Brainstorming alternate cost scalings

SpacesuitSpiff

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3 years ago

Jun 16, 2022, 7:32:20 PM

Thinking of making a mod to fix my main gripe with the game atm: cost scaling creating a bunch of weird incentives if you try to metagame, especially since there are a lot of sudden jumps. Notably:

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Districts: Currently scales with number of districts in the city, and scales inversely with worker slots for the given district type. Big jump when merging cities. Actively punishes building non-production districts by inflating the cost without helping offset it. Actively punishes extracting resources in city territories, and creates the "never attach resource-heavy outposts to your cities" meta.

Urban Sprawl Solution: treat the districts as a natural result of population/market growth rather than expansion mandated by the immortal emperor. Cost scales with number of districts in the city, scales inversely with population and stability. At high stability this enforces a certain pop/district ratio: pop gets high and district costs fall to near-zero because those pops want somewhere to live and do much of the work to develop it. When the districts finish equilibrium is reached again. At low stability the excess pops become less impactful because of the unrest. The district cost would look something like:

50 * max( [ #Districts / max(#Pops * %Stability / 2.2, 1) ] ^ N, 1) where Extractors and Wonders aren't counted as Districts.

Where N is a high exponential term. At 100% stability, having at least 2.2 pops per district will bring the cost down to the basic 50, 2 pops per district is where the cost gets to be a bit of a pain and you're better off waiting for growth. I'd be open to N increasing each era if necessary to keep up with production growth.

The upside to this solution is that it's relatively self-tuning if you only care about the cost being reasonable in the intended range. It can't go below 50, and the cost going too high with low population is both harmless and intended. There are no sudden spikes due to merging cities if the cities were close to homeostasis already, merging with an outpost could create a spike or a dip but that's at least logical immersion-wise.

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Civics: Currently scales only with Era and number of enacted Civics. At a 3.1 exponent for the latter. This heavily incentivizes skipping as many as possible. Legitimately anything would be better than this. The cost to cancel them (scales only with Era) is fine though. This one is trickier because there isn't anything to dynamically couple them with and force an equilibrium, and they all need to cost the same due to the UI.

Cultural Cohesion Solution: Scales with Era, number of cities, and the extent of your cultural/religious influence on your cities.

This represents laws being harder to push on many factions that are split geographically and ideologically. I don't know if it's possible to calculate the weighted average of your cultural/religious influence empire-wide without BepinEx though. Anyway, the formula would look like:

(Era Term) * #Cities * (1 / (%cultural control + 0.3)) * (1 / (%religious control + 0.3)) where the religious term is replaced by a constant 1.5 after taking Secularism.

This creates some sharp jumps, but they're easy to predict and play around (do I make my second city now or grab those Civics before the price doubles?) and is easy to balance by just setting the Era Term as a ratio of the existing Cancel Civic cost. The offset on the control percentages is to curb worst case scenarios and give a bit of a discount for having more than 70% in either area. Tall playstyles certainly get a boost from this, but that's sensible and it's good to give them some love seeing as the district cost change favors wide playstyles (due to pop food cost scaling). Most importantly, there's no reason to skip Civics anymore just because they don't scale massively.

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Let me know if you find any errors in my reasoning, or if you have alternatives to suggest.

Updated 3 years ago.

Anonymous

3 years ago

Jun 16, 2022, 8:21:33 PM

Very intersting take.

If I agree on the analyze, the proposition for the districts don't satisfy me. It is weird to get districts that would pop out of the earth by magic, enthusiasm doesn't equate proper labor force. I still work on my propositons on this topic and would rather start by excluding resource extractors or natural reserves (or at least put them into their own category). To avoid the full MQ meta, I'd encourage to place more importance on workers, at least until mechanization is reached, and so push for more population to sustain a heavy production. I'd also make pollution and climate change more compelling to act on it (huge topics, a lot to do here, from the too mild effects of industrialization, to the poor events or the too easy high stability, and so on).

I'm less versed in the technical aspects of civics, being used to play with enough influence not to care too much about it. It seems well thought.

SpacesuitSpiff

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SpacesuitSpiff

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3 years ago

Jun 16, 2022, 9:26:08 PM

Cure_off wrote:
Very intersting take.

If I agree on the analyze, the proposition for the districts don't satisfy me. It is weird to get districts that would pop out of the earth by magic, enthusiasm doesn't equate proper labor force.

I agree it's a stretch. The steelman interpretation is that the districts don't just spring out of the ground, but rather that exploited tiles are already full of personally-maintained dwellings and converting them to a full district is easier if they're decently developed to start. A community growing a small way away from the main city. The greater the population density (after subtracting the ones that live in actual districts) the better their local economy and communal infrastructure would be (both of which aren't officially "developed" by the empire) and this makes the upgrade easier.

VIPdocktorkain

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VIPdocktorkain

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3 years ago

Jun 16, 2022, 9:51:59 PM

Skimmed it and theres situations where the formula can have a "division by zero" situation (namely when pops and/or Stability is zero) and that can cause the game to break down and go into the turn pending bug. Also, maybe those formulas are only possible with Bepinex, but the only way to know is to try to code it in the modtools. I'd suggest you to try make a mod for it and see how it plays.

SpacesuitSpiff

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SpacesuitSpiff

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3 years ago

Jun 16, 2022, 10:03:08 PM

docktorkain wrote:
Skimmed it and theres situations where the formula can have a "division by zero" situation (namely when pops and/or Stability is zero) and that can cause the game to break down and go into the turn pending bug. Also, maybe those formulas are only possible with Bepinex, but the only way to know is to try to code it in the modtools. I'd suggest you to try make a mod for it and see how it plays.

Good catch, edited

Anonymous

3 years ago

Jun 16, 2022, 10:50:29 PM

SpacesuitSpiff wrote:
Cure_off wrote:
Very intersting take.

If I agree on the analyze, the proposition for the districts don't satisfy me. It is weird to get districts that would pop out of the earth by magic, enthusiasm doesn't equate proper labor force.
I agree it's a stretch. The steelman interpretation is that the districts don't just spring out of the ground, but rather that exploited tiles are already full of personally-maintained dwellings and converting them to a full district is easier if they're decently developed to start. A community growing a small way away from the main city. The greater the population density (after subtracting the ones that live in actual districts) the better their local economy and communal infrastructure would be (both of which aren't officially "developed" by the empire) and this makes the upgrade easier.

But the dwellings would have to come from somewhere.
I still like your explanation and give you an upvote.

SpacesuitSpiff

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SpacesuitSpiff

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3 years ago

Jun 16, 2022, 11:17:33 PM

Cure_off wrote:
SpacesuitSpiff wrote:
Cure_off wrote:
Very intersting take.

If I agree on the analyze, the proposition for the districts don't satisfy me. It is weird to get districts that would pop out of the earth by magic, enthusiasm doesn't equate proper labor force.
I agree it's a stretch. The steelman interpretation is that the districts don't just spring out of the ground, but rather that exploited tiles are already full of personally-maintained dwellings and converting them to a full district is easier if they're decently developed to start. A community growing a small way away from the main city. The greater the population density (after subtracting the ones that live in actual districts) the better their local economy and communal infrastructure would be (both of which aren't officially "developed" by the empire) and this makes the upgrade easier.
But the dwellings would have to come from somewhere.
I still like your explanation and give you an upvote.

I've always interpreted these games as having an "underground" economy independent of the "players" (Endless games even had flavor text that made it seem more advanced than the players at some points). Hence where the raw materials for building come from, same as how money "magically" appears mostly by the player squeezing it out of the existing economy via taxes. Plenty of IRL precedent too. It's not fully reflected in the gameplay but needs to be there for the world to make sense imo.

Anonymous

3 years ago

Jun 17, 2022, 12:18:44 AM

I could have took it that way if we'd not start as a simple tribe.
I do like your idea but am a bit put off by the lack of infrastructure in the first place which forces me to take those virtual economy for granted. It would work for an already established town but less so for a starting campment.

SpacesuitSpiff

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SpacesuitSpiff

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3 years ago

Jun 17, 2022, 2:32:00 AM

Cure_off wrote:
I could have took it that way if we'd not start as a simple tribe.
I do like your idea but am a bit put off by the lack of infrastructure in the first place which forces me to take those virtual economy for granted. It would work for an already established town but less so for a starting campment.

Yeah, that's an issue. ES2 was similar due to everyone going interstellar for the first time on turn 1. I think the hope (and maybe the games do this successfully, I don't remember) is to hide the larger economy behind techs to buy the world a bit of time to hypothetically grow. Such a thing existing in late-Ancient era would make sense, dunno how that could work in this case aside from just handwaving the issue though.

RedSirus

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RedSirus

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34 200g2g pts

3 years ago

Jun 19, 2022, 2:40:09 PM

I actually think the district cost scaling is pretty decent at the moment. Later game districts are generally more powerful than early game districts thanks to adjacencies, infrastructures, and tech unlocks and it helps to make sure you aren't skimping on infrastructure.

Civics scaling is weird because it suddenly jumps by so much when you go to the next Era; I know it makes sense, but it feels a bit artificial. I wonder if the cost were to jump by City it might make more sense (in the style of Endless Legend) or if the cost just gradually slowly increased with population instead. I think I'd prefer gradual population growth causing gradual Civic cost increase because going over your City cap can cost you lots of influence, so if going over the cap cost you influence and make it hard to spend that on Civics, you could get locked out of using influence very quickly.

What I think I would propose, though, is for Infrastructure production cost to scale down after you've reached each successive era or researched each Colony Model/Plan/etc. technology. Once you unlock Conly model, your new cities begin with all researched infrastructure and can start to outstrip your early cities. It might be nice if your early city's infrastructure costs were reduced so you capital could catch up to the colonies. I'm not sure what makes the most sense, maybe A 25% production discount on infrastructure from an era behind your current era, possibly growing to 33% or even 50% when you're two or more eras ahead. I don't know what numbers or triggers make sense for balance; it would need to be Playtested.

Maybe these could even be hidden behind a new civic called "Historic Preservation", which asks whether you'd like to preserve historic landmarks in your empire (for boosts to stability, faith, money, influence, or other 'intangible' benefits) or modernize your empire, which reduces the production costs of infrastructure by a generous percentage.

Updated 3 years ago.

RedSirus

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RedSirus

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34 200g2g pts

3 years ago

Jun 19, 2022, 2:58:11 PM

SpacesuitSpiff wrote:
Actively punishes extracting resources in city territories, and creates the "never attach resource-heavy outposts to your cities" meta.

I'd forgotten you also wrote this, and I'm in full agreement here! It would be great if Luxury and Strategic Extractors didn't count as districts when calculating the cost of new districts; I completely agree that it's an "awkward meta" that strongly discourages attaching territories with many resources.

By the inverse of this, maybe Luxury and Strategic extractors shouldn't count towards Builder Stars either (or should only count once attached)? I'm more torn on this balancing act. When Humankind first launched, Builder stars were a piece of cake to get and I'd often find myself already at Bronze (rarely Silver) the moment I reached the next era, because I had so many extractors around my empire. Anecdotally I'm finding that happening a lot less, though I'm not sure if the thresholds have changed or if I'm building fewer districts in general or what.

But, tl;dr, I fully agree extractors shouldn't make regular FIMS/EQ districts more expensive to build.

Updated 3 years ago.

SpacesuitSpiff

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SpacesuitSpiff

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3 years ago

Jun 20, 2022, 3:26:59 PM

Update: made the mods and played a few hours with them. The Civics one feels great even though (or perhaps because) I ended up dropping the cultural/religious control idea and just made it the Cancel Civic cost scaled by stability and number of cities. It can be found here https://humankind.mod.io/civic-cost-rework

The district cost mod felt alright in Ancient, but became a bit restrictive by Classical. This was with a Harrapans start, I imagine Builder cultures wouldn't feel too good. This may be partially because I went with an aggressive scaling term (5x cost for every 10% over the ratio), but either way once you go a little bit over the ratio and then catch up on improvements there's nothing to build. Building units drain pop and mean it'll be even longer until the next district can be built, so it's really just repeatables and shared projects. I also ran into a funny situation where I wanted a harbor and had to wait quite a while until a coastal city grew 2 more pops. There were certainly no clumps of research districts, even putting out all EQs in a 3-region city within an era was a small challenge.

Keeping this mod hidden until I decide what to do with it. The premise might just be inherently flawed, though turning down the cost scaling might help a fair bit. All that said, the mere fact that extractors don't inflate the cost makes it better than vanilla.

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