[Idea] Adminstration Cost

To add to the initial idea, there would be a re-researchable upgrade under civilization that reduces the cost so it does not become pointless to get more towns late in the game on large maps.

Similar to the 'maintenance' cost in Civ IV.

Overall, I'm in favor of ideas like this. They just need to be balanced for map sizes and different play styles. It shouldn't be impossible to create a massive empire, it should just be very hard to create and maintain that empire, which is realistic and adds gameplay challenge.

It would scale somewhat as things are now, as larger maps have longer games which result in more research of the upgrades the continually increase resource production. As I said earlier, there could also be a new upgrade specifically to reduce the cost of having a large realm. Then the cost would scale naturally with the size of the map. (Technically, better tech does make control lots of land easier)

Scaling can of course be either Linear or Exponential

Exponential works well to make early growth easier "low cost for first few then large increases" eg - (Citynum-4 (min 1)) squared gildar per turn.

Linear works well for longer games, as it makes growth early-on hard, but late-on easy (as you have more gold, etc).

Then for possible technologies:

1) Provinces - the skill of managing provinces, parts of your kingdom that are semi-independant, is a task the romans learnt well.  It drives down administration costs while keeping them "yours"  -   (1/2 cost maintainence - )

2) Colonies - granting independence - one of your cities becomes a 'neutral' city... but begins with a very friendly attitude to you and a full trade agreement of their resources - (no maintainance from that city)

3) Advanced administration - learn how to better manage local cities from your base city - (discount all cities up to 9 squares away from first city)

4) Super-duper advanced administation - up to 14 squares away

5) Efficient administation (base calculation ignores more cities -  larger effect on exponential measurement).

(3/4 based on distance, 5 on number of cities - do you have a tight ring or a spread-out blob of cities?)

The idea is to encourage the player to no build a large number of cities with no valuable resources or strategic value, so upgrades that make packing cities close together are not a good idea, but upgrades that generically reduce the cost would be good.

Id' say the idea is to give people the choice to or not, but that there are consequences for either choice  (rather than browbeating them into not doing something).

If someone wants to build cities close, with no benefit, and then spend (waste) techpoints to reduce the cost of those cities which provide little benefit then let them! Note, none of the above enable you to break the 5-square rule!

Anyway, sometimes resource distribution and landshape determine distribution more so than hardcore strategy!

I had just rather not encourage it by helping only those near the capital, though after thinking about it weighting cities by distance might be a good idea. I think a formula like DistanceToCapital / XY = I, where X is a constant based on map size and Y is a variable that starts at one and increases each time you research a specific tech. The sum of I for every city is added up and placed in another formula that calculates adminstration cost (likely exponitial, so cost is low for a small kingdom and high for a large one).

Definitely!  

Another alternative is a CIV-like Forbidden Palace, etc, which makes the calculation (lower distance of capital/palace) / XY.

I guess in the end I personally dont want to stop city spam per se, but I want to see it be one strategy option, rather than the main/default strategy option.  Similarly, people right now can really focus on one tech tree, or spread it around.

If the only way you could city spam was with

a) good resource support    (possibly, but not necessarily, .05 food per population point + city maintainence costs)

and/or

administration techs   (that make administration possible with reductions to the ratio  (note other techs can help too, and magic), etc)

Then you make city-spamming a strategic option, not the bane that many people see it as, and the choice to do it would limit you in other ways.  Sure, build your mega empire ... more cities for me to invade, blast to shreds, trade to YOUR enemies, etc.

Later I will be posting a more refined version at https://forums.elementalgame.com/397068 that will have both the distance idea and something similar to the forbidden palace. The target result is building the smallest number of strategicly important cities and building as many cities as possible are equally valid and effective strategies.

Look forward to it, and commenting on it.

Posted it, though I will be editing in the reasoning for this model (but it is the same as in the first post here).

I'd rather have a Building-based maintenance cost. (and perhaps have buildings/population matter a bit more??)

Some of the big buildings with an impact on the game compairable to that of a company of soldiers should, but I am not a fan of having all buildings take upkeep. It does not have to be one or the other, it could be both.

well, for instance, if your population gave you gold ... most all buildings could cost at least 1 gold per turn, and better buildings costing more. (except for housing of course, basic housing shouldn't have maintenance)

that might allow for larger armies to be possible as a trade off for not having all the best buildings.

I am moving over to https://forums.elementalgame.com/397365 for posting my ideas for cities and the economy as a whole. I would prefer to flesh out the idea of building maintainance there. It sounds like something that could be interesting if done correctly, but needs to be well thought out.