AOM wrote:

Ty for letting me know where this game mechanic came from. Your insight is leading me to think this isn't a game I want to buy. Basically, what you showed there is what I did in this game. It's stupid and ahistorical. Maybe it works in Endless Legends. But it doesn't work in a civ game that's supposedly based on history.

In endless legend, the cities are actually reasonably pretty (not as pretty as Humankind's graphic) because they have "level" system, district that is surrounded by other district are increased to level 2, then 3, then 4, so it creates an organically better looking "centre" to the "clump of pink". So a common that is surrounded by common automatically turn into high rises, luxury buildings etc. I haven't tested in humankind (industrial era ends too quickly for me), so not sure what it looks like. Every culture have their own aesthetic on the borough too.

I'm not too big on historical accuracy in 4x games (I have Crusader Kings 3, Europa Universalis 4 and Heart of Iron 4 for that), but cities do tend to look "ugly" in real life with clumpy high rises and low rises surrounding it.

Edit: tested creating clump of commons, they don't have any difference in appearance, there seems to be 2 version of them for my culture, but not automatically turning into high rises or more luxurious centres.

also jumping on to comment on this. currently halfway through my first run (well, technically the third I guess, first two were resets because I didn't realize the neolithic bonus was bugged right now) and I'm considering restarting because of how ruined the run is. don't get me wrong, I'm not losing here, I'm winning on score and am ahead of everyone else era-wise, but I made some assumptions based on the previous beta that grinded everything to a halt.

now, I should preface this by stating I'm trying to do a One City Challenge again. this challenge was actually quite fun in the last build, and I was looking forward to seeing if it was possible to pull off in this one. seems not.

so it seems procession has been nerfed. heavily. that's good, it needed a nerf, it was ridiculously OP before. however, I think the nerf might've been too much. it's now so bad of a pick that I'd say you're better off picking the other perk (or, you know, neither perk, but I'll save that for later/the civic discussion). just 10 stability is nothing. one extra district. ok. and I still have to check back every 10 turns to keep it running. not worth the effort, not worth the civic point, not worth the influence cost, not even worth the paltry amount of money you spend on keeping it up. it's just... bad. I can't even imagine a scenario where it'd help. if your cities are in danger of rebelling, 10 stability won't be enough to help unless you're right on the edge, and in that case, you're better off making a garrison or commons quarters instead.

speaking of commons quarters - why were these heavily nerfed as well? I didn't feel that were overpowered, or even moderately powerful, and I built a lot of them in the previous build. despite building so many, I still had so much instability from districts that procession was the only thing keeping me afloat. in the previous build, if you placed one commons quarters and surrounded it with 6 other districts, the quarters would only be able to pay for 3 of them. it's still a net -30 stability. to reach stability neutrality, you would need 3 quarters in a triangle surrounded by 9 other districts (for +90 stability). and considering quarters don't yield any tile bonuses, you generally won't be placing them near your instability-causing districts anyway, so generally you'll have your designated Manhattan somewhere not-resource-crucial, which lowers the efficiency of the quarters. after the first 4 districts placed in a rhombus pattern, which would generate 55 stability on its own (50 from the districts, plus an additional 5 from one of them starting next to the city center), each additional 3 districts would only generate an additional 70 stability (or 23.333 stability per added district). the more compact snake-like pattern you typically saw in EL would have it even worse, as, after placing 2 commons quarters next to the city center for an initial 20 stability, each additional district placed would only add 20 stability. here's a terrible drawing via MSPaint to demonstrate what I'm talking about:

as you can see, every commons quarter can, at most, pay for 2-3 other districts even when placed optimally. however, with the current nerf reducing its effectiveness down to 40%, that changes drastically. now, a fully surrounded commons quarter only generates 12 stability. it can only pay for a single district. if placed grouped up either snake- or manhattan-style, it's even worse. snake-style now only generates 8 stability per added district, and manhattan-style only generates 9.33 stability per district. they can't even pay for a single added district. factor in that they exploit no resources and that apparently every built district increases the cost of the next district and I cannot justify building them at all, ever, even if surrounded by regular districts. sure, they give influence, but influence isn't that hard to generate. I've only just unlocked the ability to make these and my city already generates 132 influence. I'm actually getting 209 influence overall, though I have no clue what my territories are doing to generate all that influence. rather, I don't even have anything to spend my influence on. I could spend it on civics, but that'd make my stability worse, and I already have a wonder reserved that would take me 17 turns to build. I get enough influence to claim another wonder next turn. and unfortunately I grabbed that civic that lets me attach districts with gold instead of influence, so I can't spend it there, either (though looking at the attaching prices, even if I hadn't grabbed that civic, I'd still be able to attach a territory once every 2-3 turns with all this generation, so I'd run out of stuff to attach before I burn through my excess influence). so, really, these districts have been nerfed into oblivion. they're absolutely atrocious now. why? they weren't even that strong to begin with, so I can't see why in the world they were nerfed so hard.

let's compare it to the garrison, the other district that generates stability. garrisons generate 5 stability per district, add 10 fortification to the city that built it, can be placed ANYWHERE, and allow units to spawn there when trained. it can also be researched at the very beginning of the game, with city defense, a tech that unlocks warriors and leads to copper exploitation, so you'll be grabbing that tech sooner rather than later. it also gets upgraded with Standing Army, one of the first techs available in the classical era, upping the stability generation from +5 to +10. one garrison is now more efficient for stability generation than a fully-primed manhattan-style commons quarters setup. this despite being a pre-requisite tech for even unlocking commons quarters, which unlock two whole techs later. this also upgrades again in the industrial era, making a garrison give 15 stability if it's a replacement upgrade, or 20 if it's additive. even if it's a replacement tech, that makes it about twice as effective as a snake-style commons quarters setup. meanwhile, the garrison costs about as much (if not slightly cheaper, for some reason my garrison currently costs 772 while a commons quarter costs 780) to build, and the commons quarter has no upgrade anywhere in any tech available to us right now.

as an aside, to other players in this thread, since there seems to be some confusion regarding what the commons quarters is and how it generates stability. I forget the name of the square so I can't double-check, but there used to be a district of sorts where people were allowed to criticize the government without getting arrested. these districts started popping up either in greece or rome. in these times, criticizing the government was a criminal offense, but not here. as it turns out, letting people publicly vent to each other did wonders for preventing riots. it also has the side benefit of making issues that may have gone unnoticed, known. so not only were people able to let off steam, but occasionally their problems would be resolved as a result. considering this district becomes available with the Imperial Power tech (which also unlocks the Roman's UU, go figure), this is one possible interpretation for the district. another would be, taken from the name, a "house of the commons". hence, commons quarters. it's not just additional bureaucracy, it's also a place where the common man can take part of the government, leveraging the power of the masses against the ruling class to ensure their voices are heard. the old name for something like this was "Tribune of the Plebs" which, go figure, the Romans invented. though, ironically, this was invented during the time where Rome was a Republic. when Rome became an empire, this district became powerless, much like all the other forms of checks and balances. so unlocking being able to build a district that, historically, became useless at the time we can unlock it in the game is pretty funny. it can also be thought of like boroughs and suburbs, but that would only be after the industrial era, and even then it's debatable. sure, urbanization has actually helped significantly with stabilizing areas (it's counter-intuitive but I can't really talk about it without politics so I'll abstain), and yea, it's why I call mass-commons-quarters manhattan, but I don't really think that's what it's supposed to represent. as for farmers causing destabilization, I just have to say: taxation without representation. farmers are pretty much always far away from city centers, and the farther away you are, the easier it is for the government to not represent your interests. farmers rebelling is not an unheard-of situation. just because they have food doesn't mean they don't have other problems. starving to death may destabilize a country, but that doesn't make the inverse also true - having an abundance of food won't make the populace any more stable than if they only had just enough food.

back on topic, the lack of any real ability to adjust stability means grabbing civics is a terrible thing to do. there are actually multiple problems with grabbing civics, but I'll focus on the stability portion for now. any time a civic would push you away from the center, you lose out on 10 stability in every city you own. the ideological center generates 80 stability. that's 8 districts, or 4 attached territories, per city (meaning it gets worse the more cities you own). it'd be one thing if you could make up for that by investing into some bureaucracy to keep the other cities stable, but, as I pointed out above, you can't. well, unless your idea of a stable city is a police state. you can't just build a wonder in every city you own (and it might not be a good decision to do so anyway since the enemy could capture the city and steal the wonder from you), as there is only one available to you at any given time, and infrastructure only works once per city. the only scaling form of stability generation is districts, and both of them suck (garrisons are still actually useful, unlike the commons quarters, but they're still not thaaat great at generating stability). before, being in the center was like having a nice bonus, but you could manage without it. not so much with the current balance. I don't feel like I'm switching one reward for another by shifting my ideology, but rather that I'm being actively punished for daring to make decisions. sure, I get +10% science production in my cities, but I lose 2 districts worth of stability in the process with no real means to recoup that loss, which generally means I don't build those two science districts.

which leads to my next point - you can't really build districts if they aren't something that gives stability or something that generates a lot of resources. most of the time, it's more efficient resource-wise to absorb another territory into my city than to make another district, and when it isn't it's because it's a farmers or makers district, and that district is giving me 15+ of that specific resource. science districts don't make enough to compensate for the -10 stability debuff. and don't get me started on merchants quarters. I didn't really build them in the previous build because they seemed really weak and only worked well when you had a bunch of them since they had no kind of adjacency bonus to speak of and pretty much never exploit the land, but now they're even worse because of stability. I can get +6 gold by building it next to a luxury resource, and 6 more if I wanted to make my pops making money instead of food or industry. ooooor I could get another 12-16 industry plus another 8 from making a makers quarters. when it costs 4 times the industry value to rush a building. yeeeaaaa, I'll stick with industry. hey, maybe they're good with merchantile civs, which I don't play as, but I already had a hard time justifying building them during the victor opendev, and the current stability issue isn't helping. there's also the fact that, due to how difficult it is to raise stability, the opportunity cost of building one district over another is significantly worse. if I can only afford to make 5 districts in a given city, none of those districts will be set to science or money production. only food and industry. food to keep the city growing (or at least not starving), industry to ensure I can actually build things, and both to make sure I can keep up with troop production. money and science are both important, sure, but without any real ability to increase the soft cap on city districts, I can't afford to build them. and I like to play science-heavy civs. not being able to afford building science when playing as people who focus heavily on science is a pretty sad state of affairs. hell, it's pretty sad to almost be in the early modern era and still not have researched my first medieval tech.

as for tall vs wide: honestly, while I'm pretty sure wide was stronger in the last build, I could still say that tall was at least somewhat viable. can't say so here. tall is terrible, and it's because of stability. every city has 20 stability by default. luxury resources and ideology gives stability to each city, meaning they effectively give more stability the more cities you have. generally speaking, by the time your stability gain from ideology hits 0 (and thus every new city should start rebelling), you should have enough luxury resources under your belt to ensure a content, if not particularly happy, populace until you can throw in some administration (or police, in the current balance). cities lose 10 stability from building districts, and 20 from every territory excluding the one the city is based in. if you had a center ideology and no luxury resources, every city you build will have 100 stability, giving you 7 districts to work with. so with 3 cities, that's 21 districts. if you have 12 stability from luxuries, that's another 3 districts, for 24 altogether.. what if we instead had one city containing 3 territories though? now that one city only has 60 stability, and thus can only build 3 districts. the 12 stability from luxuries only allows a 4th. every time you choose to attach a territory instead of making a new city, at 100 stability default, you are giving up 9 districts. every 10 points above and below 100 default stability, will increase or decrease that number by 1, respectively. mega cities may enjoy the benefit of infrustructural efficiency and being able to utilize their industrial weight in under-developed areas, but they suffer massively from the lack of stability. the reason they didn't suffer as bad as the previous build was because they could make administrative sectors to make up for the lack of stability without any harm. since you can't build districts in other cities, this means a mega city can build more commons districts than 3 separate cities can. but with the nerf, they can't build enough to make up the difference. as such, having more than two territories attached to any given city is just outright worse than having another city. sure, the city cap is a thing, so you should still have cities with attached territories, but playing tall is utterly unviable.

I also experienced that stability was much harder to come by than in victor, which is a good thing (in victor, I never even had to think about stability). Still, I was able to create some rather large cities, even without buying all the luxuries from the AI or going on an expansion spree, mainly by balancing the ideologies in the center and building +10 garrisons and commons quarters. The procession nerf is good.

Yet I can understand that some people found stability in this build to be a bit too limiting, as without having a very strong production, building all these districts just for the stab would have taken ages. In particular, the commons district is often times weaker than the +10 garrison (unless clustered), so you'll need ~1.5 commons to build one more district. Instead as a byproduct of all the commons quarters, you'll swim in influence without much use for it. Maybe give it a flat +3 boost to stab, so that with 3 adjacent districts you're at +9 stab (and at +15 with 6 adjacent). You could turn down influence production instead.

Also yes, a lot of civics still feel useless (and I didn't bother to buy them), but given how valuable stab is now, giving some of them additional stab for some things / discounts on certain districts would make them worthwhile. And yes, I also found that staying in the middle is the way to go because stab.

Also, there are some infrastructure buildings that are, well not very good. For example the influence ones, theater/playhouse as the very small bonus is only on main plazas (and there's no need for that much influence). Adding a flat +5 to +10 stab would feel appropriate and give them some use.

Another idea to avoid these commons quarter clusters might be to give it an higher adjacency bonus per adjacent district that is not a commons quarter (or garrison). You'd then need much fewer of them, but couldn't just place  them as a huge cluster in some unimportant territory.

Anyways, although it can be hard to come by in this build, it's much better to have stab be too scarce than unimportant like in victor, so its the right direction.

If the goal is to reduce the amount of districts that players can build, why not a scaling stability cost per district in a city? Like -5 for first district, -10 for second, etc. (My numbers are only meant as an example)

As it works right now, stability doesn't really restrain expansion via districts, but merely requires more commons/garrison districts.

Crunchyshuffles wrote:

As it works right now, stability doesn't really restrain expansion via districts, but merely requires more commons/garrison districts.

Yeah, stability is a bit of an odd spot. Basically, its biggest role is to work as a quarter cap, but functions a bit in a backward way.

- Quarters providing stability for building other quarters, and being able to spam them is a bit of a boring gameplay, and creates these odds situations in which you just clump them in a corner.

- Luxuries feel that they provide too little early on (I think they are fine, but I understand that it might not feel so), but later on they provide too much once you start trading, plus losing the routes has a huge impact, which is not bad, but it's hard to foresee sometimes. I kinda liked when they only gave stability once per type, and the rest was just a yield bonus.

- Very little infrastructure provides stability, and usually doesn't open up new gameplay.

- Stability is too focused on per-city, which makes having lots of cities a more optimal strategy, but at the same increases micromanagement too much. One of the things I like about HK is the reduced micro it aims to have. But building quarters over and over, and the same infrastructure in all cities gets quite boring and mindless. Personally, I'd prefer building less quarters, but with a stronger effect.

- The army effect is very obscure. For those who don't know it, each unit provides 5 stability, but only one army per city is counted. So if you place an army with 4 units in a city, you get 20 stability, right from the beginning of the game.

In any case, some suggestions to work with the current system:

- Walls could provide an stability bonus, to make them good as well for peaceful builders and provide another source of stability.

- Forts should give stability per unit on them, instead of a flat bonus. +1 at a base, another +1 with the city watch, +2 with police. And remove the obscure unit bonus that you only know if you look into the stability tooltip. Basically, you need armies stationed on forts for them to provide stability, which is a good way to balance the spam.

- Common quarters are good now stability-wise, IMO. The main problem is that there are bigger and cheaper influence income options. I like that they get "upgraded" via tech tree/infra/civics, maybe double down a bit there. So a civic/tech/infra can give +1 stability more per surrounding quarter, and also more influence. Also, I'd make it that they don't "stack" with themselves.

- Building around the city/admin center could have a stability bonus, so that you are encouraged to build around it, plus give more options to build early on.

- Some of the EQ could cost no stability to place, especially if they are limited to one per territory.

- Connecting territories to the City Center via train stations could increase stability. Or just a bit of stability per train station, instead of them draining stability. They are balanced by being 1 per territory.

- As other mentioned, there could be some infrastructure that gives stability to particular quarters, or certain quarter configurations, to make the city building a bit more involved.

The not showing excess stability over 100 is annoying. All it really needs is a simple number next to gains to give you a heads up. Like +15 if you are currently at 115%. I think that a system where a district next to your city or outpost produced less stability loss and increased as is farther away (maybe -5, then -10 at one away, -15 at two away) could possibly provide better balance. You could then have certain stabilizing districts act as a locus that reduces the destabilization of districts next to them just like the city center does. For people like me who like to build it just seems like you get painted into a corner a lot right now and just end up spawning units.