[BUILDING] Drydocks, buildings, etc.

[Oberon4278]

This is going to be unpopular, but... I don't think the current mechanics correctly reflect the expense involved in maintaining a navy. It should be much more expensive, both to build and to maintain ships, especially the larger ones. Here's my proposal.

First, I think that the docks should have "slots" in it. You can load and unload goods from any ship in the harbor, but in order to build a ship or repair a ship, it uses up a slot at the docks. Yes this means ships wouldn't be able to repair (unless they have the carpenter promotion) outside of a drydock.

Second, I think repairing a ship should require a carpenter working at the drydock, and should consume lumber, tools, rope, and sail cloth. The more carpenters you have working on it, the faster it gets repaired.

Upgrading "the docks" (i.e. shipyard, naval port, etc.) would add one drydock slot per upgrade, but you would also be able to add a drydock slot by building a "drydock" again, up to a maximum determined by how many coast tiles the city has in it. So if your city only has access to a single ocean tile you can only build a small port district that can handle three or four ships at once, but if you're on an island you can build a HUGE port district and work on tons of ships at once.

Of course, all carpenters working on ships need food, but luckily fishermen can make plenty of food already. Happy fishermen means happy carpenters!

As for other buildings -- it seems silly to me that you can't put (for example) a weaver to work in someone else's house. This is a big departure from the Colonization dogma, but I think it would make sense to let colonists do any job in the smaller buildings, but at a low productivity. So at first you build some small houses, and you can make coats in them, or weave wool, or make beer, or whatever. (Blacksmithing and gunsmithing / cannonsmithing would be obvious exceptions, not only because those are activities that require a special building but because those goods are more important in the game than the other trade goods.)

So essentially you would just build a bunch of houses, and if you wanted higher productivity then you would turn one of them into a shop, and afterwards they act like normal shops where you can only do what they're made for in them.

This would really help with some of the smaller cities, where you sometimes want to just make some small amount of cigars or cloth before you build the city up large, but you don't want to turn this into a "cloth making" city. Basically, I'm thinking when the city is small it can do lots of different things at low efficiency. Then you make specialized buildings to improve output.

So, there's two different thoughts: drydock slots, and small buildings that you can do anything in, but at a very low rate. What do you think?

 

[hdd]

Mod is cluttered as it currently is.
Of course you can go in depth with a lot of details, but still you must keep that game & pleasure factor on. As perhaps many other forum members, I am an enthusiast for modding and make a game as complicated as possible. However, if given the option, I would disable many in-depth features of the existing mod, let alone adding more.

There is a reason for Firaxis not releasing extremely complicated games. It's a game, that is. Not the real life.

In the end, there is a personal option, but I would vote for less complicated, more intelligent as AI.