View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0016503 | Stars Beyond Reach | Balance Issue | May 4, 2015 5:56 pm | May 22, 2015 10:53 pm | |
| Reporter | ptarth | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Product Version | 0.809-0.810 | ||||
| Fixed in Version | 0.840 (Pollution/Crime/Teleporters/Blueshirts) | ||||
| Summary | 0016503: Crime and Population Issues | ||||
| Description | As the resident big city creator, I suppose this duty falls to me. This is another balance issue like the ICS issue. I don't like the balance on crime growth being based upon population density. (This might actually be a flaw. I note that there is a penalty for population and one for density. However, the density is the total population of my city, and not divided by anything. If this is actually wrong, then ignore everything I say.) Crime gets too high and if anything impairs police protection, then your cities quickly enter a death spiral. In my larger cities (50k population) 95%+ of crime is generated from population density (50k generates 465 crime for Fenyn with endgame crime reductions, 52k generates 570 crime). This makes a tricky cap on population growth that will surprise people because it is nonlinear! You can be building outwards and suddenly your once stable city center will then erupt into violence. Once you pass the density boundary, the only solution is to bulldoze and place more Riot Police or to lower your maximum population. The lowest police design is to space riot police 6 hexes apart or regular police 4 hexes apart. With an endgame Fenyn you are getting 300 crime prevention per Riot Police and 200 per police. You'll get maybe 20k population cities. On the other hand, on a early game Boarine you are getting 45 for police and 80 for Riot Police. That's maybe 5k population? (I don't have good numbers for this, too many disease and crime riot problems in my saves. But it is frustratingly low. I was getting disease & crime death spirals at 3k people.) I've been designing various templates to try to estimate the maximum population of a city, and it is unappealing. There is just too much of my city devoted to Police. My last major city used a 2-space Riot Police layout, where each Riot Police was 2 spaces away from each other in a grid. Each building was then protected by 4 Riot Police. This would probably keep me safe until 75k? I was getting roughly 1 apartment paired with 1 Riot Police. I've been trying to calculate an improved untested 2-hex layout relying only on underground bunkers but it is suffering from unemployment issues. The maximum Police Protection would be a 1-space grid, but are faced with having 33% of your city being Riot Police. That would be the highest population city, but not a very good one. I guess my question is: What sort of Police density versus City population were you thinking would be ideal? | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
|
|
One thing I do want to mention is that the way that you're creating cities is intended to be impossible eventually. Basically you're winding up with so many buildings that it's just a huge problem to tackle for the AIs to even approach you, etc. I have some ideas in mind in terms of countering this in a non-death-spiral way, but also ways to let you build larger cities that are more dense. Those will revolve around both the natural wonders and the resources more than anything else. That was a stroke of inspiration I had late last week, which will help to make position and organization even more important (by far), while also letting you build really large population, high-production cities without having things like a million individual police stations or whatnot. I will be super interested to work with you in that new system to find a balance that sates your desire for large cities while at the same time making it nonoptimal to just paint the map if you see what I mean. |
|
|
No worries. When you have a breather, can you make (non-binding, unofficial) statement on what you are thinking as to the ideal city sizes? Amusingly I don't have any large desires to make big cities. It just turns out that way. |
|
|
I honestly don't really have an ideal size in mind. I figure that players will either build small but really dense, build many cities and medium size, or build something more of a sprawl. Exactly what the numbers turn out to be I have no idea just yet. But hitting 100k+ citizens in your empire is definitely expected, and even more than that. Probably half as many tiles as what you're currently using would be what I'd expect in a final balance with resources and natural wonders and market items and all that, though, to reach that. Maybe even fewer. |
|
|
My current city is around 8k but requires 2x2 Riot Police Spacing. The density crime penalty is still much too high. Building have two parameters to increase crime resulting from population directly. The first is Raw population. This value is 3 for a 50k Skylaxian City. It is 0.02 for a 8k Peltian City. This value is 572 for a 50k Skylaxian City. It is 36 for 8k Skylaxians. It is 197 for 8k Peltians. I'm not sure these are the intended values. The Peltians are getting a trivial boost to population crime, but a massive penalty to density crime. |
|
|
|
|
|
Thanks to the savegame on that -- I'll definitely need to make some changes there for sure. |
|
|
Okay, this is fixed: * The crime that comes from the number of citizens in your city has dropped dramatically, and is better calculated now as well, so that you can support larger cities (in terms of citizens) without so much crime from that. * The crime that comes from population density has been shifted downward by two orders of magnitude. It was definitely untenably high before, particularly when going for high-population cities. * A new crime source, number of buildings in your city, has been introduced. This starts out light, but then starts going up extremely sharply once you start getting past 60-80 buildings in a single city. Once you pass 300 buildings, it becomes absolutely unbearably brutal, so a number of pre-existing savegames from a few versions back are probably unplayable now from a balance standpoint. ** The idea here is that, particularly with all the resource bonuses and natural wonder bonuses and adjacency bonuses, we want you to build smart and tight rather than just doing an infinite sprawl of gargantuan cities in terms of building count. Let's see tons of citizens without the brute force of just slamming down as many buildings as possible. THAT SAID, because your city was built in the old style, it spikes to 9000 unhandled crime in the new version. This is just an unfortunate result of an old-style city in the new version. But the actual core problem of the population density portion of it is definitely fixed, and is way down. The problem in the new version is just how many buildings you have (300+), which is a lot more than is expected in the new version. In a single city, anyhow. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 4, 2015 5:56 pm | ptarth | New Issue | |
| May 4, 2015 7:44 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0040475 | |
| May 4, 2015 7:44 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| May 4, 2015 7:44 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => acknowledged |
| May 4, 2015 8:08 pm | ptarth | Note Added: 0040477 | |
| May 4, 2015 8:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0040478 | |
| May 16, 2015 8:58 pm | ptarth | Note Added: 0040925 | |
| May 16, 2015 8:59 pm | ptarth | File Added: 821 Peltian population problems.save | |
| May 17, 2015 1:47 am | ptarth | Note Edited: 0040925 | |
| May 22, 2015 2:16 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0041062 | |
| May 22, 2015 10:53 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0041078 | |
| May 22, 2015 10:53 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | acknowledged => resolved |
| May 22, 2015 10:53 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Fixed in Version | => 0.840 (Pollution/Crime/Teleporters/Blueshirts) |
| May 22, 2015 10:53 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => fixed |
