interesting, never bothered detaching, this will certainly provide easy agrarian stars indeed. (or maybe there should be no detaching, thanks to this little tip right here someone might fix it prior to release of the game)

Hmm... how about if detaching also moved some of the city's population into the detached outpost? I think that should prevent the exploit. Of course the real issue here is influence costs for attachment becoming a non-issue.

Hi all, as one of playtesters who took part in Victor and also Lucy, I did use this method of attaching and detaching a lot myself in order to gain large number of pops into my cities. I even noted this plan and presented the idea to others in Discord. Personally, I sort of call this strategy a 'pops bank outposts'. Here is a screenshot from one of my gameplays based on this strategy in mind:

Certainly, this strategy is powerful and very handy for anyone to gain some pops whenever they need. However, after playing around with this plan and analysing how it plays out after a number of games, there are still some pros and cons to it for which I will address in here.

Pros / Advantages

1. Overcoming the hard cap of +1 pop growth per turn for each city. (Most of players who have played Victor and/or Lucy build should know this already by now.)

2. More pops to work as specialists or be recruited for military purpose - This also makes those high cost Hamlets a little more attractive to build for holding pops gained from outposts with this strategy but still not to the point of spamming them like back in Lucy. I know Hamlets have been nerfed a lot already since Lucy build with double the cost of standard districts and also only exploit food and industry now. As far as I am concerned in Victor, some players already seem to be less inclined to build these in mass, for which you have achieved the goal of balancing Hamlets already.

Anyway, my point is if you nerf the attach and detach mechanic too much in certain fashion, Hamlets may be placed in even worst position.

3. Anyone and any cultures can do this - Having said that, Agrarian cultures still have an upper hand in maintaining larger population than all others thanks to their high food output while Militarist cultures can use their ability more often by converting extra pops from outposts into Militia. More on these in additional notes.


Cons / Disadvantages

1. Smaller pool of resources (rss) available to players from cities - Outposts that are not attached to any cities also means resources that are not used and exploited by players. This is actually one of major drawbacks from adopting this plan. Granted players who do this can gain a lot of pops in each turn from all outposts they have, but they are trading potential rss pool for more pops growth instead. This matters a lot especially in later Era where a lot of things start to cost more industry, science, and money to build and research. Cities with small number of territories are not going to cut it, and this would force players to expand eventually. Statistically speaking, it is almost impossible for cities with just 1 territory to build units and other expensive improvements in later Era.

2. Small and limited city development - Due to having to detach often to allow outposts to grow pops, players would have to focus more on developing 1 or few territories only in order to maximise benefits of 'pops bank' outposts plan or forcing more internal development in limited space. This can be both good and bad with regards to scaling cost of new districts being built that lends itself to players' playstyle preference.

However, do remember that the more districts we have in a city (regardless of how many territories we have given or attached), the more industry and money next district gonna cost. If we focus too much on internal development limited to just 1 territory for a long time just to take advantage of this 'pops bank' strategy alone, we may find ourselves in a tough spot where it takes longer time or harder to actually build next district in another territory when we decide to attach it permanently. (or needing more money to rush build new districts to stay in competition and not lagging behind.)

Sooner or later, as highlighted in point 1 of cons, players would eventually have to expand anyway and reduce efficiency of this plan. The main question is 'when is the right time' to forgo or stop using 'pops bank' plan.

3. Needing constant supply of influence for attaching and detaching outposts regularly - Without exploiting Religion system where players pick mostly just tenets that give influence income, it is actually hard to accumulate influence needed for this plan if not for picking right combination of Civics. This is also not to mention all of those influence pts could be better used for other things like grabbing World Wonders, founding new cities, expansion with new outposts for certain resources, etc. (An exception to this is when players choose a Civic for using money to attach instead of influence, which eliminates this disadvantage and freeing up player influence.)

Obviously, this can be minimised with careful city management and planning and also picking up Civics that reduce the cost of attaching. However, even if players do this, they will still be subjected to all the cons highlighted in here.

4. All detatched outposts are prone to be attacked or ransacked - Owners of 'pops bank' outposts need to keep armies for guarding or constantly patrolling to ensure they do not lose their sources of workforce outside of their cities. Some people might think that since they can gain a lot of pops anyway in return from having military units around to protect those outposts, but you will still lose some industry, money, and some turns (time) to build those in such process. This is particularly true for having large number of territories in Multi-player environment.

In short, maintaining 'pops bank' outposts do require an investment into military to protect them, which may varies depending on how many lands they have in poscession.

5. More Micro-management - The level of micro management from adopting this strategy is increased as much as having many smaller cities over the cap limit. Some players may not like this method in their gameplay, and this is certainly true for those who aim to min-max population growth from all outposts they have. We cannot and should not deny this fact. Instead of assigning what to produce or build next in cities, players now have to monitor all the outposts they have to check population and also calculate how much influence/money they gonna need to attach and detach again for injecting pops into their cities.

I understand that Devs most likely want to eliminate or minimise level of micro-management in the game in favour of more macro-management with allowing players to merge cities starting in mid game. However, I do not think nerfing this aspect of the game would help entirely, because players can still try to expand by obtaining many cities anyway and adopt the go wide strategy where players have many small cities instead of merging them all together. Whether by conquest from taking over Independent People cities or by founding their own cities over time and going over their city cap limit.

6. Overpopulation - If cities take in too many pops over the capacity limit they can hold from attaching and detaching outposts, the overpopulation mechanic (where players are hit with negative food income) will kick in and already serve as balance factor in Victor build. So players have to be careful when taking in pops from any of their outposts to avoid starvation and possibly losing pops intead of gaining.

7. Needing territories with high food output from terrain/tile exploits - This is the last and very important issue. 'Pops bank' outposts plan only work best in locations where there are abundant food supply from land. However, ideal locations for placing outposts may be hard to find. One thing all players have to take in account is defense. Sometimes, those locations in some territories may be close to your opponent lands, which effectively can render this plan invalid or not suitable. This is because your opponents could become your enemy can come to your outposts and ransack them. (Or outposts being stolen by Expansionist ability based on Victor build mechanic.) Again, as pointed out previously in point 4, we need armies to protect these outposts and locations do matter a lot in defense as we know in HK.


Conclusion

In summary, please DO NOT think that this strategy is broken or too overpowered when carried out. There certainly are some merits in doing this, but as pointed out, there are still quite a fair number of cons or issues that players have to take in account before adopting this plan.

Additional Notes

1. The fact that Militarist cultures can potentially swarm their enemies with huge number of militias is one of major issues that all players need to be aware of, which is by combining their affinity ability of raising militia with 'pops bank' strategy. This makes these cultures dangerous to play against, but at the same time, this makes up for their lack of economic boost unlike other cultures where their unique abilities helps boosting their gameplay in their respective fortes. (Apart from expansionist cultures for which I do not know what kind of tweaks or balance you Devs gonna give to help them.)

I am not entirely or absolutely certain myself if this issue could become an exploit with swarming tactic. Although, one could argue that large quanity of militias would not matter much as long as others who are not Militarist maintain decent armies to protect themselves and play more defensively against swarms of militia with proper army positioning and also by teching up to obtain better units. Additionally, any lost militias from Militarist cultures also means more fame pts for others who kill them.

2. This strategy actually gives a degree of importance to Legacy Traits in what kind of yield bonus from pops should players get in Neolithic Era.

If players plan to have so many of these 'pops bank' outpost lying around, then the best or ideal Legacy Trait for them to get is the +1 science bonus per pop or Story Teller. By picking this trait, it will make outposts more useful for players by contributing small science bonus to the Empire rather than being 'pops bank' only.

However, please do note that this does not mean that other 2 traits (food and industry per pops) are inferior to Story Teller but rather they are more ideal for different kind of playstyles for which I am not going into more details here in this thread. (That would be too off-topic)

3. It is actually possible for outposts to have number of pops over their capacity limit, as long as enough food is supplied to facilitate their pops growth. (Each outposts have default capacity of 4 slots, which is the same as Hamlets, City Centres, and Admin Centres.)


To Devs, you may want to consider placing a limit to how many pops can outposts can hold so that the pops number cannot go over capacity. As far as I am concerned, if there is no such limit, this whole thing would actually turn into an exploit rather than just a viable strategy. If players want to to be able to hold more pops in their outposts, I believe that they must be forced to build some districts on those lands in order to hold more pops even though they may not use them for rss. This is for balance purpose, and I would strongly recommend imposing this limit before launch date.

Besides, I also do think it would be broken if players can spend 100 or less influence to attach 1 outpost for gaining 6+ pops into their cities in 1 move. Under normal circumstances, most outposts can only hold about 5-6 pops (or even 7-8 max in ideal locations) with a tech in Medieval Era which gives +1 Food to all tiles. However, under certain rare cases like this situation where (bugged) Celts LT boosts food output from terrains:

It is actually possible for players to gain more than 10+ pops in 1 turn into their cities with little amount of influence spent. If this is not broken, I would not know what is. Even if this issue is ignored by fixing the Celts LT bug, I still think being able to gain about 6 pops into a city is still a little too overpowered or broken, because the number of influence needed to inject 6 pops would be relatively low.

Again, back to my previous suggestion... Please do consider putting a limit to how many can outposts hold pops. Otherwise, this can be exploited throughout the whole game regardless of timing.

===============================================

Thank you for reading. I will go over some of your posts in this thread with my replies when I got time sooner or later today.

wilbefast wrote:

Hmm... how about if detaching also moved some of the city's population into the detached outpost? I think that should prevent the exploit. Of course the real issue here is influence costs for attachment becoming a non-issue.

I do not think moving a certain number of city pops into the detached outposts would help solving this issue.

As many of you stated, the influence cost for attachment become non-issue later on in the game. This strategy can be become potent, but we still have to remember that anyone can still do this at any time and be subjected to all the cons I listed. Whether they wish to do it or not is another story.

If I may suggest another idea as one of possible solutions... How about also giving influence cost for detaching outposts too?

The cost could be the exactly the same as when players attach the outpost. Rather than keeping the cost for detaching to be zero which does encourage players to use this strategy more often to the point where others have concerns that this can be abused or exploited, make it so that players who want to detach their outposts need to pay more cost for it too.

Effectively, this should make it somewhat harder for players to keep attaching and detaching often, because the influence cost needed is now double the value. So in early state of the game, players would need a total of 60 influence to do this just once whereas before... They could do this 2 times in a row. (I honestly did think it was so cheap being able to do all these for a very low cost of 30 influence to get 4+ pops into any cities we want.)

The other idea or solution I have is perhaps DO NOT allow players to attach and then detach any outposts in the same turn?

Basically, putting a restriction to how many times players can attach and detach 1 particular outpost. So if I just attach 1 outpost now, then I should be locked with it and not able to detach until say like the next turn. This can reduce frequency and also increase cost of influence needed to attach 2 or more outposts to 1 city in a single turn. (As we know the more outposts we attach to a city, the more influence cost to attach more thus making it even more difficult to keep playing with 'pops bank' plan.)

At one point, I also did think that it was too easy for anyone to be able to do all these in the same turn or instantly even though I am aware of all the cons to this strategy.

Of course, we can also combine both ideas together and make a little more difficult to attach and detach outposts. However, I do not know this would be such a good idea or not, because it could make this mechanic more difficult for others to use resulting in frustrating experience for some players and reduce level of steamlining in game.

Anyway, IMHO, I think the ideal solution would be to introduce influece cost for detaching too. I will leave it to you Devs to decide whether this is a good idea or if there are any other solutions. One thing I can say for certain though is that I do feel it was somewhat too easy for anyone to be able to attach and then detach any outposts they want instantly just to gain some pops into cities. Maybe what I am feeling right here is this is actually an abuse of the system and would need you Devs to do something to penalise players who do these in some ways.

wilbefast wrote:

Hmm... how about if detaching also moved some of the city's population into the detached outpost? I think that should prevent the exploit. Of course the real issue here is influence costs for attachment becoming a non-issue.

I think the real issue here is how the growth system is designed to give every single outpost and city the same growth rate no matter how big or small they are. So how about we fix that instead of trying to limit the intended usage. If outposts growing population with a faster rate is called an exploit, that's ultimately an issue of the growth system, not the attaching and detaching mechanic. Right now the maximum population you can have without being an agrarian is (cities+outposts)*turns elapsed.
The hardcap for growth also makes agrarian abilities very powerful because they either gain straight up extra turns in population by using it or steal turns from others(which they can never get back without being agrarian btw).

Here's a little list comparing these 2 issues being fixed here:
Problems to fix:
The growth system

- agrarian has huge advantage being the only one capable of using surplus food for population
- an outpost, a city with 1 population, a city with 100 population, a city with 1 territory and a city with 10 territories all grow at the same speed
- surplus food is useless with no sink for everyone but agrarian

The "exploit"

- players are able to move population around with attach/detach mechanic

amazingly detailed post, waper

it was pointed to me that i made a mistake when i wrote that districts keep working during detached periods. except for artisans/harbors all other quarters go "dormant" and provide only negative stability

to no one in particular, it wasn't my intention to present this as something to be fixed. to me it's just a valid method of working around population growth constrictions

i'm too old for discord, can't find/read anything in its cluttered mess :-)