A new terrain improvement system

[moopoo]

ok. This idea is based on the idea of excess goods, and city population limits.

Unless i am sorely mistaken:

People learnt to irrigate, then settled down. They would farm for the food they needed. Excess could be sold, thus generating profit. with lots of farming, they need more city to live in. thus the city expanded. When people mine, they too generate profit.

So my Idea. you build a farm. It generates food, which in turn generates population. It also generates commerce. Mines generate Hammers. they Also generate commerce. BUT. A city initially has a population limit of 3. To allow for more, one must build a cottage, which can hold an extra population point. as it upgrades it can hold more population, at which point you need to build another cottage. the cottage line would also generate a small amount of hammers, and a small amount of commerce.

The other less used improvements could build on this idea. but that's the basic of it.

I could probably mod this one myself. The only problem would be imposing population restrictions. Worth doing, do you guys reckon?

 

[Popcornlord]

Sounds cool, but might be sorta hard to program the population limit. I have no idea how to, so it probalby involves python or c++

 

[Dom Pedro II]

This would in fact not be terribly difficult. Earlier civ games had hard population limits that could be raised with the construction of Aqueducts and Sewer Systems. I think though that the reason they removed this, however, was due to the fact that people were unhappy that additional food was essentially going to waste if you reached the population cap. There's a lot of things that they removed like that because they deemed them to be "unfun" like Corruption resulting in a loss of hammers, civil disorder rendering a city essentially useless, etc.

So that's something to take into consideration for the future.

 

[moopoo]

true. could the food perhaps be funnelled into something else? the excess could be converted into production or commerce. Both of these would make sense, as either having the food sold, or a kind of slavery, where people get killed to make stuff/people used to train units.

I don't think this population limiter would be annoying, especially if the above is done, as I for one have often found myself with cities expanding to quickly and creating unhappiness and unhealthiness. Which is never nice

 

[Edgecrusher]

I am not sure if this is what you had in mind, but I wish there was a system to "trade" food between your cities.

For Example:
City A Has 8 Surplus food (say its in the middle of grasslands with all farms and a couple resources).
City B, built on a Tundra to harvest Iron, Marble, or another resource, the city has a problem producing food.

Instead of having the city A grow and grow, and City B struggle, I wish you could "Send" say 2 (or 4)... of the surplus food. Obviously with an option to cancel the exchange, or what have you.

 

[Dom Pedro II]

I've been looking into create such a system, Edgecrusher, but unfortunately, to create it, I would need an interface for the player which is not my expertise. I have very few python skills eventhough I code the SDK portion of this.

 

[Edgecrusher]

I am useless when it comes to the SDK or Python, although I recently starting treaching myself some of the SDK stuff.

I always wanted to teach myself these things and work out some kind of a "commodites mod" where the resources would be just "Raw" and the buildings produced different commodities. The commodities being the things that provided happiness/health/extra production/commerce/etc...

Basically a system where the Resources got consumed in different ways, at the option of the user.

For Example the Cow resourse:

Build a Butcher: Turn 1 Cow into "Meat" or "Steaks"
Build a Tannery: Turn 1 Cow into "Leather"
Build a Dairy Farm: Produce 1 "Dairy" or "Milk" with cow (since in this instance the Cow isnt "consumed"

So at the players option/need he could either have Meat/Leather or "Dairy" (or with 2 Cow resources) all 3.

I just never understood how 1 Iron or 1 Cow was capable of supplying an entire Empire with enough resources to fuel the empires need.

 

[Dom Pedro II]

Edge, now you're getting into Quantitative Resources, and I refer you to Gaius Octavius's thread on this topic... which has proven to have immense difficulties in achieving because of how Civ is designed. Possible? Yes, but even I basically removed myself from the project because it was just too much.

 

[moopoo]

Lol. Thread theft!

Refering to your first post, Edgecrusher, that isn't what I had in mind =D While i think that would be a good idea in terms of realism, I think that would add a level of micromanagement that Civ4 tries desperately to avoid (as you would have to go into the city screen and set specific amounts for specific cities). My idea is more a different way of dealing with improvements.

 

[MurdockTheCrazy]

I like this idea... Would go well if added to quantitative resoruces.

 

[moopoo]

Cool. Anyone got any suggestions on how to go about limiting population?

 

[GoodGame]

D'ooooh! Duplicate post

 

[GoodGame]

I reckon that that flies in the face of what Civ has been from the beginning, which was micromanaging plots to get the ideal combination of food and hammers. The main advantage of lumping hammers, food etc into one improvement type would be less micro-managing though. I could see it working if there were a successive stream of improvement types, each better than the next, and logically tech dependent.

Actually on your history, there is a concept of Pastoralism as being a reason for people to settle down. Basically think of it as proto-farming. After that they gradually developed kind of science of farming and husbandry.

I think the gist of what you want has already been done in other mods. For instance the FFH mod has an Aristocracy civic that causes all farms to make 1 food less, but some also some commerce. So you could accomplish similar things just by changing civics, rather than having to design a brand new improvement system. Perhaps create a brand new civic category called Production, solely civics that modify what the output of the improvement tiles are.

ok. This idea is based on the idea of excess goods, and city population limits.

Unless i am sorely mistaken:

People learnt to irrigate, then settled down. They would farm for the food they needed. Excess could be sold, thus generating profit. with lots of farming, they need more city to live in. thus the city expanded. When people mine, they too generate profit.

So my Idea. you build a farm. It generates food, which in turn generates population.

 

[moopoo]

I wouldn't say it flies in the face of civ. My first civ game was Civ 3, where you put road on every tile to generate money, and you just choose between farms or mines.

The aim of this system is to balance between allowing for population, and how that population is used, as by building a cottage on a square, you are blocking that square from using a different improvement. also, there is a choice between building several cottages and getting the pop up quick, or waiting for your cottages to expand.

 

[Gaius Octavius]

Edge, now you're getting into Quantitative Resources, and I refer you to Gaius Octavius's thread on this topic... which has proven to have immense difficulties in achieving because of how Civ is designed. Possible? Yes, but even I basically removed myself from the project because it was just too much.

Actually, it ultimately won't. I have since developed an interesting work-around solution that will not involve having to completely redo the resource part of the SDK... unfortunately, my biggest enemy at present (aside from time) is my lack of experience in C++. However, I am going to attempt this soon, beginning with the oil counter.

 

[moopoo]

how did you guys learn C++?

 

[black baron]

i had civ 3 too as my first civ, one way you could limit pop. is by (as someone stated before) units "kill" population like in civ 3 a settler would consume one pop. so you'd have to wait before expanding.

secondly, the micromanaging could be fixed with an interface where a "governor" (the computer) takes care of the micromanaging so you wouldn't, this of course could be optional so some of the control freaks might be interested

 

[primordial stew]

Ignoring the AI for the time being.. how about just have a new set of buildings that do resource conversion? Consider a city having cow/sheep/deer.. in the city radius. That city could build could build from a mutex list:
1. tannery - provides leather for military units, so +15% ground unit production (obsolete with gunpowder)
2. butcher - provides meat for this city, so +1 extra food (+2 food if the city is on ice or tundra)
with salt (or some tech which implies salt), +2 additional food, and +1 trade routes

Meat is more complex since it spoils very easy. Others foods are simpler.

Any kind of grain (enables a granary to be built):
1. bakery: provides bread for this city, so +2 food
2. grain shipments: no local bonus, instead gives the city +3gpt and +1 trade routes
3. tavern: provides +3 gold
4. distillery: provides +1 gold, and +1 trade routes


And for cities without said resource within it's radius, the trade routes are taken away.
1. import grain: +2 food, and -1 trade routes
2. import meat: +2 food, and -1 trade routes

Trade routes handle all of the coin transfer. The mod comp would only need to handle the building mutex condition, trade route updates, and food updates. Buildings would be cheap, 10 hammers maybe.


As for how many cities can build "import grain"? Ummm... well this is just a start. The keys are checking for local (ie within the city radius) resources, and then the manipulation of the number of trade routes. Pretty sure that most of this (if not all) can be done in python.

This is a mix of the civ4 + civ3 ways in that if a city wants to it will consume resource locally and grow, or it can export those resources for extra gold.

 

[black baron]

drifting off subject but that would be cool

 

[moopoo]

Lol yeah i was thinking the same thing.

Again on a slightly different topic: I've been thinking about how to trade food/hammers between cities. I've come up with an idea that would be very difficult to code, and even harder to teach to the ai. Aren't they all

What about having a button, in the city screen, in the trade routes section, saying 'create route'. Here you could pick the city you're trading the food/hammers off to, and choose between food or hammers. these trade routes would cost commerce, based on city distance, which would also be taken into consideration.

Whatcha think?