[Gameplay] Mining Outposts (to reduce city spam)

I'm a bit sceptical on this one. Basically because I don't know whether it would stop me from building or spamming cities at all. Mainly this is due to the facts of why I (have to) spam them right now:

• Resources - Get them before anybody else gets them ... or in other words, envelope them in your zone of influence as fast as possible. But as the zone of influence expands very very slowly initially, the only way to get resources that are some distance away is a new city. Your outpost now? Would they have their own zone of influence or would they have to be still within the zone of one of your cities? If they would have to be they would essentially be useless in the context of quick resource acquisition. If they have their own (most likely non-growing) area of influence, what keeps you from spamming them just to increase it to contain the spawn of ...

• Monsters - Maybe right now an even bigger incentive for me than resources. Cities to keep them away from your resources and especially supply / caravan lines. If your outpost would not have a zone of influence, they would fail in this aspect and be a nightmare to manage. Protect them, protect the caravans ... and all that against a never ending and mindless spawn of critters, beasts and bandits that could spawn right next to them. If they have a zone of influence it would still be a problem with respect to caravans, as the radius would probably not be enough to create a continuous monster free zone. Basically you would spend most of your turns hunting monsters or rebuilding lost caravans.

• Functions of cities - The outpost would not be able to provide two things. Basic buildings and their resource output (negligible, but it still adds up) and troop training (big issue).

So in essence, I think that I would still build and spam cities as to 1) get resources fast, 2) contain monsters and protect resources and my supply lines (without much effort thanks to overlapping zones of influence) and 3) have the options to recruit more troops at the same time in the case of war / emergency.

It's a nice idea, but the game would have to be tweaked in kind a lot of ares (esp. concerning monsters) to make it viable in my opinion.

Rabenhoff

The idea is sound, and indeed one I would have modded in by now if I could figure it out, but as Rabenhoff has essentially explained but not consciously mentioned, what you really require is a reason NOT to build a city, with there being literally nothing but benefits to building cities everywhere there is no point in outposts, what you would require is for cities to have a cost to them which outposts don't.

Well, what you actually need is a reason not to upgrade every outpost into a full fledged city. Adding a new kind of settlement that does exactly the same thing a normal outpost does, but that isn't allowed to grow or build certain things, just complicates the game and doesn't really add anything.

The basic mechanic to prevent city-spamming is in the game already, namely limited food. It is just not implemented right at the moment, as food is way to easy to come by. But if food was more scarce, you would have to choose which settlement you want to grow into a city, and which will stay an outpost.

I agree.. Creating limited outpost like locations would be great limit them to size level 1 or 2..further restrict them by limiting the buildings available based on following decision.

force us to choose on founding at the location.

1) city

2) military

3) resource farm (further specialize here with choice of farm, gold, arcane, tech, mine(note mine includes gold, elementium, and metal), or material (old growth, marble, clay, and so on)"

again just brainstorming to feed the Devs creative processes.

I agree with this but currently Outposts give ya that 1 Material/Gold/Research/Arcane Knowledge buildings that can be potentially the same a lvl 5 City gives you. Maybe moving some of these buildings to level 2 would help control outpost spam some? Maybe add in a "1 Per Faction" for starting out posts to allow the first city to have them and the early game isn't changed so much?

Another concept could be that said Outposts need to be tied to a  city (limited to x distance from city or said cities AOE) and city is limited by level as to how many outposts is can support?? more food for collective  brain clouds to storm on!

This is what is needed.  Lvl one mat/gold/research/arcane buildings for every settlement is just nutty.  I could build a huge empire on a completely barren continent by spamming lvl1 cities every 4 tiles (or whatever the min distance is), each with a market/library/study/workshop and ZERO houses.

The basic idea was that such an outpost would not produce anything. Including the default 1 gold.
It would be a remote extension of the "real city" for the sole purpose of tapping resource tiles.
The tentative "Outpost Improvement" would negate the default production of a normal lvl 1 city, leaving it as just a shell.

The real advantage would be not having any reason to develop the outpost. It saves micromanagement, which is getting really really bad at 50+ cities.
Instead, you would attach the mining outpost's metal resource to a city which already has a metal mine and the apropriate bonus improvements.

There is no city/planet/colony management screen like in practically every 4X game so keeping track of every stupid little city that covers 1 resource is very painful.

And yes, it's more a workaround than an ideal solution. I just figured that a less radical change to the current system might be more likely to happen.
It does nothing to reduce the annoying number of cities in that unable-to-sort scroll bar but it uses a lot of the currently existing mechanics.

So let's ignore "likelyhood of implementation" for now.

I'll invent the "Mining Caravan".  It's as expensive as a pioneer + caravan because it can do a bit of both.
It can build/exploit resource tiles, such as a metal mine, far beyond a city's influence.
Once the building is completed, a "Mining Caravan (metal)" automatically spawns on that tile.
Then you send it to whichever city you like and remotely link the resource to it.

This adds a very fragile link - obviously the caravan - while it removes the need for a "real" mining city.
It would be a lot safer to build a real mining city and include the resource in the city wall so there has to be
a serious benefit to using "remote miners" or a serious disadvantage to having many cities. And I mean beyond the clickeroo. =P

I would like to see Forts that could gather resorces and cost to expand there influence.   

Have a Unit Engineer, That builds and maintains the fort.  Requires Fortfacation techs  

These can only buid a few Improvents - Watch Tower-  Wall- Field Hostptial- Fortifications 

Wall-  This takes one Space - blocks movment - This will let you expand to block areas,  So you could build a great wall if you wanted,  Can be attacked like a unit- Has High Armor but is weak vs Siege type attacks   Types of wall - Picket - Stone - Reinforced - Great Wall 

Have the Pack cost 100g and 100 mat 

Say (size)*200 Gold ( Size)*200 Materials + Size -1(200 gold, 200 materials) and takes Size *2 turns to upgrade 

(0)Military Outpost - Takes 2 turns to build

(1)Keep - cost 200 g and 200 materials takes 2 turns to upgrade      1(200g,200m) + 0(200g,200m)

(2) Small Fort - cost 600g and 600 materials Takes 4 turns to upgrade 2(200g,200m)+1(200g,200m) = 2*200= 400gm + 1*200gm = 600gm 

(3)Fort - cost   1000g and 1000m Takes 6 turns to upgrade 

(4)Castle - cost 1400g and 1000m Takes 8 Turns to upgrade 

Have all hostile units slowed by 50% in there area,  Need Custom Battle Maps where The Defense starts on top of the walls with +75 Def and an attack bonus

Caravans get auto spawn guards in range of the forts.     

A lot of excellent ideas here.

This makes the huge assumption that city spam needs to be reduced. Care to start with persuading me why it does?

With the current resource model I don't need more than 3 cities even on a large map and actually developing more can be penalizing. So why is this needed at all?

Personally, I think I should be incentivized to build more cities rather than bunching up a few to maximize the gains from the adventure tech path.

In my last game I had 55 cities and room to grow.

And one gold mine. Total.

Building cities was pretty much the only way to generate income. (beyond going around as Buffy, Monster Slayer)

Alas, there are absolutely no tools to manage cities. The obvious workaround to the bad implementation (or rather total lack thereof) is to have fewer cities.

Holy Crap that's low.. in my current I have 9 cities and  8 gold mines only 1 of these 8 came from adventure tech. I started with  one, then found a location with 2 made my second city.. uncovered 1 with adventure tech, and the rest were by cities I took over or I found on map and put city near them..

I have not yet had a real issue not finding a few gold mines.. some times not right away but always with in 100 or so turns. just goes to show how varied the maps resources can be...

Nice idea. Could be implented like this:

Allow a unit called slavelaborers (free), slavecamp (free), volonteers(bigots, zealots and other fools who work for free in a masochistically religious city) or a regular workforce (they get a salary from the crown) or whatever you like being able to be built like any other unit, who's only job is to go to the resource, settle on it, become totally exploited and send the fruit of their works to the city they were created in.

Many good ideas to reduce-city spamming. Seriously, lvl 1 cities should be bare bones, why the hell can you build market, workshop, arcane university and study on a city with like, less than 1000 people? And why are pioneers so cheap and fast to make? They should go with a system similar to civilization here.

These should be similar to starbases i Galciv II, you build them for a specific purpose.  I think you should be able to build a stronghold anywhere, and it should create a bubble of influence, and different addons or structures inside it would provide the ability to expand the influence, increase mining efficiency, but would require no extra food.

I haven't seriously delved into modding, yet. I'm a scripter and it just doesn't feel right without scripts. =P

So... I don't know if there are possible dependancies between city improvements.
The obvious way would be to make the "outpost" improvement one that would be mutually exclusive with houses.
Except for one rare case it would mean that you cannot have a lvl 2+ city with the outpost improvement. You couldn't build it
while having houses and you couldn't build houses while having it.

And if it had negative growth, you wouldn't be training units at that outpost. Not for long anyway.

Only - we can't code the complete transfer of mined resources just yet so it's a pipe dream one way or another.
I'd much rather see a "proper" solution, like the mining caravan I outlined. Might hit all kinds of hardcoded limitations but that's
what makes things interesting. After all, it doesn't have to work. (a common misconception about scripts and mods)
It only has to look and feel like it works. And make a good show of it.

I like some of the ideas posted here.

Personally, I wouldn't want to add an additional settlement type just to mine a resource, like I said before. I'd rather see a deterrent towards upgrading mining outposts. I agree their build options should be somewhat restricted, as there is no reason right now not to build a workshop/merchant/etc in every outpost. I have some ideas how this could be done, but maybe that's for another thread.

Hentschke's idea of a mining caravan is not bad, but like I said I wouldn't want to add another structure. How about the following; In every settlement you can build a mining caravan, and what this caravan does is transfer all resource production from the parent town to its target city, where it has that city's bonuses applied to it. This way there is no reason to upgrade the mining outpost to get bonuses, as you can get the bonuses from the central city. There could be a limit to how many outposts could send its resources towards a city, citylevel-1 might be a good one. So a lvl 2 town can receive the resources from 1 outpost, and a lvl 5 can receive 4. An additional benefit is that this way you can create 'regional capitals', which IMO would add to the feeling that you are managing a real kingdom.

It also leaves you some choice. You can have 1 central city, which would be easier to defend, and could give a bigger bonus to one the production of one resource, and surround it by outposts that are relatively less valuable. Or you can build up a few small towns, which might give you more resources overall, but would also force you to defend all of them, as they are a more significant investment.

I agree that the empire tree needs to be changed, so you can choose which cities are on it, and thus be able to remove the resource outposts that don't do much else.