As of right now Humankind has a lot of freedom with its mechanics due to the fact that few of them have direct limits placed on top of them. Sure this does lead to some balancing issues such as district spam due to the fact their stability cost is negligible, but I prefer it to stay organic like it is instead of just placing a hardcap on the amount of districts you can own. Food suffers a lot from being limited to a max of one population growth per turn, science overflows, industry overflows but not growth. This leads to problems with food as an undesirable resource aside from providing stability, which ties into the district spam problem. Uncapped Population growth could lead to its own problems but should involve the tweaking of some units and their population costs, for example ships costing more population. Having too many people might actually be a problem at some point, I never had to deal with an overpopulation penalty before during the opendev because it was so manageable.

Hopefully these problems can be addressed in time, I haven't even mentioned the issues this causes with tall vs wide, as going wide is incredibly more useful due to the increase in cities and thus increase in population growth, but either way the game releases in April and I hope Growth is uncapped by then.

I expect exponential growth to be removed entirely, as while it is realistic, it doesn't work with the game's mechanics. Pop growth really shouldn't hit 1 per turn except in the most extreme case.

Here are some solutio to prevent to many mergers of cities

- make it cost more to annax

- make the territories smaller, so you need more of them to annax

- use influence city maintenance that is higher then for more territories than it are all just cities. (i liked this influence maintenance a lot in endless spoace 2)

Or you can look at my suggestion for alternative uses for excess food. Summary. Where I suggest that growth be one of three choices for how food is used. Making food use more diverse makes the hard cap less punishing.

Lompeluiten wrote:

Here are some solutio to prevent to many mergers of cities

- make it cost more to annax

- make the territories smaller, so you need more of them to annax

- use influence city maintenance that is higher then for more territories than it are all just cities. (i liked this influence maintenance a lot in endless spoace 2)

Increasing cost to attach outpots/lands to existing cities would be a good start. Not sure about making territories smaller, because by doing so, players would then be facing so many small chunks of lands and are more encouraged to merge. In a way, this may even lead to more thinking demand from players as to which pieces of lands should they annex.

As far as I am concerned, we should not be forcing players into merging lands nor should we be encouraging them. Decisions to annex lands should be a litte more critical and not taken lightly. Sadly, it is the case in Lucy build which encouraged people to merge lands.

About using influence as a part of maint cost and scale with more territories, that can be a good idea and possible alternative use of influnece.

Lompeluiten wrote:

Other ways to approach growth: 

- increase food maintenance to 4. This studio likes to hurl large numbers at you, so more food maintenance should be implemented. Maybe even gradualy increase the food/pop with more pops.  

Could be an idea, but not gonna go into this much as I have no clues about how food formula and growth work in Lucy build. The tool tips outlining food expense and income did not entirely help much either. :(

FlamingKetchup wrote:

I expect exponential growth to be removed entirely, as while it is realistic, it doesn't work with the game's mechanics. Pop growth really shouldn't hit 1 per turn except in the most extreme case.

Agreed to some extent, pop growth in cities even in large ones should not be hitting hard cap of 1 every turn. However, I do not think such case need to be that extreme, because it may defeat the whole purpose of having hard cap limit of 1.

If we do not allow cities able to hit hard cap limit easily to some extent, large cities may suffer in war period when there is a need of manpower for creating armies. This is probably where farmers slot can shine when we want constant increase of population by increasing food production. (even if it hits hard cap +1 per turn) Another way to look at this issue, having a hard cap limit of +1 pop also means players can use this information to plan ahead with population management in next couple of turns. Uncapped growth would completely ruin it of course, because there would be no thinking/planning involved in the first place.

Waper wrote:
Increasing cost to attach outpots/lands to existing cities would be a good start. Not sure about making territories smaller, because by doing so, players would then be facing so many small chunks of lands and are more encouraged to merge. In a way, this may even lead to more thinking demand from players as to which pieces of lands should they annex.

As far as I am concerned, we should not be forcing players into merging lands nor should we be encouraging them. Decisions to annex lands should be a litte more critical and not taken lightly. Sadly, it is the case in Lucy build which encouraged people to merge lands.

They put in this lovely mechanic of annexing territories to you city. If you really commit to it, jeah, merging territories will necessary, but by having more of them, you need to chose more. This could be fun! The endless legend method did feel a bit stale pretty quickly 

O, and another possible way to attack mega cities is to increase the cost of infrastructure by the amount of territories. 

What's all this talk about making annexing cities even more expensive and difficult when that's already the worse option to use? Single territory cities I found to be much more useful and the only reason to annex a location was to place a spawn point there for my armies.

Waper wrote:

Laliloluhla wrote:

What's all this talk about making annexing cities even more expensive and difficult when that's already the worse option to use? Single territory cities I found to be much more useful and the only reason to annex a location was to place a spawn point there for my armies.

Because that is one of main reasons contributing to some cities able to hit hard cap pop limit of +1 per turn?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with single zone cities. Cities of all sizes have both pros and cons.

I don't know about you but the main contribution to hitting the pop cap is not absorbing smaller territories into larger territories, but to turn the population of your largest city into units so that they can disband inside your other cities,thus increasing the population growth rate. And unlike merging territory this has much longer term benefits in terms of production and overall population growth. I think Single Zone Cities are much stronger and there should be a bigger effort to balance the two styles of play.

And if we move away from the existing system of population growth? Now population growth depends on food and spends stability. In reality, population growth depends on living standards and food consumption. Therefore, in reality, food only provides the population, but does not increase (decreases as a result of hunger).

Therefore, it will be interesting to move away from the system of the previous 4 strategies and show the "race" with hunger, known as the Malthusian trap.