My main problem with that is the very uniqueness of it. Why go through all that effort to create an improvement type that is so counter-intuitive to the others? Especially for an improvement that really isn't that impressive.
I don't quite understand what you're getting at. Do you think that the watermills improvement isn't working as intended? It is working a lot different from all the other improvements, that's true. But I do think it's an interesting variation. It does of course make the game a bit more complicated for new players, but not a lot.
Watermills with State Property and electricity and replaceable parts: +1 food, +2 hammers, +2 commerce (3 with financial). I used to use State Property all the time because of the food bonus it gives to watermills and workshops. Food is the hardest resource to acquire more of, so any terrain improvement that adds food next to nice quantities of the other 2 resources (hammers and commerce) is a good improvement in my book.
Compare it to the farm, +2 food, or the windmill, +1 food, + 1 hammer, + 2 commerce (3 with financial), and you'll see that it's a great improvement with State Property.
However, in BTS I don't use State Property very often as I like to use corporations and without the food bonus, the watermill is not that great.
I don't know about "wasted". Every time something like this comes up, I find I learn something a little more about the game than I knew before. So if for no other reason, it's valuable in that regard.
Bh
Agreed. We can all learn from some discussion. I just meant that the impact such a change would have on the game is minuscule.
Well, that's fine for a mod, but I'm not sure it'll fly for a patch, even an "unofficial" one.
As an aside to the public at large...
Help!
Ok, now that I've got your attention (
), I was wondering if anyone would be willing to test my city placement modifications? I've done a bunch of run-throughs with autorun on to watch city placement, generally they look good, but I'm going to want more test cases than I can generate myself. So if I can get some people who are willing to try it out, that would help out a lot.
Bh
Ok, you have my attention, city placement is the core of the game.
I would like to mention first that new players always tend to build their cities with lots of space in between them wasting tiles that are never going to be used by other cities. They like to get big cities without any overlap between them and if the AI doesn't place its cities using a similar pattern, then they consider this a flaw in the AI and complain about it. However, I completely disagree with this outlook and have advised many newer players to place their cities closer to one another and use all the tiles (or almost all the tiles) in the area. The strength of a civilisation can be measured quite accurately by the number of tiles all of the cities combined are using.
Example:
An area of 50 tiles can contain 2 cities without overlap or 3 with some overlap. The 3 cities would on average get about 17 tiles. This means that at size 16 and below, each of the 3 cities would be comparable in strength to the 2 cities. Only when cities grow very large at the end of the game will the 2 cities without overlap become slightly stronger (the smaller cities are about 15% weaker). But during the majority of the game, the player who builds 3 cities will have 50% extra cities. Only when the health and happiness caps are close to 20 will the 2 cities become a bit stronger per city. Still the 3 cities combined will be stronger than the 2 cities combined because they use more tiles and have more trade routes and more bonuses from corporations.
Note that cities that can use 17 out of 21 tiles will have 6 tiles of overlap with other cities. They use 3 of the 6 tiles and the other city also uses 3 out of the 6 tiles. So overlap often seems worse than it is. 6 tiles of overlap seems a lot, but that's a psychological issue. During most of the game, the cities won't be bothered by it.
There are things to be improved about city placement. For instance, you sometimes see the AI placing a city 1 tile from the coast where it isn't needed. Sometimes this is just a barbarian city that was captured and thus not the fault of the AI city placement algorithm. However, I do not think the AI places its cities too close to one another. So I hope you were not planning to change that. Not every complaint about the AI city placement is a just one.