Played a few games now, and I agree that stability became too much of a focus. The game revolves around building districts all the time, to get adjacency bonuses, and to get other things running. If every district makes another district more pricey, then the ways to gains stability are far too restrictive. The best ways are the holy Site and wonders with you don't get that many off. Policies grant stability sure, but they cannot add to it. You can just manage it. Other than that you have the commons quarter, that is good for influence but max 20 stability (that is hard to get by the way) is way too little for stability itself. Those bonuses are too high of a price for that. The only other way is build is building garrison that give you 5 base stability. That means you need 2 garrisons to make up stability loss for any other district. With the technology its 10 stability, so at that moment  to improve your City you basically pay double the price on any district to build it. That is a very uninteresting play pattern. The technology that makes it way less restrictive is too late up in the technology tree to matter, at the point you go there it basically allows you to build those railways and that's it, the rest of your cities are mostly done anyway by that point.

I like Commons Quarter as an Influence building. If you need influence you build commons quarter. This part is nice, but the bonus it gives to stability is an afterthought and way to small and insignificant for it to be very useful. Still I like it for that role and I think the district is fine for now. Maybe it could give flat 10 stability and adjacency for influence? I don't know, but I like the idea for it to be an influence building, not stability.

But that leaves you right now with Garrison spam for stability.

What I really don't like is that you need a district to build more districts. It is artificially inflating the price of districts and basically nothing more. First garrisons are useful, because you can make reinforcements to crucial places faster (and that is nice). But after that point they are just a way to inflate district price. Maybe instead of a district needed to make a different district make more technologies that either gives you stability building (like irrigation or hydrology) or a technology that lessens the drain of stability on your districts with would make you gain stability over time with technology. Or a civic doing something like that too. Something like the Zhou culture trait.

I just really don't like the play pattern that to fix stability problem caused by too many cities and districts you need to build more districts, or create more smaller cities (with isn't possible that often because one territory is good for food, other one with industry, if you separate them none of them works alone anymore, unless you want to make that into a play pattern that a player needs to also consider placing districts).

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

At first: Difficulty to manage. I was barely able to keep my cities above 30 stability, and trade routes constantly ended up being blockaded to the point that every turn my stability fluctuated significantly without me being able to figure out why.

But after a while: It became easy to manage. I figured out what was causing most of my stability to explode was going too extreme on the ideological axis, to the point that I lose a total of 80 stability from being only on the extreme end of the ideological spectrum. Staying in the middle for the majority of the game allowed me to better manage my stability, and even begin to get a few large cities without having to inflate build costs by building a bunch of stability quarters.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
What were your primary sources of Stability?

In my first playthrough:
Garrisons were my main source of stability, but things got really expensive after I placed down a number of them.

Later:

I balanced between strategic placement of garrisons and a three or 4 grouping of commons quarters. No idea if stability went up because of Wondrous luxuries, really unclear.

But, overall:

Staying in the middle of the ideological axis is what gave me most stability. Luxury trading was too unreliable.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
What were your primary drains on it?

Very difficulty for me to figure out, as the tooltip doesn't really tell me what recent thing is causing a stability drop each turn.

But, I think it was mainly trade routes exploding, quarter building, and ideological shifting.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Did the difficulty of managing it change over the course of the game?

Yes. Primarily when I started getting late game civics and technologies that increased stability, but it was still difficult to manage if I overbuilt.

After playing a bit more, I think stability in this build would feel more reasonable, if attaching outposts gave a stability bonus of +5/+10. Currently, I often felt forced to not attach some territories to my cities at all (and just extract the ressources), because it would only produce stability problems. As others said, the commons quarters is worse than the garrison in most situations, so it should give slightly more (+3 per district or a +3 base stability) (that way its better than the garrison at 4 adjacent districts).

To make luxuries more important for stability, but not as overpowered as in victor (buy and stack them all ->oo), I'd suggest to make each artisan quarter produce stability (+10) in that city. As ressource deposits / city are limited, this will not get out of hands, but make it so that early on connecting your luxuries has a clear impact on stability. In combination with stability from attached outposts, it would also make cities with a large amount of territories able to grow larger (in terms of districts) than cities with only one territory (right now, its the other way around, except for space limitation). That would also make tall gameplay a bit more reasonable.

Population should give stability, now there is hardly a connection between how many districts you can build and the size of the city population. Industrial era add some stability per population, but there is no reason that this can be done at start. Right now you can have huge cities with zero population in them and they are still working well.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Did you find Stability easy or difficult to manage? 

What were your primary sources of Stability? 

What were your primary drains on it? Did the difficulty of managing it change over the course of the game?

When compared to last two OpenDev scenarios, maintaining Stability became very challenging. Sometimes I had to intentionally avoid enacting new civics. I think this actually worked pretty well. It prevented early-snowballing effect, so that players can experience both proper challenges in the earlier eras and impact of industrial revolution in later eras.

My primary sources of Stability was mainly garrison, since researching city watch, police station and enacting secret police civic choice would generate up to 25 Stability. But if I picked Italians, then I built commons quarter instead, simply because it was cheaper to build, and can generate up to 22 stability with its legacy trait.  

The primary drains of Influence was claiming territories and attaching to cities at early stage of the game, and then building wonders for later eras. However, after claiming all territories I need in later eras, there were little options to spend Influence. Although merging cities could consume quite a lot of influence, it was too expensive and yielded little benefits.

Hey, I'm not sure anyone said this before, but when you get your first era after the nomadic stage of the game, the game force you to pick one outpost to build a city. Which is kinda fine I guess but if for some reason, at that moment, the outpost you want your city on is not yet finished, you are just forced to pick a location you don't want to.

In my case, I had three outposts, one bad for a city, one medium and one good. I picked a new civilization and thus the game told me to build a city. But the good spot for a city was lacking 1 turn to become a fully fleged outpost and thus I couldn't pick it. And obvioulsy the game doesn't allow you to just skip a turn, no you HAVE to build that city right now !

I have a suggestion to avoid garrison / commons quarter spam to maintain stability.

It strikes me as odd that districts and infrastructures don't require money for maintainance. I think this could be added to restrict overexpansion on top of stability, while reducing the stability penalty from districts. This could be tweaked in a way that you need a couple of commons and market quarters to maintain your districts, but not too many. It would also increase the value of money, which right now I feel is fairly unimportant.

As a side note, armies should also require money maintenance.

Not anymore too easy to keep stability high
I was nearly to a revolution at a time but manage to gain stability just befor it happen. I wonder what would have happen. I have seen some kind of new  influence actor on the capital (like if a new civilisation appeared).

The rebels that are popping didn't seem  aggressive. They could scavenge whatever district they see, would have a impact. I did'nt check if the rebels remove a population when they appear, that would make sense. Maybe they could, when enough, siege the city to reclaim it ? (=> no militia, or less  if that happen)

To sum up : Keeping  stability high is now a little challenge, but we could use more negative side. 

Higher difficulty settings could put handicap on the stability instead of boosting AI in units/science/etc... That would be fun, not frustrating. 
I played a lot to "Oriental empire" and the stability is a huge part of the difficulty, not caring for the people lead to half the empire falling to peasants. Even if this annoying, this feel realistic and a lot of dinasty/culture/civisation/powerful nation did end this way i believe.

Honestly, I went back and forth.  First two eras I was Builders, and it was mostly easy to manage.  After that, I found that I would end up dropping rapidly (especially when losing access to luxuries due to wars I wasn't part of) and not notice until I was in the 40s.  Once I noticed, it would be an effort to get it back, but not terribly rough.

Higher difficulties, I imagine I'd have been run over a few times.

--

Related to cities, though.  Assuming the beta is the same map for everyone, I found something that annoyed me.  There was one region in the southern part of the map that was a little archipelago, three or four little islands in a single region, with a larger island in a separate region just below.  Dropped a city on the archipelago--and quickly realized I couldn't build anything there.  Whichever island I settled on is where I was stuck.  Eventually, a hamlet was able to let me exploit a second island, but I couldn't figure out another way to get to any of the others.  

In a previous beta (Lucy?), I thought garrisons/harbors enabled you to build new districts beside them.  Didn't seem to work here -- and it would be nice to be able to expand to a separate island in the same region if needed.  I don't have an idea of how to do it, but would suggest that something be added for it.

UprootedGrunt wrote:

In a previous beta (Lucy?), I thought garrisons/harbors enabled you to build new districts beside them.  Didn't seem to work here -- and it would be nice to be able to expand to a separate island in the same region if needed.  I don't have an idea of how to do it, but would suggest that something be added for it.

I didn't play Lucy, so I didn't know this used to be a thing. Why would they remove it? I absolutely think we should be able to build off our other districts. At least the harbors, but ideally also the resource extractors. From an immersion perspective, it doesn't make any sense that we can build a harbor or resource extractor but not have an offshoot of our city "supporting" it.

I felt stability was quite well balanced. I only wished there was a centralized place where you can check your cities stability without having to check each one by one.

I was enjoying the stability mechanics until I tried to absorb a city into another one. I did see the warning that it absorbing would come at a stability cost, but I figured that I could take the hit and just recover. Long story short, I couldn't. I'm not upset that I couldn't, but I did notice that this was one of multiple situations where I needed more information and couldn't get it. Perhaps if I could have known just how much of a stability hit I would take, I would have been able to make a more informed decision - maybe buff up my stability-building districts first? I encourage you guys giving us the information up front.

afarteta93 wrote:
As a side note, armies should also require money maintenance.

Funny thing is, they already do, but it's so insignificant nobody notices it. Also scouts don't cost maintenance, only actual combat units do...

1. If I attach an outpost to a city and then detach it, all population of the outpost remains in the city and results in a huge negative amount of food per turn and inevitable population loss.

2. The garrison district makes the Dunnu district pretty much obsolete very early in the game. It requires less production and provides slightly more bonuses. I wonder if Dunnu should provide additional, unique bonuses to make it stand out.

I think stability was nice in this build as it became for the first time something I had to be aware of. That being said, I feel the stability bonuses from being in the centre of the idological axes were too much and had the potential to turn stability into a non-issue as long as you paid attention to your civic and narrative choices (which is not necessarily a bad thing because at least you have to pay attention to something). A thing that surprised me is that the garrisson + public security infrastructures give a lot more stability than the commons quarter and with a smaller industry cost. This is not bad but if the commons quarter is not the stability district then it should have another purpose. Another thing I want to add is that I didn't notice in any of my playthroughs that empire stability was a thing. It didn't affect me, I didn't even know where I could check it and I still don't know what would happen if my empire stability was low.

Early game stability was miserable, as I wanted to attach all outposts but could not afford many.  That might be appropriate, and is affected by the low city cap too.  Mid game stability was balanced, but I was pretty limited on the number of territories each city owned (maybe 3-4) and had invested heavily in stability buildings (fountain, aqueduct).  I built a couple forts for added stability and war advantages, and some Aztec sacrificial altars (1/city).  Late game, my stability was very high due to me reverting to middle-of-the-road ideologies.  I built a few common houses only after trying to build a ton of districts.

To summarize, it was easy to manage if you focused on it.  Ideologies make up the majority of your stability it seems, and that can really start to run away quickly as you sign civics.  More often than not, it seemed better to try to stick to balanced ideologies and just build an extra district, especially early game.  Just compare the value of +1 farming district/city to +5% food growth overall (one step away from center iirc).  I won't say one is always better, but the former certainly has it's advantages early game.  I think if the tech issue is fixed, stability is definitely manageable long-term.  I do wish common houses provided more stability (or that more districts increased stability), as it can be difficult to fix stability short-term outside of ideology changes.

• I managed to claim both natural wonders south of the starting position for my capital. I think getting that much influence, money and stability in the Ancient era for free is way too strong because with the influence and money you can get even more stability through luxury resources.
  
  
• There is a point when you have to spam garrisons. Garrisons could provide a little more stability to make this phase of the game less tedious.
  
  
• Commons Quarters were little overnerfed. I think the issue wasn't that they provided too much stability, but that they're too spammable and have no downsides.
  
  
• The most severe stability swings happened because of wars and ransacking of trade posts. I'd like better feedback from the game which trade post was ransacked and how much of a stability hit my cities will take because of that. Also, I felt rather helpless when dealing with this problem. The only solution I came up with was burning through my population to spam even more garrisons before stability hit less than 30%. Perhaps the Games Ceremony could be a little more suitable for emergency situations.
  
  
• A pet peeve of mine is that the game currently rewards building snaky cities because of the way exploitation works. So here's a crazy idea: Give every quarter a toned-down version of the Commons Quarter mechanic. For example, each quarter might have a base stability cost of -12, but gains +1 stability for each adjacent quarter. This means that a fully enveloped quarter would have a stability cost of only -6, but if you're building a snaky city each quarter costs -9 or -10. Might be interesting to balance exploitation and stability this way. And it kind of makes sense roleplaying-wise, too. If your city is blocky, everyone is feeling safer and you can keep your population in check. If your city is snaky, the external border is longer and it's harder to keep track of everything.

fahnseN13 wrote:

• I managed to claim both natural wonders south of the starting position for my capital. I think getting that much influence, money and stability in the Ancient era for free is way too strong because with the influence and money you can get even more stability through luxury resources

Agree with that. There's a huge difference between playthoughs were I rushed south to pick the two natural wonders and those few were I didn't. Especially the influence is insanely powerful early on and the stability is quite good even in the late game.

Furthermore, as natural wonders are all the same, and you only need to claim their territory, so it's kind of boring. I'd suggest to put the yields on the tiles itself, so you need to exploit them.