Some thoughts on global vs city unrest

from Elemental Forums

Hello again guys,

 

It has been a while since I have posted a specific topic here but this is something that has been in the back of my head since unrest was added into the game.  I know it has been a long while now since this was added but I am trying to think things through all the way unless I want to end up posting something not worth reading.

My thought is that while the unrest system we have right now sort of works it does not really represent what it is supposed to do.  Unrest in general represents dissatisfaction and unruliness of a populace to oppose or not work as hard towards a goal/project.  This is usually caused by a couple of factors namely food availability, safety, lack of disease, and total numbers of people.  Malcontents are usually few and far between but by the law of large numbers the more people you have in one place the more malcontents you tend to get.  The more malcontents the more likely they will be disruptive causing a cascade effect.  Couple this with a government processes that can then multiply these effect by bureaucracy.  This is my reasoning behind a new unrest formula.

Code: xml
  3. City unrest = ( 5 * (citylevel-1)+GloablUnrestModifier)
  5. Globalrest = Taxrate+(NumCity*.02)

I know this is similar to what already exists but what this does is add a penalty to large cities so that when they grow too fast without the unrest reducing technologies they do not have a massive advantage over multiple small cities.  Now to account for the overall higher unrest in cities troops should have a 1% per member unrest reduction as armies tend to reduce unrest by acting as an armed police force.  This would satisfy almost all of the cases listed above without deriving numbers based upon food available (which is covered by growth index), safety is covered by adding troop unrest reduction, lack of disease is something that is not really well covered in FE or LH as population is not handled as a dynamic resource except for city growth and explorers, and total numbers is covered by the unrest increase for larger cities.

 

Anyways this is something I have been pondering for a while.  Let me know what you think.

11,506 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I dislike your suggestions. Adding a penalty to cities growing fast would only further encourage city spam, something the game already fails to prevent as is with the rules for growth introduced by LH. The game should reward larger cities better, if anything. You ask for large cities not to have such a huge advantage over more numerous but smaller cities - well, they don't. In fact, the opposite is precisely the case: More numerous, smaller cities produce equal or better research and, more noticeably, have far greater production and overall population growth. Settling as many cities as possible as fast as possible is the main winning strategy.

I also think there is plenty of incitement to building the unrest-reducing buildings without further encouragement so I don't see a place for your suggestion of requiring such buildings. Same as discussed above applies: this suggestion would only amplify the game's problems with city-spam dominance. There is no need to further hinder and penalize large cities.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

If anything you need to made less more populous cities a better option.

 

Mostly cause this is my preferred play style.

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

As an old hand at Civ I thru Civ 4, I am understandably a ICS partisan - but even I admit that perfectionism isn't as viable as it should be in LH right now. Growing cities vertically just doesn't give enough of a benefit, even if you focus on it.