The new Improvement System in Wildmana (bye bye cottage spam)

Since I completly rewrote the worker AI anyway I decided redefine how improvements work. With the new Improvement system

• You will build less improvements and not every tile will have an improvement. Much better for a fantasy mod
• The Improvements are more different and it matters a lot more what improvement you build
• Many Improvements also have penalties so you need to plan carefully
• The primary Improvements you can build at game start, others are unlocked later in the tech tree (the game option that makes build orders take longer is gone)
• Automated Workers are actually usefull. They are still worse than micromanaged workers, but micromanaging workers is a lot more fun now because there are way more options now.

How does it work?

• There are two types of Improvements: Primary and Secondary
• Primary Improvements represent the whole infrastructure of the landscape, not just of one tile but also the adjacent tiles. As a general rule you can't build two primary Improvements adjacent to each other. Primary Improvements have high yields and usually also a penalty. Primary Improvements are Farms, Pastures, Plantations, Mines, Trading Posts and Camps.
• Secondary Improvements typically enhance the infrastructure which primary Improvements represent. A Windmill for example increases the food yield of all adjacent farms. A Lumbermill either improves the Commerce Yield of a trading post or the production of a mine adjacent to it. The amount of this increase scales with the number of forests around the lumbermill (ancient forests do not count). Secondary Improvements are Wineries, watermills, workshops, lumbermills, groundwater wells, cottages and any improvement I forgot .

A few examples:

Farm: +3 food, +1.5 unhappy population requires fresh water, can discover corn, wheat, rice
Pasture: +1food, +2production, +1.5 unhappy population, can discover cows, sheep, etc., can be build on either plains or one of the bonuses it is linked to
Winery: +0.5 happy population, can discover wine, requires fresh water+hills
Cottage: +1 commerce (later stages give more), +3 unhealth, increases the rate at which adjacent primary improvements discover resources, requires fresh water, natural yield of 1 or more food

Also, build orders now also show the actual changes for the city working the tile (where effects for adjacent tiles etc. are included)

looks pretty damn cool, can't wait to see how it works out in practice

omgomg! I like playing with workers and this sounds very cool.
You are god Sephi..

@sephi
did you touch the roads as well? if there is one thing that ruins the looks, besides improvements everywhere, it is roads on every tile imho.

Is 9.0 ever going to come out? =P

I like the idea (or at least the "less cottage spam" part anyway!); if there's anything I hate it's putting my workers to.. work.

I did like the Alpha Centauri way of doing things, if you ever played that. Aside from the main/simple improvements (farm, mine, solar collector; every non-hill tile could be farmed AND have a mine or solar collector), there were "bigger" improvements as well. A Condensor altered rainfall patterns, basically making land around it more fertile (comparable to plains->grassland, I suppose); an Echelon Mirror made every solar collector on a tile adjacent to it have +1 "energy" (AC's equivalent of commerce) and some sort of supermine gave very high Minerals (production) and Energy (commerce) but no food.

They all had the downside of causing "ecological damage", making the Planet more prone to revolt (causing Fungus to grow and destroy improvents, which also caused "mind worms" to spawn, thereby increasing barbarian activity and strength when cities got more advanced; bit of an Armageddon Counter thing!)

This made planning improvements a lot more interesting, though the high degree of planning required to optimize it got very tedious once you had 25+ cities...

Conclusion: less worker-trouble = good! Tedious amounts of planning required = bad!

Gaminic said:

and some sort of supermine gave very high Minerals (production) and Energy (commerce) but no food.

Click to expand...

to add, thermal boreholes also could not be built next to each other

Gaminic, have you tried Maniac's Planetfall mod for civ4? It has a subforum here and it captures the general feel of SMAC/X terraforming (with interdependencies between tile improvements) quite well. It also has the SMAC/X leaders/setting/backstory/atmosphere. But it's also different enough from SMAC/X to be essentially a new game.

It doesn't have geoterraforming (raising new land/mountains) but i say, good riddance. One of 2 things i hated about Alpha centauri was how in every game the land used to blob to a single mass without any interesting coastlines (the other being the abysmal AI).

I'll look it up, but I don't think I'll play it. Learning WildMana already takes up so much time; if I add another mod to the fun I'll never get any work done.

tesb said:

@sephi
did you touch the roads as well? if there is one thing that ruins the looks, besides improvements everywhere, it is roads on every tile imho.

Click to expand...

I kept meaning to make a modmodmod that gave -1 food for a road on a tile for the elven civs only, as these always had too much food anyway and roads always seemed inappropriate for the elves. It also had the advantage of making elves settle around forests (double movement) and avoid flood plains. I only ever used this when the player (me) played as either one of the elves, and always disabled it whenever the ai was playing them, as I reckoned it would be too confusing for it. But perhaps with a bit of AI work going on anyway...

tesb said:

@sephi
did you touch the roads as well? if there is one thing that ruins the looks, besides improvements everywhere, it is roads on every tile imho.

Click to expand...

yes, automated workers only build roads now to connect bonuses or connect cities. They won't build a road on every tile when they have nothing else to do.

that doesn't make sense though, I'd rather have my workers build roads everywhere instead of just sitting idle. and I sure don't want to micromanage them to build roads everywhere just so they are not sitting idle instead...

[to_xp]Gekko;9512137 said:

that doesn't make sense though, I'd rather have my workers build roads everywhere instead of just sitting idle. and I sure don't want to micromanage them to build roads everywhere just so they are not sitting idle instead...

Click to expand...

the assumption here is that every tile should NOT be worked. I cant remember where or what Mod or version of CIV, but there were actually penalties for creating roads where they were not immedietely needed. Probably tied in with a preservation forest tile/scenario.

this also fits well with the civs that dont need roads, like the Ljolsafar or the Malakim, though I dont agree with the magics/I do appreciate the effects.

edit) I play this way now even though there is no direct effect, simply an atmospheric/ambiance that helps to build the wild world of wild mana for me

won't this cause the raiders trait to be worth less? maybe it could give drill 1 aside from commando to offset the fact that there will be less improvements to gain double gold from.

[to_xp]Gekko;9512813 said:

won't this cause the raiders trait to be worth less? maybe it could give drill 1 aside from commando to offset the fact that there will be less improvements to gain double gold from.

Click to expand...

Or just let improvements give more Gold anyways when pillaged.

that makes more sense I agree

I like this a lot

Sephi, thanks a lot!!! Very good, useful, meaningful and needed decision. Can't wait to finally play 9.0!!!

sounds awesome

It's an intersting change though I can't see why farms would make the local citizenry unhappy.

For Roads you could go down the colonisation route of giving them a cost. Better yet, give them based on the number of roads adjacent to that tile, and make that cost rise per number of roads. (e.g. 0-3 Roads. No cost, 4 Roads = 20 Gold, 5 Roads = 40 Gold, 6 Roads = 60 Gold, etc.) This'll mean you can make a basic road structure with T Junctions, and you'd build a road that led to a resource, but you wouldn't want to max out your empire with roads everywhere.

An alternative would be having roads spread automatically around cities by time, possibly based on population, rather than them being built manually. This would force people to build cities closer to each other (though not necessarily with overlap) and closer to resources, rather than simply Culture-pushing their way to the resources they want. A road through the wildernis doesn't make sense.

It also limits the possibilities of Trade. Rather than having Open Borders and roads to every other Civ on the map, you'd have to build pretty close to other Civs or use some sort of merchant unit to build a Trade Route to another Civ. (The Great Merchant options seems perfect for this, but it would make it rather difficult, considering their rareness. On the other hand, GMs usually end up being added to a city anyway because that seems to be their most useful use.)

This change would limit the current overpoweredness of trade. On a Huge map, a city with Lighthouse, harbor, Inn, Tavern, ... and running Foreign Trade and possibly some wonders rakes in millions by means of trade. I find myself teching for +trade route techs rather than +(%)gold buildings when my economy needs a boost, which seems rather off.