Punishing for lots of cities? Ponder this....

[thor015]

I am not sure that last time this topic was discussed so excuse me if it was not too long ago, regardless here is my topic:
I have heard alot about civ 3 punishing the player for having a large empire. Now I do think that there should be some unhappiness because of empire size (similar to CTP). But what happens when the ambitious player, creates a larger civilization with a good number of cities (~20-30) at the begining of the game. This is not a lot of cities and probably shouldn't bring too much unhappiness. But my question comes in when the player decides to win the came through a conquest of the rest of the other civs. What will happen?
I know in CTP that it is very easy to get up around 100 cities after taking over other civs. I would hate to see that the game makes it too difficult to take over other civs because you have too many cities. My final question to you is this, how upset are most americans because of the number of cities that are apart of our country?
What are your thoughts?

[JosefGiven]

The same evning that this post was submitted, I voiced these concerns in the List of Cities post by jdjbuffalo.

My guess is Firaxis are starting to visualise how much CPU horsepower Civ III will require, and that they imagine civs with 100+ cities are going to be too processor intensive.

This will be a crying shame, I say!

I like monster civs. Civ II had the appropriate facilities that allowed me to administrate my sprawling empire with ease!!

If Firaxis give us the exact number of cities we'll be able to found/conquer, perhaps it'll put our worries to rest. It's the not knowing that gets to me!

------------------
Josef Given
josefgiven@hotmail.com

[Boracks]

I saw another thread talking about having over 100 city names for each civ so there may be a huge number of cities available depending on how many civs there can be.


------------------
"Treat each day as if it were your last. Eventually, you'll be right."

[Cannes]

I would HATE having an upper bound for how large my civilization could get! In CTP it was absolutely necessary to increase the upper bound when playing on huge maps. The upper bound before the cities began to become unhappy was 120 cities when having the virtual democracy government. With the mind controler city improvement it was possible to control about 160 cities. In my last conquest game on deity level huge map I was well above 250 cities at the end of the game and there was room on the map for at least another 500 cities! If they are going to make huge empires possible and a necesity(sp?) (In conquest games on huge maps) Then it would seem totally irrational to restrict the absolute upper bound to say 100 cities...

But conquering often leads to great administrative troubles. Take, for example, The Mongol Empire after Kublai Khan's death. It was forced to switch it's small, efficient administration to a larger and larger one the more it conquered. This eventually led (together with civil strife) to the largest empire ever created falling appart. Or take the Roman Empire, also one which expanded quickly.

[colossus]

The solution for excessively large civilization lies in corruption implementation. What allows the huge number of cities in civ2 is that advamced governments- commie,demo and fundy are corruption free, thus it makes sense to ever create more cities, provided that you can manage the happiness.

In civ3, we would like to see advanced governments to have corruption, betterr still if additional corruption penalty afflicted on having many cities(say 100+). It forces player to think twice before founding new cities if corruption rate is running as high as 70-80%.

You could still conquer the world, but the power base hardly expand after a certain limit, so it would be harder than in civ2, when you could literally roll over the world.

[only human]

you would think that in 21st century software would be scalable to the hardware...

[Mihai]

I agree with colossus : there shouldn't be an absolute limit on city number, but your civ should be harder and harder to manage as it get bigger (due to corruption, unhappines etc)

[Brent]

How about if you can only have a moderate number of cities, but a large number of Towns. The towns would use the slider idea, rather than building specific things.

[Lord Maxwell]

Just as long as they block ICS I don't care if they limit city numbers or not. But I really truly hate ICS, and it is the (by far) most effective way of building an empire in Civ II. (And freeciv, and to a lesser extent SMAC.)

If the first guy works the base square it would mostly solve itself. Then you all can feel free to build a godzillion tiny cities, and the rest of us can build lean mean killing machines.

[Sean]

Putting a cap on the number of cities one has is worse than the ICS dieses in many ways. Personally, I HATE ICS, and want it gone. But putting artificial caps on civ size is not the way to do it. This, as several posts already state, ruins the conquest game. The way to get rid of ICS is to relise way it is so jolly effective, and then fix that. The reason it is so effectve is because with each new city your workers work the city square and one other. As the city increases in size you only get one additional square per population increase. Where as, with a new city you get two squares for a pop of one. So a city of size 10 (say pop 100,000) will work 10 or 11 squares. A civ of 100,000 who builds 10 cities instead, gets 20 squares of workable resources!!!!! Thats what has to be fixed.

[Ralf]

quote: Originally posted by Sean on 01-21-2001 04:54 AM Putting a cap on the number of cities one has is worse than the ICS dieses in many ways. Personally, I HATE ICS, and want it gone. But putting artificial caps on civ size is not the way to do it. This, as several posts already state, ruins the conquest game.

What is "artificial" about stepwise adding "rubber-band limits" on how many cities you can found/conquer, without stumbling into increasing empire-managememt problems?
Such "rubber-band limits" already exists then it comes to how big indevidual cities can grow, without any counter-acting happiness improvements, entertainers, luxurys and military-presence. Why on earth should it be different then it comes to size-increasing empires? Why shoudnt the player being forced to do similar counter-actions on an empire-level? Especially if the empire-expansion have derived through violent and oppressive civ-conquerings! Just look at former Sovjet-union/Warshaw-pact.

It seems to me that some of you guys want the challenge of enormous empires/world-conquerings to be as much of an increasingly steep downhill-slope as possible. As it in fact was in Civ-2 and SMAC.
Personally i dont like that. I want it to be the other way around: An increasingly steep uphill-struggle! Total world-conquerings is extremely unrealistic and have never ever happened in our civilization history.
By that im not saying that world-conquerings should be impossible. After all, Civ-3 is suppose to be a fun and engrossing GAME - not a realistic historic world-simulator. If the latter was to be the game-design goal; any ambitions of literally conquering the whole world would be utterly unrealistic and ridicules. I hope you guys can at least realize and agree on that.

quote: The way to get rid of ICS is to relise way it is so jolly effective, and then fix that.

Theres a semi-ICS version of the problem also. That is if the game allows the player to go absolutely manic about producing buckloads of city-founding settlers very early on, without penializing him for not building city-improvements as well. Seen from a historical viewpoint, such behaviour is utterly unrealistic and shouldnt be possible in Civ-3, the way it was in Civ-2.
The way to prevent that should be to gradually increase the unhappiness in the city, for each new settler that moves away (above the first one) without building basic city-improvements, in between. This should only apply in cities with no, or only 1-2 city-improvements. Above a certain basic civil city-development level (let say temple + granary + marketplace), this limit is bypassed for that particular city.

quote: The reason it is so effectve is because with each new city your workers work the city square and one other. As the city increases in size you only get one additional square per population increase. Where as, with a new city you get two squares for a pop of one. So a city of size 10 (say pop 100,000) will work 10 or 11 squares. A civ of 100,000 who builds 10 cities instead, gets 20 squares of workable resources!!!!! Thats what has to be fixed.

If your thinking on a city-area related solutions (like "expanding city-areas" ala CTP-2) of the ICS-problem, im definitly 100% against it. They shouldnt mess around with the 21-square city-area at all. Just look at the can-of-worms type of problems the CTP-2 team got themselves into!
Luckely, we already have reassurance on that expanding city-areas, or any such city-area related ICS-preventions, aint likely to be implemented.
As a response to "im not shure that city-area related anti-ICS prevention is going to be enough", Chris Pine (the Firaxis lead programmer of Civ-3) wrote back and shortly commented: "I didn't say anything about city-area".

Back then i was still lured somewhat of the buzz around CTP-2, and their ICS-solving attempts. Looking at the finished end-result however, i can only say that abandoning ideas of solving ICS by fiddle around with expanding city-areas, is a wise one.
Any Civ-3 ICS-solving is probably done by other non-city-area related methods. Hopefully, more effective then how it was prevented in CTP-2.

[This message has been edited by Ralf (edited January 21, 2001).]

[Brent]

How about the easiest level is more of a simulator than a game, without increasing challenges. Call it a Practice Level.

[ajli@home]

I think that only conquered cities should have this effect. Cities you build shouldn't have this effect.

Conquered cities should be considered "conquered" until they have like a "happy" day (joy to the king). Let's say that if 10% of your country is conquered your country starts getting 5% corruption etc.

[Sean]

"What is "artificial" about stepwise adding "rubber-band limits" on how many cities you can found/conquer, without stumbling into increasing empire-managememt problems?"

I am sorry Ralf, perhaps I didn't make myself clear (I try to keep my posts short !). I am not against "rubber-band limits", such as unhappiness cuased by distance from capital from corruption etc. It is when they become hard and fast (thus arbitary) that they become silly. Like when you play on very large maps. CTP II trys to limit empire size with govt type, but ALL govts can only manage a relatively small number of cities.

"It seems to me that some of you guys want the challenge of enormous empires/world-conquerings to be as much of an increasingly steep downhill-slope as possible. As it in fact was in Civ-2 and SMAC.
Personally i dont like that. I want it to be the other way around: An increasingly steep uphill-struggle!"

I am with you Ralp on this, my main crip is with ICS. If that problem is solved then I will be happy. I like to carefully select my city sites.

"Theres a semi-ICS version of the problem also. That is if the game allows the player to go absolutely manic about producing buckloads of city-founding settlers very early on, without penializing"

Good point Ralp!

"If your thinking on a city-area related solutions (like "expanding city-areas" ala CTP-2) of the ICS-problem, im definitly 100% against it. They shouldnt mess around with the 21-square city-area at all. Just look at the can-of-worms type of problems the CTP-2 team got themselves into!"

No, you are right, it does not solve the problem at all.


"Any Civ-3 ICS-solving is probably done by other non-city-area related methods. Hopefully, more effective then how it was prevented in CTP-2."

I will be happy as long as it works.

On an aside, I know world conquest is not realistic, but then again it is also unrealistic to be elected supreme leader, etc. But I take your point about difficulty.

[Brent]

Again, Civ is about changing history. Just because it hasn't happened, doesn't mean it won't some day or that on an alien world it couldn't.

[lord of the mark]

quote: Originally posted by Brent on 01-22-2001 03:58 PM Again, Civ is about changing history. Just because it hasn't happened, doesn't mean it won't some day or that on an alien world it couldn't.

true, but the general dyamanics should approximate history. In civ2 expansion almost always pays, whereas in the real world there is "impreial overstretch" that makes global conquest difficult. I would like to see something, whether in terms of corruption, happiness penalties, nationality factors, that makes expansion more difficult. And as with everything, it should be possible to change it so the can test out a an alternate world without such factors.

[Brent]

that makes sense.