Changes to Hub Town Assignment

[remote crystal]

So I've played a few games where I play hyper aggressive in the Modern Era (Immortal) and I started just assigning conquered settlements to Hubs (this is easy to do early, but that's another issue). This yielded hilarious amounts of diplomatic influence despite my war mongering with some settlements generating 40+ influence per turn, but usually I see around 10 influence per turn. My highest so far is 65 influence per turn, screenshots attached. Needless to say this defeats the purpose of having penalties for taking over settlements and really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially if you're still actively at war, to make these occupied settlements hubs. This feedback also helps you generate even more influence to use to garner further support. I guess the world just wants me to topple everyone when I can pay for 900+ influence costs in a few turns. One of the games, I managed to get a civ to -25 war support, but with some fairness I was prolonging a war with the last civ isolated on a nuked island to get all the legacy path XP... Either way, I don't feel like I should be getting enough influence to enable this with warmonger habits.

One suggestion would be to not allow occupied towns the hub town assignment. It digs at the heart of the issue, which is getting influence through world domination. Alternatively, if the feature of occupied towns being able to take on Hub focus is intended, I would suggest either limiting the amount of Hub Towns you can have, whether by a hard number limit or one per a set radius. Either way, I believe that there needs to be some change to this mechanic because it's pretty ridiculous generating 500+ influence per turn as a warmonger.

Thank you for taking the time to read my suggestion, and I hope this feedback is taken into consideration to better balance the game, especially in the Modern Era. I really enjoy this game and I look forward to all the improvements being made through patches.

[fresh sequoia]

I have some good news to share:
The devs just read your feedback post, and then hopped back in their time machine to last week (or earlier) and announced back in their June 10 announcement that Hub Towns are going to be tweaked/nerfed in the next patch (1.2.2 originally scheduled for this week, but delayed to next week due to a stability issue they found late or something).

Screenshot of upcoming Hub Town change attached, and I encourage you to read the rest of their announcement/overview here:
https://civilization.2k.com/civ-vii/news/civ-vii-update-check-in-jun-10/

[remote crystal]

It's good that there is a nerf incoming number wise, but with the numbers I showed in the screenshot if you cut them in half I'm still generating a lot of influence from warmongering, which is the broader issue I want to address. (not accounting any influence that may be generated from buildings)

[fresh sequoia]

just checking, are you aware that each captured city has a sizeable negative influence penalty (scales with age, so I don't recall an exact number to give you, but it's now directly listed on the "keep/raze" choice descriptions), so that depending on how connected many settlements are connected to your Hub Town after capturing, if it's a low connection town you might actually be net negative in influence, and even if it's a high connection amount, the +1 influence per connection after 1.2.2. nerf might be just barely offsetting the negative influence penalty (e.g. you might be netting like 1 or 2 influence, maybe 5 if it's really connected).

[remote crystal]

It's -6 per capture and -12 per raze in modern era. Even if a settlement nets negative influence, most of which don't atm but may after that nerf, other captured settlements can more than make up the difference. There are a lot of these when they are connected from the previous owner and for the most part the lower connection ones I find most are in the range of 10-12. I'm not even trying to make them connected either minus adding quays, it's more of the sheer amount of them snowballs out of control that I'm netting 500 influence per turn after wiping up a civ who had around 15 settlements, some of which couldn't be assigned yet on turn 39. Even cutting the number of influence I'm making per turn in half is still a ludicruous amount for that level of warmongering. This is why I think Hub town assignment should be more limited rather than adjusting numbers, though I do agree with that adjustment since my towbs at the start of the era also net a lot of influence.

[fresh sequoia]

Also if you're going that high on warmongering you're probably going over settlement cap and running into negative happiness in your captured settlements, in which case that negative happiness is also reducing your yields (-2% yields per negative happiness in a settlement).

I'll definitely be interested in seeing how the balance changes in 1.2.2. play out.

[trim violet]

I mean, taking over a countries cities does make you have a pretty big influence in that countries affair

Just wait until the nerf

[remote crystal]

The screenshot provided shows that I am in fact over the settlement limit, but penalties for that don't increase past 7 over the limit so it doesn't really matter. I also wrote down the happiness and influence for each settlement in that cluster that wasn't occupied. Oh and apparently changing to a hub focus increased how much happiness they had, so more incentive to do so. Ava is at -15.5 so -31% on yields but still generating 27.7 influence. Waset is at -26.5 unhappiness so that's a 53% decrease, yet it yields 26.1 influence. Before hub town focus Ava is generating 0 influence and Waset is generating 1.2 influence. Berlin, which has no happiness penalties and is at 22 influence per turn before focus is set jumping up to 65 influence. Tosali and Djedet also have positive happiness and have 5.2 and 0 influence prior to focus respectively jumping to 49.3 influence and 36.3 influence perturn. I captured 15 settlements this age so would be netting -90 influence per turn from that alone.

If we take into account that the nerf changes it from 2 influence to 1, then the influence from hub focus for these five occupied settlements should be adjusted like so:
Ava: 27.7 to ~13.3
Berlin: 43 to 21.5
Waset: 24.9 to ~12.5
Djedet: 27.7 to ~13.8
Tosali: 44.1 to ~22

Hub Total: 167.4 to 83.1
Grand total: 204.4 to 120.1

These 5 almost make up the -90 penalty just from being hub towns, but with their influence before the hub focus they exceed it by 30 influence. This is before I am able to convert the settlements I already captured that are still in unrest. There are also 2 other occupied settlements not shown in the screenshot that go from 0 to 39 and 0 to 15.5 with no happiness penalties, with the rest being in unrest or below 7 pop. I turned off the hub focus on all my towns and at +0 influence per turn, when I was at 513 per turn at that screenshot, meaning the nerf would get me to about 256.5 with that set up. If I hubmax all the settlements I get 229 from all the occupied settlements I can change and 373 from all my settlements for a whopping total of 604 (I'm guessing 2 influence got added from rounding). So in this instance the nerf would leave me at 302 influence per turn which is still a lot considering that I also have the -90 penalty. Interestingly, the hubs on my continent seem to have far less than those on distant lands, coastal cities and islands seem to have the highest. Either way the nerf would not prevent this situation, 302 influence per turn with 15 captured settlements is still an insane amount of influence to have, 7 settlements are occupied so the total influence will like increase by another 200 influence once I can assign a focus. Something in the system has to be changed because adjusting number clearly isn't going to be enough based on this case, and this was a trend from other games. Warmongering should not allow you get this much influence when it's meant to be penalized.

[fresh sequoia]

Warmongering should not allow you get this much influence when it's meant to be penalized.
Yeah, modern settlement connection counts go really high for coastal/island settlements.

The warmonger aspect may or may not be the right aspect to focus on (as these super high influence yields could also come from settling or having these kind of coastal/island settlements already in place).

Rather the aspect to focus on might just be the ridiculous amount of influence you can get in modern from coastal/island settlements set to Hub Town (regardless of if it's +1 or +2 per connection), because of the ridiculous amounts of settlement connections they get.

Maybe the amount of benefit from Hub Town should be capped in Modern? Or some diminishing returns factor added to the per-settlement aspect?

[remote crystal]

I don't disagree that coastal/island settlements give too much, but I believe that the 1 influence nerf could be enough for that and if not another adjustment could be made. That being said, I also don't want to penalize players too hard for making those distant lands settles and those settlements becoming hub towns is fine if they want to play a diplomatic game. The reason I focus on the warmongering aspect is because if the previous two era were spent also warmongering, you don't get penalized for those captures (since they expire), leaving islands and distant lands as your next option. Also, you're probably not going to care if they grow so setting them to a hub or mining is something you'd do anyways, but getting influence isn't as easy as getting gold so considering that why would you ever not do hub towns to mitigate the penalties of warmongering. Since captured cities have an occupied tag, simply making them not able to be hubs seemed like the better fix. I would still have quite a bit of influence without those captured settlements, but it wouldn't be 373 because I wouldn't have those 15 settlements as possible connections. If I had the turn 1 modern era for that save I would check it, but I unfortunately don't. My other suggestion would be to limit the number of hubs you could have, whether by a sum total or by a radius.

[fresh sequoia]

Also, thanks for taking the time to gather and share these data values ❤️, very helpful to see concrete numbers for the extreme situation you've got there