With the excellent .14 patch a number of issues have been resolved and we can turn to other matters to further improve the game. One issue I haven't seen discussed is the implications of the fact that (dis)approval doesn't scale with map size or number of players. This does, however, create a number of imbalances.



Essentially, it doesn't matter if you're playing a huge or tiny map or how many opponents there are - the limiting cap on how many systems you can own will be the same regardless because it is dictated by the ever-static approval limits that change only with difficulty setting. This is very different from many other 4x and strategy games where it does scale. That it is static creates some problems in that some factions and playing styles benefit much more from certain settings than others do:



For any warlike factions - such as Cravers and Hissho - the bigger the map is and the less densely populated it is the worse the situation gets. Their way of competing is through conquest but conquering a huge galaxy is impossible until the very late game when there are finally enough approval-boosting improvements and technologies to make it feasible. Conversely, these factions are overpowered on smaller maps where their military capabilities shine the most and approval is the least limiting.



On the opposite end of the scale, the Sophons are perhaps the standard faction that benefits the most from massive, empty environments: They can nearly exempt their populace from taxation and go absolutely expansion-crazy, using their fast ships to quickly scout'n'grab all the tasty planets. However, even the Sophons will run into approval issues and can only colonize a limited section of the galaxy to begin with - large parts of the galaxy will have to remain unsettled for a large part of the game since nobody can simply afford to colonize due to the approval penalty.



The question is what changes to make to how approval scales with map conditions, if any. Should it scale with the amount of players so that you can expand twice as much with only half the amount of players? Should it scale with map size so that you receive much less 'expansion disapproval' if you're playing a two player game on a huge map?

Expansion disapproval is the only thing that should scale, and it should scale based on system to player ratio. If you have a 64-system galaxy with two players (admittedly a silly situation), expansion disapproval should be very minimal, or 90% of the galaxy will be wasted for 80% of the game. On the other hand, it should be fairly harsh (as it is now, or worse) in a 32-system galaxy with 8 players.



Just off the top of my head, something like: (2 * sqrt(numPlayers/numSystems)) * difficultyMult

The difficulty multipliers range from 4x at Newbie to 7x at Endless



In the 2-player 64-system example, this would yield 1.75 expansion disapproval per system at Normal difficulty, or 2.4 on Endless. You could colonize quite a few systems early on before feeling it.



In the 8-player 32-system example, this would be the current 5 on Normal and 7 on Endless.



4p, 32s: 3.5 and 5

2p, 32s: 2.5 and 3.5

etc etc



This is not doable in a mod unfortunately, since there's no way to get galaxy size and player count, nor perform sqrt/pow operations in the XML.





Edit: I'd also like to see the Expansion Disapproval techs changed so that the earlier ones take out a more similarly-sized chunk. Right now, they're all an additive -22%, which means that the first one is doing -22%, the second one is doing -28% of what's left, the third is doing -40%, and the final one -64%.



Something like -30/25/20/15% for relative improvements of -30/35/45/60% would make the earlier techs (and especially the first) a bit more meaningful, without significantly altering end-game expansion disapproval (12% to 10% remaining, a relative 16% decrease) nor significantly harming the late-game techs.

I have to agree with Mikey.

Mikey's numbers I cannot be positive I agree with (I'm tired from helping someone move all day long, so my my math senses are below average) but the concept I agree with, but I wish to add one part to it. Also have a race multiplier, so that expansion based races get a lesser expansion disapproval.



X,Y,Z are variables that I have yet to decide on (again, perhaps his numbers make ones I approve of, maybe not. I'll check sometime later when I'm not exhausted)



(X * sqrt(YnumPlayers/ZnumSystems)) * difficultyMult * raceMult



Make like Hissho and Cravers like .85 (again, off the top of my head and not a number I endorse) compared to the rest at 1 (maybe one higher if the lore seems like the expand slower? Can't think of any off the top of my head; see why above).



Perhaps that would make them too OP in some regards, so maybe they shouldn't get that. Just an idea.

This is one of the primary factors why I just can't play the game any more. I'm sure the most of you like this mechanic, but it really does fly in the face of enjoyment of the game for me, and, I would think, many of my similarly minded, closet meglomanics. While some may argue that it may be realistic, I would point out that the very concept of this game is a fantasy, and a 4x game is about expansion, not about retarding it with an arbitrary number. Under the Endless Space model, there would be no Federation of Planets (Hundreds of planets), no Romulan Empire, no Klingon Empire, no Old Republic, no Galactic Empire, no Man-Kzin wars . . . Mass Effect would be just right out. Halo? Hahah.



The Firefly Universe couldn't exist either . . .



I much prefer to play large galaxies, and I also prefer to keep player count low.



Please either scale the mechanic as these folks suggest, or remove it entirely. I would like to play the game again.

I wonder how many other rules are fixed regardless of map size? We now know luxury resources are fixed at seven per regardless of map size. Its annoying to think what else is preventing us good play regardless of map size.

Shivetya wrote:
I wonder how many other rules are fixed regardless of map size? We now know luxury resources are fixed at seven per regardless of map size. Its annoying to think what else is preventing us good play regardless of map size.

But then you'd have to increase the number of resource deposits one would need in order to claim the monopoly bonus; else everyone is going to get it. Also, you'd have to reduce the bonus for individual resources as well.



I think expansion disapproval is fine as it is; I only play on large maps, but even there it is absolutely no problem to manage it. In fact, it probably is still to easy - lowering the tax rates provides too good results. Once you start teching you'll hit the 88% reduction in expansion disapproval quite fast and nearly all of the approval buildings are there to counter expansion disapproval. In any serious game you'll fullfill the expansion victory condition long before disapproval becomes a crippling issue.



Also you need a mechanism in order to curb expansion. If you do not, the game becomes absolutely trivial.

GruulTapul wrote:
But then you'd have to increase the number of resource deposits one would need in order to claim the monopoly bonus; else everyone is going to get it. Also, you'd have to reduce the bonus for individual resources as well.



.

Uh, so what? It would be logical that that the more planets there are that the more resources there are. Extending that would lead us to conclude by default there are more chances for each race to have monopoly benefits. So the term monopoly is incorrect. I understand one reason for their desire to push to have only one race to have four of any one unit but the system can work just fine with any number of people have a "monopoly" or should we say, "abundance of" to where they can get special benefits.



Luxury resource already have silly modifiers and should be scaled back as it. 40%????? Get real, they are game breaking. Essentially once someone gets far enough to have the monopoly the other players may as well just quit. A 10% modifier is more than justified, 40% is ridiculous.

We're not talking about eliminating expansion disapproval, just making it scale somewhat based on map size. If you look at the numbers I posted above (admittedly just a quick guess at a good formula), a standard Medium map with 8 players would have default expansion disapproval. Halving the number of players or doubling the number of systems only reduces disapproval by about 30%. This is not enough to allow mass expansion, but it will get you one or two more systems within the same approval range as the default values. Even a galaxy with 8 players set to Huge and High Density (106 systems) would only see a 45% reduction in expansion disapproval per system, despite having 3.5x as many systems as the standard Medium.





And yes, resource monopolies are far too valuable. If anything, the per-resource bonuses should be slightly increased and the monopoly bonus significantly decreased, so that you don't get a 500% jump in effectiveness when you go from 3 resources to 4, and single resource deposits aren't totally worthless.

Resource quantity should be decided by the galaxy generator setting anyway, and the limit of 7 should only apply on the Normal setting.

Shivetya wrote:
Uh, so what? It would be logical that that the more planets there are that the more resources there are. Extending that would lead us to conclude by default there are more chances for each race to have monopoly benefits. So the term monopoly is incorrect. I understand one reason for their desire to push to have only one race to have four of any one unit but the system can work just fine with any number of people have a "monopoly" or should we say, "abundance of" to where they can get special benefits.



Luxury resource already have silly modifiers and should be scaled back as it. 40%????? Get real, they are game breaking. Essentially once someone gets far enough to have the monopoly the other players may as well just quit. A 10% modifier is more than justified, 40% is ridiculous.

But this is not how they designed it; the idea was that at maximum one player gets a big benefit and all the others get only a small fraction of it. I see no reason to change that, since it works well in the current setting and encourages conflict. You really want a monopoly because the bonuses offered are very valuable. If you make them as abundant as you suggest, everyone is going to have them and if everyone has them, you might as well delete them from the game or make them intrinsic bonuses .



Also not all resources are worth that much. Depending on the stage of the game, some monopolies are almost worthless.

Mikey wrote:
We're not talking about eliminating expansion disapproval, just making it scale somewhat based on map size. If you look at the numbers I posted above (admittedly just a quick guess at a good formula), a standard Medium map with 8 players would have default expansion disapproval. Halving the number of players or doubling the number of systems only reduces disapproval by about 30%. This is not enough to allow mass expansion, but it will get you one or two more systems within the same approval range as the default values. Even a galaxy with 8 players set to Huge and High Density (106 systems) would only see a 45% reduction in expansion disapproval per system, despite having 3.5x as many systems as the standard Medium.

Again, I see no need for this. If you indeed manage to grab as many planets for expansion disapproval to matter in anything but the early game (Where expansion disapproval is needed) you've already won the game anyway. If you indeed manage to get to the late game, expansion disapproval does no longer matter since you reduce it by 88% via technology. At that point you can counteract 40-50 systems with one or two approval buildings per system, even on Impossible or Endless.

That depends entirely on map size. Grabbing 7-8 systems should be no big deal in a 106 system huge galaxy, but you're right, expansion disapproval is needed to prevent that really early on in a 32-system galaxy-- and it should be even more harsh in a 24 system galaxy with 8 players. Not everyone plays the same way, on the same galaxy size, and I don't see an issue with roughly halving expansion disapproval for extremely large galaxies and increasing it by around 50% in more crowded galaxies. This change would scarcely affect you (if at all) if you play small- to medium-sized galaxies with 4-6 players.

GruulTapul wrote:
But this is not how they designed it; the idea was that at maximum one player gets a big benefit and all the others get only a small fraction of it. I see no reason to change that, since it works well in the current setting and encourages conflict. You really want a monopoly because the bonuses offered are very valuable. If you make them as abundant as you suggest, everyone is going to have them and if everyone has them, you might as well delete them from the game or make them intrinsic bonuses .



Also not all resources are worth that much. Depending on the stage of the game, some monopolies are almost worthless.

In principle, few people will disagree with you. However, there will be plenty of disagreement over the exact implementation, namely how single resources are completely worthless (making most of them NOT worth fighting over, ever, unless you have an excellent chance of a monopoly) and how some monopolies are insanely overpowered, nevermind over 5 times as strong as having THREE of a resource.



Making each resource worth roughly 15% of the final monopoly bonus means that you can get nearly half the benefit with three resources, while still keeping monopolies very powerful and important (as they would roughly double the effect when going from three to four resources). If you really can't see how a ~115% jump in effectiveness from the third to fourth resource is enough to fight over (nevermind how the larger benefit from each individual makes those more worth bargaining for/fighting over even without the chance of monopoly), you've got an odd way of evaluating game balance and bonus worth.