My hyperexpansion test to show some faults.

Dancing Hoskuld said:
Not only that but that these changes will make the civics more sensible, for example.
Click to expand...

Man i hope so, thx BG.

Also remember to post in the Handicap thread, so i know what to do and where to do, thx. . . . SO

I have the WorldInfo ready, but as you stated i need all the other Civics and stuff also for the NightMare stuff, tghx.
 
I keep running into the opposite problem, as soon as I hit currency I'm screwed as the maintenance due to crime skyrockets (counterfeiting IIRC) I often go bankrupt within only 40ish turns.
 
KMRblue1027 said:
I keep running into the opposite problem, as soon as I hit currency I'm screwed as the maintenance due to crime skyrockets (counterfeiting IIRC) I often go bankrupt within only 40ish turns.
Click to expand...

Knowing that can you not keep/get crime below 75 so that [that] crime doesn't get built?
 
Yudishtira said:
Knowing that can you not keep/get crime below 75 so that [that] crime doesn't get built?
Click to expand...

Not without getting railroaded into closed boarders which I often don't even have access to before currency. I suppose with police unit spam I could use open instead but that's very expensive.
 
I have to wonder how you are getting so much crime. There are three major points that can be made in general about this without knowing more about the specific situation, which may or may not be applicable to your games:

You should not build all the major crime producing buildings all over the place and if you do you should demolish some before you get to the point where major crimes start showing up (Control-A when in the city screen to get to the dialog where you can demolish buildings). Even if you want the special units that require this sort of building, you don't generally need more than one place you can make them. I rarely build most of them, some games I don't build any, and only 1 or 2 cities get the ones I do build (which is normally for the money, so they are built in gold specialized cities).

You should not keep the units that are made via the crime buildings in your cities, or even in your own territory if you can help it, since they are crime sources. You are supposed to put them in enemy territory to give them crime, not keep them around to give yourself crime.

Crime fighting units can get some free XP to start with extra crime fighting, allowing you to use fewer of them. Build them in the city where they get the most free promotions. The cost of having some of them in each city, even without much in the way of extra promotions, usually ends up being less than the cost of the crimes you get if they are not there, once the more expensive crimes show up, unless maybe you have too many crime producing buildings or are letting the crime units of other civs hang around you cities.

Oh, and a fourth thing: make sure you kill off enemy crime spreading units as quickly as possible. The AI will often try to move them into your territory. You don't need crime units of your own to see them (although they can), you need dogs. Roughly one dog unit per city is a good thing. Once the dog spots the criminal, use some strong combat unit with good odds to kill that unit (I generally like mounted units for this for the speed, especially before paved roads, but that is not really necessary).

Which kinda hijacks the thread. But...

After reading this thread I have tweaked Rocks to Rockets to increase the iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance in CIV4HandicapInfo.xml a little (instead of the various difficulties using the usual 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8 they are currently at 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12) which will hopefully trim down the excess gold situation in R2R a little. In R2R, much like C2C, I rarely have significant money issues that drive me off of 100% research for more than a few turns unless I start to expand a little too early or quickly when still on too many unfavorable civics. We shall see how much of a change this makes.
 
I took a look at a game where I have 22 cities in the Classical era. It is only on Noble difficulty so the iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance went from 5 to 7. The total change in income after the recalc was a reduction of 21 gold per turn (give or take some fraction, probably). This is a noticeable change, although I was still making 717 per turn.

Although this is not a great test since this game is was pretty developed before the change took effect and it is only on Noble and I am way ahead in tech and wonders and have a triple holy city producing a lot of gold, and ... and... and... (plenty of other issues, I'm sure). But it does show the general size of the financial impact for my change. Bumping up the iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance by 2 for the game added almost 1 gold per city in additional maintenance for an empire that is over the new max. I will probably increase slowly over time due to the various buildings that give percentage increases to maintenance, and occasional drop back down to about this level as buildings that reduce it show up from time to time.

I'm fairly happy with this level of adjustment for R2R for this setting. It might be bumped up by one more (Settler and Chieftain are currently both at 5, so I may bump Chieftain and every level after it up by 1, so it would just go up one per difficulty starting at 5).

There are still some other related values that can be tweaked as well.

By the way, I think the reason the distance related maintenance modifier goes down as map sizes go up is that bigger maps mean greater distances and they were trying to have it not block you from expanding across those large maps due to economic destruction from the increased distance maintenance. The large number of "free cash" buildings in C2C (plus having more government center buildings available) changes that so it might make sense to just keep it constant across the sizes. I'm not sure if that is the case, though.
 
God-Emperor said:
I took a look at a game where I have 22 cities in the Classical era. It is only on Noble difficulty so the iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance went from 5 to 7. The total change in income after the recalc was a reduction of 21 gold per turn (give or take some fraction, probably). This is a noticeable change, although I was still making 717 per turn.

Although this is not a great test since this game is was pretty developed before the change took effect and it is only on Noble and I am way ahead in tech and wonders and have a triple holy city producing a lot of gold, and ... and... and... (plenty of other issues, I'm sure). But it does show the general size of the financial impact for my change. Bumping up the iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance by 2 for the game added almost 1 gold per city in additional maintenance for an empire that is over the new max. I will probably increase slowly over time due to the various buildings that give percentage increases to maintenance, and occasional drop back down to about this level as buildings that reduce it show up from time to time.

I'm fairly happy with this level of adjustment for R2R for this setting. It might be bumped up by one more (Settler and Chieftain are currently both at 5, so I may bump Chieftain and every level after it up by 1, so it would just go up one per difficulty starting at 5).

There are still some other related values that can be tweaked as well.
Click to expand...
This actually makes me wonder why we set a maximum # of cities that affect the # of cities maintenance at all.. what happens to your game if it's set out to like 100 or something? At some point the # of cities you have becomes the maximum and it won't go up any further so if we take away the limiting control factor at all I'm wondering how much it really impacts. Besides, more cities, if the nation is grown gradually, mean more cities that are caught up and able to build gold to keep up the needs of the empire and more 'profit' they all are able to pull in so it always makes for a major penalty to grow too quickly but should never be a big problem for the player that grows with control over his economy in mind. (in theory)

God-Emperor said:
By the way, I think the reason the distance related maintenance modifier goes down as map sizes go up is that bigger maps mean greater distances and they were trying to have it not block you from expanding across those large maps due to economic destruction from the increased distance maintenance. The large number of "free cash" buildings in C2C (plus having more government center buildings available) changes that so it might make sense to just keep it constant across the sizes. I'm not sure if that is the case, though.
Click to expand...
Ah yes... I remember that beings said somewhere now. And it does make sense. It attempts to keep some kind of consideration that the size of a plot and the globe itself is relative to the mapsize. Smaller maps don't mean smaller planets - they mean less resolution on that planet. Thus to compensate for this a larger mapsize reduces the penalty from distance maintenance.
 
Thunderbrd said:
This actually makes me wonder why we set a maximum # of cities that affect the # of cities maintenance at all.. what happens to your game if it's set out to like 100 or something? At some point the # of cities you have becomes the maximum and it won't go up any further[...]
Click to expand...

Well, the amount per city won't go up, but the total will since the new city gets the full force of it. Each city you add increases the maintenance in every city until it hits the max, then adding a city doesn't increase the maintenance in the existing cities but it starts at the max (scaled down due to low population, but still it starts higher then the early cities did - but there are more buildings the new city can have to counter the cost too).

It is not entirely clear why adding a city increases the maintenance of all the already existing cities in the first place. If you build a city out in Nebraska somewhere, does it make maintaining Boston more expensive? Some increased expenses from the additional complexity of governing multiple cities I can see, but other than that I'm not sure what this really represents.
 
The number of city maintenance at least in part was a gimmicky game mechanic to stop the REX, Smallpox, whatever you want to call it strategy, where spamming cities really close together with small populations was more effective than well developed cities. I'm not sure if the mod really needs this anymore but for vanilla Civ4 it was a really good idea.

On a side note crime seems easier to handle than it used to to so I'll get back to you when I hit later eras.
 
God-Emperor said:
By the way, I think the reason the distance related maintenance modifier goes down as map sizes go up [..]
Click to expand...

Quoting myself...

Turns out it isn't the distance related modifier that goes down as map size goes up. That does go up. It is the number of cities modifier that goes down.

I guess it is because you are expected to have more cities on bigger maps so it makes each get a bit lower cost. Or something.
 
God-Emperor said:
It is not entirely clear why adding a city increases the maintenance of all the already existing cities in the first place. If you build a city out in Nebraska somewhere, does it make maintaining Boston more expensive? Some increased expenses from the additional complexity of governing multiple cities I can see, but other than that I'm not sure what this really represents.
Click to expand...
The cost of all cities together is just supposed to increase quadratically. I don't think this is meant to represent anything specifically.

Of course it would be possible to introduce more "natural" mechanics that make hyperexpansion less attractive.
Like there could be a property on cities (with no diffusal) that represent how far they have slipped from goverment control which increases by a constant amount each turn and the higher it gets the more negative auto buildings are added. To fight it you would need expensive government buildings that can only be built in your capital, some of which would reduce the negative points in a certain radius and others which would generate government points (both of which would be very limited). The government points could then be used with a special unit (limited to one only) that represents your ruler to "Hold Court" or something like that in a city to reduce the negative points by a large chunk. With the government points being very limited and the representative unit having to move to cities this would give a "natural" limit to expansion that would increase with tech and route progress.
And if you have leftover government points you could use them to build "reforms" or similar in cities that give bonuses until they obsolete.
 
BlueGenie said:
Hi all and welcome. I did a big test recently to show why city maintenances need to be kicked up a bunch of notches, that and also increasing teh MaxNumCity values drastically.
.
Click to expand...

Do you mean the one on the civics? Such as cannot found cities over X amount without :mad: ?

If you did chnage it what did you chnage it to?

Seems like if you changed that then the game would be unbalanced. Having that is both a game balance and a mental balance to the player. I have seen it lots of times where the player in Let's Plays will not go over the city limit from civics out of fear.

Even if in reality going over the limit will not suddenly kill an empire, but instead gradually makes the empire harder to control the more cities you have.
 
Hydromancerx said:
Do you mean the one on the civics? Such as cannot found cities over X amount without :mad: ?

If you did chnage it what did you chnage it to?

Seems like if you changed that then the game would be unbalanced. Having that is both a game balance and a mental balance to the player. I have seen it lots of times where the player in Let's Plays will not go over the city limit from civics out of fear.

Even if in reality going over the limit will not suddenly kill an empire, but instead gradually makes the empire harder to control the more cities you have.
Click to expand...

Nothing to do with civics per se. It is a totally different XML file. One that has always been there with city numbers but those numbers have not been adjusted since the early RoM days when they should have.
 
Dancing Hoskuld said:
Nothing to do with civics per se. It is a totally different XML file. One that has always been there with city numbers but those numbers have not been adjusted since the early RoM days when they should have.
Click to expand...

Ok so its not the civic thing. Meaning these ...

Code: 
			<iCityLimit>3</iCityLimit>
			<iCityOverLimitUnhappy>4</iCityOverLimitUnhappy>
 
Hydromancerx said:
Ok so its not the civic thing.
Click to expand...

The limit being talked about is mostly (so far) the iMaxNumCitiesMaintenance in CIV4HandicapInfo.xml. That file also has some other relevant values: iNumCitiesMaintenancePercent and iDistanceMaintenancePercent.

There are also a couple of related values in CIV4WorldInfo.xml which are also called iNumCitiesMaintenancePercent and iDistanceMaintenancePercent.

There is a defined value called MAX_DISTANCE_CITY_MAINTENANCE in GlobalDefines.xml.

These are things that are used in the calculations for the city maintenance gold per turn costs. It is not related to the limits imposed by civics via unhappiness.
 
Well, I was going to ask why my early Ancient empire ran 100% science throughout Prehistory, with latter Prehistory starting to generate a large profit, but I assume that's it's part of the problem that BlueGenie has mentioned.

I recently expanded from one to four cities, simply because I thought I shouldn't be making so much money, at 100% science no less, but I'm still running a profit on Noble/100%. (I did start on Chieftain, but then I adjusted it in the BUG menu.)
 

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There is definitely an issue here with building new cities (and as many as possible as soon as possible) being far too good a strategy.
Very little investment is needed and new cities turn a profit very soon.
Settlers are extremely cheap so producing one is not much of an investment for an old city.
The many little buildings you can construct make up a sizable base income regardless of where you build your city.
Since there are not that many buildings that give science, your science income will mainly scale with number of cities.

So I think apart from increasing the gold cost of city number from ancient onwards, settlers should be far more expensive and cost a population.
 
I like that you can build lots of little early buildings to give your colonies a good starting base, but as with so many things, it needs to be looked at carefully so that there's some actual strategy involved.
 
AIAndy said:
So I think apart from increasing the gold cost of city number from ancient onwards, settlers should be far more expensive and cost a population.
Click to expand...

Another thing to consider is to limit the Settler to 1 only at a time, same as the Great Farmer is limited.
 
During a recommended turn-span of 9,900, just waiting 10 or 15 turns between Settlers is hardly a meaningful disadvantage.
 
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