posted 07-30-99 01:31 PM ET            

1. the way the production value works is like this

city production=(N+1)

where N is the population of the city. so having ten size one cities gives you double the production of having one size ten city.

2. the game is a rush game. by using ICS and going for elephants you can effectively do a conquering rush on those who don't adopt your strategies.

3. the way supply is handled in the game having more cities lets you have more units you don't have to pay for. if both sides are using monarchy then the one size ten city can support three units for free. the ten size one cities can support thirty units for free.

4. it is easier to pacify smaller cities than it is large cities. so a civ using ICS spends less on happiness structures and can spend more on military production.

5. smaller cities grow faster than larger cities. so in 20 turns ten size one cities might have have increased your population by 10-15 people. one size ten city probably didn't increase it's population by anymore than two people.

solutions

the general goal is to make larger cities more valuable than smaller cities thereby not stopping ICS but making it useless. the reason people complain about ICS is that it is more effective than building a few large cities. here's some suggestions to do that.

1. make advanced units (anything above the weakest infantry unit) require a certain structure before a city can build that units. have the most advanced units require two (maybe more) buildings before you can build them. for example, you can build a marine for free but to build an armor unit you need a barricks and to build a stealth bomber unit you need a barricks and a factory.

2. Make the base square not give any resources, instead have it function as a production center. this means you can have a person work an outlying square or the person can work the city square. if the person works the outlying square they bring in new resources. however if they work the city square they add bonus resources. have people working the city square have a job so they can either add to just one resource (food, shields, trade) or where they can add to all resources. if you are a specalized worker obviously you produce more of that one resource but you won't produce any other resources. there are a few issues i need to work out in this idea.

3. the way units are supported should be changed. do away with support costing sheilds. instead of shields units cost support points. each city generates a small number of support points depending on their size. to generate more support points you turn some of your population into military specialist. military specialist would generate a specific amount of support points depending on your civ's social engineering support level.

for each five people in a city that city would create one support point. so not only would larger cities generate more support points but larger cities could handle alot of military specialist where a small city couldn't. one other change to the support system would be each unit is rated from zero to three units. guerilla units and such cost zero. marines, paratroops and such cost one. armor, fighters and such cost two. aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and such cost three. cruise missles would cost zero and nukes would cost one. (missles are easy to maintain)

4. change population growth from being dependant upon food to depending on other factors. population growth can't happen unless you have a food surplus, but other things like, technology, social engineering and happiness will determine if your populations will growth.

5. and some more support for splintering

all of those changes would completely get rid of ICS, the cheese rush (chariots, elephants, or impacts rovers), and would add more strategic depth to the game, and tilt the balance back towards the builder.

korn469

posted 08-01-99 12:39 PM ET            

Sorry to let you down, but I hold little hope that ICS will be adequately addressed by BR.

He posted on Apolyton that it would be great to have detailed suggestions on how to take care of problems like ICS as the Civ III list tended to be long on suggestions and short on specifics. I fired off a two page list of suggestions to him on ICS busting strategies like, linking happiness to unit production, introducing lines of communication and attritional effects(desertion) on units as they increase distance from home. His only response was that he thought he had a great idea to put specials in for larger cities. I then asked, "what benefit will that have if your cities don't last long enough to get that big?". All I got back was thunderous silence.

Now you know why I'm not at all thrilled.

posted 08-01-99 09:51 PM ET            

In the context of SMAC, korn469's first point has, or so I gather, an immediate solution: give the base square (0,0,0) in production.

People who don't work the fields are already specialists in SMAC, as there's no prerequisite for doctors.

Incidentally, this proposal has the useful side-effect of allowing you to besiege a city and starve it to total extinction. Also, with no minerals at all it won't be able to build anything until the siege is broken - except by its faction spending large amounts of cash in rush-building.

Unit prerequisite buildings: if these buildings are fairly expensive, then this will slow down Conquerors, so I do like this idea.

In fact, let's modify the current SMAC's text files to make Military Morale buildings, including the Special Projects, much more expensive, so that Conquest Specialists have, in the best Ed Sullivan voice, "a really hard time".

In other words, we already have the ability to force Conquerors to build a solid military Infrastructure before they can afford to go on the warpath.

Unit support: let every unit cost energy to support, and don't tie it to a particular base. This has several beneficial consequences:

1. Reduces micromanagement.

2. Lets a unit fight on even though it's home base is captured. (Wouldn't you be even more determined to fight to rescue your loved ones, or to exact revenge?)

3. Means that the factions with the best economies can support the biggest military - that's how the world works. The US is an obvious case, but consider also the late Soviet Union: the only way the USSR was able to support expansion of its military was by diverting resources away from research and savings, and that eventually wore the country down. It still had plenty of Minerals to build military hardware, but it couldn't afford the Energy to support it, so the military had to be disbanded.

Although nations have naval, air, army and intelligence bases, where they build and station units, the units can continue to operate when their "home" base is disbanded. As best I recall, the US air force didn't lose units in the field when a volcanic eruption overwhelmed a base in the Philippines.

korn469 has suggested that there be support points which are proportional to population. That would make the Peacekeepers stronger, so the PK faction might have to be rebalanced, but that's easy.

An alternative, possibly a supplement, is to generate them as in MOO2, from specific buildings (for example, Naval Yards for ships).

MOO2 also allows command points to be magnified automatically by certain technologies.

Support points might come from the sum of all four sources: energy, population, buildings and technology.

This is quite an exciting prospect for us Builders, as those four are all things that Builders excel at, and that Conquerors are generally lousy at.

OTOH, it's well-known that MOO2 on large maps has a bias in favor of Builders (with the only viable Conqueror being a Telepathic race in hands trained to rush very very quickly for the Capital of the best High Production Builder's in reach). So one might then have to rebalance the factions to make the Conquerors usable on any but a small map.

Population growth: Social Engineering and Happiness (Golden Ages!) already affect this, and technology such as Recycling Tanks and Tree Farms assist it. So, what more is required?

Splintering??

Btw, have you tried Shining1's SNAC1.2 yet? It modifies many of the SMAC files to reduce ICS, make defence easier, attack harder, terraforming cheaper, etc, to sponsor the interests of Builders.

posted 08-03-99 03:57 AM ET            

Korn: You've missed a fundamental problem with the city system in CivII. For a city to grow, you need size*10 surplus food. So the growth you experience tails off rapidly once a city gets past around size 5. This means that (barring pop boom, which already the Morgan and the Hive, and now the cyborg's, can't do) there is very little point in getting a city above size 5 other than for the look of the thing. You are infinitely better to put the extra population in a colony pod and send it to a spot three squares away, where you will get another city of around size 5 in almost the same time as it will take the first city to reach size 7 or 8 (often faster). This is the main reason the ICS tactic works so well, not because a hoard of size 1 cities generate 40% extra producing compared to a size 5, but because a hoard of little cities will grow to a useful size very quickly, while a smaller number of large cities will take a much greater time to achieve this.

The counter to this is obvious - change the food system to allow bigger cities faster, and increase the drone problems for large empires. As well, link drones to food intake (e.g -1 growth for each drone), so a happy city will grow faster than an unhappy one. So a player without expansions everywhere will have a small group of large cities at nearly full production, whereas an ICS player will have heavy drone problems that prevent both growth and which slow production.

posted 08-06-99 04:12 PM ET            

Thanks for the suggestions--yes, the Civ3 design should correct the problem you describe, both by making larger cities more desirable (and more obtainable) and by restricting small cities in some of the ways described here and in others. When we get to public alpha/beta testing, this will be a key focus.

Keeping up with and responding to all of the mail we receive can be very time consuming, so there are often periods where we just hunker down and work on the games; it's not a situation where we can "just hire somebody" to respond to all our mail, because the hire-ee wouldn't know what the designer was thinking w/o taking up exactly the (designer's) time the hiring was intended to save. But all of your feedback (and especially participation in the organized suggestion lists, copies of each of which are right next to my computer) is useful, and you can expect us to resurface in e-mail, forums, and newsgroups at appropriate times.

BR

p.s. I'm out of town for a bit, so will probably not see your responses for a little while.

posted 08-06-99 04:36 PM ET            

We appreciate the posts.

Imran,

It's gonna take a bit more than a couple of token BR posts to convince me that FurXs is "listening". Especially considering he is probably posting here:

a) because you informed him some serious sh** was going down here, or

b) JKM informed him some serious sh** was going down here

I don't believe for a minute that BR just decided to "drop by".

Don't get me wrong. I appreciate his presence and contribution, but to say that FurXs is "listening" just because he posts here (and about solving a problem that has been there since Civ I for crying out loud!).

I'd say it is more like FurXs is performing damage control. After all that is there M.O. to date.

posted 08-06-99 06:23 PM ET            

not a skirt.

posted 08-06-99 07:23 PM ET            

"1. make advanced units (anything above the weakest infantry unit) require a certain structure before a city can build that units. have the most advanced units require two (maybe more) buildings before you can build them. for example, you can build a marine for free but to build an armor unit you need a barricks and to build a stealth bomber unit you need a barricks and a factory."

I hate this. I would find it very annoying to have to build a eg Stable(waste of precious minerals) just to buils some Horsemen.
Plus I would get irritated.eg
"Was it that city I built a Stable, or no, it's the one on the other side of my empire."
= micromanagement

"2. Make the base square not give any resources"

I am completely against that. Then just founded cities would produce too less food/resources/trade.

"3. the way units are supported should be changed."

Take a look in Civ3-the list of ideas for Firaxis in the SE thread.
I worked out an entire SE model + all the effects of every SE factor.
I will briefly explain Support.

First of all, this has to be said, I am using a everythingx10 system.
Means Plains generate 10 food, building cost of units, city improvements and wonders x 10, maintainance costx10, tech cost x10, 20 luxuries needed to make one happy citizen...

So most units need 10 resources for support every turn (however there should be exceptions eg an explorer or a transport don't need as much support as a knight or a Battleship).

In all previous CivX games support was something like 'x units free of support'.

I have this changed.
+4 Support : 4 less resources/shields needed as support
...
0 : normal support
...
-4 : 4 more resources needed as support

So a Knights normally needing 10 resources would now only need 6 resources if you have +4 Sup.

As you can see, unless you have a very high support rate, every unit costs something.
So there are no units 'free of support' anymore.

"3. the way supply is handled in the game having more cities lets you have more units you don't have to pay for. if both sides are using monarchy then the one size ten city can support three units for free. the ten size one cities can support thirty units for free."

Means this problem is solved.

"4. change population growth from being dependant upon food to depending on other factors. population growth can't happen unless you have a food surplus, but other things like, technology, social engineering and happiness will determine if your populations will growth."

I have another way of city growth posted on the OTHER thread on Apolyton - Civ3.
Posted 20 days back or so.

"Sing: That's the whole point. Not only is the strategy you describe a fun one, it's the only way to play."

posted 08-06-99 07:56 PM ET            

Let me drop these ideas on you so that you can tell me what you think. BTW this is a summary of detailed ideas that Yin collected from me for the Civ III list. They were not on the forum as I had to send it as a word doc and he didn't have time to add it to the forum list.

1) Simply have a barrack, naval base or airfield as the only requirement to raise units other than a militia type unit for city defense.

2) Link raising of units to the happiness of the city and really build in penalties that slam the city for over production. This includes settlers! This will force players to build in the population centers and give population the real importance for unit building. The current game systems assume unlimited population as they make units a function of production.

3)Emulate the unit support system from CTP. Regardless of what anyone may say, I think that idea and the public works system were two good ideas from that game.

4) Develop a "lines of communication" system based on movement points from the nearest city, depot or base. Units that extend beyond that point would be out of supply and subject to numerous penalties for movement and combat.

5) Develop an attrition factor that affects military units based on the same number of movement points from the nearest point of communication. The farther the distance, the higher the attritional effect. Ultimately, a unit would literally waste away. This effect should decrease with the level of government and technology as desertion was a huge problem for armies all the way through the Civil War. BTW, this is not my original idea. It actually came from an old board game that was around about 15 years ago and it works like gangbusters. It should also be real easy to code.

Finally, I have to take issue with some of what BR was so nice to say. This is the same question I sent him in a recent email.

Brian, what good are specials for large cities if they don't live long enough to get big? This should be the numero uno question because the biggest single problem is surviving the rover/chariot rush in the early game. An effective counter to this strategy will then allow builders like me to get a whole lot more enjoyment out of the game and really piss off the conquistadors like Darkstar and Analyst!

posted 08-06-99 09:28 PM ET            

ICS == Infinite City Sleaze.

posted 08-07-99 02:58 AM ET            

I am glad to hear that BR and team are trying to find ways to up large cities, and limit ICS. Hurray!

posted 08-07-99 05:56 AM ET            

Thanks to Brian for responding. This is one of my highest priorities for Civ3.

posted 08-07-99 01:31 PM ET            

Now if JKM would have sid that uncleroggy is a pathetic loser because he's an LA Kings fan, THEN HE WOULD HAVE BEEN RIGHT!!!!!!!!!

GO KINGS GO!

posted 08-07-99 05:22 PM ET            

"1) Simply have a barrack, naval base or airfield as the only requirement to raise units other than a militia type unit for city defense."

Same problem :
Barracks needed for a simple horsemen or Archers?
Naval base is only available late in the game. Do you also need a Naval base for a trireme.
Airfield is only available after you discover Radio, then Fighters already exist.

Besides the upkeep cost for a barracks in every city would be huge.

"2) Link raising of units to the happiness of the city"

Nah, USSR population wasn't happy, but they had a huge army.

"really build in penalties that slam the city for over production."

In the first millenia of the game, my entire civ was a settler producing organism and that didn't quit until I had at least 40 cities(though I didn't play ICS, I build the cities on reasonable distances).
Because of that I had a very low shields output through settler support.
Isn't that already a production penalty?

"This will force players to build in the population centers and give population the real importance for unit building."

I have in my head a support (line) system, but I haven't posted it yet due to lack of time.

An extract of it :
The production of any military land unit (so not sea/air/trade/diplomatic/explorer...) takes out of the food box 200(everythingx10!) food to simulate the loss of population.

"3)Emulate the unit support system from CTP."

What do you think of my SE Support Factor?

"Regardless of what anyone may say, I think that idea and the public works system were two good ideas from that game."

Yeah, I agree Public Works is a good idea.

"4) Develop a "lines of communication" system based on movement points from the nearest city, depot or base. Units that extend beyond that point would be out of supply and subject to numerous penalties for movement and combat."

Included in my support system. Sorry now no time to post it, perhaps August 9.

OK perhaps a little time.

Every unit needs 20 food icons each turn.
If the unit is just produced it has 200 food in it's food storage box.
If the square where the unit ends it's turn produces 20 food, there happens nothing.
If it ends on a square producing less than 20, there goes food out of the box.
So if it ended on a plains the food reserve would diminish to 190.
On a desert to 180...
If it ended on a square producing more than 20, the food would be added to the box.
So a unit ending on an irrigated grassland, would regain 10 food.

A unit can maximally store 200 food, even if it stays always on a 3 food producing square.

If the food reserve is depleted and the unit ends it's turn on a plain, 10% of it's hit points disappeares, 20% for a desert...

Units in a city or a fortress don't need food, so only if you are in an all-out war, you get supply line problems.

Perhaps in the modern time the same could be done with oil.