Tile Improvements

[Ploeperpengel]

But as it takes mines (and other improvements) ages to evolve, you would protect them with as much fevour as your towns. Just think of them as production cottages instead of commerce cottages.

Yes but cottages need a lot of time to grow not just 10 or 20 turns so I still think it's a bigger loss. As I said we could just reduce the commerce they provide a bit and giving them +1Food near watertiles and the hammer you want for villages(that I like).
Something like that maybe:
Cottage+1 commerce
hamlet +1commerce + 1 hammer
village +2 commerce +1 hammer
town +4 commerce +2 hammer
Normal time to grow.

 

[Duke van Frost]

Cottage+1 commerce
hamlet +1commerce + 1 hammer
village +2 commerce +1 hammer
town +4 commerce +2 hammer
Normal time to grow.

Doesn´t a vanilla town only give +3 commerce?? And if a town gives +2 hammers I´m likeöly not to build many mines, because towns will give much more benefits!

 

[Ploeperpengel]

Yes? I thought it's 5 but that may be because I almost allways build them near rivers, heh. ok lets just have +1 hammer then.

 

[Psychic_Llamas]

change one of the last commerces to food?

 

[Duke van Frost]

Farms give +1 Food, so why build a Farm when you can have a town that produces them? And medieval Fantasy civs should rely heavily on Agriculture.

My approach would be the following: cut off the cottage chain by one (remove the last step) and give the new last step +1 hammer, small changes, but maybe it´s better to only change the vanilla system a little bit than totally revamping it, because it´s well thought out and very balanced IMO.

Of course this would mean we should also cut the Forest Cottages chain for Woodelves agin by one (so it´s only two steps, but woodelves wouldn´t build great settlemnts in the woods either) and here I´d suggest to give the last step +1 Food to compensate for not being able to cut the Forest and build farms an due to hunters searching the forest for food.

 

[Olleus]

Why shouldn't we totaly revamp the system?

Surely thats the entire point of mod. I just think that cottages are distinctively un-warhammer like. If you think that the loss of the improvements above aren't enought, then simply increase the time it takes for them to grow. Also, a lot of them require workers to be sacrified, so they are an even biger investment.

 

[Arexack_heretic]

Upscalable fortifications!
To protect against all those incursions.

(could small fortifications be built 'next to' an existing improvement?)

wooden watchtower: +1sightrange +5%defence for rangedcombat units. does not clear forest, can be built next to improvement.
Does not require stoneworks or construction, just a worker.

Small tower: a simple stone guardtower +10%def (req: stoneworks)
3turns to build
->
Fortification: +20% (req: smalltower + construction)
4 turns to build
->
Fortress: +25%, can bombard or fire on passing units. (req: fortification + construction + planning or somesuch)
4 turns to build

all are negated by airunits and siegemagics.
(maybe give all fortifications +1 sightrange too?)

 

[Psychic_Llamas]

that would be really awsome if that is possible. I think i remeber Ploe talking about that somewhere before.

 

[Arexack_heretic]

Why wouldn't it be possible?
If scaling cottages are possible, scaling fortifications should be too.

ps maybe the lowest for of fortification should be an encampment encircled with dirt wall with wooden stakes poking out...? edit: or is that just a normal unit-fortifying?
maybe as early stoneage-fort-graphic....

I feel cottages and towns are extremely warhammer-like.
50% of the games I played were fought out in otr around small villages.

 

[Psychic_Llamas]

or you could make fortifications an addon to villages, so you wont have to worry about the fortifications being "next to" another improvement.
I agree, that villages and towns are important in WH, and i think we should make villages able to become important strategic positions after a lot of work. that would make players value them more and also protect them more.

 

[Arexack_heretic]

Good idea.
a defensive bonus for cover/houese2house/streetfighting.

edit 6/01/07:
Upgrade villages/towns with a watchtower to gain benefits of tower (see next post).
I guess the 'Turns worked' will be lost, so maybe only make towns upgradable.
Walls are only allowed for cities and should remain so.
We need requiresImprovement: IMPROVEMENT_X to make this kind of things work.

Maybe have some upgrade for fortifications, that makes them a bit more usefull for resources too?
Nah, spacial Fortified mine would be more appropriate.

edit 17/11/06: How about an "Extractor" for warpstone? can be built on top of a normal mine/stripmine.

 

[Arexack_heretic]

Stripmine:
twice as productive as normal mine, but...
creates pollution or -health in city if worked.
double resource bonus, but...
resources are also twice as likely to become exhausted.
also: requires a civic that incurrs negative relations modifier with WE.


Fortifications:
I have managed to modify some grafics to look like small towers.

However getting it to work in-game may require some scripting I'm not capable of (yet).

issues:
-Worker/Stonemason/Sapper BUILDS prereq fortification improverment.
-upgrading: how to give discount for upgrading from previous fortification?

-Manned lookout function.
LoS for dominant culture, so only INSIDE borders.
or
not improvement at all, but rather an imobile unit. (easiest solution actually,
but a bodge. Would require sappers carrying the tower to location or instant
summoning on the spot, which would req some scripting)

-Units in camp/fort/castle fortification should not be able to flee from tile.
attacking units get a free attack as normal if they defeat a defending unit.
-encampment/Fortress/castle need extra bonus.
Some artillery free bombard or protection bonus would seem appropriate.

----

Buildable -> upgrades to

wooden outlook. (2LoS, fast build) -> small stone tower (3LoS, +10%Def)
small stone tower -> Wizards Tower (3LoS, 15%def, see invisible, +1magic?)
small stone tower -> fort (30%def)
entrenchment / wooden pallisades (+15%def, fast build) -> fort
fort -> castle (+50%def)
----
Towers have limited defensive bonus, but give free LoS, and can be upgraded to Wizardstowers. Build on hills only.
Entrenchments have a decent defensive bonus, forts can be upgraded to powerfull castles.
Castles can only be upgraded to within friendly borders only.

 

[Masada]

Okay my thoughts on it...

I agree with Lord Olleus cottages are not really warhammerish, this might be a bit extreme but in actual fact there not even very real worldish.

I dont see the need for cottages, in actual fact i dont even see the point of having them... why would they generate i was lead to believe that towns relied on farms to sell goods and services to and that they onsold goods and raw products to cities...

so at the bottom you have the primary producers, farms, mines, lumbermills etc they created the raw resources and maybe refine the ore down into ingots or cut the timber into boards...

towns need primary producers to justify there existance to sell services, goods and onsell stuff to cities...

With this in mind, perhaps giving mines, farms and the like commerce, and perhaps have levels even for farms?...

Just a thought

 

[Arexack_heretic]

I still disagree.

Farms are nice because they represent people living in the province.

They also make you give a damn if an opponent is pillaging your tiles,
because they represent a significant investment.
eg working a tile that generates less food/prod for about 30turns, before a monetary return is generated.
They are also nice to pillage for money.

WHFB needs the gold to support the masses of units.

I agree that towns should not dominate the landscape.
Maybe limiting the production of a town by somefactor of the surrounding tiles or increasing production of surrounding tiles, while generating trade.
Or maybe make the investment even higher, by requiring at least 2-4 farms next to a hamlet for growth.
The easiest way to limit town prevalence would probably be to prevent towns existing next to eachother.

 

[Masada]

this may just be me but AI's pillaging my nation would be fairly new...

Yeah they do... but they take up what called a fairly large chunk of terrain... what i was proposing was amalgamating there function into farms and mines... and having them change in the way that cottages change

Clear Land---> Irragation--->Crop rotation? (whatever)

with the farms for instance giving a base +1 food and +1,+2,+3 gold for each level for instance

and the same for mines

and the same for lumber mills

it takes a while to generate the infrastructure needed to support large scale farming mining and land clearance. For farms to function there needs to be land to clear, good soil (civ is a bit silly in that respect.. a huge amount of land is not fertile enough to justify farming), mills, granaries, markets, wells etc infrastructure like that takes time to build up the same could be said of mines and lumber mills...

What im saying is that we treat villages and towns as part of the farm (which represents a large area... even assuming its only 20km^2 there could be easily a few villages, towns, cottages etc), mine or lumbermill

It would also help solve the money problem which is a big part of the game in the current version... and if that is fixed in the warlords patch it allows for a greater amount of money to be used for large armies..

Large armies are difficult to support as is, and they are fairly difficult to create not enough time... and to many wars to build up a big one but that might just be me.......

The system i envision is a slot based system (not sure if you can do it...) with the ability to build a lvl 1 improvement, lvl 2 improvement, lvl 3 improvement all the way to wherever..

With branches in the build possibilities... the ability for instance to go the full mining path

alluevial deposits--->open pit mine--->shaft mine etc

But with the chance of adding defensive upgrades to the path

--->defensive --->walled
outpost compound

With this you could for instance safeguard a rich deposit (i think hills,mountains etc should have a variable shield count when they are first mined.. some hills are richer some are poorer...) but it would take up land near the mine site limiting the ability to upgrade the mine it could if that proved to be to nasty take longer to upgrade the terrain with each sucsesive upgrade...

But you could also build better whatever you can come up with...

I have no idea if this is implimentable ingame.. maybe a modified cottage code?



even the idea of having fortresses taking up a square is a bit silly... i mean really how big can they be? a large fortress in the real world is a couple of square km...

 

[Arexack_heretic]

with cottage code it would certainly be possible to have mines and farms upgrade over time.

The choice/varyable upgrades, would require the same modifications in buildable/RequiredImprovement that I suggested for the upgradable fortifications earlier.

Another funny thing would be to have farmingland degrade if not rotated.
(eg before 'crop rotation' is invented).
Degradation would remove the farm, requiring the player/AI to revitalise the soil with workers.
(This simulates the lying fallow of a few years or manual fertilisation)

 

[Masada]

the key i guess would be to make it not to labor intensive for the player... i think personally that this would help a player tailor there terrain.. on the border they may wish to build more defensive upgrades and garrison a unit there for instance in the areas away from the enemy they may only want to build upgrades to improve the shield count etc

I do agree that it might be interesting if farms could degrade (it would be another way to limit over expansion without consoladating your gains.. with your workers being overworked if you have taken over to much or built to many farms) the key is to do it without it being to annoying..

Is it possible when you build a mine to have a variable amount of new shields generated..? instead of having a base +2 for instance would it be possible to have between 1-5? for instance it might also be useful for the player to determine what they want to build on that mined tile (perhaps change the base shield count on mines into % based figures would make the player think more in terms of what should be mined and what shouldnt)

I dont see why farms cant be built in hills, its a bit silly really look at New Zealand for instance there are sheep on almost vertical Hills feeding on grass perhaps the food count might be a bit lower (but even that wouldnt be bad if it was variable )

 

[Arexack_heretic]

Mines:
How about changing metal resources?

Higher chance of finding minerals when building mine,
but also faster depletion rate.

Dunno if this can be limited to luxury (silver/gold/gems/gromril) minerals only, depleting copper and Iron at accelerated rates could make it annoying.
But only increasing finding rates of these goods would undo the rush-factor.


Farms:
We could introduce a cheap serfs-unit that only builds farms, set it on automated....hmm maybe not. As it would probably try to farm EVERYTHING.
Unless we go more compex and erode farms to fallowlands/pollutoid-feature: = -2food.
Which these serfs can clean up.
We could use this same feature too for salted lands, dustbowls, etc. created by other destructive practices.

I don't know about the hidden fertility idea.
It would have to be known at map-generation, then revealed by farming.
Change it at random and you would need to remember the first result afterwards anyhow, to prevent people farming the same tile repeatedly to get the optimum results.


New:
I uploaded a simple textureswap for desidious forrest (full tile) for a dead wood.
I'll test out some jungle vines later.
edit: what is up with the .nif format not uploading?! weirdness.
edit: oh yeah: LINK http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/102073/deadwood_des.zip

I'm dead:
Probably not do much more this week though; that paper my sig has been whineing about is due this friday AND I stupidly signed up for a 9-17 practical course. Argh! My intern-supervisor is gonna be so mad at me.

 

[Olleus]

I'm sorry but crop rotation screams micromanagement, and no one wants that. I like the idea of farms&mines generating more income across time to represent general stability. However, if we want to keep city specialisation which IMO is what makes city management interesting then we need to make specialists worthwhile, and/or add cottages to the mid game.

 

[Arexack_heretic]

You are right about the micromanagement, that is why I suggested serfs as a remedy.
Soft healers eh?...I realise crop-rotation is too micro for the scale of civ.
At most, it could be a TECH/civic that gives a farming bonus.

Hidden foodboni... still not attractive.
Farmed tiles already have a variety of production efficiacy. Eg floodplains etc.
Perhaps development of a farmed tile over time, resulting in either erosion or improvement of soil, depending on a random-predetermined distribution.

p.s.
Check out the woods.
I forgot to add the link.