I understand that completely, and you're right that usually if I've implemented something I weigh more in the direction of keeping it. It's not completely a set decision, though. I put a lot of discussion and work into shifting the cost of national wonders from individual cities to the buildings themselves, yet when it was clear that idea just wouldn't pan out out I reverted the change and went in another direction.
Another recent example is I originally had maritime food at 3/5, but changed it to a per-era total based on your recommendation.
=====
I finally finished beta build 4.14. What took a long time was fixing a vanilla bug with yield display in the city view, spent most of yesterday working on that while iced in here at home.
For example, when comparing the
Capital to a regular city, the capital gets twice as much MCS food as the regular city. If a city is being razed, food that would normally go there it is distributed among other cities in the empire. A detailed example is below.
====================================
Say we're in the Renaissance era with one MCS friends and two MCS allies, and we have these cities:
- Size 12 capital
- Size 10 connected to capital
- City size 4 not connected to capital
- Puppet size 6, not in resistance
- Puppet size 8 in resistance.
The total food to the empire is a fixed 1:friend/2:ally food per era, which would be:
- Classical era = 4 (ancient -> classical -> medieval)
- 4 * (1*1 + 2*2) = 20
The modifiers for each city are (with the percentages represented in decimal form):
2
.0 = Capital city
1
.0 = Normal city
0.5 = Non-connected city
0.5 = Puppet city
1
.0 = Puppet in resistance (50% * 200% = 100%)
5
.0 = Total
The capital is 2 (city) out of 5 (empire), which is 40% of the total. It therefore receives 40% of the empire's total food, which is 8
out of 20
. Each city's food allocation is:
08
= Capital city
04
= Normal city
02
= Non-connected city
02
= Puppet city
04
= Puppet in resistance (50% * 200% = 100%)
20
= Total
These are all the city modifiers:
000% -
Razing
000% - "Avoid Growth" button checked (effect lessens when over 80% of cities are on avoid status)
050% -
Puppet
050% - Not
connected to Capital
200% - Resistance
200% -
Capital
The reason for each of these is:
- No reason to send food to a city being razed.
- The avoid growth and puppet modifiers are to give us time to react if we capture highly-populated cities. Without a way to block food in an annexed city or reduce it for puppets, it could cause starvation elsewhere. Reducing food to puppets and 'avoid growth' cities gives us time to react and strategize.
- Just like city capture, the 'connected' modifier is to mitigate the impact of newly-founded cities, again to give us time to adjust things elsewhere. I think the large gold income and doubled food from connecting a new city outweighs a small 0.1-0.5 reduction in food in all other cities.
- Extra food to a city in resistance helps prevent starvation.
- Capital received a bonus in vanilla.
There's four reasons why I dropped the population modifier:
- In vanilla food also goes to cities without preference based on population.
- Compromise between simplicity and complexity, and reduces the frequency food distribution changes, as Ahriman pointed out.
- Compromise between the smallest-cities and largest-cities options asked about earlier.
- Reduces micromanagement, as Apaca brought up. Food is somewhat more valuable to small cities than large ones, because they get more population-per-turn value from a given amount of food. Sending more food in the direction of new and small cities helps accomplish this without the need to micro 'avoid growth' status.
: Ancient era
