Capitals and satellite cities

Specializing cities is fun! I also believe rewards should match challenges.

When the capital is automatically better at everything, we obviously build all the wonders and best buildings in the capital. It's not a hard decision. This supports moving yields out of the capital. However, we must have some initial yields for research, policies, growth, and border expansion. These conflicting goals of specialization and initial yields are difficult to put together.

In the past I dealt with this problem by moving some yields from the Palace building to national yields we get for free. I also tried slightly increasing the yield of all cities, but this risks making undeveloped cities too good, which is a problem for the goal of rewards matching challenges. These were not an ideal solutions. I believe making these yields come from a visible, physical source will make it more understandable and realistic. Balancing the game is also easier when we don't just have lots of free stuff right away.

I'm experimenting with ways to meet these goals better in my test games. I expect to have an initial version ready for the Gem v1.13: Economy update.


=== UPDATE ===

I'm cautiously trying out things with this topic. Gem v1.13 includes two changes.

The most pressing problem was early national happiness. Starting with lots of happiness disrupts balance of golden ages and some policies. Ironically, some people also felt happiness was too low for early expansion.

Our first 3 cities now cost no national unhappiness. I did this with a new cheap maintenance-free building we can construct three times. It gives 4 to offset the 4 per city. The Liberty opener automatically gives this building to our first 3 cities. We also get 8 national happiness from our capital. This gives us lower happiness on turn 0, and more as we progress through time.

I experimented with moving some of the other free national yields onto the 3-copy building. I tried various arrangements... shifting it all to the building, leaving some national, more copies, less copies. Every setup I tried caused serious balance issues with other parts of the game. I feel I'm on the right track, but will need more time to think about it. I like how starting yields mitigate the effects of big swings of random luck in the super early game, like from weird terrain or abnormally large numbers of ancient ruins. I don't want to win on turn 10 from crazy good luck.

To support the goal of rewards matching challenges, I moved some previously-free city yields to a cheap City Hall building. We now need a little investment to get those bonuses. Our capital gets an automatic free City Hall, which offsets random bad luck from start locations. This also adds a new option to production queues in the very early game. I felt our early choices were a little sparse.

Good, i also hate whem the AI make 50000 wonders only in they capital and i just go and take it, give me so much things that the rest of the game become a piece of cake.
If this give incentive to capture other cities i would love it

I suspect the AI will stay rather capital focused, right?

If this is tied to the Palace, are you talking about moving the palace effects to various cities? Create a City Hall building that gets some of these freebies with era changes?

Agree that the major problem is to avoid buffing ICS. So do you want to disentangle the yield benefits the capital receives (and add them f.e. to the National Wonder that can be built in any city after all)?

I totally agree with this aim. In ALL of my games the capital is best at everything - best at making wonders, science, units, etc. None of my other cities ever become as good as the capital.

Each game I set up a military city near iron/coal and name it 'Fort Something' and I try to make only units there (& barracks etc) but each time the capital just builds them faster; and anyway the capital has the alambrama wonder. In CIV IV I could settle great generals in my military city as academies and that was better.

Each game I excitedly found a city on a river near the coast and call it 'New Amsterdam' and build only fishing boats and villages but at the end of the day my capital always has the most population and gold.

Each game I try and found a city by a mountain or in jungle and call it 'Oxford' and I want it to be a centre of science but the capital always outproduces it in science.

The root of the problem is that my capital always has a higher population, for the simple reason that it has been around the longest and that all city locations are equally balanced (overbalanced I have previously suggested). In Civ V, one equation rules them all.

Population=science/gold/production/wonders/buildings/military/etc.

I would dearly love to specialise my cities. I fear this might involve too much change to CIV V for GEM however.

What if buildings/wonders gained a bonus if they were in a city without another type of building/wonder.

Along the lines of a city with military and production buildings would function more efficiently if there are no major religious buildings/wonders in it.

Or a heavily research biased city gains a bonus for focussing only on that area.

In the same way that real cities rarely excel at all areas but are rather known for being great at one or two fields.

I'm not 100% sure but didn't CivIV have it that certain wonders couldn't be built in your city if you had already built another different wonder? So maybe wonders should have a mutual exclusivity on them.

Expired Reign: excellent ideas! Rather than a hard limit, we could encourage spreading wonders out by providing a bonus when building a wonder in a city without wonders - it has to be a big bonus. Wonders might have 50% of their effect when in a city already with a wonder.

Also: perhaps National Wonders can be mutually exclusive (except when OCC is checked) - so you can't build the science one if you already have the gold one, and so on. That would help. And what's the deal with religion - can we make it that religious spread is at 50% if you found it in your capital rather than a satellite city - then built the great temple in your non-capital religious city.

Real specialisation probably requires 'either/or' mechanics which may be beyond our scope here. 'Either/or' can be done either through buildings (if you have a bank and university you can't have a castle and military academy) or else through terrain and resources (need a river to build.. need wheat/iron/hills/plains/grasslands/floodplains/etc.).

Forcing a limit on the number of national wonders in a city would force decentralization, but would also feel kinda game-y and contrived - why can't I build two National wonders in the same city, when I can build two World Wonders in there? We could also limit World Wonders, I suppose - but that would be a big blow to Tall players.

I know the main topic here is how do we make the capital less dominating, but I'd also like to voice my appreciation for general city specialization: I think it's fun if *all* cities can eventually be specialized, so that you can have several science-themed cities, rather than just one super-science-city.


Back in the old Empires Enhanced modmod (man, I loved that modmod!), individual buildings could be specialized: you'd build a University (giving the regular university effects), then you could build an addon to specialize it into an art school (giving bonus culture), or an engineering school (giving extra production) etc. Since these addons were exclusive, they felt very specialization-y.

Designed correctly (so that picking multiple culture addons is more effective than picking different types of addons, i.e. by giving raw culture as well as giving a %-modifier) this might encourage city specialization. Or it could just end up adding boring micromanagment, as well as being out of the scope for GEM. For what it's worth, I found it fun and engaging.

So what is the optimal number of cities for a tall empire? 4? 5? 3? Surely all the wonders could be built in that many cities?

It would need planning to play that way so that you give the right city the best opportunity to build as many wonders as possible, but isn't that what happens already?

Some wonders already have constraints on them (Sydney Opera House, Machu Pichu).

Also we shouldn't strip the existing role of each building if it has a 'conflicting' building in the same city. Rather provide a boost if there isn't a 'conflict'.

Or add a cooldown after a wonder has been built, ie. you have to wait x turns to build one in that city again. Making you have to plan when and where to build something, but not setting a hard limit as to how many wonders a city can have. Perhaps even making it so that the more cities you have, the longer the cooldown, to compensate for the fewer cities a tall civ has.

JohnS said:

Back in the old Empires Enhanced modmod (man, I loved that modmod!), individual buildings could be specialized: you'd build a University (giving the regular university effects), then you could build an addon to specialize it into an art school (giving bonus culture), or an engineering school (giving extra production) etc. Since these addons were exclusive, they felt very specialization-y.

Designed correctly (so that picking multiple culture addons is more effective than picking different types of addons, i.e. by giving raw culture as well as giving a %-modifier) this might encourage city specialization. Or it could just end up adding boring micromanagment, as well as being out of the scope for GEM. For what it's worth, I found it fun and engaging.

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There is a sort of similar mod in the steam workshop, that let you upgrade some buildings to have extra yield, but it cost extra gold per turn too.
But this idea feel much better. Choices are always good.

I dont really like the idea of limiting buildings in cities as it seems like it would feel very gamey and be more frustrating then it was worth.

I do however like the idea of building add-ons to specialize cities and wouldn't really be too far outside scope of mod as we already added wonders and other buildings. I also think ways to make it better for things like culture to be horded rather than spread out. Right now 2 culture in two cities is just as good as 4 in one so why specialize?

4 culture in a city instead of 2n2 has advantages to that city early on as borders are still expanding. There are strategic reasons why you may want more culture in one rather than another at that point. (faster access to resources/luxuries/close off rival territory/access). In the late game, really the only reason for specialising is the hermitage+national epic bonus combined with a high wonders city to jack up the culture extra, but otherwise, there's no reason for difference from one to the other (on culture at least).

Add-ons definitely seems interesting, but may be fine as a mod-mod that remains compatible.

What if you made the power of a national wonder based on the terrain around a city?

So a production Wonder would be based off of how many hills you had with mines on them? This way you would want to build a production wonder in your production city.

Dunkah said:

What if you made the power of a national wonder based on the terrain around a city?

So a production Wonder would be based off of how many hills you had with mines on them? This way you would want to build a production wonder in your production city.

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That works for production food and gold but not culture science or faith though as they only have yield on terrain in limited instances. Also things like this would favor the human much more than the AI.

I already find that the capital is less important than it was. It often isn't my biggest production or gold city.

I also don't have a big problem with capital dominance - the majority of countries have one city that is much more important than any of the others. It isn't necessarily the political capital, but it often is.

If you want to de-emphasize the capital, one obvious way to do it would be to tweak the city state resource allocation formulas so they don't favor the capital. We shouldn't be surprised to see the capital dominate in science when it is the oldest and gets more food from maritime CSes.

I also think moving villages to 2 gold rather than 1g 1s will help with specialization some cities in science, others in gold.

Fixing mines so they weren't inferior improvements for much of the game (2 gold trading post >> 1 production mine) would also help making production cities something worth getting.

Ahriman said:

If you want to de-emphasize the capital, one obvious way to do it would be to tweak the city state resource allocation formulas so they don't favor the capital. We shouldn't be surprised to see the capital dominate in science when it is the oldest and gets more food from maritime CSes.

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That seems like a very good idea. Do these distribution formulas count for other stuff as well?

The de-emphasization of the capital may not be historical (London, Paris, Beijing, Rome), but it works for gameplay I'd say. Which is more important.

I'd also be against changes that go too far away from the base game (yields on tiles, building additions), etc. ...

I'd say a big step to better specialization would be to differentiate the map more and make some spots clearly better for one or the other purpose. Read: A better distribution system for ressources on map generation. (And adapt the ressources to let them scale better with later buildings). But there needs to be flexibility left. Pastures can be used as a culture city if I use God of the Open Sky for example.

I'm not sure that mines are worse than trading posts though. You're not supposed to use only hills after all. And what's the base amount of hills? Villages often have to compete with Plantations or Fishing Boats for gold. There's not many other options than hill for production, no?

I'm not sure that mines are worse than trading posts though.

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2 gold (boosted to 3 if freshwater) seems obviously superior to 1 production.

Pretty sure CS distribution accounts for
1) Trade route connections
2) Growth locked
3) Puppet
4) Razing

Courthouse would be another one I'd have it look at.

I agree it shouldn't automatically favor capitals if it does (other than placing some value on trade connections).

I'd also agree I don't find this to be always true that the capital is the best at anything and everything. It depends a good deal on my start location versus other city sites. I would usually find a heavy hill city to end up better off in production and population because of Banaue for example, a heavy jungle city with some food resources (bananas, fish) to end up ahead on science, whatever a higher production city is early on ends up with a lot of culture or faith from wonders, a coastal river city with some fishing boats ends up with a ton of gold, etc. It sounds like one problem is that there's not enough variety for the map to achieve these reliably specialised city opportunities instead of a capital.

Also keep in mind here that one of the reasons why your capital is so strong is due to it's age.

Given all is equal the capital should still be bigger faster stronger than others simply because it's 20 - 50 turns older than the rest of your cities.

@rahmmer60: Just because a National Wonder produces Culture doesn't mean you can't base it off of Villiages or the like. Where would a culter wonder do better in a community with lots of money or a production capital?

Dunkah said:

@rahmmer60: Just because a National Wonder produces Culture doesn't mean you can't base it off of Villiages or the like. Where would a culter wonder do better in a community with lots of money or a production capital?

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I like the general idea but it wouldn't be intuitive enough for culture or science...not sure what the answer to your question would be, a culture wonder would be fine in either community theoretically but it doesn't make sense to base it off either unless I'm missing something which is quite possible

Maybe would be better to base the power of national wonders on the amount of that specialist you had cause there are specialists for each base type.