Limit to town expansion

[Bluddy]

It seems to me that the design of the game encourages one particular playstyle: expand as much as you can, preferably relegating only a few cities to be soldier producers. The more cities you have the less chance of the factions dying out, the more resources you can produce, and the more you can recover from the destruction of town squares.

It seems to me that there should be some downside to expanding - some counterbalance to discourage expansion and resource buildup - but I'm not sure what that should be.

[Teal_Blue]

It seems to me that the design of the game encourages one particular playstyle: expand as much as you can, preferably relegating only a few cities to be soldier producers. The more cities you have the less chance of the factions dying out, the more resources you can produce, and the more you can recover from the destruction of town squares.

It seems to me that there should be some downside to expanding - some counterbalance to discourage expansion and resource buildup - but I'm not sure what that should be.

Just a thought, but if there were say a limiting cap, say, i don't know, maybe 20 of each resource that can be stored at a time, with over-runs being on a use one/get one basis, so as a player moves pieces across the board they don't have any more than the 20 at a time, plus cool-downs. Also as the end of the Age comes closer, each resource could go to zero on moving into the new age, so there would be no build up from the past age to use as a cushion or advantage. All players would start each age at a zero point and play with given resources inside the age.

With resources limited in this way, it would also make decisions on the players part more important, if they have to weight one action vs another action if they are limited to only pulling off one in the next several turns.

I think something like this could work, but am not sure of the details. A test would be a good place to see if this could be workable and make the game more interesting.

-Teal

[LaughingThesaurus]

The first order of business really is, Bluddy, what difficulties are you playing on? If you can easily cheese hard and beyond with just rampant expansion and nothing much else, then there's a real problem.

[Billick]

My experience has been that expanding becomes more important on the higher difficulties.  My highest difficulty game so far has been hard/expert/hard.

[Bluddy]

I'm not saying it's 'cheese' as much as it's one ideal strategy. As far as I can tell, nothing in the game encourages you NOT to expand, and every mechanic encourages you to expand. It seems best to build small towns without using all of their space (so you can replace destroyed buildings), and just build as many of them as possible. This isn't from playing the harder difficulties -- I admit I haven't done so. It's just a simple analysis of the rules of the game, and extrapolation from my (admittedly limited) playing time.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Ahh, yeah.
Admittedly, I have limited playing time, but I imagine that playing in this way would result in you having, say, a smaller amount of general chaos going around... or less defense against bandits and stuff. Increasing any difficulty level will likely really hurt you in that regard, if you aren't playing really efficiently and playing a bit more dangerously with your expansions. I'm personally of the idea that you should always want to expand. Why wouldn't you? You get more resources, more spaces for military production, and most importantly, it's something to actually DO with your action points. I found I'd max out a town's space within like 4 or 5 turns and then I wouldn't know what to do. I don't exactly favor making that any worse.

[mrhanman]

I'm not saying it's 'cheese' as much as it's one ideal strategy.

Is this such a bad thing though?  The game continues to be challenging (at least to me), even if this is the case.  That said, I wouldn't be against adding an option to limit the number of allowed town centers, so long as it was defaulted to unlimited.  Of course, if you do that, you start cluttering up the lobby with yet another option that fixes a problem that may not really be a problem for the majority of players.

[Teal_Blue]

Just a thought, but having an option in the lobby is a small price to pay to have an option that addresses something that perhaps part of the community feels is a problem. I myself feel that going into the age of gods with too much momentum is really cool, maybe the first time, after that it feels like it takes the challenge away, so i would agree that a mechanic that is toggleable and makes the age of gods a straight out of the gates challenge is a good thing.

Just my opinion, but that would answer Bluddy's problem, and mine as well, just don't change it wholesale from what it is now. Having an option is a good thing, and not having an option is not really a good thing.

-Teal

[LaughingThesaurus]

I think the game would work better promoting expansion anyway though. The game gives you a ton of resources to make expansions, unless you're fond of wasting action points. The game encourages mass chaos, which you can't have without a lot of production of resources and military. In fact, if you don't cause mass chaos, you automatically lose, which means that on higher levels you NEED to expand many times to actually cause the chaos you need to cause. The thing is, sure it's a strategy that you will often want to implement, but what do you do with those expansions? If you just let them die, I mean, I guess that kind of works but only for so long until you run out of time. If you're at that point, you should probably GG and reset though.
If it's just all around better to have more bases, I mean, there is again not really a problem with that. I always use Starcraft as an example but, in that game you always want to be expanding. More expansions gets more income, gets more units more quickly, which gets you enough of the army and tech you need to kill your opponent. Technically, when it comes to expanding versus not expanding, the dominant strategy is in fact to expand. Yet, most balance complaints are about how spellcasters are too powerful or whatever, not about how OP it is to expand.
But again, even stepping away from that example, it seems like the game just encourages expansion. It's too easy to fill up a whole town. You can't really fit everything in a full town. The town has a pretty limited radius to build stuff around. You need expansions to stay caught up. You have so many action points that NOT expanding wastes a crucial resource. You could shoot for fundamentally rebalancing everything that I mentioned but... it still doesn't strike me as an issue. It's all about what you do with the expansions. What we probably need is for bases to potentially be able to die more quickly, or maybe for town centers to be more expensive. Radical sweeping change probably isn't necessary quite yet.

I actually used to be a huge advocate of options. More options is better, right!? Well, the problem with options is that you can't really balance a game around them. If you have a mechanic that you can turn on and turn off, it needs to be balanced with respect to the rest of the game whether it's on or off. This will single-handedly double the amount of work that needs to go into balance. Now sure, Arcen's got time compression technology, but I don't think it's that powerful yet. As it is, I'd say experiment more with the difficulty options. Turn up that score requirement, or the main game difficulty. That'll make the game harder. There might need yet more adjustment, but it again probably comes outside of sweeping gamewide changes.
Now the age of gods thing is a different topic that I don't know about so I'm not going to address that. I just know that more options is not necessarily better. But, if you are going in with 'too much momentum' then the game's probably a bit too easy with your settings. It'd be like if I complained about how the AI is "not so bad" in AI War at 300 AIP. Sure, it's not bad for me. Anybody else would be dead before they got halfway there.

[Billick]

I think it's not so much that you can make a lot of expansions, but that a peaceful expansion is so easy to defend with just myth units.  This has sort of been discussed in other threads, but I don't think we came up with a perfect answer.  I'd like to play a game on expert general difficulty also, so I can get a better idea of how challenging that feels.   

[x4000]

Lots of good points in here.  In terms of the core things of being too easy to defend with just mythologicals, I think that the 1.008 update (coming out later today, for real this time; I know I said that yesterday too) should really help a lot with that.

In terms of encouraging expansion, I think that's really unavoidable with the combination of both the scorched earth approach to buildings plus the encouragement of destroying towns for points.

What might be more feasible/interesting would be to encourage towns themselves to be more specialized.  For instance, making it so that some of the raw resource producers produce slightly less per turn, but then get bonuses for each further producer of that type that is in that town.  That way you are encouraged to sometimes have resource-producer-only towns, but then again those are absolutely defenseless and thus the positioning of other nearby towns matters a lot more.

Something simple like that could really affect the advanced strategies for players trying to maximize resources; but I'm not sure if that is ultimately too complicated.

[madcow]

I like the idea of linking resource producers in a town to get a bonus by the way.

[nas1m]

What might be more feasible/interesting would be to encourage towns themselves to be more specialized.  For instance, making it so that some of the raw resource producers produce slightly less per turn, but then get bonuses for each further producer of that type that is in that town.  That way you are encouraged to sometimes have resource-producer-only towns, but then again those are absolutely defenseless and thus the positioning of other nearby towns matters a lot more.

Something simple like that could really affect the advanced strategies for players trying to maximize resources; but I'm not sure if that is ultimately too complicated.

I really like this idea!

[Bluddy]

Allow me to try to refine my observation: inevitably, you're going to get to a point in the game when there's a lot of chaos going on. Many units fighting many other units, towns getting destroyed etc. At this point in the game, you generally still have many resources, as well as many action points. However, rather than using those action points to sort out the mess as much as you can, it seems like it's a better idea to just keep expanding with passive cities while dropping a bunch of mythos. Trying to fix the supply chain of broken cities enough to produce units again is a lost cause, since inevitably you'll lose a critical tile and have no place to rebuild.

Intuitively also, I don't like constant expansion. It means you aren't attached to your cities and don't care about them. That means you also don't care when bandits/woes ruin them: they're all disposable. It also means the goal of balance is really about expanding as fast as you can to guarantee survival, and that feels wrong to me. It should be a battle to save what's there, not just to throw away everything and start over with some new towns.

Perhaps what I would like to see is the ability to clear ruins after X turns. Perhaps after 10 turns ruins become regular grasslands and you can rebuild your cities. This, coupled with some mechanism of limiting the number of cities (possibly just a hard limit), would mean that you have to really struggle to keep your civilizations intact as opposed to just expanding endlessly.

EDIT: A limit to the number of cities would also limit your resource production capacity. It means you really have to choose carefully when you place your resource tiles rather than just dumping as many of them as you want. The game becomes much more strategic this way.

Another idea: perhaps the limit could increase with every age.

[x4000]

In terms of "just dropping mythos," that's going to become a lot harder in the very next version.  Keeping up a supply chain of humans is a way more cost-effective method of doing this.

In terms of constant expansion not feeling right, I think that's something that is just the nature of a game like this.  With original inspirations from Carcassonne, that's just kind of how things work, you know?  Same with something like Civilization, where territory expansion is the name of the game.

In terms of clearing ruins, when it comes to an entire town that is gone, that's not something kosher.  But in terms of ruins that are in an existing town, that's actually something I do plan -- for today actually -- as part of the new souls system.  Souls letting you (expensively) "bless" a tile and turn it back to harmless grasslands.  This applying to obsidian, bridged lakes and mountain tunnels, and also building-ruins-in-towns.

Souls are expensive so you won't want to do that all the time, but it does let you prevent some towns from taking slight attrition and then turning useless.  Should help with what you want, at least!