A Solution to City Spamming

Though I think this idea is generally good, it does give particular advantage to people who happen to spawn nearby several food sources. In order for this to work, you have to make it prohibitively expensive to have more than, say 3 towns with considerably less benefit. Beyond a certain point the production of the town should become so expensive per-unit that the town has to get scrapped.

You are absolutely right, which is why it's necessary for population not to rule supreme.  There needs to be an abundance of circumstances where 100 citizens can do more than 500 if used properly.  For instance, a player might start next to little food, but a high concentration and density of shards.  It might take 1/3rd the citizens necessary to exploit it than under normal circumstances.

The more I think about it, the more I like a food based solution. Food is already in the game, it makes logical sense (with the land desolate and lifeless, food would be pretty scarce & valuable), and it opens up a lot of options without being complex. It's easy to understand that you only have enough food for 5000 people across your empire, and it's easy to understand what you have to do to improve that (capture more food sources and research improved farming technologies). Actually *doing* those things is less simple, since you need warfare tech to capture things, and the other players aren't going to sit by and let you do it without a fight.

It's also pretty satisfying, to me. If I conquer an apple orchard for example (note to devs: add apple orchards as a resource ), I'll see my population start to grow immediately from the gain in food supply

The main downside to it is wha twas just mentioned. Population influences so many things right now that food becomes the strongest resource in the game. Maybe population needs to be divorced from some things so that it isn't so powerful.

Well, there interesting factor in the equation is essence.  If you need essence to build cities, you might not want to capture every single food resource so that you can build more cities, because it takes more essence to capture those food resources in addition to building extra cities.  And like you said, if population can be deflected from being the primary source of power and growth in the game, the idea can come into balance.

Food won't discourage players to spam 5 cities with 100 pop in it instead of two cities with 250 population.

Same population, but in one case you spam cities, in other you try to stay at least grouped.

One thing that would force players to stay in few cities would be the harsh living. If you know that your low level town could be easily devasted by natural raiders, by trolls, or whatever, then you would reconsider the building of your 10th city.

I really liked the fact that in Fall from heaven, the earth was another opponent. Give hard liviing conditions to people, then you will naturally try to stay in horde instead of spreading like mad.

No, but the natural effeciency of upgrades will. From what they said about automatic upgrades, most upgrades have levels. Higher tier settlements can get the higher tier upgrades, as well as more of them due to the extra tiles.

So sure, 10 hamlets could have 10 schools, but 5 villages would have better schools instead. They're also more easily defended. 

And to be honest, I'm less concerned about Outpost spam then I am about City spam. If you reach a point where you build an Outpost to harvest a resource and don't seriously upgrade it due to food or other constraints, I'm okay with that. It only bugs me when you spam Outposts because you can turn all of them into huge Cities.

Well, like I said, you can easily add in other simple maintenance costs to each city or, Tridus states, natural benefits from large cities vs many small cities.  This issue is important to address, but can easily be resolved. 

Before spaming cities, you have to spam outposts

And more cities also means more population : with one city you have the prestige bonus and the growth bonus. with two cities you have twice your prestige bonus and the growth bonus. So, a high level in prestige will let you have a lot of population (and gold and research) with the more city you can build. And the sooner you build your first outposts (that will be cities someday) the sooner you'll get the better version of houses, research centers, etc.

For the moment there's no drawback improving an outpost to a village. So if you can do it, do it. That outpost you build just for the lumbermill will get you more bonuses if you upgrade it to a village. More place to defend it, a new place to build units, etc ...

The anti-spam mechanism should prevent building outposts in the first time, and pushing you to use your resources to upgrade your cities instead of spam new ones.

Maybe a simple thing as "you need to pay to get to the new level" would be enough ?

Well, I think we're analyzing the situation on two different planes.  I'm assuming a system that scraps the original schema and builds a new system around the limited food principle.  You are assuming a system where the old one is kept and limited food is simply tacked on top of it.  Simply limiting food and making it fluid in the current Elemental system won't work with the current system. 

After re-re-reading your post, I see that I didn't understand you. Sorry.

Now, I see you propose the same system as MoM. Generalized food. Max population limited by food nearby. That worked good for anti-city-spamming, but ... the empire building thing was too dull because there were no way to control land without a new town. The map was so empty. And starting points could be too harsh sometimes. It could lead to unfair starting points.

At the moment, availibilty of farms is already a big problem for starting points : start the gam ewith 4 farms nearby or just one and you'll take a bad start beacause you won't be able to build 3 or 4 good cities to start your kingdom/empire.

Yeah, that'll take some balancing, and of course MoM was way too unbalanced as far as starting locations were concerned.  Some people started in Tundra and other in paradise.  In the end though, the devs should be able to code a certain degree of food abundance to afford the players a fair start (or at least close enough access to new food sources.)

But even in MoM, food didn't really work in the way it does in my system.  In MoM, food restricted army growth more than it did population growth.  Build a city anywhere in MoM and it was always a good idea.  In my system, food restricts population growth.

Maybe.

But it don't take into account the reasons players choose to spam cities. I would prefer some ways that would be lore-dependant or intersting. Instead of being forced to, I would like to have choices. So I prefer to be able to create fort, to get gold other way than just caravans, get research in other way than just population (and schools just give a better %age from your population, they don't give you another way to research)

BoogieBac stated they want to follow the rule of "simple system that connects in intersting ways". Maybe more cities could get you more chances to get bastards. More chance to get magic hazards (only some buildings like magic research center could prevent you from fire in your town due to a stupid magician apprentice ). Player will focus on less cities if it is rewarding to get big cities instead of a lot small ones. Maybe things like each turn a city will suffer bad events if they don't have the right building. An outpost with only a mine would be attacked each turn by giant bugs, unless you build a barrack and train a unit. That idea is too harsh, but you get the concept.

I think one thing to be said here is that Only a Couple CITIES (with the really good buildings) plus a spamming of tiny settlements (outposts of 50-100 population or less) is kind of what we WANT. yes?

The more CITIES you have, the far more research and production and prestige your empire will attain. The BIGGER your cities are (more pop) the more research, production, and prestige. Its not a linear factor, 2 cities of 250 citizens are better than 5 cities of 100 citizens. 1 City of 500 population should be EVEN BETTER than 2 cities of 250 pop.

The food would limit your City population, and I propose all new settlements are Guaranteed 10-50 population based upon terrain (maybe a diff number, but according to the example it makes sense). In this way, you can spam as many CRAP outposts as you want with 50 citizens. They will do hardly anythihng for you other than expand territory and resource aquisition, they will not be able to reasearch or produce things worth CRAP. they will take 15 turns to build one soldier with ARMOR!!!! while your big city can build 1000 legionairres in maybe 5 turns. The amount your cities can grow beyond pop 50 will be determined by available food, and those cities with higher proportions of Prestige will get a larger proportion of that population.

youll want your outposts to have 0 prestige in order to not detract from the population of your Bread-Winner cities. In fact, you could create settlements to Harvest more food, simply for Food = Population sake, and solely to ship all that food for your big cities. Having 3 outposts of 50 citizens each, farm a strip of fertile land worth 1000 food, then your 1 city of 500 can now grow to 1500 (or 1000, or any 500 + divisible of 1000). Would it be most efficient to move all your food into one city?? Yes. Up until the point where your Big-City's housing can no longer hold population, in this case, excess food would be distributed to other settlements, first based on prestige, second based on distance to BigCity, and third based on distance from food's origin OR that being too complicated, third could simply be the natural fertility of the area (which is SORT OF like distance from food's origin).

In this way, say City A can hold 1000 citizens, and you have 500, and you have food enough for another 1000 citizens. Your city maxes growth at 1000, (500 additional people), and then City B which is pop 100 and can house 500, which has second highest prestige, gets 400 of growth, and then the last 100 are distributed among the smaller settlements according to equation (the one I colloqually spelled out, counting prestige first, distance second, ect ... lets assume that all other cities are only resource gathering settlements, and therefore its based upon distance from City .

Then your City A upgrades to City size 3, and can now build more buildings. City A can either build more housing (+500 citizen cap) research better Houses (+1000 citizen cap) or both (+2000 citizen cap), as the technology would double the house's effieciency. So lets say they tech for better houses only, and do other interesting things with the new buildable land. Its cap is now 2000, and it grows to 1500, reducing City B back to 100 pop. Perhaps you can control this with Governors, perhaps all citizens leak into highest prestige first (like the example) or perhaps the Populations of City A and City B reach an Equilibrium based upon relative Prestige levels.

I personally like the Equilibrium idea, although the Totalitarian Prestige idea presented would also work, since the biggest City would always be the most efficient location for population, and all settlements are guaranteed at least 50 pop. On the Equilibrium idea, lets say City A had 1000 prestige, and City B had 500 prestige. I think the equilibrium could work on either a direct proportional corrolation or an exponential porportional correlation or a logrithmic porportional correlation.

I personally prefer a Direct Proportional corrolation because its easier to plan and work with, and less guess work (although you could get used to either method). In this case, the City A's growth "soft cap" would center at twice the pop of City B. So, in the most simplistic assumption (assuming there is PLENTY of living space, and a deficiency of food), lets reapproach the initial setup. City A would not have 500 (+50) pop, and City B would not have 100 (+50) pop. Instead City A would have 400 (+50) and City B would have 200 (+50). If enough food for 1000 new people were added, then City A would rise to 1067 (+50) pop and City B would rise to 533 (+50) pop. This is my preferred system, although I suppose that even if such a system were not held to, it at least reveals additional ways to PREFER isolated Metropolises supported by MANY small towns and to NEGATE the view that many smaller towns are better. In addition your smaller town's cannot individually grow into larger towns, each population center would need to be supported by farming, and in the most basic instance of infinite accesibility and resource, the player would pour all available population into one Super-Mega city, as a result of this city being the only city in the empire with Prestige.

This method uses part of the All-father of prestige as a tool for Populatoin Growth-rates and Population Distribution, however only withihn the context of Population Capacity. Population Capacity comes first, through housing and farms, and population growth fills them into their perspective roles. Prestige, in this function, would not be a factor in determining Capacity for Population, only the speed at which it attains its capacity. In this way, I think any growth at all should require at least some prestige. As you can see in this example, City A grows twice as fast as City B, however City A can only have double the amount of population as City B. Both of these factors stem directly from the amount of Prestige, and incidentally all newly growing cities will achieve max population at the same time.

**as a note of interest, this Metropolis-focused plan of national growth reminds me *slightly* of the Kuriotates from FFH, although the Kuriotates were forced into such a device by arbitrary restrictions, rather than actual reasons. In my creation of Viewpoint, larger cities are so much better that its far Superior to have less, bigger cities. This method DOES NOT require much in the way of distance maintanence in the smaller outposts to prevent city spam, as its not city spam but village/outpost spam in the fight for resources, which are very poorly defensible, and quite juicy prey to raiders. They would most likely be the first target in warfare, and there would most likely be a literal *sea* of such small settlements, where-ever there is develop-able land with some pertinent resource.

Tasunke

I think one thing to be said here is that Only a Couple CITIES (with the really good buildings) plus a spamming of tiny settlements (outposts of 50-100 population or less) is kind of what we WANT. yes?

No, I don't want that. I want some cities (like you describe them) and fortresses, magical relay, fertilizer and other land improvements that you can build but aren't cities. Outpost and the like are just future-cities. Real outpost (to control borders) should be independant from the city mechanism.

Your soft-cap system could be used as a vassal system. Each new city must be tied to an already existing city and can't grow beyond half the level of the "parent" city. then if you research the right tech, the vassal city can get independant. Maybe cities could be tied with each other through dynasties.

Moreover your idea of getting rid (or almost) of the prestige system will never be heard by the devs. Prestige dose make sense in the Elemental lore. They surely won't scrap it.

Im not saying to get *rid* of the prestige system, merely to control popluation growth strictly using food, and the rates of that growth, as well as distribution, to be connected to Prestige. I don't really see this as a removal of the Prestige system, and more as stricter tie-in of the various roles (housing, prestige, food). If you have alot of excess food and housing, THEN your population growth will either eons slow (little to no essence) or so mind-boggling fast that it must be due to the influx of the Wild-men into your city that is actually worth something.

as I have *unfortunately* not yet played the Beta, due to Beta 2 being not out yet, im not exactly sure how food, prestige, and housing all tied in. In this format, it was able to make sense to me, and I reckon it could make sense to others as well. As to how different or similar my idea is to the original, it is hard to say. Once again, this is not actually scrapping Prestige, merely its wording it in a way which makes sense to me.

As to your mentioning on Settlement Spamming ..... this is from a *city spammer* point of view. Of course I want there to be Mining Outposts (for shards and Ore) as well as Fortresses for housing Military, and opposing rival expansion. (Fertilizer) as you put it, would be the job of the settlements, as all global food-gathering operations would be taken place by settlements of all sizes. The food-distribution would depend on Prestige. (I've never once disliked prestige, however I was always confused as to wether Prestige presented a population cap or not) ... also, prestige would require your city to grow beyond population of 10-50. That 10-50 is the population of the Settler or whatever, the (1) that all Civ cities start with. All outlying farmland would have some tie-in with settlements, it seems. With such a small populatoin, consider a Farming County to be a small Settlement, with Various undefended Farms expanding out from it. Not sure if this is possible, although that would be nice. (as its said you can build food-gathering resources a certain number of tiles away from a settlement .... hope you can do farming towns in that way).

I suppose there is some population based reason as to why its currently more efficient to let the smaller cities grow?? What im suggesting is to make the Higher Levels of Cities SO MUCH more efficient that you will naturally form large population centers in an empire of small farming towns if you want to max out your Productivity.

However I do suppose your Vassal-System does have merit. The only thing is that its an Arbitrary cap. My system is not arbitrary, its merely more rewarding (much moreso) for people that centralize their food/population in as few cities as possible.

Im quite sure Prestige can work in an acceptable way by all parties and work in a similar fashion as has been described. I simply tried to explain it in previous posts long ago, do the dismayal of utter confusion, as its hard to talk about one element when all the other elements are interacting with it. For this purpose, I minimized my explanation of Prestige in order to get my point across, which had more to do with Food and Housing and Prestige *working together* and less about Prestige's independent benefits.

Prestige currently has a billion uses, from recruiting dragons, pop growth, pop distribution, Champion Governing/Leading effectiveness ... tracking of Champion's exploits ... I merely used Prestige as a growth-distribution factor in this one example. In fact, for this to work the presence of Prestige is quite necessary, imho ... I just got carried away in initial post.

Hum ... your ideas about using prestige are interesting. And I hope you'll be playing Elemental soon enough You would see that your ideas are just too far away from what is already built in the engine.

Nice idea. Too many words to read all of that, but i am sure all of yall had brilliant and clever responses. In the case of limited food though, i would need to be able to prioritize one city over another. As long as i can dictate which cities starve first if i run short on food for whatever reason, then it sounds great.

Yes ... and, at least with Prestige being the only factor of Pop distribution, the city with the Highest prestige gets to hoard the food and starve off last. Only cities can't really starve past the natural forage rate ... like 10-50 people.

I suppose you could also Prioritize which cities hoarded food moreso during an emergency via City Governor, but in most cases its Prestige that (ideally) should handle such things.

Assume the Nobles bribe their guards to send them all the food, this could work for a Prestige based system in a Food Shortage scenario.

I like Demiansky's and Tasunke's ideas. They seem to solve city-spam while making cities themselves more memorable and valuable, and provide a large number of soft targets so warfare is less binary.

Since some people seem to be having trouble understanding those walls of text, here's my own formatted TLDR-friendly version:

Food Supply Limits Population

• Food is harvested from resource tiles, and automatically transported to wherever it's needed.
• Your empire can't have more people than it can feed, regardless of prestige and housing capacity.
  
• Food is rare; there just isn't enough of it on the map to support dozens of high-level cities. 
• Every settlement gets 50 free people that live off the land. This lets you make lots of Level 0 outposts to grab resources, but those outposts won't grow unless you have surplus food.

Bigger is Better, and Small Cities Suck

• Higher-level cities get access to upgraded improvement tiles and possibly other bonuses. These bonuses are non-linear, making large cities much more productive than an equivalent number of smaller cities.
  
• Level 0 outposts are useless for anything more than harvesting resources. (Addition: They may not even be able to train units, or they might not receive governor bonuses because the place is just too small to need organizing.)
• Population distribution is influenced by prestige. Smaller, poorer cities will grow slowly or not at all if there are nicer accomodations available elsewhere in your empire.

Results: Bigger Cities, and Less of Them

• Growing a city now has opportunity costs, because it takes away resources that could have gone to another city. You can't sprawl all over the map anymore because there simply isn't enough food to go around.
• You can spam as many little outposts as you want, but there's little reason to do anything other than harvest resources with them.
  
• Due to non-linear upgrade bonuses, any given population will be most productive when packed into the smallest possible number of cities.
  
• Your empire will tend to favor a small number of larger cities naturally, due to prestige's effect on population distribution.

 

 

Hum ... your ideas about using prestige are interesting. And I hope you'll be playing Elemental soon enough You would see that your ideas are just too far away from what is already built in the engine.

 

I'm in the beta, but crash bugs have prevented me from advancing far enough to learn much about the current system. If another beta tester could explain how population, prestige, and food currently work, it would be very helpful.

Excellent synopsis

Indeed, your coverage of essential points was quite excellent.

I think using food to control city size is fundamentally a good idea.  I'm perfectly fine with some factions getting a leg up if they start near food resources; others will no doubt get a leg up by starting near Shards, or wandering heroes, or whatever.

To make cities memorable, they need to be different, though.  If city size is limited by food, and if food transportation is doable but difficult, most factions will likely end up with cities of varying sizes.

This is definitely worth exploring, imo.

Population, prestige and food :

Currently, your population is limited by the houses you built AND the available food in the city. The game cap the population at the lesser number. Lot of houses but not enough food ? You'll be limited by food. Lots of food but not enough houses ? You'll be limited by food. The actual system works good BUT ... if you have already maxed your buildings in an outpost and didn't build any house, then you won't be able to level up your city .. and will never have the few tiles you would need to grow.

Population growth. You gain population through prestige (roaming survivors hear about you and come to your settlement) and birthes. Birthes are a %age of population, and population from prestige is a %age of your prestige in that city. The difference is prestige don't automatically improve. You need to do research and to build estates.

So a level 5 city can still be at 10 prestige (the initial prestige of any city. And 10 prestige will get you 1 more people each turn)  where 5 cities with 10 prestige each will get you 5 more people each turn (1 in each city)

When you select a city, you can have a detailed list of numbers about your resources (food, prestige, wood, iron, etc.)

Okay, so in a way my idea was only expanding the Idea of Prestige in a way?

See, it seems to me that Prestige controlling growth-rate/birthrate/immigration rate, is completely included into my City design. The only extra depth is that Prestige would ALSO hold a great deal into population distribution ... within one nation.

Lets say that City A is 50 prestige, and City B and C are both 25 prestige. Assuming that there is infinte housing (and enough global food) City A will have twice the population of either B or C. Once City A runs out of housing, Cities B and C will get excess population in equal proportions.

I think, it seems to me, that the most Revolutionary change with Mine or Demiansky's ideas are the changes to how FOOD operates.

FOOD would be a global variable .... largely static depending on number of farms, with fertile farms counting as multiple farms, and less fertile farms counding as a small fraction of "a farm". Also, from what I have heard, most of the land will be unarable, and thus no ability to build a farm on those tiles. Irrigation should help this somewhat, but essentially fertile land is fertile land, so each Player should start in a small bread-basket in order to actually have a chance at getting enough food.

FOOD = the number of people your empire can have. That food is distributed among your cities proportionally based upon Prestige. A city will get enough food for pop as it has housing available (assuming this is your highest prestige city).

housing is the only "hard limit". As long as you have enough food in your empire, then growth of your largest/best city is determined only by how much housing they have. Also, if you start building up prestige in other ciites, they will start to steal population away from you, unless your main city is currently maxed out on housing (even so, once Mega City upgrades, it won't be able to grow *as* large because it must remain proportional to your other prestige city).

However, if your City B is only one tenth the Prestige as City A ... then it can be sure to take excess flow from City A when needed, however will clearly be subservient to City A's food needs during times of great growth for City A. Once City A is close to maturing as a city (if thats even possible) then City B is more free to build excess Prestige buildings, as long as its always slightly less than City A. (assuming that the player wishes to create supercities that don't shift population back into newer cities).

This is pretty close to how I thought it worked, but it's good to see confirmation.

Looks like it.  In fact, I thought this was already something they had said prestige would do.

The key concept here is that your cities would compete for population. Higher prestige would attract more people, so big cities get bigger and small cities stay small. It might even steal people from opposing cities if yours are nicer. Most importantly, spamming huge cities everywhere ceases to be possible because of the clumping.

You could try building less housing to force your population to spread out more, but cities need houses to grow. I suppose you could also try giving each city the same prestige level, but that might be difficult once we start getting more "wonder" improvements that increase prestige and can't be duplicated.