[154.0] Granary Boom opportunity

[skodkim]

Hi

Just jhad the Granary Boom opportunity. One of the choices was having two workers for 600 gold (Marathon speed).

Having a hard time seing the sense in this as rush buying a worker costs 300 gold on Marathon speed..

\Skodkim

[Thalassicus]

The base cost of a worker is 140, and marathon triples costs to 420. I started a game to test this and found workers cost 360. The discrepancy is probably due to Firaxis' poor decision to round purchase costs down 2 times in the formula, instead of once at the end, and the rounding error gets amplified in marathon's 300% bonus. Are you certain they cost 300 for you?

[Thalassicus]

This appears to be a vanilla bug. Unit costs are calculated in the game core only Firaxis has access to.

Originally Posted by Thalassicus

There's a rounding error in the purchase cost formula for units and buildings. It's most visible on faster and slower game speeds.

310 cost for worker on standard
300% cost modifier on marathon
930 target worker cost on marathon
700 actual worker cost on marathon

The cost is 25% lower than the target value. The error is due to rounding multiple times through the cost formula instead of once at the end. If the error was in the ~5% range it wouldn't be a big deal, but 25% off the target is a large enough mistake to significantly alter game balance.

[skodkim]

Originally Posted by Thalassicus

This appears to be a vanilla bug. Unit costs are calculated in the game core only Firaxis has access to.

OK. But if rush buying the units are cheaper than intended wouldn't the logical way to compensate for this just be to lower the price of that particular selection of the opportunity?

\Skodkim

[Thalassicus]

That would imbalance it relative to the other choices of the opportunity. Unless the underlying imbalance is fixed, anything we do to try to work around it will only cause new imbalances.

[skodkim]

Originally Posted by Thalassicus

That would imbalance it relative to the other choices of the opportunity. Unless the underlying imbalance is fixed, anything we do to try to work around it will only cause new imbalances.

On Marathon speed a worker costs 168 Production and 300 gold to rush buy. A Settler cost 450 production and 1280 gold to rush buy. On Marathon speed the Granary opportunity lets you choose between a settler for 600 gold or 3 workers for 600 gold, i.e. you get a huge discount on the settler (which I like) but the worker cost exactly the same as if you rush bought them.

How can it be imbalanced to lower the cost of selecting the worker option in the opportunity?

\Skodkim

[Thalassicus]

I think it might be better to disable the purchase cost exponent, and manually set purchase costs with a fixed formula. I believe that would ensure costs scale appropriately across all gamespeeds.