Vokarya's Workshop: Buildings

[Vokarya]

Here are some of the modifiers I am looking to remove.

Garrison and Military Base: These buildings do not need a unit production bonus in addition to XP. These buildings are currently doing three things: provide XP; increase unit healing; and provide a production bonus. The XP is the primary purpose for this building line in the first place, and I'm fine with the unit healing, but the third ability isn't necessary and infringes on the Armourer line. Removing this will mean fewer units on the battlefield.

Security Center: This building does not need a bonus to city defense. The purpose of the Security Center is to upgrade both the Security Bureau and the Radar Station, slightly improving both of them; the Security Center gives +1 Magistrate slot, +25% espionage defense, and -10% damage from air attack over the previous two buildings. City defense from buildings at this point in the game is almost useless; any offensive unit will ignore city defense. So pulling this out cleans the Security Center up a little.

Manor: This building's effects do not make much sense to me. Manor should be about self-sufficiency, not culture. I want to give this building +1 food instead of the +1 culture and the -25% anger duration. The anger duration would only come into play if you were dealing with unhappiness from an event. The reduction applies to whipping and temporary unhappiness from events, but we have removed whipping completely. Drafting uses a different timer and there is no XML tag to reduce this. (I think this would actually make a better effect for the Draft Office, but I can't code new tags.)

 

[Vokarya]

Here is something else I noticed while creating a list of building abilities. There is WAY too much culture from regular buildings. I feel to get Legendary Culture, you should actually have to work for it and use all or most of the different culture sources: regular buildings, religious buildings, Wonders, specialists, Great Artists, the culture slider, and even the Build Culture process. I found the last few games I played that cities hit Legendary culture sometime in the Modern Era without doing very much more than build all the culture buildings and a few Wonders. I almost never touch the culture slider or deliberately assign specialists.

This is the baseline I am working from.

• A regular game of AND is 2.4 times as long as the same gamespeed setting of BTS. On Normal, this is 500 turns in BTS and 1200 turns in AND.
• The culture levels in AND are 4.8 times that of BTS (excepting Fledgling, which is only 4.0). Legendary culture is 50,000 on BTS Normal speed and 240,000 on AND Normal speed.
  
• Therefore the buildings in AND should provide 2x as much culture as BTS.

You can get much more building culture than that in AND. The maximum from buildings alone in BTS is +12: +2 Library, +3 University, +3 Theatre, +50% Broadcast Tower. So culture from buildings should probably top out around +24.

The equivalent snapshot at the end of the Modern Era in BTS is +66: +2 Casino, +4 Cinema, +3 City Park, +2 Hotel, +2 Library, +2 Monument, +2 Museum, +5 Opera House, +1 School, +4 Stadium, +3 University, +1 Village Hall, +2 Zoo; +10% Art Gallery, +10% Advertising Agency, +30% Communication Tower, +25% Convention Center, +25% TV Station -- and this is a minimum, without any upgrades to the Village Hall line which can add another +6. This is over 5x as much culture. A slight mitigation is that there is no +100% culture civic like the Free Speech civic in BTS, but you can get close with a combination of civics (Democracy, Liberal, Pacifism, Redevelopment) and there are a lot more +% culture buildings. All +% bonuses add up and are applied to the total base culture all at once.

The other thing is that too many +1 culture buildings in the early game make it too easy to get early border increases. In BTS, to get culture in the very early game outside your capital, you have to either be Creative, found a religion, build a Wonder, or build a Monument. The first is a pre-game choice, the second and third are not guaranteed (except you can build Moai in one coastal city), and the fourth doesn't do much else in the early game. AND has seven different +1 culture Ancient Era buildings: Ceremonial Altar, Graveyard, School of Scribes, Standing Stone, Storyteller Circle, Village Hall, and Walls, and Standing Stone is the only dedicated culture building. (Fire Pit is also +1 culture but is easily replaced by Ceremonial Altar.) At best, there should be 2 or 3 of these buildings. I'm willing to go a little higher, but I want to rein this in.

So I think Culture generation should be removed from ALL of the following buildings:

• Walls, High Walls
• Castle
  • I understand that defensive buildings are a symbol of civilization, but the culture is not needed here. The beginning of the Park building line is contingent on these defensive buildings and that is your source of culture. Castle also gets the +3 commerce from a capital connection so you can spend that on Culture a bit with the slider.
• Arena, Stadium, Zero G Sports Arena
• Casino
  • What I want to do here is draw more of a line between art buildings that produce culture and entertainment buildings that produce happiness. You have to build happiness buildings to keep your citizens working, so having culture on the happiness buildings weakens the usefulness of dedicated culture-producing buildings. The Colosseum in Civ4 does not produce culture. It does in Civ3, but the Theatre fills that niche in Civ4.
    
  • The other thing that I think we can do with Casino is lower the gold production to +20% and remove the hammer penalty. The combination of Market (25%) + Jewellery (10%) + Bank (30%) + Advertising Agency (10%) + Casino (20%) is just a touch less than the maximum +% gold from BTS Market (25%) + Grocer (25%) + Bank (50%). If the only other bonuses are +1 happiness and +15% commerce with Power which is a substantial investment for most of the game, I think that is acceptable.
• Village Hall, Town Hall, City Council, Metropolitan Administration
  • Like defensive buildings, I don't see administrative buildings as that big of sources of culture.
• Hotel
  • The Renaissance Era in BTS actually shows a drop in base culture from buildings as Monument and Castle go obsolete. AND has the Monument, Museum, Opera House, Painter's Studio, Printer, and Art Gallery all appearing. I'm thinking that Vacation Resort would get +10% culture instead of its current flat +4. It's a late-game benefit for coastal cities only.
• School
  • I'm actually not sure which way to go with this one, either to remove the culture completely or go up. There is already enough base Industrial culture (Cinema, City Park, Zoo) and this is where the +% buildings start to really appear. I just don't think +1 culture is meaningful at this stage.

A few other tweaks:

• Fire Pit gets replaced by Storyteller Circle as well as Ceremonial Altar. This is to stop stacking of +1 culture buildings in the Ancient Era.
  
• Artists Guild gets reduced to +3 culture. I want to slow down the Medieval Era culture snowball a bit.
  
• Museum gets increased to +3 culture. I do want this building to be a cultural center.
• Castle Keep gets reduced to +4 culture. It's almost a mini-National Wonder.
  
• Library and University stop contributing to Culture in the Transhuman Era when they are replaced by the Infomatrix (not yet in-game), but when I finally create the Transhuman Era Art Gallery upgrade, I can dial in those numbers appropriately.

 

[Arakhor]

Culture also includes laws and the way people do things. Admin buildings, particularly if they let you use culture rings more effectively, should grant culture, I think, even if it's only a small amount.

 

[Vokarya]

Culture also includes laws and the way people do things. Admin buildings, particularly if they let you use culture rings more effectively, should grant culture, I think, even if it's only a small amount.

That doesn't work for me. I don't think there's enough culture on the scale of Civ4 to qualify as even +1 culture. Otherwise, I think we would have seen culture on Courthouse and Jail. Also, I feel that granting the third tile ring is a good reason to NOT have culture, or it's making the third ring too easy to get.

 

[Vokarya]

I did discover one thing when I dug into the code some more. For some reason, all culture buildings have the <ObsoleteSafeCommerceChanges> and <CommerceChangeDoubleTimes> applied to their culture production. I don't think either of these should be used on ordinary buildings. I'm fine with them being on Wonders. I really don't like having buried information, and I think it's especially detrimental to the early eras when turns cover a long number of years.

Does anyone know if <ObsoleteSafeCommerceChanges> does anything other than allow a building to produce culture after it goes nominally obsolete? I looked through the source code files and I couldn't find anything.

If I take this into account, then the maximum culture production of the Modern Era from buildings alone in BTS is +24. That doubles to +48 which is exactly the culture produced from buildings in my revised Modern Era: +4 Cinema, +3 City Park, +2 Library, +2 Monument, +3 Museum, +5 Opera House, +3 University, +2 Zoo, then apply +10% from Art Gallery, +10% from Advertising Agency, +30% from Communication Tower, +25% from Convention Center, and +25% from TV Station.

 

[<Nexus>]

• Village Hall, Town Hall, City Council, Metropolitan Administration
  • Like defensive buildings, I don't see administrative buildings as that big of sources of culture.

• School
  • I'm actually not sure which way to go with this one, either to remove the culture completely or go up. There is already enough base Industrial culture (Cinema, City Park, Zoo) and this is where the +% buildings start to really appear. I just don't think +1 culture is meaningful at this stage.

School certainly needs to produce culture. Children are taught the very basics of their culture.

The Village Hall should have something better than it currently does.
Maintenance reduction is what would really fit it but that would make maintenance disappear eventually.
I wish if there was a max city size tag or something that wouldn't allow the city to grow above a certain size without such a building.

 

[Vokarya]

School certainly needs to produce culture. Children are taught the very basics of their culture.

I'm going to put it at +2. That makes it a little less trivial. One thing I'm trying to do is keep culture to a few clusters of buildings rather than have it all spread around. Library/University/School is a cluster because they all upgrade to Infomatrix.

The Village Hall should have something better than it currently does.
Maintenance reduction is what would really fit it but that would make maintenance disappear eventually.
I wish if there was a max city size tag or something that wouldn't allow the city to grow above a certain size without such a building.

That's what previous versions of Civ did with the Aqueduct/Sewer System/Hospital before Civ4 changed those buildings to the Health system. The problem is we can only do so much with the XML as it stands.

 

[<Nexus>]

I wonder if initial maintenance could be increased in EraInfo, HandicapInfo or WorldInfo in a way that the Village Hall line could have a maintenance reduction modifier...