Suggestion on stopping need to spam outposts

from Elemental Forums


There has been a lot of talk about the "need" to have meaningful choices and many different ways to play and win game.  And it has also been mentioned that under the currnet build, there is one obvious must-do way to start the game - spam pioneers and create outposts to capture all the resources you can before the AI does it.  This has been exacerbated by the recent change to make it so that you can harvest all mining etc. resources without having to do any research, so you can, and in fact "have to", spam pioneers to get these resources asap.

This reduces meaningful, viable choices in early game, at least (you can play other ways, obviously, but they are all suboptimal to this approach).  I have seen some suggestions on how to control the outpost spamming, including limiting the number of outposts per city.  I am concerned that that type of move will simply lead back to city spamming, which is what the outpost mechanism is designed to reduce.

Perhaps a "better" way to do this would be to limit outpost creation based on population - i.g. make a prerequisite of having reached a certain overall civilization poulation limit before being able to place another outpost.  I don't know what the "right" number might be - 100 population per outpost?  The first 2 outposts for "free", but then 200 population per additional outpost?  Whatever...

This type of move would:

- imply need to make other choices before going after every resource on map with outposts.  Research civilization attributes to grow population more quickly to get capacity to go after more resources with outposts?  Or research warfare tree so you can clear area to put up outposts?  Or save your money and research magic to recruit champions quickly and start leveling them up and clear area? etc etc

- keep map looking less filled-in/more wild for longer, playing into lore of a broken world SLOWLY coming back, and leave room for fun wandering and exploring longer than current build, where in order to keep exploring you have to declare war to get through all the outposts hemming you in

- does it really fit the lore/make sense to have a soverign create a city/toehold in a scary/broken world, then immediately send out the few people in the city into the wild to form outposts amongst big bad monsters?  Shouldn't there be a period of consolidation of the new city before striking out into the big bad world?

- not induce city spamming in place of outpost spamming, as it plays into the concept of more cities = slower population growth = less ability to get outposts

8,835 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Generally, it doesn't bother me that much, as it's much better than what we had before. I think a simpler way to stop people "grabbing" everything too early, would be to limit the maximum distance of an outpost from a real settlement, and allow the flipping of outposts by a city's influence like in GalCiv. The idea would then be that an outpost was an extension of a city's power (just a little bit further) by military means, but ultimately dependent on a city for support, and ultimately subject to the whims of populations.n I recognise the problem you are trying to address, but fairly arbitrary caps / population seem a little forced to me.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree completely cattess, there's far too much outpost spam.  If each city could only support a certain number (population based as you said), a lot of really cool things could be done with them.  Maybe they give material or grain to the main city based on where they're located, or provide research, or something interesting.

It would definitely keep more of the land wilderness - and, if lairs and monsters respawned more quickly, would make a much more dangerous, interesting world because it wouldn't all have been tamed by outposts or cities (I think cities should be limited even more severely than outposts, city spam is not fun at all)

 

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

The other way you could limit the outposts is to make them cost money for upkeep.  I would then argue a bit that you should get a free defender or two since we're talking paying for it.  But yeah, it won't take long to go in the hole if you spam.  

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top


My suggestion:

Make outposts like GalCiv's starbases. Can be upgraded, limited in numbers per area, large area of effect, defendable,expensive to upgrade.

Then, for resources, just allow pioneers to "capture" them without losing the pioneers.

This way, early game, you don't need to spam pioneers like crazy.

 

Now, this brings up the issue of resource hunting with pioneers, where the player might just search everywhere and find them.

This can be solved by a diminishing in return per distance of the resources to an outpost, and further by the outpost to a town.

Formula should go something like this:

(2/(1+(distanceToOutpost/5 [if no outpost, set number to 100 distance])+(distanceToTown/10)))

I.e. If you found an iron source 20 tiles away from town, and you have an outpost 5 tiles away, which is say 18 tiles from your town.

2/(1+1+1.8) = 0.512

Or, 0.5 Iron per turn.

If the player is to overextend with pioneers and hunt down every single resource...

say the Iron is 40 tiles away from the nearest outpost and town.

2/(1+8+4)= 0.153, or 0.15 Iron a turn. This now is therefore a virtually useless resource.

 

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top


It seems to me you are talking about 2 different things here.

1) you want less clutter and more of a wilderness feel to the game for as long as possible.

The dev's certainly agree with this idea and are redesigning cities to deal with this. This will help a lot. As to the exact role of the outpost, the dev's don't seem to be too certain about this. It would seem to me to be a perfect fit for the outpost to work the way a starbase does in GalCiv and it combines very nicely with the other point of resource efficiency.

Right now all the outpost really does for you is extend your zone of control and provide vision for you. It can in fact backfire against you when you gain the tech to build roads to your outposts because then anyone can use them to run around and tear up your stuff. As well as using them as a homing beacon to find your cities. This would be a real problem if you were not fighting an ai but instead a person. It would be nice if roads were private, and you could make treaties to allow temporary passage through sovereign's domain

 

2) You want the distance a resource is from your town to have some impact on how effeciently the resource is being harvested.

I like this idea immensely, and you can add in the mechanic from galciv to give your outposts some character. Is it a military fort ? A merchant trading outpost ? perhaps its a magical sentry post. Pariden's monolith spell could have bonuses to its magical effects or have traits that are uniquely available. A more military empire nation could have a unique fort that gives strong military bonuses. This adds depth to the mechanic, adds faction defferention. Gives a reason for CAPITAR to be - which the dev's seem to be at a loss for (think of rome. They built their military, but they didn't enslave you, they wanted an enforced market to sell you their goods, or else) They stole knowledge from others and capitalized on it, making a fortune.

You have a magical way to win the game, a military way to end the game, an adventerous way to end the game. How about a cultural way to win the game using a similar influence mechanic and make that zone of control really work for you ? 4 different game winning strategies, and each faction would have a different means of accomplishing them, some more efficient than others, but all viable.

 

A cap of some sort on the number of outposts or monolith's you can create is not an arbitrary thing as an outpost is by definition and extension of a city or state. It can exist without it and is there to enforce the will of that state. It makes sense that there should be some limit on how many of these you can build. For example some factions may not be able to build outposts, and having no monolith spell, they have a greater zone of control from their cities since they would be more vigilant about sending out patrols. Others use an outpost to drain an area of resource and then abandon it. This way they have no need to build a city there - they have more of a locust mentality.  How a faction wants to enforce it's zone of control says a lot about what that faction is like. To simulate the draining effect that faction could create a temporary outpost that exists for a set number of turns and then dissapears, then they have to wait a period of time before they can build another outpost in that are, leaving it fallow for when they return. This could be a good hit an run mechanic for tarth for example if they field small, efficient armies of 3 units.

There should be a limit on how much you can enforce your will outside of your settlements, and some factions will be better at it than others, some will require it to make up for less efficient structures, and some will have more efficient structures but need for less outpost structures

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

I don't think there's a need to do anything so complicated, just put a 1 gildar maintenance per season on each outpost. Because people = tax = gildar, you basically just did the same thing.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Or, do away with the now obviously flawed outpost mechanic, and do something better.  The cities are about to become single or small tile icons in a future build.  Maybe have a Civ5 like mechanic where you get to add tiles to your ZOC every so often.  You can snake your influence over to a resource if you wish.  Or have more buildings/research earlier on that lets ZOCs expand more. 

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Well they've decided to make pioneers cheaper than they already were so they're obviously not interested in properly balancing the cost of a pioneer to reflect the supreme importance of the unit's mechanics in the game.

Making pioneers MUCH more expensive would be the simple solution.