Small Kingdoms are Inefective

Historically speaking this is somewhat realistic unless the smaller nation has something up their sleeves. A nation's number one resource is people, if you don't have enough people then you can't field as many soldiers, scientists, or merchants. You'll naturally be behind the larger ones because of this.

Smaller nations need to be able to specialize in such a way that they can better compete. However, I don't think a smaller nation should be able to compete with a larger one militarily unless they have specially trained troops (like the Spartans) or much better equipment.

Anyways, I generally agree with you but it'd be difficult to implement something like this. Even in Civilization smaller nations are hopelessly behind... unless your playing the Rise of Mankind Mod... then it might be to your advantage one day.

At the moment, I'm pretty sure this is linked to something about nearest settlement size, and possibly other variables like prestige. It's very vexing that the UI is no help in understanding how and when something like an expensive Shrill Hive goes from being useless to being linked.

Oi, you've got a lot packed up in that short statement. I was a junior bug wrangler for a few years and I still often think about how resolving a bug By Design can be a serious mistake.

Re the general point of your OP, I have to generally agree. So far, Elemental seems to have gained only modest ground in the wall-to-wall-towns problem, and there's nothing in the diplomacy UI to indicate that I can have much hope of being a strong player without going the massive-turf-massive-forces-massive-everything route. That situation can more or less work for me aesthetically for GalCiv2, but if super-science can't help you get around massive-might-makes-right, shouldn't you at least be able to escape with the right magic?

added in with 1.07 if you click on resource then hover over not linked it will tell you how far away it is from the nearest city.. they need to be 5 tiles away.. unless you mean something else..

This is one of my pet pursuits -- small but puissant kingdoms being competitive, using magic to offset size.  There was a lot of discussion of this goal pre- and during beta.

Release took a big step back from this, removing the increasing cost per city constraint on city-spamming.  No explanation for it, either (I've looked, did I miss it?  Please to link or point me in the direction if so).

Still, in both 1.06 and now 1.07 I've been trying this strategy.  Large map, 5 fallen foes, second-hardest difficulty.  Trying to maximize champion recruitment and imbuing, then using summoned critters, instead of recruiting normal units.

So far modest success, but there are significant obstacles.  Basically, it's a numbers game -- the more cities, the more buildings to add technology and spell research points, gold income, materials, etc.  Without numbers, research is slow, gold is scarce, and it's hard to afford champs.  On the other hand, not having a lot of cities reduces gold/materials needed for buildings.  And frankly, there's only a few spells worth researching (a long range tac spell like lightning, and an AoE tac spell like chain lightning, then the strategic summoning spells, and a few city-buffing spells), so the need for a lot of spell research points is minimized.  Same for tech research points too.  (I'm viewing the lack of useful spells as a plus here )

In my current 1.07 game I restarted ~10 times and got a great starting location -- gold mine (and a second appeared not too long after), lost library, and a fertile lands (with a second in city lvl 4 range).  First wandering champ was a female (Sov is male) with the dominate trait (hugely powerful, and passes on to female progeny).  A second city nearby has a beehive, oasis, orchard, lost library, and close by a refugee camp and an ore mine.

That's an exceptionally great start, and has enabled a small empire attempt.  It shouldn't be necessary to have such a great start for this strategy to be viable.

If brad doesn't want a 'small empire' strategy to be viable and if city-spamming isn't intended to be a main part of a viable strategy, then I wish he'd say so.  Otherwise, there's some work to be done to enable it.

I'll keep an eye out for that oddball ScreenTip you mentioned, but this "5 tiles" thing is very vague, or at least not simply about squares on the map. Settlement growth is what seems to have done the job, although I wasn't paying close enough attention to see whether it was size or the local influence range.

Maybe it's "within 5 tiles and within influence range?"

I agree with the OP. The whole might-is-right thing is kinda annoying. Simply because my military is smaller than everyone else on the board, they take it upon themselves to dislike me and sooner or later declare war..Only to be crushed anytime they invade. I had the computer once send a stack of 6 armies, each exceeding 800 battle rating. I teleported in with my daughter (who had 88 essence at birth..she was like the Brolly of my faction) and watched as spell after spell was flung at them, utterly destroying their faces. Then suddenly..the AI (Altar..it is always Altar who are the biggest assholes in-game, at least for me) had a power rating closer to my own. They liked me a little more then, as I no longer needed to pay 200,000 gildar for peace. Yeah, 200,000. That's what my actual power rating should have been! Human players should get a bonus to our perceived power rating(PR), as we'll always be able to do more with less than the AI. So if the AI has say..500 PR, and the human player has roughly the same size army, his/her PR should be a bit higher, so the AI knows not to go in and get it's butt kicked.

It would also be ideal if the computer would not ALWAYS, ALWAYS attempt to win via massive armies..Why not come across a diplomatic AI? That'd be awesome.

You can turn the grid on in options to better get a grip on this resource problem. Also since rescources are global you can make a tiny village just to get a rescource if you can't expand far enough. you don't have to build up every town to the max.  I usually have a few max towns with smaller connecting towns.

I always play with the grid on; it's what the devs mean by a "tile" that I'm not exactly clear about. Is it one movement square, a 2x2 grid like larger improvements take up, or one of the bigger grid regions that are always visible on the cloth map regardless of whether gridlines are enabled?

But to try getting back to kyogre's reason for the thread, I have always wanted the game to have some form of 'offiical village' settlement form that gets built directly on a resource, maybe draws a small population from your nearest normal settlement (or from the general surroundings), and needs a garrison to protect it when it's away from your strong areas.

Building a "tiny village" just to make resource connections clutters the UI and contributes to making cities in general feel more like chores and less like unique, important parts of a given game. Building something that didn't show up in that 'tree' on the left and didn't play an economic role beyond resource extraction would be fine for me, though.

A resource needs to be within 4 tiles of of a city tile to link up. That's pretty much it. If something is just out of range, you can build towards it. 

As for the might equals diplomacy, that's a whole 'nother topic.

For small kingdoms, it's mostly just a lack of options. Practically every victory condition relies upon research. Only one (shard) doesn't but that requires either making a patchwork kingdom or having a lucky start. And outside of combat, there's really no way to interact with people. The only way to interact with other kingdoms is in a few broad strokes.

That said, what would one want to see out of small kingdoms?  It would help to figure out how we see each one operating on equal terms before just making changes and suggestions. After all, most things that help small kingdoms will likely help larger ones too.

Would like an option that would have your adviser pop up and say- Sire-  That resource is to far form a city to produce from. Do you still want to build the facilities?   - Yes , -No  option 

This would keep you from wasting the building cost, when you could not make use of the resource. 

one of the problems for me at the moment is that there is little tradeoff between developing a city and founding another. i think there need to be real, prohibitive costs in all materials associated with creating a pioneer.

there are also few options for really developing a city beyond the starting buildings. there are % increases sure, but i think there need to be improvements that increase the base production (like the workshops only moreso, and preferably ones that overlap these previous buildings rather than use extra space). expense however, should be exponential.

both in history (venice) and in most fantasy settings, the concept of a powerful city state is a real one, and i would love it for this to be viable ingame. at least for smaller maps. of course, having more naval stuff would help massively (and a few more viable harbour spots to tuse them!) but that's an area for an expansion to my mind.

A large part of the problem here is how the computer calculates point values for armies.  I had a game not that long ago where I couldn't expand much, but had the resources I needed to effectively build my empire.  One of my early conquests was one of the independent factions, netting me an Ogre Village.  I put a small garrison of Ogres in each of my cities for basic defense (one unit -a three ogre group- experienced), but two groups of Ogres with a casting Champion along with some summons.  On paper, the AI opponent fencing me in had a higher overall army score.  In actuality, I outclassed anything he could send my way.  I would have liked to have been able to negotiate with him for safe passage and focus my attention on someone a little farther out, but because of the variance in perceived army value this was an impossible feat.

My proposal is this:  keep track of the win/loss ratio of a given army and have it affect the AI's perception of it's strength.  Have it also keep track of the difference between the attacker and defender's army value to modify perceived strength.  If I'm cruising around with a small army that never looses and comes out on top repeatedly against a supposedly superior force, this should put me in a better position to negotiate with other factions.

Apologize for the derailing, but this change has really been bothering me too - if it was ever announced or explained, I missed it as well. City spam was already a problem when you could easily get 4-6 cities up before starting to run into prohibitive founding costs, and removing that cost was a leap backwards - now there's little to discourage explosive rapid expansion. Add this to the frequency (fueled by adventure research) of powerful natural resources like gold mines and lost libraries which can be harvested by tier 1 cities, compared to scarcity of tier 3+ buildings worth the cost; overall there's little advantage to getting your capital to level 3+ when you could just found a couple level 1 cities, each next to two or three resources that produce more than anything you could add to your capital. There just isn't much reason to develop a few large cities, and every reason to found a dozen small ones.

I'd also like to know what the devs think of this - is it a deliberate move towards Civ-style city spamming and rapid expansion, or an unintended balance problem you intend to correct in the long run? If it's the latter, the forums were full of good ideas back in the beta, and I'm sure we could provide more.

Balancing small kingdoms would indeed be ideal but as we all know its easier said than done. I had some ideas that if implemented could add some minor advantages to being a small kingdom, and I think it wouldn't require any kind of overhaul. I made a thread on it and it probably just got lost in the sea of threads that pop everyday, here is the link in case you want to see it https://forums.elementalgame.com/388971.

If you dont feel like reading that, my idea was simple. Have a counter that adds up all the research points you have done up to the current turn and use this counter for extra bonuses.

Example: Doing 2 Tech Points per turn. After 10 turns the counter totals 20 right? So lets say that when you reach 20 points you are granted with a temporary research increase in a city as a bonus.

Ok now my idea that would help small kindgoms was that this internal counter depended on your number of cities in order to get these bonuses, So if I had 1 city I would get the first bonus when I got 20 points. But if I had 5 cities I would need 100 points. These are just random numbers but I hope I get the idea across. These bonuses could be many things, but I think the idea would be cool and it would help out smaller kingdoms and not penalize large kingdoms as much.

Edt: Forgot to mention that this idea could apply to Arcane Knowledge or Gildar production as well. Heck anything that has numbers could use this.

This is a fairly interesting debate.

Firstly, small is relative. One lvl 5 city has 1200 people and can train 1 unit in the same time as 12 lvl 2 cities with 100 people can produce about 9 comparable units (this is a rough estimate). In fact, 12 small cities may not have the same per city resource income per city as a lvl 5 city, but would as a group be superior.

Secondly, there is a convention in 4x games to slow growth by adding some crazy penalty to building cities, either by ether making builder units cost something ridiculous( ie population in civ3/galactic civ2 or all growth resources in civ4) or making some kind of corruption multiplier which magically consumes resources. Both of these option effectively limit the growth and size of a faction, but do not fully encompass the full range of factors at play on a city. Currently in Elemental, new cities are effectively free and their buildings cost nothing to have. Consider that in real life, having a market or a trade route in a city causes the city to gain some goods at the expense of others. As it is, a caravan magically produces food at both ends for nothing. If we look at sins of a solar empire for example, the major downsides to expanding to quickly are the fact that your planets will slowly loss approval under the cultural influence of your opponents and the fact that until properly developed planets they will be a resource drain on your empire.

i don't think it should ever be an advantage not to expand. however, i think the relationship needs to be far less linear. currently there is little to separate starting cities from those developed at a later point, besides time and (you'd expect) better location.

personally, i think the removal of a lot of the persentage bonus buildings would help, and replacing them with a greaterdependence on trade, and some more base production buildings (ie, upgrading your workshop to produce more materials at level 2, using the same tile) and more one per civ buildings that you only build in your capital. i think of fantasy settings like the forgotten relams, where factions are essentially city states and satellite towns exist to control resources rather than as centres of population. your capital should be the last building to fall, and it's ability to be fairly autonomous, train decent troops on it's own and great defences should make your civilizations final battle the most epic of the game, not the least.

This is a stratagy game and part of stratagy is having to adapt to you situation. If you start with little rescources you are going to have to expand. Spam small towns and start wars. If you have lots of rescources then you can build your large city and have your small kingdom. It can work. You should keep in mind prestige if you want to do it. Start your Sovereign as royalty. because it takes a long time to get 1250 population.

I don't know how it was back in the beta, since I never took part in it, but generally I dislike any kind of mechanism which limits expansion in a stupid way. With stupid way I mean scenarios like exponental rising 'administration costs', illogical limits like 'we cannot have more than three cities, because... well, because!' or ridiculous expensive settler units like 'Milord, this settler is the same you trained yesterday, but he costs us five times more'.

Of course, free expansion leads to super-empires spanning across a whole continent, having an output of resources and armies without competition, but isn't that a viable strategy to pursue? There are reasons why big empires don't last more than a few hundred of years.

I think the problem is how the AI is evaluating its chances against the player. There is this variable telling you and him how strong someone is and if his overall strength surpasses yours, you can count on it that he declares war on you... a war he is most likely to lose. But that number is wrong, if you see it this way: what are the chances that a super-empire can mobilize its whole army instantly and crushing someone with it? Usually those empires are prone to sudden attacks and need time to strike back. They have the benefit of resources, but the disadvantige of having many troops bound as garrison in their many cities.

So how about a variable consisting of a proportion of cities to troops, combined with a value of wins/losses in battles with a certain rating (maybe battles with a combat rating of 300 vs. 300 or above...) to determine a faction's real strength? That would consider the factors of garrison troops in favor of small kingdoms, keep expansion (or 'city-spamming') still an option and allow for more diplomacy, since the overall size wouldn't be the measure of all things anymore. And the AI wouldn't keep thinking of his own garrison troops as an available offensive force.

What do you think? Is that something in the right direction?

Back when this was being hotly discussed there was a suggestion along the lines of a 'sauron template' -- Sauron had a certain amount of power, and he chose to invest it in certain ways (like the Ring).  Doing so diminished his personal power, it didn't add the Ring's to what he already had.  So, a zero-sum game.

The original concept for elemental had something like this -- essence was the 'power' and it had to be invested to create a city.  If a Sov created a lot of cities, that reduced his/her personal power.  A Sov that only had a few cities had more personal power.  Thus there was a balance between the large and small empires -- the large had relatively many cities but the sov had relatively little personal power to cast with, and the small had relatively few cities but relatively great personal power to cast with.

I think that would be a workable solution, and a fun one to play out.

Problem is that the 'essence to create cities' thing was removed, plus the 'increasing cost for subsequent cities', with nothing added to penalize city-spamming.  The rationale behind this escapes me, given that limiting city-spamming was often mentioned as a goal.

The sovereign gets carpal tunnel from all the clicking?

I know it was getting bad in my last game when I only had 55 cities (pretty few for a 4X game) and maybe 1/3 of "my" part of the continent still looking to be settled.

The main problem I had was monster spawn. City spam (all eventually developing to lvl 3) was the only way to extend control far enough to get most of the continent - and all my rear areas - civilised.

It's also pretty ridiculous to research the "additional resource spawn" techs when having a small empire.

I'd be all for less city spam but first there would have to be solutions to the problems that city spam solves.

The thing though is that you can build a city towards a resource to claim it. The 4 tile limit is to the closest city tile not to the closest city center. So if you have a banana city with the starting square at one end and a string of buildings to the other, a resource can be 4 tiles away from -any- of those squares.

While the popup would be nice... I think it would be better if the game were just clearer about what is needed to link it up. Otherwise people will assume that a resource could -never- be linked up in such a case without a new city.

As far as the original topic, I agree with ealinnara. Using escalating costs does not usually work very well. Once you get over the critical hurdle, the costs become meaningless. If I'm a decent sized empire or larger, 700 gildar is chump change. It doesn't do much to stop me from expanding. If I'm a small empire, then it hurts me a lot because my resources are much more limited.

GalCiv2 has the same general problem, too much reliance on on a metric with questionable underlying math. But I have no idea how hard it might be to improve the functionality there. Maybe it's got giant game theory math problems behind it that demand too much dev headspace or too many resources on our PCs. Maybe both, maybe neither.

The point you make has been behind some of my favorite individual games (maps). But it doesn't really refute the general complaint that in Elemental so far, it seems like quantity fundamentally trumps quality. Neither arcane nor worldly knowledge seem to include paths to make 'strength through moderation' a reasonable path to becoming a notable player in a good, long game. It all comes down to the map for the folks who want to play small on a large map, but the folks who want to play a 'pure strategy' game seem to be in good shape no matter what.

That's pretty much why I still sorely miss the old imbuing lands with essence mechanics. For a while in the betas, that very limited resource called essence was very important for founding new settlements. That made essence feel more generally important than it does to me now, and it made the random patches of habitable terrain a delight to find and not just a decorative detail on the maps.