Bringing Balance to... (series of Articles)

MadDjinn

Deity
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
4,554
Hey all,

I've gone and written a few posts on my blog related to bring balance back to the game. Mostly, this is about having the ability to choose to go 'wide'/expansionist vs. going 'tall'. At the moment, Civ 5 is very much a 'wide+semi tall' game that pretty much wiped out any semblance of having a 'tall' empire be able to compete.

This has been for many reasons:
1) the fact that wide empires get higher populations, more tiles to work, more luxuries and more strategic resources.
2) There are very few bonuses for a high pop city vs. a spam of semi-tall cities
3) there's little to no 'specialist' economy
4) Social Policy choices are very simple (Ie, top strategy is to use Liberty and parts of Rationalism/Freedom in almost every circumstance; except Culture, and even then, it's only Rationalism that's slightly less favoured)
5) The happiness system got Borken in the latest patches. It's now mostly 'every city repeatable' global happiness based, so Tall is not a good choice, since you can just repeat building each +happiness in every city, combating the per city unhappiness.

and I'm sure there's other issues.

So, I decided to write a few thoughts down on how to bring balance back to the game.

I'll write even more on other sections not listed here, as time permits.

First though, let's take a shot at the happiness system, which now lets wide dominate over tall.

Happiness System

Next, let's take a look at the Social Policies and a few Wonders.
Social Policies and Wonders

The Trading System needs a rework.
Looking at Diplomacy, War and City States.

Moving on to Promotions, Upgrades, Combat and Units.

The whole concept change will make a lot of sense when taken as a whole, rather than in parts.
 
Edit: At work so I can't read the link provided, I'll read it at home and provide my comments.

Below are my thoughts on what you've posted.



Let me preface by saying as a history centric player, I've always been a little dubious about 'X city challenges' ; it's nice to show you can exploit the game mechanics to run amazing psudo empires , but empires by definition is a wide reaching civilization.

That said, people like to play tall, so I'll give me 2 cents.

1) I can't see how tall empires should have comparable access to lux/resources as wide ones?
2) Perphas include bonuses that is dependent on city size.
- cities over size 20* gets a bonus multiplier applied. Say Size 30 cities will have 30/20 = 1.5x the gold/production. (1.5 is just an arbitrary formale I picked, it can be 3x or 1.2 or whatever)
3) RE: specialist economy - Make certain buildings (i'm thinking the national wonder line) support free (no food/unhappiness) specialists. I believe they already scale wonder hammer costs of national wonders by empire size, but they can also add

'Wall Street' or alteratively 'The Bourse' (commercial national wonder- required national treasury/banks in all cities) 3x 'free specialist slots'
'Google' (scientific national wonder - required oxford uni & public schools in all cities) 3x free specialist slots
Hollywood (cultural national wonder - requires Hermitage and Museums in all cities) 3x 'free specialist slots'


4) Social Policies- Give something like the Indian UA as a SP bonus (obviously India's UA may need to be adjusted to account for this) Alternatively, Unhappines reduction could be tied to cities. 1 or 1 cities = 30% unhappiness 2 cities increases this marginal and it goes up an exponential curve dependent on map size where you're at 'full unhappiness' (what we experience now) once you hit between 2-4cities (puppets includes)

This is also where I think the commerial SP can be buffed, as the only reasonable smallish (by land size) empire I can feel is realistic is a commercial power. For example all the buffs can start with some high base value that goes down by either a fixed or exponential amount until you hit a base cap. ie: gold bonus on capital for commercial opener could start at 100% or 200% and decreases capping at 25% on wide empires. Note that city counts here will include puppets.


5) This is tricky. Happiness was difficult to balance for wide empires and I think they've just balanced it out now. Basically how FAST one can expand will be limited by your happiness, so it forces pauses and consolidation and then waiting until puppets can get up their happiness buildings. But maintaining your existing 'large' empire and only accounting for growth is much easier to manage now than it was before because you can cycle in happiness buildings and do selective annexations to account for natural growth.

The only reasonable bonus I can think of is a small empire happiness bonus. Again scalable by empire size.

Food bonus - To support a tall empire, there needs to be a way to get extra food. One idea is to add in Supermarket as a national wonder
but have its cost scale in such a way, it would be impractical for wide empires to build, or tie it to granaries/hospitals built AND scale the cost. but I suspect mort semi wide empires would have granaries and hospitals comes way too late in the game.
 
Let me preface by saying as a history centric player, I've always been a little dubious about 'X city challenges' ; it's nice to show you can exploit the game mechanics to run amazing psudo empires , but empires by definition is a wide reaching civilization.

That said, people like to play tall, so I'll give me 2 cents.

1) I can't see how tall empires should have comparable access to lux/resources as wide ones?
2) Perphas include bonuses that is dependent on city size.
- cities over size 20* gets a bonus multiplier applied. Say Size 30 cities will have 30/20 = 1.5x the gold/production. (1.5 is just an arbitrary formale I picked, it can be 3x or 1.2 or whatever)
3) RE: specialist economy - Make certain buildings (i'm thinking the national wonder line) support free (no food/unhappiness) specialists. I believe they already scale wonder hammer costs by size, but they can also add

'Wall Street' or alteratively 'The Bourse' (commercial national wonder- required national treasury/banks in all cities) 3x 'free specialist slots'
'Google' (scientific national wonder - required oxford uni & public schools in all cities) 3x free specialist slots
Hollywood (cultural national wonder - requires Hermitage and Museums in all cities) 3x 'free specialist slots'


4) Social Policies- Give something like the Indian UA as a SP bonus (obviously India's UA may need to be adjusted to account for this) Unhappines reduction could be tied to cities. 1 or 1 cities = 30% unhappiness 2 cities increases this marginal and it goes up an exponential curve dependent on map size where you're at 'full unhappiness' (what we experience now) .

This is also where I think the commerial SP can be buffed, as the only reasonable smallish (by land size) empire I can feel is realistic is a commercial power. For example all the buffs can start with some high base value that goes down by either a fixed or exponential amount until you hit a base cap. ie: gold bonus on capital could start at 100% or 200% on the opener can caps at 25% on wide empires. Note that cities here will include puppets.


5) This is tricky. Happiness was difficult to balance for wide empires and I think they've just balanced it out now. Basically how FAST one can expand will be limited by your happiness, so it forces pauses and consolidation and then waiting until puppets can get up their happiness buildings.

The only reasonable bonus I can think of is a small empire happiness bonus. Again scalable by empire size.

Food bonus - To suppor a tall empire, there needs to be a way to get extra food. One idea is to add in Supermarket a national wonder
but have its cost scale in such a way, it would be impractical for wide empires to build, or tie it to granaries/hospitals built AND scale the cost. but I suspect more semi wide empires would have granaries and hospitals comes way too late in the game.

Tall vs. wide shouldn't be 'equal', I agree with that. But 'balance' means that there's some way that tall is better than wide (aside from social Policies) and there are other ways that wide is better than tall.

Both approaches should be vaguely competitive for the victory conditions. Though wide is obviously better for Diplomacy and Domination, while Tall seems only good for culture. Science at this point leans to 'semi-wide' where you set up a cascade of GSs, then pop your way to Future Era.

Tall won't get access to as many tiles (to be worked), luxuries or strategic resources. But there might be ways to allow it to compete. A 64 pop city should be a beast in comparison to eight 8 pop cities. But it isn't, except a little in mid game production, but the eight 8 pop cities can just buy their way through AND will have far more happiness available. (due to repeatable/city global happiness) Great People production in the eight cities will 'cascade' to eight GP far sooner than a single city.

It's no contest at this point.

But right now, I've only gotten into balancing the happiness part of the mechanics. In future posts, I'll start covering ways for a 'tall' city to compete with 'wide' cities. Things will start making more sense at that point.

I also agree on Commerce. In my posts, I've bumped up Protectionism to +2 happiness/lux. It's not too much, and there's future changes, unrelated to happiness coming.

Autocracy and Order also need some fixing, so that warmongers want Autocracy and Order is great for 'wide' empires. As is, 3 specialists using Democracy = 2 happiness. (due to a ceiling being used rather than a floor) So you can have your 3 science specialists (University/Public school) and get more happiness than Order gives you. Why waste the time on Order then? (GS popping >>>>>>> Order's factory boost)
 
I want to mention I edited my post after you replied to point out I can't read your blog at work, so will check it out at home.

I didn't want to appear to simply jump in with my own ideas.

Sorry about that.
 
Ok, regarding your suggestion on your blog here's my take:

1) Adjusted Unhappiness vs. Population total – Capping
Agreed to Keep local happiness truly local regardless of modifiers that reduce unhappiness.

Reducing Repeatable Global Happiness – Social Policies
Agreed regarding Keeping temples/monuments happiness local and not allowing sprawling 5-10 pop sized puppet empires.

Adjusting the ‘Global’ Happiness plan
aka >Rejigging social policies

Here's my issue. Piety is attractive because it comes fairly early and has a frontloaded and scaleable happiness AND gold bonus. That makes it an extremely dynamic empire building. 10% gold out from cities w/ Temples is frighteningly more powerful than anything in the commerce tree.

So if Liberty is the 'default' starter kit for a Civ, and tradition leads tall. Let's make Honor it's wide counterpart. So you have people dabbling in liberty/tradition or liberty/honor right off the bat.

To make honor palatable, the opener needs a boost. Instead of culture from barbarian kills, it should give you +1 culture from your first six military units.

Discipline adds walls in your first 4 cities, in addition to the current stats.
Military Caste - Drop the garrison stuff, rather, give an additional 1 culture per city and 1 local happiness per city.

Finisher - first eight units free / -5% happiness in puppet cities.

The way I see it, the policies can be set up as follows and you'll note the current limitations doesn't allow for it. Obviously, there will need to be further adjusmtnets to each policy tree. But you'll see choices being made per stage for a mix of empire types with min/max possible. It doesn't have to use the setup per below, but I hope below illustrates my point on how players can steer and branch their empires into specialities.

Principles
Liberty > Tradition
Liberty > Honor

Organization
+Pious or
+Rational

Economy
+Commercial or
+Order

Supercharging
+Freedom (from tradition route) Tall ultimate
+Autocracy (from honor route) Wide ultimate

Conquering Cities – Rebellious Populations
I like the flat unhappiness penalty from war weariness rather than applying full unhappiness from captured cities.

But i DO NOT like rebellions from captured cities. Perhaps there can be a mechanism where unhappiness scales up per successive capture cities with no interruption.

Improving Puppet AI

The gold focus is pretty terrible, and it's really an amended gold focus because it also likes to build the whole defensive line of buildings and forgo growth and even gold.

If improving is too much work, I don't think it will be OP to allow players to give 'focus' instructions to their puppets.

Nuking Puppet cities to free up happiness
I'd suggest far worse, but your happiness penalty seems reasonable
 
Adjusting the ‘Global’ Happiness plan
aka >Rejigging social policies

Here's my issue. Piety is attractive because it comes fairly early and has a frontloaded and scaleable happiness AND gold bonus. That makes it an extremely dynamic empire building. 10% gold out from cities w/ Temples is frighteningly more powerful than anything in the commerce tree.

So if Liberty is the 'default' starter kit for a Civ, and tradition leads tall. Let's make Honor it's wide counterpart. So you have people dabbling in liberty/tradition or liberty/honor right off the bat.

To make honor palatable, the opener needs a boost. Instead of culture from barbarian kills, it should give you +1 culture from your first six military units.

Discipline adds walls in your first 4 cities, in addition to the current stats.
Military Caste - Drop the garrison stuff, rather, give an additional 1 culture per city and 1 local happiness per city.

Finisher - first eight units free / -5% happiness in puppet cities.

Well, Liberty is about expansion (it can be simple expansion, or very wide) since 4 of the policies there directly support a per city bonus. (Representation is technically 'per city' give the reduction's effect, per city)

Honour is more about early aggression, which happens to lead to more cities. (or not if you just burn everything down and extort the AI for all it's lux/gold)

Technically, parts of tradition are 'wide' as well, but it's less effective in the early game for it, which is why Liberty is considered more powerful. (oh, and there's that free GP thing too)

I'm fine with how they've updated honour, happiness wise, though there's some changes I'd like to see as well. You can farm barbs for culture and get though Honour faster than you could go though Liberty or Tradition. If you're lucky and the hut is on a border of a City State, you get 12 influence with that CS every once in awhile. (it usually take ~4 spawns to put you near 30 influence long enough to spend less gold to be allies)

Bumping Protectionism is my way of adding a bit more happiness to the trading system, which needs it's own fix. No worries though, I'm not done with the rest of the changes that might be needed to make it all work.

The way I see it, the policies can be set up as follows and you'll note the current limitations doesn't allow for it. Obviously, there will need to be further adjusmtnets to each policy tree. But you'll see choices being made per stage for a mix of empire types with min/max possible. It doesn't have to use the setup per below, but I hope below illustrates my point on how players can steer and branch their empires into specialities.

Principles
Liberty > Tradition
Liberty > Honor

Organization
+Pious or
+Rational

Economy
+Commercial or
+Order

Supercharging
+Freedom (from tradition route) Tall ultimate
+Autocracy (from honor route) Wide ultimate

Order is technically the 'wide ultimate', peacefully. (mostly) Autocracy gives a boost to your military and allows mass annexations eventually, but at a cost of peaceful boosts. (and well, by the time you get there, it's all over anyways, so it won't matter)

I'm definitely considering changes to when these trees open. Industrial is a very very long time for a warmonger to wait before getting the ability to fight more. If you fought through most of the early game, then it's likely 'too late' as you've taken what few policies you could already. The culture costs for it showing up that late are tremendous. (especially if you annexed cities already)

The real problem is that Freedom is supposed to be 'tall' or 'culture' wrt the tree's options. But due to a rounding error, and the fact that mass GS spam is the way to go, taking 1-3 policies in it is more beneficial than Order and Autocracy. (If you have the food and happiness, you take the opener; else you work towards democracy) With only 3 specialists, you're saving 2 happiness. Given that the Uni/Public School slots are the most effective science output you have, it's no wonder everyone wants to use it. (mixed with going Rationalism for the Full RA values/two free techs/boosted specialists and TP spam science)

I'll try to address that as well. (the specialist food bonus should be at the opener, since it's the least powerful of the 3 specialist boost)

Conquering Cities – Rebellious Populations
I like the flat unhappiness penalty from war weariness rather than applying full unhappiness from captured cities.

But i DO NOT like rebellions from captured cities. Perhaps there can be a mechanism where unhappiness scales up per successive capture cities with no interruption.

I didn't think too many people would like it. :) What I'm trying to do, though, with the rebels is counter balance the current happiness hit you take. It makes some sense, and should be fairly easy to code given there's already a rebellion setup at -20 happiness. If you're fighting your way through an AI, it shouldn't be that hard to kill off a few rebels along the way.

I've also considered an idea where, depending on if you take Order, Autocracy or Freedom, (or none) the rebellions have different effects. So 'free' societies are likely to rebel more vs. an Autocrat taking over, vs. an Orderly transfer between two 'Order' based societies. And so forth. It'd start becoming it's own mechanic, but might add some flavour to the game. (and well, there's always that eventual expansion on the concept)

But for now, I'm working within the rule set that is in the game. (give or take)
 
I really like the Rebellion Idea (although I might simplify and boost them (Raze=2 per turn, Annex=1 per turn, Puppet=50% per turn... or Puppet/Annex=1 per turn if the "Annex to start" option is eliminated)... and when Razing a city, it should ADD turns of resistance rather than decreasing them. (+5 turns of resistance for every turn you spend razing the city, even if the resistance had ended before.)

I think the tall v. wide issue is in the "spending" of global happiness... it can be spent 2 ways
1. add a pop onto an existing city above the 'local' limit... (requires food as well)

2.build a new city and raise it to the 'local' limit...(requires turns of production)

#2 basically costs 3 :( (modified by Social Policies) and gives X pop (2 with Colluseums, +2 with Organized Religion+temples if they were made purely local, etc.)

#1 basically costs 1 :( for 1 pop (unless Monarchy, Democracy, or Indian UA)

Currently Happiness buildings help #2... I think the change that should be done is that Mainline Happiness buildings (Colusseum, Theatre, Stadium) should be helping #1... ir
Colluseum -30% unhappiness (70%)
Theatre -30% unhappiness (40%)
Stadium -30% unhappiness (10%)

(Monarchy, Democracy, and Indian UA would stay multiplicative)
... now this is assuming that the Other buildings (Circuses, Stoneworks, Organized Religion Temples, etc.) have been modified so that "local" happiness is capped by "local" Unhappiness rather than local population.

This way If you have a city with a Colluseum in it you are getting 1.4 pop per :(
And a new Meritocratic city with a Organized Religion+a Colluseum gets 2.8 pop per 2 :( about the same rate.

But if you got Monarchy, growth in the Capital would be 2 pop per :( (neglecting buildings since both would have the early reducers)
So a New city would need to have 6 in happy buildings (Circuses, Stoneworks, Professional Armies, etc.) to pay off.

So once you had Monarchy the only reason to build other cities would be 1. Food costs, 2. get the territory
 
unfortunately, %reductions don't help quite as much. In the low pop period of a new city, 30% doesn't help much. But once it reaches 10 pop, it'll be the exact same.

That is -

a Colisseum at 30% is effectively 3 unhappiness removed for every 10 pop. It's relatively cheap, so every wide city can 'get' 3 happiness per 10 pop city it gets. Plant 10 ten pop cities and you get the same happiness back from it as a 100 pop city. (of course, you're paying 10x the coliseum costs, but the trade route income more than pays for that)

It does mean that 'wide' empires take longer to get 'happiness' equivalent though.

Though, if it were multiplicative (and it'd have to be) with Monarchy/etc, then a Capital would only get 30% of 50% reduction in happiness. (Ghandi would get 30% of 25%, but that's his problem) Meaning the 10 ten pop cities actually gain more from the reduction than the 100 pop capital with monarchy.

Balancing out the happiness system to allow 'tall' and 'wide' is one thing, but there's no realistic way to prevent wide from gaining more out of it, due to the sheer pop values it can produce in comparison to a few 'tall' cities.
 
RE: Rebel mechanic > Reminds me of partisans from Civ2 days. Yes, human players can deal with it, but I can see it being somewhat annoying to essentially have to kill X units extra on top of what you're already doing. It could 'slow down' the total collapse of Civs that I've talked about due to high puppet ratios/AI not annexing leaving literally a small core of cities to carry their empire.

That said I'm a little dubious about the game creating things form thin air, so perhaps rebels can simply be units dropped based on the citizens lost during a takeover.

Things like social policies or rather, oppositional policies can also affect this. If you both have piety, rebel factions will be smaller than if you have a piety civ taking over a rational one. Or a 'freedom' civ taking over an autocratic one there may be more civ'fanatical' resistance ;)

But we need a rational 'oppositional'/mutually exclusive specialized SP system where policies both oppositional but also superchage certain things, rather than generic grab bag of happiness and culture. Oneof the things I'm not happy about the current SP system is it works more like a buffet with arbitrary things blocked off. This is why I sketched out the policy path the way I did with the industrial age SP surpercharging ancient era SPs.

A viable tall bonus might be pop growth of 2-3 pop at a time instead of 1 buried deep in a specialized SP branch. Or have a happiness mechanic that drops off as population grows so that the marginall unhappiness of adding a new population in a city is not a fixed amount but an ever decreasing one.

Lastly, while rebels work well with large cities and the flat bonus works well for that, it's probably a wash when taking smaller cities, and those cities go out of revolt fairly quickly; so we shouldn't create a mechanic that's too onerous on player going wide just because we think a flat unhappiness mechanic is a 'good deal' (under your proposal, wide empires will already be losing a ton of happiness).

I think the answer to tall empires is what I suggested previously > high tiered super buildings and new tier of national wonders / free specialists on national wonders / specialization on the SP tree to avoid the buffet effect and a way to boost early growth for those who want to go tall, but make it a discrete choice so that wide empires can't simply dabble and get those benefits too.

Generally my feeling is we shouldn't be penalizing players for playing the way they do now, and semi tall/wide empires are very nice economic machines. But rather we should suggest things be added to encourage specialized play to go all out on a few very large cities and conversely have a happiness mechanic to support a truly wide empire, wider than what most semi-till/wide players can get. Because I don't think there's imbalance perse, but simply a lack of good discrete choices. As you noted semi-tall/wide empires are the way to go. And maybe that will be the stock empire for Civ5, and I have no problems with that.
 
unfortunately, %reductions don't help quite as much. In the low pop period of a new city, 30% doesn't help much. But once it reaches 10 pop, it'll be the exact same.

That is -

a Colisseum at 30% is effectively 3 unhappiness removed for every 10 pop. It's relatively cheap, so every wide city can 'get' 3 happiness per 10 pop city it gets. Plant 10 ten pop cities and you get the same happiness back from it as a 100 pop city. (of course, you're paying 10x the coliseum costs, but the trade route income more than pays for that)

It does mean that 'wide' empires take longer to get 'happiness' equivalent though.

Though, if it were multiplicative (and it'd have to be) with Monarchy/etc, then a Capital would only get 30% of 50% reduction in happiness. (Ghandi would get 30% of 25%, but that's his problem) Meaning the 10 ten pop cities actually gain more from the reduction than the 100 pop capital with monarchy.

Balancing out the happiness system to allow 'tall' and 'wide' is one thing, but there's no realistic way to prevent wide from gaining more out of it, due to the sheer pop values it can produce in comparison to a few 'tall' cities.

The only reasons wide gets more pop is
1. Happiness per city > Unhappiness per city (although the unhappiness is instant, the happiness takes investment)
2. Drastically increasing food costs

Changing colusseums to a % basis would change #1... the only +Happiness per city would be Circuses/Stoneworks, Social policy buildings, Meritocracy, Order, and Warrior caste Garissons,

In that case, you would need Organized Religion+Meritocracy for cities to break even. (and they could change those Social Policies as well Temples/Universities give -20% unhappiness instead of +1 :) )

#2 is the other BIG factor. Tall would be greater than wide if you Leveled out the food costs even more (drop the exponent to 1.1 and increase the base from 15 to 25) So that you could actually Get a pop 100 capital before turn 500.
 
"Wide" is really much better now compared to tall.

Agree with almost all suggestions of MadDjinn. So long explanation for such obvious things though. :)

Another change that will make happiness even more balanced is to increase unhap/city and hap/lux.

Right now you settle cities and they GIVE you happiness, even if there is no luxury resources. Or at least these cities cost you nothing. (meritocracy, monument, temple, colisseum and theatre allow you to have 5 pop city 'for free' in terms of happiness; 3-5TPs make this city pay maintenance for itself; and even culture will not be harmed if your civ produces less than 40-80 culture per turn)

With MadDjinn's changes there will be at least 2unhap/city, but you still can settle city anywhere.
Even if there is nothing but plains, at cost of 2hap you can easily have 7pop city = 20s and 3-7g (maintenance cost included: col, the, mon, tem, lib, uni, gra). If you invest these 2hap in ultra scientific city, you can have only 12s (24s if in capital with monarchy, but it will take very long).
That means that having a lot of cities is still better.

Unhappiness from cities should be higher: 5. And 7 hap/lux as well to balance it out. That will encourage to think carefully where you want to place a city, because basically it'll be 1city/lux. Otherwise its too costly to place "just a city" in random location.


I think that is all about happiness, but as you all understand balancing tall/wide is not only about happiness. Another very important element is city specialization:

In Civ V there can be little done in terms of specialization of cities. First, national wonders that give % bonuses are rare and too weak. Second, you can have (and usually have) all this bonuses in one city (capital). Third, having all standard buildings in all cities brings you more benefit than you spend for maintenance -> just build everything.

There is tiny part of specialization because of production order and few wonders/policies, and it already makes bigger cities more appealing to invest happiness to. 1pop in city with lib,uni and NC is almost 3 times better than in city without all these buildings. But eventually (and very soon) second city will have lib and uni as well and as time goes the difference becomes slighter and slighter. In the end you have only 20% more effective production of science in specialized city than in any other. And what is more important, any city, even the smallest ones, are able to compete with scientific oriented in science/pop productivity, but they grow faster. All cities are generic, there is no point not to build scientific/gold/happiness/etc buildings in them, because maintenance is very insignificant compared to benefits you get.

For example:
.................Benefit/builing...Cumulative benefit
Colosseum. - 1g -> 2pop... 1g -> 2 pop = 2s = 2.5g = 2 p
Theatre..... - 2g -> 3pop... 3g -> 5 pop = 5s = 7.5g = 5 p
Stadium.... - 3g -> 4pop... 6g -> 9 pop = 9s= 13.5g = 9p

Gold is assuming you have road, and production is assuming we have on average plains with farms (2f, 1p tile), that are not so great. Usually cities have much more better tiles with rivers or resources for example.

We have even more gold with happiness buildings, and other very good things as science and production (both can be even bigger with scientific and production buildings)

(I have other calculations but they are for previous patch. things didnt change significantly though)


That is why buffing tall empires requires deeper specialization and this objective breaks in two parts:

1) raise efficiency/pop in tall cities compared to small cities.

2) discourage building everything in all cities so that cities wouldnt be absolutely the same.


1) It's a must if you want to make "wait twice longer but get more efficient citizen"(tall) or "growth is faster, but effectiveness per citizen is lower"(wide) choices comparable.
2 ways how to implement this:
- make all NWs give +100%modifier and no more than 2NW per city. That is just as in CivIV. And it worked there quite well.
- allow GPs build buildings that add +50%modifier in city (up to 2 times=+100%). That will both increase options you can use GP for, and make GMs and GAs more useful.

2) Wide empire has such negative factor as dublicating of buildings. You have to build 4 libraries if you have four 5-pop cities, but only 1 lib if one 20-pop. Theoretically that is significant backdraw, but actually four such cities have bigger potential to growth and easily generate much more gold than one huge city. All cities appear to be the same, you just change build order occasionly. Relatively small 10-pop city can easily generate 30g to pay for maintenance of all necessary buildings.

To add "whether to build or not" layer of decisions (to current "in what order") we need to increase maintenance costs:

- first 5 buildings cost as now, next 5 cost +1gpt, next 5 buildings another +1gpt and so on
- happiness buildings give +1h more, cost +3gpt more (otherwise these buildings are no brainer for any city, because this happiness gives back gold you lose for maintenance and also get more gold, science and production)
- market/bank/stock exchange should have maintenance too: 1/2/3. Market doesnt give +2gold. Stock increases gold by 50%. (these buildings shouldnt be in all cities: in this case buildings will be profitable only if city produces at least 4/6/6 gold)
- buildings without maintenance will have 1g maintenance.

These increases in costs will allow specialization not only by building buildings, NWs or GPs, but also by NOT building (if other cities do not have some buildings, cities with them already well specialized).

Cities will be clearly specialized.
You can have 2 cities: one is heavily science oriented, other is gold oriented. Or you can have 2smaller gold oriented city, one production oriented, and 3 science oriented. And so on.

Of course this favours taller empires (we are trying to buff them, right?), but wide empires will also be able to compete, small cities will just have small amount of buildings.


That is still not all changes to be done: there are a lot of other. Like balancing GPs (if we want to improve use of specialists GSs shouldnt be that OP), and increase of cost of GP as number of cities increases. And some minor changes like tradition finisher give +33%growth instead of +2f+15% growth and so on.
 
Thoughts:

I generally like the changes proposed. I think it's a little too preooccupied with problems that only occur at higher diff settings, but the general principles are sound.

I think the GP finisher should be moved to Tradition. Right now it's used for popping GE and the Wonder, and that's more suited to Tradition's style, and Specialist Economies are more thematically in line with Tall Empires anyway.

Without the GP finisher, a possible finisher for Liberty is additional per-city happiness. That's what the tree is for, so reducing per-city happiness to 0 should be plausible if you finish the Liberty Tree and combine it with either Commerce or Order later on.
 
Hey all,

I've gone and written a few posts on my blog related to bring balance back to the game. Mostly, this is about having the ability to choose to go 'wide'/expansionist vs. going 'tall'. At the moment, Civ 5 is very much a 'wide+semi tall' game that pretty much wiped out any semblance of having a 'tall' empire be able to compete.
I disagree. Civ5 doesn't favour wide empires too much. ICS isn't viable, and it's usually better to avoid founding new cities since Renaissance.

The challenge is getting enough happiness to REX effectively.
 
I disagree. Civ5 doesn't favour wide empires too much. ICS isn't viable, and it's usually better to avoid founding new cities since Renaissance.

The challenge is getting enough happiness to REX effectively.

?? :crazyeye:

There's plenty of happiness to go around. All you need are a few social policies that give you repeatable global happiness in every city and you can therefore remove the unhappiness/city in every city, very easily. Using Organized Religion, you can do this from Classical onwards.
 
Would a possible boost to tall empires be from making the highest tier gold/science/culture buildings give a percentage bonus of population **squared**.

For example:public school gives +50% science of population squared

10 population gives 0.5 * 10*10 = +50 science
15 population gives 0.5 * 15*15 = +112.5 science
20 population gives 0.5*20*20 = +200 science

Put large maintenance costs on the top tier buildings and you will need a specialist gold city to pay for them (or a national treasury in a OCC game with a limit of two national wonders per city).
 
I would say definitely remove all "lump sum for per turn" deals. Resources/GPT should only be traded for resources/GPT.

Solving this problem on the top level is not only easier, but works well. To me this solution is just as obvious as not allowing ROP-rape.

A human player never pays lump sum for per turn items, so why should the AI?
 
Top Bottom