Mechanism for limiting expansion

Ikael

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Since our beloved saga was born, one thing became each more apparent with each new civilization title:

There needs to be some kind of expansion constrainning mechanism put in place. There's a need to delay expansion (without making it detrimental altogether) and try to curb snowballing civilizations in the process (without punishing success).

In order to archieve that, each iteration of civilization have offered different solutions to this problem: The first 3 games tried to fine-tune the corruption system with little avail, whereas the 4th installment opted for a manteinance system that made you consider new cities as long-term investments, while civilization 5 used a combination of happiness and scalable technology and social policy costs, whose effectiveness, one must say, was also debatable.

So the question is, my fellow civfanatics: Which kind of system (or systems, or interaction between systems) would you propose in order to solve this problem?

I have come to think of two possible solutions.

- Identity radious + governance
- Civ 4's manteinance cost + cultural city level

Let me please expand upon them:

>>> Identity radious + governance

- Identity radious: The further from your capital, the less culture and science your cities will produce (there will be exceptions to this rule, based on special buildings / city placement). Keep in mind that culture not only will allow you to buy social policies like on civ 5, but it could also flip cities too..

- Governance level: The more cities you build, the higher their manteinance costs when passing a certain threshold (governance level) defined by your form of goverment. It will be a more transparent form of manteinance mechanism (the "manteinance curve" will be always visible), and distance from capital won't be affecting your manteinance costs (just your number of cities)


These two different mechanism will have a series of implications:


- Governance ensures that you will avoid Infinite City Spamming, and much like Civ 4's manteinance mechanism, it will force you to consider your cities as a long term
type of investment: They will be profitable for sure, but you will have to invest heavily in them for such a thing to happen, and if you expand your empire fast you
will certainly need time in order to "digest" it, or else you will overstrech yourself and fall behind like many empires did

- Cultural identity radious: It is an "anti-snowballing" type of mechanism. Keep in mind that there will still be a substantial difference of culture and science output between small and middle sized empires (cultural radious only start to kick in full force when placing cities in another continents or very far away from your capital), but the difference between middle sized and big empires will be almost neligible. It will also create a cool "metropolis VS colony" type of dynamic where metropolis provides cultural and scientific advances, while your colonies helps with military and economical affairs yet remain easily quite vulnerable to outside agitation and turmoil (cultural assimilation by nearby superpowers)

Why the hell would I ever want to build cities with these two deterrents in place?

- First of all, because new cities doesn't make social policies nor technologies harder to get, which means that your first wave of expansion (building up your hinterland around your capital) will be quite necessary and logical step if you wish to compete with other civs in the culture and scientific race. The lower level of governance of the early forms of goverment will be your biggest obstacle during the early game, but nearly every city that you build during this phase will be worth its initial investment cost, since nearby cities will keep providing a hefty amount of science and culture despite of the cultural identity radious mechanic in place

- Second, because as technology and social policies advances, a second wave of expansion far beyond your cultural radious will become each time more and more
attractive (colonial empires). Rembember that governance costs depends on your number of cities, no on distance per se, so if you have been landlocked by your
neighbours you can always colonice far away places to make up for that lack of vital space. There will also be several caveats and exceptions to the identity radious
limitations.

Observatories will make your far flung cities ignore their science penalties altogether, while culture generated by natural wonders won't be subjected to distance penalties either. And of course, access to certain special resources such as coal or petrol will be profitable enough to tempt you to fund a city just to get them, as their effects will be far more powerful than a mere strategic or luxury resource of yore.

In short, you will be able to keep expanding during the late game, but you should do it more wisely than on the early game, and become even more picky when choosing
the best spots for your cities if you want your empire to flourish in these far away lands (build cities near mountains for getting observatories, near natural wonders
for getting their culture, and pick the best places for your trade routes and resource control).

These two mechanics in place will make expanding your empire a far more thoughtful, engrossing and involving experience!

And now, for the other option:

>>> Civ 4's manteinance cost + cultural city level

Another different approach to this problem would be a return to Civilization 4's manteinance mechanic, but coupled with a new cultural mechanic (cultural city level)
created in order to both specialize cities and avoid a snowballing cultural effect by accumulating social policies.

Manteinance costs would work as they used to (cities costing gold the more you build and the more further away you build them). Thus, ICS is avoided, and you've gotta
invest into your cities in order to make them profitable.

Alright, but we all agreed that we liked social policies, right? Why can't we just leave them just like that? Civ 4 sytems + Civ 5 policies! Everyone wins!

Social Policies are great, but if you just gotta take into account its relationship with other game's systems. The combination of Civilization 4's manteinance system with Civ 5's social policies would give a huge advantage to big empires, making expansion the only strategy viable (you would need it for military, scientific AND cutlural victory) and thus, it needs to be tweaked. Hence why I propose this alternative system in order to replace social policies, based in the contribution of other fellow civver (whose name I can't remember for the life of me >.<):

Cultural city level

- Each city will have a certain cultural level, and social policies (now, "city traits") will be local, rather than empire-wide

- City culture will level up to 10 times maximum (reaching number 10 will mean that your city has gained a "legendary" status and it would a prequisite for archieving cultural victory)

- Every time that the city levels up, it will acquire one city trait in similar fashion to social policies, only this time, their effects will be local

- The social policy tree will have a net structure a la Beyond Earth, rather than a tree-like, branch structure. This way, you will be able to specialize a new city outright on its first leveling, rather than having to dwelve deeper into the social tree in order to "get to the good parts". Good city positioning and a couple of cultural traits will be enough for defining your new city's new role, even if older, more developed cities will have more bonuses and specialization options

- While individual cultural options will unlock as you research new technogies and build new world wonders (say, you will need to have reserached electricity if you want to pick the the "cinema festival" city trait) there won't be entire "SP trees" waiting to be unlocked trought science, in order to mitigate the "science is everything" problem

- Keep in mind, however, that there will be far more city traits avaible rather than the maximum 10 slots per city. That means that you won't be able to have every single city trait active in every city and thus, you will have to weight your choices carefully, for picking one city trait will mean to leave others

- This new cultural system will make the whole "cities as long term investments" ring more true than ever, rewarding both large and small empires, allowing a flexible degree of specialization in all your empire regardless of its size, yet allowing for small civilizations to be competitive in the cultural race too since SP will be local rather than empire-wide.

So what do you guys think of each sytem? Which ideas of your own do you have for developing expansion limit mechanisms? Go and share them! :D
 
I think it could be interesting if they made an actual divide between "town/village" and "city". It could help reach a compromise between the need to settle and develop core cities, but also to fill the map and feel more "empire-ish".

For cities you could have the hard limitations, whatever they may be, to limit how often or where you can expand.

For the smaller village types, maybe early on you are limited to expanding within your own borders. So say you have a core city towards the top of the map, and 3 tiles above that is some tundra, maybe some deer or iron. Not good enough for a city, but you could plop down a village, which could act as a branch of that city, further expanding tiles and allowing you to work and pick up the extra resources.

Later on, you could get a tech or policy which allows you to drop colonies, which allow you to bypass the rule of needing to place these smaller villages within your current borders, and you could start to pick up the various smaller island chains or unsettled areas on new continents.

These small villages wouldn't be cities in how you use them: you wouldn't be able to build buildings, garrison units, or train military. They are essentially just extended tile improvements for the city which made them. During war, the enemy could simply move on the village tile and pillage it, it cannot be captured like a city.

As far as yields are concerned, they would be extremely minor. You'd get the science from each population of the village, which wouldn't be that much since it isn't modified by science buildings (villages cannot build buildings). You'd also get a minor amount of gold, say also a set amount per population, along with any amount from worked tiles in their vicinity.

So the main reason to build these villages would be for the freedom of acquiring city locations without actually having the city, thus finding a middle ground between ICS and developing the map in a strategic way.

I don't think there should be penalties for dropping villages, since they could be limited by the core cities. For example you could tie it to population, say like 1 village per 10 population in that core city. It could also give an interesting dynamic between tall and wide play; tall play gets more villages per city due to higher population, but wide play gets even more map coverage due to more villages across their empire.

After the point in the game when you can make them as colonies, they would still work the same way, it just allows you to settle them away from your core cities.

They could even add some flavor for certain Civs. For example if they wanted to play up the colonies of Spain/Portugal, they could be given bonuses like extra colonists per city. Or if they wanted to play up Russia's map coverage or China's population, they could get a bonus to the base villages, to fill up their starting area more quickly and get more map coverage.

Not exactly a reply for the topic of limiting expansion, but I think a mechanic like this or a variation of it could help make developing the actual limiting mechanics easier, since you are both actively encouraging developing core cities (to get the actual building improvements and bulk yields) and ICS (to fill the map, get map control, but in a way which doesn't snowball since the yields are so low).
 
I have a quite simple idea. All cities grow their polulation equally fast (food kept constant), regardless of population size. That is, it takes just as much food to go from size 1 to 2, as it takes to go from size 50 to 51. Also, making a settler cuts 1 pop from the city.

Also cities don't instantly have defense and city attack when settled, they would be kind of like outposts in BE (just played the demo so don't know exactly how they were, but something like that)

Benefit of expansion: more resources, control over more militarily strategic positions
Cost of expansion: production of settler and buildings, larger area to defend
 
I don't really see why we should limit expansion. You found your capital ; you selected "settler" ; you moved this settler successfully without having him killed ; you pressed "b". New city ! = more power. It's all what we ask from your efforts as a reward.

Limiting expansion : you are doing all this, and poosh ! Rebels ! Very, very counter-intuitive.

You can argue that, once understood, the reward is not proportional to the effort. Then you can : make it more difficult (= more effort) to reach it, or limiting the reward. Civ1/2/3 have done the second, Civ4/5 the first. I still prefer the frustration of the second over the sillyness of the first.
 
"anti-snowballing" type of mechanism

Looking at human history, the development of human society, world economy and the still growing world-population (> 7 billion), one could say that humanity succesfully snowballed until every (profitable) plot on earth was settled and now they grow in height (skyscrapers) ... it's the same like populations of plants and animals would do, it is life. However the whole system is not static. Human beings move (migrate) to places were they have access to (more) food, security (peace), wealth, work, goods, liberty ... There is nothing wrong with snowballing ...

(You may also want to check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel)
 
And to those who claim that large empires are inherently unstable, and usually succumb to both internal and external pressures, and that the game should somehow mimic those effects, I say phooey. After all, look at the modern world, where 95% of all settled land is controlled by just 3 world-girdling empires -- Rome, Mongol and Aztec. Can you imagine a world where that is not the case?
 
Sigh, Civ is a strategy game not a world history simulator.

The problem with snowballing in a strategy game is that it can prevent counterplay, which kind of defeats the entire purpose of a strategy game to begin with.

That is great our own history had some empires which snowballed. They also fell due to various things, some of which could not be controlled (disease, change in environment). Unless you are implying you'd like to see a Civ game where all that work you put into creating a large empire is instantly wiped out due to a random event killing off 70% of your population and self-razing half your cities... I don't see how bringing up any of that is relevant. Civ is a PC game. Yes, with a world history theme, but still a PC game.

Imagine a fight where one fighter punches the other, knocks him to the ground. Then proceeds to repeatedly kick him in the ribcage until he submits. Imagine another fight where a fighter punches the other. The second fighter shrugs it off, throws one of his own. Maybe that punch was blocked and countered. The fight continues on this way until the end of the match. Which is more entertaining?

As a wide player I'm all for promoting expansion, but mechanics which slow snowballing empires is not fundamentally bad. Nor is the idea of "snowball" limited only to city expansions. But suggesting snowballing isn't bad is something I simply don't agree with. It is a common occurrence in strategy games, and it is not by accident that modern games implement several different types of mechanics to combat it. If snowballing is such a good thing, why is it not being embraced by the strategy community?
 
Imagine a fight where one fighter punches the other, knocks him to the ground. Then proceeds to repeatedly kick him in the ribcage until he submits. Imagine another fight where a fighter punches the other. The second fighter shrugs it off, throws one of his own. Maybe that punch was blocked and countered. The fight continues on this way until the end of the match. Which is more entertaining?

There are rules that can prevent that to happen : it's called knock down and the ensuing count. But it's not just about giving its chance to the loser, it's also an affair of ethic : one doesn't hit a man to the ground. But you're right, the loser can take its chance by recovering from a knock down... and win the match, for a spectacular turnaround.

But are such spectacular turnarounds needed for a strategy game ? I would say : only in the case of a public multiplayer confrontation, provided the audience is high. It's not the case of any Civ to date. (we can't even assist the game as spectator, even though we were in the game previously)

Simply, you more generally have to do the necessary in order to come powerful.

The problem is : some players feel "obliged" to create new cities, even tons of them, in order to have a chance. They feel "forced" and they feel mechanical in doing so. And they don't like to be forced, because then it's not about having choices, it's about playing a way you don't necessarily want to. Fine enough.

The solution to that is doing so that playing wide has the exact same benefit than playing tall. I have a solution to that, expressed in another topic :

Make only your capital a "true" city (as we know off from Civ1), and give a new tech to people who does : settle a new (empty) city, build a library (you can build an infinite amount of them)*, conquer a city (once per city per civ), convert/flip a city (once per city per civ), spend 1000 gold, etc. every aspect of Civ having equal effects on your tech advancement.

* rather than having a huge amount of useless libraries, let's just say "tech builts" (you build a tech like you would build units or buildings), libraries would only lower the techs cost, or being a cheaper tech to get once, or both.
 
Placing new cities in strategic places is like placing tokens on a GO-board.
In GO you place tokens every turn until none of the two players can place another token without violating the rules.
Civ games usually continue when the map is filled, e.g. the players are developing cities and environment, conquering neighbouring cities, etc.
So claiming/filling the map with cities is just the 1st round of a civ game.

If you implement harsh rules to prevent snowballing and wide empires, there is the danger of being caught in a dead-end,
e.g. have a major war, conquer cities, kick out some players and then get into a major economic or happiness crisis
which forces you to raze the half planet to get your empire back to a small stable state.

The game developers should accept that settling the complete map is a natural outcome and the game rules should be based on this fact.

One crucial point is population. As I mentioned above,
Human beings move (migrate) to places were they have access to (more) food, security (peace), wealth, work, goods, liberty ...

All civ games regard population as an asset of a city. Without a city there is no population.
Razing cities in Civ5 eliminates their population completely from the game.

My idea is to make population ethnic as in Civ3 and free to move as in Colonization. Each player has a global population
and he more or less can choose if his people shall settle in many small cities covering a lot of resources
or if they shall concentrate in few bigger cities. If the population is not happy with the players decision,
the player may have to raise wages or build a wall, otherwise the population may migrate to neighbouring cities
which provide more happiness, maybe even to cities on the other side of the border (e.g. Mexico -> USA) until a balance in population happiness is found.

Population growth is based on many parameters.
Lack of food usually leads to high (infant) mortality,
living in early cities usually lead to high mortality due to lack of sanitation.
Modern western life leads to low reproduction rates due to availability of contraceptives
and a rich variety of pleasures/luxuries better to enjoy without kids.
Religion may propose higher reproduction rates.

With start of Industrialisation, many people moved from the farmland into the cities (Urbanization) to get better paid work in factories.
Agricultural improvements (fertilizer, machines) changed the percentage of people working on farmland from ca. 90%-95% in ancient times
to about 2% in modern times (for a developed nation). (E.g. England 19th century : urban pop 17% -> 72%)

City sizes would vary from really small towns (1-10) to modern MegaPolis (100-1000)
representing real cities with population maybe up to 50.000.000 people (Tokyo is currently at 40M).

To feed such a city and keep it busy, all the food, raw materials (raw production) and resources in the game
would have to be transportable / tradeable (like in Colonization)
.


Spoiler :


Moderator Action: Wide image wrapped in spoiler.
 
Thing is, the beauty of expansion limiting mechanism is that it makes sense both from a gameplay and an historic point of view.

From a gameplay perspective, snowballing is bad for it makes games unfun and predictable. Having the game decided at the middle ages is boring, and being able to keep expanding in the late game keeps it interesting, as the race for land can keep being present.

From a historic perspective, history is chockfull of empires that overexpanded too fast and crumbled in a matter of decades (Alexander the Great, the Mongols, etc) and it shows that successful empires needed a hefty dose of good administration and development in order to mantain their conquests (Rome, England, etc). Conquest without good rule cannot hold for long.

So I think that it is unquestionable that some kind of expansion limiting mechanism must be in place, the debate lies in the "how". As for the general guidelines, I think that these two are good for it:

- Not luck-dependant. Loosing your hard earned empired by a random event is a big huge NOPE for me. Even if it is realistic (plages, and rebellions have brought empires down) it is horrible from a game design standpoint

- Cities as investments + high risk / high reward. The more cities and the more further away, the bigger the dangers yet the higher have to be the rewards. This way expansion becomes an option, an interesting decision to be made by the player, rather than being forced by design

As for the systems proposed, an "organic" build up from towns into proper cities might be a quite cool mechanic indeed! :D the only tricky thing would be to integrate it well with hex yields and the overall game economy, but it does have potential!
 
From a gameplay perspective, snowballing is bad for it makes games unfun and predictable. Having the game decided at the middle ages is boring, and being able to keep expanding in the late game keeps it interesting, as the race for land can keep being present.

What about doing what is necessary to become powerful ? This way, the game wouldn't be boring, and in multiplayer with the appropriate players (who all are good players) everybody would play in order to become powerful. Then when the map is becoming tinier, the forces clash for exciting gameplay.

Example : Civ5. In Deity vs the computer, the AIs have virtually infinite happiness and can steamroll other AIs, and becoming super-powerful, nearly unstoppable. Now, the matter of knowing if they are really unstoppable is a matter of difficulty setting. I would say Civ5 Deity makes it just so that a good player can stop a steamrolling AI nearly every time with effort. (lots, lots, LOTS of battles some times) But it would be easier if you war and conquer regularly. (nearly every time you are ready) It just doesn't change the way of playing, nor increase the number of ways of playing, in spite of the global happiness system.

All this goes back to "do i want to play a specific way in order to win" ? Or have I really several equal ways of playing, even in highest difficulty levels ?
 
Thing is, the beauty of expansion limiting mechanism is that it makes sense both from a gameplay and an historic point of view.

From a gameplay perspective, snowballing is bad for it makes games unfun and predictable. Having the game decided at the middle ages is boring, and being able to keep expanding in the late game keeps it interesting, as the race for land can keep being present.

I understand that from gameplay point of view it is preferable to slowly expand, in the beginning founding your capital, then after a while 2nd city, after a while 3rd city, ...

There are games which really slow down/limit expansion like "Rise of Nations" (Civ RTS) by Brian Reynolds (designer of Civ2, Col and AC). In RoN the player has to research techs to slowly increase the number of cities supported from 1-7, I think. Transfered to Civ5 this would mean that with every new Era there would be a tech to increase city limit by 1. Conquering cities beyond the limit is ok, but if the city limit is reached, no new cities can be founded. RoN also limits population units and military units to a common limit of 200 units together with increasing unit costs based on number of existing units of that type. This allows players with few units to rebuild units faster. Due to type-based increasing unit costs, it is a good strategy to build an army with a wide range of (cheap) different units instead of an army based on high number of few (and therefore expensive) unit types. Cities, buildings, units ... about everything in RoN has increasing costs based on existing numbers of this type, e.g. prices going up like 1st 10, 2nd 20, 3rd 30, 4th 40, 5th 50, ... RoN has a fantastically balanced gameplay design, everything is completely mathematically symetric in terms of numbers, resources and usefullness as in a multi-dimensional game of rock, paper, scissors ... it is fun to play but it feels a bit artificial/synthetic.

There are simple ways in Civ to artificially slow down expansion, e.g. :
- increase cost of settlers,
- limit number of settlers (e.g. only 1 settler at the same time),
- do not allow to hurry settlers,
- add a building requirement (e.g. palace) for building settlers,
- add a tech requirement (e.g. a medieval or renaissance tech) or
- completely or temporarely remove ability to build settlers and provide settlers via Tech, SP or Wonders.
(Tech allows FirstFreeUnitClass, so only one player would get the free unit. If You define a new SP-Tree with the sole purpose to grant free settlers, You maybe have to rescale SP costs and there might be a general imbalance in SP between empires who spend SPs for settlers and empires who conquer and so can aquire more usefull SPs.)
- increase barbarian spawning and remove/reduce unit healing in neutral/enemy territory

If you rely on realistic mechanism, you may have to accept historic examples like the Roman Empire, the British and other European Colonial Empires, Russia, China, the short-lived German and Japanese Empire (WW1, WW2) and the United States of America. Especially Russia aquiring Siberia is an exceptional example of limited expansion, they were "limited" by the Pacific Ocean in the East and Ottoman Empire, British Empire (India), China and the Japanese (1904/5) in the South.

Spoiler :


Cities in Civ are the Players only way to claim territory. In real life as well as in Civ, a player must be able to protect his claimed territory, otherwise he will be challenged by his neighbours and they take territory away until a "balance" is found. A large territory in Civ usually means a lot of (strategic and luxury) resources, but not necessarily a huge global population since population to a certain degree depends on food resources which depend on terrain and climate. If a player does not claim territory early, he has to accept that other players expand into his zone of interest and he has to use military force later to correct this. Building settlers and military units costs production and growth and so slows down the development of the respective city. It is a trade off. Small cities (Siberia) usually do not contribute much science or culture due to small population, small production, lack of food. Well grown cities with universities and research labs provide maybe 10 times more science per turn at the end of the game than small tundra cities.

If you assume that an empire controls a circle-shaped territory with radius R, the area is A(R) = PI x R x R, while the border is B(R) = 2 x PI x R. Number of cities and productivity of the empire is more or less based on area A(R) while the military border to defend is B(R). For a larger empire with radius 2 x R follows :
A(2xR) = PI x (2 x R) x (2 x R) = 4 x (PI x R x R) = 4 x A(R)
B(2xR) = 2 x PI x (2 x R) = 2 x (2 x PI x R) = 2 x B(R)
So an (ethnically) homogeneous empire with double radius has about 4 times the area (productivity) but only 2 times the border to defend which is a huge military and economic advantage. If the empire is based on conquest, the territory will include multiple ethnic groups who will usually try to escape, which adds a centrifugal component and increases military costs based on the conquered territory. Large border and (growing) conquered population to guard may overstretch the core-empire's military budget and human resources. This explains why historic empires based on conquest are usually short-lived. (The Roman Empire ended after about 1000 years.) China today has an almost homogenous population (92% Han-chinese), Siberia has a very small population (38 million, same as Poland today) compared with its size and with Russia (146 million).

To realistically limit expansion and conquest, you would need to add some real administration costs based on empire size/number of cities and a system of military occupation like in Civ3. However military occupation is not present in Civ5 and cannot be realized due to 1upt. (In Civ3 the player had to place stacks with maybe 20 units in freshly conquered cities to prevent violent uprising, in Civ5 it would be limited to 1 unit independend of city size. And garrisoned units in Civ5 are free of upkeep with the right SP.) If administration costs of a city were to high, it might be better to grant kind of autonomy inside the empire.

Civ5 provides parameters to penalize the player for every city, e.g. :
- UNHAPPINESS_PER_CITY
- UNHAPPINESS_PER_CAPTURED_CITY
- NumCitiesPolicyCostMod
- NumCitiesTechCostMod

These parameters are partly unrealistic.
- New cities do not cause unhappiness per se, only if they lack comfort people are used to.
- Cities who do not have significant science output should not increase Tech costs, e.g. research costs of the US atomic bomb were surely not influenced by number of eskimo villages in Alaska.
(You can use them to stop runaway civs, e.g. set NumCitiesTechCostMod to 25% and you can be almost sure that progress of huge empires will stall and they can be soon dismantled by their smaller neighbours with advanced units. However AI probably won't be able to deal with it and it will hurt AI.)

Progress in Civ is progress in research which is the simple accumulation of science production of all cities over time. With such a simple science/research model it is clear that progress scales with number of well developed cities. An empire with 4 cities cannot compete against an empire with 10, 20 or 100 well-developed cities over time.
There are ways to deal with this by changing rules :
- You can strengthen capitals to reduce the effect of additional cities, e.g. by adding science bonus to the palace (example: +10 science, +100% to science) and rescaling all tech costs. (Centralized Research, realistic)
- You can also limit the number of Libraries, Universities and Research Labs (conflict with National Wonders!) to a certain number (artificial) or increase the upkeep and usefulness to a value where these buildings are no longer affordable in every city (realistic).

If you change rules, you may have to teach AI to use the new rules in the right way, otherwise the game may become to easy for the human player.

Having the game decided at the middle ages is boring
AI winning or human player winning? Which difficulty? Map size?
 
Identity radious: The further from your capital, the less culture and science your cities will produce (there will be exceptions to this rule, based on special buildings / city placement). Keep in mind that culture not only will allow you to buy social policies like on civ 5, but it could also flip cities too..

I like the general idea of an identity radius, i.e. an expansion-limiting mechanism jointly related to cultural identity and capital distance. However reduced output due to distance was already done in Civs 2 and 3 (via the corruption mechanic), and city-flipping due to culture was introduced in Civ 3.

I think that an identity radius should be the underlying determinant of something I call "cultural identity decay": basically, any cities founded beyond a certain distance from the capital experience a gradual but inexorable increase in the percentage of their population which identifies as a generic "Independent" nationality (and a corresponding decrease in the percentage which identifies with the founding civ's nationality). As the percentage of "Independent" population increases, the city first asks to be granted independence, and if this request is refused then it leads to additional temporary unhappiness in the city. As the percentage of city population identifying as Independent continues to increase, the city may experience revolts which last for several turns (like the revolts in Civ4). Once it reaches about 50%, then armed units of Independent nationality may appear in the city's vicinity and try to take it by force. If the Independent rebel units take the city, then that city will automatically become a new civilization, and any cities nearby which subsequently get taken by Independent rebel forces will automatically join that new civilization.

The rate of cultural identity decay in a city would be increased when:
- the founding civilization had authoritarian civics
- the city was located on a different landmass from the founding civilization's capital
- there was at least 10% foreign culture from another civilization present in the city
- the city had excess unhappiness
- the founding civ was in a state of anarchy
- the founding civ had a high tax rate
- the founding civ was losing a war
- the city exceeds a certain size
- nearby cities were experiencing revolts or armed rebellions
- a religion other than the founding civ's state religion is present in the city

The rate of cultural identity decay would be decreased when:
- the founding civ had progressive civics
- the city had substantial excess happiness
- the founding civ was having a golden age
- the city had a high cultural output
- the founding civ's state religion is present in the city

Cultural identity decay can be stopped altogether if:
- both the city and the capital have airports;
- both the city and the capital have broadcast towers; or
- a Forbidden Palace is built in or near the city
 
The rate of cultural identity decay in a city would be increased when:
...
- the city was located on a different landmass from the founding civilization's capital

I remember a game in Civ4 where I played Japan on a TSL world map and the game interpreted Japan as a 1-city-continent. It was not possible to found or conquer cities in asia without getting a very high colony-maintenance for every city which left only 2 possibilities : quit game or play OCC.

Identity radious: The further from your capital, the less culture and science your cities will produce

If you define such a "radius", you have to keep in mind that Civ supports different map sizes and scenarios, so the "radius" should not be a constant value but rather scale properly with map size / number of civs in game / scenario.
 
All this goes back to "do i want to play a specific way in order to win" ? Or have I really several equal ways of playing, even in highest difficulty levels ?

I think that the best thing is to have a game with a mechanic that allows several routes and strategies in order to win, rather than a very narrow, defined path to victory. This way, the game can appeal to several playstyles (warmongers, tall players, wide players, min maxers, etc) and offer a great variety of scenarios and thus, high replayability (I resented BE due to how much same-y every game was).
 
Identity radius :
The further from your capital, the less culture and science your cities will produce

There are different ways to determine the "distance" between the capital and a city X :
- Mathematically you can subtract coordinates and get the absolute value of the resulting vector which is equivalent to air-line-distance between capital and city X. This method is easy to implement but completely ignores barriers, infrastructure, etc.
- A more historically way to determine distance is to measure the shortest time a person (or a message) needs to travel from the capital to the city X with a common vehicle available at that time, e.g. by foot, horse or horse-wagon, ship, train, car, air-plane, (telegraph, internet). The travel-duration is usually influenced by available infrastructure as streets, railways, ports or air-ports and will change during game.
(Example : London - New York by early sailing-ship : ca. 2-3 months, by Concorde (air-plane) 3-4h, by Skype : 10 sec (?))
So connecting a city to your capital's road/infrastructure-network should reduce the "distance".
 
Thing is, the beauty of expansion limiting mechanism is that it makes sense both from a gameplay and an historic point of view.

From a gameplay perspective, snowballing is bad for it makes games unfun and predictable. Having the game decided at the middle ages is boring, and being able to keep expanding in the late game keeps it interesting, as the race for land can keep being present.

Nothing in Civ 5 ever stopped players from having iterated competitions where they play for an adjusted scoring of games from different starting eras. If Rome just wrecks everyone in Medieval, maybe you load up a Medieval start and assume Rome eventually fell apart, players pick up the new starting positions and play again.

Deciding the game when it is decided is -necessary-, it's the game failing to end when it is over which is the problem and boring beyond belief. An arbitrary game might be able to be designed to have a necessary length, but a 4X game just can't - someone can take all the bananas as fast as his skill will let him, and being 4X means the bananas are up for grabs. You cannot design out of that. You cannot design out of that. Pacing controls, changing costs, diminishing returns... you can't transmute the fact.

This is the pivotal issue, I conclude from this thread so far, for going for strategy design vs. a world simulator. In the world, something made empires expand. Something also makes those empires fracture and cease to be, and literally new peoples arise from the old. A strategy game cannot track the transformation of the player's goal through something like that. The Roman empire lost, in history. Or they won, the strategy game, and it should have ended there. Or they lost - Romans, the greatest empire since China - they lost, and no one "should" have done what they did do, and simulation/strategy is proved an insoluble duality.​

Snowballing is a symptom. It almost always diagnoses overcentralized strategy. But it's not 'the' problem. It is a -condition- for a game about building things and rewarding building things.

From a historic perspective, history is chockfull of empires that overexpanded too fast and crumbled in a matter of decades (Alexander the Great, the Mongols, etc) and it shows that successful empires needed a hefty dose of good administration and development in order to mantain their conquests (Rome, England, etc). Conquest without good rule cannot hold for long.

A good intention, but the thing is, aiming for realism, as you elaborate, will end up with non realism, since the strategic pressures not to have the empire collapse will mean people won't go building the huge empires. I'm not so good at strategy but I've seen the makings of success - a system where you invest a lot, very varefully, to get a reward, will be played off not just against the cost itself, but the complexity in the face of an opponent who is really clever and will try to confuse you. A strategy with a high execution requirement will indeed be chosen if the returns are there, but if that 'execution' is interplay with the adversary and not just your controller/interface, then every unit of complexity in it is a weakness in the bottom line. It just doesn't hold up. Consistency and reliability, plus mad skillz, wins the day.


There are multiple arguments in this thread and at the least, I think it's necessary to be clear when one is arguing about history vs. strategy, or is assuming one of those norms to evaluate something else. Things will be confused really fast if liberties are taken with the word 'should' and somebody misjudges someone else's commitments.
 
I think that the best thing is to have a game with a mechanic that allows several routes and strategies in order to win, rather than a very narrow, defined path to victory. This way, the game can appeal to several playstyles (warmongers, tall players, wide players, min maxers, etc) and offer a great variety of scenarios and thus, high replayability (I resented BE due to how much same-y every game was).

I think that indeed, in the specific case of Civ, one should be able to define how it wants to play since the beginning, even though there still must be room for adaptation in some other chapters.

It has been the very beginning of most of the complaints regarding most of the iterations of the series.
 
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