Water instead of Food

When was the last time you went for war in civ4 because of health improving bonus resources? :)
 
Well, in Civ4 lack of health is never really an issue because health bonuses and buildings are so readily available. Ahriman is proposing we make health much more difficult to come by and then rebrand it water.

Could we tackle the problem david raised with Water for Health at the city connection end? I know we don't want roads, but could we limit the connectedness of cities somehow. Initially only cities on the same rock islands are connected and as you progress up the tech tree, cities on other islands also become connected.

I'd like to understand why more people in this thread seemed to be attracted by the Water for Food idea as originally presented. For example, would the reaction described in this post still happen if we go with Water for Health. The Water for Health option would be more subtle, less immediately obvious.
 
Could we tackle the problem david raised with Water for Health at the city connection end? I know we don't want roads, but could we limit the connectedness of cities somehow. Initially only cities on the same rock islands are connected and as you progress up the tech tree, cities on other islands also become connected.

The only other way of making cities connected without serious sdk changes I can think of would be buildings (habour/airport).

I'd like to understand why more people in this thread seemed to be attracted by the Water for Food idea as originally presented. For example, would the reaction described in this post still happen if we go with Water for Health. The Water for Health option would be more subtle, less immediately obvious.

Replacing Water for Food is only a flavor change without the need of relearning the concept. As many have pointed out health in civ4 isn't something you really have to care about. This would change if we implement Ahriman's water for health concept. We all know that many players are lazy when it comes to learn new conecpts (me included). We have to take care that players don't quit playing dune wars because being overwhelmed by new elements. This could be achieved by introducing new concepts step by step or at least making sure that they don't have too much impact on early game play.
 
I think either water for health or water for food would be pretty easy to understand for a new player.

However, food for health could get confusing.

And I'd say yes you'd go to war for a health resource if that resource effectively meant +2 food per turn in all your cities (+1 base, +1 more from a building, all non-tiny cities have binding health issues). Thats like a free specialist worker.
 
Another reason that I didn't like health in Civ4 is that you have two things kinda doing the same thing. Commerce, food, production and happiness all have their separate functions, but health just kinda piggybacks onto food. I'm kinda glad that you're kindof able to ignore health and still enjoy the game, otherwise I might have been frustrated with managing twp different foods.
 
I'd like to understand why more people in this thread seemed to be attracted by the Water for Food idea as originally presented. For example, would the reaction described in this post still happen if we go with Water for Health. The Water for Health option would be more subtle, less immediately obvious.
It's more splashy - you see it immediately and you get these water icons.

Furthermore, health/happiness are restriction mechanics, while they are important, it's harder to really love something that puts a cap on your city size despite having enough food.

Water as food means: "I have to look out for more water to get my empire growing"; water as health means: "I have to look for water bonuses to raise my water cap". The latter is a somehow more powerful idea. Finally, water-for-food hits you in your face, the very first time you open your city screen - you immediately get the fact "I need water!".

This said, I like both ideas, though I'm slightly in favour of water-for-food.

Cheers, LT.
 
I guess my biggest problem with water for food is that it doesn't make sense for the existing food resources to be providing large amounts of water, and it doesn't make sense for drip farms/greenhouses etc. to provide water, and it doesn't really make sense for the landscape of Dune in general to be providing water from every tile.

Its a desert, with a few underground springs and aquifers in particular places. You can build a few windtraps and get a tiny bit from dew collectors, but wells and such only come from a few tiles. It doesn't make sense to be able to build a water-providing improvement on most flat-land tiles, but the mod really does need to be able to build farm-type improvements on a lot of flatland tiles in order for the AI to get decent city development.

And second, you then lose food entirely, which is weird, or make food for health, which is even more weird.
 
It doesn't really make sense for the landscape of Dune to be providing food from every tile either. It was one of the first things that irked me about the mod.

I'm going to take all this input and have a second go at respecifying the bonuses in terms of Water for Food. I'm thinking the following:

1) Most terrain tiles produce no water. The water producing bonus tiles produce much more water than before to compensate for the lack of water from non-bonus tiles. Remember we can tune the prevalence of the bonuses in the XML to ensure growth. We can have two (or more) levels of improvement (e.g. Well, Deep Well) on each which scale up the water output of these tiles by a suitably large amount. Improved water tiles can produce 10-15 units of water - whatever level feels right.

2) We can either have a improvement that can be built everywhere that will provide a small amount of water, or use Fresh Water/Irrigation mechanic to add water output to water-less tiles. This can represent the building of qanats from water sources.

3) We can keep the existing food resources as sources of health/happiness and, where appropriate, targets for the Dew Collectors improvement to produce some water.

Since, it will be an XML only change it will easiest enough to try this out and play with the numbers.
 
I think maybe my main objection to food is the 'bread' icon. That implies the sowing of verdant fields. In my research for the map I found somewhere that the Fremen domesticated kangaroo rats for food. Maybe if we made it into a mouselike icon, it might just be revolting enough to emphasize Dune's barreness.

Another thing that might give the mod a different flavor in addition to water for food, is to use smaller numbers of yields. In Civ4, each person eats 2 food and without bonuses yields range from 0 to 3 food, in the early stages. I was wondering if we could set everyone to eat 1 water, and set the yeild ranges from -1 to 2 with improvements. Maybe put some nice resources or high production on the -1 yield.
 
Well, I'm having some fun playing with the concept. :)

I completely removed water from all base terrain - so the desert planet is now really a desert. Feels right. Then I added in three grades of spring, producing +5, +7, +9 water respectively, and increased the prevalence until most city sites contained 3 or so springs. You can see that it still needs further tuning ... two of the richest springs in my starting square = insane growth. I'm going to play some more, when I get a nice balance I'll post the XML and graphics. (Yes, I'm going to fix the bitten bread icon)



On the plant life, I think all of: Sword Grass, Burro Weed, Barrel Cactus, Creosote and Sand Verbena would be plants that dew could be collected from. I'm thinking these plants can probably a very small amount of water unimproved and then a greater amount with the Dew Collectors improvement. I awould like to replace Inkvine which is native to Geidi Prime with Spiked Paintbush which is plant I noticed yesterday in the novel.

As of now I think the water sources will not provide any health/happiness so these can come from the plants and minerals. I'd still like spice to provide a happiness benefit too.
 
Well, I'm having some fun playing with the concept. :)

I completely removed water from all base terrain - so the desert planet is now really a desert. Feels right. Then I added in three grades of spring, producing +5, +7, +9 water respectively, and increased the prevalence until most city sites contained 3 or so springs. You can see that it still needs further tuning ... two of the richest springs in my starting square = insane growth. I'm going to play some more, when I get a nice balance I'll post the XML and graphics. (Yes, I'm going to fix the bitten bread icon)



On the plant life, I think all of: Sword Grass, Burro Weed, Barrel Cactus, Creosote and Sand Verbena would be plants that dew could be collected from. I'm thinking these plants can probably a very small amount of water unimproved and then a greater amount with the Dew Collectors improvement. I awould like to replace Inkvine which is native to Geidi Prime with Spiked Paintbush which is plant I noticed yesterday in the novel.

As of now I think the water sources will not provide any health/happiness so these can come from the plants and minerals. I'd still like spice to provide a happiness benefit too.

I like the direction you're going with this, but I'm thinking that the main source of water ought to come from improvements like windtraps etc. I dunno if there are springs on dune, but that nuclear blue glowing slime stuff's gotta go. :lol:

Ugh, and somebody get rid of those dam mushrooms already!:crazyeye:
 
Well, I'm thinking of making the richest water source the Aquifer bonus which doesn't produce any water to begin with, but will produce plenty with the Well/Deep Well improvement. But there does have to be some water available from the beginning to get you started while you build a Worker to build Wells/Windtraps/Dew Collectors.

Ignore the art for now. It's a placeholder. :)
 
Ugh, and somebody get rid of those dam mushrooms already!:crazyeye:

Simply getting rid of the mushrooms is obviously trivial in the xml. But the chop bonus seems pretty important. In the dead dev thread, we thought about using "rocks with lichen" instead. There is a marker stone resource available at the download database I swapped in previously but I didn't like the result much.

Do you have any suggestions?
 
Looks great! :goodjob:

But what is about city sieges? You can cripple whole food (water) production with 2-3 units now. We have to make sure AI knows that too.
 
Defending your water sources will be really important, but that makes things interesting strategically.

Doesn't the AI know to defend things like Iron in vanilla? There is a tag called iAIObjective in the Bonus Infos which sounds interesting. It's not mentioned here which has been enormously helpful on all the other tags.
 
You are right, this could be really interesting. Having water located only on a few tiles will also give us more possibilites to increase shield production.
 
iAIObjective is definitely useful. I used it in Fury Road on all the ruined buildings, and the AI definitely shows an interest in them. There are also some iAIWeights you can set in bonusinfos.xml.
 
It doesn't really make sense for the landscape of Dune to be providing food from every tile either. It was one of the first things that irked me about the mod.

Well, its possible to set up drip-irrigation farming almost anywhere, but not to get water from almost anywhere.

Your system looks interseting, but I think it will really mess with city growth rates and AI behavior.

In normal civ, you had to work a moderate number of tiles in order to get food excess food to support citizens working on other tiles or become city specialists.
You could have a cottage grassland that would feed itself and grow, or a hills mine that would need another food tile in order to support it.

Here, all your food comes from only like 3 tiles.
So all the food income a city could ever have will come from its first 3 population.

Small cities will grow incredibly fast, but large cities will grow even slower than normal, and the population cap for a city will be determined solely by the distribution of bonus resources, and very little on improvements you build.

City placement (to get as much food in as possible) will be incredibly important. The AI is really bad at city placement as it is, but its also used to the fact that it can build farms to get a reasonable size city almost anywheere.

If the AI can't recognize that a) it won't be able to get more food by building farms on normal land and b) it *will* be able to get extra food by windtrapping hills, then it is likely to choose city spots very badly, and potentially expand even more slowly than now.

I'm not saying it can't work, but it leads to radically different behavior and outcomes, and potentially really dumb AI.
 
Simply getting rid of the mushrooms is obviously trivial in the xml. But the chop bonus seems pretty important. In the dead dev thread, we thought about using "rocks with lichen" instead. There is a marker stone resource available at the download database I swapped in previously but I didn't like the result much.

Do you have any suggestions?

I think that chopping is something talked about by people who enjoy maximizing their Civ4 efficiency to win on Diety or whatever. They do it because the rules allow it, not because there is some need for that in a game like Civ.

I'm no expert Civ player, heck I never play above Noble, but the only time I ever chop is if I want to build something in that forest tile. I'm probably wasting production by not paying attention to my build queue, but I'm quite sure I enjoy Civ every bit as much as the best of them.

I say get rid of the whole chopping thing, and let the maximizers do what they do in other ways.
 
I also play on Noble. In vanilla, I tend to save chop for when I have a sudden emergency or need a wonder, then I send a few workers to go chop around that city. But the tradeoff is losing some health. So I think it adds a little.

If we delete the mushrooms off the map altogether, will the map be too boring?
 
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