Severe problem (Game Breaking) with Large Empire Penalty for both players and AI with conquest on insane map

Beta 6 patch 2 release notes:

Balance

<snip>

Reduced the large empire approval penalty

So the question is have you patched?

It wasn't really reduced; the mechanic was changed.  Now the intention was certainly for it to be reduced.  But in my experience, it's actually worse right now.  At least before when it was percentage based, one could hook up Approval Relics to directly counteract it (in theory - Approval relics were slightly bugged at the time).  Now, however, it is entirely possible to tank one's morale no matter how many relics or other things one has.  Even as one hits 20 to 30 colonies, it starts to be very noticeable unless one is already planning ahead of time.

Currently, when one has 30 colonies, that's the equivalent to having 6b extra pop on a planet.  50 colonies is the equivalent to an extra 10b.  100 colonies is the equivalent of an extra 20b on a planet.  

Now I certainly think a flat LEP can work.  Better, I think, than percentage based (which had a different set of problems).  The main problem is, if it's balanced against the bonuses to approval supplied by the tech tree (and the improvements they grant), the tech tree doesn't really scale well as map size increases.

There ARE workarounds.  Take the malevolent trait that grants permanent flat bonus for each planet one invades is the major one as that will be completely independent of map size.  Get as many Harmony Crystals one can get.  Stack as many starbases as one can around your colonies to stack up the bonuses.  Build and build and build some more approval buildings (though this is problematic for other reasons - namely taking up valuable tiles).

Still, a lot of this trickery shouldn't be necessary.  As it currently stands, the LEP probably hits the sweet spot on Medium and Large maps.  It's probably NOT  strong enough on Small and an afterthought on Tiny maps.  For Huge, it looks like it should still be manageable if one is on Common, though this is where the problems start.

Once one hits Gigantic, it can render certain playstyles nearly unplayable unless one employs so much cheese that's it's no wonder Mr. Wensleydale ran out at his shop.

As I said, in theory a flat LEP is probably better than the percentage.  But I think the Magic Bullet is to make is somewhat dependent on number of planets that can be colonized, instead of making it the same for all games.  Simply because it does hurt so much more the more planets there are.

You know what I feel is missing, techs that give a flat reduction to empire approval. Even maybe even a one per player building that decreases approval penalty on a global basis. Although would I prefer a tech as if your planet with the building is taken your screwed. The game Endless Space had this and did it very well, it allowed you to expand at your own pace and as soon as you started getting to big you could just research say a 20% empire approval bonus.

Galciv 3 could do the same thing, and to prevent players being forced down one tech path you could spread them out. Have one called "warring empire" or something more thought out lol, once you research planetary invasion. Have one somewhere down the entertainment path "Deep space Entertainment network". Have one in the Trading path "empire mail and trade network". Even one down the manufacturing path, "Automated assemble network", pretty much anything that could be considered something that could make your empire more happy. There are plenty of ideas Stardock could come up with.


Even if Stardock didn't want to go down this route they could just add a global bonus at each "Age" you unlock.


maybe this would just cause more problems then help, i dont know.. but from what i keep hearing it needs to be looked at. This is part of the reason im waiting on trying a bigger map until i hear from people its fixed

I managed to play 355 turns yesterday without hitting a big problem here so not sure I agree there is such a massive issue. 

Quoting 00zim00, reply 3

You know what I feel is missing, techs that give a flat reduction to empire approval. Even maybe even a one per player building that decreases approval penalty on a global basis. Although would I prefer a tech as if your planet with the building is taken your screwed. The game Endless Space had this and did it very well, it allowed you to expand at your own pace and as soon as you started getting to big you could just research say a 20% empire approval bonus.

Galciv 3 could do the same thing, and to prevent players being forced down one tech path you could spread them out. Have one called "warring empire" or something more thought out lol, once you research planetary invasion. Have one somewhere down the entertainment path "Deep space Entertainment network". Have one in the Trading path "empire mail and trade network". Even one down the manufacturing path, "Automated assemble network", pretty much anything that could be considered something that could make your empire more happy. There are plenty of ideas Stardock could come up with.


Even if Stardock didn't want to go down this route they could just add a global bonus at each "Age" you unlock.


maybe this would just cause more problems then help, i dont know.. but from what i keep hearing it needs to be looked at. This is part of the reason im waiting on trying a bigger map until i hear from people its fixed

As it stands now, the percentage (negative or positive) is applied last.  This causes all sorts of problems if he LEP is larger than ones' total morale (a bonus to approval actually makes things worse  ).  But even if it isn't negative, it can still be problematic.

Let's say a planet has 15 units of Goods And Services being applied from all sources.  Let's also say there is a 12 Large Empire Penalty from 24 colonies.  Lastly, let's say that there is a 40% boost to approval from various sources.

(15 - 12) * 1.4 = 4.2 overall morale  (current way it is calcuated)

vs

(15 * 1.4) - 12 = 9 overall morale (alternate way it could be calculated)

Even at 40%, this makes a huge difference.  The more sources of percentage based morale there is, the bigger the difference.  But, then again, on a map with a thousand or more planets. we're talking aobout LEPs in the 200 range.  The two overwhelming forces might just cancel each other out.

Sure, but how many total planets were there on your map?  As I said in a prior post, I think the current setup hits the sweet spot on some maps. Maybe even many maps.

To see just how this plays on other maps, I'm currently working on an A/A/A Gigantic map just to see if that is going to be as problematic as I suspect it will be. I'm going to refrain from some tactics, while employing others,.  All star systems will only have one economic starbase supplying them (usually), for instance, as I think a lot of players simply aren't going to go down the road of multiple starbases that some like to do.  I am cheesing out on getting approval techs via survey ships, however.-

I also want to see how long I can stave off using the malevolent trait I've mentioned as a lot of players won't want to be forced to do it.  

In short I want to see just how viable this is with only 1 to 2 economic starbases affecting most colonies, maybe a couple of approval buildings, and a whole mess of relics and harmony crystals before I am forced to break out the Invading Stick.

The math generally supports the conclusion of it being worse right now. Under the old system, you wanted to have a morale bonus of at least

P / (1 - n*0.01 + a)

to keep everyone happy, whereas under the current system you want a morale bonus of at least

(P / (1 + a)) + n*0.2

to keep everyone happy, where P is the maximum planetary population, n is the number of colonies you have, and a is the percentage morale bonus you have on the planet, expressed as a decimal (note - this is the morale bonus before percentage modifiers; i.e., if the numbers say 11 morale, I want to have 4 entertainment centers for +8 and the colony capital can provide the other +3, and this is not affected by any percentage morale bonuses I have on the planet). The new system is a more severe penalty for any number of colonies n such that 0 < n < N, where

N = 100*(1 + a) - (P*5 / (1 + a))

is the number of colonies at which the penalty under the old system is equal to the penalty under the new system.

Thanks for that!  The main problem with the old system (and this has been beaten to death which is why I didn't revisit it) is that there might not have been enough percentage based boosts to approval to counter act the negative ones on maps of sufficent size.  Never really found out for sure, as the entire tech tree only opened up once it went to flat.:)

I think it's not just about map size but also abundance of habitable planets. Generally I think they should add scaling factors to the penalty to account for number of habitable planets in the game. 

I certainly understand the OP and issues with the AI low morale and caving in and surrender. This can have serious consequences on a game and obviously need to be looked at from a balance stand point, that much is obvious.

I also think that percentage modifiers on morale need to be applied before the penalties of LEP, this would reduce the problem both the player and the AI are faced with and would make larger map scale better since you could more easily offset the penalty with relics and other percentage modifiers.

Overall I otherwise like the flat penalty better than the percentage one since if scale a bit better. Although I would have liked a better LEP system altogether not directly tied to just the morale of the empire or at least not in this way.

Currently of you have a 100% global bonus on approval then each 10 planets you have basically means 4 billion less potential population on each planet. With a zero global bonus it is 2 billion less potential people on a planet. These numbers will just grow the more planets you have and with no structures to specifically counteract the penalty in a big way there simply is no real incentive to build a large empire and will make both influential and conquest victories pretty hard to obtain in really large maps.

Here is a rather rudimentary numbers experiment...

Lets assume that we can keep planets at 15 population on planets at ten planets and that we have a 50% global percentage boost and 100 approval, just to start somewhere. In this experiment I just reduce the population to keep morale at 100%, not realistic but just to have some numbers to show.

At 10 planets we have a total RAW production output of

(5+(15^0.7*2))*10*1.25 = 229 production points

At 20 planets we have a total RAW production output of

(5+(12^0.7*2))*20*1.25 = 409 production points

At 30 planets we have a total RAW production output of

(5+(9^0.7*2))*30*1.25 = 536 production points

At 40 planets we have a total RAW production output of

(5+(6^0.7*2))*40*1.25 = 600 production points

At 50 planets we have a total RAW production output of

(5+(3^0.7*2))*50*1.25 = 582 production points

Soo... eventually you end up at a point where it is no longer relevant to grow considering the resources it takes to invest in colonizing new worlds. This is in itself not a bad mechanic, but it may have some bizarre side effect as above where an empire just tank... will the AI even stop to think about if expanding actually is a good idea anymore?

This can actually be controlled by a bigger map having more relics that give you more percentages and tradeable resources giving you global extra morale, but only if percentages is added before the penalties are applied. That way you should only need to apply a very small scaling factor for habitual planets on the map.

Basically large map should increase the LEP while large number of habitual planet should decrease the LEP. This way you can enjoy an insane map with both rare and abundance of habitual planets.

+1 to LEP scaling with map size and star/planet/habitable setting

Still, I rather like that the penalty can turn severe on really large maps. However, the AI (and also players) should be able to react more constructively to morale problems: If I were a player who pursued conquest on a really large map, the solution for me would be to abandon all my low quality planets once I reach the point where morale can't be balanced anymore in another way. Similarly, AIs should always consider if their morale still allows them expansion either by colonizing or by conquest. If not, the AI should abandon its worst planets. Of course, an AI that inherits another empire might have to abandon a large part of it to stabilize.

I made a slight error in my earlier post, which has been corrected. For some reason, I had treated the current LEP mechanic as though the percentage morale bonus applied before the penalty. The conclusion still stands, however, as the error I made resulted in the current LEP being treated as though it were less of a penalty than it actually is.

As far as revisions to the LEP mechanic go, I personally would rather see the penalty moved off of approval and on to something else. For example, modify the technology costs based on the number of colonies you have, rather than applying a morale penalty. Something like

[tech cost] = [base cost]*(1 + [large empire penalty]*([number of colonies] - 1))*[other scaling factors]

would do nicely. The real effect of a morale penalty is to target research rates (which makes sense; increasing the number of people working on a project tenfold does not generally increase the rate at which the project is completed tenfold), manufacturing rates, and net wealth generation (which makes some sense; administration and bureaucracy does seem like it grows faster than anything else) anyways. Why not directly target the research rate by scaling the costs, rather than indirectly through the approval modifier and the requirement to have more morale structures to keep the approval modifier constant (or, at any rate, lessen the penalty)?

With a penalty such as is given above, you don't have the need for ever increasing numbers of morale structures even on well established colonies as the empire grows. Furthermore, this penalty system is self-correcting for map size; you expect to have a research rate of R on an 'average' colony, for a total empire research of n*R with n colonies. The rate of research under this system is n*R / (1 + [scaling factor]*(n - 1)), which increases with n so long as the scaling factor is less than 1. This function goes to a limit of R / [scaling factor] as the number of colonies n goes to infinity, which means that this cost scaling keeps the maximum research rate constant across map size and planet availability settings. As this function grows sublinearly with n, this means that while a larger empire will have a technological advantage over a smaller empire, the magnitude of the advantage will be something less than the simple ratio of the empire sizes (assuming both empires have the same average research per colony). This is not true of the current model, which scales research production but has a maximum penalty, meaning that once that maximum penalty is hit, the research rate grows linearly with empire size.

As far as applying a large empire penalty to manufacturing, I'm somewhat inclined to leave it be. Perhaps apply a manufacturing cost penalty similar to the technology cost penalty based on the number of sponsors of a shipyard, but aside from that, I'd just leave it be. Money can be penalized in the same manner as technology or with a scaling empire administration cost.

Note - I am not advocating removing the approval modifier to base production. I'm advocating moving the large empire penalty out of approval.

As far as I am aware you do not take a hit to production at all from 1% to 99% approval. Only when you reach 100% approval do you see an effect, that being a bonus of 50%.

So if all your planets are at 1% approval nothing happens (as far as I am aware), I am not sure about population growth however.

No, there is a sliding progression from (I think) 75-100 approval where you go from +0 to +25% bonus to production on the planet. 50-75 is 0% and below 50 you gain negative percentage modifications to a planets total production output.

**EDIT**

According to the XML files people are content between 45-65% and you receive positive effects from 65-100 and negative from 45 and below. Can't be 100% sure though.

Looking at the numbers in game, approval does modify the production, and it does come into play within the range 1% to 99%. It seems however that they've changed the system from

[production] = [approval multiplier] * ([flat production] + [population production])

in all cases to the above when approval is greater than 50% and to

[production] = [flat production] + [approval multiplier] * [population production]

when approval is less than 50%, with the approval multiplier ranging from 0.75 at 0% approval to 1.25 at 100%.

By the way, devs, this isn't significantly better. Sure, the penalty doesn't hit as hard, but population is still likely to contribute at minimum roughly a third of the base production value.

To me,  I still really thing the LEP should be based of the percentage of habitable planets colonized.

Thus one a rare/rare tiny map,  You start noticing the hit on even your second/third colony if there are only 20 habitable planets.

Likewise on an Insane Abundant/Abdunant  you might see the same penalty when you have 300 planets.

My personal thoughts on mechanics.

Each planet gives you a penalty of X / number of habitable planets.

With my first hunch on balance being that with all tech/planet buildings (not starbases, events, or rares) you could offset say 20% of X.

So you could have 10% of habitiable planets, wiith 'no penalty' with effort but not drastic effort.

If you want an empire that spawns more then that, you need to start going to extra length to maintain morale.  (true building effort on morale buildings, extra starbases, precursor, etc

Making it a formula based on total number of planets, makes it work for tiny maps, insane maps,  rare maps, or abundant maps.  The only real question is what percentage do you control before it 'hurts'

I think the best, simplest fix is to make LEP grow logarithmically, not arithmetically.

I've read through most of the posts here, and skimmed through the rest--so if someone has already said something like this, I apologize:

I disagree with the notion that LEP should increase based on the number of habitable planets.

I think a few mechanisms could be put in place to manage this issue:

First, AI should be less likely to colonize depending on their LEP and the quality of the planet in view; smart human players should do the same - with the result that strategic planets and high quality planets will be colonized, leaving some habitable planets uncolonized due to the LEP until later in the game, when the LEP can be managed through the following mechanisms:

1) the LEP could be lowered by political techs

2) starbases could have modules that can help negate the large empire penalty for planets within their range; this module could either negate the effects on the planets in range or could alternatively effectively lower the number of planets causing the LEP

3) a planetary improvement could help negate the LEP

These are just some thoughts. I personally like the idea of the LEP - I just hope it can create interesting strategic dynamics in the game and not just be an annoyance.

Yes I tend to agree... having it scale wit habitable planers will screw with game pace, research and a bunch of other things. There are no mandatory rule that say all habitable planets need to be colonised. 

THe AI have to be taught how to mange it's approval and even abandon planets in worst case scenario and not just surrender to someone. 

new thought that as far as i can see hasn't been explored. instead of thinking in terms of numbers of colonies, what about a per-colony calculation based on distance from the capital?

Malevolence Level II grants +1 morale for each planet you conquer.  

If you don't go Patriotic, that's the only other choice you have.  

Hello!,

   I realize this is a bit of a necro.. so apologies. But I thought I would throw my two cents in, and ask a question. Question is, does the Malevolence perk that grants +1 morale per planet conquered only applied through planetary invasions, or does colonizing count?

The issue I am running into in my rather large scenario (Forget size, just, lots of planets everywhere lol) is that after colonizing a good amount, the Large Empire Penalty actually out weighs how much base morale my colonies come with, and as mentioned, bonus %'s are calculated AFTER the fact.. so every new colony, despite my bonus morale % researches and goodies, comes with 0% approval from the start, because its a negative number that gets multiplied by my bonuses.. Once I create a approval structure, I normally go straight to 100% due tobonuses, but its rather annoying having 0% approval instantly...  I feel like there should be some refinement on this mechanic for larger scenarios?


Ser JuJoo Guppy

Get one of the mods that changes it to -0.2 Money/Planet.  

It should be per planet conquered, unless there's a bug. Culture flips might count as conquering the planet, though I've never really checked. Colonizing should not count. Also, conquering a planet you've already conquered should not increase the morale bonus.

You can gain a larger immediate benefit by picking up Supportive Population if you don't already have it (possibly through trade, if you developed something else instead; this provides +4 morale on every colony you have) or by trading for Harmony Crystals (+1 morale on each colony for every Harmony Crystal you have; I would suggest that you never trade these away unless your empire isn't large enough and won't grow large enough for you to need them, or unless you're playing with a mod removing the base-game large empire penalty). There's another tech later in the tech tree that provides another +4 morale to every colony you have, if I recall correctly, but I don't remember what it is. Something down the branch giving approval buildings, I think.

In order for your method to "work," Ser_JuJoo_Guppy would need to start a new game. That's not terribly helpful, especially as Ser_JuJoo_Guppy seems to be indicating that this is a game that he has put a large amount of time into.