Expansion Stability

[Arkaeyn]

In RFC, it's pretty easy to know where you should or shouldn't expand to. In RAND, it's much more difficult to know when you're expanding into a place that you don't want to be. The only clue tends to be when you capture/found a city that immediately wants to switch to its "rightful" owner. But this can sometimes get a bit absurd.

I was playing a game as the French and managed to get to the New World, first, and captured Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Cuzco wanted to flip to the Indians and Machu Picchu to the Portuguese. I said no, and my expansion stability was shot to hell.

In the Old World, prior to civs spawning, it's equally as hard to know if your newfound city is going to cause you problems or flip or be perfect.

So how to fix this? I'm not sure if there's any way to show the player a stability map that won't seem cheap. The expansion penalty could be weakened, but that seems a little simplistic.

 

[Rhye]

settlers maps (thus, stability maps) are dynamic, they depend on the actual world. Latitude plays a major role in them

 

[innonimatu]

settlers maps (thus, stability maps) are dynamic, they depend on the actual world. Latitude plays a major role in them

Stability is the one thing about this mod which often frustrates me. I understand the desire to impose enough penalties that a few civilizations will fall, but the punishment for expansion is, IMHO, far too high. The games simply loses its fun when the player must worry about stability before founding every city or conquering an existing one. Stability penalties for losing cities are OK, and so are all the other parameters (that idea of stability or instability spreading from the other civs is great!) but overexpansion... that's already "punished" with a heavy science penalty, so why should player options be further limited also with stability?

I understand that you put a lot of work into tweaking the current system, but I'd like to try reducing this penalty for my games. Can I do it just by changing these two lines?
iNumPlotsAbroad = max(0,self.getOwnedPlotsLastTurn(iPlayer)-32)
iNewBaseStability -= self.getOwnedCitiesLastTurn(iPlayer)*7

Also regarding stability, what is the commerce bonus (apparently always +40 except for 4 civs)?
And founding any religion or spreading a non-state religion reduces stability?

 

[Arkaeyn]

settlers maps (thus, stability maps) are dynamic, they depend on the actual world. Latitude plays a major role in them

That's good to know - it's actually helped me in my current game.

 

[musicfreak]

I understand that you put a lot of work into tweaking the current system, but I'd like to try reducing this penalty for my games. Can I do it just by changing these two lines?
iNumPlotsAbroad = max(0,self.getOwnedPlotsLastTurn(iPlayer)-32)
iNewBaseStability -= self.getOwnedCitiesLastTurn(iPlayer)*7

Yes, I've made similar modifications to my own game.

And founding any religion [...] reduces stability?

Yeah, I never understood that either. Rhye?

 

[Arkaeyn]

Founding a religion has helped my stability IMMENSELY in my last two games, as China and Rome, which usually collapse for me around 1700. I was also fairly lucky in that no other religions made significant expansions into my empire.

 

[solanacea]

I think there should be no stability map in RAND. What is the point anyway, this is no longer historical since its a random map. Every city should cause a little bit stability decrease, perhaps more after a threshold number of cities to penaltize huge empires.

 

[musicfreak]

I think there should be no stability map in RAND. What is the point anyway, this is no longer historical since its a random map. Every city should cause a little bit stability decrease, perhaps more after a threshold number of cities to penalize huge empires.

True, I actually greatly agree. Maybe just make it based on distance from your starting location or something like that, I don't know. But you're right, it really doesn't make sense.

 

[scu98rkr]

Well it does make sense if another CIV is likely to spawn in your Empire.

Basically what stability is representing is are the people living in that area the same or similar culture to your empire ?

Therefore founding a city out side of this area might lead to new civ spawning / cities rebelling.

There needs to be some way of representing this and maybe even changing it with your culture.

I imagine the easiest thing to do begin with would be just to show the stability of each square as a text message in one of the bottom corners as you mouse over each individual squares this would be annoying but at least it would give you some ideas which way to expand to keep your stability good.

What we really need is a button which actually shows the stability maps(or some of that) overlaid on to the screen. Then people could decide whether to expand within there culutural group or move outside of it.

Basically what the stability maps are trying to represent is that certain empire start in more culturally homo-genus area's such as China/India and therefore are more likely to reach a large size before struggling with stability problems. But the player NEEDS to know this.