I will be working on this, but am new to modding, so I'm posting it in the open. Some elements of it become much more complicated than others.
Improved Town Utility
Purpose: To improve the utility of towns-as-towns, creating incentives to keep settlements as towns instead of converting to cities.
Other design intentions:
Supporting the importance of choosing to create farming towns over other towns, especially with the high growth rate of growing towns (which, we are reminded, produce gold), should be a new system of food distribution. This will be supported by a new settlement connection system.
Settlement connection rules:
Food distribution can now be customized, as larger cities will no longer need surplus food (thematically, the middle class is using their gold salaries to purchase food from a free market not managed by bureaucrats, and market revenues are implicitly connected to implicit taxation related to town hammers into gold). You may want to direct food to growing cities instead of to well grown cities, or you may want to massively consolidate food so you can create specialists.
To nerf over-stockpiling town yields to fast grow cities (as towns themselves now grow rather fast), there will be distance limits on food:
Replacing settlement caps will be the following distance and happiness based system:
Changes To Towns
Towns now have the ability to produce militia. These cost food not production. They produce at a fixed rate of half the town's food output, no greater than the cost of one unit per turn (proper cost TBD). Any food spent toward the militia will be removed evenly from distribution. There will be two types of militia:
Third permanent specialization:
Workers' camp.
A specialized town can always be reverted to a growing town, but there will now be a third option: the workers' camp. A workers' camp can:
About these changes:
With increased town growth rates, your empire will feel like it's growing fast and can really fill out even a larger map. You have a lot of options for generating yields and defending settlements, but to fully implement them, you need a set of well-placed, diversely specialized towns. In theory, you can play the entire game this way. However, without cities, natural (rather than hard and fast) limits begin to bear down on you empire due to distance from capital and tile availability. Cities solve this, and allow for substantial boosts to yields overall, producing advanced military units with incredible combat bonuses. This is town-wide, city-tall play and its meant to be simultaneous, more along the lines of wide play rewarding less advanced players and tall play opening up opportunities for more advanced players. However, this is without a punishing trade off between tall and wide. Wide is always available and it is especially suited for the larger maps which should represent a more satisfying and thrilling complete experience. However, tall is where advance players can thrive and excel, in addition to wide play. Beautiful gameplay comes from fully diversifying town specialization for incredibly strong empires, on top of strategically chosen bonus sets produced by cities. Ideally, these trade offs should manifest as results. A cavalry focused player will drive a challenger off the steppe, but not penetrating their well-defended walled cities, while the other player will develop navies to compensate through trade and coastal warfare.
Changes To Town Specialization
Town specializations will now be enhanced to increase their utility as towns.
Improved Town Utility
Purpose: To improve the utility of towns-as-towns, creating incentives to keep settlements as towns instead of converting to cities.
Other design intentions:
- To utilize the town-city dichotomy to achieve better game balance, with a more forgiving, less balanced, less restrained early game juxtaposed against a more nuanced, more skill rewarding city based late game.
- To lean into tactical gameplay, with more easily obtained units and bigger battles, with fewer pain points resulting from balance that slows production.
- To expand the scope of the antiquity age, where things happen more quickly, allowing for wider spread suitable for larger maps. While technology and wonder production will remain balanced.
- Intended only for Antiquity Age. If these changes were to carry over to the other Ages, it would be with significant changes to those ages (i.e.: Modern Age becomes scenario based rather than continued progression)
- Increased town growth rates
- Modified settlement cap
- Higher convert to city costs
- Improved town functions
- Growing Towns grow at 100% (maybe 200%) of standard growth rate. This should "feel" fast, and granaries should "feel" very fast. De-specializing back into growing should be prompted by the anticipation of "fast feeling" growth so that frequent changes to specialization can occasionally feel appropriate.
- Specialized towns grow at 50% standard growth (i.e.: they keep growing in spite of specialization so that the faster growing town growth rate doesn't disincentivize ever specializing)
- Farming towns don't grow
Supporting the importance of choosing to create farming towns over other towns, especially with the high growth rate of growing towns (which, we are reminded, produce gold), should be a new system of food distribution. This will be supported by a new settlement connection system.
Settlement connection rules:
- A newly founded settlement automatically road connects through the shortest route possible to the nearest friendly settlement, relying on open borders policy if applicable. The road length must be within trade range, or the settlement will not be connected.
- The distance between two settlements is the total road length to pass from settlement to settlement to get to the destination. Because of triangular geometry, this might not be the shortest possible route. Merchant road-to can directly connect settlements who are only connected through a third settlement, and reduce road length.
- To make use of this feature and encourage city connections to utilize the road-to function more (i.e.: Mandarins receive a bonus for this), for every settlement, each road connected to it will add a -1 road length modifier to all its roads. For example, if a settlement is connected to three roads of lengths, 8, 10 and 13, the modified length of those roads will become 5, 7 and 10 respectively. Thematically, this assumes better mercantile infrastructure in natural hub settlements. You can use this feature to dramatically reduce trade route lengths. Trade route maximums may need to be shortened, although I think this won't be a problem on larger maps which can have extreme separation between trading partners.
Food distribution can now be customized, as larger cities will no longer need surplus food (thematically, the middle class is using their gold salaries to purchase food from a free market not managed by bureaucrats, and market revenues are implicitly connected to implicit taxation related to town hammers into gold). You may want to direct food to growing cities instead of to well grown cities, or you may want to massively consolidate food so you can create specialists.
To nerf over-stockpiling town yields to fast grow cities (as towns themselves now grow rather fast), there will be distance limits on food:
- 100% of food can be split between any cities within 10 tiles.
- No greater than 50% of food can be split between any cities within 11-20 tiles.
- No greater than 10% of food can be split between any cities within 21-30 tiles.
- Food cannot be distributed further than 30 tiles, although maritime distances receive a +10 modifier.
- However, hub settlements with road distance modifiers can reduce the "road distance" counted in tiles relative to the actual literal distance for the purposes of food distribution. This will make road-to functions critical in improving your food network.
- Screen left will feature a list of towns, each showing their total food available for distribution (or whether they are growing), along with how much is currently distributed.
- The map layer will show all settlement connections, with road adjacent numbers showing the modified road length.
- Clicking on a town in the sidebar will highlight its connections, with modified range displayed through tile colorization (bullseye pattern).
- Clicking on a settlement on the map will highlight the connection and show the road length, a menu pop-up will appear next to the settlement icon with an up/down arrow interactable allowing for direct allotment of food yields. Changes will reflect back to the left in the sidebar, showing how much food is left over from the town's production, left to be allotted.
- Each town will also have three auto-distribution options. Distant/middle-range/close. Close distribution will send all food evenly between all cities within the 10 tile range. Middle-range will take 50% of food and distribute evenly to the 11-20 tile range cities, distributing the rest to nearby cities. Distant will distribute 10% to far cities, 40% to medium, and the remaining 50% to close cities.
- In the event that there are no 1-10 tile cities, 50% of food will be left over in the town, even if it is a farming town. In this case a farming town will grow from the natural leftover yields.
Replacing settlement caps will be the following distance and happiness based system:
- Every 10 tiles distant from the capital, towns will receive a -5 happiness penalty.
- On top of this, when a town is within 10 tiles of any other city it receives a +5 happiness bonus.
- If you have a town sandwiched between two cities, itself 30 tiles distant from the capital, you would have -15 happiness plus +10 happiness, for a total -5 happiness. Distance induces unhappiness but can be mitigated with city placement. No settlement caps otherwise.
- Modified road distance due to hubs modifies this happiness calculation. The algorithm will take the lesser of as-the-crow-flies or road connection distance.
- Civics and techs which formerly increased settlement cap will now instead both add +5 happiness as a universal modifier on all towns against the penalty (it can't create positive happiness), and reverse one tier off the cost of city purchasing. The first few cap increases will solve the unhappiness problem, but the last few will more serve to help afford cities.
- Cities do not suffer happiness modification due to settlement concerns. Exception: occupied cities will receive a -5 happiness modification per 20 tile distance from your capital, but a +5 happiness bonus per 20 tile distance from their founders' capital, not going positive but counting against the penalty (30 tiles for maritime, and as always, tile distance is modified by road distance).
- City costs will now be adjusted to balance tech progression over the scope of the age. Ultimate size and breadth of antiquity empires is no longer limited by anything other than settler costs and happiness/distance modification. However, the ability to produce large yields through city development will represent how balance is implemented.
- Ideally, balance will take the form of aligning typical player performance with the cadence of the crisis.
- 85% of players and situations should be able to reach tier 3 units and buildings by the final crisis policy. 15% of players and situations should be able to reach tier 3 units and buildings at the onset of the crisis. 50% of players and situations will reach 3 tier units and buildings by the middle crisis policy.
- This cadence will be implemented through managing cost to purchase cities in light of the changes to town growth rates and food distribution. Ideally, maps can be completely inundated with units, but nuanced combat bonuses and tech tier levels will be limited to advanced players optimizing their situation.
- Some wonders and civics may need to be modified to accommodate difficult-to-implement, overpowered bonuses which represent hard trade-offs with other bonuses. This last detail may be the most important, and also remains the most vague at this stage.
- The actually correct balancing for city costs is contingent on implementing the improved towns and seeing how things unfold.
Changes To Towns
Towns now have the ability to produce militia. These cost food not production. They produce at a fixed rate of half the town's food output, no greater than the cost of one unit per turn (proper cost TBD). Any food spent toward the militia will be removed evenly from distribution. There will be two types of militia:
- Peasant: 10 combat strength, 2 sight, 1 movement (i.e.: half a warrior).
- Militiaman: Unlocks upon researching tier 2 infantry (bronze working). Equal in strength to a warrior and a slinger, both infantry and ranged in ability.
Third permanent specialization:
Workers' camp.
A specialized town can always be reverted to a growing town, but there will now be a third option: the workers' camp. A workers' camp can:
- Produce city-state suzerain buildables received through diplomacy.
- Produce warehouses/altars/town purchasable buildings.
- Produce at a 50% rate of total hammers rounded up, costs 1 gold per hammer used toward production. In other words, zero gold from hammers, half hammer production rate.
- E.g.: granaries cost 55 production but 220 gold; for a 20 hammer town, you will trade-off 10 gold and pay 10 gold, getting 10 hammers of production and zero gold from hammers. You can produce a granary in 6 turns. 6 turns is 120 gold traded off. So, you save 100 gold, and the gold cost is distributed over 6 turns instead of upfront, but you wait 6 turns instead of 1, and you forgo the benefits of normal specialization.
About these changes:
With increased town growth rates, your empire will feel like it's growing fast and can really fill out even a larger map. You have a lot of options for generating yields and defending settlements, but to fully implement them, you need a set of well-placed, diversely specialized towns. In theory, you can play the entire game this way. However, without cities, natural (rather than hard and fast) limits begin to bear down on you empire due to distance from capital and tile availability. Cities solve this, and allow for substantial boosts to yields overall, producing advanced military units with incredible combat bonuses. This is town-wide, city-tall play and its meant to be simultaneous, more along the lines of wide play rewarding less advanced players and tall play opening up opportunities for more advanced players. However, this is without a punishing trade off between tall and wide. Wide is always available and it is especially suited for the larger maps which should represent a more satisfying and thrilling complete experience. However, tall is where advance players can thrive and excel, in addition to wide play. Beautiful gameplay comes from fully diversifying town specialization for incredibly strong empires, on top of strategically chosen bonus sets produced by cities. Ideally, these trade offs should manifest as results. A cavalry focused player will drive a challenger off the steppe, but not penetrating their well-defended walled cities, while the other player will develop navies to compensate through trade and coastal warfare.
Changes To Town Specialization
Town specializations will now be enhanced to increase their utility as towns.
- Farming town (unchanged, save for the customized food distribution feature)
- Mining town: Retain hammer % bonus. Mines have +1 hammer adjacency for mines (a mine surrounded by 6 mines creates +12 additional hammers). Woodcutters have +1 food adjacency for woodcutters (7 tile woodcutters = +12 food). No such bonuses for clay pits or quarries, other than the total yield bonus.
- Hub town - Retain city connection influence boost. Add 5% diplomatic endeavor yield boost per connection to that civ, at a maximum of 50% (imagine 4 border towns across from 4 border towns with a farmer's market food boost of 15% on 100 food yield. Normal endeavor makes 115 food. 4 hubs each connected to 4 hubs is 16x5 = 80 capped at 50%. So 150 food is the modified result of 4 hub towns just from that one endeavor). 5% to food yields in domestic food distribution per connection (3 roads, one carries 20 food, one carries 8 food, one carries 40 food for 68 total; 3x5%= 15%; 23 food, 9 food, 46 food after modification for 78 total).
- "Cult Center" Trade Town - Trade route increase remains (however, is somewhat redundant due to hub settlement road distance reduction multiplier; route increases are now for far flung settlements to stretch out a trade network on a large map). Happiness bonus remains (to mitigate distance unhappiness effects). In addition, altars built in cult centers will produce double yields on pantheon bonuses. This is particularly thematically appropriate, especially for marginal pantheons. For instance, Iranians would build fire altars on mountain tops. Mountains were sacred. If your pantheon is rainforest based, then it's not a matter of if your city happens to be in a rainforest, it's more a matter of strategically settling towns in as much rainforest as possible to serve as religious destinations.
- Philosopher's Retreat (new) - +5 science with +1 adjacency for districts on town center. Scales ageXage (exploration +20/+4, modern +45/+9). In Antiquity, if you built 10 towns just to science specialize them, and you somehow built 3 districts in each, you'd have 8x10 = 80 science. This is pretty good parity for the age, considering all the specializations you're passing up.
- Bard's Hollow (new) - +5 culture, etc. Not necessarily redundant with Augustus, who can just make more culture or forgo this specialization for something like a mining town, but still get culture from them.
- Fort Town - Retain defensive bonus. Fort towns can now produce any military unit and defensive structures. Functions equivalent to workers' camp in calculating production.
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