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Reduce Sub 20 City Costs


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Just now, Roquentin said:

Not really sure what you expect to happen. Either people will get more aggressive in their response or simply drop the forums short of a change in regulation. The current atmosphere pretty much condones and fosters aggressive flaming as the main form of exchange.

I don't disagree about the atmosphere being pretty bad in places, but if it bugs you there's no rule saying you need to do it yourself.

So I don't expect the forums to change, but I'd expect people who are making the point to hold themselves to a (perhaps slightly? :P) higher standard.

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I'll just throw this little datasheet I put together in here to see if it generates any good ideas. I think that this shows that income increases exponentially with city count, which is a real issue for long-term gameplay and probably the reason we have the discrepancies we do between the top and the bottom. Without either some way to redistribute some of the funds from the top to the bottom, or change the shape of the growth curve, I think we'll always have a problem.

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4 minutes ago, Critters said:

Wealth redistribution? What are you Obama? 

I am going to point out here publicly that this user has been warned for this post, and that if you only offer low-effort trolling/spam posts in serious discussion forums like the Game Suggestions or Game Discussion subforums, we will issue warnings.

Obviously the moderators cannot personally review every single post to see whether it follows the rules or not, so please use the Report button to report rule-breaking posts to flag them for moderator attention.

Now, back to the serious discussion, please.

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Per my initial response to this thread, here is a graph on the average days it takes to buy a new city (given that you're dedicating all of your monetary daily net revenue toward buying a new city, based on the average daily net revenue figures used in my earlier post as well.)

Current City Cost Formula

BQP7sQK.png

My Proposed City Cost Formula

41BzfVG.png

This is just to give everyone participating in the thread some more information about the current situation, and what one proposed change could look like. As you can see, everyone would benefit as shown, but newer players would benefit more.

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1 hour ago, Alex said:

I'll just throw this little datasheet I put together in here to see if it generates any good ideas. I think that this shows that income increases exponentially with city count, which is a real issue for long-term gameplay and probably the reason we have the discrepancies we do between the top and the bottom. Without either some way to redistribute some of the funds from the top to the bottom, or change the shape of the growth curve, I think we'll always have a problem.

xOlzjoO.png

What exactly is this supposed to be? You're showing us a data sheet to tell us that with more cities means more income? That's pretty self explanatory. How would that create discrepancies between the top and bottom? The discrepancy is because some people have played the game longer than others. The high city nations have been playing for years and the low city nations have been playing for months? These people complaining about city prices are young nations trying to get ahead faster than us older folks did. We all went through the same econ system and we paid our way to where we are. This suggestion is just about making it easier for some while us older people didn't have it so easy. In fact, like it has been said. Us older folks didn't have what the newer nations do. Established upper tiers that can funnel money south and help build cities. We did it on our own. 

This proposal does not help the retention issue. Like I said, 99% of new nations just don't play past the first day. They have a city or two and just stop playing. Others join micros and don't grow or some don't join alliances at all. Established alliances should have programs in place such as wealth distribution to help their new guys grow. If they don't, well then they are out of luck. 

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7 minutes ago, Justin076 said:

What exactly is this supposed to be? You're showing us a data sheet to tell us that with more cities means more income? That's pretty self explanatory. How would that create discrepancies between the top and bottom? The discrepancy is because some people have played the game longer than others. The high city nations have been playing for years and the low city nations have been playing for months? These people complaining about city prices are young nations trying to get ahead faster than us older folks did. We all went through the same econ system and we paid our way to where we are. This suggestion is just about making it easier for some while us older people didn't have it so easy. In fact, like it has been said. Us older folks didn't have what the newer nations do. Established upper tiers that can funnel money south and help build cities. We did it on our own. 

This proposal does not help the retention issue. Like I said, 99% of new nations just don't play past the first day. They have a city or two and just stop playing. Others join micros and don't grow or some don't join alliances at all. Established alliances should have programs in place such as wealth distribution to help their new guys grow. If they don't, well then they are out of luck. 

Well the point of it was to show that growth in cities isn't a linear trend, it's exponential. As in, once you have more cities, you're growing faster than small guys, which is not really ideal game design.

Ideal game design would look more like a diminishing returns curve, whereby smaller nations would catch up to larger nations over time. I understand that doesn't sound like a fun idea if you're an established large nation who wants to keep their advantage, but for the longevity of a game, the same person can't be on top forever.

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You also have to consider that each alliance has different growth programs, which will effect that chart to an extent.  Some past alliances (And even some today) continue to feed all the tax income into a few select nations, which pumps their growth faster than what they would've been on their own.

I don't think "larger nations" want to "keep that advantage", but moreso players don't want to see easy hand-me-downs given to alliances that have awful economic practices.

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1 minute ago, Buorhann said:

You also have to consider that each alliance has different growth programs, which will effect that chart to an extent.  Some past alliances (And even some today) continue to feed all the tax income into a few select nations, which pumps their growth faster than what they would've been on their own.

I don't think "larger nations" want to "keep that advantage", but moreso players don't want to see easy hand-me-downs given to alliances that have awful economic practices.

Well, I think you make good points and I do agree with that same sentiment that I'm not trying to give out handouts that effectively punish players with good strategy. It's a difficult thing to balance, IMO.

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7 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

You also have to consider that each alliance has different growth programs, which will effect that chart to an extent.  Some past alliances (And even some today) continue to feed all the tax income into a few select nations, which pumps their growth faster than what they would've been on their own.

I don't think "larger nations" want to "keep that advantage", but moreso players don't want to see easy hand-me-downs given to alliances that have awful economic practices.

Basically this.

 

Also @Alex that chart isn't taking into account a lot of factors, first of all remember that most large nations past a certain city count also have dangerously high levels of infra which helps them when it comes to getting more income, and since we have been around for a long time there is age as well that is a factor among other things.

Also most people dont even think this will help retention, (because honestly this is more of a ploy than an actual retention suggestion), if anything you should look into bettering the game itself to make it more attractive, not make things cheaper (I'm no expert but giving us more things to do within the game would probably further improve retention way more than making things cheaper or making the game look nicer, or even fixing small details that haven't been fixed yet).

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26 minutes ago, Alex said:

Well, I think you make good points and I do agree with that same sentiment that I'm not trying to give out handouts that effectively punish players with good strategy. It's a difficult thing to balance, IMO.

The other thing to consider when making any big changes, is that players often get into a rhythm of sorts with the current standing mechanics of the game.  They begin to teach others how the game works as well.  Making an adjustment like this, while with good intentions, can upset the player base with the disruption (As we've seen in the past throughout this particular game's history).

A couple of other things that we should consider is that you cannot lose Cities, as well as strategies employed by various alliances (Some with quick growth circles, some with tiering at a certain city count, etc).  Once you create a new city, it's there permanently unless you request for city deletion.  The investment put into that city will pay off eventually.  Therefore you will eventually hit a sweet spot of just continuous growth till it's too expensive to build another city (Therefore causing you to focus more on Infra later).

So while the growth is slow early on, you will eventually "catch up" to 20+ cities on your own.  However, some alliances have strategies built around centering a certain city tier, which causes issues with the perception of this idea.  And I've already touched base on the quick growth circle ideas that some alliances employ.

 

I've caught some word on what you'd like to try out (The 10 City Timer), and honestly I don't think that's a bad idea.  It'd be a small step in helping new fledgling alliances and new nations to "catch up" to the more competitive "teen" level of cities.

Some other ideas:  Separate the City Timer from the Project Timer, that way if a nation manages to buy a project (Regardless of who funds it), they're not restricted to purchasing another city.  This could help establish new players in the game quickly, either through the alliances they join or from their friends that invite him into the game.

Could explore Infra costs up to 1000 or 1500 Infra.  Make it easy for nations to recover after a devastating war.  Although this would be tricky too.

Perhaps try something with the color bonus again, or explore the Religion idea you posted in my thread (That actually wasn't bad and I'm intrigued by it, I'll post up thoughts on it later).

The reason why I like @Sketchy's idea earlier is that it focuses on the main area of the game where raiders are rampant.  While raiders are a necessity in encouraging conflict and generating activity (To an extent), it does hinder new players growth.  Getting to city 10 can be painful, but after that, it's relatively easy as you can have enough Improvement slots to focus on Trade or just play passively with Commerce growth.

Edited by Buorhann
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@CandyShi I completely agree with your last line and would like to elaborate on it. Making the game easier for new players is fine although there is a fine line between being reasonable and just being over generous. If you make it too easy it becomes boring thus difficult to find interesting enough to continue.

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Speaking as a biased party again (Because i just bought myself IA with my own resources, instead of my 10th city), separating the project and city timers would be nice. This may be a symptom of my still being new, but, i don't currently see any of the projects as being so powerful as to balance out the benefit of another city. Really, i just bought IA more because i was annoyed at my one spy operation restricting my normal operations, as opposed to thinking it better for me as opposed to a city. 

I suppose you could also change improvements to make them significant enough that they really should be a "one or the other" sort of deal.

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7 hours ago, Alex said:

Ideal game design would look more like a diminishing returns curve, whereby smaller nations would catch up to larger nations over time.

1) Alex, I feel most of your recent solutions, such as re-igniting the market and your suggestion to make it easier to buy cities, keeping everything else same, for new players are all quick and dirty fixes to delay the inevitable as opposed to a permanent solution.

2) It should definitely be made more difficult to buy city 35+ by increasing their cost, and there should be fewer cities at the top.

3) To introduce diminishing revenue at the top, increase the cost of maintaining a high population. Either make the formula for population have fewer people per city, the more the city count, or increase pollution cost exponentially with city count. This should then make your curve be more linear or exponential in the opposite direction.

You could also make dissent impact population and make a higher city count have more dissent.

4) This last point is debatable, but consider negative growth through random events or player initiated actions. Examples:

a) An earth quake can destroy infra and it can damage a fixed (randomised) percent of infra. So a nation with fewer infra (total) would loose relatively fewer than one with higher due to city count or just buying more than normal infra per city. This would redirect funds

b) If a higher ranked player looses a war to a lower ranked, then make the higher ranked player have a fewer percentage of population (due to dissent/low morale) for a certain number of days, using a reducing multiplier. In other words, the first day after the war 30% of the population don't come to work and you loose tax income as a result. Then 29%, 28%, 27% every day.

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5 hours ago, CandyShi said:

less than 10 days to buy a city?

Isn't that going a little.. overboard...

That's not even possible unless you use credits...

Also that's based on monetary economy, however if you're going to buy cities by yourself with no loans or without an alliance, you're... even more antisocial than I am.

Newer players is nowhere near 15 cities, much less 20.

I've been playing the game for a solid year and a month now and have 15 cities.

Why not decrease the amount necessary for cities 2-10, but keep 10-30 the same and increase 30+, if you really think that decreasing city cost will increase player retention. (Spoiler alert, it definitely will not.)

I feel as though this idea of reducing cities up to 20's cost is solely biased towards **cough** a not-specified alliance **cough**, especially since their members are aggressively defending it, along with some of their treaty web.

If you want dedicated players, then making the game even easier isn't the way to do it.

I don't think it's going overboard.  With the current market prices on products/goods, if one was to go straight production or commerce - manage to avoid being raided, etc.  They could probably do it.  It'd also depend on Infrastructure levels too, as that variance could cause issues with the economic graphs.

(I think Sheepy is going based off of his optimal growth chart though, so we'll assume 1k Infra iirc that's what it's based off of up till I think it was city 14, when 1500 Infra becomes the feasible step from his graph he showed)

I would also not judge a person's capability of purchasing cities and compare it to your antisocial life, lol.

 

The rest of your stuff has already been beaten on.

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16 hours ago, Alex said:

 

Current City Cost Formula

BQP7sQK.png

 

 

Sheeps, based on that graph, I don"t see what the issue here is.  You show that income grows exponentially as cities increase, but the city purchase graph seems to be fairly linear, even if the small sample size at the top makes the numbers a little wonky. (ape is that you dragging down the 30 city incomes?) 

I don't understand how making it harder for the largest nations to continue to grow helps the game in any way.  Currently there are 22 nations with 30 cities or more, in 6 months that number may increase to about 40-50.  you aren't exactly talking about a huge percentage of the game, as compared to the 1350 players between 10-20 cities.  The way the war declaration ranges work, us 30+ nations are generally struggling to drop down to hit guys below 25 cities (unless they hold a ton of nukes)

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23 hours ago, Justin076 said:

What exactly is this supposed to be? You're showing us a data sheet to tell us that with more cities means more income? That's pretty self explanatory. How would that create discrepancies between the top and bottom? The discrepancy is because some people have played the game longer than others. The high city nations have been playing for years and the low city nations have been playing for months? These people complaining about city prices are young nations trying to get ahead faster than us older folks did. We all went through the same econ system and we paid our way to where we are. This suggestion is just about making it easier for some while us older people didn't have it so easy. In fact, like it has been said. Us older folks didn't have what the newer nations do. Established upper tiers that can funnel money south and help build cities. We did it on our own. 

This proposal does not help the retention issue. Like I said, 99% of new nations just don't play past the first day. They have a city or two and just stop playing. Others join micros and don't grow or some don't join alliances at all. Established alliances should have programs in place such as wealth distribution to help their new guys grow. If they don't, well then they are out of luck. 

Newer folks don't have what older nations did. That is, cheaper resources. Older nations were able to stockpile resources for warchest while they were significantly cheaper. Now, newer nations have to basically sacrifice growth in order to maintain a warchest that will be depleted the instant it's built up. Most of the older nations that have grown out of reach of the majority can continue hoarding since they typically go years without a major war, while the newer guys are faced with wars and raids very regularly. 

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37 minutes ago, element85 said:

Newer folks don't have what older nations did. That is, cheaper resources. Older nations were able to stockpile resources for warchest while they were significantly cheaper. Now, newer nations have to basically sacrifice growth in order to maintain a warchest that will be depleted the instant it's built up. Most of the older nations that have grown out of reach of the majority can continue hoarding since they typically go years without a major war, while the newer guys are faced with wars and raids very regularly. 

You have a source to back up this claim?

I'm pretty sure resources are cheaper now, or on par roughly, with what they were before.  I know resources were definitely cheaper during the 9mo lull of no major conflict.  Steel was 2200 PPU at one point.

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24 minutes ago, element85 said:

Newer folks don't have what older nations did. That is, cheaper resources. Older nations were able to stockpile resources for warchest while they were significantly cheaper. Now, newer nations have to basically sacrifice growth in order to maintain a warchest that will be depleted the instant it's built up. Most of the older nations that have grown out of reach of the majority can continue hoarding since they typically go years without a major war, while the newer guys are faced with wars and raids very regularly. 

Alright, let me explain.

Both older nations and younger nations had, and still have the same *monetary* price for military, improvements, infrastructure, land, cities, and projects. The price of resources, however, has gone up considerably. This is called inflation, because the "price" of money is now lower.

This means that cities/infrastructure/land/projects/military/improvements are now essentially cheaper than they were before. Same price... easier to get the money.

This means that everyone that produces resources has the value of their effective income scale with inflation, whereas commerce builds end up stagnating. If your economic build and alliance economic policy is competent, then cities are easier to come by now than ever before.

Also, since your capacity to produce resources is limited only by taxes and money to build improvement slots with, resources are now easier to come by now than ever before anyway!

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42 minutes ago, element85 said:

Newer folks don't have what older nations did. That is, cheaper resources. Older nations were able to stockpile resources for warchest while they were significantly cheaper. Now, newer nations have to basically sacrifice growth in order to maintain a warchest that will be depleted the instant it's built up. Most of the older nations that have grown out of reach of the majority can continue hoarding since they typically go years without a major war, while the newer guys are faced with wars and raids very regularly. 

Ayy back in the day money was harder to come by so buying resources had to be cheaper, but small nations are producers and most of their income comes from selling resources on the market, meaning that it doesnt really affect them negatively for prices to go up since they are making a lot more money meaning its somewhat relative if not better for them.

As for us going to war Grumpy has had about 1 a year or so.

1 minute ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

- lots of words -

What he said!

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8 hours ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

Alright, let me explain.

Both older nations and younger nations had, and still have the same *monetary* price for military, improvements, infrastructure, land, cities, and projects. The price of resources, however, has gone up considerably. This is called inflation, because the "price" of money is now lower.

This means that cities/infrastructure/land/projects/military/improvements are now essentially cheaper than they were before. Same price... easier to get the money.

This means that everyone that produces resources has the value of their effective income scale with inflation, whereas commerce builds end up stagnating. If your economic build and alliance economic policy is competent, then cities are easier to come by now than ever before.

Also, since your capacity to produce resources is limited only by taxes and money to build improvement slots with, resources are now easier to come by now than ever before anyway!

In my CN alliance, when someone makes a great post, we just quote it as reinforcement or approval.

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On 5/8/2018 at 9:33 PM, CandyShi said:

less than 10 days to buy a city?

Isn't that going a little.. overboard...

That's not even possible unless you use credits...

 

am i reading this wrong somehow? are you saying that its not possible for a new player to build a city in less than 10 days? cause i had 5 cities on my tenth day without credits or any kind of loan or grant and i didn't play for 3 of those days.

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On 5/8/2018 at 7:05 PM, Alex said:

Per my initial response to this thread, here is a graph on the average days it takes to buy a new city (given that you're dedicating all of your monetary daily net revenue toward buying a new city, based on the average daily net revenue figures used in my earlier post as well.)

Current City Cost Formula

BQP7sQK.png

Okay the way I'm reading this graph is that despite the increase in revenue larger players have, it still takes longer for larger nations to buy higher numbered cities. Meaning smaller people are already catching up. I'm confused because you seem to have reached the total inverse conclusion.

 

Edited by Spaceman Thrax
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