DESIGN: Government City Caps

[Maquiladora]

Discussing this with a friend online who i play MP with, he was telling me how he uses certain small mods to the game to make things more interesting including smaller city caps, along with the advantages and pitfalls. So if i missed something really embarrassing and obvious, it wasnt my idea

Good:

(1) Everyone would be spacing their cities wider and so would the AI, so less chance of the AI overlapping too early if its told to space far enough. At the moment its, cram cities in allowing for 2 borders, the AI doesnt know how to cram and i suspect it will be hard to tell it how to, not as good as a human anyway. So lower the city cap and tell it to space wider, that will help the AI sustain and keep growing food/commerce/production, into the modern age even. Telling the AI to space wider now with the default city caps just makes it waste good land and split its empire too wide, needlessly.

(2) make better use of the expanding borders. Before generally only 2 border bumps, crammed tight were necessary to sustain a good empire, thus totally bypassing a unique feature of CTP2.

(3) Reduces the late game tedium and makes specialists more important, because of larger cities sooner.

(4) slows down early science to better follow the timeline, but not too slow that it becomes a pain.

Bad:

(1) Some people think the caps are too small already, in conquests and such.
(2) ?

Heres some numbers +/- a few,

* Tyranny - 5

* Monarchy - 10
* Republic - 10
* Theocracy - 10

* Fascism - 20
* Communism - 20
* Democracy - 20

* Corporate Republic - 30
* Technocracy - 30

* Ecotopia - 40
* Virtual Democracy - 40

Im talking about changing the default game here, for the better (i think), not a mod, so if its a bad idea with the majority of people then it wont happen. Thoughts?

[The Big Mc]

Well if you are talking about capping the max pop it is a can of worms with many governmental arguments to come I think in the past the amount of pop is normally determined by food

[Maquiladora]

Good, cause im not talking about capping the max pop, just lowering the max cities.

[The Big Mc]

well that’s mod dependent not a main game change

which should be left to moders or in any new apolyton mods

but putting a max pop flag into the government text could be usefull

[Maquiladora]

No, thats what im saying, it should be a main game change for the reasons i mentioned, to help the AI, to balance the timeline, make border increases actually useful, reduce tedium, increase use of specialists etc

[Solver]

Personally, I have changed the city limits to be higher in my game. The low city limits generally annoyed me. They meant that, if I did any conquesting, there was no point building Settlers, which wasn't what I liked. I would then end up only building my initial cities, and conquering the others, all the time staying about my city limit... pah.

The way I have it, it's possible to both expand through Settlers and conquest, although city limit is still an issue.

[Maquiladora]

Some more points made in here on city caps and other little things.

Maquiladora: (1:50 PM) i dont think anyone is gonna agree with me in that thread lol
Solver: (1:51 PM) Apparently
Maquiladora: (2:02 PM) dont you think if theres less cities to conquer it will be easier to defend an empire? so no more rolling through a city a turn
Solver: (2:02 PM) Yes, but I also will find myself highly unsatisfied if I build 5-6 cities in the Ancient era and have to stop.
Solver: (2:02 PM) Besides then, razing cities is the only really viable option...
Solver: (2:03 PM) While it helps the AI, I think that the gameplay fun price is too big
Maquiladora: (2:03 PM) but the fun is making those 7 initial cities as efficient as possible and exploring the land too
Maquiladora: (2:05 PM) why do you feel unsatisfied with only 5-6 cities? is it memories from civ? its good to understand the reasons
Solver: (2:05 PM) not enough fun... expansion is the biggest factor early on
Solver: (2:08 PM) Memories from civ... not enough of a "grand" feeling. 5 cities are more like a game to micro these cities, not a real empire game
Solver: (2:09 PM) I've played with low limits and high limits... high limits way more fun
Maquiladora: (2:09 PM) so youre a builder?
Solver: (2:09 PM) generally, yes, and that's another issue i wanted to bring up in the forums today
Solver: (2:10 PM) the fact that you play the game to conquer the world, no real alternative. basically, even if you build econ, it's just so that you can then produce more units than your enemy
Solver: (2:10 PM) like, i always build during middle ages... but it's so that I can get Cavalry & Cannons before others get Gunpowder, for instance
Solver: (2:11 PM) while what i want is a way to sit on my continent in peace, develop, do diplomacy, etc.
Solver: (2:11 PM) with high city limits, conquerors will also be satisfied, being able to fight wars over bigger chunks of land, etc
Maquiladora: (2:11 PM) well if theres no alternative enonomic goal...... but you also need to research those units, for defence purposes
Solver: (2:13 PM) Yes, but normally, I'd put a higher priority on infrastructure to win an alternative victory, spaceship (civ 1/2/3), economy (smac) or something... while CtP2 science victory is generally far away, AND requires control of lots of land (conquest)
Solver: (2:13 PM) to that extent, i prefer the Alien victory... and give me a diplomatic or economic or cultural win, too...

simply put, in ctp2 there's really no way you can play while only having an army for defensive purpose
Maquiladora: (2:13 PM) yeah i didnt understand why they had that in the gaia victory, sort of contradictory
Solver: (2:13 PM) exactly
Maquiladora: (2:14 PM) is the sci victory too far away in general?
Solver: (2:15 PM) well, look at the amount of techs in ctp2. remember the fact that you're unlikely to develop a new tech in 2 turns... that makes the gaia victory a *very* long-term goal
Solver: (2:15 PM) in civ 3, at least, by the time i have my empire set up as i want it to, i can already start thinking about an alternative victory
Solver: (2:15 PM) i'm fine with leaving gaia as far as it is, but give me another alternative, as said
Maquiladora: (2:16 PM) economic victory? controlling all goods of a certain type, on the planet
Solver: (2:16 PM) for instance, or having some uber trade, dunno... but an econ victory, as a concept
Solver: (2:17 PM) yeah, ctp2 has the diplo victory, but generally, AI hates alliances and won't keep em
Solver: (2:17 PM) that boils down to conquest for me... kick them till they are ready to sign it, lol
Maquiladora: (2:17 PM) lol so true, threatening them for peace is the quickest way
Solver: (2:18 PM) you get my point - hard to call that a diplo victory
Maquiladora: (2:18 PM) well the civ that wins the game has to have some amount of military, or its just unrealist too
Solver: (2:19 PM) yes, but that need not be offensive. sure, you must have a strong defensive army, but ideally, you should be able to win the game with solid defense, but little offense
Solver: (2:19 PM) i made a goal once in civ3 to only make defensive units... and won
Maquiladora: (2:20 PM) well thats the combat system isnt it, but i see your point
Solver: (2:20 PM) of course, with a very strong defense during my game, and that was hard, but possible
Solver: (2:20 PM) well true yes you will need knights in ctp2, but i want to win without sending my stacks all over the world, but leaving them inside my borders to protect the land there
Maquiladora: (2:21 PM) you can do that in ctp2 but it involves building forts on no-mans land then building obelisks there, its ugly
Solver: (2:22 PM) true. besides, another thing i want to ideally see, is no no-mans land. look at civ 3 again, everything gets colonized, which makes sense
Solver: (2:22 PM) another reason not to lower city limits btw, as that will create a world with tons of no-man land
Maquiladora: (2:23 PM) yeah it does, and thats a plus point (one of few) for not lowering the city cap, but its also because theres so much bad tiles to build on in ctp2
Solver: (2:23 PM) as for the limits, you'll see more arguments in the thread
Solver: (2:24 PM) btw, how about you repost this converstation at forums? someone might have some good points...
Maquiladora: (2:24 PM) yeah ill post it in the thread
Solver: (2:25 PM) fine then let's see what the people say
Maquiladora: (2:26 PM) maybe im looking through blinkered MP-glasses.....
Solver: (2:26 PM) also possible

[child of Thor]

Difficult one to call. On a personal level i think the city caps should be much lower from the opening part of the game until around the middle ages(pick a time). As this would better reflect 'real' populations and maybe also have a slower pop growth at this time.
Still that would too claustrophobic for many people i'm sure.
So for the gameplay aspect maybe we could just slow down population growth and leave city caps as is, hmmm i'm not sure on this either - its a difficult one to balance.
One of the frustrations with the early game can be the large amount of time it takes to build units etc and do stuff, so maybe if we were to try to better model the ancient period, how about reducing the city cap but also decreasing the amount of build time for ancient stuff? So when you reach the right time(middle ages?) you can relax the city cap but increase the build time? something like that.............

Still not sure though.....

[Maquiladora]

One of the frustrations with the early game can be the large amount of time it takes to build units etc and do stuff, so maybe if we were to try to better model the ancient period, how about reducing the city cap but also decreasing the amount of build time for ancient stuff?

But thats the great thing about lowering the city cap, you have less cities but each one is more developed and so can produce things faster, so you can have dedicated cities, which you cant really do in the default game until you have 20 or so cities and one or two grow beyond 12 pop.

[The Big Mc]

right lets look at the real world

City caps in the real world don't happen it just gets that the city is to far from the capital so that communications is difficult

which depend on local conditions tech and distance

what i am saying is that city caps were intended to reduced the amount of cities a player can have to all the ai to keep up and most importantly to keep the save file and system drain small

I don't think we should have a limit instead lets just try to work on the AI long term there will probably be quick fixes in the code but the problem will be that we jeopardise enjoyment of a game and get people frustrated when they conquer a enemy civ then see there country torn apart because they accidentally went over the max cities

If I remember right one of the people on apolyton may have had it right

I can’t remember who said it but they suggested customizable governments

Were you could reduce your civ production to average to get more cities so penalizing the player for having to many cities without a revolution

I think I ranted on to long

[child of Thor]

True Maq, true..........

I think the way Civ3 went with it initialy was IMHO not the right way. ICS is just wrong, especially in a game thats meant to reflect actual history

So in principle i agree with you - to encourage the player to take more care over his initial cities, rather than feeling forced into expanding to grab as much territory as possible, then later building them up.

Still you need to make this smaller scale more interesting, less time to discover/build etc - maybe have a much more compact tech tree with more minor discoveries? But then if it comes too quick and easy you can lose track/interest in the process. Which was one of my (few) complaints about Smac, things came so fast in the weapons race that often a tech was obsolete before it came into service.......

And Big MC, yes that would be a neat way to do it - give the player an in game option, 'ok i want more cities(to get the land before the Ai does), but its going to cost me the flexibility of using max production etc'. Those kind of choices are all good IMHO

[Solver]

Good points, but indeed, the ancient improvements (well, not only ancient) in CtP2 take quite some serious time. I know that, if I built my 5 cities, and after that only had to worry about improving them and doing stuff, I would find myself certainly bored. For an early warmonger start, getting only a few cities up might be a good idea, but that should be optional...

[Peter Triggs]

There have recently been a couple of quite civilized discussions of CTP over at CivFanatics:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=69385

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=67356

It's not just "CTP suks", but some actual constructive criticism. The first one has a few comments on governments. Now that we can do pretty well whatever we want, I think we should play close attention to what people didn't like about CTP and see if we can come up with ways of satisfying their objections.

One thing that occured to me would be to allow players to customize the difficulty level they're playing on at the start of the game. They did this in Imperialism II: you could either choose "Easy", "Medium", whatever, or press a "Custom" button which would take you to a sequence of screens where you could adjust lots of parameters on a cases by case basis. I've attached a bitmap of one of them. (Had to zip it, it's too big.) So, although the city limit caps are not really part of the diffDB, perhaps we could put in a parameter that would allow the player to modify them. (Details need working out.)

[Gilgamensch]

Talking about history:

You think that thye roman empire, the Egyptans, Chinese ever had a city limit?

Same goes for the mayas/inkas.

And mayas/inka/egyptans/chinese never really went out of despotism/monarchie.

Actually in RL, is is more that the new governments had more people in the same amount of cities. So maybe we shall rethink.

Instead of having a city limit, we might want to decrease the possible size of the cities. (leaving only the capital untouched, as the capitol was always better/bigger........)

[Solver]

Or ditch the city limit altogether, but make corruption increase strongly with distance from capital...