I felt stability was much more interesting in the closed beta than in Victor. It actually became one of the most limiting factors in my city-planning since I usually played at the limits.

There are only few things I would change:

First, reducing the threshold for getting stability bonuses to 80 or 85. It is usually too hard to reliably keep above 90 when needed. I would also make the bonuses of high stability stronger, maybe add a percentage-based boost to production, gold, and science.

Second, I it would be interesting to have faith or religion impact stability. Maybe there could be a stability boost or hit depending on the percentage of population following the state religion or the number of religions in the city (just one gives a boost, three or more reduce stability until a certain tech is reached or civic enacted).

Third, I feel like a lower stability-cost for emblematic quarters might be worth considering. There can only be one per territory, so it would not be over-powered but it would make it easier to make use of EQs early on. Maybe half the stability cost would make sense. 

Forth, I agree with what some people above said that commons quarters are nerfed a bit too much. There is (still) less need for influence in the late game and the commons quarters don't impact that enough. Since the stability gain of commons quarters is so low it is rarely worth building them. Maybe there could be a civic or tech that sligthly increases the stability gain of commons quarters. Alternatively commons quarters could provide small adjacency bonuses for others districts so that they fit into the cities more easily, which I think would probably be the more fun option.

But I think thanks to the stability changes the game is much more strategical now. It adds more depth to the game play and creates interesting choices. Previously events that give stability bonuses were generally useless, now they are a viable option. I also like that the impact of the civics-dimensions now actually have an impact on my choices. Thanks for this very welcome change!

DuskSarsis wrote:

To be fair part of that was the number of territories being linked directly to my city as well, made necessary by the expansionist stars to progress. This progression star should probably count outposts rather than just when they're added to a city, since stability rapidly becomes a problem doing so. Either that, or something needs to counterbalance stability, perhaps some way of gaining a small amount of stability over time, that adds up to allow large metropolis cities forming over time.

Good point. Thinking about it, I don't even think that adding territories to your city should decrease stability at all (or a lot less, at most -10 like any other district). A lot of the stability boni (and a few others) are already on a per-city basis (luxuries, keeping civics centered), so attaching additional territories instead of making more cities is already worse stability wise.

DuskSarsis wrote:

Aside from a few luxury resources with very low impact on the city stability, the only real source of stability is certain improvements specifically for stability. I found it somewhat frustrating however, as I always ran to low on stability to really expand the city more than a district or two, and eventually stopped trying to do so at all. To be fair part of that was the number of territories being linked directly to my city as well, made necessary by the expansionist stars to progress.

It counts when attached to any city, so try to make several of them if you aren't. When you make two, you get a civic to get an extra cap, and even going by 1 over the cap it's only 30 influence per turn.

If you are trying to make it closer to a One City Challenge, which I love to do, I recommend taking the tenet that gives 10 stability per territory, plus stacking wonders and holy sites in that city.

Elhoim wrote:

DuskSarsis wrote:

Aside from a few luxury resources with very low impact on the city stability, the only real source of stability is certain improvements specifically for stability. I found it somewhat frustrating however, as I always ran to low on stability to really expand the city more than a district or two, and eventually stopped trying to do so at all. To be fair part of that was the number of territories being linked directly to my city as well, made necessary by the expansionist stars to progress.

It counts when attached to any city, so try to make several of them if you aren't. When you make two, you get a civic to get an extra cap, and even going by 1 over the cap it's only 30 influence per turn.

If you are trying to make it closer to a One City Challenge, which I love to do, I recommend taking the tenet that gives 10 stability per territory, plus stacking wonders and holy sites in that city.

I considered this, however I was -always- at the max number of cities throughout my game. Any more and I take penalties to influence gain, which as I tend to have a heavily expansionist play-style I -utterly hate-, but which meant avoiding the stability problem directly as a result of the territory need, just was not possible.

impetuousskink wrote:

In general, stability is a major obstacle to building tall and in my experience I spent more time worrying about stability than anything else in the game, particularly in the later portions of the game. That being said I can see why stability is necessary to provide an obstacle to growth and limit the formation of continent-cities. Here are some of my thoughts on how to increase the abundance of positive stability effects in game:

1) Endless Legends is a great game and you should copy more from it, particularly I think anomalies that provide local stability would be great and make the map more interesting, also some sort of stability though city geometry would be very cool, adding interesting descension making and an incentive not to just snake out to maximize tile exploitations. 

2) Borrowing from total war games, I think one change that could be really good at promoting a healthy sort of play is to make military garrisons (that is armies themselves stationed in cities) provide significant stability boosts (perhaps based on their combat strength). This makes militaries useful outside of wartime and incentives players to build up standing armies in the mid-late game even if they don't plan on launching an immediate invasion.

3) I think luxury base stability can't really be increased too much because later in the game you can amass an absurd amount of them, but what I think might make sense is providing some sort of incentive towards diversifying your luxuries, maybe the first instance of a luxury provides more stability than copies, or maybe a city with access to some threshold of unique luxuries gets some stability bonus, or perhaps a city can develop a desire for a particular luxury resource and gets a temporary stability boost when you secure it (think civ 5 we love the kind day). 

4) This would be a more radical change but you could look into altering the role that stability plays in the game altogether by buffing positive stability modifiers in general, but then making certain things lead to heavy stability penalties. For example war support could be linked directly with stability, if you have really high war support but aren't declaring war, your people get mad and your stability suffers, similarly if you are fighting a war your people see as needless and unjust with low war support, your stability also suffers. Certain ideological decisions against your civilizations ethos could also cost you in stability, maybe if your civ is extreme free thinking, but then on an event you choose a religious option, this causes a stability drop. Finally particularly brutal actions, like using population to insta build, or conscripting huge swaths of the population into your army (maybe some ratio threshold of pop vs units, or pop in specific city vs units produced in that city in the last x turn) would be penalized with stability. 

I really agree with everything here. More variety in how you can get stability is the big thing that this game needs now. At the moment, I'm always thinking of two things with my cities:

1. How am I going to build this into a great city with lots of yields and population

2. How many garrisons will I need.

You might also say what about the commons quarter, but the only way it can get to 10 stability is if it's surrounded by disctricts, destroying adjacency of the districts around it, and it gives you influence, which you should already have enough of by the time you unlock commons quarters. The garrison on the other hand gets to 10 stability every time (once you get city watch infrastructure) and you can just put it somewhere far away from your other districts. It even goes up to +20 with police during the industrial era. 

So anything that makes it less of an obvious choice to always just spam garrisons would be awesome.

The stability system works pretty well in this build for me. It's something you really have to think about now before expanding to much. I agree though that there should be some bonusses in between the 30 and 90% to give more incentive to keep up your stability.

Another thing that I found out is that for me the luxury resources didn't help to much. To me the bonus of +3 stability per city wasn't enough to go for it for me. You need a minimum of 4 luxury resources to build a new district what is quiet a bit in my opinion. I would rather see that a luxury resource provides +10 or +20 stability to the city that it is connected to. So having a city with a luxury provides a big bonus to that city. A bit in the same way as natural wonders work now. And if you buy a luxury it should go to the city with the lowest stability. 

The cost of 10 Stability per district is too much, it only takes 7 districts to go from maximum stability to rebellion. The district stability cost should be reduced to a smaller number, say, five, and then stability should be rebalanced around that.

Perhaps choosing a city specialization could be a clever way to a) ease some of the early burden of stability costs while b) giving a narrative reason for higher stability costs for districts/improvements not part of the particular city's specialization.

Maybe it's too late to implement something like that(?) as I would think it might require tedious re-working of existing systems; however, maybe having growth itself serve this function works better?

For example, each population up to your cap has the possibility to reduce stability depending on the amount of surplus food being produced?
Same for production and gold.
In this manner, the curve gets higher later in the game and is less punitive at the beginning.

Perhaps this doesn't make all that much sense :)

My issue with stability is that there are a lot of infrastructures and districts that promote building lots of districts in a single city but stability makes it prohibitively difficult to do so. Same with combining multiple regions into a single city. It would be nice to have a city with multiple regions, but even with just 2 regions and a few districts, I found it the stability costs far too high to actually expand any more. I like the mechanics and I think having a stability cost for districts and regions is good, but the costs to do so currently make it too difficult to actually use the mechanics that the game gives you. I ended up having to have almost half my city be devoted to commons quarters and I still struggled to keep my cities above 30 stability

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Did you find Stability easy or difficult to manage?

In the very early game, Stability is a nightmare to manage. There's no on-screen indication of how attaching an outpost would actually impact your city's Stability, or of any malus you'd incur as a result of your Stability drop either from additional districts or outposts. Once I understood the penalties I could plan around them as part of future development, but even then I found myself consistently prioritizing tech for and laying down every stability improvement I could find. Civic options were never used to develop an ideology choice, only to keep myself centered as best I could.

By late Ancient/early Classical, the problem vaporized. I was pushing to my 10th territory (which would be attached to my 3rd city) and had enough luxuries online that coupled with my Civic choices and building to Aqueducts in all cities finally put me into the high 90s. I was also able to put down Stonehenge and Pyramids, though I was under the impression the stability bonuses would apply to all cities and not simply the one it was located in. At this point I felt comfortable taking Civics for the specific boosts I wanted, so long as I kept a very careful eye on my Stability.

By the late Classical, my Stability was so high I was actually having difficulty bringing it below 100%. Stability was no longer a problem in two of my cities, which had wonders and Stone Rings with Steal Not. It certainly felt like I'd been over-compensating, though thinking back I'm not sure I can narrow down exactly when it happened as I seemed to go straight from "not enough" to "way too much".

first of all, i have to say that i played on humankind difficulty.

after i was able to take possession of an AI city, it was at 0 or maybe -stability for the reason that too many districts were built. it seems that the AI also gets massive stability bonuses which means that it actively punishes the player for playing well, as there is no way to effectively remove districts.
you can loot your own districts but this takes too long even in general and makes no sense narratively.
therefore the AI should not get any stability bonuses through the difficulty level.

P.S. the city was an assimilated independent people city.

even after playing two open devs i still didn't understand what bad stability does exactly.
i know you can't build districts anymore and only bad events can happen there. but does that do anything else?

I'm barely concerned by the stability since I'm not sure there is a significant advantage to get +90% stability. The game says that more positive events occur. However it happens too sparingly (barely never actually, mb I'm unlucky) that I don't bother to reach the +90% stability. I'd rather spam districts and territories until I reach 30% just before the mutinous status. I got enough time to discover happiness buildings, build common districts and buy luxuries.

As has been mentioned before, Stability is too much of a focus. I found myself almost completely ignoring the events and bonuses related to ideologies, and focusing only on maintaining max stability.

At the very least, the impact on stability from ideologies should be halved. (A difference of 80 is way too much.) Possibly even make it so that only extreme ideologies have a stability impact (and a relatively small one at that).

However it must be said, the change away from Endless Legend's adjacent districts for stability is GOOD. (We all remember the stick cities...) The new system you are using is a massive improvement. all it needs is some number tweaking.

So in the victor opendev, commons quarters were very powerful, adding 10 stability per adjacent district, not including itself. This beta reduced it to 2 per adjacent district, plus 2 from itself. This caused commons quarters, except maybe for its influence, pointless compared to the garrison, which still provided 10 stability, and it could be built anywhere, and it has walls too. Additionally, I found the Theater infrastructure and its upgrades not so useful, providing a meager amount of influence when I already had several hundred per turn due to religion and unique civilization traits. So my idea is to solve two problems at once - make the Theater upgrade the stability of the Commons Quarters, maybe up to 4 stability, then 6 for the Playhouse, finally 8 for the Cinema.

I agree that theatre infrastructure should make the commons quarter give more stability, right now they are useless. The description of theatre even say it is about order:

Supported by investment from adjacent districts, carefully crafted theatrical performances can promote order in the city.

And so do also playhouse:

Provided the funds can be channeled from wealthy neighbors, plays offer a subtle means of political control via the powerful upper classes.

EffAMES wrote:

first of all, i have to say that i played on humankind difficulty.

after i was able to take possession of an AI city, it was at 0 or maybe -stability for the reason that too many districts were built. it seems that the AI also gets massive stability bonuses which means that it actively punishes the player for playing well, as there is no way to effectively remove districts.
you can loot your own districts but this takes too long even in general and makes no sense narratively.
therefore the AI should not get any stability bonuses through the difficulty level.

P.S. the city was an assimilated independent people city.

even after playing two open devs i still didn't understand what bad stability does exactly.
i know you can't build districts anymore and only bad events can happen there. but does that do anything else?

You lose population and "rebel" armies spawn. Like for example you will lose 3 population and an army of 3 horsemen will spawn. If they manage to capture any of your cities the city will behave like an IP from that moment onwards.