Dreamland of Financial-cottage madness...

[Guardian_PL]

It's an unbelievable hype, and I love it, but to be honest I've come to the conclusion that there's no better tile than cottageable tile, so all resource tiles etc are a bother really, not a benefit

Honestly, Wheel, Pottery and you're set to conquer the world. Don't bother with food/agriculture - cottaged tile has the same food yield as a farm now, so y'see, farms are good only for resources.

I mean, it's great to have tiles that give 5, 3 and 11, but it feels kinda... Harmful to all the other tiles
...Perhaps farms could give additional +1 to compensate or something?

And of course, thank you Zappara for creation of that champion mod

 

[JosEPh_II]

The AI has an Overwhelming propensity for cottage building now. I've conguered AI that had Cottages(and upwards) on Every tile. No farms, no mines, no workshops, just cottages.

Early RoM versions I would Never build a cottage. In fact I posted to zappara that they were basically useless for BtS and RoM 0.94. Since then, with their current enhancements, I build about 1/4 of my tiles as Cottages. I still use all other tile types but the AI sometimes does not. Even resource tiles for the AI has cottages and that Does need to be addressed.

JosEPh

 

[Loke.be]

I agree.. the fact that cottage gives +1 food is too powerful imo.
Same strategy here.. cottages all the way... even on resources most of the time!

 

[Nefelia]

It's an unbelievable hype, and I love it, but to be honest I've come to the conclusion that there's no better tile than cottageable tile, so all resource tiles etc are a bother really, not a benefit

Honestly, Wheel, Pottery and you're set to conquer the world. Don't bother with food/agriculture - cottaged tile has the same food yield as a farm now, so y'see, farms are good only for resources.

I mean, it's great to have tiles that give 5, 3 and 11, but it feels kinda... Harmful to all the other tiles
...Perhaps farms could give additional +1 to compensate or something?

And of course, thank you Zappara for creation of that champion mod

First of all, the bolded section is inaccurate: initial irrigation gives a farmed tile +2 against the cottage's +1. This is significant, as each citizen requires 3 food to support itself in RoM.

Secondly, showing the stats of a cottage by a river skews the comparison to other improvements. (shaft) mines and farms also gain a +1, +1, +1 bonus (with Levee & River Authority) from being situated beside a river.

An honest comparison (with a few caveats, and assuming financial trait, road, railroad, but no river) would be:
Town: 4, 2, 10
Farm: 6
Shaft Mine: 7, 1 or 8, 1, +0.5 if built on a tree.

Of course, that does not include the additional advantage Towns can get with the right civic. The easy fix to this imbalance would be to remover the two +1, +1 bonuses cottages get from the road and railroad. Having those bonuses in does not only help overpower cottages/towns, but also encourages a ridiculous amount of road/railroad spam.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Road/Railroad Spam!?? Why wouldn't you build roads and railroads everywhere?

The current cottage bonuses do make me use them again in RoM, where in vanilla BtS I Never use cottages.

The current cottage bonuses are of themselves not the real problem but the AI's propensity of overbuilding them. So maybe a formula or weighting change to give back some balance to the AI's decision tree?


JosEPh

 

[Guardian_PL]

Look, I'm not saying it's bad. I love it. Lots and lots of rivers make me happy now
Good thing to know that specialist takes 3, didn't really notice that.
...But if that is the case, why bother with them at all? Why to change 4 1 7 tile on a guy that can give me what, something like 3 1 1, and requires 3 to support?

It seems to me that cottage, cottage, cottage everything and only then, when there's no workable tiles in city radius and I have a food surplus (and I rarely don't, especially the case with riverside or coastal cities) I can employ specialists. Farms for resources only.

Simple solution to "overpowered cottage" problem to me was to not to take Financial leaders. That guarantees pleasant gameplay (and Financial AI's can occasionally become a challenge, providing Revolutions spared that poor nation), without just clicking enter and 1-2 turns tech progress which left all other AI in the dust. And Encyclopaedia Project just killed them.

 

[Nefelia]

Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Road/Railroad Spam!?? Why wouldn't you build roads and railroads everywhere?

The current cottage bonuses do make me use them again in RoM, where in vanilla BtS I Never use cottages.

The current cottage bonuses are of themselves not the real problem but the AI's propensity of overbuilding them. So maybe a formula or weighting change to give back some balance to the AI's decision tree?


JosEPh

Cottages are already strong enough without the road/railroad bonus. They are useful enough to warrant frequent use in standard BTS, and are made even more attractive in RoM. I don't know why you would avoid using them in BTS.

Also, roads are representative of large transportation arteries (think Roman roads). Their construction is expensive and time-consuming, and so their use has been generally limited to connecting cities, vital resources, and strategic fortifications.

 

[zappara]

I'll take this into consideration for the next patch. Earlier the problem was that AI players never built cottages and thus their economy didn't develop enough. That was the reason why I added +1 food to it in some past patch - so the food amount probably have to stay the same or the AI won't build them, but other modifiers can be changed, also other improvements can be changed.

 

[Guardian_PL]

wow, thank you zappara, good stuff
I like those powered tiles in RoM, and additional resources. They make me want to develop so much faster. More cities, more population, more tiles worked
So yeah, maybe simple +1 to farms will suffice.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Nefelia wrote:Also, roads are representative of large transportation arteries (think Roman roads). Their construction is expensive and time-consuming, and so their use has been generally limited to connecting cities, vital resources, and strategic fortifications.

Expensive? How? Please explain?

Time consuming? Not when you group 3 workers together. Road or Railroad on most tiles built in 1 turn. 2 sets of 3 workers and 2 tiles built per turn. In RoM once you have lumberyard then +1 hammer and +1 gold for every forested/lumberyard, and +1 hammer on mines. You can boost a city's production fairly rapidly that way.

Not to mention the obvious benefit of unit movement.

So it must really Be a DOYPS then (Depends On Your Play Style).

JosEPh

 

[Nightguard]

Expensive? How? Please explain?

Time consuming? Not when you group 3 workers together. Road or Railroad on most tiles built in 1 turn. 2 sets of 3 workers and 2 tiles built per turn. In RoM once you have lumberyard then +1 hammer and +1 gold for every forested/lumberyard, and +1 hammer on mines. You can boost a city's production fairly rapidly that way.

Not to mention the obvious benefit of unit movement.

So it must really Be a DOYPS then (Depends On Your Play Style).

JosEPh

He was saying what your 'road improvements' represent when compared to a real world road network. The road improvements aren't just little country roads or wagon tracks. They're the Roman road networks, or the modern US highway system. They represent a major investment on the part of your civ. Yes, with multiple workers, you can put roads out pretty quickly. But those multiple workers represent thousands of laborers. That's all he was trying to point out.

BTW, the 2.4 adjustments to the Cottage improvement line is a step in the right direction. The answer to an overpowered item is not to make the other items overpowered as well, but to bring the one exception more in line with the rest of the options available.

 

[lordrune]

Perhaps its worth thinking about improving the length of time that it takes workers to make improvements by a significant factor. Maybe as much as double or more.

As probably most if not all of us probably use workers in stacks, it won't hurt our gameplay, just mean that to improve your tiles rapidly, you actually need to make an economic investment to maintain large armies of workers.

You could then justify starting each civ with a worker, as well, so that you don't lose that leadtime.

Secondly - given all worked tiles got bumped up in ROM - should specialists receive similar love as well?

 

[zappara]

Perhaps its worth thinking about improving the length of time that it takes workers to make improvements by a significant factor. Maybe as much as double or more.

As probably most if not all of us probably use workers in stacks, it won't hurt our gameplay, just mean that to improve your tiles rapidly, you actually need to make an economic investment to maintain large armies of workers.

You could then justify starting each civ with a worker, as well, so that you don't lose that leadtime.

Secondly - given all worked tiles got bumped up in ROM - should specialists receive similar love as well?

I think doubling the amount it takes to make improvement is not suitable a solution as in some game modes it could lead to situation where cottage never upgrades fully to town before your game rans out of turns. I tried the option to build directly hamlets, villages and towns once certain techs are founded but for some reason the game didn't make buttons visible for those actions even when I did have everything correctly set (same functions do work with Shaft Mine). Cause for it not to work with hamlets->towns is probably caused by LSystem which those improvements use (only setting that was different from Shaft Mine setting). So because I didn't get this to work, I discarded those changes from v2.4 before release.

Specialists do get bonuses from wonders and they do become powerful if you get few of those wonders.