New Concept - Demand for buildings

One thing we have not considered is the demand for buildings as your population grows.

Demand refers to what the various sectors of your economy want. This is in addition to the normal goods and resources mechanism and allows us to add some variability to individual buildings.

IMO in general it should not apply to buildings that provide resources as that demand is covered in the need for the resources and building chains.

Some buildings has some flow on effects of demand.

The demand buildings would auto-build and would be "removed" by upgrading to the building they are demanding and any upgrades of that building. They would also require the Technologies and other requirements of the building they demand.

EconomicInfrastructure I - Government
Infrastructure II - Roads

Having citizens demand buildings brings me flashbacks of the old Sim City 2000. Not bad flashbacks mind you! (And for a game built by a confirmed libertarian I always found that part especially ironic.)

Anyway, having a specific demand for certain buildings when the city's current selection is significantly outdated or non-existent is another layer of realism. I don't quite get how your mechanics would work. Like, I build a bazaar, market, grocer, but am still in the medieval era, so the citizens can't expect any better. Do I get the malus then? Or is the malus for if the building doesn't exist?

Also, it shouldn't always be sensible. A topical example would be rich people in my city lobbying my city's government to build a thing with a very low return on investment, but putting out all these fake numbers and propaganda to make it look like there was all this non-existent demand, because they want kickbacks from the construction. And they get a promise from people in Dancing Hoskuld's city to supply the money to build it, but then my state's government changes and it turns out the demand really was never there in the first place. You could even associate it with crime in that case, like an obscure crime type that only causes nonsensical demand for stupid unnecessary buildings.

IronClaymore said:

I don't quite get how your mechanics would work. Like, I build a bazaar, market, grocer, but am still in the medieval era, so the citizens can't expect any better. Do I get the malus then? Or is the malus for if the building doesn't exist?

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The simple ones are the ones where if you can't build the building then you wont get any malus. All the buildings except roads in my above example only need a tech and population size to be able to be built. Therefore the demand is for those buildings directly and when you build them or their replacement you would loose all the malus. I have to test it but I think the "actual" value of the building may show the effect of the building including the removal of all the malus buildings since the demanded building replaces all the malus buildings.

The more complex ones may need some other work first eg you can demand paved roads all you like but if you don't have stone there is no way to build them. This means that the demand should be for stone and only later for paved roads. Housing is even more complex.

Not bad thinking... but terrifyingly complex to implement imo. From a perspective of keeping balance during the effort anyhow. Which is why I haven't been terribly responsive. Still on break mode anyhow.

Actually it is almost trivial to implement using auto buildings. The building "actual" value already takes into consideration all buildings being replaced. This means it is a simple upgrade chain of buildings for the simple cases.

I am still trying to figure out how to describe how to do the demand for stuff so you can demand the buildings wanted.

I hope to have a demo up and on the SVN this week or next for the economic and admin examples above.

The complexity is a matter of how it interbalances with all the other things taking place and making sure that the whole of our massive building list is taken into full consideration then making sure all new buildings also take this into consideration. But that's to be said for most modifications I suppose.

The more we can make buildings 'chains', the more this works and the more we get out of the project having been done to make things more organized for future projects as well.

Currently the demand buildings are not things you want or build. This is more like the crime or education buildings. The represent the need for some buildings over time and with population growth. I don't see it being applied to most buildings or building chains. In fact besides the ones in the examples I gave I don't see it as useful elsewhere.

I mentioned housing but I am not sure it will be useful or fit since you don't build houses. They are auto built. Some houses do require other buildings but when does the demand happen? Discussing a game with a player who had a bug, I discovered that they did not know about the housing aspect so were not building sewer systems because of their cost. He did not realize that by building them he would also get the top two levels of housing with all their income (he had access to marble).

Showing building chains of what building requires what other buildings is not easy since most are "or" connections. Some just require the building somewhere in your nation. One requires a building be built by anyone in the world. Some require a number of a particular building to build, eg on huge maps you need 8 monastery level Shaman buildings to build the first cathedral level building and four of them to build the second cathedral level building. Some require any state religion while others require a particular state religion or no state religion.

The current demand buildings make the mall and supermarket required buildings especially once you research applied economics and markets and bazaars become obsolete. This is because the demand buildings for those 2 buildings does not go obsolete so you get 1.5 unhappiness per population in you city if you don't have a mall/supermarket.

is it a idea to change the market penalty to - commerce to represent the lack of a place to trade?
and make the penalty for not having a bazaar go obsolete once the bazaar goes obsolete ?

sunrisereader said:

The current demand buildings make the mall and supermarket required buildings especially once you research applied economics and markets and bazaars become obsolete. This is because the demand buildings for those 2 buildings does not go obsolete so you get 1.5 unhappiness per population in you city if you don't have a mall/supermarket.

is it a idea to change the market penalty to - commerce to represent the lack of a place to trade?
and make the penalty for not having a bazaar go obsolete once the bazaar goes obsolete ?

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When I did it I did not realise that the bazaar and markets became obsolete. I will make the demand buildings go obsolete at the same time as the buildings.

I may add other effects as I get better at figuring out consequences. I want to get the Admin buildings done next.

The admin buildings require a lot of buildings as we don't have a percent maintenance per population as far as I can see.

Just now testing the Paved Roads demand buildings.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

I mentioned housing but I am not sure it will be useful or fit since you don't build houses. They are auto built. Some houses do require other buildings but when does the demand happen? Discussing a game with a player who had a bug, I discovered that they did not know about the housing aspect so were not building sewer systems because of their cost. He did not realize that by building them he would also get the top two levels of housing with all their income (he had access to marble).

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This is a double-edged issue at hand.
On one hand, I also prefer being able to tell in advance what will happen when I build something, and how I should PLAN my building queue.
On the other hand, though, playing "blindly" is also a lot of fun, especially in a mod where you can hardly build EVERYTHING anyways (I progress faster than I build soon-to-be-obsolete stuff, usually).
And THAT isn't a BAD thing at all, really.
It gives the game the spice of variability, as opposed to "hurry to build everything possible and then rush to raise the biggest army to conquer the world" (which gets rather dull pretty quick; and this is why vanilla basically sucks).
But if you CAN'T "build everything all the time", because most stuff gets OBSOLETE very quick - you will have to BALANCE between progressing faster technologically, and building every single thing you already CAN.
I find it to be a BONUS of this mod.
Again, while I'd love to understand all CONCEPTS (and how they work) - I'm not against NOT planning ahead about some of the BUILDING issues.
It makes the game feel more realistic (you never know what will happen tomorrow, do you), lol.

This is a failed concept and I will be removing it.

I was under the impression that the actual value of a building would show the effect in the city but it does not seem to be calculated for a city but for a nation. This means that the buildings that will be obsoleted that are showing the malus in that city are not showing in the actual. Marketplaces should be giving a + as well as the commercial benefits but it is not showing. Same for the other buildings.

Not sure if the AI does get this information or not and it is only the player that is disadvantaged.