City Development

Here is one thought that came to me when thinking through a few concepts to make coastal cities more attractive, but it is more or less unrelated to the discussion in the "Balance-Improvements" thread:

While you have numerous possibilities to have 3- or even 4-food tiles on land, even without ressource nearby. Water tiles have a max of 2 food per tile except with fish.

Maybe the lighthouse should get +1 food on the building itself, to allow an easier food surplus for on riverless islands and other coastal locations?

One anomaly with Civ V city development is that every city EXCEPT your capital can get the 50% railroad bonus, which always seemed a little funny considering how important the capital is in this version. Is it possible to give a reciprocal bonus to the capital if it connects another city with a railroad?

Polycrates said:

One anomaly with Civ V city development is that every city EXCEPT your capital can get the 50% railroad bonus, which always seemed a little funny considering how important the capital is in this version. Is it possible to give a reciprocal bonus to the capital if it connects another city with a railroad?

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Thal has said he intends to add the Capitol Railroad Boost to TBM.

4 per 5 is the same concept as 1 per 2, just fractions.

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Its not as simple though; people can easily halve things, they can't easily take 80%.
Half of anything is an instant response. 80% of, say, 13, or 17, can take a couple of seconds to think about. Its not intuitive.

I haven't had a chance to do a ton of testing; busy with family stuff and work.

Four new things have been added:
Aqueduct, Agra Fort, Baths of Trajan, National Treasury

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Three of those are national wonders, aqueduct is the only new building.
In vanilla, you have to think carefully about which buildings to get, and the opportunity cost (not building military units). With a very large workshop bonus, you don't have to think about which buildings to get so much, because you can get nearly all of them. Its a huge production boost.

In addition, many things that were less-than-useful are now worth building:
Armory, stable, forge, walls, castle, military base, public school, research lab, granary, watermill, and the workshop itself.

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These are still specialist buildings. IMO it is a huge mistake to make these worth spending the time building in every or most cities.

A little more production

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A 30 percentage point increase is not a "little more production", especially combined with the tile yield hammer boosts in the improvements mod.

I've found national wonders very challenging to get

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Good. This is as it should be. National wonders should be extremely difficult to get if you aren't using a small, focused empire. National wonders should be a reward for staying small, not something you should expect to be able to acquire if you have lots of cities.
This is something that Civ5 did really well.

Have you actually experienced these issues?

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No, because I dislike 5 food yield farms, so I'm not using the improvements mod.

It's very difficult to get large populations due to happiness limits. The food boosts simply let you get to that limit faster

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Not when combined with the ability to rapidly build the happiness buildings.
Also, with Freedom policies happiness is much less of an issue; with 5-yield freshwater farms, you can have 1 farm support 3 specialists at a total of 2.5 happiness.

I do appreciate all the feedback and it is helpful in many ways, most of the mod is built around suggestions from the community. Based on things you've specifically discussed, for example, I moved some bonuses to Machinery, removed the Fertilizer bonus (as discussed a few days ago here), and renamed England's building to the Steam Mill. Our discussions also prompted me to better explain the new leader uniques, among other things. Thank you for the great suggestions!

Eventually though we just gotta sit down and play a few games to really get a sense of the cumulative effect of the mods. Most of the changes are designed to tie in to one another, and there's hundreds of changes in a game with thousands of options. Civ's too complex to be able to figure out how everything interacts simply by looking at numbers. Most concerns you've expressed (such as city size boosts canceling out late-game tech increases) I haven't seen in actual gameplay. Late-game teching is somewhat slower than vanilla in the games I've played (on epic/immortal/large/pangaea).

Thalassicus said:

4 per 5 is the same concept as 1 per 2, just fractions.

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Ahriman said:

Its not as simple though; people can easily halve things, they can't easily take 80%.
Half of anything is an instant response. 80% of, say, 13, or 17, can take a couple of seconds to think about. Its not intuitive.

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It's just an example... if you want a better one, the Library increases science from 4/4 to 6/4, and the University to 9/4. The happiness change is from 5/5 to 4/5. Civ players are smart people, we can handle fractions.

I'm not entirely sure I understand your thoughts about building balance. If I'm getting this right you're saying:

1. Choosing buildings requires careful thought in vanilla.
2. The dozen buildings listed are not, and should not be worth building in most cities.

Could you clarify this, because these seem to be opposite viewpoints? If there's fewer worthwhile (and balanced) choices of what to build there's by definition less thinking involved.

To recap from earlier, the city I described goes from 14 (without mod) → 15 (with BCD). City production is not increased 30%, and the workshop doesn't have that modifier in the current version. "A little more production" is a relative term but it does seem appropriate to describe this. I use generalizations (like with the fractions example above) because going into details for everything takes lots of time away from actually modding and playing the game.

If I understand your second point correctly -- that most buildings are useless in most cities

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That's not it. My point is: you *shouldn't* want to or be able to get most buildings in most cities.
Buildings should be specialized. It should be a bad idea to build a university or market in a mid-size hammer-oriented city. Not necessarily because the maintenance cost is so high, but because the opportunity cost of spending X hammers on that building isn't really worth it. For example, if a market is only going to give you 2 gold per turn, its probably not really worth a hammer cost of 120 (inventing hypothetical numbers here).

The Workshop at 50% messes this up. It makes constructing buildings go so fast, and be so cheap, relative to building units, that you *can* afford to build most buildings in most cities, and that the opportunity cost of doing so is low enough that you want to do so.
If a market cost 120 hammers and you had a city with 10 hammers per turn, with a vanilla workshop it would take 10 turns to build rather than 12 turns. With your workshop, it only takes 8 turns to build.
With your workshop and sufficient hammer boosts that increase the base yield from 10 hammers to 13 hammers (eg 3 mines that now have a hammer boost), it takes barely 6 turns to build.

So, you're effectively building structures in only ~60% of the time that you were in vanilla. This means that you can afford to build many more buildings than would otherwise be the case, and yet the game isn't that much slower. So there are the same number of buildings to build, but much faster construction, so you have the time to stuff your cities full of infrastructure and still field a large army.

As a result there's not much thought involved in what to get, as players can rule out most buildings automatically

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But there is equally no thought in what to get if every building is good, and if they're cheap enough that you can get all of them.
A balanced design has to walk a fine line; I agree with you that many buildings in vanilla are underpowered, sometimes severely (Arsenal), such that they were almost never worth building. But I think you've gone too far in the other direction on some buildings, most particularly on the Workshop, and particularly with the higher hammer yields in the improvements mod.

I agree some testing is required, but I haven't had much time to do so; the gaming/modding time I've had lately has been devoted to Civ4 Dune Wars.
From the little I have played, the workshop does feel too strong, and too much of a no-brainer that I want in every city. I haven't done late-game testing though yet.

I think what I've been trying to say is it'd be easier to directly talk about the topic I've been discussing (effect on city production), instead of roundabout concepts leading up to the final effect on the game. Here's a way to think of it visually that might be easier for everyone to understand (remember I lowered the workshop modifier from 50% to 40% about a week ago in the dev version).

The green line is the effect of the change to the Workshop. For example, if the change made a city go from 10 hammers to 20 hammers the green line would show a 100% increase.



Now, the industrial-era city I described (point 3 on the graph) goes from 14 (without mod) → 15 (with mod). Your feeling is this is too much of a change. This is something we can discuss and analyze.

Okay, so thinking this through... the mod gives you an extra +1 hammer per turn when building buildings. In 300 turns you could build a Theater where you wouldn't have been able to in vanilla. Most games don't last this long after the Industrial era however, so we should probably pick a better example.

Let's take the first class of city instead of the third. Medieval-era cities typically have lower population and production so let's consider a city with 7 (average cities seem to be about this in most my games when the Workshop becomes available). It would go up to 8 with the mod. This could let you build 1 University in 200 turns you might not have otherwise had.

I could use some more viewpoints on this matter, as just two isn't enough to really gauge the effect this has on the game. Anyone else have some thoughts on this?

Ahriman said:

Buildings should be specialized. It should be a bad idea to build a university or market in a mid-size hammer-oriented city.

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Although I agree with many of your suggestions, I am starting to think that we have pretty different ideas of what makes a good game, or mod. I would be bored with the limitations you prefer, much as I was somewhat bored by vanilla, pre-patch Civ 5.

And no, I don't think a 10% increase in city production is too much. I don't think 10% of anything is too much, except tax increases.

I never had the feeling I'd ever run out of useful buildings to construct in my cities in practical TBM gameplay. I always had to specialize, and hardly could build additional stuff in e.g. gold cities, like a barracks. Maybe the 2 or 3 strongest cities were somewhat of an "allrounder", but I never experienced boredom because I could easily have everything.
I also never really used the "wealth" mechanic or such, and I only try to get very few, select wonders.

Overall: I've never actually seen a hyper-production that could make city-specialization unnecessary.


I usually play on Emperor level, large or huge terra maps, normal climate and terrain, epic speed, 1-2 more civs than suggested, max CS number.

here's a way to think of it visually that might be easier for everyone to understand

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And I still think this is totally the wrong way to determine balance.

The in-game decision a player makes is whether or not to build a workshop in City X.

If they have the mod installed, they don't care what the vanilla value is.

Attached is my conception of how this should work.
Suppose a hypothetical size 8 city in the midgame (after Machinery).
It works 3 grassland river farms, 2 lumbermills, a mine, and 2 plains trading posts.
In vanilla, its total production yield is 9.
If it builds a workshop, it will have 10.8 production per turn when producing buildings.

In the combined mod, its total production is 11 (lumbermills boosted).
If it builds a 40% workshop, it will have 15.4 production per turn when producing buildings.

Thus:
a) the effect of building a workshop in the mod is to increase building construction by 40%
b) the effect of adding the mod to the sample city is to increase building construction by 43%. [(15.4-10.8)/10.8]-1 = 0.43
Thats a pretty huge change.

I think 40% is high (I'd prefer 35%), but its not that big a deal. My main objection was to 50% workshop boosts.

Anyone else have some thoughts on this ~10% average increase in city production of buildings?

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It is very misleading to describe the change as a 10% average increase.
That relies on weighting the extreme lategame of a city that has a nuclear plant *and* a solar plant along with just the workshop.

I am starting to think that we have pretty different ideas of what makes a good game, or mod. I would be bored with the limitations you prefe

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Quite possibly. I would be bored by a game where every building was always worth constructing, because the best strategy would always be to expand with more and more cities and build everything in all of them. I don't think thats fun. I think fun is where you have to think and pick and choose carefully which things you put where.
I also don't think ICS is fun, and making buildings so that they are very valuable in large cities but not very valuable in small cities is one of the best ways of combating mass expansion.

I mostly play Immortal, standard maps, mostly continents, normal speed, standard civ and CS settings.

Ahriman said:

I would be bored by a game where every building was always worth constructing, because the best strategy would always be to expand with more and more cities and build everything in all of them. I don't think thats fun. I think fun is where you have to think and pick and choose carefully which things you put where.
I also don't think ICS is fun, and making buildings so that they are very valuable in large cities but not very valuable in small cities is one of the best ways of combating mass expansion.

I mostly play Immortal, standard maps, mostly continents, normal speed, standard civ and CS settings.

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I play with the identical settings and, like Tomice, don't come close to expanding with more and more cities, or building everything in the ones I have. For me, this is the play-tested proof.

Yes, I have a hard time in TBM to balance military vs happiness vs gold vs science vs settling tile improvements. I still have the feeling that maybe 2 of the big concepts work fine, while 4 or so are problematic, but I simply don't have enough capacities and ressources. Not the slightest hint of auto-mode or boredom.

Ahriman said:

It is very misleading to describe the change as a 10% average increase.

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Fair point, 15% is probably more accurate.

The reason numbers were initially lower was I thought for quite a long while the vanilla workshop modifier was 5% higher, I'd misread it. I didn't realize the mistake until just last week, which is why I reduced the workshop's new value.

Hey Thal, just wanted to say a *huge* thank-you for this Mod. Even post-patch, I really doubt I'd have been able to play my game as long as I have if it weren't for your mod.

I'm just curious about some things though. Have you actually boosted the yields for improving resource tiles? Its just the tool-tips suggest they haven't, but its really difficult to tell one way or another once the improvement is built. Also, have you considered officially merging this mod with other mods about the place-like Dale Kent's anti-ICS mod, the Courthouse Mod or the City-State Diplomacy Mod? The reason I ask is that-I have all these mods running together &-though it doesn't cause crashing-it is playing havoc with my interface.
Anyway, thanks again for all your hard work, & I look forward to future improvements .

Aussie.

EDIT: Whoops, sorry-I thought this was the Balance-Combined Thread.

Hi, Thal, a question:

As happiness is empire wide deal, so a bulding/wonder gives happiness to the whole empire, I ask:
is it possible to scale the bonus to the map size? (And what do you think of it?)

EDIT:

Some idea:

How about making happiness bonus:

- part a value for the city it has it
- part a value for all/some other cities - this can be varied and tied to some criteria (if any)

criteria can be having a certain Policy, having a building, being a certain city size, etc...

Something I've been trying to figure out what to do with for over four months now is the Water Mill. I can't really identify what it's intended for (among the set of riverside cities).

The high cost and maintenance typically are for buildings good for large cities, yet the bonuses are fixed non-scaling values, which are better for small cities. It's got such a weird dichotomy going on it's very hard to analyze, and I've never figured out when's the best time to build it, or where, so I always end up leaving it out. Small cities have more important priorities, and so do large ones.

My suspicion is that since it's so early in the tech tree it's intended for small cities, despite its maintenance cost indicating otherwise. As such, one solution I've been thinking about lowering its cost a bit so it's not prohibitively expensive to build for small cities, but with maintenance high so it's still important to choose where to build it. Basically, a building that can buff 1 or 2 important cities (such as for wonder production) at the expense of the empire at large. Would this make sense? Something that's useful a few times but not everywhere.



@Aussie_Lurker
I'm not exactly sure what you mean, getting a little sleepy.

I've improved a few resource tile yields, such as food resources, mine-type resources and bananas. I've been thinking about buffing the rest slightly, details in this post.

I haven't really looked at much else out there in detail, haven't had enough free time between this/work/family.


@V. Soma
There's lots of stuff that doesn't scale to map size, and I have indeed considered it before. I've looked into it some... in the end I don't think we really have the capability yet.

Thalassicus said:

Something I've been trying to figure out what to do with for over four months now is the Windmill. I can't really identify what it's intended for (among the set of riverside cities)... As such, one solution I've been thinking about lowering its cost a bit so it's not prohibitively expensive to build for small cities, but with maintenance high so it's still important to choose where to build it. Basically, a building that can buff 1 or 2 important cities (such as for wonder production) at the expense of the empire at large.

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This makes sense to me, and could go hand in hand with a buff to wheat.

Windmill is a very good building as is. It is basically production city specific booster that does Its job well.

Thal, are you talking about the wind- or the watermill???

I suppose it's about the watermill, so: IMO just making it slighly cheaper would be an improvement already. I mostly use it if a riverside city cannot produce enough food (which can happen, e.g. many riverside hills, short river). It is usually (much) worse than the smokehouse, though, depending on bonus ressources nearby.

I also believe there should be a building to get at least some production into a production-poor city. Quite often there are very nice spots overall, they just lack either production or food, making them develop badly.

Oops yeah I meant watermill.