minerals) - meaning the whole gameplay will slow down quite a bit (or may be even a lot). *I*, personally, am a huge fan of slowing gameplay down(as 200-300 years for a party seems like very short one for me), but judging from comments in different threads this idea isn't very popular overall.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Yeah, consumer goods raise a lot of other issues.

A secondary problem, for example, is that it makes access to early game M deposits (and subsequently the problem of defending offworld mining stationsin against rushes) even more problematic. Right now having +10 M vs nothing in your home system is already a big advantage. But if your base M income is lower due to consumer goods, the impact is magnified significantly.

Actually on my "things I have to ask Wiz" list for next week.
That being said: Back to testing.

(Yes, it's already so much fun that I will gladly spent my whole weekend on Stellaris. )

 

[mudcrabmerchant]

Yeah, consumer goods raise a lot of other issues.

A secondary problem, for example, is that it makes access to early game M deposits (and subsequently the problem of defending offworld mining stationsin against rushes) even more problematic. Right now having +10 M vs nothing in your home system is already a big advantage. But if your base M income is lower due to consumer goods, the impact is magnified significantly.

Actually on my "things I have to ask Wiz" list for next week.
That being said: Back to testing.

(Yes, it's already so much fun that I will gladly spent my whole weekend on Stellaris. )

Perhaps have a "tournament rules" setting, that sets a narrow range for resources in home systems the immediate expansion sphere.

 

[Madzai]

Perhaps have a "tournament rules" setting, that sets a narrow range for resources in home systems the immediate expansion sphere.

Actually, as we already have some pre-defined things - like number of planets of prefer type nearby, i wish for more setups for resources and planets- total random, normal and tournament, as you said.

 

[Radically Right Wing]

I have to say that this is a terrible example.
Does Singapore punch far above its weight class? Yes. It's certainly much more important in the Geopolitical arena than its MUCH larger Indonesian cousin.

But... compared to China? The nation that has used its huge market potential to make nations (like the UK) bend over backwards to meet its economic interests? Uh... no.

-----

The advantages of playing tall should be in less apparent fields that requires more cooperation and conflict by proxy. Like the ability to lead a lead a Federation to victory using superior research, or able to juggle many strong allies/vassals (i.e. how the Better Subjects mod allows a relatively small empire to control more vassals than their military strength can deal with thanks to the ability to raise relations through subsidizing). But even then, you're likely to lose a direct engagement against a much larger power. The only way victory can be achievable is by using superior strategy, born out of the fact that smaller empires are easier to manage while your larger opponent is... distracted ^^

Seriously, even Frederick the Great -- the poster child of playing "tall" in EU4 -- required not one, but TWO "Miracle of the House of Brandenburg" to save his butt.

You made a good point without even realizing it. Comparing Singapore to Indonesia shows just how powerful playing Tall can really be, then you go and compare them to China and say "Well playing tall just doesn't match up". Well obviously China is out of their league, but if you compared China to Japan, another extremely tall nation. living on a thin island which is mostly mountains, I think you would be surprised to know that Japan invaded and in fact defeated China in WWII. So clearly there is another real world example of a Tall nation beating a Wide nation.