Structural Integrity

After watching shenryyr2 play Pharaoh on Youtube. I noticed a cool mechanic that we don't have, which is Structural Integrity.

In this Egyptian city building game they have similar factors like Flammability and Crime, but also have Structural Integrity. You build Architect's Post to keep buildings from falling down. I think we should have a similar property. It could work like Flammability in that you build buildings like the Architect's Post and instead of having Fire events you would have building collapse events.

Likewise buildings that are made of weaker materials such as Bark Huts or Bone Huts would have a low Structural Integrity while say a Bomb Shelter would have a high Structural Integrity.

What do you guys think? I personally think this is a very cool idea.

I think the city maintiance cost represents the cost of building support to avoid their collapse. It would be a bit annoying.

Maybe this is a good idea but only for erly eras prehistoric/ancient era.

Does disease system works as it should in v25? I didint notice any impact of it during my gamepay

Edit : and new specialist - city architect.

When will be possible to add more city specialist categories?

Nimek said:

Does disease system works as it should in v25? I didint notice any impact of it during my gamepay

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Yes and no. The current disease are triggered like crimes. However we would like disease to be more complex. Such as spreading and other stuff. See the Disease thread for more details.

This sounds like a terrible idea. No offense, but the last thing we need is more complexity.

I don't think this would be a good 'property'. I have another mechanism in mind for one of the potentially next projects coming up after the Combat Mod.

As you know, I was considering making a Destructive Attack value on some units. This would be cause for a random roll to destroy a random building (that would be the quick and easy implementation.)

But I was thinking of giving buildings Hit Points instead and, rather than making 'Destructive' units have a random chance to destroy a random target, they would deal their damage to the target (and defensive buildings would tend to come up first).

Buildings would recover at a natural rate every round though you could put production into 'repair' which would make a hammer fix a hp and spread out all production evenly across all buildings. In this way you're city, when under siege could be scrambling to repair your defenses knocked down by walls.

Although you'd still have cultural defense%, it would be modified by structural defense which would come from the hp on the defensive buildings themselves. Then we could disable the whole 'obsolete with gunpowder/high explosives' BS that's always bothered me a great deal and leave ourselves with a defense value system that scales nicely throughout all eras.

Additionally, hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, any event that causes structural damage would cause it as a measure of HIT POINTS to the randomly selected buildings rather than a pass/fail wipeout system like we currently have.

Hydromancerx said:

After watching shenryyr2 play Pharaoh on Youtube. I noticed a cool mechanic that we don't have, which is Structural Integrity.

In this Egyptian city building game they have similar factors like Flammability and Crime, but also have Structural Integrity. You build Architect's Post to keep buildings from falling down. I think we should have a similar property. It could work like Flammability in that you build buildings like the Architect's Post and instead of having Fire events you would have building collapse events.

Likewise buildings that are made of weaker materials such as Bark Huts or Bone Huts would have a low Structural Integrity while say a Bomb Shelter would have a high Structural Integrity.

What do you guys think? I personally think this is a very cool idea.

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Just got this game from Gog. The colapsing buildings is VERY annoying but at least I know how to stop it now!
If you do implement this, please make it harder for buildings to fall apart. Maybe have it linked to available building materials; marble less likely to fail than stone which is less likely to fail than mud huts, etc. It could also be affected by storms or natural disasters.

@hydro

You can connect yout idea with thunderbird idea. Buildng hit points should depend of used materials and avaiable technology. Some buildings can be build from few materials so hp for the same building built by bricks, stone, marble should be diffrent.

+1 for Nimeks idea!

In that case we must add new resource bricks (now brick factory provides stone) and bricks should apper on the begining of ancient era. Ancient egiptians mixed potter with wheat (without grain) and burn it on the sun.

Building materials beginning from prehistoric era shuld be
Sticks and leafs - bones and leather - wood -bricks - stone - marble - highly burned bricks and cement - concrete and stell - nanomaterials

Edit
Techs like masonry, architecture, city planing coul give ex +10 hp points to all buildings

@Nimek

We already have Brick resource. You just have to build a Brick Mason to make them.

So your and thunderbird idea can work that way. Every building have hp. Disasters like fire decrease hp of buildings.Every turn some small amount of buildings hp decrease representing that the buildings getting older and older (but even than i am not convinced that we need this option)

I like more stuff, but this seems a bit overboard in terms of more micro. I would prefer to add new mechanics that are more fun, such as the SDK map generator, a Genetic Era setup, or Multi-Maps.

Nimek said:

When will be possible to add more city specialist categories?

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When I get round to it. People keep asking me to add stuff, fix bugs and change stuff. All that and my Mum is coming to visit and I still haven't got all the wood work and electronics bits out of the lounge room yet.

ls612 said:

I like more stuff, but this seems a bit overboard in terms of more micro. I would prefer to add new mechanics that are more fun, such as the SDK map generator, a Genetic Era setup, or Multi-Maps.

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As I'm proposing it, which I must remind isn't an overnight objective from now, it wouldn't be much in terms of micro... just a tag for the building's max HP. It would primarily represent a major improvement in how we resolve defensive building benefits. With walls and such adding repel and other defensive values aside from just +cultural defense, having bombarding target the building itself makes more sense. And I've always wanted to be able to set my city to rebuild lost defense... In truth, such a project will be rather easily enacted once I get a chance to focus on it.

I would like to revisit this as a possible property.

How difficult would it to make a Fire-like event that caused a building to colapse based on the Structural Integrity?

Likewise how could we link random events like Earthquakes to how weak Structural Integrity for buildings a city? Thus making more damage the weaker it is.

And we may want to tie in defenses to this when siegeing a city.

Hydromancerx said:

I would like to revisit this as a possible property.

How difficult would it to make a Fire-like event that caused a building to colapse based on the Structural Integrity?

Likewise how could we link random events like Earthquakes to how weak Structural Integrity for buildings a city? Thus making more damage the weaker it is.

And we may want to tie in defenses to this when siegeing a city.

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So what increases Structural Integrity?

My answers off the top of my head:
- tech
- materials; and importantly
- money

I don't think it's feasible to have different versions of each building, with different costs, for different degrees of shoddiness. So that just leaves techs and materials.

For building collapses, it sounds like something event-driven, and no new properties are needed, just the techs and materials (resources) we already have.

For siege warfare, maybe a %age adjustment to the effectiveness of fortifications, again based on (existing) techs and resources/materials.

(As an aside) Japan historically was built primarily of paper, I think largely because of earthquakes (and the impossibility through the ages of sufficient structural integrity to withstand them - so why even try?)

Might be interesting to have a construction selection in the city (REINFORCE) that allows you to select it, then select from a list of buildings you already have, that has yet to be reinforced with a resource access or tech you may have now that you didn't have when the building was built that then recalculates the building as if it had been built according to modern standards.

Personally I thought that this was just one factor in the building maintenance. So if you are going to go with this you would have to reduce maintenance on all buildings.

@Yudishtira

Yes I am thinking along the same lines. Unless its a specific building to help fight against it such as an Architect's Office or an Ordinance for a "Building Code" then most would be auto-buildings triggered by techs.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

Personally I thought that this was just one factor in the building maintenance. So if you are going to go with this you would have to reduce maintenance on all buildings.

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Possibly. Note that it would be more for a reduction in "Maintenance" and probably less with -

But really its hard to decide how it should go especially since it would be more of a generalized property rather than a specific property on each building. I think it would be too hard to have each building with their own Structural Integrity.

Hydromancerx said:

But really its hard to decide how it should go especially since it would be more of a generalized property rather than a specific property on each building. I think it would be too hard to have each building with their own Structural Integrity.

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It would be possible with the 1d properties I am writing these days (still some time off until they are completed though) but I don't really recommend it as I doubt it would be meaningful to have such a value on every separate building.