Balance - The "Wide vs Tall" Problem

[NarrativeKnight]

I always read every post in the thread before commenting so be assured I haven't missed a comment. The Settlers using food instead of hammer is awesome. Using the current food is good but the old population point cost is not. I still remember face palming when I accidentally let a size one city build a settler and being back a square one as my city disappeared. The luxuries giving more happiness based on population is too, although I was thinking someone was saying it would be for total population instead of city population which is just another bonus for wide.

Yes, wide does win. I don't think you have actually played tall if you think it is easy to win all the time with it. Those 1-4 cities have to have the right location to give you the production you need for all of those wonders and for building armies on top of everything else to keep your wide friends from wandering in. Every decision is crucial because fighting off barbarians, building wonders, culture and growth buildings all at the same time with so few cities is NOT easy. There are fewer cities and units to manage but if anything goes wrong you are basically dead. Easy is going wide where it is nearly impossible to fail. You have ridiculous amounts of luxuries from being so spread out, multiple connections to the capital and selling extra luxuries for money and then the internal trade routes for boosted growth and production. That is easy, even if it comes with more management.

The only change to the caravansary I can see is adding tourism bonuses to it. In early game those caravans are your actual people going to sell your stuff face to face to people in another culture and it is event for those who receive the caravan. It was a big deal back then for a caravan to come from exotic far away lands. This early start to tourism might be the beginning of the late game tourism edge tall would need to compete since building culture would be necessary for everyone with the new happiness system.

As to people calling people who play tall 'lazy', I think you need to learn how to play the game. The reason I play tall is because victory is guaranteed if you go wide. It is just simply too easy. You can set up your cities to auto-build because everything is the same with minor changes for resources available. Then you take your unstoppable army and crush anyone who gets in the way. You don't have to be afraid of your neighbors, your decisions are not critically important, you barely have to think. Science and money and you are done. You don't need religion, culture or wonders except a very few. EASY. Specifically, the reason there are penalties to going wide is because it is so easy in the first place. That is why there is no debate as to the game being unbalanced in favor of small. It simply isn't.

I really like the idea of finding victory conditions that would let small have a chance to win in multi-player or just win in single player in a way that doesn't make every single decision be the possible fatal mistake. That being said I do like competing against the wide civilizations for tall victories as well.

As to the trade routes they are shields for coin or shields to production or food. I honestly see this as mostly good. Building the cargo ship or caravan is making the goods for sale and sending them off which is where the money comes from so it isn't 'out of nowhere'. The same can be said of internal caravans shipping shields to other cities. I don't really like the shield production transforming into food though for internal trade routes. I would like to see food disappear if you are going to send it some where. Building internal food caravans with food just like the settlers would be my ideal solution for that.

My apologies to Wodhann and Gazebo but, partially since I have not tried the patch yet, I will believe the AI handling the change in happiness management when I see it. I am skeptic there like mystikx21. I do hope it works though and that we can figure out something to do about tourism to compensate for the changes if it does work.

I know it is a lot to say in one post but there is lot going on in the thread and I am late joining in. I am looking forward to testing things myself once I learn how to install it and what other mods I use that it replaces.

Ingolenuru on Steam

 

[guto8797]

I do think that the AI is the game's major fault. It usually turns into a "watch the AI up" show. Not very often they get good, and higher difficulties are just cheating. They don't get any smarter, just starting bonuses, that makes early game unfair, and late game changes none.

I think that in order to fix the AI; it needs more awareness. Probably shouldn't be denouncing friends if you are about to get attacked. Probably shouldn't refuse trading with hyper military goons. Probably should actually fight in a reasonable matter. Etc. Hard work, but I think it would make the game much better.

 

[Mutineer]

Personally I believe the only think need to be changed from vanilla is effect of national wanders.

Rigth now National wanders are too expensive to build for wide empires for same gain.

And NC is broken,

So, my suggestion would be.

NC 5% to science + 5% * Number of non occupied, non pupets cities.
Ironwork 1 + Number of non occupied, non pupets cities.

That is an example, that way we can keep cost same, but give wide empires benefit of hard to build national wanders.

 

[Funak]

NC 5% to science + 5% * Number of non occupied, non pupets cities.
Ironwork 1 + Number of non occupied, non pupets cities.

That is an example, that way we can keep cost same, but give wide empires benefit of hard to build national wanders.

You are aware that it is the small empires that suffer right now, right?

Wide already got a huge boost when we removed the requirement for needing the building in all cities to build a national wonder

 

[Mutineer]

you did not need to remove that. But NC is still broken. I believe philosophy is it to change less?

 

[NarrativeKnight]

you did not need to remove that. But NC is still broken. I believe philosophy is it to change less?

The whole point of National Wonders is that you either build them early before going wide or you have a very hard time building them. This is was specifically arranged to balance the wide vs tall equation. The tall empires get to build National Wonders to boost yields while the wide empires get their extra yields from having a lot of cities. They are a balancing mechanism. Making them easier for wide empires to build AND giving them extra bonuses is totally contradictory to their existence in the game.

Ingolenuru on Steam

 

[Funak]

you did not need to remove that. But NC is still broken. I believe philosophy is it to change less?

NC was discussed in another thread it is getting lowered.

The whole point of National Wonders is that you either build them early before going wide or you have a very hard time building them. This is was specifically arranged to balance the wide vs tall equation. The tall empires get to build National Wonders to boost yields while the wide empires get their extra yields from having a lot of cities. They are a balancing mechanism. Making them easier for wide empires to build AND giving them extra bonuses is totally contradictory to their existence in the game.

Ingolenuru on Steam

Agreed, that's why we are trying to find another way to balance it out. Being able to build national wonders is fun and not being able to build them as wide is boring =D

 

[Gazebo]

NC was discussed in another thread it is getting lowered.



Agreed, that's why we are trying to find another way to balance it out. Being able to build national wonders is fun and not being able to build them as wide is boring =D

The population-based system is wide/tall neutral, and works quite well. Balancing the individual buildings is all we need to do now for NWs to work as we want them to.
G

 

[noto2]

Wide empires should have an advantage... it's far more difficult to establish, defend, and maintain a wide empire than a tall one, why should they be balanced? How hard is it to sit in your capital building wonders all game? It's very difficult to rapidly expand early game, and then fight all the wars that are the result of said expansion. You should be rewarded for all that hard work.

 

[Funak]

Wide empires should have an advantage... it's far more difficult to establish, defend, and maintain a wide empire than a tall one, why should they be balanced? How hard is it to sit in your capital building wonders all game? It's very difficult to rapidly expand early game, and then fight all the wars that are the result of said expansion. You should be rewarded for all that hard work.

You need to understand the difference between "Balanced" and "Equal", "Balance" is what you want, it takes difficulty of management and construction into mind and understands that if you put more effort into something you should get more back. Equal however would mean that building additional cities wouldn't help you at all.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

Yes, it should.

In short: The problem with wide is one, a competitive problem. A game has to be balanced around the competitive scene, if you base it around the casual players you end up with a game with mechanics that are too easy to exploit, as you cater to the visceral whims of the people who only want a soft ride when choosing their own personal style of gameplay. Take a game like DOTA or League of Legends for example: if designers nerfed every champion/hero that frustated the newbies, these games would end up being very unbalanced for serious players.
And the second is a game concept one - going wide should have pros and cons, but right now the only con is psychological one, if you disregard speedbumps. There's no real action>consequence dualism from the choice of going tall or wide - wide is "tall +" right now.

About the comments on going tall being more "fun", that's a matter of taste. Some aggressive players may think it's more fun to have a sprawling, dominating empire. You can't base game design decisions on what some amount of players consider more fun.

Taking this as an assumption (which I disagree with, but will proceed nowhere to argue), the critical step is to recognize that altering the game to create a balanced scenario between wide and tall is going to be hard, unintuitive, and mathematically demanding.

Things that one may think help to address wide vs. tall may, most of the time, do something other than expected, or do something unrelated, or do nothing at all, or even adjust the balance in the opposite direction from desired. The only antidote to this ignorance is total analysis. This is the troubling point:

Everything you have comes from a city. From a city, your ability to pay for what you get will come. Therefore, a city will pay for your ability to build up a city, or to settle another one.
Settling more cities, or conquering them, gives you more of the thing from which everything else comes. So it is only a hop and a skip to conclude that Civ V's method of hard-capping growth with a number that was itself limited oppressively even against the use of city resources, is the only way to make few cities better than more even some of the time.

As remarked repeatedly as the 'problem' at hand, wide tall is better than tall. The trouble is what can stop wide from becoming wide tall if any city can be tall. Nothing, so there has to be something that stops a city from becoming tall sometimes, and which NO RESOURCE can subvert or overcome.

I just require one further clarifying point to understand this, admitted, position I don't agree with. Are wide and tall descriptions of a game state, or a strategy? So, do you reach or achieve a wide/tall scenario through (allegedly) paying costs and making a strategic guess about the optimality of either, or do you adopt a widening or heightening approach to the investment of your resources , having made a strategic guess about the optimality of either and constrained from the rules-as-a-whole to commit to one of those approaches for the best outcome (i.e., waffling and the middleground are clearly non-optimal all the time)?
Or is it like the second one, except switching between the approaches could be correct? Which of these is the game that you and the target playerbase want to play?

 

[Funak]

You do realize that the post you're quoting is a year old, right?
Not really relevant to the discussion but just wanted to put that out there.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

You do realize that the post you're quoting is a year old, right?
Not really relevant to the discussion but just wanted to put that out there.

Did anyone ever answer the problem? No.

 

[noto2]

Civ 4 managed to balance wide and tall just fine. It was possible, with a really good start, to have an empire consisting of only 2-3 cities and yet build a massive lead into the lategame that you could translate into victory. This occurred if you went with representation and built tons of wonders and settled all the GP in a super city.

Then again, time was always on the side of a much larger civ. Expanding in the early game stagnated your research and meant you couldn't build wonders, but if you managed to get 3x as much land as your opponent, you would eventually pass them in economic output. The question was, would you pass them quickly enough to win.

I actually like Civ 5's economy better than Civ 4. I like that gold is its own thing and research is independent of anything else. I'm still trying to figure out the cost/reward of going wide, though. It's a lot more complicated than Civ 4, with the social policy cost increases and research cost increases.

 

[hokath]

with the social policy cost increases and research cost increases.

And it is so hard to tell how important this factor is. As a rule of thumb, sub par cities are not worth it scientifically and culturally. But where is par?

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

I like civ IV as much as the next guy. So you want to have a game with actual gold in its own right and science. That's fine. Ok. Civ IV achieved its curious balance with some carefully tuned settings of its admirably simple components. In Civ IV , the question is not having the wide or the tall, it was when. The resource , I owe this understanding entirely to Delnar, is time. More cities are good... but they're a penalty in a short term.

But we don't want to emulate/recreate Civ IV, I'm just pointing out Civ IV did some design gymnastics and really got down and dirty with some math to bring about its simple goal of making expansion good but not mindless. And Civ IV had commerce and such, with no intrinsic science from population, so we're in a different situation indeed.

----
If you squint a bit lot, the 5% research penalty is sort of like the growing per-city maintenance costs from Civ IV eating into your research bottom line. However, it's as if the penalty is always small for the first expand, and more for the next, and more for the next, regardless of location. And since it is percentage, it's actually -constantly- running away from your empire, because as is well known to Civ BNW players now, it's just a question of when a new city could not possibly produce 5% the science of the capital in the timespan left. It's flat or one-dimensional in some sense, its ultimate effect is only at the value of the empire in a single moment, it doesn't change the motions or risks along the way.

But not to get sidetracked , before overanalyzing details from the base from which the cpp has already far departed, it could serve to remember that, the design objective of getting all the land settled up quickly so there aren't empty lands in the modern era, has its own pull in the design of the mod and would affect directly the manner of the tradeoff for attempting width. Or deciding that unsettled lands is not an issue and the reasons are XYZ and that's that.

 

[Strigvir]

it's just a question of when a new city could not possibly produce 5% the science of the capital in the timespan left.

Actually, science penalty per city is the subject to diminishing returns. First 10 cities increase the cost by 50%, thus bringing it to 150% of the normal values. The next 10 cities bring it to 200%, however the effective increase compared to 150% is 33%. In the endgame, science-based cities produce maybe 1.5 more science compared to normal ones with just all science and food buildings. So science rate is more-less the same for wide and tall empires and depends mostly on how much you invest in it.
Wide empires generally have problems with culture. My wide Spain game couldn't even max the 3rd tree before ideologies rolled out, while in Venice game I got the ideology before the modern era.

 

[DLimited]

Actually, science penalty per city is the subject to diminishing returns. First 10 cities increase the cost by 50%, thus bringing it to 150% of the normal values. The next 10 cities bring it to 200%, however the effective increase compared to 150% is 33%. In the endgame, science-based cities produce maybe 1.5 more science compared to normal ones with just all science and food buildings. So science rate is more-less the same for wide and tall empires and depends mostly on how much you invest in it.
Wide empires generally have problems with culture. My wide Spain game couldn't even max the 3rd tree before ideologies rolled out, while in Venice game I got the ideology before the modern era.

While correct, I don't think looking at relative values actually is something useful. As long as your new city offers enough science/turn that it can absorb the extra science impact it has over the turns you'd normally need, you can feel free to build that new city. So, if it takes 1,000 beakers for a tech and you have 100 science/turn already, if the new city gives you at least 10 beakers/turn you're fine. If it offers more, you actually gain something from founding the city.

I do agree that really wide empires suffer a culture falloff, however they also offer more production, so you can combat that through winning Worlds Fair and more antiquity sites.

All in all I actually really like the way CBP handles tall vs wide currently. Especially with the recent changes to specialists, I'll need to test it some more but the choice tall/wide is now pretty meaningful.

 

[Finarvi]

While correct, I don't think looking at relative values actually is something useful. As long as your new city offers enough science/turn that it can absorb the extra science impact it has over the turns you'd normally need, you can feel free to build that new city. So, if it takes 1,000 beakers for a tech and you have 100 science/turn already, if the new city gives you at least 10 beakers/turn you're fine. If it offers more, you actually gain something from founding the city.
[...]

Well, to be strict, in this case you lose. That's becuase you get the same science, right, but you get it later than if you wouldn't build that city.

So I'd say that building new city lategame is OK as long it will produce clearly more and than you could get from this 5%. But early game, more cities = better, as this 5% doesn't affect you that much and you will have very important from new city after you build base buildings.