Vokarya's Workshop: Buildings

Here's another tweak I thought up and decided to post. What do you think of taking the Cathedrals and moving them from Music to Papacy?

As a technology, I find Papacy to be very solid theoretically (it's a good capsule for institutionalized, multinational religion, plus the Medieval Era is the lightest in tech count at 28) but hard to find content for. When I was switching around religious civics, I almost had to keep one of them at Papacy just to keep it from falling from below the two-trick threshold. Giving Cathedrals to Papacy would definitely strengthen it.

The only thing I worry about here is stripping Music too far. Music would keep the following: build Culture in cities, free Great Artist for first discoverer, and the minor tricks of Artists Guild and The Sagas (both require Medieval techs, although in The Sagas' case, it's only that any one civilization has Rudder to found Asatru). That's still 3 on the trick scale, which is pretty good and I think it's quite a bit easier to find something for Music than Papacy.

Vokarya said:

Here's another tweak I thought up and decided to post. What do you think of taking the Cathedrals and moving them from Music to Papacy?

As a technology, I find Papacy to be very solid theoretically (it's a good capsule for institutionalized, multinational religion, plus the Medieval Era is the lightest in tech count at 28) but hard to find content for. When I was switching around religious civics, I almost had to keep one of them at Papacy just to keep it from falling from below the two-trick threshold. Giving Cathedrals to Papacy would definitely strengthen it.

The only thing I worry about here is stripping Music too far. Music would keep the following: build Culture in cities, free Great Artist for first discoverer, and the minor tricks of Artists Guild and The Sagas (both require Medieval techs, although in The Sagas' case, it's only that any one civilization has Rudder to found Asatru). That's still 3 on the trick scale, which is pretty good and I think it's quite a bit easier to find something for Music than Papacy.

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Sounds good to me, makes sense too

Vokarya said:

Here's another tweak I thought up and decided to post. What do you think of taking the Cathedrals and moving them from Music to Papacy?

As a technology, I find Papacy to be very solid theoretically (it's a good capsule for institutionalized, multinational religion, plus the Medieval Era is the lightest in tech count at 28) but hard to find content for. When I was switching around religious civics, I almost had to keep one of them at Papacy just to keep it from falling from below the two-trick threshold. Giving Cathedrals to Papacy would definitely strengthen it.

The only thing I worry about here is stripping Music too far. Music would keep the following: build Culture in cities, free Great Artist for first discoverer, and the minor tricks of Artists Guild and The Sagas (both require Medieval techs, although in The Sagas' case, it's only that any one civilization has Rudder to found Asatru). That's still 3 on the trick scale, which is pretty good and I think it's quite a bit easier to find something for Music than Papacy.

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Well, I dunno...
Cathedrals and Pantheons have the same role, but this way they would be too far from each other, won't they? I am a bit concerned about balance in this case

Sogroon said:

Well, I dunno...
Cathedrals and Pantheons have the same role, but this way they would be too far from each other, won't they? I am a bit concerned about balance in this case

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How about either Aesthetics or Construction for Pantheons? I'm leaning towards Aesthetics -- right now, Aesthetics is Wonders (Shwedagon, Parthenon, Kotoku-in) and that's about it. Tailor Shop is a bit problematic; I've seen commerce drops when upgrading, and I'm not completely sure why (it's either that Tailor Shop doesn't get a benefit from Hemp, while Weaver does, or it's just a bad result from the Actual Effects display).

One thing I just thought of. The Holy Roman UB has been the Rathaus as a Courthouse replacement since BTS. However, Rathaeuser aren't courthouses; they're City Councils. Would a switch to something in the Village Hall line be a good idea, or am I being a bit pedantic?

triplebassist said:

One thing I just thought of. The Holy Roman UB has been the Rathaus as a Courthouse replacement since BTS. However, Rathaeuser aren't courthouses; they're City Councils. Would a switch to something in the Village Hall line be a good idea, or am I being a bit pedantic?

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I wouldn't do it unless we make it a Metropolitan Administration replacement. Otherwise, it gets replaced too early. But if we do that, then that means waiting all the way until Social Contract, and most UB's are available before then (UB's are generally associated with a civilization's historical peak, but not always). There are a few other UB's that do wait that long. One possibility might be combining City Council and Metropolitan Admin into one UB. I wuould have to think about that more.

Courthouse is definitely the most-overused building among the buildings that get replaced by a UB; there are 5 Courthouse UB's in the main mod and 12 more in the Megapack. I'd love moving some of them to other buildings.

Also, the Rathaus is one of the weaker Courthouse UBs. The Longhouse gives the same -50% maintenance as well as 1, the Zigarat has -50% maintenance and is availiable at Priesthood and is 20 cheaper.

Randomness said:

Also, the Rathaus is one of the weaker Courthouse UBs. The Longhouse gives the same -50% maintenance as well as 1, the Zigarat has -50% maintenance and is availiable at Priesthood and is 20 cheaper.

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That's actually evidence that Longhouse is overpowered. The Iroquois civ and the Longhouse UB are not part of regular BTS.

I think it might be enough to just take Metropolitan Administration and reduce its maintenance increase from 75% to 50%. I don't think we can bring down Metro's tech without also bringing down its population and culture requirements (Village Hall line buildings have both minimum population and minimum culture level requirements to build) and that may be too many changes for a UB.

One of the things that still bothers me is the placement of the Chemical Plant. It is currently located at Plastics, and I think it should be changed. The Chemicals resource allows the following:

• Build Fertilizer Plant with Organic Chemistry. The problem here is that Plastics is currently acting as a hidden prerequisite, which I don't like. In fact, the only things that Organic Chemistry can really call its own are Standard Ethanol and a minor +1 hammer from Workshops.
• Build Rubber Plant with Plastics.
• +1 health from Pharmacy. This effectively offsets the -1 health from Chemicals itself.
• 50% faster production of Laboratory. Laboratories are available from the Chemistry tech, so the point of this bonus is to give players a small upgrade to building Labs between getting Chemicals and getting Computers tech, where the Lab is replaced by the Research Lab.
• Construct Biological Warfare Missile with Biological Warfare. BW is Modern Era, so as long as Chemical Plant stays in the Industrial Era, the exact placement is irrelevant.
• Build Replicator Plant with Rapid Prototyping. RP is Transhuman Era, so like BW, any placement of Chemical Plant has no impact.

Here is what I think we should do:

• Move Chemical Plant to Organic Chemistry.
• Move Fertilizer Plant to Organic Chemistry AND Agricultural Engineering. The two techs are not linked, so I think having both is appropriate.
• Leave everything else untouched. Laboratory gets a bigger window of opportunity, Pharmacy gets its bonus earlier, and the post-Industrial stuff moves on.

Plastics is fine with removing Chemical Plant, as it keeps Hydro Plant, Rubber Plant, and Offshore Platform.

Sounds good

A thought on Farmscrapper I, II and III:
I think it is really out of the pattern: One building per city. No other building has multi-copies. I think it could/should be tweaked to have only one copy. Don't you think?

Here are three more building ideas I have had. I haven't coded them up yet, but they are not extremely complicated. Two of them are civic buildings, and the third is, I think, a good Transhuman Era building.

Peace Movement

• Requires Labor Union tech
• Requires Pacifism civic
• +2 culture
• +5% global War Weariness

I think this would make a better civic building for Pacifism than the Art Gallery. The idea is that this is cumulative for all players, so the more cities on the globe embracing Pacifism, the harder it is for anyone to have a long war. (It could also work as a National Wonder, with +25% for all players; then it would be the number of pacifist nations, not size, that would have an impact.) Art Gallery would become an ordinary building.

Omnifactory

• Requires Planetary Economics tech
• Requires Post-Scarcity civic
• Requires Replicators and Nanobots
• Replaces most/all production buildings
• Provides a copy of all manufactured resources

I'd like to do a little more with the Planetary Economics tech. Right now, it grants only the ability to build Hybrid Forests and boosts the yields of Hybrid Forests and Geothermal Factories. The Omnifactory is supposed to be a giant robotic factory that churns out everything at once, and I thought it would be an appropriate civic building for the Post-Scarcity civic. I will have to experiment with the replacement mechanics to see what I can get away with as far as how many buildings can be replaced (as an example, what happens if Omnifactory replaces Warhead Factory?)

Power Receiver

• Requires Wireless Electricity tech
• Requires player to have built at least one Fusion Power Plant
• Provides clean power (no unhealth)
• Replaces nearly all previous power plants

This is the large-scale application of Wireless Electricity; beaming power from a Fusion Power Plant to any city on the planet. I picked Fusion Plant because you can only really do this with one building that isn't present in the city, and other power plants don't have the power to run an entire planet. This building would be much more complicated if we had power grid mechanics, but we don't, and I'm not going to suggest implementing them just for this.

Sounds good to me, but a few thoughts:

Peace Movement
Don't you think that +2 is too little, while +5% global War Weariness too great? On a bigger map with a 50 cities civ it is +250%. Isn't that too much? Shouldn't it be map size scaled? Just asking. (I prefer the PM to be a regular civic building, not a national wonder.)
Anyway, I really like the idea to replace the Art Gallery with a better choice.

Omnifactory
Provides a copy of all manufactured resources.

Will it be a National Wonder or we are going to have an over abundance of resource like it is with Steelmills?

Power Receiver
I just love it

Sogroon said:

Sounds good to me, but a few thoughts:
Peace Movement
Don't you think that +2 is too little, while +5% global War Weariness too great? On a bigger map with a 50 cities civ it is +250%. Isn't that too much? Shouldn't it be map size scaled? Just asking. (I prefer the PM to be a regular civic building, not a national wonder.)
Anyway, I really like the idea to replace the Art Gallery with a better choice.

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War weariness already scales with map size, so I think whatever works for a Standard map will scale properly. The stacking is kind of the point; the bigger the pacifist civilization, the more public opinion it can bring to bear on the world, and it won't show up until the Industrial Era, so there are ways to build up your forces and win your wars before war weariness can really kick in. I think we should give it a trial run at 5% and if it proves to be too much then we can bring it down.

Sogroon said:

Omnifactory
Provides a copy of all manufactured resources.

Will it be a National Wonder or we are going to have an over abundance of resource like it is with Steelmills?

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Post-scarcity means there is no lack of any resource; that's what this is trying to represent. The Omnifactory also comes into play very late in the Transhuman Era; Planetary Economics is 3 columns from the end of the tree. I think the stuff in the Transhuman Era really is allowed to break the rules.

Okay, I see your point. THX for answering
One more thing: Pacifism as a civic seems to be very early, especially as its civic building showes up so late.
Also when you look at the Civic screen it looks misplaced. I think it should be moved either to a later tech, or rather just simply higher in its column in the civic screen.

Sogroon said:

Okay, I see your point. THX for answering
One more thing: Pacifism as a civic seems to be very early, especially as its civic building showes up so late.
Also when you look at the Civic screen it looks misplaced. I think it should be moved either to a later tech, or rather just simply higher in its column in the civic screen.

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Civic buildings aren't perfect; Junta's civic building (Interrogation Building) is so far down the tech tree that I don't think anyone is likely to build one, but civic buildings still need to be appropriate to the time period where the building comes available. The civics do need a little bit of shuffling in the XML so that they track better with where they are likely to be found, but Pacifism is at the right tech (Asoka converted to it, and that was during the Classical Era).

Vokarya said:

Civic buildings aren't perfect; Junta's civic building (Interrogation Building) is so far down the tech tree that I don't think anyone is likely to build one, but civic buildings still need to be appropriate to the time period where the building comes available. The civics do need a little bit of shuffling in the XML so that they track better with where they are likely to be found, but Pacifism is at the right tech (Asoka converted to it, and that was during the Classical Era).

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I've played a few games where I've used the Interrogation Building before for the extra Espionage points, but it is indeed down pretty late where most folks wouldn't use it in normal circumstances (This is excluding challenges/variants, 'roleplaying' a certain theme, or just the odd situation where you'd find yourself in Junta that late in the game)

Maybe if Junta had a smaller and earlier building along with the late-game building? Something centered around the happiness boost to Walls/Barracks?

Here is a rather weird idea I had. It's been pointed out that the Monument is not really a building that obsoletes. I agree with this. I think we can take the concept and split it into two parts:

• Standing Stone is a building with the basic stats of the Monument (+1 culture, requires Mysticism, obsolete with Astronomy) with a new name and artwork.
• Monument is a new building with the Monument's name and artwork. It would replace the Standing Stone, come available about when the Standing Stone obsoletes (so late Medieval to early Renaissance; I'm actually considering Leadership, but something else might work), keeping the +1 culture and a little extra bonus.

What bonus do you think would be appropriate?

That would mean that Stonehenge would give free Standing Stones instead of Monuments?

Tolni said:

That would mean that Stonehenge would give free Standing Stones instead of Monuments?

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Finally Stonehenge would give an appropriate building
I'm all for it

Yes, Stonehenge will be Standing Stones instead of Monuments. There might be room for another effect or two that plays into true Monuments.