Colonial city settling - Brainstorm Thread

[Pipiskus]

Have you ever been in a situation when you wanted to claim a land that doesnt worth culture and science penalty but you needed to get this luxury resource or that strategy resource or stop your rival from expanding there. But what if you didnt have to make such a tough decision and just plant there your own puppet city. This is why i made this thread to know how you guys feel about this idea and in what way it should be implemented if we agreed that we need it.

Lets start with my idea of a colonial city:
Colonial city is a usual puppet city that can be build by one of main civs. The only thing it should differ from a puppet city is a decreased buildings maintenance and increased yield gain, which can be introduced through unique on-settle building (NEEDS A NAME) and a free Courthouse in a case you would want to annex it later (Ai should have bigger change to annex these cities over captured puppets). In order to introduce this mechanic we would need to do one of these things (ive not yet decided which one would work best):
1. Make every settler type unit (except Venetian merchant) capable of building a Colonial city from day one as a separate button
2. Make this option unique to only Colonists from day one as a separate button
(1-2). We can also leave the button the same but at the moment when you decided to build a city you would get a window similar to one when capturing a city where you will be asked if you want to settle or make it your colony.
3. Make this option appear at Compass(or any other) tech the way i described it in 1 and (1-2)

Here are some examples of AI decision-making modifiers (all numbers are arbitrary and need adjustment):

The map type is Pangea or Communitas Map with None oceans option enabled - -1000% chance to settle a colonial city (you probably dont need these here)
The map size is Tiny/Small/Standard/Large/Huge - +5%/+5%/+10%/+10%/+15% chance
Ai has rless than 4 cities- -100% chance
Ai has less/more than 6 cities - -35%/+5% per non-puppet city and +1% per every puppet city chance
The distance to the Capital: <25 tiles = -40%chance, >25 tiles= +0.5% per tile
The distance to the nearest non-puppet city: <10 tiles = -20% chance, >10 tiles = +1% per tile
The distance to the nearest road(or connected city? what do you think?) built by AI: <10 tiles = ????????? , >10 tiles = ?????
The planned city is on the same/different landmass as the Capital - -25%/+25% chance
The planned city is a naval city/or not - +10%/-10%
The planned city has a luxury you do not own/you do own within 3 city rings: +10%/+5%
The planned city has a strategic resource within 3 city rings: +10%
The planned city has more/or less rough terrain tiles within 3 city rings: +10%/+0%
The planned city has more/ or less than 2 bonus resources within 3 city rings: -10%/+10%
This is all i could come up with, i think we would need more -% modifiers but i cant think of much

So what do you think, does it worth the struggle?

 

[CppMaster]

Yes. Propose that on the next regular VP Congress.

 

[SwirlSlayer]

If you want to try a similar concept to this, balparmak has a mod called "Miscellaneous Tweaks" which allows you to settle puppet cities (and annex them for free, if you want to). I personally always play with this mod, because I love the idea of settling colonial cities (though I also delete some of the other tweaks included that I don't want). You can find it here in the second post:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/bals-gameplay-mods-naval-supply-reduced-supply-etc.674584/

 

[CppMaster]

If you want to try a similar concept to this, balparmak has a mod called "Miscellaneous Tweaks" which allows you to settle puppet cities (and annex them for free, if you want to). I personally always play with this mod, because I love the idea of settling colonial cities (though I also delete some of the other tweaks included that I don't want). You can find it here in the second post:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/bals-gameplay-mods-naval-supply-reduced-supply-etc.674584/

Good! I'll be easier to intergrate it

 

[N.Core]

Why do people forget that I already proposed this one in VP Congress and it didn't get passed?
Don't bother trying to convince the community once again if the idea isn't well received.
I have something in my mind to expand this one further, as a modmod.

 

[Pipiskus]

Why do people forget that I already proposed this one in VP Congress and it didn't get passed?
Don't bother trying to convince the community once again if the idea isn't well received.
I have something in my mind to expand this one further.

But you were close and there were lots of pioneer proposals, maybe this time it would win

 

[SuperNoobCamper]

I like the proposal as a concept but i voted against it for a simple reason.
In my opinion strategy games especially turn based are about calculated risks or risk VS benefit; is denying my neighbor to settle this barren piece of land/connecting the strstegic resource/ getting the monopoly on a luxury worth settling it myself for the cost of tanking a hit to the global needs modifier and increased cost of acquiring policies and techs? There should not be simple answer where you can get the best of both worlds without suffering a consequence or this would be more of a free style world building rather than a strategy game.

 

[Amask]

I think the problem with that reasoning is that in the overwhelming majority of cases the answer is a simple no.
Hurting yourself a lot just to hurt one out of many AIs a bit is not worth it.
There's still a cost to settling a puppet - producing a settler, pissing off neighbors, having to defend it, having to pay maintenance for its buildings.
I think the question of whether it's worth it becomes more complicated, not less.

 

[CppMaster]

Why do people forget that I already proposed this one in VP Congress and it didn't get passed?
Don't bother trying to convince the community once again if the idea isn't well received.
I have something in my mind to expand this one further, as a modmod.

Wow, there were plenty of counterproposals on that. I'd try again, because it was kinda a chaos.

 

[CppMaster]

I like the proposal as a concept but i voted against it for a simple reason.
In my opinion strategy games especially turn based are about calculated risks or risk VS benefit; is denying my neighbor to settle this barren piece of land/connecting the strstegic resource/ getting the monopoly on a luxury worth settling it myself for the cost of tanking a hit to the global needs modifier and increased cost of acquiring policies and techs? There should not be simple answer where you can get the best of both worlds without suffering a consequence or this would be more of a free style world building rather than a strategy game.

So maybe puppets should be nerfed?

 

[SuperNoobCamper]

So maybe puppets should be nerfed?

Puppets are already not good and imo an economic burden both to acquire and to maintain.
Settling a pupet however is extremely powerful for the aforementioned reasons which is for the measly cost of a couple turns of production you gain an footground on land the human player would have never wanted to.
As for the buildings maintenance cost, a human player can cheese their way out of it by settling using a bunch of vanilla settlers, not a pioneer or a colonialist and never improving any single tile so the city does not have any meaningful production which would extremely hinder it's growth and production and make it's maintenance a trivial task.

 

[KungCheops]

Why do people forget that I already proposed this one in VP Congress and it didn't get passed?
Don't bother trying to convince the community once again if the idea isn't well received.
I have something in my mind to expand this one further, as a modmod.

Why were "add herbalist to the pioneer" and "completely rework pioneers" even combined into one vote?
Looks like two entirely orthogonal proposals to me.

 

[N.Core]

Why were "add herbalist to the pioneer" and "completely rework pioneers" even combined into one vote?
Looks like two entirely orthogonal proposals to me.

Blame the Magi. I deliberately separated all those proposals because they should be voted on individually. Ended up being consolidated into a single voting thread.

 

[msw1]

Puppets are already not good and imo an economic burden both to acquire and to maintain.
Settling a pupet however is extremely powerful for the aforementioned reasons which is for the measly cost of a couple turns of production you gain an footground on land the human player would have never wanted to.
As for the buildings maintenance cost, a human player can cheese their way out of it by settling using a bunch of vanilla settlers, not a pioneer or a colonialist and never improving any single tile so the city does not have any meaningful production which would extremely hinder it's growth and production and make it's maintenance a trivial task.

Well, the cheese you mentioned could be circumvented by allowing only colonists to found puppet cities. That in my mind makes the most sense, both from a gameplay and historical point of view. I almost never build colonists because it's just not worth it to add more cities that reduce culture and science at that point. I think giving them the option to found puppets would make them a lot more interesting. Would also have a nice synergy with imperialism, which makes sense and would make imperialism more interesting for non-warmongers.

 

[Pipiskus]

Well, the cheese you mentioned could be circumvented by allowing only colonists to found puppet cities. That in my mind makes the most sense, both from a gameplay and historical point of view. I almost never build colonists because it's just not worth it to add more cities that reduce culture and science at that point. I think giving them the option to found puppets would make them a lot more interesting. Would also have a nice synergy with imperialism, which makes sense and would make imperialism more interesting for non-warmongers.

No, from historical point of view, it makes much more sense to start it in Renaissance with pioneers, at this point in time you have already settled your main cities, oceans get opened in renaissance as well, so you can build colonies across the sees.

 

[balparmak]

Well Phoenicians and Greeks and possibly many others also had trading colonies, but yeah for gameplay it's best to delay it to later eras - you wouldn't even want puppets in earlier eras anyway. I don't particularly care if it can be cheesable, imho it shouldn't be a big concern for VPs design, cheesers will cheese. Balance concerns are of course perfectly valid, it feels fine for me but I'm not a balance guy. Also I'm surprised noone mentioned the other downside the colonies, they are prone to pissing of your rivals (or even neutrals) and very vulnerable. Even more so if you consider that most colonies will be placed in other continents or lately discovered resourceful islands, and AI is very good in sniping them (and if you're going for colonies instead of proper cities you're probably also going tall-ish hence already short on supply, but this can just be my own modpacks/play style).
Aaaanyway, nice to have this discussion, keep the feedback coming!

 

[Rustonreddit]

I don't particularly care if it can be cheesable, imho it shouldn't be a big concern for VPs design, cheesers will cheese.

That sounds like awful game design

 

[CppMaster]

That sounds like awful game design

What? Settling puppets?

 

[Rustonreddit]

What? Settling puppets?

Implementing mechanics without taking into account the cheese factor.

 

[CppMaster]

Implementing mechanics without taking into account the cheese factor.

Sure, cheese could be considered, why not, but for mainly single player game fun is more important.