The problem lies in the ElementalDefs.xml file.
Here is the problem area:
<BaseCityHubPrestige>1.0</BaseCityHubPrestige>
<PrestigePenaltyPerCity>0.1</PrestigePenaltyPerCity>
<MinCityHubPrestige>0.1</MinCityHubPrestige>
Now, I don't know how they intended this to work - but here are what the calculations look like:
Base + Min - (Penalty * City)
So, normally, you would have 1 + .1 - .1 or a growth of 1 with just your starting city (and then factor in buildings, ect).
The problem gets really bad once you have 10 cities - the equation becomes 1 + .1 - 1.0 = .1
This wouldn't be so bad on its own - except rather than summing this value with building bonuses (like +2 from pub/inn), it seems to do some really weird stuff. I'd like to think its multiplying this Hub prestige stuff, but without running a debugger I can't be sure which value is lying to me, and which value the game is actually using. I have a number of cities that claim a growth of 5+ when I look at the calculations from within the city, but the actual growth shown on the overhead map is .1
Either way, the calculation is hosed.
My suggestion is that people who wish to play the game as it was before - change the latter 2 values to 0:
<BaseCityHubPrestige>1.0</BaseCityHubPrestige>
<PrestigePenaltyPerCity>0.0</PrestigePenaltyPerCity>
<MinCityHubPrestige>0.0</MinCityHubPrestige>
This way every city will start with 1 prestige and never be penalized for having too many cities. Or, play with them however you feel.
----How it should really work----
This is all hypothetical, but my design of prestige functionality would be as follows:
-------------------
Prestige = {BaseCityHubPrestige + Building Bonuses + Cha Bonuses} * {Empire Size Calc + Empire Wide Soveriegn Bonuses}
------------------
Base is defined in BaseCityHubPrestige as above, likely would start at 0.5
Building Bonuses are the sum of all bonuses in that City
Cha Bonuses are the sum of all cha bonuses from heroes in that city.
Empire Size Calc is defined as follows:
--------------
if (Cities <(MinCityHubPrestige*10))
{
Empire Size Calc = .25 + [{MinCityHubPrestige - Penalty (Cities)} * {MinCityHubPrestige - Penalty(Cities)}] / (MinCityHubPrestige - Penalty(1))
}
else
{
Empire Size Calc = .25
}
------------
MinCityHubPrestige would start at 2.1 for small worlds, 3.1 for normal, 4.1 for large (configurable)
Penalty would be default of .1
Theorcraft:
Assuming a Small world (MinCityHubPrestige = 2.1)
At the start of the game, with 1 city, the Empire Size Calc would be 2 * 2 / 2 = 2 + .25. This would result in roughly a x2.25 gain to all population when only 1 city. But with a start of .5 pop growth, this would only be 1.125 people. You need to start getting buildings to make use of this influx of people.
With 10 cities = 1.1 * 1.1 / 2 = 1.2 /2 = .6 +. 25 = .85 This would result in roughly a 15% penalty to all growth
With 20 cities = .1 * .1 /2 = .005 + .25 = .255 This would result in nearly 75% loss in growth! However, if you had 21 or more cities, you'd not be within the if calculation - you'd be in the else calcuation, and thus suffer at max a 75% calc.
As long as you had MinCityHubPrestige configurable by map size, you could scale how many cities you can have before you bottom out at 25% growth.
For instance, if you had 1 cities on a normal sized map:
MinCityHubPrestige = 3.1
3.1 - .1 * 3.1 -.1 / 3.1-.1
3*3/3 = 3 + .25 = 3.25 growth for a single city (this makes sense, as there are more people wandering the wilderness looking for someplace to live on larger maps). With a base of .5 growth, that would make 1.615 growth per turn.
At 10 cities:
3.1 - 1 * 3.1 -1 / 3 = 2.1*2.1 / 3 = 1.47 + .25 = 1.72 growth bonus for all these cities. Which is still a pretty good bonus.
At 20 cities:
3.1-2 * 3.1 - 2 / 3 = 1.1*1.1 / 3 = .40 + .25 = .65 growth bonus, which means the sweet spot for normal maps would be somewhere around 15 or so cities, and after that, everything starts going slower. But at the very worst you would have only a 25% modifier, rather than a 10%
And even if you think x2.25 or x3.25 growth is a lot, remember that I've lowered the base population growth to .5, so much of that will not be seen until you start getting buildings - and then you likely have a bunch of cities as well.
Thoughts?
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