I'm returning to playing Civ4 after many years
Welcome back!
1. WonderBread Economy (
http://forums.civfanatics.com/threa...-10-year-veteran.574724/page-12#post-14463743 )
3. Rushing small units for money from overproduction.
4. Missionary gold.
I believe that a discussion on these items needs to talk about them all in the same discussion, as the design of a chosen alternate implementation should take them all into account, even if only some of them were to be changed.
In Civ 3, if I recall correctly, overflow Hammers were lost. You got nothing for them--no Hammers, no Gold, no anything. So, allowing Hammers to overflow was a helpful addition to Civ 4, to avoid tedious and needless micromanagement.
The rule of Hammer overflow being capped at the cost of the item being produced was a pretty clever rule, and I think that this rule, or some rule like it, deserves to be in place. Sticking with this rule is as good as any other arbitrary rule, so I'm quite fine with it, at least for the case when no production bonuses are involved.
So, we already have a way to avoid the extreme micromanagement of needing to "precisely" complete a build item in order to avoid excess Hammers from disappearing into the ether.
Do we really need a "reward" for the Hammers which exceed this game-designed cap of overflowing a maximum of the number of Hammers that cost to produce the current build item? That's the fundamental question for item #3.
Now, add to the discussion a second cap that lets you actually exceed the amount of Hammers overflowing past the cost of the current build item if you generate more than that number of Hammers in a single turn. Is this second rule really needed? Maybe not, but it appears to have been designed into the game, so there is a second possible cap.
Regardless of which cap applies, the game intentionally limits how many Hammers that you can overflow.
So, the question still remains: do we really need an additional reward (Gold) or can we simply be happy with the fact that we don't have to perform extreme micromanagement for every build item just to get an exact number of Hammers over a series of turns?
Minorly further complicating the situation is
Hammer Overflow Cap Exploit bug, which allows for even more Hammers to overflow than either of those two designed-in caps. However, due to players' consensus that this extension of the Hammer overflow cap should not be allowed in our games, let us exclude it from the discussion as being an unintended bug that is treated as an exploit and which does not fit the design of the two possible caps on overflow Hammers.
As for item #4, I would argue that it was a poor design choice. If I whip a Monument, but I obtain Stonehenge before that City can produce the Monument, then I don't get anything for those Hammers. They simply sit inside of the Monument build item, which can no longer be completed, until I lose access to Stonehenge.
Personally speaking, I believe that that's how Missionary Hammers aught to work--they should remain as Hammers, no matter how many Missionaries are in build queues or have been produced. Yes, you could argue that you could have a lot of Cities put a few Hammers into Missionaries over a period of time, then have a short window of Slavery where you whip a lot of Missionaries over a short period of time, but even then, the game's imposed limits of only 3 Missionaries existing at a time are not being exceeded, so you have a very practical limit to just how much you can prepare this way. I don't think that this preparation of putting a few Hammers into many Missionaries over time would be seen as a bad thing and I think that it is quite reasonable to do--you can accomplish the exact same thing right now if you limit yourself to having 2 Missionaries completed at a time, then quickly spreading them, then having the other Cities that had a few Hammers stored in other Missionaries whipping them, at a maximum of 2 at a time. So, you can already "make use of" the ability to have Hammers stored up in a lot of Missionaries, thus it doesn't seem like the change would be significant from what you can already do.
So, I would be in favour of changing the code to make it so that Missionary and Executive Hammers don't turn into Gold when the capped amount of those Units exist on the map and/or in build queues.
As for Wonders, the answer to whether or not we should "reward" a player with Failure Gold can be closely linked to Hammer overflow. For example, an alternate implementation would allow you to return those Hammers as HAMMERS.
There are design tradeoffs here. For example, is it realistic to start building a structure that looks like The Pyramids, nearly complete it, then switch those Hammers into Hammers in The Oracle? People might question the reality of the game, especially if you could then overflow the remaining Hammers into completing Stonehenge on the turn after that.
Further, if the Hammers were used for a smaller build item, like a Warrior, the first cap on overflow Hammers would kick in, prompting a player to get frustrated when the last Wonder that could be built at a given time is the one that got completed by an AI, forcing you to "only" build a maximum of two small build items with those Hammers.
So, okay, given the overall situation, converting those Hammers from a single City into Gold seems like a reasonable choice.
However, WHICH Hammers get turned into Wonder Failure Gold is certainly up for debate. Why do the final Hammers get converted? Why not the base Hammers?
I don't think that it would be unreasonable for the base Hammers to convert into Gold.
Now, it's easy for me to say so, but does the game actually keep track of base Hammers across of turns? Aha! Now, therein lies the rub. Maybe not--maybe the game was slow enough as it was on hardware at the time that this number likely wasn't being tracked.
It's also easier to explain to a casual player that final Hammers were used, since, for a casual player, the concept of base Hammers vs final Hammers is glossed over in terms of the Wonder-completion bar.
So, even if this idea is reasonable, it might not apply until we get a game like Civ 7, when the game can be rewritten to keep track of base Hammers, given the assumption that this number isn't currently being tracked.
All right, so what other possibilities might exist? Well, the game is set up to allow only ONE copy of a given World Wonder (or even a given National Wonder within your empire) to exist. So, why should a player who chooses to build multiple copies expect to be rewarded for those extra copies?
I believe that it is quite reasonable to argue that a player who is building multiple copies of a Wonder, which is only supposed to exist in one place, should not expect to be rewarded in multiple places any more than a player should expect to be able to break the game by completing a Wonder in multiple Cities. Imagine being able to complete 10 simultaneous Stonehenges, for example, and getting a Monument in each City for each copy of Stonehenge that you have (10 Monuments per City, in this example), or completing 10 Oracles and getting 10 techs.
Since we can't get those multiple copies of Wonders, how does it make sense to get multiple copies of Failure Gold?
There is some trickiness with how the game calculates Wonder Failure Gold, since the game processes each City, in City Order, once per turn. So, if you have partial Hammers in The Pyramids in City #2 in the City Order and you complete The Pyramids in City #3 in the City Order, and you also have partial Hammers in The Pyramids in City #4 in the City Order, the game currently will give you the Hammers for City #4, but won't give you the Hammers for City #2 until a turn later.
This City-by-City processing may hamper some possible solutions, so let's make sure that a given alternate implementation takes it into account.
For example, if you complete a Wonder, one possible alternate solution would be that you do not get ANY Failure Gold from that Wonder. Period. Done deal. You don't need a reward for "missing" it, because you didn't miss it!
You got the Wonder! That fact should be reward enough for you. Failure Gold (in my opinion) was intended to reward the casual player who got beaten to completing the Wonder.
However, what happens if you didn't complete the Wonder? Well, if another player completes a Wonder, then the City-by-City processing will happen for EVERY City of yours on the turn after the Wonder was completed, so we do not need to worry about a Wonder being completed partway through the City-by-City processing order. But, here's where the implementation details of the City-by-City processing can get in the way.
For example, you could choose to give Failure Gold for the first City in the City Order that had partial Hammers in the Wonder, then provide no Failure Gold for any other Cities in the City Order. In a sense, this method is consistent with how the City Order deals with other tie-like scenarios, such as which City gets a Forest Chop that is equally distant from 2 or more Cities where that Chop resides outside of the big, fat cross of any of your Cities.
Now, exactly how to implement such functionality when processing is done City-by-City may be a bit complicated--you'd need more than just a boolean variable, because there might have been 2 Wonders that were completed on the same turn as each other, possibly by different AIs. It really depends upon the code's implementation as to what's actually possible to do.
Another possible idea would be to keep track of the highest amount of invested partial Hammers out of each City that had partial Hammers in that Wonder, then award Failure Gold that matched the City with the highest amount of partial Hammers. Ignoring intentional (mis)uses, such as Wonder Bread, this scenario would help you out if you'd changed your mind of where you'd like to complete a Wonder. However, the code would require a slightly-more complicated data structure, though, and the extra processing time required to support it would arguably not be worth paying a possible time delay for every turn in the game--just stick with the simpler rule of "the first City in the City Order" and avoid slowing down the game significantly, and people who care can simply be aware of how the game mechanic works and plan around it.
Again, though, it comes down to the current implementation, and we might be stuck with a slightly-less-palatable rule of only getting Failure Gold for a single Wonder in a given turn, no matter how many Wonders were completed by other players in the previous turn, just to keep the code simple and not impacting the game's performance significantly, with us using a single boolean variable to allow for only a single instance of Wonder Failure Gold (from other players completing Wonders) to be awarded per turn, no matter how many Wonders were just completed. It's not the most user-friendly of options, but it should be quite straight-forward to code, and players could simply take this behaviour into account when planning their Wonder construction plans.
So, if we choose to agree that Failure Gold should not be rewarded if you complete a Wonder yourself, and we find a way to limit Failure Gold from a Wonder that another player completes to a single City of yours, and if such a thing can be feasibly implemented without a significant performance impact to the game, then we come back to the question of whether there should be any Gold rewarded at all after overflow Hammers have been capped.
Given such a limit on Failure Gold from Wonders, then it seems rather out-of-place to reward Hammers, after the overflow caps are applied, as Gold.
INSTEAD, I would suggest that a discussion happen around whether the two types of Hammer caps are reasonable. If they are deemed to be reasonable, then it seems logical to extend the claim that no Gold should be rewarded for Hammers that exist past the calculated overflow cap, since you just said that you already are being awarded a reasonable cap. If, however, those caps are not deemed as reasonable, then I would argue that different rules for the caps be put in place and that the Hammers stay as Hammers, just with possible bigger caps, and that any further excess Hammers simply disappear, much like how ALL overflow Hammers would have disappeared in Civ 3.
So, you ask, then, in what way may the rules for the two caps change?
Well, if we look at how the first overflow cap works, when you own a Forge and you complete a Warrior, only 12 Hammers (Normal game speed) instead of 15 Hammers overflow. That example is a nice one to use, as it doesn't deal with rounding errors: 15 final Hammers / 1.25 Forge bonus to production = 12 base Hammers.
I would say that it would be a reasonable argument for the first cap to stick with only using base Hammers. So, if I complete a Warrior with some ridiculously-high number of final Hammers (say, I chopped many Forests on the same turn as each other), but the City can only produce 10 base Hammers from worked squares (meaning that the second cap wouldn't apply and only the first cap would apply), then, for the Normal game speed, I would have a maximum overflow cap of 15 Hammers, regardless of which final-Hammer production bonuses exist in the City.
I think that such a change fits within the spirit of the original rule behind the first type of cap. Further, such a change, in my opinion, would help to mitigate the "blow" of no longer getting Gold for overflow Hammers in excess of a cap, as the cap wouldn't be so limiting in a City with a lot of production bonuses. You still wouldn't earn extra Hammers--I mean, if you only had 30 final Hammers in a Warrior, you'd still only get ( 30 - 15 ) / 1.25 = 15 / 1.25 = 12 base Hammers overflowing, but if you had 50 final Hammers, and you hadn't triggered the second Hammer cap to apply by only producing a smaller amount of base Hammers from worked squares than the base Hammer cost of the item being produced, you would get the minimum of:
( final Hammers - base Hammers of the item being produced ) / production bonus
OR
base Hammers of the item being produced
which in this case would be the minimum of:
( 50 - 15 ) / 1.25 = 35 / 1.25 = 28
OR
15
meaning that you'd get 15 base Hammers overflowing.
Just to be clear: I am not advocating a rule-based change. Instead, I would advocate a possible code-based change, so that we are all forced to live by whatever change gets made. Having a ton of rules that are based on the honour-system isn't a great way to go, and such an approach of using honour-system rules should (in my opinion) generally be reserved for extreme examples, which seems to be the approach that is already used.
And for the record, I think games that were already done should stay anyway.
We have kept the games where code-based changes have made things impossible to perform anymore (infinite City-Liberating while at war with the Civ to whom you are Liberating a City is one such example), so this approach would be consistent with the decisions of the past, no matter how untouchable any such games might be given any changes which get made to the code.