The new Improvement System in Wildmana (bye bye cottage spam)

i reworked the buttons a bit so you can easily see what improvements are primary and which are secondary. if you have suggestions regarding the buttons feel free to add them

great work!

tesb, would you please make two different buttons for camp and resources camp? Better if Sephi is willing to change the name of 'resources camp' into something else. It's just confusing to see two same buttons with a similar name but very different function.

yes, this confused me as well because i saw the camp in the xml as a primary improvement while knowing you could build it as often as you want to connect recourses. now i know why i am confused ^^

I assume you have given this some thought, so I'll wait to see how it plays, but the 1.5 unhappiness for a farm and 3 unhealth for a cottage concern me, especially for the early game. What we want, I think, is a system where larger city sizes are supported as the player moves up the tech tree and this without every choice of civic and technology being driven purely by economics.

you really have to do a rethinking with the new system. the negative bonuses are justified you just have to realize that one, maybe two primary improvements are enough for the early to mid game.

the yield of the improvements (primary) have increased dramatically if you add secondary improvements to them.

tesb said:

maybe two primary improvements are enough for the early to mid game.

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I totally agree with that. The new improvements are way more powerfull than they used to be. At first you have to think a LOT what improvement to choose, or where to place it, but then... we all will get used, and I personally think that this system is much better than the old one.

tesb said:

i reworked the buttons a bit so you can easily see what improvements are primary and which are secondary. if you have suggestions regarding the buttons feel free to add them

Click to expand...

It's certainly clear, although it's quite aesthetically unappealing.

Also, I want to mention this...

While it's important that the game be balanced... It's also important the game make some degree of sense. It doesn't make any sense for all civilizations to be unhappy about "treehugging" when building mines/farms! It's the opposite of tree-hugging to build mines and forests, and it makes no sense whatsoever for it to make people unhappy.

If it made certain civilizations unhappy for a temporary period of time due to "too much change, too fast," that would make sense.

If dwarven races were upset about farms and happy about mines, that would make sense. If dwarfs got an unhappiness bonus for pastures that said something like, "There are bloody goats wandering through this stream I'm sifting for gold!" then that would make sense.

It would make sense if the elf races were upset about any improvement that removed a forest.

It would make sense if races that disliked "tree-hugging" were upset about groves or nature preserves or whatever.

It does not make any sense at all for the city to be unhappy about improvements. That's why they are "improvements" after all; because people feel that they are overall, an improvement.

As Pazyryk said on the beta forum thread about this: "I just can't come up with a rationalization for the happiness hit. I'm really very relaxed about the "realism" aspect of these games, but I do like to have some idea/rationalization for my imagination to work with. I wish you would consider some other solution, such as charging gold for improvements (I can believe in infrastructure costs)."

but I do like to have some idea/rationalization for my imagination to work with.

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Somebody needs a rationalization?
That's my thing!

Think of the unhappiness not as "Waily, waily, where are all the trees?" but rather potential unrest among the new classes of workers created by the Improvements. Better access to luxuries, either through connecting new Resources or government subsidy (Shifting Commerce to Happiness) placates the workers. But as a city increases in size fewer and fewer of the people, relatively speaking, are in any particular group. (Class.) This mis-aligns the city's goals/and desires from that of the worker-group. And that can make potential unrest become real unrest where labor is lost. ("Unhappy" people.) Alternatively, if the city stays relatively small but there very many workers the city's goals and desires become misaligned from those of the rulers, with the same general result: Loss of labor unless the workers are placated.

So, basically, the "unhappiness" from Improvements is simply the game recognizing that an increasingly fictionalized society with increasingly large and demonstrably-important factions encounters destabilizing forces, and that those forces can be diminished.

Frankly, what needs to be justified is not Wildmana's implementation of unhappiness in Improvements, but instead the near-lack of representation for a civilization's internal dynamics in vanilla Civ, FfH, and pretty much any mod outside the excellent "Revolution".

It's certainly clear, although it's quite aesthetically unappealing.

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can you elaborate on this, what would you change or make different to point out primary and secondary improvements, maybe just a different color scheme or frame?
you can also try to make the changes yourself, i can send you the original buttons if you want. i am quite curious on your take on this.


about the tree hugging thing: this is mostly a text issue and is already changed for the next beta. we all know that the current improvement system is far from finished/perfect or even balanced so if you have ideas to make a system that achieves the following conditions, feel free to add them:
- less improvements overall, especially in the late game. it just does not look like a fantasy world with cottages everywhere.
- more strategic depth on where and what improvements to place
- easily to grasp, yet hard to master (this is where the current version falls short)


suggestions are always welcome

One thing I haven't seen anyone mention... Fewer improvements drastically effects the power level of pillaging (and raiders!). You get less gold from it (unless prices are adjusted), but with improvements being that strong it is a FAR more painful thing to have happen.

I always thought that it would be more realistic if rather than working any of the tiles in the BFC each tile should allow specialists in the city. For each farm you could assign a farmer, workshop lets you build a blacksmith, etc. Building would allow further specialists (Smokehouse lets you assign a Rancher). Resources could either give you bonus to the specialist yields and/or allow more specialists. Would be a bit more realistic.

Oh if I had the time anymore.

Probably wouldn't be too difficult in RifE; Improvements can grant specific specialists to the owning city.

i don't think this would be a good idea to implement for all improvements, for some maybe but if you add it to all you can simply give them a yield increase or something.



it basically comes down to this one point:
-we need an easily visible incentive so that players will not spam improvements all over the place.



currently this is done with the 'no primary improvements next to each other'- rule and the negative bonuses from the improvements themselves. the first is hard to see and is also very imposing on the player. imho that has to go. the second causes problems in the early game and does not impact the late game much.

i think the current train of thought just have a negative progressive % based income bonus once you have more then a certain amount improvements per city is a way better way to do it.

Question: Why exactly do you need that incentive?

tesb said:

can you elaborate on this, what would you change or make different to point out primary and secondary improvements, maybe just a different color scheme or frame?
you can also try to make the changes yourself, i can send you the original buttons if you want. i am quite curious on your take on this.



- less improvements overall, especially in the late game. it just does not look like a fantasy world with cottages everywhere.

Click to expand...

Okay, NOW I understand what you're trying to achieve and can think on it. You're right. It doesn't look like a fantasy world with THOSE cottages everywhere... But why not just skin the cottages to look all super-awesome. And then just add minor improvements that look more fantasy-like as well that don't cover so much of a single terrain plot so that the terrain doesn't look very changed.

On the note of the buttons, if you send me the original buttons I'll add a Primary and Secondary indication that would be more appealing. Hell, I wouldn't mind re-making the buttons in general. They are not very fantasy-esk the way they are, and were never all that appealing to begin with.

Edit: Just had an awesome idea!

If you send me all the improvement buttons... I wouldn't mind making three versions of each button. One for Evil alignment, one for Neutral and one for Good. And if your alignment changed, then the buttons would change. I think that would be a super cool aesthetic for the interface.

Valkrionn said:

Probably wouldn't be too difficult in RifE; Improvements can grant specific specialists to the owning city.

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yep that works in WM too, Malakim get a free specialist for each town. I do share your opinion about it upsetting the pillaging/raiders trait balance, but as someone pointed out when I mentioned it, it's something pretty simple to balance by raising the gold given by pillaging.

i don't know if the alignment works, we just need buttons for primary and secondary improvements. i put the buttons in the attachment.

Raitonalization:

I mean, how can farm not cause unhappiness? Farmers and city folk have been in cold war since forever. Townsmen/farmer relationship is kinda like noble/peasantry. Townsmen eat the food produced by tears shed by unborn children of farmers. And then complain how smelly and stupid they are. This is bound to cause unhappiness ,and schizms between groups.

Pillaging gold gains were already raised(still needs tweaking though), at least for the new improvements.

Whole thing doesn't matter much to me . Improvements and workers are boring, neccesary evil. I also play with minimal graphics , tile yields & resource icons showing all the time, i couldn't tell windmill apart from farm, if i ever even saw one. Farm is the one with big bread icon ! Only reason i took part in this conversation in beta forums was to crush the hopes and dreams of all the people using aesthetic reasons to drive changes to the system. Damn you /shakes fist.

The improvement system is causing totally unproportional amount of fuss!

[to_xp]Gekko;9553997 said:

yep that works in WM too, Malakim get a free specialist for each town. I do share your opinion about it upsetting the pillaging/raiders trait balance, but as someone pointed out when I mentioned it, it's something pretty simple to balance by raising the gold given by pillaging.

Click to expand...

Uh, no. That's a different mechanic, and is in BtS.

That is a free specialist SLOT from an improvement.

What I refer to is granting a specific specialist from an improvement. As in, Homesteads (Grigori improvement) grant the Statesman specialist, and no other.

sounds pretty much the same to me, except that WM Malakim can choose what kind of specialist they want their free specialist to be, no?

anyway, the new Grigori stuff in RifE 1.3 is awesome