Purpose of the Discussion, the Problem with the Puppet System:
When you look at a casual civ player, they likely dont care if they are controlling their cities or the computer does it. For these players, a puppet or governor is a fine way to play and they are happy to use it. However, for more hardcore players, a big part of the game experience is the total control factor. Being able to grow your civ in just the way you want to, tweaking where buildings are built and workers work is a huge part of the Civ Experience.
The puppet system has removed a good portion of that control, but in exchange has provided the user a number of benefits he cannot acquire in any other way (less culture inflation, reduced cities needed for national wonders, reduced unhappiness). These benefits are often critical to winning, which means a strong civ player is torn between his love for total control and his desire to win the game.
It creates a damned if you do, damned if you dont scenario that can reduce the fun for the player.
So the question becomes: Is there a better way? I believe I have found one, and will now go over a series of changes to provide the benefits of the puppet system without the forced control. Once those benefits are realized, the need for the puppet system is gone and the system can be safely removed.
Step 1: National Wonders
National Wonders are one of the key Tall vs Wide balances in Civ 5. (Tall means a small civ with big cities, wide is a civ with a lot of smaller cities).
National Wonders require a specific building to be built in every city in order to produce them. By forcing wide civs to build a lot of buildings, it gives an advantage to tall civs, who have to give up a higher percentage of their cities in order to actually build the national wonder.
Puppet States dont count as cities for the purpose of national wonders. This allows a person to have a core group of cities, gain a number of others through puppets, and continue to make national wonders. This is a powerful benefit as building a number of new buildings in conquered cities can take quite a bit of time.
The Goal: Our goal is to tweak the system so that Tall civs still have an advantage but that annexing new cities does not completely remove your ability to make national wonders.
Solution:
1) National Wonders require X cities with a specific building (X does not increase during the game). The cost of a national wonder increases by Y hammers for every city founded.
This is a blend of the old Civ IV wisdom and a wonderful Civ V idea introduced in the latest patch. We keep the old idea that once a civ has a core group of cities with the needed buildings it can always create a national wonder. This is good for both advanced and new players. I remember a time when I was one turn away from building a national wonder. However, I had forgotten and founded a new city. My national wonder was invalidated, and was completely cancelled! Im a veteran player and that was frustrating, for a new player that could be extremely confusing and annoying.
However, we do want to make it more difficult for wide civs to get the same advantages. By increasing the hammers required to build the wonder, we tie up one of the wide civs good cities for a longer period of time (I would assume most people would build a national wonder in a good city).
Once the balance between X and Y is reached, puppeting is not needed to balance national wonders. Conquesting nations can still build national wonders, but the more they conquer the longer it takes to build those wonders in their good cities.
2) Retweak National Wonders as needed for wide vs tall balance.
If the new changes do give too much advantage to Wide Civs, it might be prudent to tweak some of the national wonders to provide more benefits. For example, changing the benefits to percentages instead of flat bonuses gives a bigger impact to large well developed cities (often the province of tall civs).
Step 2: Conquered City Unhappiness
Just as we mentioned tall vs wide civ balance in civ, another importance balance aspect is Peace vs War.
Using war to acquire new cities can have a number of advantages to a civ player (such as acquiring big cities that you dont have to grow yourself), so much so that war can be the better way to play compared to a peaceful builder who prefers to build his own cities.
Right now conquering cities through war provides a lot of extra unhappiness, so that acquiring a lot of cities quickly can cause havoc on your civ. This requires a conquest player to do a little building and infrastructure to keep feeding his bloodlust.
This is good in conception; the problem is that the unhappiness from a conquered city NEVER GOES AWAY! Either I have to keep the city a puppet (which is undesirable), I have to build a courthouse (-4 gold for all time with maintenance), or simply deal with the extra unhappiness forever. This makes early conquest less attractive (players will often raze early cities and rebuild with their own cites), and is less realistic (why is a city thats been conquered for 2000 years still causing me problems?)
Goal: Change the conquest unhappiness system to provide soft caps on continued conquest, but provides a barrier that can eventually be overcome by a dedicated player.
Solution:
1) Increase the base cost, reduce the maintenance cost of the Courthouse.
a. Puppet Cities default to building a courthouse first.
In this option, we make the courthouse more expensive up front, but it doesnt provide a permanent drain on resources. This means a conquest player can eventually gain full benefit from their conquered cities, but it takes some infrastructure building.
2) Extra unhappiness from Conquest decreases with time.
a. Another option here would be to reduce unhappiness with time only if a garrison is in the city.
In this model, the courthouse might even be removed. The impact here is that the civ has to absorb a lot of unhappiness at the onset, but over time the impact is reduced and then eventually removed as the conquered city is integrated into the core civ.
With the subset option (option A), it means a conquest player has to dedicate some of his army in order to overcome the unhappiness and provides a pretty realistic model with history.
3) Reduce the immediate benefit of a conquered city, such as with the following examples:
a. Conquered Citys building maintenance is temporarily increased (increases initial drag on civilization, but goes away with time. Also makes conquering more important cities have a greater cost).
b. Population is further decreased when city is conquered (less immediate benefit)
c. Revolutions last more turns (more time before you can build)
The idea here is to reduce some of the immediate benefit of conquering a civ, which allows the builders some time to catch up by building settlers and growing cities. Conquering is still a faster way to expand (as it should be, else whats the point of war?) but builders dont have some of the headache to worry about.
4) Return war weariness back to the game.
Though I was never a big fan of Civ IVs war weariness mechanic, it probably would work a lot better with Civ Vs global happiness system. You could simply apply an unhappiness penalty if your civ has been at war for X years, and that increases with time.
This means that conquest unhappiness would be more about the process of waging war, as opposed to only when you actually get benefits from the war (taking a city).
Step 3: Changing Culture and Cultural Victories
Culture is probably one of the biggest factors with the puppet states and is another aspect of the Tall vs Wide balance.
Cultural Victory right now is squarely a tall civ victory type, and is one of the only victory types where they have an advantage. Adding new civs to your empire hugely increases the cost of policies, to the point where its simply not practically to go for a cultural victory after a certain number of cities.
Puppets provide a crutch to this, allowing a city to expand but keeping policy costs reasonable. It also means that the only way a wide civ can go for cultural victory is through conquest, not building.
Goal: Readjust the culture victory to give the advantage to tall civs, but greatly reduce the cultural impact of developing new cities. We want civs to able to expand and still gain culture, but still allow for Tall civs to have the edge.
Solution:
1) Greatly reduce the increase in policy costs due to more cities.
a. A second option to this would be to create a Civ IV courthouse type building for culture.
This one is the critical point. We dont want a person to have puppet all of their cities in order to get policies. More cities dont impact policy cost greatly.
The subset option would allow a player to decide how much impact culture will have on his large civ. For example a Forum building that reduces a cities impact on policy cost by a large percentage. This allows a player to make the judgment call. Do they care about culture in their wide civ, or would they rather ignore it?
2) Readjust culture buildings to provide more culture for bigger/better cities. Some examples:
a. Monument provides 1 culture instead of 2.
b. Palace provides more base culture.
c. Museum provides 1 culture per 2 citizens instead of static bonus (thanks Thal for this great idea!).
d. More culture for national wonders.
The goal here is to say: A bigger civ doesnt necessarily produce more culture than a small civ. A tall city that has well developed cities can actually generate a huge amount of culture through multipliers. This already occurs in the game (such as the freedom policy that provides 100% culture to cities with a world wonder. Its likely tall cities will gain more culture from that than a wide one).
3) Change the Utopia Project to a National Wonder type of build.
When talking about cultural victories, the UP is often ignored. This is a great balance point because we can alter the culture system (for policy purposes) but can leave cultural victories relatively the same by altering the UP.
In the first step, we talked about modifying national wonders to further favor tall type civs. We now apply this model to the Utopia Project. We make it so that the UP costs more hammer the more cities in your civ. That means that even if a wide civ is able to generate more culture than a tall one, they have a handicap in building the UP vs a tall civ.
Putting it together: Removing the Puppet System
By implementing these suggestions, we get the following new model:
1) Acquiring new cities makes building national wonders a bit tougher in a core city, but does not require building a lot of buildings in your new city. (Burden shifts from new cities to old cities, where Tall civs tend to have an advantage. However, a wide civ doesnt have to stop expanding just so it can start building national wonders).
2) Conquering new cities provides an initial cost that fades completely with time. The unhappiness may a big impact but its something that can be managed and eventually removed.
3) Adding new cities doesnt have a huge impact in your policy costs. However, getting new, small cities to generate a lot of culture can take a lot of work and doesnt necessarily give you an advantage in the cultural victory. (Wide Civs and Conquest players can still play with policies; Tall Civs still have the advantage in cultural victory).
With these in place, the need for puppet cities goes away. A new player can turn on their governors for automatic management. However, a hard core player can conquer and build new cities without hindering their ability to win as long as they smartly manage these new cities.
When you look at a casual civ player, they likely dont care if they are controlling their cities or the computer does it. For these players, a puppet or governor is a fine way to play and they are happy to use it. However, for more hardcore players, a big part of the game experience is the total control factor. Being able to grow your civ in just the way you want to, tweaking where buildings are built and workers work is a huge part of the Civ Experience.
The puppet system has removed a good portion of that control, but in exchange has provided the user a number of benefits he cannot acquire in any other way (less culture inflation, reduced cities needed for national wonders, reduced unhappiness). These benefits are often critical to winning, which means a strong civ player is torn between his love for total control and his desire to win the game.
It creates a damned if you do, damned if you dont scenario that can reduce the fun for the player.
So the question becomes: Is there a better way? I believe I have found one, and will now go over a series of changes to provide the benefits of the puppet system without the forced control. Once those benefits are realized, the need for the puppet system is gone and the system can be safely removed.
Step 1: National Wonders
National Wonders are one of the key Tall vs Wide balances in Civ 5. (Tall means a small civ with big cities, wide is a civ with a lot of smaller cities).
National Wonders require a specific building to be built in every city in order to produce them. By forcing wide civs to build a lot of buildings, it gives an advantage to tall civs, who have to give up a higher percentage of their cities in order to actually build the national wonder.
Puppet States dont count as cities for the purpose of national wonders. This allows a person to have a core group of cities, gain a number of others through puppets, and continue to make national wonders. This is a powerful benefit as building a number of new buildings in conquered cities can take quite a bit of time.
The Goal: Our goal is to tweak the system so that Tall civs still have an advantage but that annexing new cities does not completely remove your ability to make national wonders.
Solution:
1) National Wonders require X cities with a specific building (X does not increase during the game). The cost of a national wonder increases by Y hammers for every city founded.
This is a blend of the old Civ IV wisdom and a wonderful Civ V idea introduced in the latest patch. We keep the old idea that once a civ has a core group of cities with the needed buildings it can always create a national wonder. This is good for both advanced and new players. I remember a time when I was one turn away from building a national wonder. However, I had forgotten and founded a new city. My national wonder was invalidated, and was completely cancelled! Im a veteran player and that was frustrating, for a new player that could be extremely confusing and annoying.
However, we do want to make it more difficult for wide civs to get the same advantages. By increasing the hammers required to build the wonder, we tie up one of the wide civs good cities for a longer period of time (I would assume most people would build a national wonder in a good city).
Once the balance between X and Y is reached, puppeting is not needed to balance national wonders. Conquesting nations can still build national wonders, but the more they conquer the longer it takes to build those wonders in their good cities.
2) Retweak National Wonders as needed for wide vs tall balance.
If the new changes do give too much advantage to Wide Civs, it might be prudent to tweak some of the national wonders to provide more benefits. For example, changing the benefits to percentages instead of flat bonuses gives a bigger impact to large well developed cities (often the province of tall civs).
Step 2: Conquered City Unhappiness
Just as we mentioned tall vs wide civ balance in civ, another importance balance aspect is Peace vs War.
Using war to acquire new cities can have a number of advantages to a civ player (such as acquiring big cities that you dont have to grow yourself), so much so that war can be the better way to play compared to a peaceful builder who prefers to build his own cities.
Right now conquering cities through war provides a lot of extra unhappiness, so that acquiring a lot of cities quickly can cause havoc on your civ. This requires a conquest player to do a little building and infrastructure to keep feeding his bloodlust.
This is good in conception; the problem is that the unhappiness from a conquered city NEVER GOES AWAY! Either I have to keep the city a puppet (which is undesirable), I have to build a courthouse (-4 gold for all time with maintenance), or simply deal with the extra unhappiness forever. This makes early conquest less attractive (players will often raze early cities and rebuild with their own cites), and is less realistic (why is a city thats been conquered for 2000 years still causing me problems?)
Goal: Change the conquest unhappiness system to provide soft caps on continued conquest, but provides a barrier that can eventually be overcome by a dedicated player.
Solution:
1) Increase the base cost, reduce the maintenance cost of the Courthouse.
a. Puppet Cities default to building a courthouse first.
In this option, we make the courthouse more expensive up front, but it doesnt provide a permanent drain on resources. This means a conquest player can eventually gain full benefit from their conquered cities, but it takes some infrastructure building.
2) Extra unhappiness from Conquest decreases with time.
a. Another option here would be to reduce unhappiness with time only if a garrison is in the city.
In this model, the courthouse might even be removed. The impact here is that the civ has to absorb a lot of unhappiness at the onset, but over time the impact is reduced and then eventually removed as the conquered city is integrated into the core civ.
With the subset option (option A), it means a conquest player has to dedicate some of his army in order to overcome the unhappiness and provides a pretty realistic model with history.
3) Reduce the immediate benefit of a conquered city, such as with the following examples:
a. Conquered Citys building maintenance is temporarily increased (increases initial drag on civilization, but goes away with time. Also makes conquering more important cities have a greater cost).
b. Population is further decreased when city is conquered (less immediate benefit)
c. Revolutions last more turns (more time before you can build)
The idea here is to reduce some of the immediate benefit of conquering a civ, which allows the builders some time to catch up by building settlers and growing cities. Conquering is still a faster way to expand (as it should be, else whats the point of war?) but builders dont have some of the headache to worry about.
4) Return war weariness back to the game.
Though I was never a big fan of Civ IVs war weariness mechanic, it probably would work a lot better with Civ Vs global happiness system. You could simply apply an unhappiness penalty if your civ has been at war for X years, and that increases with time.
This means that conquest unhappiness would be more about the process of waging war, as opposed to only when you actually get benefits from the war (taking a city).
Step 3: Changing Culture and Cultural Victories
Culture is probably one of the biggest factors with the puppet states and is another aspect of the Tall vs Wide balance.
Cultural Victory right now is squarely a tall civ victory type, and is one of the only victory types where they have an advantage. Adding new civs to your empire hugely increases the cost of policies, to the point where its simply not practically to go for a cultural victory after a certain number of cities.
Puppets provide a crutch to this, allowing a city to expand but keeping policy costs reasonable. It also means that the only way a wide civ can go for cultural victory is through conquest, not building.
Goal: Readjust the culture victory to give the advantage to tall civs, but greatly reduce the cultural impact of developing new cities. We want civs to able to expand and still gain culture, but still allow for Tall civs to have the edge.
Solution:
1) Greatly reduce the increase in policy costs due to more cities.
a. A second option to this would be to create a Civ IV courthouse type building for culture.
This one is the critical point. We dont want a person to have puppet all of their cities in order to get policies. More cities dont impact policy cost greatly.
The subset option would allow a player to decide how much impact culture will have on his large civ. For example a Forum building that reduces a cities impact on policy cost by a large percentage. This allows a player to make the judgment call. Do they care about culture in their wide civ, or would they rather ignore it?
2) Readjust culture buildings to provide more culture for bigger/better cities. Some examples:
a. Monument provides 1 culture instead of 2.
b. Palace provides more base culture.
c. Museum provides 1 culture per 2 citizens instead of static bonus (thanks Thal for this great idea!).
d. More culture for national wonders.
The goal here is to say: A bigger civ doesnt necessarily produce more culture than a small civ. A tall city that has well developed cities can actually generate a huge amount of culture through multipliers. This already occurs in the game (such as the freedom policy that provides 100% culture to cities with a world wonder. Its likely tall cities will gain more culture from that than a wide one).
3) Change the Utopia Project to a National Wonder type of build.
When talking about cultural victories, the UP is often ignored. This is a great balance point because we can alter the culture system (for policy purposes) but can leave cultural victories relatively the same by altering the UP.
In the first step, we talked about modifying national wonders to further favor tall type civs. We now apply this model to the Utopia Project. We make it so that the UP costs more hammer the more cities in your civ. That means that even if a wide civ is able to generate more culture than a tall one, they have a handicap in building the UP vs a tall civ.
Putting it together: Removing the Puppet System
By implementing these suggestions, we get the following new model:
1) Acquiring new cities makes building national wonders a bit tougher in a core city, but does not require building a lot of buildings in your new city. (Burden shifts from new cities to old cities, where Tall civs tend to have an advantage. However, a wide civ doesnt have to stop expanding just so it can start building national wonders).
2) Conquering new cities provides an initial cost that fades completely with time. The unhappiness may a big impact but its something that can be managed and eventually removed.
3) Adding new cities doesnt have a huge impact in your policy costs. However, getting new, small cities to generate a lot of culture can take a lot of work and doesnt necessarily give you an advantage in the cultural victory. (Wide Civs and Conquest players can still play with policies; Tall Civs still have the advantage in cultural victory).
With these in place, the need for puppet cities goes away. A new player can turn on their governors for automatic management. However, a hard core player can conquer and build new cities without hindering their ability to win as long as they smartly manage these new cities.
