Added note: why have crime based on buildings AND population? Simple: it doesn't overly encourage either style of play. Playing with next to no buildings is not a huge advantage over playing with next to no population.
Eventually you'll just accept I'm always right and life will be easier. Well, mostly. Or, maybe just sometimes.
Let's go with sometimes.
Hahaha.
You guys crack me up.
I'm actually okay with both citizen count and tile count crime. I think they are both useful. I dislike that they didn't matter before because the other crime sources outweigh them by 100 - 1000 fold. I would actually like to see residential crime, especially caused by density and crime. However, I don't have anything more to add than the other Discussion thread on it.
I disliked that those were so outweighed, too.
Planetary Rage and Monsters - I still think generation should be roughly 100 fold what is now.
Agree to disagree. You can easily go overboard here and make it way frustrating and not fun.
Sure. But right now Monsters do not make much of an impact, let alone rage. My best strategy for Chris is to keep saying things over and over and claim that other player hate them. It is a propaganda war (re: Chris do not look at the giant wall of quoted text. Nothing to see here).
As often is the case I'm doing None Of The Above.
I think that increasing planet rage a ton would indeed be frustrating for a variety of reasons, because it would just make it feel like you are being penalized all the time. That's not to say that we don't need more monsters and so forth, though -- that's not at all to say that. But it is to basically say that the Planet Rage concept as a whole is dodgy at best and something I intend to rework a lot so that monsters are more of a factor.
re: Chris and Math. If I have to listen to one more person say how math isn't informative. I'll generate 10 pages of text no-one will read with appropriate figures. But this time, I'll fake everything after the first paragraph.
Eh? I've never said that. My points boil down to:
1. My goal is designing complex systems with emergent behavior, and to do that I have to set up multiple quasi-related math systems that will interact with one another in hopefully funky ways, and then make other rules to stop the "bad funky" stuff that happens from that.
2. Thus looking at a specific part of it and going "that's needlessly complex" is missing the point, because the idea is to introduce chaos, but then to prevent that chaos from spilling over into Armageddon accidentally.
3. So from that standpoint, looking at part of the math is not a very informative bit of information. Even knowing all the math, it's extremely hard to predict emergent behavior in systems like this. Because you aren't dealing with one formula, you're dealing with a bunch of them interacting in randomized ways with unknown inputs, etc. It becomes like predicting the weather, or worse.
4. On the other hand, if we're talking about a single formula for linearly calculating something, obviously we're on the same page. But disease specifically is meant to be a realistically chaotic system that acts within certain constrained bounds, and hence my comment.
You want barbarians, I don't Hence the tricky part in balancing it. I don't like random encounters (outside of my jRPGs). It's one of those things that may well need a lobby option. To me it doesn't add value to my game. iIt's there to make me waste time and resources on something that has zero effect on the end game. I'd rather be building/teching and playing a minimal amount of diplo to get to where I want to be.
I personally feel like barbarians are an important part of the game in terms of it feeling like a 4X, but I also respect the option to turn off barbarians in the game setup screen.
I think you're looking at barbarians how I look at the disasters in SimCity, though: all they do is wreck something that I care about in a way that is really frustrating, so I turn them off.
But looking at them from a Civ barbarians standpoint, they serve a couple of purposes:
1. Gently test my defenses in a variety of places, and remind me to put up defenses, so that when the big enemies from other races drop by I am not caught flat-footed.
2. Add some more tension and interest to the start of the game in particular. Arguably there are a lot of things in the game that don't contribute directly to the end-game, but they are all obstacles to overcome. Right now it's been focused on internal ones -- crime and disease being the two big ones -- but threats from external sources are just as valid and hopefully interesting. My goal has been for it to be interesting even without those external threats, but not for the game to exist in that sort of state for most people.
3. Like crime or adjacency bonuses, barbarians help to shape your city. They provide yet another factor for how you'll build your city, and I think that the more factors, the more interesting and unique cities become. So a city without those external threats is a little lonely to me in some regards.