Can you not see that WE shouldn't have to mod the game to fix it.

It's not like many of these issues have been brought up several times by several people.

The time to fix it is during the beta.

I applaud your modding abilities, but I, like many others, I am sure, don't have the time to mod the game.

Never said you should mod anything. I only was using my mod as an example of how minor the issues are.

Let me reiterate:

The issues are very very very very very minor.

The game makes modding very simple, and I believe, at least in my mind, that modding is a way of customizing the game to your liking, if the pioneer spam irritates you then, by all means, there are easy changes.

To mod use someones balance mod, you merely need drop some files into folders, check a box and restart your client. I'm sorry, if you can't be bothered.

I would also say, that for me the 'pioneer spam' is not anywhere near as irritating or game-breaking as it seems to be for you.

Finally, as Frog said:

Overall, I would say your excessive worry about this pioneer spam seems to be to the degree you think the game is unplayable without it fixed. To that, I would say:

A. The game is not complete, refer to Frog's comment.

B. Ever played a Civ game where you NEED to PUMP out settlers? No? Well this is mild in comparison, if its too rough for you, learn to adapt or lower the difficulty, or apply a mod.

all praise the frog and it's minions. 

i cannot wait....

Very excited about different AI strategies!

I like turtle myself... who needs more than 1 city... and an army of doom anyways...

Again, the point is missed.

If these issues are easy to fix, and I take seanW3's word for it, then shouldn't they be fixed by the devs?

Also, please don't focus only the pioneer spam, there are other issues.

I know mathematics are only *part* of the balance, but still: from a purely arithmetic point of view, if you quadruple the area of your empire, you only double the size of the frontier (provided that it keeps the same shape, so there's some assumptions which are only partially verified in practice).

As a result, you have up to 4 times the troops for only twice as much frontier to defend. That's a simplistic model, I admit - the point is just that if each city can provide for its own defense by producing troops or funding fortress to produce troops, then more is always better. It's just a matter of being well-organized.

Even worse: more cities mean a LOT more research, if you build at least basic research buildings. So not only will you have more troops, but they'll be better, too.

I don't think there's enough of a trade-off for large empires/horizontal expansion when compared to smaller empires - especially since you don't have to choose between lots of cities and very "powerful" cities. There's very little downside to expanding a lot, and many advantages. You don't have to sacrifice quality for quantity. The main limiting mechanism used to be prestige, but growth is now mostly tied to buildings, making prestige mostly irrelevant. From my experience, your empire will always be a lot better if it's large.

Trojasmic is right:

That's just how the game plays out, and that's how I crush hard+ AIs with moderate ease.

Friday night beta 5! Hopefully. 

Im thinking its brittle because you expanded so fast and quickly, that you havnt had the time to build the resources and army you would need to hold it.  So if you had multiple opponents who could thrust thru even a single area, your empire could fall quickly.  On the other hand, if you can hold it and reinforce it before they attack the game could be yours.

Because a lot of the time you're putting up outposts rather than cities, and having to protect those.  Which means you're relying upon the gildar-producing buildings in your cities to cover not just those cities, but everything else, as well.  I've long been a proponent of Strangle, since I play Pariden or a Pariden variant a lot, and it's made for the strategy.  Resource grabbing via arcane monoliths.  But there's a lot of exposed, under-protected outposts around, plus a lot more terrain to cover with your stacks when attacked.  The AI is more compact, closer in, and has to protect less.  You can get your ass handed to you on a magical platter, very easily, if you don't carefully manage things.  Plus, the occasional wandering troll group looking for a fun time on a Saturday night can just knock out one of your cities, and there goes even more of your thinly stretched financial base.

I guess i didn't make myself that clear, sorry for that.
Partly because of a certain language barrier please excuse that as well.

As this probably isn't the right thread for it so just in short:

With pioneer spam, yes i meant this rather hasty land grab at the beginning.
I love to explore the wilds and fight against monsters and do quests.
Granted, you still can do that when all the goodies lie in your territory but that rather feels like cleaning up the backyard of your empire.
And if the enemy plonks a city beside all the good stuff you can be dead sure they ask you to leave before you get to return to a questgiver or kill that giant thing guarding a treasure.
So yes, sometimes it feels a bit counterintuitive when players and AI alike desperately try to claim all available land right from the start.

And my population and guildar comment should read like, that population doesn't feel that special anymore..... in E:WOM or early FE betas i actively wanted to be cities as big as possible.
Now almost everything depends on buildings, sure higher level cities get their unique boni, but in most games i'm faring better with many smaller cities as long i build everything there to increase production, research, troop generation etc.
I just don't feel rewarded for nurturing few big cities in relation to the advantages REXING has to offer.
So maybe it really is a certain lack of incentives for vertical empires in comparison to horizontal empires that irks me.
Not that i want to enforce my favored playstyle on everyone, but i guess i just miss a rewarding decision how i'm building my empire, wide or tall.


Again, beta 4 has many cool concepts going but a few inconsistencies appear to lie rather deep within the mechanics, so hence my concern whether they still would be changed drastically (if neeeded) in the polish/balancing phase.


But true, as one poster pointed out, there also could a slight possibility that the latest CIV spoiled me a bit with it's very very appealing gameplay mechanics that make a vertical empire surprisingly competitive so the standard 4X REX isn't the only viable choice.
I guess i'll be contemplating about that for a while, thanks .

This is not so simple.

Lets assume the following, for easy scenario:

It takes 2 turns to build pioneer, 1 turn to build a troop, 1 turn to move 1 tile. Each city has a 6 (I believe) tile of free space and a you want extra outposts for resource grabbing your city spam is missing. There are a lot of resources you want. Resources take no time to use. 1 monster kills 1 troop and dies, always. A player has to deal with 3 monsters to build a new city. There are 40 tile range between both players, mission is to kill the sovereign.

Both players start the game in a flat world. Both build 4 troops and 2 pioneers. Turn 14 both players got a second city and a resource outpost between them.

Player A doubles his land every 14 turns, till he meets player B or he has no more room for effective expansion.

After  roughly 70 turns, player A has 32 cities.

Player B created 112 troops, and starts marching to player A. 100 or so are left from monsters. Will player A manage to stop the army player B sent?

Maybe, maybe not. In this case, mose likely. If troops were moving faster, probably not.

As you can see, investing in military can topple an expansion based strategy, which beat turtle based strategy, which beat the rush strategy. It all comes down to balance.

But anyway - I'm speaking from experience; try it for yourself and compare between a small empire and a big one. In civilization 4, infinite-city-sprawl was a winning strategy, and that was *with* major limitations for large empires. Fallen Enchantress doesn't even have those. In practice, I've seen it to always be true: a large empire has so many resources it can just overwhelm small empires with no significant drawback. Expansion is a winning strategy, all the time.

And expansion opportunity cost is a valid concern, but right now it's not that big of a deal: a hero with 1 or 2 low level troops can escort a pioneer, which itself takes 3 turns to build. After turn 30-40, it's negligible.

I'm fine with Fallen Enchantress being all about the land grab and expansion, but I strongly disagree that small empires can compete with large ones, unless the large one is poorly managed. Remember GalCiv 2: was there any *significant* downside to expanding as much as possible? And FE didn't change much in that area, aside from the monsters.

There is, by the way, one disadvantage to large empires: tediousness, which can lead to a player not managing a large empire as well as a small one. But that shouldn't be a concern for the AI *or* a meticulous player.