Rincewind57

Join Date 05/2006

Map Size Balancing Philosophy

As a player who almost always plays on small maps, I'm often curious about how map size seems to be ignored during balancing and I'm curious if this is intentional or not.

For example, the ideology trees have very different impacts based upon map size. On an insane galaxy one extra class 10 planet is a very small boost, on a small or tiny map it is a significant increase in power.

The building that gives you 1 ideology point? On a tiny map you have barely any spare tiles, on an insane map it's far easier to populate a group of worlds with these.

I haven't really seen this issue discussed in any of the dev journals. Would any of the devs care to share the teams thoughts? Are the balance differences a boon, making different strategies important on different map sizes, or simply a balance problem?

I used to play GalCiv 2 an awful lot and I eventually learned that on a small map the Spin Control Centre was something to beeline for. The boost it gave to apparent power was small on huge maps but on a small one it meant i could basically ignore my military and the AI players would all fear my supposed enormous military power.

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What you seem to think of as an imbalance between how things play on large and small maps does not seem that way to me. Different sizes should perform differently, drastically differently. The same is true for other settings and combinations of settings. In this case, imbalance is a plus because it provides variation in game experience.

It seems to me that they could not be so successful at creating different types of gameplay with different settings if it were not deliberate and fully taken into account by the devs. There is a basic narrative flow, but variation of events and patterns is built in to all aspects of the game. This is in the nature of sandbox games.

I don't think you need a dev to come here and tell you their design philosophy. I think it shows pretty clearly in their product.

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Taslios

Join Date 11/2002

+74

You are both right.

One of the things that has bugged me about the way the Ideology system currently works is that it is very very dependent on map size.

The different size maps should play differently

However the tools in the game should be balanced so that when a player is making choices the size of the map does not automatically choose for them.

I think the Ideology trees need a lot of help to actually work right... and some of the choices in the trees should be race unique. Some of the choices should only be available on specific map sizes to give the map sizes a bit of special flair....

and some of them should be balanced depending on the size of the map.

my 2 cents.

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Do we know if the tech costs scale with map size? Does anything else scale?

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Larsenex

Join Date 04/2009

+212

Techs do not scale with map size although the probably should. I would love a 5th Ideology bar that was as race specific as Stardock would make it. It would make a nice DLC but I really think it would require FAR more hours of development and work than they could pull out of it via paid DLC.

Take all our base races and add one more ideology bar for them. That is a ton of work. I think we may be getting some form of this flavor in the expansion since Brad has stated we are getting new tech trees. Lets see!

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Seilore

Join Date 10/2006

+154

Quoting Larsenex,

reply 4

I would love a 5th Ideology bar that was as race specific as Stardock would make it. It would make a nice DLC but I really think it would require FAR more hours of development and work than they could pull out of it via paid DLC.

Love the idea, however, there still needs to be something extra for players to get ideology in MP, it's almost pointless after the colony rush in MP to do anything with ideology, sure you have the buildings but, with 10 or even 20 planets if each has one or maybe two (if you were lucky and unlocked 2 prior to the end of the colony rush stage) this means that maybe you get 20 points every 10 turns means that you may get lucky and be able to unlock 1 or 2 more the rest of the game... This kind of sucks to even have ideology in the game for MP.

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"I don't think you need a dev to come here and tell you their design philosophy. I think it shows pretty clearly in their product."

I´m not so sure of that. I´m a software engineer myself and I know there are often many aspects to a product you´d like to improve but they just aren´t high enough priority to ever really make it into scope. My instinct is that the game is balanced for one or two map sizes (standard/large probably) and the rest is just left to be what it is unless glaring flaws are noticed or a lot of player complaints are raised.

One of the reasons I say this is that several aspects of the game aren't just a little badly balanced on different map sizes, they're horrendous. On small maps you'd have to be absolutely crazy to choose many of the ideology options over others. Choices should always be real, it's okay to have some a little better than others, that's part of learning to play well, but meaningless choices really damage the strategy in a game.

Another example is range techs. On a small map the AI still seems to bother with these things (please correct me if I'm wrong with the latest patches) but they're a complete waste of time. That's not anything to do with balancing, it's just an area where the design fails to take smaller map sizes into account and has a purely negative impact.

The fact that I do continue to play on small maps is evidence that the faults still leave a playable and enjoyable game but it's enough of an issue that I'm surprised not to have heard any word of plans to change this, or reasons not to.

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