Steady Challenge and Expansion Penalties

Tohron

Join Date 11/2008

Steady Challenge and Expansion Penalties

Right now, Galciv3 has essentially no expansion penalties. Maintenance costs are trivial, especially for new colonies, and your existing colonies suffer no ill effects from the expansion of your empire. The only thing you lose from expanding is the cost of the construction ship. Thus, a civilization's growth will follow an extreme exponential curve.

The consequence of this in the gameplay is that the early game is everything. If you grab 1-2 more colonies early, your expansion later will be accelerated, meaning that it will take extreme circumstances for an player behind you to catch up. The complaints about map balance bear this out - a map that hands one player more nearby planets lets them start their exponential buildup sooner, making it nearly impossible to stop them. In these conditions, reaching a challenging midgame scenario requires that players expand at roughly the same rate - which is improbable given that small variations in the first wave of expansion can lead to seriously different expansion rates in the second wave (by "second wave" I mean the wave produced when the initial colonies get their own shipyards).

Expansion penalties have been implemented in 4X games in order to slow this exponential runaway factor - with the goal that good play will still be rewarded, but comebacks can be achieved through superior play later on. This serves to keep the game interesting both for those who did well, and those who did poorly. This has been done in several ways - Endless Space and Civ V penalized happiness, GalCiv2 had a fairly stiff base maintenance cost on colonies, and Civ IV had increasing maintenance costs based on city count and distance from capitol. I like how the Civ IV system keeps the decision on whether to expand interesting from start to finish - since cities get more expensive as you add more, it generally requires thought as to whether you can afford more.

However, GalCiv3 has a lot more planets than CivIV has cities, so perhaps that system isn't suited to this particular game. Another option would simply be increasing colony maintenance back to around GalCiv2 levels. Whether this would work depends on how readily one can generate wealth. This would certainly be worth testing in the beta - it would probably take a good deal of iteration to find effective values, if they exist.

Any other ideas on how to keep early expansion from deciding a match?

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Quoting Bamdorf,

reply 24

I remember a LONG time ago there was a tabletop game in which travel by warp was initiated, and the ship(s) then could not be given orders until they appeared at the target destination X turns later.

Metagaming's Stellar Conquest (later acquired by Avalon Hill) had this mechanism. You can order a fleet to jump to any star you've already explored (only a scout can jump to an unexplored star, which explores it). Once they're en route, they cannot abort or change direction. A typical mid-game jump is 15 hexes at 4 hexes per turn = 4 turns. If there's a hostile fleet waiting for you, tough rocks. Later knock-offs and imitators, e.g. SSI's Godsfire, may have copied this rule.

I have doodled some UIs to display such a locomotion:

Pea in a soda straw. Every warp jump is drawn on your map as a tunnel. Your fleet appears as an icon (pea) inside the tunnel. Every turn, it moves its speed in hexes. Pro: Fits most players' everyday intuitions (cf. a car on a freeway).
Schrödinger's pencil lead. Every warp jump is drawn on the map with a groovy gradient pattern, which has nothing to do with the ship's "position". The entire tunnel is labeled with the turn number of arrival. Pro: It emphasizes the mind-bending idea that a ship/fleet in transit is nowhere; its position is not mappable to the X-Y of normal space.

One of the TOS Star Trek novels tossed in a silly variant of 4D chess, including time warps. (Their "standard 3D" chess has little movable 2x2 board fragments on long stems, and I guess for one of your moves you can move an entire board fragment by 1 notch instead of moving a piece.) 4D added time as the 4th dimension, where you can elect to warp out a piece and secretly tell when it returns to the board. Anyways, Kirk is about to resign (to Spock), McCoy takes over, warps out about four pieces, plays on to delay the inevitable ... and they warp back in simultaneously with a mate-in-1, and Spock didn't see it coming. Funny, but ultimately cheesy to no point: it postulates that McCoy has the spare time to oh-by-the-way become a better chess player than Kirk + Spock together, and keep it a secret for that many years, which was ... just stoopid. Slapstick with an aftertaste of blagh.

BTW, for you modders, and players who want more enabling techs, here's an idea I adapted from Brin. Postulate many different variations of hyperdrive. Each one is a separate tech. You need only 1, but you may want to also research the locomotion techs of the fodder you're about to war upon, so that you can intercept their ships. In no particular order:

Alderson jump drive [Pournelle]. Stars et al. create 1+ jump points nearby, which are linked in pairs between stars. Once you enter a jump point, I think you're committed: one-way, no maneuvering. The exit point may be inside the host star's upper atmosphere, so bring some shields.

Stellar Conquest one-way jump drives are similar to this, but maybe with the relaxation that the available lanes are essentially the complete graph between all pairs of stars. You can jump from any star to any star, with no extra cost.

Star Wars hyperspace. You enter hyperspace, where c is very different. Lanes exist from stars to stars, i.e. there's an implicit map of "cheap/easy" travel that you can gradually map out. I think you can make your own lane (by paying way more energy). Dense masses in realspace (black holes, Interdictor star destroyers) decant you back into realspace, or just eat you dead. Once you lay in your course and jump, you can't change direction (but you can abort back into realspace, maybe with some damage).
Star Trek warp drive. You create a local bubble in which c is very different. You can maneuver freely, even in combat.
Stargate. You fold space between 2 points. On both ends, it looks like a portal, but there is no tunnel at all: the "depth" of the tunnel is nil. Step through and you're there. Star Trek resorted to something much like this when they admitted that even going 1,024c is nothing compared to the size of the Milky Way (e.g. it cuts your trip time to the galactic center from 50k years to 5 years -- which eats up one full tour of duty, and then they all take shore leave and nobody's left to come home). Hence the Borg run various galactic sector train stations, where each station is essentially a labyrinth-of-stargates that can jump you 1/6 of the arc around the perimeter of the galaxy ~= 50k ly in <1 minute.

There's a rough progression of "strength", which could make for interesting tech decisions. Maybe a one-way, must-commit drive is easier and cheaper (beware my weenie gambit!) than the unrestricted, combat-dogfighting drive, which is in turn easier than the doomstack-teleporting drive. That could make for very rich gameplay, where you never build the same fleet twice, and you never fight against the same combination of ship techs twice.

Of course, it would drive the AI developer nuts, so you'd need some breakthroughs in meta-level AIs that can crawl over a game definition and output viable strategies.

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