Gold vs Commerce on buildings

I know this was mentioned before, but I like to give in input of new aspects here.
Hydro, I know you want to have almost exclusively on buildings, and no at all. I can understand that; one can argue that a Market or Bank is generating and has nothing to do with or .
But the way it is now, there is waaaay to few in the game and the slider makes not that much of a difference.
I think can be seen as taxes you collect: If a Bank makes money, you get taxes. Same for Market or Sculpturer's Workshop. You as a Leader can choose what to spend these taxes on: or . This way, the slider becomes usefull again (and I see people complaining that they can't run at 100% ) as it can really make a difference. Even on deity the only thing I do is pushing down a few % in the early game to get more - beside this I never bother with it.
Converting to (in most cases) would have another positive effect: We can't add "+1 with Wool." But we CAN have "+1 :Commerce: with Wool". This would allow much more freedom on bonus at certain buildings!

The downsites would be A LOT of boring work on buildings to convert this, and also some balance issues since the current system is in for such a long time that everthing was balanced for that. If you do want to keep it "the old way", I'd strongly recommend that you add - not only to buildings, but to as well!

The move from to was done because people were complaining about too much gold.

If you convert to you would have much less gold, especially with 100% research...

I'd actually have to agree here Faustmouse. Commerce seems to be intended to represent taxes but also trade influence factors (thus the research/culture/espionage) so anything that would be derived from trade could be considered to be Commerce.

It would mean that research could be driven much higher than current limits but if we were to take a very soft approach it could probably be beneficial to the gameplay if we did reconsider some of the gold to be commerce instead.

This 'project' could seem overwhelming but if one at a time we take a look at each building and its commerces and yields (which could use some review anyhow) - best in order of appearance in the game I think - and discuss each with patience here I think we could 'rationalize' out the values a bit more cleanly over time.

EDIT: Oh and this goes for gradually reviewing some of the upkeep costs associated with buildings as well - many are really not coming across as reasonable to the average player at the moment.

Faustmouse said:

If you convert to you would have much less gold, especially with 100% research...

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Except from experience it doesn't. We went through all this back in v16 or earlier and converted them all over.

Thunderbrd said:

EDIT: Oh and this goes for gradually reviewing some of the upkeep costs associated with buildings as well - many are really not coming across as reasonable to the average player at the moment.

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Unless it was changed in C2C maintenance is a percentage of gross income not a gold cost per turn. Cities with the same buildings will have different maintenance if their incomes are different.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

Unless it was changed in C2C maintenance is a percentage of gross income not a gold cost per turn. Cities with the same buildings will have different maintenance if their incomes are different.

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Negative gold is included as maintenance is all I know - which is mostly to say it is unaltered by % modifiers I believe. I'd have to review the code or ask Koshling who made that adjustment. We're not talking about the standard maintenance system here - just that many negative gold sources on buildings are overwhelming compared to their benefits, making them a construction to passionately avoid (AND are completely illogical given what that sort of thing would actually cost a government in comparison to other expenses.)

The main support source I have for a partial shift to commerce from gold in some cases (not all) is because the slider has really lost a lot of its impact. It's naturally going to by adopting any amount of the current philosophy - in Vanilla BtS you'd be able to increase your research by building a bank! And I'm not advocating going all the way back to that - but I think we've tipped the balance too far the other direction and should consider things such that we can strike a middle ground between the current C2C Commerce vs Gold mentality and the Vanilla mentality. This will re-infuse the slider with a bit more power.

The documentation on the maintenance tag says it is a percentage not a unit cost. So building a building with a 10 in that tag means a 10% cut to your total income for that city. It is one of the bad changes from Civ III where it was a unit cost.You can never know how much the building is going to cost per turn because its maintenance cost is a percentage of the city income not a unit gold cost.

I am all for this. I find it boring that I can play with the science slider to 100% constantly and the only economical game I play is within each city regarding what buildings I prioritize.

In my opinion it gives far more meaning if more or less all produced in a city was instead , howver I can see from the discussion that this would also mean that something would need to be done in regards to maintenance.

I also think that the produce wealth possibilities should be changes or removed as well, otherwise they (imho) risk of breaking the game anyhow (imho all three options in the city is broken, produce science, produce weatlh and produce culture)

And if I've understood Civ IV's concept of taxes correct that would need to change as well. If I remeber correctly any % taken as gold instead of science/culture/espionage (by using the sliders) is considered taxes by the population and causes unhappiness. And by changing the economic game from the cities to the sliders (by changing from to ) that would encourage (force) the player to never have a sum of 100% in the sliders since they will need gold as well.

The produce various wealth is set to give you what you would get from building a unit and disbanding it. So it just removes some micro management.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

The produce various wealth is set to give you what you would get from building a unit and disbanding it. So it just removes some micro management.

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Yeah I rember seeing that earlier in the forum.
Can't really say that I see the logic in getting Gold from disbandin units either.

Anyhow I find it hard to see how the economic game could becoma challenging or interesting when there's such a big (imho) difference in scale between hammer production and gold production.

No matter how huge economic problems you have early on they can easily be solved by just having one single city produce golds (mostly at least), and thereby still allowing me to have research at 100% even though my nation is in reality crippled economically.

If anything has to be provided when disbaninding a unit (imho that isnät needed) can't you just have them give part of their production cost in hammers to the closest city instead (sort of lika a lesser version of the production merchants)?

Dancing Hoskuld said:

The documentation on the maintenance tag says it is a percentage not a unit cost. So building a building with a 10 in that tag means a 10% cut to your total income for that city. It is one of the bad changes from Civ III where it was a unit cost.You can never know how much the building is going to cost per turn because its maintenance cost is a percentage of the city income not a unit gold cost.

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So you're talking about Civ IV documentation, not Koshling documentation right? A while back he changed EVERYTHING about how - on a building works.

So far as I understand it without looking closer, - will give a negative flat amount of gold that counters + amounts. The main difference is that - is unaffected by % modifiers so that strong +% modifier totals in the city don't magnify the effect of a - as well.

Thunderbrd said:

So you're talking about Civ IV documentation, not Koshling documentation right? A while back he changed EVERYTHING about how - on a building works.

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This is a problem. There is no documentation about the tags in the files except the default stuff in the Modiki and what Afforess did in RoM:AND.

So are you saying its a problem because there's no documentation on it or for another reason?

I am saying that when we converted from to maintenance was a percentage. If that is no longer the case then changing back may be worth considering.

Faustmouse said:

I think can be seen as taxes you collect:

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has been the taxes. Every shop, farm, etc is basically earning your empire money. This is directly mimics from games like Sim City 4. % adjusts the gold rate.

We also have - and maintenance. Which works like funding government run things or discounting things. Like in sim city where police, fire station and hospitals all cost money to maintain while housing, commercial and industrial make you money.

for the most part has been linked to land yield. While buildings use the .

Then there is also trade routes and trade yield, but that's a whole other thing too.

Well, it works in sim city because you can adjust tax rates or maintenance for police, hospitals etc. But in C2C it just takes away the strategyfrom the slider.
That's my main argument against from all buildings. would work fine as taxes and you have much more freedom on what to spend your taxes.

I think we can make a distinction between money as in currency and allocatable resources (Commerce) that is not purely defined as money is manipulated by buildings while allocatable resources are manipulated by land and trade.

Truth is this is one of the basic flaws of the civ design and it IS tough to work one's head around the difference.

Faustmouse said:

Well, it works in sim city because you can adjust tax rates or maintenance for police, hospitals etc. But in C2C it just takes away the strategyfrom the slider.
That's my main argument against from all buildings. would work fine as taxes and you have much more freedom on what to spend your taxes.

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You can do tax rates by spending less on science.

And you can adjust your crime by building more police units. Which also cost money to maintain.

Dancing Hoskuld wrote in another thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=13638216#post13638216

Dancing Hoskuld said:

The abundance of Specialists in C2C make it very difficult to specialise a city. I have tried to make cities specialise in science, doctor and spy buy all end up producing Great Prophets or Merchants because those are the specialists available in abundance from early in the game.

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By specialization I meant the BTS strategy of turning a city either into a production city or a commerce city - a very powerful strategy. (other city types include a military production city, a whipping city or a Great Person farm city)

In fact I won my first BTS deity game (normal map/continents/no huts/no tech trading) while having only 6 cities most of the game (plus later a size-1 village on the South Pole to grab iron and oil). But one city location was in an ideal commerce location: gold hills, flood plains, lots of grassland bordering rivers. I put cottages everywhere around that city, placed my palace there and changed to bureaucracy, and built every kind of tech multiplier building there including Oxford University. That city produced so much research I actually out-teched the AI on deity despite being the smallest empire. I was the first to be able to build tanks, and conquered the world with them before anyone else was capable of building tanks.

In C2C, I have found no tech multiplier buildings (apart from elders council) so it doesn't matter where you build your tech buildings. Cottages start weak and their growth is gated by tech level. And due to lack of tech multiplier buildings, it doesn't matter where you build cottages.

So in C2C, size is everything: Large empires tech the fastest, small empires stay behind.

In BTS, a smaller empire meant that you had less city upkeep cost so you could increase your tech slider. Which meant that smaller empires had an easier time keeping up in tech.

Noriad2 said:

So in C2C, size is everything: Large empires tech the fastest, small empires stay behind.

In BTS, a smaller empire meant that you had less city upkeep cost so you could increase your tech slider. Which meant that smaller empires had an easier time keeping up in tech.

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So what would you chnage to allow smaller empires to keep up more?