"Land Power" & How Civ6 Could Be Different

[Bobchillingworth]

I think one way to make small empires truly competitive in a way which large ones (in terms of city count, anyway) can't exploit just as easily would be to copy the Kuriotate "super city" game mechanic from FFH. I think someone already noted it in this thread, but in FFH the Kurios are limited to building only 2-5 productive cities in a game (depending on map size), but they make up for it by allowing each city to work its third thing of culture. This has the effect though of preventing you from placing your cities too close together- after all, you'll be wasting your limited and precious supply of maximum potential tiles.


What if we adjusted this mechanic a little bit for regular civ? In regular civ nobody is prevented from founding as many cities as the land and borders allow, so conserving tiles won't matter much to players. But what about this- enable empires to change a regular city to a "metropolis", allowing it to work all tiles in its third ring but also dramatically increasing the minimum distance which cities must be founded from each other. In this way, and empire which for whatever reason has a proportionally smaller amount of land compared to its competitors can make up for it by maximizing the value of individual cities. Cribbing from the Kurios again, you could also make it so that Metropolises have some special buildings which further increase their output above regular cities, to make them more competitive against ICS play. You could even get creative and allow them to do stuff like finish two units per turn.


One serious issue would be if you founded your first few cities close together and then soon afterwards ran out of land; you'd still be a small empire, but your cities would be too close to allow for a promoting any of them to a metropolis. I suppose one option would be to allow players to disband the offending cities, turning them into fully-developed towns and maybe a few workers or something to represent population migration. You could also change the mechanics and replace a minimum-distance penalty with a cap on maximum cities allowed (like making it so that owning a metropolis prevents you from founding more than a certain number of additional cities), although that has its own issues.

[Krill]

So long as productivity is tied to tiles and pseudo tiles (specialist slots) then BIAB.

EDIT: Did I just distill the OP down to one sentence?

[antisocialmunky]

I think one way to make small empires truly competitive in a way which large ones (in terms of city count, anyway) can't exploit just as easily would be to copy the Kuriotate "super city" game mechanic from FFH. I think someone already noted it in this thread, but in FFH the Kurios are limited to building only 2-5 productive cities in a game (depending on map size), but they make up for it by allowing each city to work its third thing of culture. This has the effect though of preventing you from placing your cities too close together- after all, you'll be wasting your limited and precious supply of maximum potential tiles.


What if we adjusted this mechanic a little bit for regular civ? In regular civ nobody is prevented from founding as many cities as the land and borders allow, so conserving tiles won't matter much to players. But what about this- enable empires to change a regular city to a "metropolis", allowing it to work all tiles in its third ring but also dramatically increasing the minimum distance which cities must be founded from each other. In this way, and empire which for whatever reason has a proportionally smaller amount of land compared to its competitors can make up for it by maximizing the value of individual cities. Cribbing from the Kurios again, you could also make it so that Metropolises have some special buildings which further increase their output above regular cities, to make them more competitive against ICS play. You could even get creative and allow them to do stuff like finish two units per turn.


One serious issue would be if you founded your first few cities close together and then soon afterwards ran out of land; you'd still be a small empire, but your cities would be too close to allow for a promoting any of them to a metropolis. I suppose one option would be to allow players to disband the offending cities, turning them into fully-developed towns and maybe a few workers or something to represent population migration. You could also change the mechanics and replace a minimum-distance penalty with a cap on maximum cities allowed (like making it so that owning a metropolis prevents you from founding more than a certain number of additional cities), although that has its own issues.

You'd have to modify health and happiness values to compensate.

[Bobchillingworth]

Yeah. Special buildings specific to a metropolis could work. In FFH the Kurios get several exclusive improvements which give happiness, and their leader has a trait which provides health. But if adding a bunch of unique buildings doesn't appeal (after all, those would force the small empire to expend extra hammers on making its cities viable), you could just make it so that a metropolis comes with a bunch of innate benefits, like +X health upon creation.

[darrelljs]

If the new "minimum distance" is so great you can't abut metropolises, wouldn't you still be better off with regular cities? If not, wouldn't ICS be replaced by IMS (Infinite Metropolis Sprawl)?

Darrell

[sunrise089]

One quick thought: Stonehenge is how to do this right. It's a per-city benefit at a huge opportunity cost that may or may not pay off later.

[Bobchillingworth]

If the new "minimum distance" is so great you can't abut metropolises, wouldn't you still be better off with regular cities? If not, wouldn't ICS be replaced by IMS (Infinite Metropolis Sprawl)?

Darrell

Yeah, that would be an issue. The idea is so that, if for whatever reason you're going to be stuck with a small empire, you can at least have the option of using two or three super-cities as opposed to a half-dozen mediocre ones. But I can see situations where players don't realize they're running out of land until it's too late and they've already settled several regular cities, locking them out of metropli, or a large forced distance between super-cities really screws with placement. There are other ways of keeping the mechanic while preventing large empires from just spamming metros everywhere and thus getting more benefit out of the option than the smaller empires it's intended for, like having each metro dramatically and irrevocably (unless the city is lost) increase maintenance fees for regular cities. Something that makes them still useable for large empires, but a much more efficient and optimal choice for a smaller empire.


I wonder if you could have a "civic"-type mechanic which permanently makes your empire run by the Kurio rules? Settlements & everything. That might be cool, a small empire shouldn't mind sacrificing a couple cities to endow the rest with incredible abilities, but it could cripple a large one.

[Darkmantle]

What you could do is make converting to Metropolis a building that the city can build. A variety of things could be used to control it though, such as increasing the hammer cost for each city you have, make it increase maintenance for the number of cities and so on.

It would provide a cheaper option for small empires to build up the power of their cities.
If a big empire wants to do it they can but they have to spend more resources building it and maintaining it.
If someone planning a big empire wants to build them before they land grab everywhere they can, but those hammers could have been spent on settlers instead and so now they don't have as much land.

[SevenSpirits]

What this discussion has been missing is that fundamentally in a game you need options to be conditionally the best. The civ model of this is:

Is good land available? If so, focus on more cities.
Is good land unavailable? If so, focus more on infrastructure.

(And then there's also: Is there an accessible weak neighbor we an attack? Is there a useful wonder still unbuilt? etc)

You can't just take away the "if there's land, build settlers" aspect and succeed in balancing it on a hairpin. You'll screw it up somehow; one can't balance things that precisely. (And also, do you really want to play a game where depending on player whims the map is near full or near empty?) If you want land to be less important you have to replace that aspect with something else.

I think Civ IV (particularly at a high difficulty, with heavy maintenance) has the right idea but has a weird hammer/commerce issue in that hammers so SO much more efficiently invested in expansion than anything else (i.e. building settlers/workers/granaries pays back so fast compared to building libraries/markets/forges/wealth) that you should pretty much just make as many hammers as you need to expand and focus on commerce improvements (or specs) beyond that point.

[TheMapDownloader]

Great discussion developing here.

I don't suggest any penalties for large empires. That would be the game punishing you for trying to win. It's obvious that rolling the economic snowball is the single route to all victory conditions.

Actually, here's an insight. In the early game you only build infrastructure because of unhappiness and you only build military because of barbs and AI threat. You do this because you HAVE to but you would much rather be REXing. If these factors were removed, the game would just be Who Can Pump Settlers Fastest and building anything BUT settlers (& a few scouts/workers) would be a play. Nobody would build a single building until all possible land was filled!

Instead of a penalty for REXing, infrastructure needs to be better. A lot better. There needs to be an alternative to building a settler that provides nearly as much return for investment, over the course of the entire game, as a new city. When you understand that there is no building in any Civ game that even comes close to 1/10th of that incredible value, then you see why large empires are imperative. So long as "new city" is an option (i.e. until the land fills up) it is always the best thing you can possibly invest in.

One of the reasons there cannot be a building with settler-quality return is because buildings help production. That's all they do, whether directly (+%) or indirectly (happiness/health). For a building to help production as much as a whole new city they'd be massively powerful.

All the victories, too, are production victories.

Conquest, Domination = produce the most hammers-> units
Culture = produce the most commerce-> culture
SpaceRace = produce the most commerce-> tech

Now look at it differently. If buildings really did something that tile-working could not replicate, and we made that a victory condition, then we could make an early building that was as useful to that victory condition as a new settler would be to one of the production victory conditions.

Then you would have a real choice between building a Settler to put you 5% closer to a production victory, or building a Something in your city to put you 5% closer to a Whatsit victory. Now all of a sudden there ARE really two strategies, rapid-expansion and intense-infrastructure.

This is sooooort of what culture was trying to do in III and IV. Temples and such didn't create production, instead they racked up culture points. The whole point was a victory condition that only buildings could accomplish but then the developers screwed their own design by allowing you to transmute production into culture. That meant back to square one, more tiles = you win at everything, faster.