Knob
Expansion brake
You might say: empire size penalty, city maintenance, sprawl, unhappiness from cities
A cost that grows with the number or spread of cities: upkeep, unhappiness or an empire-size penalty.
- What it does
- Stops "more cities is always better", so the player must weigh each new city.
- Ask
- At what empire size does one more city stop paying for itself?
- Trouble
- No brake: many small cities win every game. Too strong: one large city is the only good play.
Catalogue: Brake
- City maintenance: Each city costs gold per turn, and the cost scales with the total number of cities.
- Empire-wide unhappiness: More cities add unhappiness to one empire-wide pool, which slows growth when it goes negative.
- Empire size: An empire-size score; empire size above 100 raises the cost of technology and traditions.
- Expansion disapproval: Each additional city creates expansion disapproval, so approval limits how many cities the empire can control efficiently.
Pattern
Sources
- Soren Johnson, GD Column 17: Water Finds a Crack, Water Finds a Crack
Thus, building too many cities too early crippled a player’s economy, killing ICS at long last.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Expansion brake" (expansion-brake) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/4x-strategy/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal