I'm designing a new yield for Civ VII: Stability. Looking for feedback

[kotpeter]

I don’t think your solution is consistent with the motivation for it as you laid it out. Misunderstanding the settlement limit to be a hard limit is what I would consider to be a beginner’s mistake. How it works might not be immediately obvious, but the settlement limit mechanism is actually very simple and can be explained in a couple sentences. Settlement limits are also very small numbers with increases coming from a fairly limited set of sources, whereas the proposed stability yield comes from many different sources and the amount varies a lot on the source. That’s not exactly beginner friendly.

Hey, thank you for taking your time to read the document and write feedback on it!

I agree that settlement limit is a very simple mechanism that's poorly explained. And I do agree that stability is much more complex than that.

My intention was to introduce this complexity in order to give players more freedom and choice, while avoiding ambiguity and preserving or improving immersion. Let me elaborate:

• Stability is a cost for expanding and growing, but it can be paid with policy cards, satisfying government objectives and accomplishing other gameplay milestones; it's up to the player to decide how and when to expand and how to keep stability positive. In current iteration of Civ 7, there are fewer possibilities to increase the settlement limit and it doesn't involve as many interesting choices.
• That's subjective, but to me stability feels more natural to a 4X game than settlement limit. It's a broader and more immersive concept, and its built-in narrative allows to integrate it with other gameplay systems in a meaningful way. Meanwhile, settlement limit puts the burden on the player to add immersive "flavor" to it, because it's very artificial both in the way it works and the way it's presented. I'd argue that bonuses which provide +settlement limit don't connect meaningfully to what they do. They are scattered around tech and civic trees for the purpose of balance, and while this isn't inherently bad, there's a wasted opportunity that I'm trying to take advantage of. Actually, I removed stability bonuses from techs and civics on purpose for that very reason.
• I agree that stability (as well as the penalty) comes from many different sources, but I tried to introduce them gradually through existing gameplay loop by using governments, as well as UI for yields, settler lens and government policies.

Also, maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t see why the listed effects can’t just all be translated directly to happiness changes. It looks like what you’re trying to replace is happiness, not settlement limit.

I wanted to keep happiness a local yield for each settlement, working as is, while stability is global and affects many things, not just happiness. And I think happiness works well as is, so I don't really want to change anything about it. I'm thinking to maybe add the following bonus to positive stability: +1 happiness per excess stability. Without age scaling, so that in the Exploration Age players are inclined to settle or colonize more, which feats the overall theme of the age.

 

[kotpeter]

Come to think of it, remember age dedications from Civ 6? When the new age starts, you get to choose an extra source of era score.

Stability from governments is very much like this. I think this associative link will help players' understanding a lot, and players are generally good at recognizing patterns and similarities.

 

[kotpeter]

It might be a good idea to adjust the stability on Palace based on the difficulty level. It will provide more freedom for experimenting and learning the game to players on lower difficulties, and a challenge to those who seek it. Lower base stability means players are required to fulfill government objectives to progress their expansion or add more policies to their governments.

For example, in the antiquity age players on Deity difficulty would get 5 base stability on Palace, while players on Governor would get 10 base stability. Scaling could be implemented like this:

Difficulty level	Stability from Palace
Scribe	12
Governor	10
Viceroy	8
Sovereign	7
Immortal	6
Deity	5

As for the AI, I assume it would be fine to let its base stability always be 10. So on Governor difficulty the player and AIs are equal on all terms, and on higher difficulty AIs have an advantage.

 

[tman2000]

I would be surprised if something like this, connected to a loyalty system was not implemented in the first expansion.

Brilliant. Loyalty being the counter pole to Stability. Your stability versus there's factoring into loyalty. Stable empires just naturally absorbing unstable neighbors.

 

[rocksinmypath]

I think stability as a yield that replaces happiness is an idea worth pursuing. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how the game would look with radical differences between one age another, and making yield types age-local is one such possibility. The happiness/celebration mechanism doesn’t need to persist through all three ages, and it would be interesting to see how stability can replace it in one of the ages. A stability mechanism that is local to one age and divorced from happiness can help the game feel fresh beyond Antiquity. Not having to layer stability on top of happiness should also allow us to keep things simple.

One possibility is this. For some time, I’ve been looking to expand on this idea I had about adding an XP system to policy cards, so that the player can develop a sense of attachment to certain cards that they get to develop throughout the game as they do with cities that they plan out and build. I’m wondering if something similar can be achieved with stability. Instead of being an yield multiplier like happiness, what if stability was all about amplifying the effects of policy cards? I’m just spitballing here, but we could look at something reminiscent of the celebration mechanism where excess stability accumulates over time, and when it reaches a threshold, you get to level up one of your cards for enhanced effects. Now, that system might lead to a weird situation where the player may choose to upgrade cards they haven’t used yet. To prevent that, we can re-interpret policy stability costs mentioned in the doc as XP that each slotted card gains per turn during which there is no stability deficit. Say you had slotted in two cards A and B costing 1 and 2 points per turn, respectively. If you were generating at least 3 stability per turn, both cards would gain XP. If you were earning less than that, neither would progress, and optionally (only during crisis?), you suffer further negative consequence for running a stability deficit. Excess stability accumulated over time could be used to buy a chance to swap out a card.

 

[GeneralZift]

I had the same idea actually, but I like to see it fleshed out the way you did it.
I didn't have the time to read through it fully, but did you consider having Towns cost less than Cities in Stability?

 

[kotpeter]

I had the same idea actually, but I like to see it fleshed out the way you did it.
I didn't have the time to read through it fully, but did you consider having Towns cost less than Cities in Stability?

I did, my initial version had cities cost twice as much.

Later on I decided to make cities' population cost larger, while keeping settlement cost the same for both towns and cities. I'm currently working on the spreadsheet framework to test numbers that I presented, and if I see a lot of surplus stability, I might consider adding more stability penalties, including the one you suggested.

 

[kotpeter]

Recently I came up with another idea of how to rework celebrations with the new stability mechanic. Here it is:

during celebrations, happiness in each settlement (i.e. local happiness) increases all other yields by 0.25% for each point of local happiness, stacking up to a 25% increase at 100 local happiness.

This is very similar to how negative happiness currently works, and while it may seem a bit too small, achieving even +5% to all yields is very doable and actually powerful (similar leader attribute bonus from alliances have recently been nerfed)