Limits to expansion?

[Louis XXIV]

I've already given my thoughts for why I think ICS won't be a factor, but I'll give some more thoughts on REX.

It seems this game will offer a lot of stuff to do - especially early. Religion is a race you probably want to win. The same is true with trying to build culture on the civics tree or wonders or trade units (so you can get roads at a minimum) or military units. These are so many other things that settlers are a cost you'd have to bear. Given this, REX may be a strategy, but it certainly doesn't seem like the clearly best strategy. I'd much rather this (where opportunity cost is the limiting factor) than some artificial cost.

That being said, limits to military conquest are still something that I feel is important.

 

[historix69]

Limits to expansion?

Imagine 10 players starting on a map with place for 100 cities ... the game rules have been adjusted so that possessing more than 10 cities is a no-go due to massive penalties in order to limit expansion. After a while war breaks out and some of the players are eliminated ... finally only 2 players are left ... to avoid the penalties, each player has to raze the conquered cities ... in the end there is a 100-cities-map with only 20 cities and lots of unused free space ...

Look at Russia, USA, Canada ... in real life there is no limit to expansion / land claiming until you reach the coastline ...

Since Civ games are always played on finite maps (different to MineCraft), there is always a limit to expansion in Civ games.

 

[Nixalo]

What about an increasing local happiness penalty based on distance. Like 1/2 the tiles away as penalty.

Your capital would have no penalty. But a city 20 tiles away might have a -10 penalty to happiness. It would need tons of luxuries, amenities, and housing to not rebel against the capital. Nearby military units could lessen the blow. A Civ like Indonesia would have 1/2 this penalty.

So you are allowed to REX and spam cities. Just not bad cities with no armies keeping them calm.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I've already given my thoughts for why I think ICS won't be a factor, but I'll give some more thoughts on REX.

It seems this game will offer a lot of stuff to do - especially early. Religion is a race you probably want to win. The same is true with trying to build culture on the civics tree or wonders or trade units (so you can get roads at a minimum) or military units. These are so many other things that settlers are a cost you'd have to bear. Given this, REX may be a strategy, but it certainly doesn't seem like the clearly best strategy. I'd much rather this (where opportunity cost is the limiting factor) than some artificial cost.

That being said, limits to military conquest are still something that I feel is important.

Let's say you need 10 turns to build a settler. You build one and lose 10 turns of valuable production. You build your next city and in 10 turns you compensate the loss and if the cities grow independently, if the independently produce culture, science and so on, you're already ahead of those who started with buildings. They could be slightly ahead in the area they've picked instead of settler (i.e. science if they took library), but this will compensate easily. After this you build third settler in the second city - this already doesn't count against players with only 1 city as your capitol doesn't build that third settler... Repeat while you have place to settle.

If no additional restrictions apply, it's worth settling as much cities as you find space for and as much as you can protect (note - building military units is also easier with larger number of cities). It's a no-brainer strategy and any no-brainer strategy is good.

What we know already Civ6 does right is - cities require more space to work efficiently, so the worse version of ICS from early civ games with cities built as close as possible doesn't work. However, it doesn't limit expansion itself.

Also, it's important to restrain only early-game expansion as it's the problem. Once most of the territory is settled, expanding through war or settling unhabitated lands during the age of exploration shouldn't be punished. Civ5 global happiness was quite good idea as it restricted quick settling, but once you unlock happiness building and start trading resources, the happiness restrictions aren't that hard anymore.

 

[MIS]

Imagine 10 players starting on a map with place for 100 cities ... the game rules have been adjusted so that possessing more than 10 cities is a no-go due to massive penalties in order to limit expansion. After a while war breaks out and some of the players are eliminated ... finally only 2 players are left ... to avoid the penalties, each player has to raze the conquered cities ... in the end there is a 100-cities-map with only 20 cities and lots of unused free space ...

Look at Russia, USA, Canada ... in real life there is no limit to expansion / land claiming until you reach the coastline ...

Since Civ games are always played on finite maps (different to MineCraft), there is always a limit to expansion in Civ games.

I think the main difference between Civ and real world is that in Civ your empire is the sum of your cities. There's plenty of land in North Canada with no cities.

 

[historix69]

There's plenty of land in North Canada with no cities.

Since global happiness in Civ5 did not work, one could implement kind of "global population" ... a civ's population would grow globally (more in a logarithmic way than exponentially) ... Population could travel freely between cities ... to claim land, you need to place population in a new city where it might be less productive compared to the well developed core cities ... the difference between wide and tall would be how you distribute your population on the map. (Similar to Colonization)

Since cities are usually unhealthy places, you would need some rural population to counter the population decrease in big cities ... Building military units might use global population so that this part of population will not be available as farmer/worker in the same time. A nation with sufficient population so might be able to claim the surounding land on the continent with small cities while the core cities have high population and grow.

 

[mjs0]

I would like to see a system that allows tiles to be claimed outside the traditional 5 hex radius.
This would allow late game empires to fill in all that unclaimed land.

However, I don't think simply adding a sixth or seventh ring to cities is the right approach.

Perhaps a system of cultural influence that calculates the cultural pressure on a tile that is outside the fifth ring of any city, and once it is above a certain threshold of pressure from two cities, not just one, it would get claimed.

 

[kaspergm]

Since global happiness in Civ5 did not work ...

Well, Civ5 (post vanilla) succeeded far too well in limiting expansion (as shown by the fact the default 4-city tall strategy). Of course that was also courtesy of absurdly poorly balanced policies and national wonders, but imo. global happiness was not such a bad idea as people sometimes make it. Personally, I agree with Nixalo that a system where the happiness cost of founding a city scaling with the distance to the capital would be a good start, and then I would add a gold maintenance for cities that grows with number of cities, similar to Civ4. I definitely don't see a return to local happiness as something that will discourage expansion, if that's what one wants.

 

[Gali]

Ics is probably dead due to districts. Cities need more space and powerful adjacency's make proper city positioning more important. Ics will probably be possible but lose on efficiency. They talked about wide empires having science penalties. I think the 5% science penalt will be back. No problem for a mid-size city to overcome but Ics will suffer.

Rex will be limited by having so much to do. There is the religious race, city-state quests fulfilling eureka requirements building expensive districts. Also AIs and barbarians sound much more aggressive early on. Rex might be dangerous if it leaves you overstretched and a barb scout finds you. If you are suffering multiple barbarian invasions at once it could hurt. The AI also sounded more aggressive. Cleopatra will apparently respond quickly to perceived weakness. Roosevelt was described as going after isolated settlers. It sounds like they are expanding on the changes to warmonger rules in BNW and making early war more acceptable.

I also heard a reference to war weariness coming back and affecting amenities. Could make overly aggressive warmongering cripple your homeland.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

I want reasons to settle cities. In SMAC there were bonuses on tiles but they were just plus whatever. But any place would still gain you something so no city was special and you just built them because you could. I had lot of fun in Civ 5 as Polynesia on an archipelago map grabbing islands everywhere. With their unique improvements any coastline was valuable. With other civs going wide it was fun finding resources and claiming them. Going tall I liked having great cities making great people and cultural advances, but it made exploration a downer. There's a good city location. Too bad I have four already.
Also the colonization era was one of the most interesting parts of the game for me although it never quite worked out. The AI just wasn't good at making a second, new world land rush so I grabbed a few good locations and stopped.
Expansion should be useful but I don't want to spam cities and then have to manage all these generic cities. I think expansion should be generally better but have options that balance having fewer cities so if expansion stalls the civ isn't out of the running right then.
One problem with civ 5 was you had to choose between tradition and liberty right away rather than after you see if you have space or are boxed in.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

[stiiknafuulia]

Imo, the balance to expansion should come chiefly from competition with other game mechanics. It seems like they're going in this direction, with the Eureka moments, limited use workers and everything. So a city would always be a net benefit, but something else might be even more important. In the early game, when each new city is a double-digit percent addition to production, science, etc, this will be hard to accomplish though. Otoh, later on you'll likely have a disposable 'settler pump' city available to churn out settlers and claim even remotely useable tiles ad infinitum... Doesn't sound so hot either.

I'm merely brainstorming here, but I saw someone suggest (in this thread?) that each new settler that is produced should cost more than the last one. Thus after some point, building 'native' settlers would become prohibitively expensive, and to have a really wide empire, you'd have to either resort to military conquests or adopt policies / build wonders / etc that would enable you to get some free settlers or lower their price once again. It's a bit of a gamey solution, as a settler is just a rag-tag group of folks who'd realistically cost the same amount regardless of when you assemble it, but it'd be interesting to see this in action. If expansion is deemed too easy in the base game, someone could grab onto this as a mod idea.

Another, similar solution is to increase settler cost with each new era; but then you'd likely get 'pumping phases' where players would deliberately delay science in order to pump out settlers and then accelerate it after they've settled enough cities with cheap settlers. It's a tedious no-brainer 'strategy' the likes of which should be avoided... Maybe with a real good tech-tree design this could be prevented, but fwiw the first solution (more expensive native settlers with each built settler) avoids this problem altogether.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Let's say you need 10 turns to build a settler. You build one and lose 10 turns of valuable production. You build your next city and in 10 turns you compensate the loss and if the cities grow independently, if the independently produce culture, science and so on, you're already ahead of those who started with buildings. They could be slightly ahead in the area they've picked instead of settler (i.e. science if they took library), but this will compensate easily. After this you build third settler in the second city - this already doesn't count against players with only 1 city as your capitol doesn't build that third settler... Repeat while you have place to settle.

Except if you lose out on religions because other civs built faith so a civ with three cities is more effective. You don't have any money because other civs built trade units and you have no roads so your settlers are traveling more slowly. Meanwhile those civs that started slower can now buy settlers. They also have better units, a better government, etc.

 

[Japper007]

I think the new Master of Orion has an amazing expansion limiter:

It doesnt have one!

You can spam colony ships willy nilly but that will leave your empire (and military) stretched out, making it easier to conquer, and your planets will lack many core buildings (so your science, defenses, population and production will suffer).
Eventually a big empire should always be better than a small one, it should just be harder to create and defend.

I think the best answer to ICS/ REX'ing is a good, aggresive, AI that'll take advantage when the player is weak and overstretched.

 

[CaptainUnknown]

I think the new Master of Orion has an amazing expansion limiter:

It doesnt have one!

You can spam colony ships willy nilly but that will leave your empire (and military) stretched out, making it easier to conquer, and your planets will lack many core buildings (so your science and production will suffer).
Eventually a big empire should always be better than a small one, it should just be harder to create and defend.

I think the best answer to ICS/ REX'ing is a good, aggresive, AI that'll take advantage when the player is weak and overstretched.

Would be cool that if there was a huge penalty levied on the civ if their land borders were no longer continuous. For obvious reasons, if you blocked off an opposing civ's extended cities, those cities should not be happy with the empire and potentially have high unhappiness, to the point of revolts/culture flipping (if it's in).

 

[stealth_nsk]

Except if you lose out on religions because other civs built faith so a civ with three cities is more effective. You don't have any money because other civs built trade units and you have no roads so your settlers are traveling more slowly. Meanwhile those civs that started slower can now buy settlers. They also have better units, a better government, etc.

A valid point - yes, with hard competition like religion or the first available wonder you may lose, but their lose isn't critical (unless the game is purely inbalanced) and winning in all other areas definitely worth it.

Regarding traders and the rest - the point is incorrect. With several times more production you could build more traders, more just everything. Once again - I'm not speaking about small undeveloped cities close to each other, I'm speaking about standard cities with full development, just dedicating the initial efforts to full expansion.

 

[The_Reckoning]

I think the new Master of Orion has an amazing expansion limiter:

It doesnt have one!

Isn't ICS impossible in MoO because you settle planets, which there's a finite supply of, rather than tiles, which there's a practically infinite supply of?

 

[Louis XXIV]

A valid point - yes, with hard competition like religion or the first available wonder you may lose, but their lose isn't critical (unless the game is purely inbalanced) and winning in all other areas definitely worth it.

And not having quite as many cities may not be critical either. It's about balance there too. I didn't find REX to be a particularly dominant strategy in BNW either (and it wasn't due to global happiness, since expanding to gobble up all the luxuries would be a major reason to expand).

 

[stealth_nsk]

And not having quite as many cities may not be critical either. It's about balance there too. I didn't find REX to be a particularly dominant strategy in BNW either (and it wasn't due to global happiness, since expanding to gobble up all the luxuries would be a major reason to expand).

In Civ5 the happiness and culture penalties affected later game more - if you have more cities, you can't afford them being as tall. And with too many boosts for a single city, like Wonders and natural Wonders, specialist-related freedom policies and so on, this makes tall empires too viable.

 

[Acken]

No. Freedom specialist happiness+free food favors wide. As unintuitive as it sounds. Wide empires simply run more specialist and the food creates a bigger difference on those food levels typical of such empires.

Wide is easy to play past ideologies anyway. Regardless which one you picked and pressure aside.

The problem of happiness for wide is the Middle-age to Industrial period where poor hapiness will just wreck your game compared to a smaller and efficient empire. Wide games NEED this period to be uninterupted in growth to catch up to tall strategies.

 

[Gali]

Districts can not be built adjacent to a city tile. Ics cities will be what 3-4 tiles away at most that is even more crowded.

Also remember that even if you ignore faith as most do on high levels you can no longer afford to ignore culture to anywhere near the same degree as in 5. They have said the civics tree unlocks governments, buildings, policy cards, districts and wonders. My guess is most of your amenities which allow you to grow your cities and offset war weariness come from the civic tree.

So in the early game you need to build more military to counter barbarians designed to be more threatening. Most articles talk about the AI being more aggressive especially against militarily weak civs. So thats another reason to build more military Then you need to grow science and culture and consider diverting resources/ attention to eureka requirements. There is still the faith game. It seems like they are trying to promote early war by allowing for reduced warmonger penalties and easy switching to military civics. You also want to be getting up early trade routes for the free roads. i routinely ignored trade routes early on but that is likely to change. Early mass rex might be a strategy and could work in the right starts but it sounds that there is enough to be doing in the early game that it will not be the one strategy