A core set of balance changes

[Roxlimn]

Ahriman:

This is intended. The only way to make buildings like public school valuable, by making large cities more feasible and more useful.
Its a deliberate design change to try to make few large cities more viable, relative to many smaller cities and expansion. Currently the game favors the latter in an extreme way.

Why *should* small cities get more benefit from Maritime city states?

It goes to point of balance. You're trying to power up large cities to match the insanity we've been observing with smaller cities captured through conquest and held by puppet. I don't agree that that is a reasonable point of balance.

Rather than power up the large cities, scale back the small cities.

Biology is not gettable any time soon, at least not without massively delaying military development.

Then, shouldn't the solution be to transfer a portion of the power of hospital earlier?

It isn't nonexistent. It's just a little late, relatively speaking. I'm still not entirely sure this is actually the case. My last game with large cities involved India, and I kept pace easily with non-cheating King AI where I had two Civs that dominated their very large respective land masses. Of course, I used Maritimes as well, and I'm sure that they benefited me greatly.

Until factories, there are no particular benefits to having one city with 20 production as opposed to 2 cities with 10 production.
And thats not even how it ends up working out, since its massively easier to have two size 10 cities than a single size 20 city.

A single Forge will benefit the production of a single large city that's geared towards making troops. Windmill performs similarly, each contributing +15% production. A single city can benefit from Marble. Two cities cannot. A single concentrated city also makes Wonders faster, and it will definitely complete Forges and Windmills faster than two cities making one copy each of such buildings.

20 production is low. For a size 10 city, it's respectable. For a size 20 city, that's on the low side. This is why many players cannot see the point of Forges. When you're only gaining 3 production, it's not that good. When you're gaining 6 and 6 each, and when they build quickly, it gets significantly better.

The production disparity is quite significant.

As for ease, I'm actually finding that not to be the case. Two size 10 cities require 24 happiness, whereas a single size 20 city requires only 22. It's true that two size 10 cities can each produce one Colosseum each, but that just eats into their production queues even more.

It's the happiness that's the main issue, I'm finding. Spread out empires founded on conquest have more luxuries. As long as you have enough luxuries, keeping small in terms of land size seems to be manageable.

If their gold gold output can't match that from puppets, then they *do* lack in gold. Everything is relative.
Hence the boost for large cities and the nerf for puppets.

It's probably best to change things one at a time. Puppets right now seem to have workarounds that players are using to subvert designer intent for them. They are supposed to be liabilities, but players are controlling them through indirect means.

As long as puppets always cost the player instead of benefiting them, I think it ought to be fine.

 

[iop]

I don't like making puppet yields too pathetic. Why no science? Some basic realism is still needed.
An alternative method: make puppets increase social policy costs by 10% each (rather than 30% of a regular city).

I consider no science/no culture more realistic - basically, puppets are simply money printing machines for you. There is no interest whatsoever in their culture or knowledge.
3gpt/pop+1unhappy/pop may need balancing, but at size 8, 24gpt doesn't look particularly pathetic (though the 8 unhappiness that won't be mitigated by the city's buildings will hurt - thus you should go and annex them as soon as you can).
Basically, I'd like puppets to be different from normal cities, and I'd like there to be an incentive for annexing them. With decent gold yields, they could still be very useful for a warmonger, but due to no science/culture, they wouldn't be too useful during peace.

As long as puppets always cost the player instead of benefiting them, I think it ought to be fine.

At the very least, puppet states should bring an interesting cost/benefit decision. It should be possible to puppet the world, but there should be consequences for that. If they're just weaker so that you need more to reach the same level of benefits, I don't think that the consequences are serious - or interesting - enough.

I don't think this is really true. Ranged units have mounted units as effective counters.
A strength modification isn't the only way to be a counter.

You're right.

A hardcap is a bit messy and can be non-transparent, but might be best.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea of not making them scale at all with empire size, but I'm worried about very concentrated strats that let you concentrate large food bonuses in the capital, particularly when combined with say the Aztec Floating Gardens.
Maybe if the city state bonus can be hardcoded to apply only after all other food modifiers?

I understood the hardcap to be empire-wide, i.e. the city state is not able to deliver more than, say, 50 fpt to your empire (would scale with time). If 10% increase everywhere would mean +100fpt empire-wide, you'd get only a 5% yield increase.
Thus, smaller empires can get larger yield increases than large empires, but even with one huge capital you still run into diminishing returns eventually.

Trade for them, get city state for them, or conquer them.
I have never not had coal.

Ok, that could work.

 

[Elenhil]

Please do inform us when these changes get implemented in a mod!

 

[Ahriman]

Rather than power up the large cities, scale back the small cities.

Why?

You didn't actually make an argument here.

And I'm not powering up cities that much, since I'm nerfing Maritime city states.

Then, shouldn't the solution be to transfer a portion of the power of hospital earlier?

Did you read the thread? I like the idea of splitting the hospital in half, and making an aqueduct as an early hospital, available at engineering.

20 production is low. For a size 10 city, it's respectable. For a size 20 city, that's on the low side. This is why many players cannot see the point of Forges. When you're only gaining 3 production, it's not that good. When you're gaining 6 and 6 each, and when they build quickly, it gets significantly better.

This is exactly the point.
People think forges and workshops are underpowered. I want to improve them, not by changing the buildings themselves, but by making larger cities more feasible, which increases the value of these otherwise low power buildings.

As long as puppets always cost the player instead of benefiting them

I fundamentally disagree with this design goal. Puppets should not cost the player. They should benefit the player, but not as much as annexing, and not necessarily as much as using the same happiness by growing your core cities instead.

Conquered cities are a prize. Its a terrible idea to make them unambiguously bad for the player.

There is no interest whatsoever in their culture or knowledge.

How is that realistic?
Nobody had any new ideas in Roman Alexandria, or Soviet-controlled East Germany, or Persian Satrapies in Asia Minor?

 

[Roxlimn]

Ahriman:

1. You're not nerfing Maritime City States. You're changing them. A percent increase in food becomes correspondingly better as the city size increases. My estimate is that at about size 15, your way is better for large cities than they are now, where every city gets a flat bonus.

2. Your point was that large cities do not have better production. My experience says otherwise. Large cities have fantastic production at all eras in the game.

3. Puppeted cities already benefit the player by giving him control of the territory, and access to luxuries and strategic resources in the controlled area. This alone can greatly improve the player's happiness standing, regardless of how he treats the city.

As such, puppeted cities should always cost the player in exchange for this benefit. He can raze the city and resettle, and try to exert territorial control that way, or he can annex.

 

[Buccaneer]

I fundamentally disagree with this design goal. Puppets should not cost the player. They should benefit the player, but not as much as annexing, and not necessarily as much as using the same happiness by growing your core cities instead.

Conquered cities are a prize. Its a terrible idea to make them unambiguously bad for the player.

I agree on all points. There somehow should be a hard choice to make whether to annex or puppet. Both would have their own set of pros and cons. Once we get to having to always do X, then that's one less decision for us to do, which leads to a less active game.

 

[King Jason]

I agree on all points. There somehow should be a hard choice to make whether to annex or puppet. Both would have their own set of pros and cons. Once we get to having to always do X, then that's one less decision for us to do, which leads to a less active game.

Except as it stands right now there seems to be virtually no reason not to puppet your conquests since with a functional empire of your own you can do everything important your puppets can't do which is; Reinforce your military - Build wonders.

We make conquests for the resources and the greater yields from cities... right now the choices basically boil down to this;

Annex ~ deal with a happiness hit.
Puppet ~ Deal with a potential "tax" on the city due to it building useless buildings.

The latter penalty is by far easier to handle and deal with since it is solved by the fact you can dictate the tile improvements of your puppets. Furthermore, It's a bit absurd that in one game, as china, my top 3 GPT cities were;

Tenochitlan (puppet)
Persopolis (puppet)
Beijing

There's virtually no drawback to puppets even if they do waste the occasional time, hammer, and relatively minor maintenance cost on a building that's useless. You still gain the benefit of their GPT, their CPT, and their science. Which means with a strong economy you can conquer, puppet, and forget.

However, even if you had a strong economy, if you tried to conquer, annex, and forget... you'd probably fall into the red zone. Unless you're ignoring happiness, that's an issue.

I think the simplest solution would be to give puppets a penalty to the the amount of the GPT, CPT, and science they give you. Give it a 30% hit and call it a day. That way you can't have some instantaneous massive empire of puppets that's all-around better than if you annexed. The problem with Annexing is that it straps on an incubation period that the city has to overcome... it has to build a courthouse or it's a drain on the rest of your empire.

 

[Celevin]

I'm going to come out and say that the puppet/annex mechanics can't be fixed.

There's something fundamentally wrong with annexing, as it's better to raze and rebuild to avoid the 5 gold cost of the courthouse.

Puppets take away control from the player, which leads to a less fun experience. You are no longer managing an empire with puppets as compared to watching it.


I say take out puppets. Change annexing so that it gives a happiness penalty that will go away with time. Then the job of annexing is done (empires are slowed down from annexing several cities in a row), and we once again have full control over our empires.

 

[cembandit]

Its actually often not better to raze. This is one of those myths spread by people who have a system that works, but its not the best system or even a good one. 5 gold for a decent annexed city is nothing, and even a puppeted city with borders and pop is preferable to a fresh off the boat 1 pop city.

Plus, settlers take time or gold.

 

[King Jason]

I think Annexing would be worth the extra 5g cost if conquered cities retain their buildings. In fact that'd probably merit an increased cost for conquests. There are many times I've annexed a city and had the fortune of it containing a whole host of buildings... if this were more of a guarantee, annexing and it's associated penalties would be much more appealing I figure.

In the end, however, what's a 5g maintenance cost compared to the gold you'd be paying if your puppet built a barracks or an armory.

So I do think it remains balanced as is, honestly. The problem is puppets, not annexing.

Time is a commodity in civ, and every settler built is time, production, and money not spent on something else. I don't mind the 5g tax on conquered cities. The problem I face now is there pretty much no reason not to puppet a conquest.

 

[Buccaneer]

Before one of my conquests, I made sure I had a really positive g/t and a decent (but not great) happy/t. That way I felt safe annexing. If they were marginal, then puppeting would be the choice (or raze if it's not in a good place).

Sorry for the quick reply, not much time right now.

 

[Monadenia]

Just a quick idea I had:

Currently, conquered city happy and culture buildings (I believe) are all destroyed; others with a certain percent chance. What if puppet cities instead kept these buildings, but didn't retain any of the benefits (or maintainance)? You'd have a clear incentive to annex, rather than raze, if you got to keep these buildings. Puppet cities would be nerfed a little bit, and can't immediately start to re-build these buildings. Not sure if an additional penalty might be needed to prevent puppet + TP spam from still netting you a lot of gold, but it's an option.

We need buildings as well as wonders to incentivize keeping cities, maybe. Especially since pop. seems to be reduced (from what I've seen) upon attack, re-building the city doesn't have enough opportunity cost there.

Do you guys think a variant on this idea might work?

(Actually, it looks like King Jason had a similar idea as I was formulating this and somehow I didn't see it. Scooped!)

 

[iop]

I fundamentally disagree with this design goal. Puppets should not cost the player. They should benefit the player, but not as much as annexing, and not necessarily as much as using the same happiness by growing your core cities instead.

Conquered cities are a prize. Its a terrible idea to make them unambiguously bad for the player.

I agree with this. Still, since they are now "somewhat like annexed cities, only with more manageable problems", I don't like the current system, and I really think if you change it such that annexed cities give you gold and unhappiness, but nothing else, they become different enough to pose an interesting, but in many regards not as beneficial option as annexing.

Do you guys think a variant on this idea might work?

Your suggestion (keeping the buildings, but not giving benefits while puppets) works very well with what I've suggested for puppets: That they only give you positive gpt and some unhappiness (although they still build and become more and more interesting to annex). Since gpt would be tied to city size, no amount of TP spam would make a difference, and since unhappiness would scale with city size as well, conquest would get difficult after a while, and you'd eventually be better off annexing large puppets.

How is that realistic?
Nobody had any new ideas in Roman Alexandria, or Soviet-controlled East Germany, or Persian Satrapies in Asia Minor?

Your puppets are Alexandria and East Germany. My puppets are more like the colonies, or like pre-revolution Iran, where the invaders/controlling powers were only interested in the profits they could squeeze out of the country, but didn't take the locals seriously, nor were they interested in the local culture. It would work both ways, I guess.

You're not nerfing Maritime City States. You're changing them. A percent increase in food becomes correspondingly better as the city size increases. My estimate is that at about size 15, your way is better for large cities than they are now, where every city gets a flat bonus.

That's why there needs to be a empire-wide cap on total food delivered by a city-state. For a large empire, this cap will be reached quickly, while smaller ones can grow a little larger before they start hitting it as well. Thus, the bonus will be great, but can never become insane, and it scales with empire size similar to cultural and militaristic city states.

 

[Khaim]

I had an idea I wanted to float:

What if defensive buildings increased ranged attack power in addition to the strength boost?

Right now, a city suffers a 50% penalty on its attacks. (I think.) Let's drop that to a 25% penalty with a Castle, and no penalty with a Military Base. That would make these buildings much more useful. Right now, there's really no reason to build them instead of building more units. If a MB-equipped city could do 8+hp per turn to modern units, then it might be worth thinking about.

As for Walls... Maybe drop them to 0 maintenance?

 

[Roxlimn]

It seems to me that the problem is that Maritime States favor small cities more than big ones, and that small states can then use it to make huge science and gold at the cost of production capability.

The solution is to level the playing field using yields which we can already estimate.

The current +3 food per City State is okay for cities at size 20. It's not super-powerful, and the city won't starve if it doesn't have this, because you can't grow the city fast enough if you didn't have that much food.

Therefore, it makes sense to tie Maritime States to size rather than to era. +1 food per Maritime State for sizes 1-10, +2 at sizes 11 to 20, and +3 at sizes over 20.

 

[Celevin]

Dropping walls/castles to 0 maintenance is a start. I often not build them because after the puny war I'm in, I don't want to be taxed for the rest of the game.

Walls are a HUGE deterrent to archers and warriors and spearmen, but don't stop horsemen at all. I think we'd also need to severely nerf horsemen city attack as well.

I'm actually thinking -1 strength, -50% city attack for horsemen is needed. They run over everything right now.

 

[remconius]

@ OP

You should post this also on 2K forums as it is a good start for developers to fix balance issues!

 

[Ahriman]

1. You're not nerfing Maritime City States. You're changing them. A percent increase in food becomes correspondingly better as the city size increases. My estimate is that at about size 15, your way is better for large cities than they are now, where every city gets a flat bonus.

Just because a size 15 city might be better off under the new system doesn't mean they aren't weaker.
The problem with Maritime city states isn't their effect on size large cities, its their effect on small-medium cities.
I'm nerfing them in the area where the problem is, and fixing that they are currently a substitute for food production.
I'm certainly open to some of the ideas of having a fixed food amount, like other city states provide fixed culture/military benefits.

2. Your point was that large cities do not have better production. My experience says otherwise. Large cities have fantastic production at all eras in the game.

Large cities do not have better production than could have been achieved by having multiple small cities instead, because of how much food it takes to generate large cities.
It is massively faster to grow 2 cities to size 10 than one to size 20 (or even size 15).

3. Puppeted cities already benefit the player by giving him control of the territory, and access to luxuries and strategic resources in the controlled area.

This is fairly small benefit.
Providing nothing but territory would be a Not Fun change for many players, and would *overly* nerf the value of building a big army and conquering enemies.

As such, puppeted cities should always cost the player in exchange for this benefit.

Totally disagree. A puppeted city should be a reward for conquest, not a cost.
It shouldn't be as big a reward as it currently is, but it should still be a reward.
But if you over-nerf puppets, you're going to encourage raze and resettle, or turtling, neither of which are fun. You're also going to prevent the occurence of super-power AIs, who are the only possible late-game threats.
What we want to encourage is going through the short-term pain for long term benefits from annexation.

I think the simplest solution would be to give puppets a penalty to the the amount of the GPT, CPT, and science they give you. Give it a 30% hit and call it a day.

Did you read point 1. of the first post in this thread?

I think Annexing would be worth the extra 5g cost if conquered cities retain their buildings.

I would like captured cities to retain more buildings (and why lose half their population?)
I'd be fine with increasing their unrest time.
I would like to see a system where I could lose a city, and then recapture it a few turns later, without devastating consequences to that city. History is full of cities that changed hands without utterly destroying them and butchering their population.

This has always been one of the flaws of the Civ series. Losing a city is too painful, even if you recapture it, because you lose *so* much stuff.

My puppets are more like the colonies

You don't think that Britain benefited from any innovation in the 13 colonies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Malaya or India?

Therefore, it makes sense to tie Maritime States to size.

This is what my % proposal does in effect.
I'm agnostic as to whether it still needs to change by era. Removing this might be fine, and make them easier to balance.

 

[Ahriman]

Another possibility I thought of that would make a huge difference: increase the happiness penalty per city to 3. [And maybe ignore the first city. So it is 3*(#of cities-1), rather than 2*(# of cities).

 

[Celevin]

I'd rather the # of cities unhappiness to be non-linear. Yes this would make fractional unhappiness gains, but so what?

Have it go up as your empire increases in size. Something like 2*(# of cities)^1.2, or something.