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Hi, and welcome. Things like that have been tried in varying degrees. In the Ages of Man (free) expansion to Call to Power 2, for instance, distance from capitol and government determine how far away and how many cities you can have before various levels of unrest set in. Usually, however, you can research a wonder or zip toward a government advance that allows for cities further away, more of them and so forth.
The bigger reality, though, is that even with these limitations, you can almost always tweak cities to counter the problems, and even if this means that they are barely making a profit or, indeed, are losing the overall empire money, it's easily absorbed. Then, once you have that wonder or government that makes larger empires easier to sustain, you've already got the cities ready to go. One tweak, then, would be to make cities *not* part of the general coffers until much later in the game so that your cities in high-gear around the capital can't take up the slack for those newer cities farther away.
Another approach, as I've suggested before, isn't to make the cities go away but to introduce a different empire management scheme (in this case, state-based) that then alleviates the micro --or, at least, makes for different and hopefully more interesting micro-- associated with so many cities.
So what really gets me down isn't so much the expasion part (which is fun, actually) but a) the mindless micro and b) the fact that the AI simply can't keep up. Civ3 tried to get at this a bit with city expansion, most apparant with what I termed "Settler Diahrrea" -- and this kind of worked except that the AI disregarded your borders completely when in the land grab phase, and it took a lot of the atmoshphere out of the game.
Somewhere in here is a good mix of limiting city producivity in relation to empire size / government / tech, etc. and, perhaps, by introducing different kinds of management schemes as those changes occur. Again, I don't mind being a city sweeper early in the game (what else is there to do but to gleefully squeeze that extra 2 gp from a slider bar?), but toward the middle and end game, I want to think more about how government policy on energy conservation, for example, helps and hinders my empire overall rather than continuing (by now) to find those slider bars a pesky lesson in repetitive motion.
Hi, and welcome. Things like that have been tried in varying degrees. In the Ages of Man (free) expansion to Call to Power 2, for instance, distance from capitol and government determine how far away and how many cities you can have before various levels of unrest set in. Usually, however, you can research a wonder or zip toward a government advance that allows for cities further away, more of them and so forth.
The bigger reality, though, is that even with these limitations, you can almost always tweak cities to counter the problems, and even if this means that they are barely making a profit or, indeed, are losing the overall empire money, it's easily absorbed. Then, once you have that wonder or government that makes larger empires easier to sustain, you've already got the cities ready to go. One tweak, then, would be to make cities *not* part of the general coffers until much later in the game so that your cities in high-gear around the capital can't take up the slack for those newer cities farther away.
Another approach, as I've suggested before, isn't to make the cities go away but to introduce a different empire management scheme (in this case, state-based) that then alleviates the micro --or, at least, makes for different and hopefully more interesting micro-- associated with so many cities.
So what really gets me down isn't so much the expasion part (which is fun, actually) but a) the mindless micro and b) the fact that the AI simply can't keep up. Civ3 tried to get at this a bit with city expansion, most apparant with what I termed "Settler Diahrrea" -- and this kind of worked except that the AI disregarded your borders completely when in the land grab phase, and it took a lot of the atmoshphere out of the game.
Somewhere in here is a good mix of limiting city producivity in relation to empire size / government / tech, etc. and, perhaps, by introducing different kinds of management schemes as those changes occur. Again, I don't mind being a city sweeper early in the game (what else is there to do but to gleefully squeeze that extra 2 gp from a slider bar?), but toward the middle and end game, I want to think more about how government policy on energy conservation, for example, helps and hinders my empire overall rather than continuing (by now) to find those slider bars a pesky lesson in repetitive motion.
!
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