2011-10-25
A lot of things to answer again
Ahriman said:
I don't understand the value of the village founder mechanic (to me great people should have 2 abilities, like the existing ones, either an effect or an improvement creation), but I'm trying to be less negative
Well, I'm just going to replace all the GP improvements by one that gives a little bit of everything. And I don't know what should be the other use of the Village Founder... I want the AI to build villages too, so if I set this unit's AI to UNITAI_WORKER, I hope they will do it. I've never seen any GP improvements built by the AI in vanilla game...
You could rename the village to "town" and "town founder" or "colonist" or whatever, have the gold-bearing improvement be trading post or cottage, and have the gold-building be trading post.
Hmm, I think I like Villages better, for me towns mean small cities, one of the buildings will be called Town Hall (I know I can rename it to City Hall, but somehow Town Hall sounds better for me in a fantasy game).
I'm not fond of bead maker because it is very narrow. Beads aren't a culturally universal thing, and it starts feeling odd for all kinds of different factions and races to have beads as the foundation of their economy. Beads are also a very very small part of any economy, so it feels weird for it to be the main economic building of the early era. Whereas trading post is more generic. "Barter hall" or something could also work.
Beads are just an example, but different forms of things that were used for body ornamentation were an important aspect of most of the prehistorical societies. Also, we're talking about a fantasy mod here, so it doesn't have to resemble the real world history. And by no means I think bead making was a "foundation of economy". It's just a building that gives a small amount of gold, there are other early sources of gold as well (rivers, sea, resources, and trade routes when you have the tech to build roads), and economy is a much broader term, it includes the food and productions concepts used in civ games.
I prefer to have more "flavorful" building names, "Trading Post" or "Barter Hall" sound too generic to me. So if you want me to abandon the "Bead Maker" idea, you should propose something "flavorful" as well, if you know what I mean.
Another possibility would be to make "market" the first one, and then have a "great market" or "forum" or "agora" or "souk" or "caravanersai" or "trade center" or whatever as an intermediate step between markets and banks.
A market is just somewhere that trade is conducted, and we have had markets since the very first cities.
A market doesn't even require currency, you can still have barter in a market.
Caravanserai sounds like a good building or improvement for the Azrac civ, as it's the only civ that can research the Caravans technology, and it needs something to be built on Desert... So perhaps Caravanserai can be a building that can be built by the Azracs only when the city is placed next to Desert. I'm not sure how their Desert improvement should be called in this case, perhaps something like Caravan Post.
Agora and Forum can be the unique buildings of the Archons, which are based on the Greco-Roman history.
The Market comes before Currency indeed, but maybe I'll rename Currency to Coinage, because currency is a very early concept as Pazyryk pointed out.
About the city growth cost: I think I'll reduce the effect of increasing size of the food basket somewhat, but won't make it entirely flat like Pazyryk did.
About the policy cost per city: I think it makes sense, because when you have more cities, you can build more cultural buildings, so the policy cost should balance this effect somewhat. I can think about reducing the impact of number of cities on policy cost, but not about removing it entirely.
About the unhappiness from number of cities and population: In the normal game, you get the same unhappiness from number of cities and from population at city size 3 (or even less on large maps). In my mod you'll get it at size 20, and it's not a very rare thing to have cites with more than 20 citizens, especially in late game. Also you can get extra happiness from many "per city" sources (like buildings and policies). So unhappiness from population is still an important factor, but not so overwhelming as in the vanilla game.
So, when deciding where to found a city, the potential population is an important factor, but not the only one, making cities that have lots of population but are not very productive and don't have any important resources doesn't make much sense. I don't think placing cities is a no-brainer in my system, actually it's very important where to found a city, because you won't be getting the next Settler for a long time...
Ahriman said:
Another thing with limiting settlers; the AI is really, really bad at protecting its settlers from barbarians, and this would be even worse if there is more wilderness. So with this system you would probably need to make settlers able to defend themselves.
Well, if they fail to found a city they will still have the excess happiness, and they will get the next Settler sooner, so I don't think it's a big problem.
[Another thing on wilderness and barbarians that could be considered; increase terrain costs of tundra and deserts to 2, and have barbarians that spawn in tundra/desert have an arctic/desert survival promotion respectively that lets them move normally in home terrain.]
The terrain movement costs will be changed for sure, at least for Desert and Snow, I'm not sure about Tundra, but it's possible that I'll make it 2 for Tundra and Desert and 3 for Snow. About Barbarians getting the terrain promotions: the best thing would be having different types of barbarian units appearing on different terrains, but it's not something that I'm going to implement in the first version, making LUA scripts that add more flavor to the game is a good thing, but it will have to wait, because I want to create a "minimal playable version" of the mod first, with LUA used only when necessary, so I can release it to the community and get feedback.
If there was a combination of low unhappiness per city and a flat or only very slightly increasing food cost per population point, then I would expect to see a few very large cities that build all the infrastructure and tried to be as large as possible, where all the production took place, and then lots of size 1 cities all over the landscape that were just taking up space and capturing terrain, and I wouldn't bother building structures in those cities (wouldn't be worth the hammer/maintenance costs). That would seem to me to be unambigulously the best strategy in such a situation.
You're right, and this is what I want to avoid by increasing the unhappiness per city.
Pazyryk said:
If you think that is a radical idea, wait to you see what I did to the tech tree.
I'm eager to see this too, you seem to have very radical ideas, my mod seems quite "conservative" compared to yours...
