I originally intended to talk about our new planet specialization in the upcoming economic overhaul, but I’m going to rant about something else – admin cap.
In principle, the admin cap variable is a good idea. It takes an existing system –research and tradition costs scale up logarithmically as the empire expands, as a way to allow tall empires a fighting chance against wide empire – and makes it more transparent and intricate. Now, a player has a ‘safety margin’ where their costs do not increase – a manufactured variable that players can increase in various means.
The notion itself is a good thing. It also adds another meaningful value that players can work with, which means more meaningful choices in tradition, techs, perks and elsewhere.
Where admin capacity fails, however, is player perception. Admin capacity is a value you are supposed to, that you have to, surpass during a game if you want any hope of winning. If you consider how things used to be, that sounds fine – large empires used to be ‘penalized’ by much, much higher increments to their tech or tradition costs than they are now. An x10 tech cost modifier was pretty standard for a mid-sized empire, for example. Compared to those values, base costs have been increased and tech malus due to size has been reduced.
Yet admin capacity fails in the most important test – player perception. Many players FEEL penalized due to admin cap. They feel compelled to not go above it, and they strive to find every possible way to increase it. Asking for ways to increase admin caps is one of the most popular requests I get. What would supposedly a good thing – improving transparency, letting players know exactly how much malus they are getting, and even manage it to an extent – ended up with a feeling of frustration.
Nor can I simply give players ways to increase admin capacity further. Any way where a player can divert resources to get more admin capacity is a way to erode away the intentional malus for wide empires. Whatever it would be unique buildings, or districts, or anything, all of these are basically… resources.
Letting the player get admin capacity in any certain, reliable method, basically allows for a conversion of resources to admin capacity.
All of this is a reminder of a very famous game design blunder. Almost 20 years ago, during the World of Warcraft beta system, Blizzard introduced a system meant to discourage players from pointless grinding. Basically, past a certain point, players would be penalized and gain less XP than usual.
Players hated the system. Interaction rates dropped across the board. So Blizzard did a simple thing – they flip things over the head. Instead of being penalized on kills beyond a certain point, they would gain ‘extra’ experience points for ‘rested time’. The change was a huge success, improved player interactions, made players happy and was adopted by nearly every MMORPG out there. The clever thing? None of the values actually changed.
Sadly, as a modding team at least, there is no way for us to flip the admin cap on its head. In addition, some changes to admin cap have to happen or at least should happen, as part of the economic overhaul, so we can’t just ignore the issue. Since admin cap is increased by +1 per district, keeping the system as could discourage players that want to take full use of the district specialization system.
This is also a system I am loathed to experiment with too much. From a design point of view, it’s not good to reinvent too many mechanics at the same time (from a resource management, QA and balance point of view) and it would be best to leave admin cap alone as much as possible. In addition, who knows how the AI will handle too drastic changes here?
So, long story short, I intend to make just small changes to how admin cap will be calculated by tweaking the variables. The idea is that a fully developed planet will cost roughly the same amount of ‘admin’. The base cost will be slightly bigger, which in my eyes reflects better the fundamental difference between ‘playing wide’ and ‘playing tall’ (you need more penalty for every new planet).
Every single pop will also cost a small amount of admin, to offset the fact that districts themselves will cost almost nothing in admin cap. The hope is that the end result would be a system that isn’t changing values too much, but would still make you wish to experiment and specialize your planets.
That’s our proposed changes, but from a theoretical point of view, I personally feel the entire admin capacity system need to be changed.
Admin cap, I believe, would work better as a hard, rather than soft, cap – ie a cap where players can’t easily go above it. Players could tend to assign pops to jobs to increase admin cap and allow them to keep expanding their empire. The wide/tall malus can come from a small penalty that requires the player to spend more and more resources to increase their admin capacity, taking considerations like stability and distance from the capitol to represent how efficiently a planet can generate extra admin points.
A system like that would work a lot more in line with player expectation. It would also make balancing a bit more straight-forward (you could expect the base tech and tradition costs to be, for the most part, the actual costs). It will add another layer of interesting complexity while keeping the core mechanic simple.
But those are changes I have no intention to add into STNH, at least for now. Still, hope you found it interesting. See you around next time, where we will talk about planet specialization. Promise.
He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him. I’ll chase him round the Moons of Nibia and round the Antares Maelstrom and round Perdition’s flames before I give him up! –
Khan Noonien Singh