On the game rules front, I spent some time recently to rebalance the various kinds of city maintenance: number of cities, distance, and colonies.
For
number of cities, I only made sure that it scales better with the map size, but nothing fundamentally changed.
I made some more extensive changes for
distance and
colony maintenance. Before going into the actual changes I think I should describe in more detail how colony maintenance used to work because I rarely see it discuss and I don't think everyone knows. In the vanilla game rules (unchanged in RFC and DoC) all cities that are not on the same continent as the capital pay colony maintenance. The definition of continent here is what I usually express as "landmass", i.e. a contiguous area of land. Meaning that e.g. Britain and Ireland are separate continents from mainland Europe and consequently England pays colony maintenance for European cities. Colony maintenance increases quadratically with the number of cities
on the same continent after the first city, e.g. if you have one city on another continent you pay 0 colony maintenance, if you have two you 1x, if you have three you pay 4x etc. This may look like a steep curve but there are (map and difficulty based) scaling modifiers that make it not as punishing as it sounds.
Actually, with base rules, even with multiple cities on the same continent it is very rare to see more than 1 gold in colony maintenance. Note that colony maintenance is entirely independent of distance, but it does increase with city size.
From these base rules, I have made the following changes:
- You now only have to pay colony maintenance if the city is genuinely on a different continent, i.e. islands are counted as part of the biggest neighbouring continent (e.g. Britain is counted as Europe, Japan as Asia etc)
- However for the scaling factor of colony maintenance, still the proper landmass is considered
- Scaling of colony maintenance begins with the first city, not the second city
- However if there is only one city on the entire landmass, the colony maintenance is still 0
- I overall increased the modifier to colony maintenance to make it more impactful
- I introduced a civ based modifier to colony maintenance similar to the existing number of cities and distance modifiers and balanced it accordingly. Some colonial civs that received a strong (i.e. low) colony maintenance modifier had their distance modifier weakened (i.e. increased) to compensate.
- City distance maintenance is halved when the city is considered a colony (i.e. on another continent as the capital)
- City distance maintenance now scales with player era: the impact of distance is highest in the ancient era, reaches its lowest point in the industrial era, and increases with the global and digital eras to be slightly above the Renaissance again
- The English UP has been changed: it no longer limits city distance maintenance, instead it reduces the number of cities counted for colony maintenance by 1, effectively reducing their colony maintenance costs
Several considerations are behind these changes. The main purpose was to make colonial civilizations easier to balance. Colonies are supposed to be desirable for these civilizations, but also should not give them too much of an advantage relative to other civilizations. Previously, the only lever to balance this was their distance maintenance modifier. However, that was a crude tool, it often led to either backwards or runaway colonial civs, especially England and Portugal.
With these changes, colony maintenance now should not be negligible and instead becomes a significant concern. The benefit of colony maintenance is that it is independent of distance, making colonies regardless of their location more valuable, without having to give those civs distance maintenance modifiers that make them too powerful at the same time. At the same time, the fact that colony maintenance scales quadratically means that it will better limit huge colonial empires like England controlling all of India. Nevertheless, in more common configurations distance maintenance is still the dominant factor - for example a 1700 Portugal is paying around 7g for distance, 2g for number of cities, and 3g for colony maintenance in its Brazilian cities. The new English UP is to stop letting them ignore distance altogether while still helping them maintain a larger colonial empire than others. Of course, England (along with France) also has a strong colony maintenance modifier.
The era-scaling distance maintenance is half related to this. Part of its purpose is to give the greatest benefit of colonial empires to the Renaissance and Industrial eras, and give them diminishing returns afterwards. But another motivation was the early game. Compared to 1.17 DoC, the scale of the map and the available number of turns means that it is now more common to control a lot of cities even in the ancient and classical eras (imagine the typical Assyria, Persia, or Rome game, but it applies to a lot of civs). This made number of cities maintenance the dominant kind of maintenance, which I thought was unsatisfying because it made city location matter almost not at all (e.g. you pay 3g in number of cities maintenance regardless of location - then it rarely matters whether the distance maintenance comes out to 0.4 or 1.4). For this reason the impact of city distance is much higher in the ancient and classical eras. I think this also helps with immersion because it reflects the contemporary perception of distances and the knowledge about the world.
Entirely unrelatedly, I also decided to balance
inflation. As a reminder, inflation is not a game mechanic intended to model economic inflation but rather just the name of the mechanic intended to reflect rising costs that come with the economic growth happening during the course of the game. I realised that the game code does not automatically adjust inflation to the game length, it simply scales with the number of turns elapsed no matter how long the game is. This caused inflation to be overall too high throughout the game, and to be impactful too early during its course. I addressed this by adding additional turns before inflation "kicks in", so the total number of turns that inflation scales should be the same as in 1.17. I will keep monitoring this aspect of the game as it is quite important for mid and late game tech speed, but for now it looks alright.
As with all balance changes like this, they are not meant to be perfect from this first pass onwards - I do not have enough capacity to observe all of that just on my own, so I expect to get back to it once I can get more player feedback. For now it was only important to me that the system works in broad strokes so that I have a solid foundation for further tech speed and civilization balancing, and for now it looks quite good.
