Maintenance of Empire (and Kingdom)

Seriously, I was thinking of a similar mechanic by myself.

I would suggest the following changes:

Pioneer's should already cost guildar to build them (or the pioneer pack) - this would reduce the uncertainity of how much the new cities costs. Additionally, I would suggest to have them as fixed costs.

As a caveat on the opposite way, I would suggest as mentioned above to introduce a maintenance fee for the cities. But going beyond the OP I would suggest to have TechLevel in the Research tree. Without tech, everyone is allowed to have 3 cities without penalty. For every city beyond that level, a -10% penalty to all resources produced. This means, for 5 cities you get a penalty of -20% on guildar, arcane points, research points etc. The first Tech to increase the number of cities is the palace. After research that tech and build the palace, you are allowed to have a 4th city without penalty. The next tech level should auto-upgrade the palace. With that behavoir it could bring in three tactical opportunities: 

1) If you are at war with another nation and you see the palace you can identify the number of cities the player could bear (giving a hint on the strength of the empire/kingdom 

2) If you conquer the city with the palace or race the improvement, you can effectly harm another player

3) You have to decide if you conquer a certain city from an enemy, take the penalty if you don't have the appropiate CityTechLevel and on bash his economics. Or you raze cities / improvements and drive deeper into his kingdoms heart 

What problem are you trying to solve?  I have a decent idea of what it might be, but I think it'd be good for you to clarify what you see as a problem.

Larger Empires have a Linear or Exponential advantage. I wish to make it more like a root curve ... where science and arcane knowledge proportionally lower, and the Big Empire's strength is mainly in Gold and Population.

I can only speak for myself:

Currently it gets very costly if you try to build a lot of cities by your own. If you have a decent income because you were lucky and have a good amount of gold mines this is not an issue and gives you an advantage towards player which were not so lucky. Secondly, if you conquer others cities you don't have any downfall and get more and more cities. Both supports city spamming which normally everyone don't want to have.

With my proposal there would be a downside and on the other hand provides some additional tactical features.

@ Wylaryzel ... your proposal is more balance(able), and I would propose the following Changes.

Default free cities is 2. Your third city would reduce Arcane Knowledge and Research by 15%, 4th City by 30% total ... etc

building a Palace gives +1 free city

Refined Administration gives +1 free city

there are still techs that decrease total Army maintenance (by 10% each)

captured cities still start @ 0 influence and take a long time to spread influence

Basically, there should be less free cities, and extra cities should only reduce Arcane Knowledge and Research perhaps. (and by larger amounts)

Arcane Knowledge and Research should never be penalized more than 90% (6 extra cities)

As for Gildar ... either extra cities should reduce Gildar by 5% each, or Maintenance should be Arithmetic Sequence (1 + 2 ... + n)

How are you defining steamrolling? If I plan and expand smartly and then decide to crush a smaller kingdom, is that steamrolling?

Some starts are better than others, and I'm okay with that, but I understand what you're getting at.  The primary issue that I am seeing in your writing is that it is too easy to expand quickly and consolidate conquests. This means that a faction which springs out to an early lead in cities will be able to easily overpower the rest of the players, ending the game before it begins.

So there are three points at which you want to address the system:

1. Founding New Cities
2. Maintenance
3. Integrating Captured Cities

I'm going to quickly run through each of these points, talking about how some previous games (CIV IV, FfH2, EU3) have addressed them, what the general effects of a particular tweak were, and then afterward, rephrase your proposal and sum up my thoughts.

Founding New Cities

By increasing the cost of new cities, either through pioneers or on founding, you curtail early expansion.  A good example of a game which took this approach is Fall From Heaven, where settlers cost significantly ( x 2, iirc) more than they did in standard Civilization.

In the case of super-starts, it means that the difference between a super-start and a normal-start is smaller, perhaps only a 1 city difference, instead of 2 or 3 cities.

What increasing the cost of founding cities does not do, is curtail mid and late game expansion by established powers.  This is made even more so in Elemental since Unit and Building queues are separated from each other.

Maintenance Systems

A maintenance system is designed to slow growth by forcing players to do some form of "building up" between additional cities, either through research of maintenance reducing technologies (part of your proposed system) or the construction of particular buildings in a city (courthouses in CIV IV).  It is supposed to reflect the "overhead" associated with having control of a city.

It can reflect the need to improve the imperial bureaucracy (building up your palace in the capital), establish a civil code (technology), or the appointment of local magistrates (building courthouses in the new cities).  Hopefully it also reflects how "connected" your empire is (I continue to hold out hope for such a system).

A game which used a particularly aggressive maintenance system was European Universalis 3.  In EU3, the amount of research necessary to advance a level in technology was directly dependent upon the number of provinces that you controlled.  A many province power would need to accumulate many many more research points before it advanced a technology level.  This meant that grabbing many provinces quickly, before you could improve them, would stagnate you - leaving you exposed to smaller, more technologically advanced opponents.  However, there were certain provinces which would never be able to produce enough to justify owning them if you were primarily concerned with technology, no matter how much you improved them, and it was a very frustrating feeling for me.

Integrating Captured Cities

Integrating new conquests normally has additional mechanics associated with it beyond the ever-present maintenance system.  In CIV IV this was accomplished by having cities fall into civil disorder for a period of time after conquest, before the city produced anything for the conquering power.  These mechanics exist to slow down a conquering power, such that it cannot immediately turn its new conquests to use.

EU3 forced integration slow-down by having the player wait a number of years for a territory to become fully integrated into their nation, achieving core status.  Until a territory was considered a core, it would only produce on the order of 10% of its actual value.  This meant that while new territories would immediately provide you with more manpower and trade-goods, they would not provide you with the means of supporting such expenses.  If an empire acquired too many non-core territories as a ratio of cores/non-cores, it could gain the "Over Extended" debuff, which reflected the over-strained administration's attempt to integrate so many new territories.

Integration mechanics force an empire to conquer at a pace which allows for consolidation phases.  These are phases where the empire is not ready to take on new territories.

Solution On Table

1. Number of Cities controlled without penalty is a function of Palace "Level" and technology. 
2. Going beyond an integer limit imposes malus on all resource generation. 
3. City cost is baked into pioneer kit - pay your Gildar up front.
4. Conqueror is slowed by additional cities hitting him with the "Over the limit" penalty.

I like the idea of building up the palace.  I'm pretty sure I put forward a similar idea in the distant past, but I'm not going to look for it.  I think it's both flavorful and creates a weak point in an empire to attack.  If you give the palace multiple levels, it also becomes progressively more expensive to replace, and a capital strike on a large power becomes incredibly powerful.

Making pioneers cost more than they currently do is a twiddle value, I'd want to see how it plays.  I agree that it is the correct knob to tweak if you want to make the lucky and normal start more similar in the number of cities they create early on.

The universal malus is something to be careful with, and I think having the "allowed number of cities" is a bit clunky.  Here's how I would implement the same idea:

Imperial Efficiency:

Take two point pools, one called "Administrative Load" and the other called "Bureaucratic Power", shortened to AL and BP respectively.  Imperial Efficiency is the ratio BL/AL.  AL points are generated by cities, so a Lv. 1 City "costs" 3 points of AL, a Lv. 2 costs 5, etc.  BP points are generated by "government" buildings, so things like courthouses, road connections, palaces, city centers, a technology of two, etc.

The entire production of the empire is modified by Imperial Efficiency.  Eg. if your empire would normally produce 10 materials per turn, and your Imperial Efficiency is 150%, you would instead produce 15 materials.

I'd also put this ratio (as a percentage) somewhere nice and prominent on the UI (next to the resource bar perhaps?) and kingdom report.

The end result of such a system would be to encourage both small and large empires to research this particular part of a civics tree, since a small empire with lots of things improving is BP would be gaining a multiplier, while a large empire that didn't expand smartly would suffer the penalty.  This makes your previous discrete system a full sliding scale, and lets the player see the immediate effects of their builds on the efficiency number.

Personally, I think there should be some period of time where the conqueror is integrating his new conquests into the empire.  I prefer the EU3 form of this mechanic over the CIV mechanic.  For elemental, I would make it so that a newly conquered city has an administrative control timer based on the level of the city, the level of the imperial palace in the conqueror's capital or perhaps the conqueror's Imperial Efficiency, with a penalty for the number of cities already in administrative transition.  While that control timer is ticking down, the city does not harvest resources.  So the new conquest can be used to build troops and structures, but won't generate the resources to support such things itself.  Effectively, when you conquer a city, you immediately deny its resources and territory to your opponent, but do not gain them for yourself until you've negotiated a consolidation period.

... and that ended up being longer than I thought it would be when I started typing.

Again, I think the main purpose veiled behind my secondary suggestion is to remove an undue advantage in the realms of Knowledge and Arcane from Larger empires.

Therefore, if your goal was only for lots of gold and massive army size, having many cities is the way to go, yet if you wanted simply Research and Arcane abilitiy ... you would focus on just one or two cities.

Another person had a suggestion where  all Factions need to pick a "Primary" city for Research and a "Primary" city for Arcane Studies.

Cities not designated the primary are exponentially lower.

However, cities could do this automatically by having the city with the highest Knowledge potential set to 100%, and the 2nd highest is at 50%, 3rd highest at 25%, 4th highest at 12%, 5th highest at 6%, 6th highest at 3%, and all remaining at 1%.

In this case, the Science of a 1 city empire and the science of a 20 city empire isn't all that removed ... except that the 20 city empire has a better chance to have one city with ... say 2 lost libraries.

Same would go for Arcane Knowledge.

With Wylar's proposed system, Having too many cities would hurt your research in all cities ... and I think an improvement would be to not effect gold as much (big empires can have gold as an advantage) but to effect Science and Arcane Knowledge even more.

With the other proposed system, however ... all empire sizes would have equal opportunity for Research and Arcane Knowledge ... with slight advantages for empires with at least 3 cities.

In this case ... Increasing Maintenance in Gildar would be better, because while not Exponentially better, the Larger Country would still have all the advantages of its size. Even with the maintanence, it would still likely have a gold advantage ... if they expanded smart.

And anyways, taking over enemy cities should be far less rewarding than it is now. Also, if you take a huge enemy city with just one unit ... it should spawn rebel units, attack and kill your unit, and become a rebel city.

I can see newly conquered cities being not very fun to own ... as it should be.

In order to not have any negative affects, a large military force should occupy the city.

Aside: You changed the thrust of your initial response (reply 3) twice, I responded as if you had given the second.  Please, if you're going to edit your posts, at least leave some indication that you've done so, so it doesn't look like we're talking quite so far past each other. I have no way of hitting the moving target that you're presenting to me.

EDIT: I'm reading the other post now, and am summarizing my thoughts, it shouldn't surprise you that I disagree with the OP

Well, I find it interesting that you couldn't simply disagree with the OP, but instead needed a "reason" to latch onto. And that reason was whatever "X" I inserted into Reply 3.

Honestly, my initial reaction was simply ... there doesn't need to be a problem in order to suggest a new mechanic, after all ... some people prefer needing to land grab, and others don't.

My "references to the past" in reply 7 were actually referring to reply 5.

That being said, my current preference is the Dark Horse Candidate ... where your primary Research City produces at 100% capacity, and your secondary produces at 50% capacity .... third at 25% ... decreasing exponentially.

Its reverse specialization. Do this for both Knowledge and Arcane Studies, and you'll see having size only grants the benefit of more gold and soldiers (more materials/gold/iron leads to more soldiers).

so yes, the OP is a bit out of date, and the reply 5 is a bit out of date, but that doesn't mean the ideas aren't usable.

In fact ... the idea of the Grand Palace and Imperial palace is to simply help the Big Nation people specialize in getting more Gold out of their Empire (thus more sodiers) for even less research.

The only problem with the idea, perhaps, is that there is not a large enough research penalty.

Because the Idea here .... is to make research roughly equivalent across the various factions. In regards to size at least.

(both mundane and magical research)

I also like the idea that less tech-savy Nations gain Knowledge points from Caravans with more Knowledgable nations.

What can I say, I'm a goal-oriented kind of guy...

My biggest issue with that is it basically says you want 6 + n cities.  3 to be spec'd for Arcane Research, 3 for your "normal" research, and however many you want to grow your armies and make money in.

And yes, that caravan idea is really nifty.

Larger empires shouldn't be dumber. Quite reverse. They can feed a larger population of craftsmen who stand for most research. They might have a penalty to arcane knowledge but not to research. They will however have to research mostly civic, military, and diplomacy to fully exploit the advantage of having a big kingdom, and to avoid losing their edge towards other large nations.

Magic makes the whole realism thing iffy but anyone should be good at magic, both the large and small nations.

Medieval societies.  Who was more advanced in overall technology, the cities of Flanders or the sprawling kingdom of Poland-Lithuania?  The City States of Italy or that beacon of Chivalry in the Kingdom of France?  The City States of the Hansa (Lubeck, Stettin, Gdansk, ect) or the Kingdom of Sweden/Norway?  Small city states in the medieval time period are almost always more dynamic than large sprawling empires.  Proportion of the population that is urban is what matters in terms of overal development in the medieval time period, not overall empire size.

I mean in a larger scae, not a few nations to nations. Look at the entire arab territory of the Middle East during the years 1200 to 1300. The population and city size and amount of advances in every field were way above that of little Europe. China with even more population stood for even more research advances. More population will in the long run always help in research. The only reason small nations could outpace larger nations is for the larger nations needing a lot more built out beaurocracy, constant wars, and constant troubles at the fringes. They simply didn't have time and organization to spend on research and the like. They still did more research per person in smaller nations, yet far from what has been suggested here on the forums.

The reasons your examples are different are:

Poland/Flanders - Flanders lies on the middle of the worlds densest trade network and is the link between the Hansa and Genua/Venice. Imagine if Flanders was twice as large, would it create more or less research?

Northern Italian States/France - France is barely a country. The king has no power and all the nobles squabble. There is nobody in the country looking at research instead of war. They were fighting to keep France together, or fight the ones who were. Once they were able to give the king all the power at the end of the 17th century, which of NIS or France as the ost advanced?

And what is your point concerning Hansa and Denmark/Norway or Sweden? Hansa is much more connected to the world and can therefore more quickly get access to technology diffusion from the rest of the world. Isolation is the worst thing possible that can happen to your research.

My point is thus: If only nation size matters, bigger is always better in terms of research. There should be other things that would bother a larger nation so that they have less freedom to pursue speific things, yet EWoM lacks this, and this is why larger nations are always better. Simply saying, "Look your nation is big, so I will make most of your cities useless in terms of research. Hope you have fun." is not good game mechanics imo.

I agree with Goa. There were various reasons in the past why some nations were outstanding in research compared to others. To put that into a game like Elemental you are ending up very soon into a Sim-Style gameplay which should not - at least in the beginning and without mods - be the the core basics of the game. 

Nevertheless, I really like the general approach of Sareln. Having the need of additional buildings to support larger empires would have several benefits:

* Additional research options in the Civic tree - which needs some heavy improvements nevertheless as it's easy to research all currently available options in a short period of time

* Decision for the player to keep cities small or get them bigger - or decide if you like to have a bigger empire compared to a smaller one.

Adding a mix to Sareln's & Tasunke's input: I would suggest that conquered cities should provide resistance for several rounds which means no resources, no support from gov.-buildings and new start of influence area. 

Another suggestion would be a slider per city to define the focus of resource output.. e.g. go for 200% of guildar but 0% for research for that city.

Well, Influence per city should definitely be determined by player (not by city only) ... and newly conquered cities should start at 0 Influence and perhaps have halved influence growth for a certain number of turns (minimum of 5 if you have a large army)

And I do kind of like Sareln's idea of having specialized buildings give an "average bonus" ... where too many cities and too few buildings has penalties while plenty of buildings and only one city has like +200/300% bonus.

AND! ... the reason the Middle East and China were ahead of Europe for about 1000 years (fall of Rome-> Renaissance) was multifold.

Corrupt Roman Governments and Barbarian Invasions.

You'd lose a lot of research points too if all your researchers got killed/moved away and your research buildings got looted.

Barbarians are indecent idiots who have no love for technology? They were not dumber than romans, they were more isolated. The centre of all our learning comes from Ancient Greece, the Romans were awed, ashamed, and angry at the greeks for being so d**n smart. They basically moved all the intelligent greeks away from Greece. When the Roman empire collapsed the greek learning was no longer in Greece, but rather in Italy and the roman part of the Middle East. When No one could decide who would rule Italy, the learning was put aside, yet it remained in the middle east and became the heritage that would make the arabs into the worlds smartest. The greek learning was almost on the edge of steam power, yet since Greece was so divided and abused, the learning was neglected. What the Europeans started to focus on was warfare, nautics, and agriculture... The "barbarians" were more tolerant than the romans, they could adapt to new things, that is why they outlasted the romans. The romans would do things we today consider barbaric, while the "barbarians" were closer to what we today would call civilized.

The thing that matters more is how you use what you discover, yet the technology is almost always there for most nations. In reality there is a fine balance between ingenuity, education, and demand as to how to achieve the most advanced nation. And a higher crafts population would increase all three, but not highly exponentially.

I am very interested in history, as you might see, yet I don't even know half, yet there is a pattern in research. And bigger, richer and more populated nations with an above average unity usually develop more new technologies.

The deal with the Barbarians is not that they are less intelligent, but usually less educated.

Sure, their rulers were highly educated ... but rulers do not discover new technologies, they specialize in keeping their power.

(they can of course be very interested in the latest technology, but that doesn't by itself lead to new technologies)

I mean ... some things kept moving forwards, but most of the Roman technology was lost when the Roman Bureaucracy was destroyed.

Much of the Infrastructure was destroyed in the Pillaging, the Anarchy, the general switch between Roman Rulers and Gothic Rulers. (Ostrogoths, Visigoths). It wasn't the people themselves, but the destruction that occured.

Also, most of the specialists either moved away or were killed.

And yes, the basic key to gaining technology is to have enough Farming so that you can support enough Specialists. Specialists include Rulers, Artisans, Merchants, Warriors.

However, everyone in Elemental has Farming and Specialists. Size and population get REDUCED RETURNS ... if it was all about land-size .... Russia would be 50 years ahead of the world technologically speaking ... and if it was all about population then India, China, and Indonesia would all be about 100 years ahead of the world.

Sorry to be the bad guy, but I think we are driving away from idea's of improvement for the current system in Elemantal to a philosophical act.

As stated by myself, if we would really try to capture what is affecting which part of a nation we would be in a full blown simulation similar to what Paradox tries to achieve