joasoze

Join Date 02/2006

+39

City spamming - its easy to avoid

I am aware of multiple threads on this topic, but I havnt seen anyone having quite the same take on the problem as I have. So here goes:

The reason city spamming is a good strategy is that more cities gives more production, control over more resources, more land and so on. This is standard 4X functionality.

I think that PEOPLE should be the limiting factor to avoid city spamming. The population growth in a city should be based on more than a standard percentage or the influx of food (CIV IV). Population growth is based on birth and immigration (could be limited by emmigration).I assume here that the number of people in a city is strongly influencing production capasity in said city.

I also assume that people attract people. That is that immigration is based on the status of the city, but also the size. The size factor could be a percentage (based on race and other modefiers). A city of 10000 people would attract 200 people a year (2%) and a city of 100 would attract 2 (2%) people a year if the status is the same of both cities (normally the large one will attract a higher percentage due to the higher status of the city).

1. As far as I understand there will be no settler unit, but the settlements are created by our main channeler. I would say that it would be a good idea to have all new settlements get their first inhabitants from the cities that the player already owns. This will slow spamming considerably.

2. If people are immigrating based on a city`s status then the cost of city spamming will increase. The extra city will cost money to sustain, but it will grow very slowly due to its low status until it gets the right buildings and more people.

The 100 people used for a settlement would grow at (just an example here) 2% a year if they are in a large city, but only 0.5% if they are in a small settlement. The cityspam tactic will then lower growth for quite a while.

3. Since production time of new buildings and such will be very long in new settlements, a tactic of city spamming will grind your growth to a halt as you dont have enough people to get your cities thriving.

The result of this is that the player will have to balance growth of the major cities with the construction of new settlements. Expanding from 1 to 4 cities in a short time will stop the empire growth for a long time, while a more controlled growth with one or two smaller cities at a time will give better results short term and long term. Ofcourse any race with extra growth bonuses (high birthrate, high status giving more immigration) will have more potential for a bit of spamming.

Is this understandable??

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WildBoarPie

Prestige already do that. High prestige = more people to immigrate. And your max pop is limited by : houses and available food, whichever is lower.

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joasoze

Join Date 02/2006

+39

Quoting vieuxchat,

reply 1

Prestige already do that. High prestige = more people to immigrate. And your max pop is limited by : houses and available food, whichever is lower.

Yes, but houses are cheap and they do not stop spamming. If prestige is based on civilization and not on individual cities then it doesnt influence spamming either.

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astrath

Join Date 04/2006

+28

Possibly this could be united in a sort of 'regional population'. So if you have lots of cities in a region with not much population, cities would be slow to grow.

Possibly prestige could be divided into two categories:

Local prestige - encouraging people to come from the surrounding ares

Global prestige - people from further afield will come to your city

These could be scaled by the prestige count (so you wouldn't have to worry about them as seperate entities), and would stop city spamming in one area. Once a city gets a certain size then it gets people from further away so it can get bigger.

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Whoa, okay I think we're misunderstanding the original poster. I think he was suggesting that new cities get their first growth from immigration from your other cities, but your big cities get immigration from the wastes?

Either way, it doesn't seem to fix the problem of cities eventually expanding to fill every corner of the map. Sure, it might slow civilization expansion down, but that's only one part of city spamming.

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No ... the biggest way to stop spamming is to make FOOD a global resource, shared amongst all cities (based on Prestige, to the limit that the housing will fill).

If Food is global, and City-level Thresholds are made much Higher (as I understand it), then City spamming will not be a problem and a gigantic size-5 city will be a true accomplishment.

as it currently stands, it seems every city can grow large if they truly wish to. I say that without some serious Re-Distribution of food, cities would normally be able to grow no larger than 2.

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just a couple of wildfire points, as it wasn't suggested earlier - what about immigration drawing population from neighbouring opponents' (or neutral) cities (not from your own). - Another way besides combat to come into conflict with other players...

I agree with this post that population should be a limiting factor. Food as a global resource creates a fixed formula that limits build - but having to shepherd your population around, to choose what's operating/producing at any one time, gives us strategic choices.

Don't just think that population should limit what you can build. I think:

- Buildings built are limited by your research and cash

- Population should limit how many buildings actually operate (are staffed) once they are built. ie. You build a factory that needs population 100. You have only population 70 in that city. = The factory works, but at 70% efficiency.

You can build what you like, but you have to manage your population to make stuff work or not. Plus you can de-activate/activate industries depending on the need of the time - that dynamic from citybuilders, at least, is worth adopting. You could have default mechanisms to take care of population assignment, but micro-manage if you wanted to for efficiency. - A simple mechanism, with plenty of complex potential.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2410

Prestige will suck people away from other cities so if you have a bunch of crummy cities you are vulnerable to migration.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 7

Prestige will suck people away from other cities so if you have a bunch of crummy cities you are vulnerable to migration.

This is good... Especially if the number of people available is limited and so people have to compete for them. If people are a vital resource and hard to come by it would make city spamming pointless because you wouldn't have the people to make your cities productive and would encourage the construction of many sizes of settlements so each one has just enough people to accomplish it's purpose. This would help create the RPG-esque feel of empires you guys are going for...

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Ah, so Prestige will reign over Population Distribution ... not only within your Own Nation, but also Globally?? Very intersting

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joasoze

Join Date 02/2006

+39

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 7

Prestige will suck people away from other cities so if you have a bunch of crummy cities you are vulnerable to migration.

Sounds great mr Green!

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Unless I am mistaken, city spamming is associated with the fact to be able to create fastly lots of cities to get better results with lots of small cities than with a few big cities.

This point alone reduces greatly the city spamming: you cant' have a snowball effect where the more cities you have, the more cities you can build as you can build a settler unit in each city. So you can't start an exponential curve for your number of cities.

More, in order to create fastly lots of cities, you will need to spend your limited essence since the land will be inhabitable. And to get more essence, your sovereign will need to level up, which is generally done with fighting creatures/ennemies in distant areas.

You can build city without spending your essence, but that means waiting for current cities to influence the surrounding land in order to make it livable.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 7

Prestige will suck people away from other cities so if you have a bunch of crummy cities you are vulnerable to migration.

Oh yes !

Like in "Citta" the boardgame. there also were an interesting mechanism in it : people weren't only migration due to high prestige but they also had "needs". It could be culture, health, education. Just add "security". Each building would be of a kind (or several : an hospital is health and education). When two cities are too close to each other, the city with more "citizen needs" get some population from the other town. It add a way to avoid bigger = always better.

In the boardgame, "needs" evolve with time.

Just food for thoughts.

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I said this in another post. As of now, the major reason I feel pressured to spam cities is to take advantage of all the resources that I find. This could be helped by allowing us to build a unit that could go out and build outposts that harvest resources and send the resource back to whatever city you want, maybe by building low level roads. That way you could even have one massive central city surrounded by outposts feeding resources to it, which of course would have good and bad strategic benefits.

Otherwise if you only want to build one city, chances are you will have to sit by and look at all those other resources beyond your walls that you can't seem to harvest just because they are not close enough to the city.

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The Prestige ideas works well to have any group of cities be built at the same rate, or face losing ones Pop. to the one with more Prestige. Loverly.

Sadly, as noted by RomanGuy, the current setup of forcing a player to establish a City in order to harvest a Shard, at every Shard, has to be looked at.

The Outpost idea will work when you don't have to have a City Center within actual touching range of it's outskirts. The current allowed range to set up a resource, 4 squares out, is great, until you realize that until it actually touches the border of a City, you don't actually gain any benefit, other than ownership, of said Resource. That has been touched on in another thread and warrants more discussion.

I still think between Prestige, Food and increasing Upkeep cost oper City built should curb City Spam pretty good. Just tweak the #'s such that having 10 cities, without the resources needed for each, makes them a financial burden so big as to be untenable. Like now, but not quite so dramatic.

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Yea ... as I have said before, if we are not separating outposts from Cities, then level 1 cities should be a viable option for resource gathering.

level 1 cities should not be included in the arithmatic sequence of maintanence (+1 instead of +(n+1))

additionally, I think that level 1 cities should be able to have a strategic Domestic Trade option. (or two)

This strategic option should be "Send all of Resource X to city Y" ... so the resource would now be considered as part of City Y instead of the small town. Sure, theat might stir resentment within the colony, but its for the greater good.

alternatively, you could have the settlement "Sell all of Resource X on the internal Market" which doubles availability of resource via trade route to all your cities, and a slight increase in gold "profit"

alternatively "Sell all of Resource X on the Open Market" ... which allows all neighbors access to the resource at the road rate (or double the raod rate) and GREATLY increases financial commerce. This option increases the morale/prestige/influence of the outpost as well.

The Gold and Prestige bonuses for selling a resource on the Open Market depends on the Utility and Rarity of the resource.

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alternatively, "Send Resource X to city Y" and for all intents and purposes, the Resource is being harvested in City Y at 75% efficiency.

so, if City size 1 farmed 1000 food, and decided to send all of it to City Y, then city Y would have 750 base food. And all food caravans exporting from city Y would be increased accordingly. (the resource would now "exist" in city Y)

alternatively, you could have it be harvested in City Y at 100% if it pleases you, however, if harvesting bonuses are based on city size, then a size 5 city harvesting 1000 food would actualy harvest 5000 food. This, however, if not using the 75% method, should probably be limited to native resources.

For instance, either City A with 1000 food (size 1) sends to City Y size 5 at 75% efficiency for 3750 food (1000x5x0.75)

City A sends 1000 food to City Y size 5 at 100%, however is a non-native resource so does not recieve the multiplier, and remains at 1000 food.

I mean, otherwise you could end up with 1000 food turning into 5000 as opposed to 3750, or turning into only 750. Either permutation has its differences, and I hope I explained it clearly enough. The point is that I think city size 1s can "translocate" their resources "into" larger cities.

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