Cottages vs. Trading Posts

Cottages vs Trading Posts?

  • Cottages

    Votes: 17 60.7%
  • Trading Posts

    Votes: 5 17.9%
  • Some hybrid implementation of both

    Votes: 6 21.4%
  • Indifferent to either.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    28
Joined
Jul 31, 2014
Messages
836
Hey all!

Disclaimer: Wall-of-text below.

Recently, I've been nibbling on some food for thought: design-wise (and in terms of implementation), has the replacement of the Cottage with the Trading Post been anything but "no need to invest time to grow your little huts, just take the gold up front!"?

This line of thought was brought up by a need to engage in the infamous "Trading Post Spam" if playing on a map (or starting area!) with fewer-than-preferred luxuries (or not enough variety of), in order to support a large army/infrastructure/happy, as well as to support consistent rush-buying and city-state bribe-money. While they have been nerfed in the past, spamming these if you have nothing much to do is still free gold.

There are obviously many other ways to accrue gold/commerce in both games, but these improvements are on the whole, an income source unaffected by the winds of your petty diplomatic spats, barring a full-force invasion & pillage/conquer of your lands.

Background Information (for those who are unfamiliar with (or have since forgotten) the arcane rituals of a "Cottage Economy"):

A cottage is an improvement in Civilization IV, that was available as an improvement upon researching the technology Pottery (as opposed to Guilds for Trading Posts in V). It generated commerce :commerce: (which unlike in Civ 5, can be Globally set to be converted into either Science, Culture, Espionnage, or Gold), but for the sake of basic comparison, we will just consider it's output as Gold :gold:.

In Civ 5, although the Trading Post is unlocked later, but does not need to be "upgraded" further; in Civ 4, Cottages must be "worked" by a city in order to "grow" (into Hamlet/Village/Town), which in the end will produce a significant yield output if left to mature. A player would only need to nurture and protect few dedicated (preferably riverside) "cottage cities" to support his mid-late game economy.

However, a cottage was extremely vulnerable to early game invasions: it takes a full 70 turns for one to fully mature. In the meantime, an enemy civ (or barbarian) can simply waltz into your lands (if you do not protect yourself) and pillage your lovely huts (note: there was no such thing as "repair improvement" - you lost it permanently. Compound this with the fact that pillaging these babies gave approximately 2 to 15x the amount of gold than other improvements meant the AI would love to do so at first chance).

The level of vulnerability at the early stages is somewhat similar (in terms of actual units on the ground) to wonder-whoring in Civ 5, in that if you can get through the early game without dying, you will come out with a very strong lead.

So my question(s) to you guys is this:

- Are trading posts a little dull (i.e. build and forget, spam on every non-resource tile, in every city, given enough food to feed the citizen to work it)? Especially with a puppet's focus on gold (or rather, it's inability to do anything else), it pretty much defaults to "demolish everything and build some of these".

- Would a hybrid or re-implementation of a "growing" improvement (not necessarily for just trading posts, mind you) be, in your opinion, an interesting mechanic to be added into the game?

- What else makes Trading Posts spamming so prevalent?

- Which 'system' do you (or if you've never played Civ4, would you) prefer, in terms of generating gold? (Note: diplomacy/trades and trade routes are irrelevant, as both games supported such trade)?
 
I'm a huge proponent of CiV over CIV, and am generally annoyed when people act all superior because they like CIV better... but I must admit I miss the cottages. They were a very dynamic improvement, one of my favorite features of CIV, and trading posts really don't compare at all, if only because they're rather underpowered at the moment, compared to farms.
 
Civ4 has mainly dynamic systems (culture, espionage, civics, cottages, etc).
Most mechanics in civ5 are static, tourism is probably the only exception.
Dynamic mechanics are more fun.
 
I agree that cottages > TP, one of the few things I miss from IV. Thanks for the reminder about that, as I had forgotten about cottages getting better as the game progressed.

Civ4 has mainly dynamic systems (culture, espionage, civics, cottages, etc). Most mechanics in civ5 are static

I agree with you that interactive and changing elements are more fun. Please remind me how culture was dynamic in IV, I cannot recall the game mechanic at all! I miss the IV spy unit, so I agree with you there too.

I was initially very skeptical of SP versus civics, but the fact that you have so many choice and options over the course of game more than makes up for lack of changing them per se. How many times in IV, over the course of one game, do you actually make a civics selection? How many times in V, over the course of one game, do you make an SP selection?

Religion is much more dynamic in V than with IV. I really don’t think it is accurate to characterize most mechanics in civ5 as being static.
 
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I agree with you that interactive and changing elements are more fun. Please remind me how culture was dynamic in IV, I cannot recall the game mechanic at all! I miss the IV spy unit, so I agree with you there too.

I was initially very skeptical of SP versus civics, but the fact that you have so many choice and options over the course of game more than makes up for lack of changing them per se. How many times in IV, over the course of one game, do you actually make a civics selection? How many times in V, over the course of one game, do you make an SP selection?

You can adjust your cultural slider to convert :commerce: into :culture:. :culture:'s production mechanics were also directly tied to :c5happy:, with each 10%(? or was it 20%?) of your slider being converted into 1 additional :c5happy:, in each city.

There were several buildings that would provide stacking effects on this (i.e. the Colosseum gave an additional :c5happy: per 20%, the Theatre gave 1 :c5happy: per 10%), such that by mid-late game, you could very easily sustain a considerable amount of population in each city :)c5happy: was local), as sufficient economic production :)commerce: directly, :hammers: indirectly as buildings had no explicit maintenance, and most actually did something useful if you were not tied up building troops for an extremely quick domination win) could be converted into just about anything your empire needed.

As for Civics...... some pre-conditions to how many times you switch:
- Are you spiritual? Switching religions/civics for no anarchy every time the AI whines for you to do so (and they did it a LOT) can rack up plenty of free diplo freebies. Being able to switch from a pure economic-focused combination (i.e. Representation/Universal Suffrage + Free Speech + Pacifism) into a military production machine (i.e. Police State + Nationhood/Vassalage + Theocracy) with zero turns of anarchy is pretty sweet. Of course, this is a non-issue lategame (post-renaissance) when anarchy lasts only for 1 turn anyways.
- Did you build the Pyramids/Shwedagon Paya [sic]?
- Did you build the Cristo Redentor? (mimics the effects of spiritual)
 
I'm a huge proponent of CiV over CIV, and am generally annoyed when people act all superior because they like CIV better... but I must admit I miss the cottages. They were a very dynamic improvement, one of my favorite features of CIV, and trading posts really don't compare at all, if only because they're rather underpowered at the moment, compared to farms.
This pretty much sums up what I have to say about this topic. I would add however that one feature I miss from the CIV cottages is the fact that during war, if someone pillaged your fully developed town, it really hurt you a lot, which added a small but nice extra twist to the warfare/pillage dynamics.
 
You can adjust your cultural slider...

I was hoping you were thinking of something other than the slider. I understand that people miss it, and sure it’s “dynamic”, but IMHO it was a crude and arbitrary mechanism that dumbed down the game.

But now I am remembering the territory boarders that slowly got brighter, and that you could flip forward settled cities. I miss that! Tile buying is interactive of course, and Ideologies gives us some city flipping, but not as much as we had with IV.

As for Civics... some pre-conditions to how many times you switch

Taking advantage of the spiritual trait is the exception more than the rule, but once everything was unlocked, I must confess that probably I switched fewer than most. Still, BNW is upwards of 50 choices every game. As I recall, IV was a 5x5 grid, so as few as 25 picks. The raw count has to heavily be in favor of V.
 

The slider is the "most intuitive and obvious" example of one aspect in how culture is dynamic, used to illustrate that point to people who may have potentially never played Civ4. We can sit here and write a concise encyclopedia on the various fleshed-out mechanics on every aspect of Civ if we really wanted to, but that is beside the point.

I did not mention culture border expanding as they are present in both games; but main difference is you can expand into your opponent's land with just cultural presence alone (however, this usually only applies if you have 2 cities pressing on 1, or if your opponent forward settles you). Great Artist bombing half a continent was fun though, i'll say :lol:.

City flipping through culture is on the whole, negligible in 95%+ of most typical scenarios: the AI will not hesitate to build and stack a group of 20 units in each border city if it feels it is being culturally threatened by you. This is in the base game though, I played mostly on K-Mod which had/have changed a whole bunch of underlying mechanics, so YMMV from mine (iirc, Karadoc implemented some changes to the culture system, where your cities in the back will now contribute to the cultural pressure on your frontier, and he made cultural flipping a lot easier to trigger with reduced revolt-suppression power of units).
 
This pretty much sums up what I have to say about this topic. I would add however that one feature I miss from the CIV cottages is the fact that during war, if someone pillaged your fully developed town, it really hurt you a lot, which added a small but nice extra twist to the warfare/pillage dynamics.

There is the "trading posts grow into towns" mod -- I should check that out at some point. I suspect pillaged towns don't cost you nearly as much as losing a town in CIV, but I suspect it could be possible to have a town "burn down" into a trading post again with some Lua code...
 
There is the "trading posts grow into towns" mod -- I should check that out at some point. I suspect pillaged towns don't cost you nearly as much as losing a town in CIV, but I suspect it could be possible to have a town "burn down" into a trading post again with some Lua code...
Thanx for the heads-up, I was not aware of that. That does sound like a really interesting mod, and also very wellmade, because instead of just mindlessly increasing gold yield, it actually takes into account balance by adjusting other yields of the tiles. I will definitely look into that one.
 
In CiV how often are you building trading posts?

I always put them on non-riverside, non-hill jungle, and non-riverside grassland but beyond that it depends on the situation. Anything riverside is farmed and forests get lumbermills. Gold comes from luxuries or trade routes. Trading posts are just not that important of an improvement for me at least.
 
Yep, pretty much just jungles for me. I sometimes put them on non-riverside plains or grassland if I'm planning on going full Rationalism (as opposed to only dipping into it for Secularism).
 
Would a hybrid or re-implementation of a "growing" improvement (not necessarily for just trading posts, mind you) be, in your opinion, an interesting mechanic to be added into the game?

I think this would be an interesting concept. What if farms could eventually evolve into plantations? That way you could build the improvements for resources earlier than you would have been able to, and then when you unlock the appropriate technology the improvement will transform into the resource specific improvement (i.e. farms transforming into plantations) and thus give you the full yield and luxury from said resource. Maybe the same type of thing could be used for mines too? After a certain amount of time the mine will eventually run deeper and more efficiently and thus grow into more advanced versions (kind of like cottages from CivIV).
 
I think this would be an interesting concept. What if farms could eventually evolve into plantations? That way you could build the improvements for resources earlier than you would have been able to, and then when you unlock the appropriate technology the improvement will transform into the resource specific improvement (i.e. farms transforming into plantations) and thus give you the full yield and luxury from said resource. Maybe the same type of thing could be used for mines too? After a certain amount of time the mine will eventually run deeper and more efficiently and thus grow into more advanced versions (kind of like cottages from CivIV).

Isn't this already in the game now?

Mines get better with chemistry, and again with order, lumbermills get better with scientific method, farms get better with civil service or fertilizer, and trading posts get better with economics and again with rationalism and commerce.
 
In CiV how often are you building trading posts?

I think your larger point with this question is that in IV, one built cottages all the time and that TP are kind of weak. I agree with you that TP are just not that an important of an improvement.

I always put them on non-riverside, non-hill jungle, and non-riverside grassland but beyond that it depends on the situation. Anything riverside is farmed and forests get lumbermills. Gold comes from luxuries or trade routes.

I don’t think it is the gold so much as the science. TP on flat dry jungle is a no-brainer. I would rather chop and farm forests, or put TP on forested hills rather than lumbermills mills.

Yep, pretty much just jungles for me. I sometimes put them on non-riverside plains or grassland if I'm planning on going full Rationalism (as opposed to only dipping into it for Secularism).

Hmm, even with full Rationalism, I think plains and grasslands are better with farms. You don’t complete Rationalism until Fertilizer, so I don’t know why wet (or not) would change that (except that wet farms are an early priority, and TP not great, so no compelling reason to TP old farms).
 
- Would a hybrid or re-implementation of a "growing" improvement (not necessarily for just trading posts, mind you) be, in your opinion, an interesting mechanic to be added into the game?

I think a growing improvement is a good idea. Tile improvements are one of the weakest features of Civ 5 and basically aren't very interesting.

I think you could possibly build a town (maybe it should consume a worker?) and as it grows larger the tile provides food, gold and production to the city. It should also provide walls and a modest defensive bonus over time too.

Sizes could be something like this
-Hamlet, consumes a worker on construction (I don't like the name cottage...) tile must be worked by city to grow - same as Civ 4.
Provides +1 food +1 gold (requires currency)

-Village.
Provides +1 food +2 gold (requires currency) +1 production

-Town
Provides +1 food, +3 gold (requires currency, economics) + 2 production (industrialization) +1 culture.

Hamlets must be located adjacent to a source of fresh water and cannot be adjacent to other Hamlets....

Balance of this being it consumes a worker for the tile improvement much like the work boat but it provides a stronger tile bonus than early farms or mines etc....
So there is some balance here, use your workers to build average tile improvements or consume to populate a village for a stronger bonus.
 
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