SD, For the love of god re-address the food/city spam issues

Reworking population and dealing with city spam are two of our priorities, and both will be addressed in 1.1 and onward. See Brad's latest journal for some initial information on this.

Jesus H, not another "nix the city spam strategy" thread 

Where's that beating a dead horse smilie when you want it??

My opinion?

Click here to see it.

That was funny.  I actuallly lol.

he he he,

good one

^^ Glad I could help.

But seriously guys, this is srs bsns.

I think this thread is done now. Any one second such a movement?

seconded.

I think it should be kept alive to mock people who mock anxious folks who might have missed (or not been much encouraged so far) by the dribbles of dev info about 'the city spam problem.'

I very much agree with folks who claim that making city spam (nearly) impossible would be a mistake--the game needs to support as wide a range of play styles and strategies as possible. But what I've read so far from Brad et al says a lot more about moderating city spam than it says about tweaking the game so that both players and AIs will have viable, few-city paths to the late game. The OP's tone might leave something to be desired, but so does the thin info on planned changes that we have so far.

well i have what i think to be an interesting way to deal with city spam.  i normally don't like to pimp one of my threads in somebody elses thread, but i am curious as to what you think.

corruption and why you don't want a bunch of cities.

Ok so maybe i am just fed up and yes my "tone" was a bit overzealous, but i thank you for seeing the point behind my post.

I didn't mean anything by my post. I just saw a comment on a dead horse and thought I'd interject a more visual response.

But city spam is a problem that will hopefully be sorted out soon.

There have been Tons of great ideas posted in the Ideas Section over the last few months and many of them I've personally pointed out to Boogie and some aspects of a lot of ideas actually have been addressed in part in the current version.

I've noticed just in the last two patches the rate of spread of the players ZoC has increased drastically which has helped some. I don't need to make nearly as many cities now as I did two versions ago. The AI still spams cities a bit, but, it won't matter much soon enough as Kryo has pointed out the new system they have in mind is going to take care of the issue .

@ Tydorius: LoL that pic was funny as f'k...good stuff!!!

city spam is bad in civ 5 because of social policys thats if you wanted them should have made all the crappy places i took pupets too .... oh well...

nothings going to deal with city spam... unless you make it that you can only have one city.

I think civ 3 or 4 had an artificial control with corruption. The further you were from the capital the more productions & everything you lost to "corruption," there was a wonder improvement that allowed you to build a second capital which helped a lot, but it was mid-game before you could get it as I remember.

There is nothing wrong with "city spam" per se. The problem with it is that right now, in 1.09, city spam is the most effective tactic for the game.

City spam is caused by:

1. It costs basically nothing to found a city.

2. It is the most effective way to gain access to resources quickly.

3. It allows you to out train your oppponent.

These are the 3 issues IMO that have to be addressed in v1.1.

how has city spam been delt with in real life?

It hasn't, there's like 6 billion people on the earth.

Yea but a lot of them are getting negative productivity penalties because of a lack of food resources.

Speaking of city spam, do enemy sovereigns retain the power to found new cities after the first one is placed?

I ask because I took an enemy city, and then ghosted the sovereign, taking each new city he created because he would leave after a turn or two, allowing me to waltz in and take up residence.  I built a lovely empire thanks to that, finally getting bored after taking 3 newly made cities. 

Message here is that founding cities as a sovereign need to cost something - there needs to be a limiting factor - and I would suggest 5 essence, starting all sovereigns 5 higher to make up for the first one.  Anyhow, I don't have to explain how this would be abused with human players. And it would also provide some logic as to why sovereigns aren't super-pioneers.

Top

The mechanics in Elemental are a bit different than the typical 4X game because even in terms of warfare, there are very different paths. For instance, Player A may have a huge army ready to steamroll but Player B may have an incredibly powerful sovereign who can wipe out vast armies and Player C may have built up an incredible well of mana that can be used to decimate vast swaths of the world and all three of these things could come together at once based on which path players take and of course all 3 could lose to Player D who wins through the quest victory condition if they're not careful.

Whatever happened to that game that Froggy envisioned/described there?  That's the game I expected and want to play.  I wouldn't object to city spamming (ie -- Player A) were that the game Elemental is. 

Nick - non-global mana was the achille's heel of this.

In the original design, global mana was a core game mechanic.  Which isn't surprising since I ripped it er, I mean was inspired by Master of Magic on that.

However, our engine was not able to allow unit actions to make use of global resources until v1.09.

The mistake was thinking that we could turn mana into a local unit stat without it undermining the overall game mechanic. 

People nitpick this or that about Elemental but IMO, that one issue ruined for me the whole game design.  If there is a mistake of mistakes, it is that particular compromise.

So how did it happen?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Why did that happen?

Stardock policy: NO manager shall work fewer hours per week than anyone under their management including the CEO.  If my guys were working 90 hours a week, I was working 100 hours a week. It was a bedrock principle.  You do that for a few months and you'd be surprised at how "good" easier solutions start to look.

I find the Elemental launch endlessly fascinating (which I know I shouldn't bring up from a PR point of view) because experiencing first-hand some of the project development catastrophes I had previously only read about has been a real eye opener. 

When I yelled at Ben over on Qt3 when he suggested the game wasn't ready, I was 10X angrier than even my post implied. The game was ready. Only a horrible evil terrible no good very bad person could even imagine it wasn't the case.  At least, until we got to take a few days off and sleep and look at things from a fresh perspective.  It's a lesson to be learned by any developer.

And the most concrete example of that lesson was the compromise on global mana. 

Lol i know what you mean on the long shifts, though not quite that long most weeks.  Worked about 6 months of 7 days a week, 12+ hours a day before i decided to tell my employer I had better things to do and went back to school.

The lack of global mana keeps us going with the "What the hell were we thinking???"

Must say I am curious to see how this global mana plays out, I was a bit wary when I heard of the change but further info has me (almost) positive.

I am one of those folks who starts lots of games but has not got past about turn 300, trying to fix the sliders so I get a nice balance between exploration and expansion, so, totally off-topic, can we have an option to play without any opponents (or is there one there and I missed it - I'd like to just 'play the system' while I learn and trying to start alone on a random island is not working)?

Your asking, let alone answering, your above question bodes well for Elemental's future, and upcoming SD games.

I respect your 'the boss expects more from himself than his/her employees' philosophy.  The bosses I've most respected led from the front, didn't ask of others what they wouldn't do themselves, and generally worked their way up through the ranks so they understood each job they oversaw.  Sometimes it bites one in the keister, but what doesn't sooner or later? 

I hope the laid-off SDers get their jobs back ASAP.