Technology growth not proportional with empire growth

. . . the buildings in Endeavor. Each turn everyone gets a building. You can make choices in the game that will let you access higher tiers of buildings, and for some strategies you must do that. Other strategies might let you take the earlier buildings and be fine with just them. Some buildings allow actions and some boost scores in other areas. Everyone gets one every turn, though; No one ever misses out on getting a new building. Picking the right ones at the right times becomes a huge part of strategy.

Sounds pretty much like the mechanic you're describing.

:)

But that would mean you chose buildings/ moves to advance other areas instead. Sort of like if we were playing a space technology game, and I spent the whole game upgrading my hyperdrive and my laser weapons, I wouldn't immediately get to just grab the highest level cultural monument, or something.

What you're talking about seems like a good goal for a game. What other games try to limit/modulate growth?

Twilight Imperium's technology ability seems sort of along those lines. Whenever someone gets a technology, everyone else (with planning) has the chance to also get one. Some races are better at it than other in that game, though. And everyone gets sort of nudged down a path with starting technology.

:)

O.o

Yes, I was talking about the newest version of the game, where when anyone picks the technology card, anyone else gets a chance to buy technology.

This sounds like an awesome way to mitigate it. I never though of having 2 different tech trees.

Now that is the perfect way to do this. I never thought of having negative increasing as well as positive. It solves the problem, and even makes it more realistic!

Are you talking card game, boardgame, or computer game here?

Having "Maintenance" rules works ok with computers that handle the paperwork, but adding the bookkeeping to boardgames or cardgames can make it a tedious slog.

Plus what mechanic to you support for players who want to cull the empire they currently have and then the effects on that. For example some cities, or territories should be able to be abandoned. Most empire games rely on you only getting bigger and bigger. Card decks can get problematic when too large as well. People want ways to get rid of negative cards.

Real economics of scale is otherwise. But not everyone likes that reality in a game. However having areas to abandon leaves new opportunities for other players in the game to move in and do things there better.

The ability to shrink territories and holdings to reduce resource demand so that resources can be used for better purposes is something that smart players want. This is something I build into all my card and computer games. For skill teaching games this is an essential feature.

I'm talking board games, here. And I agree -- requiring maintenance is tedious, and not the way I would go.

The trick is to simulate the cost of maintaining your empire without actually requiring players to do the micromanagement. That's what I had in mind with the suggestion to make action points grow at a proportionally slower rate than the number of territories you control.

For example: if I have a small empire -- say, 5 or fewer territories -- I have 4 action points per turn. When I expand from 5-10 territories, I get 6; 10-15, 8 action points, and so on. This is simple and easy to tune, but it's not interesting.

Someone above suggested events, which was what I had in mind for point #2. If, each turn, you have a chance for an event that's proportional to your empire size -- and most events are bad -- larger empires will have to spend more action points dealing with random trouble (in this model, action points scale directly with territory size). For this to work, most events have to scale with the size of your empire -- think of those cards in Monopoly that made you pay a fee for each hotel you owned.

A system like this can provide a mechanic to shrink your empire, which, as you pointed out, some players may want. Has a Plague Event lain waste to Outer Mesponia? Maybe it's time to cut those barbarians loose -- they're not worth the action points it would cost to save them.

Finally, scaling costs to develop tech -- or any infrastructure -- can effectively, and simply, reduce the benefits of constant expansion. For example, suppose you develop the "Paved Roads" technology. That's well and good, but doesn't help your empire until you disseminate the tech to all your territories. So, to "unlock" the victory points associated with the tech, you need to spend 3 gold per territory you control. Oops! You've spread throughout central Europe? That's gonna cost ya...

As far as I can tell, none of these methods increases the "fiddlyness" of the rules, and all of them have been used before. And there are more....many more. It's not so much a question of "is there a solution" as which solution best matches your design goals.

What if a player's research rate is based on the average research production of their cities/planets/whatever? This would still let players choose how much to focus on research by building improvements, without tying research to empire size.

So, building universities (or something) in half of your cities gives you half as much research as building them in all your cities. Players with larger empires would be able to build more, but it would cost them more to increase their research rate, and expanding too fast without developing the new territories would reduce your research.

I too am working on a CIV game right now, and I think it is balanced enough that it will tough to become a run away leader, but I understand the dilemma of a smaller empire having less of a chance at Techs. Let me offer two other ideas.

In the game Antike, the first person to buy the tech pays a premium, but once they have it, everyone else can buy the tech at a discount. This can allow people with smaller empires a chance to sit back and get all the same techs as the leader a turn or two later but not have to have the same access to resources. Of course, in Antike, the first person to discover a tech gets a victory point, so if you are never the first one to buy, you will lose, but that doesn’t have to be a victory mechanism in your game.

The other idea is what I am using in my game. Each of the cities produces growth points or growth potential based on the size of the cities. These growth points can be used to build the city, build units, build wonders, or invest in technology. While a bigger empire will have more growth points, they will also have many more things to spend their growth points on. To defend a big empire, you need to build a lot of units, eating up a lot of your growth points. It is similar to the maintenance idea, but easier to keep track of as the penalty for having a big empire is self imposed, and therefore easier to grasp. You can choose to spend nothing on defense, city growth, or wonders, and spend all of your growth on technology, but you will be extremely vulnerable.

Another option is to let the bigger empires develop more techs, but after a number of turns say 2-3, they become available to everyone. This gives the big empire their edge, but keeps the little guy from getting steamrolled.

If you wanted to get really fancy with it, you could have each new tech developed in one particular city. And from there it spreads outward to all connected cities every turn.