Overreach: Scaling costs for districts/settlers/etc...

[Olleus]

This is going to be another one of my very long posts. Sorry.

Civ 6 has steep scaling cost for a lot of things that depends on how the game is going. Each civilian unit increases its own cost as you build them and, as we all know, districts get more expensive with each tech and civic researched.

This system is bad. It feels completely arbitrary (like the hated inflation mechanic from Civ4), it encourages weird tactics (deliberately leaving holes in the tech/civic tree), and it's very opaque (making it hard to plan). I consider this 3 very strong negatives for a strategy game. However, there does need to be some way to make late game stuff more expensive for basic balance. That's the preamble, if you disagree with this then you probably won't be interested in what follows.


My proposal is to get rid of these myriads of counter intuitive scaling systems and replace them by overreach. The idea is very simple.

• Overreach for each civ is initially at 0
• Some actions increase overreach. For example, finishing a builder/trader might give +3 overreach. A new district might be +5. A new city would increase overreach by its distance to the capital. [Numbers obviously here just for illustration].
• Each turn overreach decreases by 1, but cannot go below 0.
• The game also displays the accumulated overreach, call it something like corruption (or disorganisation if you don't want any civ 2-4 reminders). This is simply the sum of the overreach at the end of every turn.
• The cost of settlers/builders/traders/religion units/districts/etc... scales with corruption (say, cost = base_cost * (1 + corruption/100).

That's it. The rest of this post is me trying to convince you this is a great idea. I'll put it in a spoiler so you can ignore it more easily

Spoiler :

What this does is ensure that costs go up continuously during the game, but punishes rapid expansion the most. Say I build 4 cities 5 tiles away from my capital in one turn. That gives me 20 overreach at once. This gives me 20 corruption next turn, when my overreach has then decayed to 19. Fast forward a bit and, 20 turns later, my corruption is 210, which is with me for the rest of the game. On the other hand, if I had built the same 4 cities 5 turns apart my overreach would have looked something like: 0, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 5, 4, ... And would have only given me a total of 60 corruption after 20 turns. In other words, the slow expansion scenario would give a +60% increase to district/builders/etc.. costs, whereas ridiculously fast expansion would give a +210% increase. Numbers here are clearly just illustrative, but I'm sure you get the idea.


The historic reasoning behind it is that empires that grew quickly (by conquering tons of cities, or having a huge internal population growth) became more and corrupt over time. This didn't hurt them straight away, they still grew massively rich, but the problem grew worse in a short amount of time afterwards and it inhibited their ability to adapt or reform later. The example would be the roman empire. When it was just Rome it was doing fine, uncorrupt and able to be run efficiently. When it grew slowly in Italy and in the western Mediterranean it was still fine; growing slowly meant the state could keep up with the demands on it. However, in the last century BC it grew hugely fast and - at the same time - became disorganised and corrupt, and kept getting more corrupt even after the initial wave of expansion. That didn't stop it being more powerful and richer than everyone else for the next 300 years. But it did mean (in civ terms) that it couldn't build enough IZs when it entered the medieval era and so was eventually over taken by neighbours. Or, take the Spanish Empire, which tried to build a million cities when it discovered the new world, and was then unable to get any builders to clear the rainforest for them or build nice districts.

But the gameplay justification is even more important. It encourages players to pace themselves rather than blindly zerg forwards. It doesn't provide a maximum empire size what-so-ever (completely unlike happiness in Civ 5). It doesn't provide a hard cap to rapid expansion either (as maintenance in Civ 4 did), it merely imposes a long term cost to rapid growth. But rapid growth also brings long term gains, so this idea merely allows the two to be balanced. By tying in different ways of growing (more cities, more districts, more tile improvements, more religion, more trade) it creates payoffs and interesting decisions between everything. It also makes sure that players can't completely circumvent corruption, doing nothing will be far worse than having a modest amount of overreach.

There are many ways that this could be spiced up:

• Advanced governments reduce overreach faster than old ones. Do you build lots of cities in the ancient era to get them growing and pumping out hammers and science early, or do you wait until classical republic so you're not dragging around lots of corruption for the rest of the game?
• Policy cards reduce overreach cost of specific actions (Colonialism reduces overreach from new cities on a different continent by 3/4).
• Some Wonders/GP give a one off reduction to overreach, resetting it to 0.
• Reduced overreach from Unique Districts, or from districts that you have very few of
• UA and ULA that reduce some sources of overreach, or the impact of corruption.
• New 'Administrative Quarters' districts that reduces overreach/corruption in some way. Buildings in it can also have a branch that increases points towards CS envoys.

tl;dr. Current way the game scales the cost of civilian units and district is poor. Instead, having overreach keep track of rapid expansion (both tall and wide) and corruption being the accumulated overreach provides an intuitive way to prevent snowballing. Lots of ways this can interact with existing game systems in a way which is fun, opens up and new strategies, and is historically grounded.

 

[Amrunril]

The issue I see with this system is that virtually everything contributes to the overreach counter, leaving you with little to do if you want to give it a chance to cool down. Under the current system, when your settlers get expensive, you can build builders. When your builders get expensive, you can build districts. If all of them contribute to the same counter though, you don't have many options besides eating a penalty or artificially slowing your progress.

Personally, I think the settler and builder scaling is fine as is, except perhaps for some minor balance tweaks. The district scaling, to which I think your criticisms apply more strongly, definitely needs an overhaul, but I'd rather see something comparable to settler/builder scaling for each district type than putting all types of progress on the same scaling counter.

 

[Olleus]

I think having everything linked together adds an interesting layer of strategy however. It means that there's an extra level of empire specialisation that goes in - you can't both fill up all available land on your continent AND have the maximum of number of trade routes. Or you can, but then you pay a price for it the rest of the game.

But maybe this system doesn't need to apply to everything. Having it apply to new cities (both built and conquered) and for new districts definitely makes sense.

 

[stinkubus]

The district scaling, to which I think your criticisms apply more strongly, definitely needs an overhaul, but I'd rather see something comparable to settler/builder scaling for each district type than putting all types of progress on the same scaling counter.

Why not just have fixed district costs with discrete increases as you advance eras? So a district, any district, costs X in ancient, X+Y in classical, etc.? This way costs scale as you advance, and it would discourage some of the crazier beelines which are available in the tech and civics trees. This also has the benefit of being very simple and easy to plan around.

Though I would like to point out the current game does have a mechanic to mitigate scaling costs, as you can get a deep discount on any district that you have fewer of than others. Since I tend to spam encampments, campuses, and commerce hubs or harbors early I can usually get industrial zones on the cheap, and will often build them first in new cities to try to get things kick started.

 

[Amrunril]

I think having everything linked together adds an interesting layer of strategy however. It means that there's an extra level of empire specialisation that goes in - you can't both fill up all available land on your continent AND have the maximum of number of trade routes. Or you can, but then you pay a price for it the rest of the game.

But maybe this system doesn't need to apply to everything. Having it apply to new cities (both built and conquered) and for new districts definitely makes sense.

The issue though, is that if everything contributes to the same counter, you aren't generating trade offs between different actions, you're generating trade-offs between doing something and doing almost literally nothing.

More generally, I'm still not convinced that anything is fundamentally wrong with the current scaling system for civilian units. Your complaints of counter-intuitiveness, opacity and encouraging weird tactics are all very much valid when it comes to district scaling, but a simple cost increase for each unit of the same type seems quite simple and intuitive to me, much more so than an overreach/corruption would be.

Why not just have fixed district costs with discrete increases as you advance eras? So a district, any district, costs X in ancient, X+Y in classical, etc.? This way costs scale as you advance, and it would discourage some of the crazier beelines which are available in the tech and civics trees. This also has the benefit of being very simple and easy to plan around.

I would argue that the issue with the current district system is tying costs to tech/civic progress in the first place, not the precise mechanism by which it does so. Switching districts to the same mechanic as civilian units, would make for a more unified, intuitive system and would avoid actively penalizing tech and civic progress.

 

[stinkubus]

I don't think of district scaling as punishment but rather a balance mechanism to keep the player from snowballing too quickly.