Many people have posted that 'snaking cities' is 'bad' because . I disagree. First, its a fantasy game, and snaking gives us some choices. Second, in real life, all cities are NOT circular, etc., especially pre- auto cities. Actually, many come in some pretty strange shapes. Spend an hour looking at old geography books.

Apheirox wrote:
Strange thread. It is completely incorrect that the Broken lords ignore approval - in fact, they get exactly the same penalty as everybody else. Yes, city-level Approval only affects Food and Industry, but empire-level Approval - which affects Dust and Science in exactly the same way is directly derived from city-level approvals of your cities - get the same maluses. If you spam lots of cities with BL your dust- and science production will plummet. You can see your empire-level approval and its effects on your Empire Overview Screen (or whatever it's called, it's the button at the extreme top left).



I haven't looked the numbers deeply over yet, but I strongly doubt BL are as 'broken' as most here appear to believe - unless the amount of Dust required to buyout population is much lower than the amount of Food required to grow pop, they should scale nicely with the other factions.

The reason for the confusion is the misleading feedback on city-level happiness and the heavier penalty that food and production receive in a large city. The BL can--to an extent--exploit the bifurcation of the happiness modifiers and build a huge powerhouse city and avoid the empire-level happiness penalty by keeping happiness very high in other cities (leaving them with smaller foot prints) or by using global happiness boosters (wine luxury goods booster or the empire plan modifier).



That said, I don't find this to be a problem after about 80 hours of gameplay (half of that as the BL). The concerns expressed in this thread seem to be based on either (a) a misconception of how happiness functions (as you've pointed out), or (b) a theoretical notion of what the BL can do without examining the faction in comparison to others, or (c) general hostility to the concept of buying things out.

Are BL easier than other factions? For sure easier than Necrophages.

But otherwise:

They loose 1 resourse to benefit from. And it is not hard to get food. Also you need to manually care for population when in vaulters/windwakers it just came to you.

You need to pay for healing after battle this one really sucks.

You have no ranged, and ranged now rocks.



The thing which keeps them now is that economy is a mess, and there is a lot of everything, and it can snowball in any FIDS you want.

Strange thread. It is completely incorrect that the Broken lords ignore approval - in fact, they get exactly the same penalty as everybody else. Yes, city-level Approval only affects Food and Industry, but empire-level Approval - which affects Dust and Science in exactly the same way is directly derived from city-level approvals of your cities - get the same maluses. If you spam lots of cities with BL your dust- and science production will plummet. You can see your empire-level approval and its effects on your Empire Overview Screen (or whatever it's called, it's the button at the extreme top left).



I haven't looked the numbers deeply over yet, but I strongly doubt BL are as 'broken' as most here appear to believe - unless the amount of Dust required to buyout population is much lower than the amount of Food required to grow pop, they should scale nicely with the other factions.

Broken Lords is not OP after turn 200, when Vaulters finally show how OP they are.

I am absolutely loving playing as the Broken Lords. It's the first civ-style game with a "doesn't consume food" mechanism that is interesting and fun.



And please, dear god, can people stop crying about anything being too strong? One, it's an alpha - what's important is fun, not balance. And two, if one civ feels too strong, boost the others, don't nerf-bat everything interesting into the ground.

Varadhon wrote:
Out of curiosity, what was the design motivation for bifurcating the application of city-level approval (to food and production only) and empire-level approval (to dust & science only)? This mechanic strikes me as odd.

I would guess it's so that if you're taking lots of cities, it doesn't hit your production/growth in your main cities. If they had everything apply for the empire, expanding too fast would shut down your factories, meaning that all playstyles become more similar. It allows for a split - productive on science dust + not expanding so hard vs. expanding hard, not so productive on science + dust.

For those who consider the Broken Lords OP, it's worth considering that each of their advantages also has a downside.



Yes, they can buy pop increases with dust - but then again, they give up all food production, whether on the map or from nice efficient buildings such as Seed Storage. Those aren't replaced with some dust-equivalent, they're just stripped from the Broken Lord's options entirely. For the Lords, it's not FIDSI, it's just IDSI. Or maybe iDsi?



Yes, they can heal their units instantly with dust, and yes that's powerful... but otherwise they get no natural healing at all. With other factions, if they can pace their battles, their units will eventually heal to full at no cost.



Don't get me wrong, I think the Broken Lords are powerful overall... but not OP.

Something to consider:

When you expand city each new tile outside the walls gives you -5 happiness, but every tile in walls gives you +5 hapiness. Only counts tiles you work, so no ruins or unpassable terrain. You can't build city walls near region border. :-)

Which means that the starting city happiness is 90, and everything counts from begining. (1 tile in walls, 6 around without gives around 60 hapiness to start).

I snaked a city really big going into Era 3 and realized I needed to put two very unimportant upgrades to "level up the town" for the faction quest. It's kinda lame how leveling up a town requires city buildup a certain way, but if that's the mechanic to avoid snaking, so be it.

I've tried out the diff factions, game keeps getting encountering errors with the broken lords. Whom are my favorites by a land slide so far, heh.

You also have to compare it to how the food cost scales up - I would not be surprised if they were actually scaling exactly the same, it's just that spending dust to grow population is so much more "painful" as you're made aware of how much it costs.

Atepa wrote:
I'm confused, in the first paragraph, you're saying the cost is too low for population, and in the second paragraph your saying to reduce the cost of buying higher population. Wouldn't that mean they are somewhat balancing themselves out? You can get a lot of cities to 5-6 population (which is 3 Boroughs I believe) relatively easily in a BL city, however... to get the 10+ pop it costs a fair bit, I'm actually really okay with this... it makes the BL more expansionist... lots of smaller cities as opposed to a few big cities.

The idea of forcing them to have smaller cities sounds interesting on paper, but then they need an ability to counter expansion disapproval to stay competetive.

Although I must say I am not 100% sure how big cities can actually grow anyway. It seems that diminishing returns past 15 pop are pretty insane (which might be the reason why their pop becomes so costly).

It also looks like cost of population does scale with something... not sure if it is with the Era you're in or how many cities you have (on the list of things to test tonight) but for my 20th city in my game yesterday my 2nd population was costing me 137 dust as opposed to the 34 or so it was costing for my first city.

Maybe the devs could give us some info on how the cost does actually scale.

3ntf4k3d wrote:
After playing the Broken Lords a few times I think we need a BIG increase on buyout cost and either signficantly increase the cost for buying pop in low-pop cities or make their pop consume dust instead of food (add a per-turn upkeep scaling with pop size).

Overall they seem like a nightmare to balance - the ability to ignore food means that these guys can focus much more on the outer IDS and the fact that dust can replace production means that they play a bit like the Sowers in Endless Space: Just focus completely on your strong point and ignore everything else.



As for the problem of 10+ city size: Add race specific techs that reduces the cost for high-pop cities (this way you could more easily control the max pop in each era).

E.g.: "Dust is Life": -25% pop cost for 5+ pop cities in Era II

"High Purity Creation": -25% pop cost for 10+ pop cities in Era III

I'm confused, in the first paragraph, you're saying the cost is too low for population, and in the second paragraph your saying to reduce the cost of buying higher population. Wouldn't that mean they are somewhat balancing themselves out? You can get a lot of cities to 5-6 population (which is 3 Boroughs I believe) relatively easily in a BL city, however... to get the 10+ pop it costs a fair bit, I'm actually really okay with this... it makes the BL more expansionist... lots of smaller cities as opposed to a few big cities.



It also looks like cost of population does scale with something... not sure if it is with the Era you're in or how many cities you have (on the list of things to test tonight) but for my 20th city in my game yesterday my 2nd population was costing me 137 dust as opposed to the 34 or so it was costing for my first city.

After playing the Broken Lords a few times I think we need a BIG increase on buyout cost and either signficantly increase the cost for buying pop in low-pop cities or make their pop consume dust instead of food (add a per-turn upkeep scaling with pop size).

Overall they seem like a nightmare to balance - the ability to ignore food means that these guys can focus much more on the outer IDS and the fact that dust can replace production means that they play a bit like the Sowers in Endless Space: Just focus completely on your strong point and ignore everything else.



As for the problem of 10+ city size: Add race specific techs that reduces the cost for high-pop cities (this way you could more easily control the max pop in each era).

E.g.: "Dust is Life": -25% pop cost for 5+ pop cities in Era II

"High Purity Creation": -25% pop cost for 10+ pop cities in Era III

Past city-sized 10, growing a single city with Dust is impossibly expensive even with a total focus on Dust with tech, heroes, etc. The stage when you start getting thousands of Dust is also the stage when everyone else is still growing, getting leveled-up cities. For example, going from 13 to 14 in one city costs over 7,000 Dust!



Essentially, the Broken Lords are a rush position. They are powerful in the beginning of the game because they don't need Food and can use Minor Factions and modest Dust costs to get some size 5-6 cities, but getting decent-sized cities with developed districts is something that they don't do. Essentially, rushing other people's size 10-13 cities is going to be the only way to fuel a rush since they can't really take advantage of tech and hero abilities that use the "per worker" mechanic.



Without the ability to build larger cities, I think this will keep the Broken Lords out of the top tiers of tech if Production, Influence, and Research costs scale in the last two Eras at the same rate as they do in the first four Eras.

Broken Lords is just OP..

Get the Dust production up and running, and you are home free ^^

Propbuddha wrote:
Isn't the calculation the root of the problem? Any faction with a lot of Dust is going to be able to do this, Broken Lords are just easier to do it with...

In theory, Broken Lords aren't supposed to "have a lot of dust". They're supposed to be earning enough extra that they can afford to grow their cities at a similar pace.

In practice, they get mounds upon mounds of Dust beyond what other factions get.

wyldmage wrote:
Its better to tackle the roots of the problem than simply try and apply a band-aid solution over the top.

Isn't the calculation the root of the problem? Any faction with a lot of Dust is going to be able to do this, Broken Lords are just easier to do it with...

SticknStack wrote:
I can't tell if any of the factions are actually strong (1) or tier 3 equips combined with basic ai makes the faction seem strong (2).



Broken lord population growth is not bad and probably on the really high side in late game once you have 2k dust per turn.

True: there's functionally no difference between proposition 1 and proposition 2. =) We can't really evaluate any faction against another until more features are implemented and the AI is improved (or MP added). The only viable approximation I see is to run parallel games and evaluate one faction's progress against another. Even then, that's far from complete as comparisons go.