Building consolidation and stat balancing

[pepper2000]

After receiving some favorable comments, I've decided to attempt building consolidation. There are several reasons I think this is necessary.

- The way the numbers are now encourages a player to building a bunch of older buildings rather than a single newer building.
- The build lists get long. I find that it starts to be a real problem around the Industrial Era, when the long build lists cause severe lag and make it take a long time to find what I am looking for. Call me impatient if you will.
- The existing build list already provides more health, happiness, gold, etc. than a civ really needs, which reduces the opportunity for Transhuman and Galactic buildings to contribute as much.
- Making old buildings go obsolete will make it easier to implement space colonies.
- ...

The proposed solution is as follows:

- Categorize buildings into three categories: buildings that are essential and that every city needs (e.g. University, Factory); buildings that are needed to advance but should not be essential in every city (e.g. Bioinformatics Lab); and buildings that are nice to have but could be ignored without any real problem. The first category should be small, and most should be in the third.
- All nonessential buildings are replaced and/or go obsolete. The rule of thumb I have in mind is that a nonessential building should go obsolete about two eras after it becomes available.

My main worry is throwing off the balance. So here's the balance situation as I see it.

Gold: This seems to be a touchy subject based on what I've read in the forum. My sense is that there is more than enough gold available throughout the entire game, but that can be a bit unstable. I've had issues in the late Industrial Era and later with funny things happening which require a recalc.
Science: The pace of scientific research seems fine to me.
Culture: Far more than needed.
Espionage: I find spy missions to be quite expensive, but I generally don't optimize my play to produce espionage, so I can't say how the balance would be if I made this a priority.
Food: Cities grow slowly in the early game, as they should, but around the Classical or Medieval Era explode. Part of the problem may be that the granary-type buildings are overpowered or that there are too many operating at once.
Production: It's a little too easy to build things, especially units. Rather than tweak the upscaled building costs, I would want to reduce the number of hammers available.
Health: Health is a problem through the Renaissance, a big problem in the Industrial and Modern Eras, and the situation improves rapidly because I switch to Paradise at Ecological Engineering. Pollution is really the source of it. By the mid-Transhuman Era, health becomes too good (which I hope turns out to be realistic, but is not the best for gameplay).
Happiness: I find it easy to keep people happy so long as crime doesn't rage out of control. Way too much happiness in the later eras. I guess I'm a grinch.
Crime: It seems to be well understood that, despite all the anti-crime buildings, policing units are the best way to manage crime. Just build a few more guards and crime goes below 0.
Pollution: Air pollution is almost unmanageable until the Transhuman Era, though I suppose I could build more park rangers. I don't seem to have much trouble with water pollution.
Tourism: A good feature now. It's hard to get it up, but since it's more of a bonus, that is appropriate.
Education: Keeping education up to the highest level isn't too hard.

All in all, I'm not too worried about making buildings obsolete and throwing off the game balance. In fact, I think it would improve balance.

Any general thoughts about this? If all goes well, I hope to present a draft cleaned-up building XML.

 

[Faustmouse]

I think the balance in the TH era is quite off. That is mainly because it is rarely reached. We have a formula for building costs that you could use.
And unit costs are about to be reviewed and increased and soon(-ish).

 

[Thunderbrd]

Again, make sure to break down your categories into sub-categories and possibly sub-categories within those sub-categories so that you've got the buildings being evaluated in achievable chunks.

My advise would be to start with some of the core obvious upgrading buildings so that what you can establish is some baselines for bonuses being given out in a given era.

An example might be 'markets'.

Regardless of what you do, make sure to spreadsheet the hell out of it all and share it with us so that DH and I and others on the team can comment on where we feel there may be some design issues.

Also... I'm soon to be (like maybe this weekend) working on decimalized yield and commerce per population tags as requested by Faustmouse long ago. These could be extremely instrumental in helping to provide a more measured sense of balance to building progressions.

But if you first work to categorize within categorizations it wouldn't be the immediate steps to take to go straight into what the building xml details are right away so this buys a little time for me to perfect those tags.

 

[Snofru1]

I really appreciate what you are doing here!! I just finished a game on a gigantic map (yes, it is possible!) after passing through all of the Galactic Age and I can tell you, it is boring towards the end. Some comments:

Gold: This seems to be a touchy subject based on what I've read in the forum. My sense is that there is more than enough gold available throughout the entire game, but that can be a bit unstable.

Agreed. Only once (late Ancient, can´t really remember) gold became a little bit scarce.

Science: The pace of scientific research seems fine to me.

Agreed

Culture: Far more than needed.

Definitely agreed.

Espionage: I find spy missions to be quite expensive, but I generally don't optimize my play to produce espionage, so I can't say how the balance would be if I made this a priority.

Same here, I nearly don´t do anything with espionage, I only try to keep counterespionage high.

Food: Cities grow slowly in the early game, as they should, but around the Classical or Medieval Era explode. Part of the problem may be that the granary-type buildings are overpowered or that there are too many operating at once.

That has been improved a lot recently and I wouldn´t want to change too much there.

Production: It's a little too easy to build things, especially units. Rather than tweak the upscaled building costs, I would want to reduce the number of hammers available.

I don´t agree. In most eras hammers are what I desperately try to get more of. Especially buildings need a lot of hammers, IMO. Some later wonders and even more so projects are expensive like crazy. I agree that some units can be extremely cheap, especially if they are somewhat outdated. Missionaries or workers come to my mind, but modern units usually are expensive enough to be built.

Health: Health is a problem through the Renaissance, a big problem in the Industrial and Modern Eras, and the situation improves rapidly because I switch to Paradise at Ecological Engineering. Pollution is really the source of it. By the mid-Transhuman Era, health becomes too good (which I hope turns out to be realistic, but is not the best for gameplay).

Health isn´t a problem usually because the effects of illnesses are pretty small. I never build medical units, not worth the effort. Pests are worse, usually.

Happiness: I find it easy to keep people happy so long as crime doesn't rage out of control. Way too much happiness in the later eras. I guess I'm a grinch.

Agreed.

Crime: It seems to be well understood that, despite all the anti-crime buildings, policing units are the best way to manage crime. Just build a few more guards and crime goes below 0.

Also agreed.

Pollution: Air pollution is almost unmanageable until the Transhuman Era, though I suppose I could build more park rangers. I don't seem to have much trouble with water pollution.

Again agreed. Park Rangers are units that also aren´t worth the effort. Their effect on pollution is minimal and they are way too expense to be built.

Tourism: A good feature now. It's hard to get it up, but since it's more of a bonus, that is appropriate.

Agreed.

Education: Keeping education up to the highest level isn't too hard.

Agreed.

 

[JosEPh_II]

@pepper,
Crime is still evolving with T-brd's Criminal units addition.

But currently once you hit Late Med or Early Ren it Is easy to control. I was moving the Individual Crimes to later eras but I'm basically On Hold till all this New stuff from T-brd is in place and fully functional.

Remember this mod is not a stand still Mod. It's constantly changing from SVN version to SVN version. Today's change is............Fill in the blank as to which Modder today has recently committed to the SVN.

JosEPh

 

[pepper2000]

Thanks for the comments. I'll be careful with food and hammers so as not to cripple mid-game growth. What I imagine we'll have to do is consolidate buildings, make educated guesses as to the corrections on other buildings, and then test to make more corrections.

Based on the way crime and anti-crime buildings are currently structured, I'm not guessing much consolidation is needed. I'll tread lightly there.

I'm hoping that some time over the next few days, I'll have a buildings excel sheet up to give a better sense of the project.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Thanks for the comments. I'll be careful with food and hammers so as not to cripple mid-game growth. What I imagine we'll have to do is consolidate buildings, make educated guesses as to the corrections on other buildings, and then test to make more corrections.

Based on the way crime and anti-crime buildings are currently structured, I'm not guessing much consolidation is needed. I'll tread lightly there.

I'm hoping that some time over the next few days, I'll have a buildings excel sheet up to give a better sense of the project.

I have a good feeling you'll be a card carrying mod team member in no time! Thanks for your efforts here!

 

[Thunderbrd]

Ok, we can now take the new YieldPerPopChanges and CommercePerPopChanges into consideration in the act of rebalancing building chains.

More info in THIS post.

 

[pepper2000]

That's a great addition. I like the idea of using YieldPerPopChanges and CommercePerPopChanges on the core buildings to make them more powerful than the others and to mark them as being important.

 

[Thunderbrd]

You can also use them to make some buildings weaker or simply scaling.

For example, a building that gets +.1 gold per population in the early stage of the game isn't going to get even +1 gold until the city grows to 10 population but once it gets to 20 pop it'll be giving 2 gold and so on. This makes the building weaker AND stronger than +1 gold alone, depending on the development stage of the building.

This could allow us to more gradually scale some replacement chain upgrades as well.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Ok, we can now take the new YieldPerPopChanges and CommercePerPopChanges into consideration in the act of rebalancing building chains.

More info in THIS post.

I really do hope this works. But I fear another Blue Genie disaster is in the making. I truly hope my gut feeling is wrong.

JosEPh

 

[MacCoise]

Food: Cities grow slowly in the early game, as they should, but around the Classical or Medieval Era explode. Part of the problem may be that the granary-type buildings are overpowered or that there are too many operating at once.
.

Personally I find cities grow a bit too easily. Once you get control of Health in your first city there are more than enough buildings to grow cities even in really barren terrains. Food is population I think the rule goes...

Is there any scope for more negative food buildings?

Defences like walls would limit a city's pop while barracks and the like taking able bodied men away from home might have same effect...

Not really "consolidation" though I guess, sorry!

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

You can also use them to make some buildings weaker or simply scaling.

For example, a building that gets +.1 gold per population in the early stage of the game isn't going to get even +1 gold until the city grows to 10 population but once it gets to 20 pop it'll be giving 2 gold and so on. This makes the building weaker AND stronger than +1 gold alone, depending on the development stage of the building.

This could allow us to more gradually scale some replacement chain upgrades as well.

I really do hope this works. But I fear another Blue Genie disaster is in the making. I truly hope my gut feeling is wrong.

JosEPh

Looking at the example given it looks like this is just going to make things worse as it will reduce whatever early on when it is rare and increase it later on when it is over abundant.

Personally I find cities grow a bit too easily. Once you get control of Health in your first city there are more than enough buildings to grow cities even in really barren terrains. Food is population I think the rule goes...

Is there any scope for more negative food buildings?

Defences like walls would limit a city's pop while barracks and the like taking able bodied men away from home might have same effect...

Not really "consolidation" though I guess, sorry!

I have a mod that limits your population in the same way it is done in Civ III, if you don't have the infrastructure to support a bigger population then instead of growing you get an immigrant instead. The Total War mod and my mod do it slightly different from Civ III as there are buildings that let you go slightly above the limit making it a bit more flexible.

I like the city walls limiting the pop in some way but I am not sure how to implement that as I think it should limit based on the population when you built it not a hard and fast number.

 

[pepper2000]

I've gotten a start on the spreadsheet now. Attached is the sheet together with the python script that generated it. Before I go too much farther in categorizing buildings, I want to make sure that I'm on the right track.

I plan on adding columns indicating the current cost and how that cost deviates from the guidelines. Anything else I should add (that can easily be automated)?

A picture is worth a thousands words, so I plotted out building proliferation as it stands now. This counts only regular buildings in the core file (Regular_CIV4BuildingInfos.xml). It counts the number of buildings that can be built at a given technology level, not counting obsolete or replaceable buildings. It's an exaggeration obviously because it doesn't take into account resource, terrain, civic, or any other requirements. In particular, all those early farm buildings are skewing the plot. But you get the idea. The question is, what ought this plot look like?

Spoiler :

Once I'm done with categorization, I plan to fill in the columns on proposed obsolescence, replacement, and modifications.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Looking at the example given it looks like this is just going to make things worse as it will reduce whatever early on when it is rare and increase it later on when it is over abundant.

Don't forget to consider negative value implications as well though. Buildings that cost to maintain that cost more as the infrastructure needs grow... could be helpful there as well.

@Pepper... looks like you're on the right track. Don't be afraid to break the document down into multiple pages when that could be helpful to keep from working one big list.

 

[Toffer90]

The question is, what ought this plot look like?

An "S" graph that peaks at Renaissance, makes sense to me. Steep slope through ancient and classical.

 

[pepper2000]

I've finished a draft of classification of regular buildings. It should be current as of SVN 9067. Some buildings could fit into several categories, some I wasn't sure what to do with, and some might be misclassified by mistake. I'd appreciate any corrections, suggestions for improvement, or requests for additional data so long as it is easy to automate.

Next I plan to start filling in the columns for proposed changes. Maybe I can even write a script to implement those changes. And there's that ominous "New" tab.

Thunderbrd: I don't have a category specifically for buildings that would be good for ongoing unit training, but I suspect most of them are in the Civil/Crime/Law Enforcement category or the various Defense categories.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Sounds like an excellent first step. But I'll have to look into it tomorrow morning. Thanks for your efforts!

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

All the Housing (xxx) buildings are auto build. They are a fairly straight forward upgrade path between eras and define the basic economy of the city. I have some plans to have them open up some buildings, including some crimes.

 

[pepper2000]

The housing looks pretty good as it is now. To split hairs, Housing (Colony Arcology) is not auto-build, but the rest are.