KevinTMC
Utopian
Greetings all,
So long as people are mulling over ideas and starting to put together modding projects, I thought I'd mention the one big improvement to gameplay that I have been wanting to see for several versions now.
So here goes. First, the problem; then, my envisioned solution.
PROBLEM:
It is hard for me to figure in my head just what a particular set of improvements in the city sphere will lead to in the long run.
When deciding whether to build a farm or cottage or what-have-you I find myself looking at a couple different screens, plus a helpful guide to terrain that I printed out from the forums. After looking back and forth between these, I give a couple of orders to a couple of workers (the worker task queueing is nice, but needs further improvement); and then, a few turns later, repeat all the above. Until all that's left is to build roads and railroads, at which point I click the auto-trade-network button and finally enjoy a holiday from micro-managing!
Or I give up on most of the above and just start ordering the workers to build whatever looks nice.
Either way, down the road I will often find that the city is not quite optimized in the direction I would have liked...I should have held the population down, I ought to have built a town on that square much earlier, I shouldn't have cut that forest, I wound up not working that tile I went out of my way to improve for ages, etc., etc.
Then there's the additional problem of the tedium involved in manually executing a plan over however-many years it takes, even when I do have one.
SOLUTION:
Create a new city screen--or add to the existing one--so that the player can dynamically draw up a city plan and then order it to be executed.
The screen I imagine would give the player a map of the city's workable tiles and allow "what-if" placement of improvements and modifications on the tiles. There would also be statistical feedback provided...i.e., if you build this combination of improvements, then your city can feed x many people before Biology and y many people after; when it grows to size z then here is the projected production, health, happiness, and so on; et cetera. Perhaps the player could also play around with assigning workers to tiles, in order to better determine which ones need to be improved how soon and in which order, and what the production will look like at each stage of the city's growth.
The player would then be able to order his workers to automatically execute the city plan. Control freaks like myself would thus be able to save ourselves a ton of drudgery down the road by making the workers' decisions for them from the beginning. If the planning model were really sophisticated, it would even allow the player to pre-order modifications to the city plan as new technologies are acquired (i.e., "build a farm here, then replace it with a watermill when available").
Would anything remotely resembling this be possible via a mod? I don't understand how this all works well enough to have a clue. (I knew most of what was worth knowing about personal computers...back in 1987 or so. Fat lot of good it does me now!
)
So long as people are mulling over ideas and starting to put together modding projects, I thought I'd mention the one big improvement to gameplay that I have been wanting to see for several versions now.
So here goes. First, the problem; then, my envisioned solution.
PROBLEM:
It is hard for me to figure in my head just what a particular set of improvements in the city sphere will lead to in the long run.
When deciding whether to build a farm or cottage or what-have-you I find myself looking at a couple different screens, plus a helpful guide to terrain that I printed out from the forums. After looking back and forth between these, I give a couple of orders to a couple of workers (the worker task queueing is nice, but needs further improvement); and then, a few turns later, repeat all the above. Until all that's left is to build roads and railroads, at which point I click the auto-trade-network button and finally enjoy a holiday from micro-managing!
Or I give up on most of the above and just start ordering the workers to build whatever looks nice.
Either way, down the road I will often find that the city is not quite optimized in the direction I would have liked...I should have held the population down, I ought to have built a town on that square much earlier, I shouldn't have cut that forest, I wound up not working that tile I went out of my way to improve for ages, etc., etc.
Then there's the additional problem of the tedium involved in manually executing a plan over however-many years it takes, even when I do have one.
SOLUTION:
Create a new city screen--or add to the existing one--so that the player can dynamically draw up a city plan and then order it to be executed.
The screen I imagine would give the player a map of the city's workable tiles and allow "what-if" placement of improvements and modifications on the tiles. There would also be statistical feedback provided...i.e., if you build this combination of improvements, then your city can feed x many people before Biology and y many people after; when it grows to size z then here is the projected production, health, happiness, and so on; et cetera. Perhaps the player could also play around with assigning workers to tiles, in order to better determine which ones need to be improved how soon and in which order, and what the production will look like at each stage of the city's growth.
The player would then be able to order his workers to automatically execute the city plan. Control freaks like myself would thus be able to save ourselves a ton of drudgery down the road by making the workers' decisions for them from the beginning. If the planning model were really sophisticated, it would even allow the player to pre-order modifications to the city plan as new technologies are acquired (i.e., "build a farm here, then replace it with a watermill when available").
Would anything remotely resembling this be possible via a mod? I don't understand how this all works well enough to have a clue. (I knew most of what was worth knowing about personal computers...back in 1987 or so. Fat lot of good it does me now!
)-- Kevin
