Specializing cities

Rwn said:

Too much things to do at the same time Originally I intended to put it on hold because I wanted to do some other things with buildings, something I haven't got the courage to start yet. But I'll get back to it at some point.

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Oh that sounds very promising, I'm really excited

Noriad2 said:

If you give free buildings to a new city, wouldn't that give boatloads of money if you sell off those buildings for money (CTRL-A) and disband the city? Depending on the price of the settler and the rewards for selling the buildings, this may be a competitive way of making money.

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The code does not let you sell free buildings.

I suspect that if you build a lighthouse in an existing city after Colonisation you wont be able to sell it

Rather than going fully into specialization directly, I'd "bump" Pepper's idea first where he wanted all buildings obsolete around two eras after they were discovered.
In my experience, the building lists really adds up when you reach the Industrial Era. So a good first start would it to review all buildings up to (and including) the Renaissance Era and try to figure out, how and when they can be obsolete and replaced.

For example, whe have tons of different Mining /Farming buildings that require two resources in your vicinity. They add a nice flavour early on, but later it can be tedious to go through all cities and build every new combination building just to get some cheap extra hammers / food. A building at around Agricultural Engineering could replace ALL of them with a building that gives plain +5 . For some cities this will reduce food production, while for others it will boost it a bit. And all in all, 5 (or even 20) isn't really a GREAT deal in the industrial era.

Same goes for mining buildings. The main reason we had them was to simulate that it is very difficult to transport ore. You need a mine and then smelt it directly in a local smelter. But this changes with railroads. So at railroads, there could be a single mining building that gives the boni from mining camps, along with the ability to build every smelter that exists (if you have the required ore, of course).

To reduce the smiths / smelters and Factories that every city can build (but obviously not want), there could be a prereq building for all of them, that you don't want to build normally. The Factory, for example, is a prereq to all production factories (IIRC). But it is inself so good that you can't skip it. So there should be something like an industrial park (we have one, I know), that is very cheap, but not having a bonus in any form. It is purely there to enable all the factories. Or, if someone prefers to split their factories to different cities: The Industrial Park could unlock a handful different Industrial Parks that specialize in certain things: Food, Military, Electronics, every-day-stuff etc.

Finally we do have a tool that gives a building to all cities for free, once you reach a certain tech. This could be used for "old" buildings that don't obsolete (Banks, Temples....). I think the problem was that it doesn't check for prereqs, does it?

The problem I have with Rwn's suggestions are that

1) you are forced to specialise

2) it happens way to early. IMO it should not happen until City Planning at the earliest.

Faustmouse said:

Rather than going fully into specialization directly, I'd "bump" Pepper's idea first where he wanted all buildings obsolete around two eras after they were discovered.
In my experience, the building lists really adds up when you reach the Industrial Era. So a good first start would it to review all buildings up to (and including) the Renaissance Era and try to figure out, how and when they can be obsolete and replaced.

For example, whe have tons of different Mining /Farming buildings that require two resources in your vicinity. They add a nice flavour early on, but later it can be tedious to go through all cities and build every new combination building just to get some cheap extra hammers / food. A building at around Agricultural Engineering could replace ALL of them with a building that gives plain +5 . For some cities this will reduce food production, while for others it will boost it a bit. And all in all, 5 (or even 20) isn't really a GREAT deal in the industrial era.

Same goes for mining buildings. The main reason we had them was to simulate that it is very difficult to transport ore. You need a mine and then smelt it directly in a local smelter. But this changes with railroads. So at railroads, there could be a single mining building that gives the boni from mining camps, along with the ability to build every smelter that exists (if you have the required ore, of course).

To reduce the smiths / smelters and Factories that every city can build (but obviously not want), there could be a prereq building for all of them, that you don't want to build normally. The Factory, for example, is a prereq to all production factories (IIRC). But it is inself so good that you can't skip it. So there should be something like an industrial park (we have one, I know), that is very cheap, but not having a bonus in any form. It is purely there to enable all the factories. Or, if someone prefers to split their factories to different cities: The Industrial Park could unlock a handful different Industrial Parks that specialize in certain things: Food, Military, Electronics, every-day-stuff etc.

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There are different ways to achieve what we want

Faustmouse said:

Finally we do have a tool that gives a building to all cities for free, once you reach a certain tech. This could be used for "old" buildings that don't obsolete (Banks, Temples....). I think the problem was that it doesn't check for prereqs, does it?

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I think that it only gives those buildings to new cities not all cities.

I was against forced specialization, too, at first. But now I think that if you are forced to lock out certain buildings permanently, this will add a great new layer of strategy. Now I don't care; I would take it either way.

I agree with you that specialization here started to early.


If the free building thing only works for new cities, than you could work around it like that:
You have a pseudo national wonder that requires the palace and is autobuilt, once you hit a certain tech A. These autobuildings give a free Building X to all cities. So it can be said as "Building X is free in all cities when you hit Tech A".

This could be done for different buildings on different techs, or we could use key techs that construct an auto building that generates many different buildings. Classical Lifestyle for example could give all relevant PH era buildings for free. I must say that I think this is a quite ugly way to do that and I'd rather reduce the building list and the list of buildings in a city at the same time.

The MOST elegant way would be a full review of all buildings. And that's a really terrifying task, sadly.

How I would approach it is something like this:

1) Make a List of every building, including the Tech Prereqs (-> Mostly complete)
2) Add one (or maybe two) categories to each building. Like "Mining", "Production", "Manufacturing", "Crime Fighting"...)
3) Only look at one category then and divide it into sub categories to figure out building lines. We have a Townwatch Line and a Punishment Line for anti-crime buildings for example. Or a Crane line and a Construction Firma line for building-speed-enhancing buildings.
4) Figure out a good progression inside the line. Like having them 20X Tech colums apart. Gradually enhancing stats. Obsolete tech at the same distance for each new building.
5) Get rid of stats that don't fit a category's line very good. Some buildings got very complex as the mod added new stuff.

The first two steps were done a while ago and would need an update. And from there on it is "just" one building line at a time. This would also helpto identify relicts like Carnival. It still gives a HUGE 20% bonus while other buildings at the time only give a plain +2 or so.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...-J75c/edit?copiedFromTrash&pref=2&pli=1#gid=0

While this is a very good idea, this has the potential to go awry. Many post-industrial buildings have prerequisites, sometimes several. It is very easy to get a situation where several ressource buildings depend on each other, locking you out of all these ressources. I think something like this has already happened.

Faustmouse said:

4) Figure out a good progression inside the line. Like having them 20X Tech colums apart. Gradually enhancing stats. Obsolete tech at the same distance for each new building.

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This can be a really bad idea. Hydro has done that with some of his buildings and it makes no sense since

Which brings up another issue - should the amalgamation be affected by city size, eg up until size 13 you get to build the individual gatherers but at 13 and above you get a "Gathering Crew" which replaces all of them?

Yeah that's true... But how would you start otherwise?

Maybe the first step should be a review of all buildings up to and including the Modern era. Because after that, they really get out of hand with very complex building dependencies; which is not necessarily a bad thing! But a cleanup is definetly needed.

Mr Azure's work was never properly combed thru. He was very prodigious in his bldg making, took his cue from Hydro's teaching and ran wild with it. But in his defense, every time he came back to finish it out he got put on hold by senior modders/coders. So he's not around anymore to share his "vision".

JosEPh

Dancing Hoskuld said:

This can be a really bad idea. Hydro has done that with some of his buildings and it makes no sense since

1) you want to build the cheaper early building in small cities

2) not everyone researches tech in the same way so you may end up obsoleting a building before the general building becomes available.​

Which brings up another issue - should the amalgamation be affected by city size, eg up until size 13 you get to build the individual gatherers but at 13 and above you get a "Gathering Crew" which replaces all of them?

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It's a perfect method as long as the buildings upgrade from one to the next and they don't obsolete until far far down the path.

City size building upgrades basically? That sounds like a good idea actually. Outside of using % rather than +/- to represent scaling effect of a larger city this could work fairly well. However, that's also one potential use of the new +/- per population tag set.

I just found some Manufacturing Complexes in the game. Most likely Pepper's work. If so, WELL DONE!! They really help to cut down the building list; I like it.

Yeah, that came out of the building consolidation project. I figure that by the time you reach the Transhuman Era, some resources such as Water Bottles just ought to be taken for granted.

Sure.
Advanced Copper and Iron Works could come even earlier; around the Modern or even Industrial era I think. Copper and Irons Smithes are around since the Ancient Era after all.

I think there are alot of buildings from every era that could be consolidated. For example, you could consolidate almost all the farm buildings into generalized buildings: animal / fruit / vegetable / grain / fiber / dairy.

Each building would work like the stonecutter's workshop that gives a bonus if you have the resource within city vicinity.

So for example:

Grain Farm +1
Provides 1 Grain
+1 with Wheat in city vicinity
+1 with Barley in city vicinity
+1 with Rice in city vicinity
Require Wheat or Barley or Rice in city vicinity

Dairy Farm +1
Provides 1 Carcass 1 Milk
+1 with Cow in city vicinity
+1 with Yak in city vicinity
+1 with Goat in city vicinity
Requires Cow or Yak or Goat in city vicinity

This would work for anything that provides a manufactured resource, or just a general bonus. It would require changing the 'trainer' buildings to require the resource in city vicinity instead of a particular farm, since there wouldn't be a 'horse farm' or a 'camel farm' anymore. But I think this is good too, since long chains of A requires B, B requires C, etc. prevent players from queuing up things more than 1 building in advance.

You could do the same thing with the mine buildings, consolidate them into metal mine / gem mine / etc. and have the smeltery buildings become city vicinity ones, with the alloy smelteries requiring access to both ores and either of the ores in the city vicinity. By adding the city vicinity requirement all of the smelteries you could never build in a city will disappear & shorten the building list alot.

In the case of Advanced Ironworks in particular, I was thinking about the growing use of electric arc furnaces. But that technology already exists. One of these days (we all know how much will happen "one of these days") I will do something more comprehensive. Or better yet, someone else will.

Nevets_: That is a good plan. Things get complicated where, in some cases, a specialized mine or farm requires two resources in the city vicinity. If memory serves me correctly, that was done to make up for the fact that there are only so many resources that can be placed on the map.

Nevets_ said:

By adding the city vicinity requirement all of the smelteries you could never build in a city will disappear & shorten the building list alot.

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1) Not sure if we can do Or on the vicinity requirement but there are ways around that.

2) Another problem comes when a nation has the ore or whatever but not in the vicinity of any city. This is what the National Smelters are for - just need to take care of this case as well is all.

pepper2000 said:

If memory serves me correctly, that was done to make up for the fact that there are only so many resources that can be placed on the map.

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Exactly.

I would set it up like "Requires Farm in Vicinity, +1 for every appropiate resource, produces Grain" (for example). The Farm Supply also requires a farm in vicinity.