Trading Posts

1. Saying we cant balance things that grow is saying we cant have cities.

Do you understand what balance is? It means you have strategic choices as none of the variants has obvious advantage. For improvements you have choice between building different things on each tile (plus choose which tiles needs to be worked). So if one improvement grows while other don't, you have obvious choice early game - cottages are better and obvious choice late game - you could ignore cottages.

2. As you said they are not burned to the ground. Possibily pillaging cottages should give more gold so we should think twice before spaming them in frontier cities. Maybe even asigne 1 or 2 units to protect improvements in a city.

This doesn't change a thing. If pillaging destroys cottage to the ground (from Town to Cottage), they become viable target and with more or less smart opponent you'll get them burned in the first war. If pillaging doesn't burn improvement (so pillaged Town is restored back to Town), you lost the only benefit cottages bring to the game.

3. I agree that gold should be more scarce to actualy make you work those luxuries but adding cotages isnt about making gold more abundant. It is about making improvements more fun by introducing the strategic positioning aspect to it. Filing our hearts with joy when we see our babby cotages grow is a plus too. :p

1. I don't see how it could bring more fun in Civ 5 realities. As I said, the biggest gameplay value of cottages was in planning how to make them protected.

2. Civ 5 makes quite different fun with strategic positioning. It has fort importance and in BNW we'll have 3 civs with UI bringing additional defense (or at least 2 if guess about Chateu bringing defense in addition to culture is wrong). Plus:
- Overall 1UPT combat is about positioning.
- Road maintenance brings additional level to landscape design.
- Cities typically have more tiles than they could work.
 
Is there a choice now ? +1 production vs +1 gold is a no brainer. By the time you get +2 gold you get +2 production aswell. City conections + luxuries cover road and building maintanace and international trade roots will give you all the gold for armies and purchasing. So where is the choise ?
Improvements that grow are not neceseraly better than others. "Growing" things are balanced by being worse at first and better after. They are also balanced by risk factors such as opponets being able to destory them.
Needing a unit to protect you town actualy makes it worse than a mine in terms of yields but having one unit protecting 3 towns makes towns better than 3 mines but only a bit. It also makes you defend your improvements not just the city.
 
One way to balance cottages could be this:

Have them grow like they do normally. However, also have them automatically upgrade in the next era. So, you can build a cottage in the ancient era and have it become a hamlet by growing. But, if it didn't grow in time, it'll automatically be upgraded when you reach the Middle Ages. And if you build a new one in the Middle Ages, it'll automatically be a Hamlet.

It's not all that different from now where certain techs give you +1 gold or +1 food for various tile improvements and it removes the "start it early or don't start it at all" problem. Then it'll just be a matter of managing how quickly they grow so you aren't encouraged to build them early to get towns by the beginning of the Classical age.
 
Is there a choice now ? +1 production vs +1 gold is a no brainer. By the time you get +2 gold you get +2 production aswell. City conections + luxuries cover road and building maintanace and international trade roots will give you all the gold for armies and purchasing. So where is the choise ?

- Choice between farm/mine and trading post isn't that obvious as it may look for you. In this thread there was a post from a guy who almost never build trading posts.
- Fort placement is quite important thing. You need to consider both defensive value and tile output (it shouldn't be needed to be worked in the significant time).
- Speaking about roads, I meant exact road location. That's quite important thing to think about, especially if you think about defense.
- Great person improvements add very interesting layer on top of all these decisions.
For me, it's much better than it was in Civ4.

Improvements that grow are not neceseraly better than others. "Growing" things are balanced by being worse at first and better after. They are also balanced by risk factors such as opponets being able to destory them.

Ok, I'll explain it in another way. Let's say you're near the end of the game. Regarding the tile improvements, you could do 2 things - either build a new improvement there needed or change existing improvement to something else. In both cases you compare different improvement types. Let's say, Cottages and Farms to make things simple.

So, at this point you actually have 2 types of cottages. Ones built some time ago and grown and the ones you consider building (or built recently). Both are compared to exactly the same farm. This can't be balanced. Either it's not worth changing old cottages to something new, and/or it's not worth building new ones near the end of the game. You can't have reasonable strategic choice in both cases.

Needing a unit to protect you town actualy makes it worse than a mine in terms of yields but having one unit protecting 3 towns makes towns better than 3 mines but only a bit. It also makes you defend your improvements not just the city.

Are we still speaking about Civ 5? Because in Civ 5 if you're attacked by AI on Emperor+, you have huge wave of units thrown at you. They can't attack target cities with all these units due to 1UPT, so you actually have a front of units against you. If you try to use a single unit near this front to protect tile improvement (other than Citadel), it will be destroyed. And if you let enemy cavalry slip behind, you have much bigger thing to worry about - roads.

Have them grow like they do normally. However, also have them automatically upgrade in the next era.

Currently we have all improvements upgraded on specific techs and/or social policies. From gameplay perspective, that's the same, just more flexible as you could use more triggers than just era switch.
 
Yeah, this would be the same trigger, plus a trigger for working it a long time.

I would suggest the possibility of having this for all improvements, but the others would be unrealistic. A mine or a farm that has been worked for a long time becomes less productive instead of more.
 
I would suggest the possibility of having this for all improvements, but the others would be unrealistic. A mine or a farm that has been worked for a long time becomes less productive instead of more.

And it wouldn't help too much. If all improvements were growing, replacing improvements would be bad choice almost all the time.
 
Trading posts rewards aggressive war aggressive expansion. If removed, the only gain from war is a few population without science buildings boost. This makes peaceful playstyle even more appealling and most of gold must be generated from trade. If trading post is removed, I won't miss them a bit.
 
I think Trading Post should be removed, because it is very unnatural and often out of place (IRL who the hell built a trade post in tundra anyway). But it have to be replaced by another gold-producing improvement.

My idea is that we should be able to built terrain-specific gold improvement. Such as:
- Village; can only be built in Forrest, Jungle Flood plains, Plains and Grassland.
- Nomad camp: can only be built in dessert
- Villa or Hill station: can only be built in hill but at all base terrain.

To balance things out, we may should make the gold improvement come with penalty of -1 food yield in order to force player to balance things out and not just spamming the gold improvements in all their tiles. I have no idea about flat Tundra, unfortunately.
 
Canadians. More specifically, trappers of English, French, and Native American descent who saw great value in the furs that could be traded to larger settlements or to Europe.

The same for Siberia and north Europe.

From gameplay perspective, there should be some gold-producing improvement as an alternative to other improvement. It doesn't matter how you name it.
 
I could find 3 arguments against the cottages, first is general, 2 are Civ5-specific.

1. Improvement growing over time can't be balanced with other improvements. So early-built cottages are more powerful than other improvements, while those built later are weaker.

2. One of the most important thing about cottages was protecting them against pillaging. With SoD this works ok, but with 1UPT it's almost impossible to protect tiles from pillaging during serious war. That's one of the reasons why in Civ5 improvements aren't pillaged to the ground.

3. With more game systems to come, developers have to balance output of gold and happiness by limiting its sources. Adding improvement which grows gold output over time would make the things difficult.

So, I think the improvement was quite ok in Civ 4, but doesn't suit well in Civ 5.

There is a 4. point: It proved impossibly hard to get the AI to deal with the growing cottage mechanic (as witnessed by the civ4 AI repeatedly buidling over cottages, only to rebuild them later. The civ AI lives pretty much in the here and now of the current decision that it is making, and it proved very hard to get it to properly factor in the long term advantages of cottages.
 
Perhaps (to keep gold scarce) the trade post can consume the Worker.

That could work.

Could also have it that a cottage gives 0 gold while it's growing, 1 gold when it's hamlet, and 2 gold when it is fully grown to a town. All of these would increase with tech in the same way that trading posts do know; but only towns would get the bonuses from the commerce or rationalism trees. Pillaging reduces the level by one.

Should be pretty balanced, as its more gold than now, but at the cost of working a useless tile for a while. And would be difficult to defend.

Sure, not worth building in the late game; but pretty much nothing is balanced in the last 30 turns of a game anyway as investments become pointless.
 
Perhaps (to keep gold scarce) the trade post can consume the Worker.

Trade posts have their role. They provide alternative to other improvements. The alternative allows choice between maximizing trade route output with Commerce and Rationalism or focusing on gaining food and specialists, etc.

And people want to throw this huge part of the game for the ability to have growing cottages, considering no one could explain why they are good for the game?
 
Trade posts have their role. They provide alternative to other improvements. The alternative allows choice between maximizing trade route output with Commerce and Rationalism or focusing on gaining food and specialists, etc.

And people want to throw this huge part of the game for the ability to have growing cottages, considering no one could explain why they are good for the game?

I'm not saying we should have growing cottages. Just that unrestricted trade posts cheapen ITRs slightly.

And it might make them more interesting.
 
I'm not saying we should have growing cottages. Just that unrestricted trade posts cheapen ITRs slightly.

And it might make them more interesting.

Ok, but they should be unrestricted to fulfill their role of alternative. And actually there is a restricted gold-producing improvement. It's called Customs House.
 
  • Tie the Cottages into the city population. As the city grows the cottages can grow as well. Also have it tied into tech so they can only grow so much until you tech up.
  • My initial idea is one level of Cottage per pop. Cottage-Village-Town-City-Metro = 5 pop equivalent.
  • Also I would restrict that by distance to the city that is supporting it, so you need to be 1 tile away in order to be able to grow into a Metro 2 tiles away can only become Cities etc.
  • I would make the growth based on population as well and make it instantaneous or make it something a worker needs to build. No more slow auto growth mechanic.
  • I would require population to be assigned to those tiles, 1 per size of the city. So your workable tiles area would become much LARGER.
  • I would tie all population bonuses into those cities as well, so if you get 1 Science per pop the science would be in those cites. So if they got pilliaged they would be lost temporarily.
  • I would make the bonuses you get from the cottages get larger as the cottage gets bigger. (so it would be better to have 1 village instead of 2 cottages.)
  • Pilliaged Cottages would remain the level they are, so if they are Metro's they would remain Metro's... only they would be pillaged so they wouldn't produce anything until they were repaired. Repairs would be based on size of the Cottage so a Village would be quicker to repair than say a City or Metro.
  • You could also tie them in to other cottages in that you can't build a villiage until you have at least two cottages or something like that not to mention you would need the farm support.
  • Lastly I would have abandoned cottages automatically become pilliaged after so many turns to represent them becoming abandoned and in disrepair.

If you tied all this into a system where Farms became Farming communities, Mills, Windmills Mines etc are represented as communities as well and Civ all of a sudden gets a real big scale to it.

Your main cities would act as State capitols and your poulation would be represented by the number of communities you can see on the map.

I would also add in Wonders as improvements that can be built and pilliaged 1 per tile and they blend right in to whatever normal improvemnt you have built there all ready.
 
Eh cottages, trading posts, it doesn't really seem to make such a difference that there should be a change of that extent. I can't say I ever really gave either that much thought when I'm dealing with wars, exploration and ever-shifting alliances. Seems like it would just hog memory on my computer since the old trading post codes would still be there and, as a non-technical person, I don't know how to take them out. Or if that is possible without then being unable to get the Steam achievements due to it being considered modified.
 
  • Tie the Cottages into the city population. As the city grows the cottages can grow as well. Also have it tied into tech so they can only grow so much until you tech up.
  • My initial idea is one level of Cottage per pop. Cottage-Village-Town-City-Metro = 5 pop equivalent.
  • Also I would restrict that by distance to the city that is supporting it, so you need to be 1 tile away in order to be able to grow into a Metro 2 tiles away can only become Cities etc.
  • I would make the growth based on population as well and make it instantaneous or make it something a worker needs to build. No more slow auto growth mechanic.
  • I would require population to be assigned to those tiles, 1 per size of the city. So your workable tiles area would become much LARGER.
  • I would tie all population bonuses into those cities as well, so if you get 1 Science per pop the science would be in those cites. So if they got pilliaged they would be lost temporarily.
  • I would make the bonuses you get from the cottages get larger as the cottage gets bigger. (so it would be better to have 1 village instead of 2 cottages.)
  • Pilliaged Cottages would remain the level they are, so if they are Metro's they would remain Metro's... only they would be pillaged so they wouldn't produce anything until they were repaired. Repairs would be based on size of the Cottage so a Village would be quicker to repair than say a City or Metro.
  • You could also tie them in to other cottages in that you can't build a villiage until you have at least two cottages or something like that not to mention you would need the farm support.
  • Lastly I would have abandoned cottages automatically become pilliaged after so many turns to represent them becoming abandoned and in disrepair.

If you tied all this into a system where Farms became Farming communities, Mills, Windmills Mines etc are represented as communities as well and Civ all of a sudden gets a real big scale to it.

Your main cities would act as State capitols and your poulation would be represented by the number of communities you can see on the map.

I would also add in Wonders as improvements that can be built and pilliaged 1 per tile and they blend right in to whatever normal improvemnt you have built there all ready.

Ok. Just one question - why? I mean that goal you try to achieve with all this?
 
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