Number of Cities Maintenance

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Maniac
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Number of Cities Maintenance

Post by Maniac »

ICS, short for Infinite City Sleaze, has long been the bane of the civ series. Basically it means players will found an infinite carpet of small cities rather than build up any of them to a large size. Different civ versions have tried different methods to tackle the problem. Unfortunately I see Pandora has none of them at moment. Despite the risk of ICS also being present in Pandora: every city starts with 8 Growth for free. That's a huge incentive for ICS, a very boring way to play a game.

I think Civ4's method of tackling the problem fits best with Pandora's current economy model: city maintenance. Basically each city should cost you a number of credits, up to a ceiling of 32 credits per city. Reason for that value: the exchange rate between credits and other yields is 4 to 1 at the moment, and a city gives 8 Growth, so 4*8=32. Of course in the beginning your economy can't support 32 credits per city, so the maintenance value should gradually increase depending on your number of cities. Example:

1 city: no maintenance
2 cities: 2 times 2 credits, for a total of 4
3 cities: 3 times 4 credits = 12
4 cities: 4 * 6 = 24

Of course that's an example, actual values dependent on playtesting.
Maniac
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Re: Number of Cities Maintenance

Post by Maniac »

Another way Civ used to combat ICS was to increase settler's movement points from 1 to 2. Every turn your settler is moving rather than settling down is wasted production. Increasing its movement points reduces this pressing need, and the opportunity cost of moving to a location, which is better but further away, is less. So for Pandora I'd suggest to increase the colonizer's movement points too.
whaleberg
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Re: Number of Cities Maintenance

Post by whaleberg »

Heh, you should see how it was a few weeks ago. Every city gave you free resources as well, and the early production boosting buildings were +4 flat bonuses, and there was no monetary decay with distance from the capital. So they're making major strides to reign it in.

A cost per city would help, but if that's added in they also need to add in city razing, and ways to add additional capitals/ expand your profitable area. Right now to make money it makes sense to found as many cities as close to your capital as possible, because the income reduction with distance is pretty severe. Troop movement is really slow too, even on roads, so that is also a strong incentive to pile initial cities on each other.

It would be nice to see more mobile colonizers. Especially since there isn't any balancing of initial start locations. You can get pretty screwed if you get put in a corner, being able to move around a little faster would help with that. Then you might have to bump up infantry movement too though to keep pace.
void
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Re: Number of Cities Maintenance

Post by void »

Ye it was pretty bad not long ago.

Personally I'm not a fan of maintenance going up with the number of cities. The idea that you lose a fortune because your expansion forces take a couple minor cities at the end of the world doesn't make too much sense to me. Our headquarters system means that for every 10 tiles away from the HQ your income and growth gets halved, so you'd just profit way less from those frontier colonies. Once we roll out espionage with our first expansion, we can also use the HQ distance as a metric to calculate risk/reward chances for infiltrating agents.
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IainMcNeil
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Re: Number of Cities Maintenance

Post by IainMcNeil »

Could we use the puppet state idea from Civ 5 in that only cities you control directly effect the penalty. Then you can choose when to make the jump from puppet to fully managed? It reduces the micromanagement too. This way penalties could he higher and we could add buildings that combat the penalties to give the player levers to deal with it.
Maniac
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Re: Number of Cities Maintenance

Post by Maniac »

void wrote:Personally I'm not a fan of maintenance going up with the number of cities.
So are you ok with the optimum colonization strategy in every single game being, regardless of your starting position and environment, founding a whole bunch of cities as close to each other as possible in a circle around your capital?
The idea that you lose a fortune because your expansion forces take a couple minor cities at the end of the world doesn't make too much sense to me.
You are not losing a fortune. You are only gaining less of a fortune: the number of cities maintenance is only to offset the 8 growth every city gets for free.

It's IMO more frontier/distance penalty which causes taking small cities at the other end of the world to be unprofitable. Having it in the game is a good idea. But in a game focused on conquest you want it to be possible for conquered cities on the other side of the world to become profitable. So there should be ways to reduce the frontier penalty. I'd suggest to take a page from civ5 and have the following two options to reduce the frontier penalty:
1) connect a city to your headquarters with a road
2) build a Harbour building in a coastal city.
(and of course the combination: connect an inland city on another continent with a road to a coastal base with a harbour, which connects to a coastal city on your home continent that also has a harbour, which is connected to your inland capital by road)
IainMcNeil wrote:Could we use the puppet state idea from Civ 5 in that only cities you control directly effect the penalty. Then you can choose when to make the jump from puppet to fully managed? It reduces the micromanagement too. This way penalties could he higher and we could add buildings that combat the penalties to give the player levers to deal with it.
Yeah, civ has tried three ways to solve the problem of being able to conquer more than your economy can support:

1) As you mention, puppets in civ5.
2) Allowing you to vassalize factions rather than conquer them completely (SMAC + civ4).
3) Give the player resources for razing enemy cities (civ5). Personally I would not like having this as the only option, as razing cities basically creates room for another one of your rivals to expand onto. Making them stronger rather than you.
whaleberg
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Re: Number of Cities Maintenance

Post by whaleberg »

1) connect a city to your headquarters with a road
2) build a Harbour building in a coastal city.
I would probably add the Forbidden Palace to that list. It's a large project which lets you build an additional headquarters somewhere else. I would really like to see roads and shipping trade networks in place though. I would love to see trade networks influence your cities access to your global resource pool. I.e. instead of global resources, you have a separate resource pool for each disconnected network you have. Or shipping costs for minerals to got to places far away without easy access. There's nothing like cutting the only rail line connecting the enemies mines from their manufacturing center, and then watching their war machines crumble...

One easy way to implement road connections helping spread your HQ's power would be to change it from a flat distance, to a "unit travel distance." Basically, instead of the straight line distance, count the shortest number of turns it would take an infantry unit to reach the location. That way, roads automatically extend your HQ radius, short ocean trips lengthen it ( because of the turn spent loading onto transports), and long ocean trips are shorter than long land trips over unimproved terrain. It ties in automatically with technology upgrade in exactly the ways you expect it to, and since you have pathfinding, it's already built into the engine.

One easy way to clear up map space would be to increase the initial city control radius and forbid placement within that radius. That wouldn't fix the problem of needing to fill the map with cities, but it would at least cut down the sheer number of them, and give some room for unit maneuvering.

Vassals and puppet states are another solution, but the AI never does what you want it to, so it just trades micromanagement frustration with inept AI frustration.

I don't love empire wide negative effects based on number of cities. I have had experiences in games where conquering a city increased my costs and crippled my empire which I found incredibly frustrating. Some games have flat city maintenance costs, which make it expensive to spam colonies in unsuitable locations, but doesn't affect conquering productive cities.
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