Personally I think OP is correct that unrest as it is implemented is a poor mechanic for providing tradeoffs for/against ICS. However I think the Civ 5 example isn't all that much better because Civ 5 global happiness has a multitude of problems to it. You have to go back to Civ 4 to find a game that really nailed the trade offs with expansion by making it expensive short term, even crippling if done at the wrong time, but a winning strategy in the long term if you could pull it off well (ie it makes you weaker at first, but in the long term if you can defend you expansions and avoid trashing your economy it pays off).

Dunno that it is the biggest problem in LH though. I would still put ongoing AI improvements at the top of my wishlist for LH.

I'm still waiting to find out what ICS stands for...

infinite city sprawl.

I disagree - I think unrest is an solid way of handling ICS in this game. I think it was a smart move. It is a way that both works and was convenient for the developers since it meant they didn't have to invent an entirely new system and could just use what was already a feature of FE - unrest - and, really, was under-used in back then. It's a simplistic system but it's OK. There are just the two exceptions I mentioned that end up breaking it: It doesn't work for the early game and, more importantly, you have *no* way of dealing with high unrest until you're into what would basically be Apollo Program late if it were Civ V. That naturally has to create some problems. No, I'm not being entirely fair here: There are a few things you can do: You can waste a level 8 hero on administrator skills and have him reduce unrest globally by a whopping 5%. You can also completely ignore the other options for your level 4 Fortress and always go with the Prison. You can get lucky with a random quest from an expansion pack you may or may not own and be able to build a [overpowered] Temple of Forgetting. Yet, what you'll generally see happening is that you have to wait a *lot* of turns before you reach this 'Apollo Program' era to finally allow you to conquer the map (unless you just want to run around razing everything), because it simply takes a lot of turns to put 600 population into a city when it can only gain some ~3 pop/turn on average *if* you focused it on growth... and then you have a size 5 military city you built pretty much for the sole reason of circumventing the whole unrest mechanic.

What I'll admit about what I've said on this matter is that what experience you get is going to be highly dependent on how you set up the game. If you set the AI skill very high/exactly strong enough that neither party can conquer each other and populate the map with many more factions than are "recommended" then theoretically you'll get a game where unrest doesn't become a problem since nobody can expand. I actually did play one such session and my first level 4 Fortress went into building a Mining Guild, a situation I believe is very uncommon. Under more normal circumstances, though, 'unrest' (What are they rioting about? Naturalists angry that the whole world is no longer a wilderness populated by demons? ) becomes the main limiting factor to what you can do in a game and can potentially remain so for hundreds of turns. Which is too long... and so needs a mid-game option. It's the Theatre/Zoo that's missing. You can't put all the 'happiness'-buildings at the very end of the tech tree.

I don't know if you're commenting while being opted into the v1.4 beta update but this one significantly improves the AI - or, perhaps it's the effects of 1.3 I'm seeing as well since I didn't play since pre-1.3 until recently. Either way, this game's AI has come a long way since release - I'm impressed with the progress: even if it has taken a while, StarDock has still moved way faster with this than Firaxis has with Civ V. AI is also something I'm always craving for (especially in a single-player only game) but I also understand that developing a good one is no small task. However, I also feel the base game rules have to be solid; else a good AI is meaningless. The unrest-per-city implementation is the one area where I think Legendary Heroes has dropped the ball.

One way of solving this would be by increasing the base unrest per city, but adding a few buildings in mid and late game that lower the faction-wide unrest per city. Each building would be 1 per faction.

e.g.:

- Base unrest gets raised to 5 per city.

- Somewhere in the middle of the Civ tree is a new building that lowers the unrest per city back to 3.

- Near the end of the Civ tree is another new building, which lowers the unrest per city further to 2. (1 just seems too little)

So you'd get a larger unrest impact at the start of the game, but you'll be able to build with a less severe unrest penalty in the later phases of the game.

I feel like it is unrest-per-city itself that is just inherently not fun. I think game makers themselves kind of knew this when they tried to move away from it and focus more on growth-hits with games like Fallen Enchantress. But for me, I also think early game ICS, is also inherently not fun. There's really nothing that make it impossible to handle both problems at the same time. I've seen good, relatively simple to implement ideas posted on these very boards, and I've posted some pretty decent ones myself. 

@ Primal_Savage: I just skipped past your post initially but that's a nice result from the last post of yours. Season 257 is still very late but I can see how the game might go on if you've cranked up the difficulties. Yes, I've considered if I might be wrong about this, if there was some mechanic I had overlooked. As much as I wanted to, I didn't find it. However, if there is some magic trick for me still to learn I'd be happy to have it if you are able to present it in a civil manner because I just can't be bothered if your whole agenda remains discrediting me - I'm not looking to bash the game, I'm looking to have it improved.

So, let's see:

You've got -20 faction-wide from Prisons, -15 from the Forgetting temple (which you can't always expect to be picking up). Where is the remainder coming from?

@ Primal_Savage: I just skipped past your post initially but that's a nice result from the last post of yours. Season 257 is still very late but I can see how the game might go on if you've cranked up the difficulties. Yes, I've considered if I might be wrong about this, if there was some mechanic I had overlooked. As much as I wanted to, I didn't find it. However, if there is some magic trick for me still to learn I'd be happy to have it if you are able to present it in a civil manner for a change because I just can't be bothered if your whole agenda remains discrediting me - I'm not looking to bash the game, I'm looking to have it improved.

 

So, let's see:

 

You've got -20 faction-wide from Prisons, -15 from the Forgetting temple (which you can't always expect to be picking up). Where is the remainder coming from? There's still a long way till -58%.

Thanks for your valuable input. It's good you're enjoying the game as is. Now get lost.

Another idea:

Each city generates 2% base unrest per city level.

• 10 level 1 cities would be 20%
• 7 level 1 cities and 3 level 2 cities would be 26%
• 5 level 1 cities, 3 level 2 cities, and 2 level 3 cities would be 34%

You see the trend. Odds are you'll not have 10 level 5 cities. Maybe this would encourage keeping all your cities low level...

Thoughts?

I have at least 400 hours logged with FE:LH.

I only play on huge maps with at least 9 other civs.  I play at one level above "normal" (hard?)  I often play with the "cruel" leader trait b/c I roleplay my leaders and often play the Empire as a savage race of mutants bent on domination.

I often have 10-15 cities by 1/3rd of the game or so and I have never had my game crippled. 

Where do you build your fortresses?  on 1/5 tiles?  I find plenty of tiles that are 2-3/4-5 that are suitable for fortresses .... keeping my empire contiguous and building all unrest reducing buildings has always worked for me.  I almost never raze cities and by mid-game on a huge map often have 20+ cities..... they often start (the captured ones) with an inability to build any buildings due to unrest but I simply build the bell tower-city hall and then, if they have essence, use spells or send a hero to "pacify" the city.... Plus I usually have at least a level 4 or 5 fortress by mid-game.

I'm not sure of your play style but this issue is definitely not game breaking the way you portray it.  I suspect your play style has as much to do with it as the issue.

I do NOT want the return of the prestige system.  And I do reside in the camp of making a mountain out of a molehill.

You then go on to make various comments where you talk about why unrest as implemented in LH doesn't work very well to limit ICS. So I disagree that we disagree .

Unrest could possibly work as a mechanic to limit expansion if it were implemented better, in particular if there were more ways of controlling unrest with resulting trade-offs. I still think unrest isn't a very fun way of doing it, but it might have been the only option Stardock really had given that it is the only mechanic currently in the game which has broad affects on your empire (the other systems such as gold, research, production, mana, etc are fairly disjoint from each other - the reason the Civ 4 mechanics works so well is the gold income penalty from expanding more quickly than you can afford has a direct impact on your research which then has a followup impact on virtually everything).

You are quite right here, I haven't tried the v1.4 beta. I have played 1.3 and saw general improvements but in a way it highlighted the areas where the AI does dumb things more. If 1.4 contains significant further improvements then my priorities may in deed be out of date.

Personally I like the "cities penalty system" just the way it is.  I like how Fallen Enchantress gives you more than one solution to a potential problem which shows how well thought out the game design is in my opinion.  Along with the solutions other posters have pointed out by working with options given to you in the game my favorite is using outposts which are pretty useful to help manage expansion without having to build a bunch of cities to micromanage. 

At least the unrest system of fe:lh is vastly superior to stupid happiness system of civ 5, its so damn annoying. I can work with it but, its no fun at all. It doesn't even give me any way to kill off my city population so that I can become happy again short of using nukes as happiness bombs.

Yes, I have nuked my metropolises just to keep on expanding before in civ 5. I had too many people for bad mechanic anyways.

My favorite Fortress llc is a 3/3/3 or equivalent, I REALLY value the essence unit enhancements in my fortress.  Especially the +INT/Essence one.

Back to the original topic of unrest, I typically play on Large maps and I just manage it given the tools in-game.  Seems to work fine, even if the peasants are restless.  On a huge map with 30 cities I could see it being more of an issue.

I'm not sure why 'balance' is a biggy in a 4x game vs AIs?

This game gives you so many complex mechanics to mix and match it's never going to be balanced. That's not the point - it should be fun.

If you feel that spamming pioneers is too easy then don't do it. Abide by a rule that you can only build a pioneer from a level 2 settlement. Problem solved.

Or try to play a game without using any crystal or iron.

Or build an army full of wraith ninjas.

If you can't beat insane with your wraith ninjas try it on hard.

Balance is an irrelevance in games vs the AI...it just means that some things are easier or harder to work with than others. So what?

By that same logic you might as well give spears a combat strength of 9999 because hey, you're only facing the AI so balance doesn't matter. Balance does matter. The current system precisely isn't fun when you understand what's going on, and when you enjoy the game enough to care about its 4X aspect actually working.

The only convincing case that's been made so far as to why this isn't a problem is Primal_Savage's last posted example game where he does manage to subdue most of the unrest penalty. Yet, reviewing his example I'll ultimately have to dismiss that as well since it was accomplished using the Temple of Forgetting, presumably the Noble profession trait on his sovereign as well and then some third major factor he hasn't disclosed - so, he was able to do it by building both his empire and his sovereign entirely around unrest suppression and then still having to run a minimal tax rate and get lucky with a random event - he did every single thing he could to minimize unrest! Something is wrong if one has to jump through that many hoops to overcome the unrest mechanic. With a less extreme setup than his, simple arithmetics dictate that you'll end up in a situation where it simply isn't feasible to expand - which would be OK, if only this period wasn't so lengthy. As Ericridge exemplifies, the same situation of non-expansion arises in Civ V, but in V this period(s) is broken up, gradual and will never last 100+ turns like it can in this game. Here, once you hold those 15 cities or so somewhat developed cities the weight of the unrest penalty becomes so heavy (3% unrest in your six level 2 cities is acceptable, 3% unrest in all your 15 level 3 cities is painful) it simply stops making sense building or conquering any more until your Fortresses have matured to the upper tiers - which could take ages, even when built in grain-heavy locations and supported for growth in every way possible (in turn typically making for a relatively weak Fortress city).

You can certainly still build an army of 'wraith ninjas' out of your 79% unrest empire or play with house rules or use mods or whatever else and if the RPG aspect is all you want from Fallen Enchantress, that will do. It doesn't mean balancing this is irrelevant to the game, however. The 4X aspects are half the gameplay and need to work, as well.

There are no 'pointed out solutions' in this thread. Primal_Savage has used screenshots to try to build a case for the current system working - that's the closest thing, I believe. There's a vast array of improvements, upgrades, spells and abilities in one's arsenal in the game that can all help reduce unrest and while I agree with you it's interesting figuring out how to best combine them I believe none of them, even combined, offer a genuine 'solution'.

I don't see Outposts as a solution, either - they can't replace cities in the early game, are fragile and very expensive (Pioneer for Outpost + Consulate costs upwards of as much as the Storehouse, which also tends to result in the same +1 growth but also raises population capacity and is much better protected, so Consulates really aren't that hot). Outposts can indeed help you keep the number of cities down and can help you build super-cities with many resources, but they also don't give you as much raw power as a city does so it's mostly a moot point relying on them. This is an analysis based on what is efficient, though, not on what keeps down micromanagement.

Double post, delete.

I absolutely DESPISE the penalty city system in civ 5. For me it makes zero sense it many occasions.

The best example being, when you conquer or are given a city. REJOICE WE WON THE WAR, WE CONQUERED THAT CITY, BOOM! The whole empire becomes unhappy and or even revolts. It's a silly restriction for no apparent reason.

I'm not opposed to having some sort of restriction for having many cities, but not the civ 5 way. In what possible way does it make sense that the whole empire becomes unhappy because of 1 conquered city? It could affect some part of the empire maybe, but everything? It just a ridiculous restriction.

The solutions are genuine enough for me since they are working but I have kept my cities limited to 10 more powerful cities with outposts controlling resources since I am playing for non aggressive victory (Alliance or Research).  For those who are seeking military victory I understand the desire not to be penalized for conquest.  Perhaps a more genuine solution for conquest play styles (especially on larger maps) is to give the player a choice of creating a vassal out of a city so that they still contribute but do not count towards the unrest penalty for number of cities under the players direct control.     

IMHO the biggest flaw of that 3% per city mechanic is that it's a static value across all map sizes. so it's pretty much negligible on small maps and at the same time crippling on very large maps. i never understood why the percentage doesn't scale with map size. even civ 5 (which is known for it's rather strict anti-ICS mechanics) scales the most important per-city penalties based on map size so you can have a lot more cities on large/huge maps.

also, during the beta it was suggested several times that the unrest modifier of fortresses could be moved from the level 4/5 upgrade picks to standard buildings unlocked by research and built with production (for example, 3% global unrest reduction for city walls, another 6% for a castle or whatever) so you could actively build "unrest management" fortresses (as opposed to the rather passive option of slowly growing them to level 4/5 which we have now). i guess that system might have worked better, but at this point i think it's safe to assume that it will not be implemented

not saying the unrest system in the game doesn't work. for most games, it's good enough - it slows down expansive civs and gives you some incentive to grow your cities vertically instead of mindlessly building new cities in every available spot. unfortunately this also means you'll never be able to fill a huge map with cities unless you keep playing long after the point where you could have won the game.

Because honestly it doesn't matter, i play on huge and I end up having five fortresses with Onyx throne giving me a huge -150 unrest reduction across the whole island. Sometimes I have more than five onyx thrones. ;)I literally can go on unstoppable conquering spree if I wanted to. And I have done it.

If a change to the mechanic is necessary, I would say that the penalty should be capped at 75% if it is not already capped as such. That way you could build a new city after you have built 25 without having the onyx throne.

If you have 5 Onyx Thrones, the game was over 5 hours ago anyway.

That isn't really be relevant to serious discussions.

Apheirox - It seems to me that your two criticisms of the game are conflicting:

1) the early game encourages ICS because unrest doesn't sufficiently penalize small cities

2) the mid-game discourages ICS because the global unrest penalty to your existing big cities makes starting new (small) cities inefficient

I'll note here that ICS is really the wrong term - check what the "I" means.  The unrest system encourages growth to a specific size, and not further.  And that seems to be your complaint - that the game has an optimum empire size for maximum efficiency, and does not equally reward other empire sizes.  I disagree that this means it is "broken".  I think you can argue that the game unnecessarily constrains the player's strategy, but this is more of a reasonable design choice made by the devs than a critical flaw in the game.

The rest of your posts indicate to me that you want the game to reward you (or at least not penalize you) for expanding your empire, indefinitely.  Isn't that the definition of ICS, the very thing you are so critical of?  In the end, I think your criticism is really that the game doesn't reward your particular play style.  Maybe you should try playing a different way.

It simply stops making sense?  The goal of the game is to win - not to have a large, pretty, efficient empire able to crank out super-troops in 4 turns rather than 6.  If your primary goal is not winning the game, then you should expect that the game mechanics might start to get in your way.  Try this: learn to handle the extreme pain of 3% unrest in 15 level 3 cities, build the troops you need, and go win the game. 

Civ V went overboard with the whole 'tall vs wide' experiment, that's what's causing its problems. I certainly agree V doesn't do things the optimal way, either - seeing stuff like major sections of the world remaining uncolonized wildlands in the 20th century because nobody can afford to claim that land suggests something is wrong with its model. With that said, V is hardly any worse than celebrated games like Civ IV. I think what pisses off you (and many other players) is how they called it happiness... It has nothing to do with happiness, it's just an abstraction. Would it have made more sense to you if they had called it stability and conquering cities caused your stability to drop? I think so. In Civ IV, all your cities became more expensive to run (increased number-of-cities maintenance) following conquests. That made also "made no sense", but it served the exact same purpose as happiness in V - a balance mechanic to stop you from conquering the entire world while still having stone age level technology. As discussed many times over now, LH does the same, which is fine - except LH has put all 'happiness-buildings' at the very end of the tech tree.

This is very true. The fact it doesn't scale in LH means conquest is even less feasible on the larger maps - the larger the map, the worse the unrest-per-city situation can naturally get. Combined with how heavy the unrest-per-city penalty builds up to, this means typical gameplay has each empire expanding to that ~15 city 'island', then settling in for the Spell of Making or Master Quest victory since that's about where you'll be in the tech tree at this point. It's the exact same situation as on even Medium maps, just the relative percentage of the map you'll cover before this happens is obviously that much smaller.

It just doesn't make much sense that because one city builds a wall or whatever military structure, global unrest decreases. It makes some sense that unrest reduction is tied to the military, but I don't think further global unrest buildings are the way to go - except perhaps as a new military type World Achievement building. That's why I'm suggesting a new building - call it City Hall or whatever - as a new tier 3 follow-up to the Town Hall and Bell Tower we already have. This gives you the new unrest-reducing building needed and helps fill the lengthy gap between the Town Hall and the arrival of Prisons and Onyx Thrones, but it is of course costly so that the production a smaller empire is sinking into other useful structures you'll have to spend on this. Because it works locally and not globally just like the Bell Tower, Cleric and so on the cost of using it scales with the size of the empire so the incitement not to just spam cities everywhere but use smart placement is retained.

It doesn't work. It's not just an incentive not to expand; it makes expansion pointless if not detrimental, then asks the player to sit around waiting 100+ turns for a military city built as a farm to mature.