Will Civ6 punish players for expansion?

[Pepo]

Okay so looking at most of these posts, we generally want both of these?

1. An additional city should always benefit the civilization (but can have lower rewards)
2. Small empires should have a chance against larger empires (through random sp and national wonder bonuses) edit: and to prevent snowballing

Aren't these two goals mathematically impossible to fulfill at the same time? Which is why civ 5 tended to one or another depending on the patch.

Unless you introduce a separate resource(reward) that each play style can maximize (like how they're separating culture and science for wide and tall respectively in civ 6)

I will change what you have said to:
1 Additional cities are an investment that end up being beneficial after some time
2 small empires should be able to win the game (culture, science) but will normally be crushed by larger empires
3 research should be independent from size to allow small civs to be viable (but uncompetitive on production). A new system should be design

 

[evanaurora]

Whcih is why id argue for a relaxation of the global hapiness mechanic.

And they're eliminating it in 6!

I think that pretty much.... solves all of the complaints here, but I could be wrong, LOL. If you have local happiness creating problems in your newer expands without dragging down your main centers of production/beakers/what have you, the balance is all back. Especially considering the geographical limitations of 6 (tile requirements/limited districts/etc), there seems to be much more incentive to tend toward wider from what we know right now. I don't even think a science and/or culture penalty will discourage that, though it depends on the harshness of such, of course.

 

[historix69]

I think the idea is you should have to spend significantly to Get large.

If settlers cost 300 hammers (+100 for each additional city you have)

Then REX will not be a good strategy, even if that settler gave you a bonus with no happy/science penalties

You could also make cities slow to develop (every population point costs 80 food)...so it might be worthwhile building up the capital rather than expanding.

Then to ensure the map doesn't stay empty, later techs/policies can make settlers cheaper/start with more pop/buildings.

An increase of settler costs by +100 per settler/city will make settlers soon be unrealistically more expensive than a modern day world wonder ... some Civ players like to build 10 - 20 - 40 - 100 cities during one game ... should those players better not play Civ6?

New cities in Civ5 usually cost a lot to get them running unless you want them to be useless for some hundred turns (marathon speed) ... buy monument, buy granary, buy aqueduct, buy colosseum, buy workshop, buy library, ...

Civ is a game about old empires (with exception of USA which are only a few hundred years old) ... so most cities should be placed in the early eras (ancient, classic, medieval) ... you can still later conquer, raze, rebuild cities ...

The opportunity costs for a city are usually the costs for the settler plus military units to guard it plus all the buildings you buy in the city. Your return is the amount of production, science, gold it produces, which highly depends on the resources (food, production) at the city's location.

In Civ Call to Power, the empire size was limited by government, allowing I think 10 cities at start (the 11th city would cause a -10% penalty on everything or so) and later went up to 60 or 80 cities (Trade-Union) for the end-game ... The problem here is the global penalty ... the -10% costs you much more production, science from your core cities than you can compensate with the new city unless it contains some luxuries or strategic resources which allow to boost all cities ...

Civ games usually follow the line : found a city, grow until you reach the local happiness cap, expand, research to increase happiness cap, grow, expand, research, ... it is a very organic process, like growing weed ... (Civ5 with global happiness was an exception since exhausting your global happiness made it difficult to found/conquer more cities ...)

There were tries to implement Empire-Stability and administrative costs for wide empires in Civ-Games / mods ...
Example : You could add an administrative department Level I in your capital with 3 specialist slots ... allowing up to 9 extra cities to be managed. When you expand beyond, You need to upgrade administrative department to Level II in capital and add administrative department Level I in some of the cities until all your cities are managed. Costs would be similar to national wonders of respective era ... If a city would not be managed, it would be like a puppet in Civ5, generating some Gold but no Science or Culture ...

In general the best solution to the expansion discussion is :
Players who don't like expansion should play on small to standard map size, players who like expansion should play on large, huge or giant without restrictions ...

 

[qwerty25]

In general the best solution to the expansion discussion is :
Players who don't like expansion should play on small to standard map size, players who like expansion should play on large, huge or giant without restrictions ...

I agree with your earlier points.

But this is a horrible solution as it doesn't really solve anything. The larger maps do have a lower science penalty but that is only to compensate for naturally having more cities. You'll still hit a limit where building more cities penalizes you, it's just at a higher number. The point of having a large empire is that you are larger than others, not that you just have the ability to build more cities.

 

[historix69]

I agree with your earlier points.

But this is a horrible solution as it doesn't really solve anything. The larger maps do have a lower science penalty but that is only to compensate for naturally having more cities. You'll still hit a limit where building more cities penalizes you, it's just at a higher number. The point of having a large empire is that you are larger than others, not that you just have the ability to build more cities.

In Civ5 if you would play an endless game on huge/giant map you could add an arbitrary number of size 20-30 cities until you run out of space without hurting your happiness or science in the long run ... (strong religion and social policies and ideology help). The problem in Civ5 is that the game usually is over before most of these cities are productive and therefore they are not worth to be build if you aim for the fastest victory possible (Civ5 Quickie). (I usually win by culture before I can colonize / take over the world ...)

I don't have a problem with the 2%-science-penalty on huge, but the 5% on smaller map sizes hurt people more. (2% means that an empire with 50 cities has double Tech costs compared to a One-City-Empire ...)
(What hurts me more is the National Wonder nonsense in Civ5 which really disturbs any early expansion strategy since you need to rush basic buildings and national wonders or have to abandon them for the rest of the game ... this is a fun-killer for me.)

 

[hellohithere]

The opportunity costs for a city are usually the costs for the settler plus military units to guard it plus all the buildings you buy in the city. Your return is the amount of production, science, gold it produces, which highly depends on the resources (food, production) at the city's location.

The opportunity cost of a settler+military unit+worker is actually fixed and fairly low. In fact less then Settler+Military Unit+Worker since typically the workers you build for your early cities run out of active tiles to upgrade, and can be moved to new cities while you really only need to garrison borders, and those garrisoned forces can double as an offensive/defensive force.

So in civ 5, without global happiness and dminishing returns it would always be best build new cities, since even with the various building you might want to build later you would overall net more gold, science, and production from building the new city. It is the diminishing returns that made it of more questionable value.

But with builders having fixed charges, building new cities no longer leverages the potential limitless value of workers. You gain a quantifiable net resource gain from the city itself, as well as possible access to greater efficiencies, but this is now a direct trade off with using that production on a builder and netting additional production in an already existing city.

So builders become a direct tradeoff with settlers in civ 6 where previously workers tended to be a relatively fixed cost augment of them.

 

[historix69]

So in civ 5, without global happiness and dminishing returns it would always be best build new cities, since even with the various building you might want to build later you would overall net more gold, science, and production from building the new city. It is the diminishing returns that made it of more questionable value.

Which "diminishing returns" do you mean in Civ5?

 

[hellohithere]

1. An additional city should always benefit the civilization (but can have lower rewards)
2. Small empires should have a chance against larger empires (through random sp and national wonder bonuses) edit: and to prevent snowballing

Aren't these two goals mathematically impossible to fulfill at the same time? Which is why civ 5 tended to one or another depending on the patch.

Fundamentally the problem with civ 5 was there was not sufficient tension between the opportunity cost of expansion vs. development. Starting a new city from an existing one had a relatively short term loss in the building city, but ultimately did not sufficiently present an opportunity cost to effect the decision. Instead the tradeoff was with artificial global limits on size. Have too many cities, and you lost too much science or you didnt have enough unique resources to maintain happiness. This is why you would create a binary relationship between expansion and going tall, there was a baked in ideal maximum size baked into the game mechanics.

Civ 6 seems to be having a direct opportunity cost between expansion and development. You can build a settler, or you can build a builder with x number of charges. If you build a settler, you gain another settlement and the resources from that, but you miss out on the chance to further develop an existing city. Develop too much instead and you potentially are running out of efficient development opportunities in your city.

So if settlers and builders were to cost 1:1, an empire that builds 10 settlers and 15 builders is not necessarily going to have greater production then one that builds 5 settlers and 20 builders. It comes down to whether 11 cities cherry picking the best 45 tiles to develop can outproduce a 6 city empire that has 10 developed hexes each.

 

[hellohithere]

Which "diminishing returns" do you mean in Civ5?

The science penalty mainly.

 

[CivScientist]

So, I'm of the opinion that tall vs wide is a false dichotomy. If building tall provides no competitive advantage against building wide, then there's no choice, and thus, no actually wide strategy. Building wide in this case wouldn't be a strategy, it would just be playing the game. The reverse is naturally also true.

So players who like playing wide empires shouldn't feel punished for aggressively expanding when they compare their empire to the tall strategy. Similarly, players who like playing tall empires shouldn't feel punished for trying to get the most out of their few cities when they compare their empire to a wide empire.

Frankly, a lot of what made Civ IV and CiV (post BNW) compelling games and CivBE mediocre was the balance between tall and wide strategy, or a lack thereof. You can ask for a focus on your strategy and ask that the other be marginalized but that will just end up alienating a large segment of the Civ fan base. And, really, there's no reason that tall and wide strategies can't both be served equally in Civ VI. Seriously, why can't the game cater to tall and wide strategy players and make both equally interesting, challenging, and powerful?

Can't we all just get along?

 

[historix69]

The science penalty mainly.

The math in Civ5 is quite easy ...

For huge map size = 2% penalty
If a tech costs 100 beakers, you pay 102 beakers with 1 city, 110 beakers with 5 cities and 200 beakers with 50 cities. Unless your #1 Science City (NC, academies) has an ouput bigger than the sum of the other 49 cities, the 50 cities will research faster than the single city ... but usually at higher costs since you pay maintenance for 50 libraries, universities, etc ...

On standard map = 5% penalty
If a tech costs 100 beakers, you pay 105 beakers with 1 city, 125 beakers with 5 cities and 200 beakers with 20 cities.

The problem with the 50 cities is that 40-45 of them usually are in development and can only grow when the local happiness cap is raised by tech or social policy/ideology. So 50 cities are usually better than 1 city but less effective than 4-5 tall cities which use local + global happiness ...

 

[hellohithere]

The problem with the 50 cities is that 40-45 of them usually are in development and can only grow when the local happiness cap is raised by tech or social policy/ideology. So 50 cities are usually better than 1 city but less effective than 4-5 tall cities which use local + global happiness ...

I dont think we are disagreeing on anything here at all. By diminishing returns I simply mean if all your cities were equal, that your 2nd city nets you +100% potential science (more or less) while increasing costs by 2%, but your 51st city only increases your science by 2% while increasing the cost by 1% for a net gain of less then 1% (102%/101%). If the new city is netting you less then 1% of your total science (and it most likely will) its just a straight loss. When you factor in the global unhappiness hit Im sure the point where you actually lose science hits much sooner.

 

[ClavisRa]

There is some very shady and very incomplete analysis going on in this thread.

Cities are an unqualified good. They are cheap to make, and even the worst cities generate science, gold and culture. So there is no reason not to carpet the landscape in cities and fill up the map. Until now the solution to this problem has been to introduce punishment mechanics for adding cities, like global happiness.

Instead, cities and population should not be an unqualified good, but should only be as valuable as you can make use of them. Then there is no need for a punishment mechanic at all.

Consider a model along these lines: You are growing your first city with a good surplus of food and good housing capacity, you make a library and your extra workers get production from working the forest and science from working the library. You build a settler with gold, hammers, food and population and settle a nearby hill. It produces enough food to get started from a nearby river valley, but your capital sends some of its food to it (though some food is lost in the process), so it can grow enough to support workers in the hills mining iron and gold. As you stockpile the gold, you look for a trading partner, and find one, but the trade path is very inefficient, slow, and robbed by barbarians. So, you make another settler that founds a coastal city, etc.

So, you see the difference, population alone does not generate a benefit, and you have limited food surplus that forces you to choose how to use it, but with good flexibility, based on the opportunities available based on the cities you choose to settle, and buildings you make. In the past growth was king because you got so much for free with it in science and production.

Also as the game progresses, technologies can make tiles productive in a way they weren't in the past, making previously undesirable city locations suddenly desirable. Also, cities may wax and wane over time; the city you formed to mine coal may become superfluous and lose population as you stop working the mines and direct food elsewhere, or become repurposed to a tech city.

 

[historix69]

When you factor in the global unhappiness hit Im sure the point where you actually lose science hits much sooner.

Once you have Aristocracy, Meritocracy and Forbidden Palace, additional cities actually create global happiness which more than compensates the costs per city in global unhappiness (3 on std, 1.8 on huge), if you do not grow them beyond the local happiness cap. (Micromanage growth of every city) But this is Civ5 specific ...

In general the science-penalty is a controversal design since it prohibits players from expanding by unrealistical means ... It would be better if new cities would not contribute to research and cause no science penalty until they are able to compensate the science penalty (give the player a button to enable/disable research participation) ....

In Civ games in general barbarians emerge from the tiles with Fog-of-War, so you either need military units to guard your boarders and fend off barbarian invasions, or you place cities to permanently remove the Fog-of-War ... cities also keep away your neighbours and provide strategic resources ... think about USA manifest destiny settling North America from coast to coast or Russia expanding eastwards into Siberia until they reached Pacific coast, mostly just by pacifying siberian barbarians ....

 

[Zaldron]

Adding a city should not have an corresponding negative mechanic. What constrains empires should be things like competition, diplomacy, opportunity cost and terrain. Would be great if empires naturally developed a variety of types of cities of differing sizes that contributed in a different ways, such as trade, military value, resource development, and food.

I think that in fact new cities need a negative mechanic, something to correspond to the bureaucracy and empire management concepts that exist in real life. Otherwise there is no gameplay balance to encourage you to slow your expansion and creates stale gameplay from simply managing hundreds of cities every game. Personally that is not an age of Civ that I'm interested in returning to.

 

[Magil]

I think that in fact new cities need a negative mechanic, something to correspond to the bureaucracy and empire management concepts that exist in real life. Otherwise there is no gameplay balance to encourage you to slow your expansion and creates stale gameplay from simply managing hundreds of cities every game. Personally that is not an age of Civ that I'm interested in returning to.

New cities should cost you on some level. Whether or not that's a negative mechanic is up for debate.

What it doesn't need is: a science penalty, a culture penalty, a happiness penalty, slowing the production of national wonders on multiple levels, in addition to maintenance costs for a new set of buildings and a road connection, to say nothing of opportunity costs involving the production of the settler and additional military protection required.

At some point it just becomes too much. Some of those things might be appropriate. I think all of them put together are far too much.

 

[historix69]

Where was the

gameplay balance

when
- Alexandre conquered his Empire
- Rome conquered its Empire
- China was united
- USA spread from coast to coast (Manifest Destiny)
- Russia conquered Siberia/Central Asia
- the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British Colonial Empires were founded?

Empire Size is directly corelated to the size of the map / landmasses ... if 10 players start on a map and you take out 8 of them, you either will have a lot of cities to manage or most of the map will be covered by no man's land / city ruins (razed cities) ... It is a silly idea to create a game where you can conquer / destroy the world but you are not allowed to (completely) settle it ... Civ is a dynamic game ... number of players is not a fixed value but can quickly decrease when wars start ... the game should be playable even when only 1 player is left and playing for time/score ... Global Happiness was a try to completely limit a players expansion/conquest in Civ5 ... fortunately global happiness/unhappiness can be managed ... (otherwise you would have to mod it ...)

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

The world is not a civ game and a civ game is not the world. Most of these empires do not exist today.

 

[Chinese American]

Stability of the empire should be up to the competence of the ruler/player. not hindered by an artificial, superficial cap imposed by incompetent game designers.

 

[Staler87]

Stability of the empire should be up to the competence of the ruler/player. not hindered by an artificial, superficial cap imposed by incompetent game designers.

What is your suggestion as to how this would be implemented?