Stability proposals

[onedreamer]

Of course.

Number of cities - Well the Roman Empire needs to have lots of cities, can't do much about that.

true but this causes instability, heh. All Empires (including the Roman one) collapsed when they overexpanded.

Civics - Never less than 3 stars.

Civics, not civics stability. Civics you adopt influence the stability of pretty much all categories, including expansion.

Look if you haven't read my posts before I've tested it out; when I gift 2 or 3 cites on my border to other civs my expansion and overall stability immediately go up without doing anything else. I understand that other factors are involved but it seems to me like this is the predominant factor as "combat results" for instance should be overwhelmingly in my favor.

No need to get all set up, I was trying to help as it seemed you were looking for clues on how to improve expansion stability, but since you already know everything there's no need for it.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Having played BTS quite a bit, I got the impression that stability of AI civs in BTS is worse then in Warlords (I've never seen Enland in Warlords collapsing with no visible reason, while I see it in BTS). Maybe it has something to do with flaws of BTS AI worker code, combined with the fact that the AI is less cottage-happy? (and often replaces cottages with other improvements).

Here's the state of collapsed England. Note the absence of cottages. (The workshop south of London was a cottage some turns ago - the BTS AI workers are suffering from indesisiveness, noted in the thread of Bhruic's patch discussion: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=246057&page=47

 

[Aeon221]

Q-Meister, your Roman (French) losses just gave support to my idea. If you moved your palace to Paris (or any other non-Roman city) and you made that city permanently Roman, you would not have lost that city. That's why when a palace is built somewhere else (not haphazardly sprung up because the emperor is fleeing from a captured capital), it should not cost the player (or AI) stability points.
If the Chinese emperors lost stability for every time they moved their palaces China would have collapsed a long time ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_capitals

You do realize that China did historically collapse on multiple occasions? Most famously in the War of the Three Kingdoms? You know, where Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms are set? But there was also the Warring States period (remember that fellow Sun Tzu?) and the more recent troubles in the 19th and 20th century for China.

So, historically speaking, China has alternated between extreme stability and extreme instability fairly regularly. And several of those palace moves you mention were either a response to or a result of instability.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

You do realize that China did historically collapse on multiple occasions? Most famously in the War of the Three Kingdoms? You know, where Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms are set? But there was also the Warring States period (remember that fellow Sun Tzu?) and the more recent troubles in the 19th and 20th century for China.

So, historically speaking, China has alternated between extreme stability and extreme instability fairly regularly. And several of those palace moves you mention were either a response to or a result of instability.

Yes, but if we're talking about the timespan of RFC, these collapses didn't really last long (the 3 Kingdoms lasted 60 years (220-280), which is less than 4 moves in RFC. I.e. we're talking about collapses and respawns in that amount of time, which is unrealistic in RFC. Even later, with the 5 Dynasties and 10 Kingdoms (907-960) that's barely 6 moves.

So yes, the capital being moved represented instability and even collapse, but in the big picture of RFC that should not give instability points.

Another example would be Russia which didn't even technically exist (until 1547 when Ivan was crowned the first Tsar) at the earliest. There wasn't even a capital to speak of since there was no centralized state--just a bunch of duchies and khanates. So what I decided to move my capital from Kiev to Moscow or vice versa? Should that represent instability?

Maybe a better solution would be to penalize the player or AI only if he/she/it is in bureaucracy (would be tough to move all that paperwork around).

 

[chococid]

Yes, but if we're talking about the timespan of RFC, these collapses didn't really last long (the 3 Kingdoms lasted 60 years (220-280), which is less than 4 moves in RFC. I.e. we're talking about collapses and respawns in that amount of time, which is unrealistic in RFC. Even later, with the 5 Dynasties and 10 Kingdoms (907-960) that's barely 6 moves.

Sounds like it would be better represented by a turn or two of anarchy. People riot, things get run differently by the next ruler... Seems like it would work well since you have to dedicate a city to building the palace for several turns.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Russia which didn't even technically exist (until 1547 when Ivan was crowned the first Tsar) at the earliest.

Russia did already exist and was united before 1547. 1547 is just the time when young Russian ruler Ivan adopted the title "Czar" for prestige. The official date of reuniting of Russia is 1521.

In RFC terms, Russia started roughly in IX-X century with the capital at Kiev, collapsed, was conquered by the Mongols, respawned as a Mongol vassal, then broke off when Mongolia collapsed.

 

[Whitefire]

I think stability really needs to be overhauled, especially for the chronically unstable civs. Maybe the following might help:

1. If the palace is moved because it's built by the player, there should be no stability loss (different if the capital city was captured by another civ).

2. Right now the player has very little leverage not to "shrink" the economy except by running a positive gold balance with research which probably worsens inflation eventually. If there's a way to account for the total economy (i.e. including whatever gold that goes into research), then running negative gold balances would not be as much of an instability. It's my gold anyway, so it's my choice whether to hoard gold or to spend it on research.

3. Agricultural biases should be eliminated/lessened when it's the human player.

4. Showing the total stability score would help the player gauge what moves to make next (e.g. build more courthouses/jails, etc). I know about the text localization issues, but stability is easy to translate as 1 word.

5. Anarchy-free civics switches during Golden Ages should be back, or at least the stability cost during GA should be less (e.g. half? a quarter?). -15 for anarchy basically eliminates the advantage that GAs give (+15).

6. There should be neutral areas for expansion (Australasia, Africa south of the Equator, various scattered islands around the world). By neutral I mean all players (AI and human) can build cities there without them counting towards their expansion instability.

7. Building intelligence agencies/security bureaus should also add stability (as their names would imply).

8. Commonwealth needs to be strengthened (maybe also lessen the instability from agricultural minuses).

There. I tried to make it to 14 points like Wilson, but I'm running out of ideas. Maybe other people can add 6 points.

1. Don't care.

2. Meh

3. Meh

4. Stars and arrows are good enough IMO.

5. Yes. I argued with Rhye quite a bit over this one before he changed the rule.

6. I like that idea as well, although it would need to be tested to make sure the AI doesn't do wonky settling patterns.

7. I mentioned it, I don't remember why that change was never implemented. If it does go in, it needs to be balanced with something like +2 "Citizens keep disappearing!"

8 No.

Q-meister: Razing cities gives you a -2 to your stability score in order to offset the +2 you get from the city. Then when your borders popped (assuming Germany was restricting your borders) you got hit with negative modifiers from the number of tiles you controlled.

 

[chococid]

There needs to be a +/- thing ingame. I shouldn't have to load up a wiki to find out that jails and courthouses boost stability. Yes, yes, I know, localization. You can bypass that entirely by simply putting the positive stability icon in the jail/courthouse description.
It'd be even better if it said +2 or -2 or whatever. If these numbers are actually known somewhere, again, they should be visible in-game. Hiding information in a wiki somewhere or forcing people to sourcedive just to know what's going on is fairly pathetic.

Frankly, the two worst parts of the stability system are:
- All the information being hidden
- The massive anarchy penalties

...Actually, I'll go ahead and say that my biggest problem with stability from a gameplay perspective is that it tends to penalize things that were already being penalized. Overexpansion is penalized by way of killing your finances (play China in the 3000 AD start and crank out 8 cities going for the UHV and watch your tech rate hit 10% in a hurry). What hurting stability for expanding out of the historical area does is force players into a specific area; which is something you're ALREADY doing with other civilization spawns flipping cities and so forth.

If someone's actually able to do well enough as India to crush Persia, Babylon, and Egypt- and still keep their economy humming- they shouldn't be slapped with "your empire is descending into civil war!" just because they did a better job of things than real-world India.

I mean, this game *is* an alternate history, and right now the stability system pretty much locks out a lot of the options that would otherwise be available.

To me, playing as Egypt I see it work the way I think it should. Your expansion is not held back by your stability rating. It's held back by the fact that Arabia to your east is going to rape you if you go there and there's nothing but desert to your west.

I understand that the fall of empires is part of the game, but surely there's a more player-friendly way to do it than just going "lol you don't have your cities anymore gg".

I mean, units go on strike in normal civ if you run out of money due to maintenance costs. You could have the cities going independent thing happen when money runs out, when your capital is taken (which makes a fair bit of sense- if the capital is gone the other cities are on their own) and if unhappiness and/or unhealthiness in the city gets too high. I'm pretty sure it'd be a lot more transparent and would feel a lot more fair to the players.

At the same time, I know it'll never happen simply because of how much work has gone into the stability system as-is.

So I simply ask for the actual values to be made more transparent instead of hidden away and making the game less user-friendly because people just flip to wikis and sourcedive instead of just clicking the civilopedia or highlighting and seeing "jail: +2 {stability icon}" or having the anarchy window show "1 turn of anarchy, -15 {stability icon}".
Even simply putting the icon to show that it affects stability in SOME way without having a number would be useful.

 

[The Q-Meister]

A minor note - I've noticed that a civ running State Property can still get hit with Great Depression penalties from neighboring civs that have them. Even when that civ is my vassal and I get them to switch to State Property the GD will continue anyway. It'd be nice if a master only had to ask the vassal once to switch civics and stay there instead of switching back to whatever he wants every so often.

Also a civ running "Commonwealth" can still get hit with the same Great Depression penalty from a neighboring civ even though it's supposed to give you no stability penalty for poor economy.

 

[chococid]

A minor note - I've noticed that a civ running State Property can still get hit with Great Depression penalties from neighboring civs that have them. Even when that civ is my vassal and I get them to switch to State Property the GD will continue anyway. It'd be nice if a master only had to ask the vassal once to switch civics and stay there instead of switching back to whatever he wants every so often.

This is a problem in vanilla bts/warlords as well.

I was playing on Archipelago, had vassalized Islamic Hashepsut via capitulation, with most of the world being Confucian or Jewish. (I'd gotten Buddhism and Hinduism.)
So, naturally, I rushed up to Free Religion so I wouldn't have a religious conflict, yelled at Hatshepsut to switch as well. Great.
Eventually she went back to Organized/Islamic, dragging me into a war I wasn't prepared for... over and over again.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Never seen a powerful Germany. I've played 5 games so far, Germany collapsed in the early Middle ages without losing any cities in 4 of them, and was doing so-so in fifth one.

 

[blizzrd]

There needs to be a +/- thing ingame. I shouldn't have to load up a wiki to find out that jails and courthouses boost stability. Yes, yes, I know, localization. You can bypass that entirely by simply putting the positive stability icon in the jail/courthouse description.
It'd be even better if it said +2 or -2 or whatever. If these numbers are actually known somewhere, again, they should be visible in-game. Hiding information in a wiki somewhere or forcing people to sourcedive just to know what's going on is fairly pathetic.

I tend to agree.

I have often wondered why it can tell me that Viceroyalty give +4 Stability points for each vassal, or that Resettlement can give me +2 Stability points for settling distant locations, but that I can't find hard details for just about everything else - save trawlling through these forums for little tidbits along the way.

I don't really need to know if it is +2 or -4. I'm happy enough with +/- or ++/--. But I totally agree that it is simply bad that the stability improvement jails can make is nowhere to be found ingame.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

Never seen a powerful Germany. I've played 5 games so far, Germany collapsed in the early Middle ages without losing any cities in 4 of them, and was doing so-so in fifth one.

And yet some would swear that Germany is all-powerful in their games...at least I know I'm not hallucinating.
I don't know what's wrong with them, their civics look OK to me, but maybe it's the culture from the Dutch (but even in my Spanish/Dutch squat game when my Utrecht had no culture to start, they were STILL unstable/collapsing).

 

[Lone Wolf]

Strange that Germany is indeed powerful in Warlords. BTS Germany does receive a small stability hit when Netherlands spawn, I think, but French receive the hit also. So I dunno why they are instable shortly after spawn. Maybe Germany is very powerful when it survives the initial instability?

 

[AnotherPacifist]

Strange that Germany is indeed powerful in Warlords. BTS Germany does receive a small stability hit when Netherlands spawn, I think, but French receive the hit also. So I dunno why they are instable shortly after spawn. Maybe Germany is very powerful when it survives the initial instability?

I just loaded several games, refining my Dutch kill as Bismarck. Half the time I was unstable even before founding a city, regardless of whether France conquered Bona Mansio or not. I think the problem is Venice (too much time culture eating into German territory).

 

[RedRalph]

Why does a great depression in a capitalist country affect a communist one? this makes no sense... the USSR experienced an enormous surge of growth in the 30's while the capitalist worlds economy was going down the pan. this should be fixed IMO.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

Why does a great depression in a capitalist country affect a communist one? this makes no sense... the USSR experienced an enormous surge of growth in the 30's while the capitalist worlds economy was going down the pan. this should be fixed IMO.

Um, I think some of their numbers were cooked.

 

[RedRalph]

Um, I think some of their numbers were cooked.

Yes it was inflated but there is no two ways about it, the USSR grew economically to a huge degree in the 30s, while the capitalist world practically collapsed. Thats not ideology, its fact.

 

[chococid]

And yet some would swear that Germany is all-powerful in their games...at least I know I'm not hallucinating.
I don't know what's wrong with them, their civics look OK to me, but maybe it's the culture from the Dutch (but even in my Spanish/Dutch squat game when my Utrecht had no culture to start, they were STILL unstable/collapsing).

If you play Vikings 600 AD, collapsing germany gives easy access to the entire middle of Europe for pillaging purposes. It's also absurdly easy. Wait on Amsterdam to spawn, watch Germany go to unstable, build 6 berserkers, ferry them over, raze Berlin, and the rest of the empire collapses in a hurry. Have fun pillaging the independents.

I don't see what's so powerful about Germany but I haven't played America yet.

 

[zuraffo]

The stability penalty to oversea territory should be made possible to be counterbalanced by civic / building combined.

Currently, maintaining a huge empire not only means low stability, it also means a huge hit to your research rate. Which by itself was acceptable, but when combine with the stability hit it become too overwhelmingly penalizing for big empires.

my suggestion is this:

Instead of giving (minor) stability bonus here and there, the expansion civic should be more decisive and more influential in how stability is calculated:

- Ressettlement :- Original bonus + Instability from oversea territory is reduced to 1/3

- Occupation :- Original bonus + Instability from number of cities is linear instead of exponential.

- Commonwealth :- original bonus + if Base stability decline more than 5, any amount exceeding 10 is halved. (meaning is base stability drop by 15, in commonwealth you only get and drop by 10, in basically slowdown the stability decline in case of overexpansion.)

- Viceroy :- No negative stability from Vassal State, Stability bonus from Vassal state is exponential.