Fixing Magical Maritime Food (ala Sullla)

How to fix "Magical Maritime Food"

The problem:

By befriending/allying with maritime city states, you can get a bunch of free food per turn in each city. That allows you to 1) not build any farms, and instead spam trading posts and 2) build a bunch of cities everywhere without regards to food resources (infinite city sprawl, or ICS). ICS was prevelant in civ III, fixed in civ IV, and now is back for civ V, partly due to maritime food, partly due to no corruption or maintenance costs that scale with number of cities. ICS makes the game play out very mechanically, the landscape is very homogeneous (trade posts everywhere) and, I feel, is somewhat soul crushing. Check out some of Sullla's civ V walkthroughs or the succession game he is playing at the moment for examples.

The Fix:

Instead of cheesely nerfing maritime city states, I suggest an overhaul of the city state system. Instead of getting food/units/culture from city states, let friendly or allied city states benefit players in the same way a puppet city benefits players. You would get some science/gold/culture each turn from the city state. How much depends on friends/allies, and on the era. Military units could be coopted (ie. come under command of the player) from allied city states as long as the player was at war with another player. After the war the units would return to their home city state by normal movement rules.

To retain the character of the three city state types, they would focus on different things. Maritime would focus on growth and population, and build accordingly. An allied player would derive more science from these types of cities because of higher population. Militaristic city states would have more/better units for the player to coopt. Cultured city states would focus on cultural buildings and thus give more culture to the player than the other two types.

The Result:

The player would once again have to be careful in choosing city sites, to balance food, production and gold. An additional small corruption penalty, scaling with number of cities, would probably bring the game even closer to being balanced. Interesting play would commence with city states' units in times of conflict.

What does everyone think? Good idea?

So Maritime City-States would produce more unhappiness, Cultural city-states would produce more building maintenance, and militaristic city-states would pretty much do what they're already doing.

The reason they give significant bonuses is to encourage competition for them and discourage simply annexing them. The problem isn't the system, it's the overpoweredness of one type.

The simplest way to balance the maritime abuse would be to tie the bonuses into buildings and infrastructure, so a granary gives an extra +1 food if you've a maritime ally for example, and stop/reduce the bonuses from multiple maritime states

I agree that some element of balance is probably the best solution to the Maritime City State issues. But there is another approach that could work just as well I imagine.

I would doubt anyone relies on Maritime City States in multi-player games. When your entire strategy can be significantly hampered by your enemy spending some gold, it seems like a tenuous strategy. If the AI was programmed to recognize the strategy and counteract it, it would actually go a long way toward reigning it in. Sure you could attempt to use the strategy, but if your enemy notices you are reliant (through scouting and city-state ally info) they go out of their way to shut the strategy down.

Make Maritime cities a percentage increase to food instead of a static bonus.

BubbaYeti said:

The Fix:

Instead of cheesely nerfing maritime city states, I suggest an overhaul of the city state system. Instead of getting food/units/culture from city states, let friendly or allied city states benefit players in the same way a puppet city benefits players.

Click to expand...

Wait... so why don't I just attack and puppet them instead?

Make maritime city states give trade, not food.
Or just nerf how much food they give.

Maritime states are fine as is, the AI just needs to be tweaked so that they go after them more. I recently had the (dis)pleasure of being reliant on city state bonuses to support my empire and running into an AI that pays more attention to city states than most (Elizabeth). I was fighting a war, she had just shown up in a caravel at my continent with a metric buttload of gold to spend, and suddenly my cities are starving because the maritime states all want to be HER ally now. I was forced to adapt, and I'm a bit more hesitant to rely on the city states so much. When the AI is patched so that everybody is like Liz, relying on maritime states will require a lot more money and politicking.

What needs to be done is to improve the other city states so they are competitive with maritime states. What I'd like is for the culture from the cultural city states is spread to multiple cities, like the food from the maritimes. For the military states, it would be nice if you had the option to have the units show up in your capital instead of at the state that's giving it to you. After all, you can gift a unit to a city state anywhere in the world in 3 turns, why can't they do the same for you?

Badtz Maru said:

Maritime states are fine as is, the AI just needs to be tweaked so that they go after them more. I recently had the (dis)pleasure of being reliant on city state bonuses to support my empire and running into an AI that pays more attention to city states than most (Elizabeth). I was fighting a war, she had just shown up in a caravel at my continent with a metric buttload of gold to spend, and suddenly my cities are starving because the maritime states all want to be HER ally now. I was forced to adapt, and I'm a bit more hesitant to rely on the city states so much. When the AI is patched so that everybody is like Liz, relying on maritime states will require a lot more money and politicking.

Click to expand...

This is a great example of the exact point I made earlier. People who rely on city-states to implement their strategies are in for a rude awakening if the AI is tweaked to recognize the strategy and neutralize it (gain ally status or conquer the city-state).

The idea that the city state can give unlimited food is crazy. It is essentially unlimited as they give +2 for each of your towns. I am not sure what the best thing to do about is as should it be nerfed too much, players will just ignore or puppet them.

Maybe the can give only what extra food they have plus some base amount. So if they are +4 they give that and the base. Maybe the base is a fraction of all the towns the allied state owns.

So 10 towns and say .5 per town and the excess is all you can get. If +4, then it would be +4 and +5 for 9 food. Nice, but you will have to still feed yourself. That still gets it back to why then would I pay for them to be allied?

Not sure what would work, possibly 1x rather than 2. Still the larger your empire the more the boost will be worth.

What about limiting the bonus to coastal/river cities only. It is maritime food, after all. Alternatively, it could boost base tile yield for water/river tiles.

So Maritime City-States would produce more unhappiness, Cultural city-states would produce more building maintenance, and militaristic city-states would pretty much do what they're already doing.

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No, not what I meant. You don't pay anything for them, except the gold to keep them friends or allies. Their populations don't count as your citizens, so no unhappiness.

By the way, I realize how powerful maritime CSes are (the maritime vs cultural vs military imbalance should be resolved), but it's fully possible that an AI that properly values the friendships of City-States would resolve this issue by itself. Right now the cost of allying a MaCS is about 500 gold (give or take depending on exact circumstances) + ~1 gold per turn. That's a tiny cost. If allying a MaCS cost that + enough gold to outcompete a rich competitor, well, that's a lot more cost, thus a lot less return on investment.

I'm not saying it will definitely fix the issue (and it's also not the only CS issue to fix), but this might be a non-issue once the AI is up to snuff.

Something definitely has to be done, but this solution favors annexing the city states too much. I'd suggest that maritime city states could, perhaps, provide a bonus of an entirely different nature. Any change like this will, of course, require Father Governs Children to be reworked.

One thing that I was thinking earlier today about Militaristic city states was that they could provide a creation XP bonus barracks style and perhaps provide upkeep for a certain number of units.

Perhaps maritime city states could provide free upkeep for a certain number of specialists per city? Just an entirely random idea to throw on the pile.

Have them give basically the same bonus as the ruins. +1 pop to a random city every X turns.

It could be a nice bonus if you're trying to grow a few cities, and lousy if you have a ton of junk cities.

City-states should cost more based on the distance from your capital. Establishing an alliance should require a Great Merchant (maritime), Artist (cultural), General (militaristic) and maintained thereafter with gold and mission achievement.

The better solution would be to make Maritime a fixed amount of food, distributed in 'looping' fashion.

ie +1 food to your 6 biggest cities

If you only have Washington, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago
1st biggest=Washington
2nd=New York
3rd=Chicago
4th=Philadelphia
5th=Washington
6th=New York

So Washington and New York get 2, the other two get 1.

I like the suggestions of '+1 population every X turns' & 'less food for max X amount of cities'. I'm sure both of them would work very well. The former even mimics the Military City State unit spawning.

I have a better solution... they should forget CIV 5 ever happen and built a real CIV game

Drawmeus said:

By the way, I realize how powerful maritime CSes are (the maritime vs cultural vs military imbalance should be resolved), but it's fully possible that an AI that properly values the friendships of City-States would resolve this issue by itself. Right now the cost of allying a MaCS is about 500 gold (give or take depending on exact circumstances) + ~1 gold per turn. That's a tiny cost. If allying a MaCS cost that + enough gold to outcompete a rich competitor, well, that's a lot more cost, thus a lot less return on investment.

I'm not saying it will definitely fix the issue (and it's also not the only CS issue to fix), but this might be a non-issue once the AI is up to snuff.

Click to expand...

I agree with this. Mostly in my games the AI builds up so much gold that I think if they fix the AI and make it value city states in general instead of gobbling it up, it'll make human players make harder decisions on whether or not to throw more money into them.

And please Ghimbert, people are being helpful in this thread by suggesting/discussing solutions. Suggesting that they should just forget about the current civ isn't.