Stability is way too punishing now.

[snilldog]

With the new update, this mechanic is just way too frustrating. I find myself constantly prioritizing stability over everything else. Even with three world wonders and a holy site in my capital, along with the +50 stability in capital religious tenet, I was still struggling to maintain stability with only 4 territories and 22 districts.

Commons districts got nerfed too hard and garrisons are lame. I had fun planning out and building big cities in the last OpenDev but now it just feels frustrating.

[utilityguy]

Stability was non existent in Victor opendev when you got a good few region full of luxuries running your empire or spammed Commons Quarters together, I'm fine with how punishing it is now, as a lot of it seems to be from trade routes going up into flames, lack of Armies patrolling your city tiles, etecetera--not to mention it helps stop city district blobbing for a while.

Wondrous luxuries, made from Patronage technology and/or the Babylon Garden wonder helps a lot with stability if you put it on the right luxury resource. So if you wanna district spam starting from classical era and forward, I'd recommend building the Babylon Garden wonder.

[SemtexMan47]

Stability was practically a non-factor on almost every difficulty in Victor, so I'm not surprised they boosted it. I'm only 30 turns in this one so I can't comment on the changes.

[Snake]

Reading this post makes me want to try out the beta.

Glad they're finally making city building interesting :)

[The Doctor]

Sorry but I have to disagree very strongly with this. In my experience, stability is just fine. As others have already said, it was almost a non-factor in the last open dev. With this build, I actually had to worry about it and it's a good thing.

It also makes the cultural/societal shifts more impactful. I actually made a couple of Civics decisions that went against what I really wanted to do in order to keep my stability up. Easing this up just robs other game features of their weight and relevance. Please do not ease it up devs.

[Arc'Xeno (jdsh)]

Originally posted by The Doctor:

Sorry but I have to disagree very strongly with this. In my experience, stability is just fine. As others have already said, it was almost a non-factor in the last open dev. With this build, I actually had to worry about it and it's a good thing.

It also makes the cultural/societal shifts more impactful. I actually made a couple of Civics decisions that went against what I really wanted to do in order to keep my stability up. Easing this up just robs other game features of their weight and relevance. Please do not ease it up devs.

I second this, this was a really good change and it got rid of the issue that it was possible for you could over-urbanize entire regions across the map without self destructing.

[fhqwhgads]

I'm going to disagree with the notion that it's fine--there are a lot of problems with stability being as it is now. It has ripple effects through the rest of the game, and is definitely a contributing factor for techs, buildings, and units being pretty consistently behind era-wise compared to where a culture is at.

It is not uncommon on normal difficulties (where the AI isn't cheating like mad) for both the AI and the human to have armies of archers and spearmen in the Medieval era, while crossbows and pikes won't come into play until the Early Modern at best. I always feel like I'm playing "catch-up" on infrastructure, because production is incredibly slow due to the nerf to population sacrificing to speed it along as well.

It also makes ideology largely a non-choice. +10% to a yield is NOT worth giving up +20 stability right now. Do the math, it just isn't going to work out. That's two districts and the citizen slots they bring. Except in the very late game where you are snowballing like mad, it's probably not even worth considering. This means ignoring most civics and only choosing the most impactful ones, and picking event decisions to counter-balance them.

By also limiting luxury resources and making them less valuable, this also has an impact on the trade game, making it easier to ignore and effects that scale with trade routes less valued. Since you can't build districts, you might as well just build military units and use them to vassalize your neighbors, then you'll get ALL their resources and a tidy sum of money per turn besides. Don't worry, they'll never rebel, and they'll probably be overwhelmed by your religion and influence too.

I think the over-focus on stability negatively impacts the game. It is true that in Victor it was unbalanced, especially Procession which was rightfully nerfed along with luxury manufactories, but I feel this build went too far in the other direction.

[SemtexMan47]

It's a little concerning they're making quite big changes to the system mechanics balancing this late in development. I appreciate that they're trying to make the decisions more interesting and impactful though.

Some of the game's systems feel too gamey though. Why are civic choices permanent
-stability modifiers? Shouldn't civs get used to changes over time? They should make it like a temporary revolt instead.

Wish they had a more elegant mechanic than stability. I guess it does keep things simpler for beginner 4x players, to focus everything on 1 modifier.

[SIX]

Current meta is cities with 3 to 4 outposts attached to them and simply spam garrison (+10 Stability) stab is a non existent problem after you research the city watch tech. The balance is fine if you disregard garrison you should not build more than 5 districts per cities in the first ages. Also, if you build your city centers close to each others you can maximise the district agency bonus and need a lot less of them for the same result.

[mizugori]

I have MANY complaints about the beta but stability isn't one of them. I actually found it to be reasonable, it's a hedge to stop you from just spammimg a billion districts as far as I can tell. Which is probably a good thing and adds some challenge.

Regarding infrastructure lagging behind, add that to the 5000000 reasons why they need to SLOW ERA PROGRESSION AND OVERRALL PACING WAY DOWN. It goes so fast you hardly even get a chance to do anything with the unique buildings and units. I want way more time to build up my cities right now this just feels like the game is designed to force you to play it like a speedrun.

[View The Phenom]

Stability is much better now, previously you could ignore it after the first era or so. If you're struggling, it's likely due to blindly building districts and attaching outposts without considering the stability hit first. There's also an interesting decision to be made for civics and events, since you can get a bonus for maintaining your stability outside of just keeping things in the middle.

"Only four territories and twenty two districts" should be tanking your stability; that's quite a lot of districts without proper stability management. The point is to discourage spamming out yield boosting districts without thought, and possibly build other things (such as more expensive infrastructure) on off turns. I much prefer how they've improved the importance of stability over the Victor Dev.

[fhqwhgads]

Originally posted by View The Phenom:

Stability is much better now, previously you could ignore it after the first era or so. If you're struggling, it's likely due to blindly building districts and attaching outposts without considering the stability hit first. There's also an interesting decision to be made for civics and events, since you can get a bonus for maintaining your stability outside of just keeping things in the middle.

"Only four territories and twenty two districts" should be tanking your stability; that's quite a lot of districts without proper stability management. The point is to discourage spamming out yield boosting districts without thought, and possibly build other things (such as more expensive infrastructure) on off turns. I much prefer how they've improved the importance of stability over the Victor Dev.

That's not an interesting decision though, because +10% to a yield will never realistically outweigh being able to build two extra districts until the very late game. So staying in the middle ideology-wise is definitely the best move.

It's not like I'm not paying attention to stability myself, I prioritize the public fountain and aqueduct and build them in every city, I spread out my holy sites and push religion, I even favor holy site wonders because they give +40 stability instead of +20. But it's still not really very satisfying, balance-wise, currently.

Originally posted by mizugori:

I have MANY complaints about the beta but stability isn't one of them. I actually found it to be reasonable, it's a hedge to stop you from just spammimg a billion districts as far as I can tell. Which is probably a good thing and adds some challenge.

Regarding infrastructure lagging behind, add that to the 5000000 reasons why they need to SLOW ERA PROGRESSION AND OVERRALL PACING WAY DOWN. It goes so fast you hardly even get a chance to do anything with the unique buildings and units. I want way more time to build up my cities right now this just feels like the game is designed to force you to play it like a speedrun.

In the Victor build, I felt early and midgame building was a lot more satisfying and I was able to stay reasonably close to era progression in tech and infrastructure, but the single massive hit to stability in this build broke all of that. Production is slow because I can't build as many Maker's Quarters, and tech is slower because I can't build as many Research Quarters. It is absolutely one of the root causes of the issue. Not the only one though, the hit to sacrifice population for production was also a big one.

Really, I think Victor's stability imbalances were primarily in the mid-to-late game with Procession and luxury manufactories, and were otherwise largely fine. Certainly the change to luxuries was totally unwarranted. Not everything is necessarily as simple as "make things slower".

I'm kind of curious as to the end-game stats of those saying stability is fine. How many districts did you have constructed on the final turn? How far in the tech tree did you get? What difficulty did you play on, etc?

[mizugori]

@fhq there are a ton of people complaining that the pacing is way too fast. The devs even created a pacing sticky and admitted that people complained previously about it being too rushed.

It's very simple, you are blasted through the eras without having enough time to smell the roses. We need way more time to build and develop cities before the era changes. And the 'option' to simply delay transitioning to the next era is absurd, they might as well just give you a 'click here to lose' button.

Regarding stability, I haven't really struggled with that because as soon as it gets around 50-60 I take evasive action and build things to raise it, or at least stop building things that tank it to let it recover if it's trending up over time.

However that is also possibly what's screwing me because doing that, taking the time to build fountains and ♥♥♥♥, may be why I'm consistently not having enough armed forces standing by to repel the 3+ AI players that keep trying to bumrush me every single game.

As a related side point - this is supposed to be a civilization building sim / strategy game, not an all out 24x7 war game - they need to make the AI do more than just try to bumrush everyone and they need to rework a number of systems that invariably lead everyone to war constantly. You can't even freaking breathe in this game there is no pacing it's just a frustrating sprint. It screams ADHD.

[fhqwhgads]

My thing is that I'm a builder. I like to build. In my last game when I looked at the end game stat screen it said I built over 400 districts. Now by the endgame stability is fine to manage, I have very little issues with it past the Early Modern Era or so, even with my 400+ districts I had 92% Empire stability.

But in the early to midgame it feels like a yoke that you don't have any realistic way to control. You can build some holy sites, public fountain and aqueduct, but then you're pretty much stuck with garrisons, which take up valuable space and are annoying to build.

I personally feel that luxury resources should be returned to giving +5 stability like in the Victor build, and they should definitely be more plentiful than they were on this map. There is no way someone is going to convince me that it was "perfectly balanced" that the entire New World mainland (not counting offshore islands), with a dozen or so territories, had two--TWO!--luxury deposits. Either that, or keep it at +3, but add some late Classical infrastructure which gives +2 Stability per luxury, some kind of Luxury Market infrastructure. And the Theater/Playhouse should definitely give some Stability, I don't think I've ever once even considered building them.