Thanks for the extensive feedback! I'm not one to go for the tldr part of a message, I like the details! By reading some posts earlier in this thread, I got the impression that there might have been some larger changes to city maintenance too. Something that you'd need to know about because otherwise, you'd make a great game-crippling error in game play and would only notice 20 or 50 turns after you'd made the error. Like how some players started playing Civ4 in the same style as Civ3 and then bankrupted their empires and complained loudly.
They just realised the impact of city maintenance too late. The extension of my empire from the 7th to the 8th city was just an example and there's nothing in these numbers specific to CIv4 BTS. I just tried to ask by using an example whether there was some (semi-hard) cutoff point that I'd need to be aware off.
Sure! I really enjoy this mod and discussion surrounding it, both the historical modeling and representation of features and concepts it aims for and of the balance and gameplay feel of strict strategic factors.
Even what Civ IV vanilla did with this mechanic was a substantial improvement over the way that rapid early expansion was a mandatory gambit in the third game; but, I think RI takes what was already quite good and makes it even better.
However, yeah, one other practical factor in addition to your mention of the courthouse now reducing maintenance by only 30% rather than 50%, with the difference coming in the renaissance with the mayor's house (or medieval, if you're Germany - one of the cool things about that civ), is that you get a nice buff to maintenance reduction from much earlier civics. Both monarchy and autocracy reduce maintenance from number of cities by a quarter, and the latter of those is available very early, so, even while the way that maintenance itself is calculated hasn't (so far as I know) changed, in practical terms it takes a smaller bite if you're running a "wider-natured" combination of civics, when in BtS you wouldn't get this bonus from civic selections outside of state property if I remember correctly, and that's hardly an obvious choice most of the time, and also comes rather late.
I fully agree and understand that the combination of difficulties that you need to overcome in Realism Invictus with happiness from happiness resources only coming later in the game with some buildings, the cost increase of research when expanding and all the other new difficulties together mean that you cannot build larger cities in the early stage of the game and that will indeed also naturally stop you from expanding horizontally. That makes a lot of sense. I however saw that when I started an emperor game, that I had a base happiness of 4 (5 in the capital) and the same on monarch, not the 2 that you mentioned. Do I have a different version of the game? I got the latest normal download and didn't change anything with regard to happiness.
Oh, I made a mistake there. Newly founded cities will have a happy cap of 3 population in the ancient era. (I must have been thinking of new cities in classical when I wrote that.) That's actually the same for monarch and emperor, too (and even immortal, though it gets knocked down by 1 for titan and deity).
You get 4 happiness "out of the box," but bear in mind that your default government civic gives you 1 unhappiness, as well as the starting population unit, so until you improve this, you'll be capped out at pop 3 (and 4 for your capital). Tribal union is strictly a malus civic, and timing anarchy is the only incentive you have to hold onto it once either autocracy (which retains the same unhappiness penalty, but flips your city maintenance penalty into a corresponding bonus among some other nice perks) or confederation become available.
But, as my mistaken train of thought demonstrates, this can become a significant problem if you hit classical (which, all era changes, increases unhappiness and unhealthiness per city by +1), in which case new and completely undeveloped cities will have a punishing cap of only 2 population until you improve this. The eras all make the passive caps lower, but also introduce new ways to actively overcome them.
Thanks for explaining how the horizontal and vertical expansion feels in the various era's of the game.
That sounds like a good natural progression.
Yes, it does feel quite natural and correct to me. As I mentioned above, each new era provides the means of increasing
and
beyond their individually-contributed penalty, but at different phases of the game the balance certainly swings more one way or the other. For instance, late medieval and early industrial place
at much more palpably felt premium than
in my experience, while you're raking in the general abundance of food and happiness from religion and your early manufactured goods (alcohol and glassware) put the weight much more on that leg of the stool, and in industrial, building factories and power plants is still much more of a net positive from the enormous boon to
(and that fact that power is a literal necessity for your late game buildings) but still results in a lot of
. Once you build the modern medical projects, though (which actually start in the renaissance, and get progressively better and better, though are enormously expensive) and you've industrialized and modernized your power plants from coal, you really feel like your civilization has conquered nature and is free to have its population explode, much as it has in real life during the timeframe of living memory. That sense of weightiness and scale through a precarious and varied journey of fighting both of these caps to different degrees and in different forms throughout the game is quite satisfying to a sense of progress and accomplishment.
I used to play on immortal and deity in Civ4 BTS, but I haven't played in a really long time. I think I will try emperor. I do like my bigger maps though, in every type of 4X game that I play, so I won't go for the smaller map, but I also won't go for the largest maps. But that is also why I wanted to make sure that I understood some of the basics before playing a longer game. Thanks for the input.
The smaller map suggestion had more to do with playing a "tutorial run" initially before really attempting to play seriously, but of course you do what you feel would be most enjoyable. It was already mentioned above, but be forewarned that the pace of RI is
much slower than the base game. I play on standard maps and the default "Realistic" speed at a fairly steady pace and a typical game for me takes anywhere from 30-60 hours to complete. The larger maps will have substantially longer turn resolutions mid-game onward, which is likely to extend that number further (and all the more so if you deliberately play slowly).
Also, it is way harder at the same nominal difficulty level. If you played deity in the base game, I'm definitely not your peer in terms of this, but as a stable monarch player of the base game when I first started playing the mod, RI's monarch was atrociously hard in comparison and it took quite a while to get comfortable at this level, as I am now. I would probably suggest starting there, yourself, while you learn to read the game and its balance. Besides that, bear in mind, too, that Karadoc's AI got installed, so the viciousness and toughness of your opponents will be a lot steeper.
I see you mention a huge size 40 city. Wouldn't you prefer a smaller city with a mix of farmland, cottages and some production improvements and some farmland powered craftsmen late game. I have no experience here, so just inquiring. But it seems that a bit smaller city would be easier to manage in happiness, health and chance of epidemics. Although, I could see a great person factory type of city going for lots of farmland and specialists and get really big.
Funnily enough, size 40 actually is fairly conservative if you were really trying to maximize this. Playing with an agrarian leader will give you +1
on late game mechanized farms, and you can build multiple canned food factories (each adding +2
of their own (which, unlike worked farms, don't have a "tax" from the citizen working them, of course, so these boost growth quite a bit), and this in conjunction with all of the late-game food explosion stuff like agronomy stations, agricultural machine depots, and industrial shipyards (which basically make every water tile a food bonus) would make settling in a particularly blessed slice of the earth net you ridiculously high populations if you are deliberately going for this. (In my first "serious" game of RI that I won, admittedly on Prince, I maxed a city out at size 52, I believe.)
Interesting question, too. The relative worth of
as an output of
massively outcompetes the yields from other improvements by the late game, once you've industrialized, so a typical mature late game city should be able to net several hundred units of production by working mechanized farms and running craftsmen. The beauty of this as well is that, as a short-term situation may dictate, there's no "sunk cost" in switching from craftsmen to whatever other specialists you might need, so you can switch to merchants or spies or scientists, etc., whenever you may need (and, craftsmen provide no great people points, unlike these others, if you need a great person, so being able to switch full-scale temporarily is beneficial). In general, though, for the great majority of the game's timeline, cottages and farms are in a nice and delicate balance (the former even being nerfed with epidemic chance and providing a defensive bonus to would-be attackers). As far as scale itself is concerned, though, bigger and more developed cities are definitely better than numerous small ones (let's not forget about that research penalty
), but if you're running slavery or serfdom, that can be a huge liability since the potential size of a revolt is just a randomized number between 1 and the population of the city in whose BFC it will spawn. (Also, for your reference on that, revolt risk itself is a flat 1% per city under slavery and 0.5% per city under serfdom.)
In practical terms, it's a fascinating dichotomy between farms and cottages when choosing how to develop your arable land before the late industrial and modern era swing it decisively in favor of the former. As engines of commerce, towns remain unparalleled for quite some time, and also entail a high sunk cost in needing to be developed over time, which both incentivizes building them early and disincentivizes destroying them over only a slight newly-gained edge. I've played probably at least a hundred games of RI and I still don't think I've quite gotten a grip on which is better overall, even though specific situations are more or less clear.
Oh, one final question, if you will. The epidemic mechanic is also a limiter to expansion and it seems more chance based compared to happiness and health. Happiness and health are just a sum of plusses and minuses and you typically want to stay below their cap, especially with happiness. But with the epidemic mechanic, there is a chance that things go wrong, so you can take the gamble and may sometimes maybe have to take the gamble because you'd otherwise be limited too much. For instance, my capital in the game that I just started had a swamp directly next to it and started with a few % epidemic chance at size 1. I haven't seen a very clear description of what an epidemic does. The calculation of the chance that it happens is described. And the fact that it spreads via trade routes thereby increasing the risks in connected cities was also mentioned. And it was also explained that it hits cities below size 4 more limited. But what does it do in bigger cities? I think that it will kill off a population point each turn or something like that, but I couldn't find that description. If that is the case, then it seems quite harsh. Does that mean that a few bad rolls of the RNG, resulting in a few early game epidemics in your capital will mess up your game, or is it not that influential?
I think this is something that I can completely clarify for you. It is correct that the
chance for an epidemic is purely hypothetical (as in, a city with even an extremely high risk of an epidemic occurring still receives no actual malus to anything until one actually occurs), but obviously, the higher the likelihood, the more often they will actually occur and therefore incur real penalties on your empire.
When an epidemic actually does occur from the per turn percentage chance for each city that you can see the breakdown for, it does two things (which you actually can check in the Pedia, with the epidemic being listed as a building), with a 50% chance of ending every single turn, regardless of any other factors:
- Reduces the affected city's population by 1/turn only for cities that are above 4 population (which is the floor for population loss from epidemics).
- Inflicts a -25%
and -25%
penalty on the affected city,
regardless of its size.
Were it not for the floor described above, I think your suspicion would be entirely warranted as a potentially game-endingly bad consequence of a normal function of the RNG, but in practical terms (though probability mathematics still confuse me, honestly) I've never seen it take out more than a handful of population units in affected cities, and most often only 2 or 3. I suppose question "What are the odds of flipping tails 6 times in a row?" is one that objectively has an answer, but in practice it seems to be really low, as this is exactly how the mechanic functions and in hundreds of hours of play I've never seen one of my large cities reduced to a nub from an epidemic, and in the very early game it's only a somewhat concerning penalty on research and production.
Also, the manual showed a screenshot of a city with an epidemic chance of 12%. Wouldn't that city quickly shrink by getting hit by regular plagues and thereby never be able to keep such a large size and such a high epidemic chance? Maybe epidemics work differently than I think, but I would think this city would on average be hit by an epidemic every 8 turns, needing a very big food surplus to be able to remain at that size.
There are a few things that come to mind here for me.
1. The entire dynamic of "whipping" has been removed from the mod (except for a fringe case in the late game under forced labor, which Trashmunster was asking about) so you no longer can treat excess
as an input of reserve
, and every unit of
that isn't contributing to either growth or building settlers/workers or irregulars is strictly thrown out of the window. Since that was a vital function of high level play in the base game and a key means of staving off wasted yield, its removal poses a big paradigm shift in the whole Civ IV economy scheme of things, with its various means of conversion between different yields and the ratios for them. Epidemics are a means of rebalance. Early game cities with netting high
production but getting consistent epidemics will see themselves bouncing off of a soft ceiling and quickly growing back up to it (just as a high
yielding city in BtS would see itself consistently whipping and regrowing) instead of staying stagnated at a growth cap and wasting excess
.
2. Conversely to the base game, where excess unhappy population is an asset rather than a liability (there being no population-scaled revolts, revolutions, and ability to convert them to buildings or units immediately) epidemics are quite punishing, even if they seldom do more than hinder and slow you down in an acute sense. Therefore you have a pretty strong incentive to try to mitigate them. 12% is rather high (though, to be more or less expected in particularly squalid eras) and often you have the means to at least bring that down to something more modest, but of course at the cost of not doing something else you acutely need to be working towards.
3. As far as it being hit predictably every 8 turns and needing quite the food surplus to regrow back to its natural cap, I don't think it usually works out to being this severe. As I mentioned above, epidemics in my case in core cities usually result in 1-3 population units lost. Sometimes it's more, but that is honestly pretty rare. By the time you have your farms spreading irrigation and the ability to build them without irrigation (especially if running serfdom),
tends to be rather abundant relative to
or
, meaning that oftentimes well-improved landscapes often have to avoid working all of their farms not to hit the ceiling and waste tile yield. In those situations, the cities having frequent epidemics seldom have trouble staying at or close to their population cap.
micromanagement.
- most likely for Walter:
- no I'm not kidding, Forts are important in my spinn-off) or canals 
, but also those kind of buildings, that we call converter-buildings
.
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