Tall vs. Wide

from Stardock Forums

Ok folks, I may be creating a monster flame-fest here, but it's a discussion the family needs to have...

Build Tall or Build Wide??

There's been a lot of talk about giving players the ability and choice to either build tall, or build wide.  This has been a claimed design goal through since before the days of GC4.  But this has generally amounted to just talk.  No matter the systems implemented it has pretty much always been hands down advantageous to build infinity colonies instead of a single Sigil like homeworld.

Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but it seems to me that the above point is in broad agreement.

My take on the matter is that there hasn't been a solution to this simply because there is really just no drawback or tradeoff to colonizing planets, nor building Core Worlds.  You spend some resources and over time those resources grow at a compounding rate through the whole game with no drawbacks.  Indeed, worlds and it could be said, Core Worlds - are the fundamental economic building blocks of the game.  Everything important in the game derives from colony production, with few exceptions.  Building out colonies is just fundamentally a overwelmingly dominant strategy.

This is also the case in virtually every 4x game ever created, so it's not an issue specific to this franchise.  Obviously one can make the quite appropriate argument that this is how 4x games are supposed to work.  You're supposed to build colonies/cities/castles/whatever, bulk them up, and run over your opponents with them.  And this is a fine argument, but on the other hand the long-standing talk of Tall vs Wide hints at a problem with this argument: primarily that it would be more fun to have a choice in the matter, instead of simply being pigeon-holed into a colony rush strategy every single game. 

So...  What can be done about this?  Recent efforts to scale back the colony rush phase of GC have done a pretty good job of reducing the frenetic stress of the early-game rush.  But the rush still exists, it's just been slowed/tempered.  Some of the ideology/etc abilities have done a decent job of including tall vs wide choices, but fundamentally building an infinite number of colonies is just too dominant a strategy.

Solutions:

I'm not going to propose a "solution" because this is a immense and complicated issue that does not have an easy answer.  However, might I propose a theoretical framework from which to address the issue?  Infinite Colony Spam is not an issue in real life, but it is for video games, why?  The answer is that building colonies (or Cities/infrastructure in real life) requires resources and energy to both produce and run.  In real life these resource constraints underlie our entire socioeconomic structure, but in video games these constraints are generally abstracted to the point of being basically free.  There may be a 'guns or butter' decision to be made, but it's never colonies vs something else it's always a choice of what to produce with those colonies. 

One way to introduce this choice and high level decision making into GC4 is to make colonies (probably just Core Worlds) require resources to both build and run.  The resource base in GC4 is the Durantium/Promethium/etc + some other esoteric resources (Snugglers/Techapod/etc).  So a logical place to start would be for Core Worlds to need to consume some of these resources in order to not suck.  Maybe the peculiarities of each planet dictate the types of resources they need per turn to operate efficiently.  Precursor worlds might require none, because that precursor tech was so damn good.  But those other planets - daaaamn, you really want that sweet Class 33, but damn, 0.2 prometheon, 0.1 techapod, and 0.1 hypersilicates per turn for it to not get output penalties... hmmm.

The choice comes in because players need these resources for other things, especially later in the game.  If your colonies are going to eat all of your Durantium, well then you know that you're sacrificing fleet strength later down the line.  So you can build planets, or you can build fleets, but it's difficult to build both.  This makes sense, because the resources underlying building a high tech society would probably be similar to those that go into make starships. 

So one workaround is just to skip Core World spam and just build tall.  You have plenty of resources (your homeworld obviously wouldn't require any resources since this is where you're from) and can focus on other things.  Like building fleets to resource starve your enemies that did build Core Worlds..

One change I would make to allow this, would be to allow mining starbases to also mine planets.  They could get something like 1/2 the resource output of those planets (the food/wealth/etc) as well as whatever special resources they might have (snugglers/etc).  So if you wanted to build tall you can still feed your one core world, and do it efficiently.

I have some other ideas too that've crossed my mind that aren't coming to me at the moment, and I have to get going here to run an errand, but I just wanted to start this discussion and get an actual tall vs wide choice into GC4, as having these decisions would be REALLY fun.  Most of the proposals heretofore haven't been bad, but they don't really address the underlying issue (colonies produce free resources) in a way that seems entirely satisfying, or aren't sort of immersion-breakingly cheesy, like just giving insane bonuses to a single core world for no reason at all.

Thanks for reading & Please discuss!!!!

I would be very interested in people's thoughts on the matter,

cheers,

-tid242

galactic civilizations iv
14,333 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Crime and food can be a limiting factor but not often. The Colony rush is definitely slower in my games which I appreciate greatly. I don’t enjoy quick knife fights. I have seen the drawbacks to having to many core worlds when I was playing against the AI and they had far too many core worlds and not enough colonies each of their cores couldn’t produce large ships quick enough and I just out produced them because I had 12 core worlds to their +40.

I don’t think a single core world should be able to win the game but when I broke out of my single sector even though the AI had me hemmed in and resources from 4 sectors I started grinding them down bit by bit so in that regards I feel like tall works. Of course we may disagree what tall is. To me a single medium sector with 4 cores is playing tall when there are 8 sectors with 100 to 200 of cores.

Reply #2 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Civ 4 had a "bureaucracy" mechanic that worked to limit city spam. Basically, each new city introduced a non-linear, cumulative econ penalty on the whole civilization. Each additional colony would consume more money than it produced until it had time to develop. This makes some intuitive sense: overexpansion crashes your economy. Just ask the Romans. In that game tech eventually made your economy more productive and your civilization could tolerate a higher penalty.

I can also imagine something like a "capex" slider that would control how fast new colonies develop, as tid242 suggests. Your colony development and ship production are pulling from the some of the same resource pools, so there's an opportunity cost to prioritizing one over the other.

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Reply #3 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Hi,

Like ForgottenSlayer noticed, the first discussion is about what tall and wide building are.

For me, in GC3, colonize and develop 20 planets to secure and grant production of strategic ressources for specific buildings, citizens recruitment and citizen's actions wasn't wide building. I always paid attention to develop to max my planets by selecting planets with good class, through classic terraformation, aquatic terraformation and space stations (only to save real life time in place to manage dozens of planets). Expansion was a need to face strong ennemies, catch specific ressources, extand ship range or influence.

I think that colonizing lots of colonies is not that free/cheap because how more spread is your civilization, how more fleets and infrastructures you need to link and defend your planets what has a constant cost. In addition, when you send population/citizen(s) colonize new planets, you make your homeworld weaker and slow down population growth. In my opinion, all that is already quite operating costs.

Another point is that it would look strange to me that a single homeworld civilization (in a pure tall building) be able to defeat a vast galactic empire. What could be possible in GC due to limited fleet size. It just required a fleet unbeatable by any opponent's fleet to become invincible (perhaps it changed with multiple turns battle in GC4).

Also, In GC4, with core worlds system, I feel like this dichotomy is solved. Colonizing lots of colonies feeds several core worlds. Then building wide make you building tall in the same time.

Maybe 4X games just inderectly point that when you look outward and lean on more diversity of ressources you become stronger than staying introspective. It's more obvious in GC4 with colonies-core world system where links between them are graphically visible. Building wide makes you tall.

Cheers

Reply #4 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

I feel like the colony mechanic is undercooked. It seems like the thing to do is collect them like trading cards. There is no possible downside to them other than their startup cost, decay (limiting their value), and the fact that you might have to patrol them. Colonies have happiness and population, yet they are both completely outside your control and neither has a discernible effect. Events that can effect them seem kind of pointless as well. For example, there's one where you can give +10% to colony science for 50 turns which sounds great until you do the math. Unless you are playing on a huge map or are already winning, you will never pick the +10%.

They're better than asteroids. 0.3 minerals? Seriously? Zzzzz.

Reply #5 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Yes you do eventually collect them all but how and in which order is important. It was done to reduce micro management. In 3 once you had +120 colonies things got bogged the hell down I would only finish about half of my 3 games and I’d normally rush ascension or tech victory because shit was taking forever and I never had enough legions.

I will say that I think the core worlds should be a bit more productive and what you build on them should make a bit more of a difference because without snagging a lot of Colonies they just seems kinda underwhelming. 

Reply #6 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Quoting ForgottenSlayer, reply 5

how and in which order is important
End of ForgottenSlayer's quote

But is that really true? No one has demonstrated that any of these mechanics is actually important other than creating a doomstack as expeditiously as possible.

Reply #7 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

I think so if you colonize a bunch of the planets with just +1 mineral and +1 wealth and ignore a bunch of +4 food planets you can run out of food, I ignore poor quality planets and leave them as infill for later citizens.

Doom stacks can only engage once a turn unlike in 3 where they could mops up several fleets at a time. Although late game once I funneled the AI to come at me from across the sector into a bottleneck it. Which is why I think there needs to be a late game technology that opens other ways to travel between sectors.

Reply #8 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Well sure and I didn't send my citizens to desert tiles in Civ. Certain things are kind of obvious. My point is more that you're not going to snowball because you're really good at selecting colony worlds.