How quickly should I expand?

[Man of the Milk]

This is just an on average for any faction. Played with the community balance mod, got wrecked early and i thought it was due to my expansion weakening every other aspect of my empire. Is it better to build up a city and patrol a region I plan on colonizing? Or rush expansion.

[Martial.Lore]

I don't know if there is a formula for success, but there are lots of things to consider:

1. Building up a really strong first city that can grab a couple of legendary buildings before your rivals can (and push out units when you need an army)
2. Snagging regions that have luxury resources you want or strategic resources you need
3. Researching technologies that give your empire happiness
4. Buying or mining luxury resources that provide happiness
5. Monitoring your cities' happiness and keeping them all happy
6. everything else: armies for defense, heroes for strength, cashflow, influence, quests, etc.

Obviously you need to find a healthy balance. I try to get a my first city close to 6 population before building my first settler. That gives me time to explore, find a rival empire or two, build the Museum of Auriga, build a level 1 army, and figure out what I want/need and where things are.

Then I pop out a settler to quickly develop a second city while my first is building the Industrial Megapole, or after, depending on my growth/industry ratio. That second city needs to get up to speed with FIDS production before I go for another settler either from the original city or the second one.

If I have access to some good luxuries either from exploration, the marketplace or from mining then I might put out two settlers instead of one, again keeping an eye on happiness: happy cities are far superior to content ones.

And so it goes. Do you need to build a lot of cities? The more you expand the more expensive it becomes to activate the boosts from luxury resources, so you have to decide for yourself if you have everything you need to keep up the happiness level. Unless you are going for an expansion victory, you can do quite well with a dozen cities by game's end for a wonder or science victory.

It's all a matter at looking at the regions you can colonize, the technologies you prioritize, you ability to purchase what you need from the marketplace, and so on. Typical 4X. But as you have found for yourself, fast expansion, particularly early on, can really slow you down in the longer term.

You can win without certain resources of your own if you are prepared to go to war for them or have the dust to buy them. You want to make sure that the regions you choose to colonize fill the gaps in your empire: resources, minor factions, border control--these are all things that can help you.

There is a lot to learn and it might take you several campaigns to become familiar with everything. (I am now back at square one as a newbie with Endless Space 2!) Have fun!

[Man of the Milk]

Thanks. While I understand the core game trying to find that ratio that works against the improved AI is proving challenging. Maybe I'll get lucky and have a continent all to myself again.

[HellSlayer]

I start to use having 1 city and getting startng army back into the city defences while researching tier2 army. Then I start pumping out them.

[Gilmoy]

Yes, in EL, Expansion Disapproval is a significant brake on your settler spam. Some other 4Xes have no penalty, and so exponential colonization tends to be the arch-solution. EL limits colony spam by imposing a quadratic penalty:

- Each city you settle or capture gives -10 expansion disapproval, i.e. -10*N total.
- Every city adds that total to their approval.

- Exception: A city with Palace (i.e. the starting capital) contributes 0 expansion disapproval. Hover over Palace and read its fine print: it says "x0 Expansion Disapproval Generation". That's what it means! It literally means its penalty is -10 * 0 = 0 :)

Ergo, let C be the number of enemy starting capitals (with Palace) you control (via capture ... or, I guess, if a 3rd party AI captured it, and then traded it to you, haha). Let c be the number of non-Palace cities you own. Then C+c = N, your total number of cities.

Then every city in your empire (including your capital) gets -10*c approval, just from the size of your empire. This is pretty harsh, until you learn it's just how EL does 4X. It goes:

1 city (your capital only) = 0
2 cities = 1 + 1 = -10 each
3 cities = 1 + 2 = -20 each!
4 cities = 1 + 3 = -30 each
etc.

It sneaks up on you, but it rapidly gets significant. (Amplitude's Endless Space uses a similar mechanism, but not identical.)

Now, the number of cities you can keep Fervent also increases, roughly with Era and the success of your economy, due to various factors:

- Many city improvements (Eras I, II, V twice) give +approval. Research and build those in every city.
- Two techs (Eras III, V) directly reduce Expansion Disapproval, by -25% each.
- Many luxury boosters give some +approval. Extract your own, and also research the Marketplace and binge-buy boosters you don't already have activated.
- Some heroes-as-governor have skills that give +approval, or -x% Expansion Disapproval, or both. Mid-game, you should hire a governor for each city, up to about 10-12 governors; after that, it probably doesn't matter much. (Hero upkeep is also quadratic in the number of heroes.)

When playing solo vs. the AI, if your economy is successful, there's a point in every game where you first research Marketplace and spend a few K dust to buy and activate 1 tranche each of about 6-12 different boosters, all in the same turn. And then you keep buying them as needed, for the rest of that game. It's not at all weird to have 10 different boosters active concurrently.

- Era V legendary deed (Beloved of the People) reduces Expansion Disapproval by -50%.

Yes, if you research both techs and win the vast race to get this deed, then you get the famous -100% Expansion Disapproval, and then the size of your empire is unlimited. Do this when going for the Expansion victory condition on a huge map, and you really can have 55+ colonies with all of them Fervent. This is why Beloved of the People is a demanding race.

~~~~~~~~

I show some typical numbers. This presumes that you emphasize techs that give +approval and -% Expansion Disapproval, so it's kind of an upper bound on the number of cities you can keep Fervent. (Of course, you're free to cross the threshold and have more cities at less than Fervent.)

Era I. 60 (default approval) + 20 (Sewer System) = 80 = Happy. You can't even make 1 naked capital Fervent (90+). You generally need a lucky +approval anomaly in your starting region, or an early jackpot of Wine or similar, to reach Fervent with a lone capital.

You can, as a gambit, grit teeth and go for a 2nd city in Era I, as a land-grab. Do this to lock down great strategics, or a must-have minor faction, such as the only Ceratan you've seen in 20 turns of sprinting. You'll take a mild -10 disapproval on both of your 2 cities, but you actually have quite a bit of slack. Once you shrug and give up on reaching Fervent or Happy (for now), the next threshold is Content, which goes all the way down to 50(?). So you could have 2-3 cities at Content, and just get by without the +15% or +30% FIDS bonuses.

Of course, there's a Steam badge for having (edit) 1 colony + your capital on or before turn 15, so go for that in one quick game just to see what it's like. Then restart if you don't like it :)

Era II. (60 + 20) + 25 (Central Market) + 20 or so from boosters = 125. Now you can have -30 Expansion Disapproval and still be Fervent, which means 3 colonies.

Era III. (60 + 20 + 25) + 35 from boosters = 140, which is 50 above the 90+ threshold for Fervent. You now have -25% Expansion Disapproval, so you could have 6 colonies = -45 Expansion Disapproval.

Era IV. Somewhat more boosters than Era III.

Era V. (60 + 20 + 25 + 30 + 20) + 100 from boosters = 255, and you have -50% Expansion Disapproval, so ... 33 colonies! This presumes that you build Dust Revitalizer everywhere, so that you can finally afford to buy all those boosters. But it's probably overkill: that's maybe too many precious tech slots spent just on this focus, and you'll go bankrupt in Mithrite trying to build all those copies of the Era V techs. Anyways, if you did do all of that, then low-30s is a reasonable upper bound for your sustainable colonies.

Of course, Beloved of the People trumps all of this.

~~~~~~~~

Finally, recall that starting capitals (cities with Palace) don't generate any Expansion Disapproval (because Palace explicitly says so). This means that you can freely capture Cultist's lone city (which is their capital), or any other AI's capital, without regard to approval. It doesn't make your other cities unhappy! Go ahead and take that city-with-Palace, hehe.

[PhailRaptor]

Gilmoy gives quite a thorough analysis, but it is missing a small piece. Each city locally is affected by the number and orientation of it's Borough Streets (or for the Allayi, their unique Garths), as well as other unique Districts like the Wonders, Intensifiers unlocked with Pearls, etc. Each District you build will apply a small penalty (I think it's 10?) to local Approval. But when surrounded by 4 other city tiles, that central District will be upgraded, and provide a bonus instead (I think it's 15 -- more than the penalty was). This is to offset the increase in FIDSI the city will now generate from have more tiles in range, and acts as another check against rampant growth.

[Gilmoy]

Right, I omitted the city layouts. (When you're juggling 53 Fervent cities en route to 60 for an expansion win, you'll have cities of every possible size and shape, and it's not so easy to generalize :)

I also ignored +approval anomalies. Some cities will have them through RNG, most others won't.

Borough Streets give -10 approval each at L1, an additional +15 approval at L2 (= +5 net approval), and +30 (= +20 net) at L3 for Cultist. (Pearl and legendary districts are approval-neutral: they don't give -approval at L1, and they don't give +approval at L2+. Era III Cargo Docks and Era I Museum of Auriga have their own approval effect, as stated on their texts.)

The known solutions to the district layout puzzle, for optimal approval and exploitation tiles, are:

a) The 2xN stick. Each end has two L1s and two L2s, and all of the interior of the stick will be L2s (or L3s if Cultist). That's optimal in both the number of L2+ districts, and the number of exploitation hexes around them.

b) The big triangle of side k. The three vertices are L1s, the six tiles adjacent to the vertices are L2s, and all of the interior are L3s (or L2s). This is slightly less efficient than the stick because some interior tiles have 6 adjacent neighbors at L2, which is overkill, and it's closer to a circle, which minimizes the perimeter, i.e. the number of exploitation hexes.

(a) morphs into (b) when you run out of room, i.e. your stick reaches from one border to the other border.

Generally, you grit teeth and lay down your 1st (and 2nd) Borough Streets, and just accept the mild approval penalty they give you, even if it drops you from Fervent to Happy (to Content). The extra FIDSJ from more exploitations makes up for it, and anyways it's just a phase you go through en route to 4+ districts and the start of your stick layout.

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For colony expansion, we can simplify and assume that cities are approval-neutral. Then the number of cities you can keep Fervent depends on Era (techs) and economy (boosters). Relative to that benchmark, each city will actually trace out a sine-curve-like approval path: it will dip below neutral as you grow to 2-4 districts, then (with good layout) creep above neutral at 6-8 districts. This is not a rapid process, so don't expect good layout to compensate for expanding too quickly.

Conversely, if all of your cities are Fervent with a lot of slack, go get some more!

~~~~~~~~

After you master the stick (and/or triangle), you'll learn when you can deviate from it. Ardent Mages' pillars benefit greatly from a concavity in your layout, so that a pillar is adjacent to 3 districts. You can achieve that by the basic stick + a top polyp (1-tile protrusion) + a bottom polyp. You take a mild approval penalty for those two tiles if they're Borough Streets, or you use pearl/legendary districts (with no penalty) and accept that you won't level them up (which is an implicit FIDSJ penalty).

Other Ardent Mages layouts exist (there's a guide for them), but I found that stick + polyp was the easiest image to memorize, and it worked well enough.

[Groo the one]

For optimized city building I'd recommend this thread placed in official forum: https://www.games2gether.com/endless-legend/forums/9-tips-tricks/threads/3824-building-big-efficient-cities-borough-streets-leveling-districts?page=1

[Man of the Milk]

Cheers Gilmoy, lots of helpful information. How many cities do you recommend with the Allayi? Because I'm in a campaign with them doing well-ish and through their quest I've kinda stumped myself because i forgot how much pearls they actually need for quests and each city really piles on that required amount, I had to hire several allayi heroes and level them up so i get the combined 40% pearl reduction i think. So my quest was delayed by alot.