Demiansky Demiansky

A Solution to City Spamming

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A Solution to City Spamming

from Elemental Forums

So we all hated the city spamming that took place in Civilization.  The problem with Civ was two-fold.  Food resources were generally evenly distributed across the landscape, meaning you had cities everywhere.  To make matters worse, food could never move so cities always popped up around food resources.  Not only that, but by late game virtually any landscape, almost deserts even, could support a worthwhile city.  With my solution, there simply isn't enough food existing on the map to make even 25 percent of the world colonizeable, even with tech upgrades and spell bonuses.

Stopping city spam should be easy.  The devs only have to do 2 things, which I'm surprised not many people have mentioned yet:

A: Make food limited and localized to specific types of landscapes.

B: Make food fluid and moveable.

Basically, food would be limited to certain fertile pockets or crescents along rivers (and players would generally start near these regions).  So let me illustrate (don't get hung up on the numbers, this is just hypothetical.)  The vast majority of regions on the map would have a diversity of resources, but not have any "fertile ground" that can accomodate food production so food from fertile regions would be shipped in.  So let's say you control the Teullon Valley with it's 5,000 available food resources, with each food resource accomodating 1 citizen.  There are 4 regions surrounding the Teullon Valley, only 1 of which has a food resources (1000 available).  If you wanted to spam all 5 regions wall to wall with cities, you'd need 100,000 food resources.  First, you naturally colonize the fertile region.  From there, you are left with a variety of decisions.  Do I colonize the Orgonian Mountains to exploit their rich metals?  Do I plunge into the Moonglow Glade to exploit its exotic animals and wood?  Do I colonize the Wind Swept Coast to pick up those extra 1000 fish food resources, even though I have to spend a hefty amount of research to do so (and the not to mention the magical fire coral there aren't as valuable to me as the metas of the mountains.)

You would have a little icon somewhere on the interface (probably near your treasury) that would display how much free food was available.  Every time population grew anywhere in your empire, your food would decline.  Every time you built a new farm or fishery or what have you, it would increase.  Population wouldn't grow if you didn't have enough food.  This seems like the most intuitive, simple, and realistic way to stop city spamming.  Once you've "capped out" on your food, you'll have some even more interesting decisions. 

Do you improve your food research to exploit new types of food resources or improve existing ones?  The food you have so far has only allowed you to colonize 10 percent of your 5 region area, so improving food research will allow you more dense colonization.  

Do you move onward and conquer neighboring cities of opponents?  Even though your home territory isn't exploited to its fullest, you could always just grab low hanging food resources from your opponents.

Do you simply improve upon the non-food resources that you already have and ignore food growth alltogether?  It may be that quality rather than quantity is the solution.  You could always just grab the most important pockets of resources in all 5 regions and arm your soldiers very, very well.

Add essence to the mix in order to build a city and you end up with some interesting choices.

Naturally, you'd need a few tweeks so that people don't spam a billion, 1 citizen cities all across the landscape, but overall I think the idea is pretty solid (so please refrain from stating a simply resolved problem).  Also, there are some other, very interesting ideas that spin off of this one, but I'll await some feedback.

16,178 views 28 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

I hope it works in a way that allows Population to gravitate towards singularly large population Centers among the presence of multiple towns and villages.

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

There are some good ideas here on how to stop city spamming. The only thing i don't realy like is the system of distributing food according to prestige. Here's how i would like to see it done;

*DISCLAIMER* I know the developers have an economy model where resources are distributed through all your settlements and that you can't direct where your goods go. I'm still hoping they'll change their minds about this, but even if they don't I still think that it would be a good idea to do this for food.

First, outposts should be self-sufficient. They should require no management (so no govenor) or food source. They should have a small max population, lets say 100, that feeds itself by hunting, fishing, gathering and maybe a little farming (this doesn't have to be represented in the game). Outposts would be used mainly for securing a resource (food, ore, mana shard, whatever..) and maybe to secure a strategic location like a mountain pass. Production in an outpost would be nearly zero. You could maybe build a squad of scouts there every few turns, but anything more advanced would take ages.

Second, farms build on fertile land produce a certain amount of food. This could be 1 (where each unit of food can feed a thousand people) or 1000 (where each unit of food feeds one person). It doesn't realy matter which for my idea. The former would be easier to keep track off, the latter would allow for an upgaded farm to produce 1250 units, for example.

Third, there should be a screen where you can direct the flow of food. This could be done for each settlement individualy (you could set outpost A to transport 1000 units of food to city Z), but it should be doable to make one screen for your entire kingdom, or even an overlay on the cloth map. On this screen or overlay you would be able to see at a glance where your food is going, and make adjustments (you'd be able to see that outposts A, B and C are each transporting 1000 units to city Z). Also, it should be possible for a settlement to transport the food that it recives from one settlement to another settlement (Outposts A, B, and C transport 1000 units of food each to village D, which keeps 1000 units to feed its own population, and transports the remaining 2000 units to city Z).

So if you want to upgrade an outpost to a village, it would either need a farm nearby, or it could import food produced in another settlement. If you wanted to upgrade the village to a town, you'd need another food source, either locally or imported.

The food available would determine the maximum population you can sustain in a settlement. Population growth could be a percentage of the current population. Prestige would influence migration from and to a settlement, housing would have a great influence on prestige. If you have more population than you have housing for, your prestige would take a big hit, up to the point where emigration and growth through births would cancel each other out.

So if for example you have a town with 2000 people in it and housing for 2000 people, and you gain acces to a new food source, the town could theoretically grow to 3000 people. However, if you dont build housing for the additional 1000, the prestige of the town would drop and people start leaving. If nothing changes, the town would grow to maybe 2,500 people.

What do you guys think about this system?

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Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

Its more brute force and would require some more AI work ... but its really nothing compared to what we want them to give the AI in forms of Diplomatic readiness and combat readiness ;)

Its not a bad idea. Obviously, if simplicity is better in these such aspects, I rather like my initial build simply for its elegance in simplicity. Your idea would require a seperate screen and a very *involved* view of food.

Since Prestige will effect Migration and Immigration, as well as basic pop-growth/population distributions, you would have to be constantly keeping track of where to send your food, and you would always need to be sending more food to higher Prestige sites.

If your idea is taken into consideration, then I would prefer for my build to be the *default* and then for your build to be an option to *brute force* the aquisition of X units of food per turn for City B. In my build its less automatically that Food willl *always* follow prestige, but more that Food will follow the people, and that people will follow the prestige.

See, your food will never leave your nation, but your people *might*. your food will follow the population that chooses to move within your Empire, from city to city. If you look at it that way, then perhaps simplicity and elegance is better in this matter. Think on it again, and tell me your reponse.