Pioneers should only be able to found cities, and should cost population to produce.

Outposts should be created by selecting a valid empty tile and choosing a 'build outpost' option.  The outpost is then tied to the closest city's build queue at an appropriate cost.

That is all.

Along the same lines as mqpiffle.  Why not have an "engineer" unit that can create outposts and can make roads?

I think they're getting it right in LH. Pop cost for pioneers (or gold cost for that matter) doesn't ultimately change anything. City spam is still the answer it's just slower. More cities is still always better and the only "right" decision. By having an increasing number of cities cause an increasing empire unrest penalty (in LH) there is actually something to manage and balance expansion against.

I don't care if pioneers in the base game are free (labor cost though of course), cost gold, cost pop, it's all the same and fine by me. I'm looking forward to LH though.

You28 has the correct answer. You fix city spam by making young (ie small) settlements a significant burden on your empire, ala Civ 4. Settlers should still be expensive enough (probably just in labour time) that you are a bit wary about risking them as scouts but the main cost should be in the actual settlements.

This also has the byproduct of making outposts viable again whereas any system which has expansion cost front loaded into settlers kills off outposts.

This is a tough question, and in many ways it's at the heart of this great game.

Derek, here's an idea, and it could work with options 1 (the way it used to be, and still fun) or 4 (the way it is now, and also good, though the AI may struggle):  why not make the absolute number of Pioneers you can build configurable in the game set up along with the other parameters.  Unlimited Pioneers -- the current scenario -- would be the default of course.  But if you wanted a game about a few powerful city states (the Athenian League) you might choose a small map with 2 opponents and select 3 Pioneers as your limit.  Your capital is free of course, but after that you could only build 3 Pioneers total:  cities or outposts your choice, but only 3.  Interesting strategic decisions would arise:  a great tile, I really want to settle on it, but this is my last Pioneer and better tiles may be waiting in the great unknown....I have to make a decision.  With only 3 or 4 cities I am practically forced to play the highly developed city game (because of parameters chosen at game set up, along with Faction, map size, difficulty etc.).  This might also help the AI out because you could set Pioneer Limits for each AI separately (along with Faction, race etc.).  So I play a small map against two opponents with a 3 Pioneer limit all around, and I defeat the AIs handily.  Fun, but not too challenging.  Next time, I choose the same 3 Pioneer limit for myself, but give the AIs 5 and 7 Pioneers respectively for their limits.  Would this not help the AI out somewhat and the provide the further edge and challenge I wanted in that game on the small map? 

The idea has elegance because it doesn't change the way Pioneers are produced or anything fancy.  It just sets an absolute limit on the total number you can build, and lets the player choose in some sense the kind of game he will be playing.  And it allows a subtle tweak to the AI strength, if the feeling is that it is struggling with the Pop cost (which does seem like the best choice at this point).

There may be a host of reasons why this can't work, but I thought it was worth suggesting.  I think it's worth considering whatever end up doing with Pioneers.  Fits with the highly configurable experience you want to offer your players.

Having new cities be a burden until they develop past the break even point is actually the same as an economic cost to building pioneers. It's a flat cost differing only in whether you pay up front or get the new city as a loan that you have to pay off. An ever expanding empire is still always better. More cities are still always better. It is only the rate of expansion that must be managed.

That's not inherently bad but I am under the impression that the devs want both small and expansionist empires to be viable with differing advantages and disadvantages. It's a worthy goal to me. The unrest mechanic in LH won't automatically achieve that depending on the implementation. How will global unrest be countered and how will global and local unrest be differentiated? The system might only result in a specific ideal empire size based on current tech level rather than a strategic choice between small and large empires.

The unrest mechanic reminds me of Civ 3's corruption system though I think it will be different in execution. I like Civ 5's happiness system better but having all happiness modifiers divided between global and local without explicitly showing this to the player is not an elegant solution. It does work really well though, creating a meaningful choice between going wide or going tall. I'm really looking forward to learning more about the system Stadock has come up with for LH.

Maybe if you go with option 3 you could help balance it by having all factions start with a pioneer? You could also make a trait that lets you start with an extra pioneer at the cost of points. You could also add extra labour cost at that point since players and AI already have options for early expansion by starting with a pioneer.

I always felt pioneers where game dominant, rushing them was the easiest way to get a win for me. I don't think gold cost hinders that much.

I have another idea.

Pioneers cost gold like they currently do.  However, when a pioneer founds a city, growth is reduced until the pop cost is redeemed.

I agree with this ^ because just having a gold cost the player can just take that pick that gives them 500 more gold to begin with. Still a win situation. I usually take an economic character anyways as to have an early lead in income and then get civics along with that and rush build everything I can. WIN! Also with so much money I can buy other characters into war with each other. WIN! lol

I still think building a pioneer should cost population AND money for the player and the AI gets one free pioneer from the start on higher difficulties.

you can't edit posts or reply to posts past the first one with Firefox in the Elemental forums, though you can in other forums.  This will drive me nuts.

This was the reasoning behind my idea and why I suggested the gold cost initially, then the growth reduction afterwards.

If pioneers cost pop, it screws outpost building.

If pioneers cost gold, it doesn't really impact city spamming, especially for wealthy civs.

You can't apply the pop cost all at once, because it would be possible for someone to make a city go into negative pop.  Reducing growth instead prevents this.

Would also synergize well in LH with a high-agriculture strategy.

I think my idea provides a happy medium, though I still think it has potential to screw the AI slightly (but if the rules stay consistent Brad has a chance to catch up and figure optimal strategies)

I agree with splitting up the city/outpost building - pioneers build cities, scouts or someone else builds outposts.

I really like the Masters Affliction paradigm of increasing the monsters.  That way the cost of pioneers doesn't matter - the key is clearing out the monsters before you have any hope of settling.  It prevents city spamming so much that you feel relieved and accomplished when you finally get to plant one.

A secondary idea I had was to tie outposts to troop building, with a time cost that could be reduced by more troops (so techs like cooperation/logistics would help here)  or civics tech (and maybe a faction trait)

Doesnt taking pop cost away from pioneer mean that now nothing except earthquake and death level 5 mana spell reduces pop?

That is quite a balance shift, with pop cost population growth was important, sovereigns call and well rather useful, pop growth will be more limited by food than by speed. Shifting it to gildar weakens life and strengthens air and wealthy a lot. Furthermore faction prestige will be a lot less important.

Tinkering with pionner cost or gating them is not a good solution. Balancing mechanisms are sorely lacking in the game and must be added.

There are several simple solutions to be copied from civ, as well as other ideas:

- increase the benefit of large cities: tax, research, food & production becomes strongly (ie linearly or more) correlated to population size (kinda makes sense btw...), replace faction prestige by city prestige f(population, buildings) or give some buildings a prestige factor

- increase the inconvenience of sprawling empire: add a strong unrest component f(#cities), add a per city upkeep cost or city militia wages which scale with unrest but little or not with city size, add an unrest penalty to cities far from the capital (taking into account map size)

- add a min city requirement to produce settlers: civ requires pop 2, FE could require level 2 (that would be more a bit more obvious than pop level on FE)

- on higher levels, AI starts with bonus settler(s): it's more fun to have them start out strong and struggle to catch up rather than perk them up so much that they runaway no matter what you do (ie on insane)

- change outpost construct mechanism: almost any unit (heroes, human armies, unconsumed settlers but not caravans or animals) can initiate outpost construction, but actual construction is undertaken by closest city (just like for resources when they are within your territory) or by arcane monolith

- add a small military unit pop cost (eg 1 pop per squad member), add the same kind of small unit replenishment population cost (war costs population)

I like most (if not all) of those proposals. Very well thought!

Isn't this already happening at least partially? A higher level city is much more important than several low level cities. If I remember correctly, gold/research production increases exponentially with each city level, so a level 5 city is like 32 level 1 cities.

The higher unrest depending on number of cities it's a good way to slow expansion. I disagree however with the distance penalty (unless it's distance to sovereign, not to capital). The city upkeep based on buildings and/or militia sound cool.

That would only slow initial expansion. Not sure if it's worth.

Would be nice :) 

This one is a very good idea, and makes outposts consistent with the rest of resources AND with outpost upgrading itself.

This one is also very good idea. The game engine already has this scace resource called population, so why not use it? I would even go beyond and make unit replenishment cost all resources involved. Let's say that you have a unit costing 2 crystal 1 metal and 1 pop in a group of 3 for a total of 6 crystal 3 metal and 3 pop. If the group loses one unit in battle, healing that unit should automatically reduce that 2 crystal 1 metal and 1 pop from your pool. Make economy matter.

Is it not possible to have the population cost extracted from the player when the settle button is pushed, rather than when the pioneer is queued? Then you can make all the pioneers you like, but you can only settle cities when you have the population to start the new settlement, and outposts would effectively not be hit with the pioneer pop cost.

Alternatively, can scouts create outposts while pioneers create cities?

The other suggestions are good, but this one is bad:

Reason is that game mechanics limit the number of cities to something like 5-6*number of players. By giving AI bonus pioneers this balance can be screwed rather easy (with civ thats less of a problem, because in civ number of cities is not that limited). Human player would be forced to react by either even earlier and faster expansion or by directly attacking, since AI still has one sovereign but already several cities. ( BTW, an example of such potential unwanted repercussions of AI bonuses is in Civ 5 the carpet of doom - the AI gets economic bonus, but tiles are nonetheless limited, hence the game breaks down).

Furthermore one should be careful with one time AI boost, as AI will have a hard time making best use of the one time boost, while the human can adapt its strategy to the game phase in which the boost effect is strongest (therefore civ always also had economic bonus in addition to unit boost, without economic bonus the AI would start strong and fall flat by just waiting for him to fail).

Screwing balance in favor of the AI: that's exactly the point of higher levels (although I would agree that artificial limit in total # of cities, if confirmed, should be fixed to something not limiting in terms of gameplay)

I am not suggesting to replace all existing AI perks with this one, only toning down slightly the long term perks in favor of more initial perks

For what I've read here, some of you may want to try Engineering mod (DL from the Nexus) that enables some faction building capacities for your units.

Any feedback welcome so I can put it in V1.0 (no known issue for now on v0.95). Thanks

Hey Furibar, could you elaborate a bit more about the Engineering mod?

Between this change, and how stuff like Influence is being cut in LH I think the game is going to turn into a pure economic game where you just want to build strong gold generation to win. I hated that in Civ 5. You wanted to just spam gold in Civ 5 cause then you could buy out all the City States. Buy all the army you needed. I would say you could buy AI allies but they were bat **** insane in that game so you couldn't trust them lol. But in LH it sounds like you will be able to buy allies. That to me is boring when gold is all that matters. I for one don't welcome our new Capitar overlords.

Why I like pioneers costing population:

It gives meaning to the population growth rate. It is an extra interesting reason to make a city a town, to build the well and subsequent growth buildings.

It reduces pioneer spammage - extra growth is something one really has to work for, or to wait for.

From an AI point of view, here are the times to build a pioneer when the cost population:

1 If your city has reached it's population cap, queue a pioneer so that it keeps growing (possibly keeping producing what is already queued.

2 If you have found somewhere to settle, and you need a pioneer, and your city is not about to level up, queue a pioneer.

3 If you have found somewhere that needs an outpost, and you need a pioneer, and your city is not about to level up, queue a pioneer.

4 If you are not producing pioneers fast enough, get a town and increase its growth. Or upgrade outposts so they provide growth.

Personally I don't like the idea of not choosing the more interesting cost, because it is hard for the AI. In my opinion, the interesting part of the game is the expansion, and conquest of the monsters. If the computer players are not very good, just cranking up the difficulty is an easy solution.

Suggestion - higher difficulty levels could have increased growth rate for AI players, if one cannot manage to get them to produce their pioneers strategically.

I see your point. There are some functional differences but probably the key point is actually how Civ4 implements the mechanic. In Civ4 each city costs an increasing amount of maintenance. So the 10th city will cost more maintenance than the 2nd. This is a large part of what makes the mechanic work so I apologise for not mentioning it before.

You could of course have each settler cost more than the last but that will suck if you lose a couple of settlers or cities to monsters, you would still be facing high settler costs while you no longer have a big empire. Or you could make settler cost scale with total number of cities and settlers currently in play which is better but still hurts if you don't get to settle them all. Both of these are largely a result of the total cost being upfront and the same regardless of whether the settler/city dies immediately or whether the city exists for the next 500 turns.

Of course in FE another big problem with having the expansion cost linked to settlers is that settlers also produce outposts so you are making outposts expensive (and increasingly expensive if you tried to scale them up).

Lastly there is a realism difference. I can accept that bureaucracy increases non linearly as the size of my empire grows but it is hard to accept settlers becoming more expensive as my empire grows.

I really don't see any good arguments for having expansion cost upfront and linked directly to building settlers when there is the alternative of doing it the Civ4 way.

(BTW I agree that it sounds like Stardock are heading the Civ3 way with their current unrest plans. Personally I'm very disappointed, as an empire builder style player I hated the Civ3 corruption mechanic even more than Civ5's global happiness... Civ3 crushed dreams of finding far off islands/continents and settling the new world, etc. Civ4 has by far the best mechanic IMO).

They really should separate the pioneer portion of the pioneer from the outpost ability of it. Make an "engineer" unit that does the outpost part and just let pioneers be settlers and scouts. I was surprised there was no ability to create a new pioneer type unit. When they cost population points it was even worse. At least now I can churn them out like candy and get outposts and look for settlements although it would be nice to create one that has the "monsters not likely to attack" attached to it.