What if workshops behaved like cottages?

I think it'd be interesting to tinker with the game and make workshops gave + hammers the longer a town worked on them. They become available pretty early in the game, but by and large they are unused for quite a while until guilds + caste, or guilds and chemistry come into play. Then with state property the become these awesome things if you adopt State Property.

I think it may give the game some more flexibility in hammer poor areas in the early eras then just rely on whipping for production. So perhaps instead of guilds and chemistry giving them +1 hammer each, they both reduce the time for a workshop to develop to the next stage by a certain % (25 or 50% each?)

Thoughts on how that's rubbish or too overpowered?

I know a mod does this with mines. let me load it up to check if they do workshops. Its rise of mankind with modmod a new dawn.

The only problem is this doesn't really make any sense from a realistic point of view. For instance the reason a cottage gets more commerce the longer its 'worked' is that it is a village and working it grows its population, thus gaining more commerce. The same type of argument can't be made for a workshop, as workshops don't expand in the same manner and certainly don't become more efficient/productive after hundreds of years (without a technology breakthrough).

Obviously you weren't asking about this from a realistic point of view, but I offered it anyway.

As for from a gameplay point of view, I don't think it would unbalance the game at all as long as the cap on workshop production is reasonable.

Having more hammers early in the game is very, very powerful. It right now cottages ask for quite a big investment and workshops do not. However there are quite a few buildings that give a bonus to science or gold, therefore there is a lot of synergy with the different buildings and cottages.

Workshops are quite another case entirely. They start off weak and become major powerhouses over time after enough civics and technologies. It enhances cities to become major powerhouses in production, which is quite another approach to the game.

I feel that in essence it is not a bad idea to have workshops grow over time, but I feel it will take away the differences between the two improvements which would be bad imo. In the end I think it is solid the way it is and I feel changing workshops may easely upset the balance. Do not underestimate the effect of giving skilled players more and earlier hammers...

From a realistic point of view I think it depends on what you think about tile improvements. Cottage growth to me signifies additional population outside of your city, or places the people in your city go to live. Their houses and neighborhood if you will. Workshops, mines, farms, watermills ect signify places the people in your city go to work.

The idea by workshop growth is to show that your people have enhanced their craftsmanship from the continued passing down of how to make better weapons and armor. This is also portrayed in new technologies, but a workshop growing would be more smaller steps in craftsmanship not really worthy of a new tech. But again it depends on how you think of tile improvements for it to make some sense, but it could be plausible to me.

Regarding getting too many hammers. I think when you first get workshops with metal casting they would start with 1f 1h. Then after say 10-20 turns they go to 1f 2h. Then, after about 30-40 turns, they max out at 1f 2h 1c. Caste system would still give them 1h. So if you ran Caste and had some developed workshops nearing completion they would be quite a bit powerful, but still require excess food from other tiles and a concentrated effort to make fully functional.

I think the worker turns to develop them would be shortened to about the same length it takes to make a cottage. Since you city has to work them in order to make the best use of them like cottages now.

Then we could still have guilds and chemistry boost their hammer output for 2nd and 3rd tier workshops. As the needs for more hammers with these technologies is worthy of a hammer increase. Then with either steam power or Combustion they start off at max tier (or have highly accelerated growth rates).

I don't really think it makes sense either. Workshops/windmills/watermills progress naturally with technology and civics switches, I think that is good design. It also makes sense for mines to increase in return as the mine shaft goes deeper. Game balance is important though, and if a mine is going to return more than +3 after X turns, it has to be offset by decreasing the return to only +1 on initial build. That stymies initial production as mines are really the only consistent source in the early game. There are so many ways to get 1-2 turn unit production late game per city that I don't think this is a worthwhile change.

I, for one, would welcome more 'natural' growth, such as growth of workshops.

Here's why: cottage growth is not a model of population growth, it is a model of productivity growth. Clearly, the city size models population, and tiles are the space where population lives, irrespective of what is there. If cottages grow buy population, it implies both that there are hidden people there separate from the people in the population count and, more importantly, that the commerce per citizen is fixed.

But of course, we know that development of real civilization is about accumulating the largest number of people who are all equally productive. If that were true, China would have 3-4 times the GDP of the United States.

Instead, we look at how the establishment of commerce centers may lead the same number of people to be more productive without improving technology. Necessarily, we are talking about entrepreneurship...independant business people benefitting your empire by their everyday innovations separate and apart from the big innovations that your clumsy state-directed research generates. It seems perfectly appropriate, then for commerce to be boosted by entrepreneurship (cottage growth) AND for big new techologies to give a big boost (education and banking unlocking universities and banks).

By parallel reasoning, it makes realistic sense to combine those technologies that improve hammer output, like metal casting and steel with workshop growth, which would model entrepreneurship in production.

Finally, just as the final civics boost to towns adds a hammer, the final boost to workshops should be to add a commerce.

Sound logic isn't always the basis for good game design (even in a realism setting). If archers gained offensive bonuses for attacking from a hill (as they should logically!) for instance, it would really upset the pre-gunpowder balance between archery-melee-mounted-seige, and more importantly it would make hills entirely too strategic. It would require unit rebalancing.

I'm no Sid Meier but I've done a decent amount of game design/programming. The basic contention is that in order for a balance issue to be solved (workshops suck, or railroaded mines are too good!), the implementation has to be tested.

So assume "workshop growth" is instantiated and every 40 turns a workshop gains an extra for a total of +4 after 120 turns. Guilds, Chemistry, and Caste System were already boosting them (in a coincidentally ~40 turn spread), so you could potentially receive +8 from a fully developed plains workshop, with no food/commerce penalty (state prop). Is that really appropriate? An all-plains non-river city will now beat a city piled with railroaded coal (or other mineral). While I guess that would make use for the crappy plains land, it seems hardly balanced and completely backwards for making a good production city. You'd also have 150-hammer powerhouses by 1000 AD. If you take the bonus away from guilds/chem and give it a free-speech type growth multiplier you're still not going to want to build fresh workshops since the investment loss of developing those for a few meager hammers (esp when a new city is supposed to be commercial or growth). You're also going back on the logic circuit you built earlier because in an industrialized civilization setting up new "workshops" (factories in the modern age) are going to be outfitted with state-of-the-art technology. If anything, a "worked" workshop should undergo decay as the equipment gets worn out or needs maintenance (costing ).

Could workshops use a boost? Sure, because right now even in production cities under the most ideal circumstances they're pretty underwhelming. Maybe give industrious leaders a tile bonus or add them to the +1 railroad bonus. I don't think growth is the answer though.

Just my $.02!

goodolarchie said:

Could workshops use a boost? Sure, because right now even in production cities under the most ideal circumstances they're pretty underwhelming. Maybe give industrious leaders a tile bonus or add them to the +1 railroad bonus. I don't think growth is the answer though.

Just my $.02!

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You've never seen a state property/caste/guilds/chemistry workshop farm. Each grass tile is 2 food/4 hammers, 5 with a levee. I remember one game on the earth map where I workshopped the russia/mongolia area, and was cranking out some pretty insane production over there. In ideal circumstances, SP/caste workshops are one of the top improvements (along with FS/US(/Kremlin) towns and bio farms/Kremlin whipping)

UWHabs said:

You've never seen a state property/caste/guilds/chemistry workshop farm. Each grass tile is 2 food/4 hammers, 5 with a levee. I remember one game on the earth map where I workshopped the russia/mongolia area, and was cranking out some pretty insane production over there. In ideal circumstances, SP/caste workshops are one of the top improvements (along with FS/US(/Kremlin) towns and bio farms/Kremlin whipping)

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I don't see what this has to do with the thread, I know all of this

Point 1:

goodolarchie said:

Could workshops use a boost? Sure,

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(Disagrees)

UWHabs said:

workshops are one of the top improvements

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(???)

goodolarchie said:

I don't see what this has to do with the thread

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Workshops can behave like cottages when production is impeded by inflation.