Better RoM: BuildingUpgradeChains & Balance

[JosEPh_II]

The university thing still bothers me. In Germany, Killtech's observation about the universities is spot on. But the American system is VERY different (and Universities in the US are generally associated with significant increases in research, production, labor, capital, etc.)

Here in my home town if the Univ. was to close up this town would literally die. Only the local farmers and farm equipment businesses would survive.

Part of the problem is that the Actual values for each building that BUG provides is in 10ths of a percent. The use of per cents instead on integers can sometimes seem niggling in it's effects. I build a Library and I gain 3.60 test tubes, 1.06 culture and lose 0.62 Gold. I added 3.72 gold from Tailor shop but lost 0.65 from the Temple and 0.60 from the library and the maintenance for the Toll house is costing me 10% more and the bank causes 2 redfaces plus it only generates 30% commerce/gold but that is reduced by the 20% maintenance and soon I don't build banks! Or Universities or Toll houses. After a while my head is spinning.

I studied to be a Math teacher for High school ( ran out of funds for college before I could do my Student Teaching) and still my head hurts after an hour's play.

JosEPh

 

[Hydromancerx]

Afforess said, "...too many buildings..."

For the rest, let the discussion continue before I say anything else. That's why I'm very slightly disappointed about Killtech letting a certain modmodpack of buildings to pressure him. Killtech should stand up for what he believe in with a strong clarity, and along with Afforess and several others critical criticisms and analysis improve this modmod for AND .

You can say it. I am not offended. In fact I have changed much of my views on buildings and have come to like the whole upgrade chain idea.

However I still hope that some sort of balance can be made that has both more buildings and balance. How this can be done is a struggle that all of us modders have had to deal with.

In short I like the new ways Afforess has found for buildings and giving some (like his castle mod) more unique attributes. If such could be done for more buildings then perhaps there would be a great need for them, rather than just the same old stats re-packaged with a new icon.

That's one reason I really was hopping to get some crafting dependency chains working. At least then buildings would be there to unlock new buildings. Thus making what buildings you had important. Then combine that with the upgrade chains and unique features, then BAM! you got something.

 

[os79]

You can say it. I am not offended. In fact I have changed much of my views on buildings and have come to like the whole upgrade chain idea.

However I still hope that some sort of balance can be made that has both more buildings and balance. How this can be done is a struggle that all of us modders have had to deal with.

In short I like the new ways Afforess has found for buildings and giving some (like his castle mod) more unique attributes. If such could be done for more buildings then perhaps there would be a great need for them, rather than just the same old stats re-packaged with a new icon.

That's one reason I really was hopping to get some crafting dependency chains working. At least then buildings would be there to unlock new buildings. Thus making what buildings you had important. Then combine that with the upgrade chains and unique features, then BAM! you got something.

Yeah, but even if we had a strong disagreement in forum history, you in comparison with many other users always had "friendliness" aura and my tact always come into play. With some other users who don't have "friendly" aura about their posts, my tact just lose it .

Otherwise, cool .

 

[JosEPh_II]

The "Number" of buildings has never been my concern. I like variety. And have almost always used Hydro's stuff. It was when the Modmod went to % instead of integers that the headaches began.

I miss Hydro's Farm modmod. Cattle, sheep, pig, etc. Farms was a great idea. And the AI used them too! And that was the "key" IMHO to their success. Others cried "out of balance" and "OP" but that could've been easily addressed. Instead is the Farm Modmod still even in AND? I don't think so.

JosEPh

 

[Hydromancerx]

@os79

Thanks. You have been very civil as well with things. I agree we are more or less on opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to more content but i think we both want AND to be better. And nothing is wrong with a civil debate now and then.

@JosEPh_II

No its not in AND anymore (i wish it was), however HAND has it if you want to use it. It should work I think. I took out the wool resource need awhile back so there should not be any conflicts with that either. And I agree it was/is a great mod.

 

[Killtech]

sorry for my absence in the last time. i'm quite busy with other things right now.

I'm actually leaning towards agreeing with Joseph II on some key issues here. I love the concept of upgrade chains, and felt it was a feature RoM never really used that well. I love some of the new building ideas, especially the earlier ones. But that's where my praise ends. I'm starting to wonder if AND 1.74 without the upgrade chains is actually more balanced than with it. I know 1.74 without it has a bit of a issue with over-production, but I think that could be fixed fairly easily. However, BuildingUpgradeChains still causes way too much gold to be earned... in fact, it puts a huge emphasis on buildings, and makes the tiles you work almost inconsequential. The static bonuses make any and every city a major gold city, and it's not hard to have even size 2 cities producing 16-18 net gold for your empire.

true, i've also noticed there is still too much gold. at the other hand research speed progresses a bit less exponential (which was the priority). the concept was first to reduce bare commerce yield excess (of which research beakers derive). thus many raw commerce boni were cut and/or changed to gold boni (i couldn't get rid of the bonus completely because some buildings would have no good effects at all... and RoM has a lot of buildings). i've tried to get the gold bonus controlled by city maintenance which is a direct counterpart for income. but: city maintenance scales with city number and distance to palace (i.e. empire size) while the gold income from buildings scales with technology level (defines what you can build). so there is no trivial way to balance these.

Perhaps the issue is that there are just too many buildings, especially once you hit the Renaissance and Modern eras. I get weary of seeing a list of 35 buildings I can build, each in less than 3 turns. I'd rather see 10-12 buildings, averaging 6-12 turns.

isn't this one of the core differences between RoM and vanilla BtS? RoM adds a lot of stuff - especially balancing problems.

I think a consolidation of the Bazaar and Market lines is in order. Also, Trade Ports shouldn't give both extra trade routes, and gold, since a trade route is generally ~ 3 commerce each already. Also, instead of having the science and gold buildings produce negative hammers and happiness, why don't they just cost citizens to employ and staff them? Perhaps each requires one or two citizens to staff, who can't then act as specialists or workers for your tiles.

the gold from bazaar and markets only compensates the previous commerce you could get from resources - which was huge if you could acquire some of them: example bazaar: the original RoM bazaar gave +15%, +16 form 4 resources, +3 from 3 resources. i've reduced it to +10%, +10 form 10 resources, no happiness bonus.
the market was reduced form +20% down to +3 + 5 form resources. also the +6 happiness from resources was reduced.

your idea about specialist to work these buildings isn't bad but also requires much higher city sizes due to have enough population to be able to work a small amount of them. big change in balancing -> much work, many problems at the start.

instead i thought of something else. the maintenance calculation of city cost is somewhat problematic i think. it seems it was originally invented to bound the power of large empires (maintenance scales with city count and distance to capital). what is realistically missing is a summand for city size (evidently New York will have to pay more for infrastructure then a small village. and the costs will be more significant then the civ IV maintenance factors i guess). so let's say cities of size between 1-10 pay 0.2/size. above that they pay 0.5 per city size and beyond size 25 it's 1 per city size (as an example). commerce/gold buildings like markets can get a min population requirement so one has an mechanism to control gold income/expenses.

this is also the good effect that it lowers the over-powerness of mega cities.

 

[Killtech]

So, a university could give either a bonus to scientist specialists or provide a bonus dependent on the amount of scientists?

actually a good point. especially because this is doable and i think Afforess extended the possible yield/commerce changes to fractional values. this idea came to me too as i struggled with the boni for free press buildings (for alternative civics). made them give the basic citizen (normally gives +1 only) much more usable.

Part of the problem is that the Actual values for each building that BUG provides is in 10ths of a percent. The use of per cents instead on integers can sometimes seem niggling in it's effects. I build a Library and I gain 3.60 test tubes, 1.06 culture and lose 0.62 Gold. I added 3.72 gold from Tailor shop but lost 0.65 from the Temple and 0.60 from the library and the maintenance for the Toll house is costing me 10% more and the bank causes 2 redfaces plus it only generates 30% commerce/gold but that is reduced by the 20% maintenance and soon I don't build banks! Or Universities or Toll houses. After a while my head is spinning.

I studied to be a Math teacher for High school ( ran out of funds for college before I could do my Student Teaching) and still my head hurts after an hour's play.

very true point. but that is what you get if you add a lot of buildings (which all need some boni to make sense at all) and then notice that the game became unbalanced and you need to do quite a lot of changes to make it playable again.

at the other hand there are those who want to have it more realistic. and reality is infinitely more complicated then this causing much bigger headaches.

(one question though: banks should not cost any maintenance - no sense making a building that produces gold on the one side while cost some gold on the other. the should be the only negative effect of banks. is this different in your version?).

 

[Afforess]

your idea about specialist to work these buildings isn't bad but also requires much higher city sizes due to have enough population to be able to work a small amount of them. big change in balancing -> much work, many problems at the start.

instead i thought of something else. the maintenance calculation of city cost is somewhat problematic i think. it seems it was originally invented to bound the power of large empires (maintenance scales with city count and distance to capital). what is realistically missing is a summand for city size (evidently New York will have to pay more for infrastructure then a small village. and the costs will be more significant then the civ IV maintenance factors i guess). so let's say cities of size between 1-10 pay 0.2/size. above that they pay 0.5 per city size and beyond size 25 it's 1 per city size (as an example). commerce/gold buildings like markets can get a min population requirement so one has an mechanism to control gold income/expenses.

Maintenance is quickly become an extremely unpopular way to balance buildings. I suggest that we look to either more conventional means (increase hammer costs), and unconventional means (University, Factory, etc... require 1-2 citizens to staff).

 

[Killtech]

Maintenance is quickly become an extremely unpopular way to balance buildings. I suggest that we look to either more conventional means (increase hammer costs), and unconventional means (University, Factory, etc... require 1-2 citizens to staff).

complain about too much gold but then dislike buildings adding maintenance? do i need to understand that?

hammer cost won't help. they don't scale appropriately. eventually you will build all buildings anyway - just a few rounds later.

about unconventional means: no occupation of citizens (not sure what you exactly mean with that). just change max specialist type count (as these buildings do currently anyway) and boost specialist stats (instead of other bonus) so specialists become better then worked tiles. e.g. an engineer should be similar as effective as a mine. and since mine yield changes over time so could the engineers with the right buildings.

however i currently don't think there is the need to change factories and other production buildings. they cause the least problems. universities and science buildings - yes, the negative production can be removed if the direct % bonus is reduced and therefore the scientists stats are slightly boosted. commercial/gold buildings. definitively yes.

as for maintenance: the maintenance on buildings is somewhat nasty because i penalized quite a lot of buildings to compensate for the commerce->gold change. if it is restricted to the essential buildings only (i.e. universities and factories chain) it will cause less upset as it won't appear that frequently in the actual BUG display. maintenance on cities was always there in Civ IV. i never saw complains about it. changing the formula to depend more on city size then number of cities of your empire/distance to capital (and thus to be a less arbitrary seeming fireaxis balancing concept and more realistic factor)

 

[Afforess]

complain about too much gold but then dislike buildings adding maintenance? do i need to understand that?

Yes. Frankly, the gold situation was better BEFORE Building Upgrade Chains than afterwords. The static gold boosts instead of percentages give more gold overall. Switching back to percentages would actually be much more effective at reducing gold. Sure, it would encourage the big gold cities again, but it wouldn't allow every city to produce tons of gold, like the current system now.

hammer cost won't help. they don't scale appropriately. eventually you will build all buildings anyway - just a few rounds later.

It will, especially with production related buildings. Not-so-much for others.

about unconventional means: no occupation of citizens (not sure what you exactly mean with that). just change max specialist type count (as these buildings do currently anyway) and boost specialist stats (instead of other bonus) so specialists become better then worked tiles. e.g. an engineer should be similar as effective as a mine. and since mine yield changes over time so could the engineers with the right buildings.

To be clear - it's a new tag, iEmployedPopulation. Let's say, for example's sake, you set it to "2" for Universities. Universities would require that you have at least 2 population, and if you build the university, in a size 2 city, both citizens would work at the university. No citizens could be specialists, or work tiles. If the population dropped too low, the building would de-activate, until the city can work it again. The build effectively reduces the working population, it doesn't have anything to do with specialists or otherwise.

 

[os79]

To be clear - it's a new tag, iEmployedPopulation. Let's say, for example's sake, you set it to "2" for Universities. Universities would require that you have at least 2 population, and if you build the university, in a size 2 city, both citizens would work at the university. No citizens could be specialists, or work tiles. If the population dropped too low, the building would de-activate, until the city can work it again. The build effectively reduces the working population, it doesn't have anything to do with specialists or otherwise.

Is it better to have the building require maybe double (of citizens working on that building) pop size first before letting it loose? That way, there are SOME citizens still working tiles .

 

[Killtech]

Yes. Frankly, the gold situation was better BEFORE Building Upgrade Chains than afterwords. The static gold boosts instead of percentages give more gold overall. Switching back to percentages would actually be much more effective at reducing gold. Sure, it would encourage the big gold cities again, but it wouldn't allow every city to produce tons of gold, like the current system now.

as i said the static bonus should scale with city maintenance. they will cause a problem if the don't. and with the current maintenance formula they are very hard to match.

i fail to see why switching back to percentage helps as the gold excess problem remains. it strikes just a bit later when you cities reach a certain size where the percentage boni overtake the static ones. and if they reach twice the size the problem is twice that big. i see the problem with the current status. but what you propose is not a solution.

It will, especially with production related buildings. Not-so-much for others.

you like to add difficulties to the AI? more expensive production boost buildings mean you must make a more concentrated effort to hurry them with caravans or other. this requires more situation dependent planing and thinking which up to now AI fails epically. so it means i will have these buildings even more earlier then my AI opposition.

To be clear - it's a new tag, iEmployedPopulation. Let's say, for example's sake, you set it to "2" for Universities. Universities would require that you have at least 2 population, and if you build the university, in a size 2 city, both citizens would work at the university. No citizens could be specialists, or work tiles. If the population dropped too low, the building would de-activate, until the city can work it again. The build effectively reduces the working population, it doesn't have anything to do with specialists or otherwise.

so you make the university building like a special specialist with special stats. why not just use a specialist with the stats of the building then or boost the stats of existing specialist by the building. the effect will be the same except everyone knows specialist and is used how to control them. the new tag seems a bit redundant to me and less easy to control then specialists (can i deactivate such a building other then decrease the city size below a certain level? just like i can reassign specialists?)

Is it better to have the building require maybe double (of citizens working on that building) pop size first before letting it loose? That way, there are SOME citizens still working tiles .

as i said. specialist do about the same job but are easier to control without causing strange situations. i don't want to see cities starving due to universities. this will cause more controversy then my production penalty for science buildings.

 

[Afforess]

i fail to see why switching back to percentage helps as the gold excess problem remains. it strikes just a bit later when you cities reach a certain size where the percentage boni overtake the static ones. and if they reach twice the size the problem is twice that big. i see the problem with the current status. but what you propose is not a solution.

Yeah, I don't see your logic. Yes, SOME cities will earn more with percentage bonuses in the long run, but overall, your nation will earn LESS.

you like to add difficulties to the AI? more expensive production boost buildings mean you must make a more concentrated effort to hurry them with caravans or other. this requires more situation dependent planing and thinking which up to now AI fails epically. so it means i will have these buildings even more earlier then my AI opposition.

Planning a mod around AI instead of planning the AI around a mod is a total mistake. Don't create things with the goal of having the AI use them. Let me deal with the AI.

 

[Killtech]

Yeah, I don't see your logic. Yes, SOME cities will earn more with percentage bonuses in the long run, but overall, your nation will earn LESS.

my experience says otherwise. All cities will earn much more. when they reach 3rd radius and size of 30+ they come close to cause and integer overflow i guess. why should i get less gold? i don't understand. form a certain base yield +10% is always better then +1 (here exactly at the point of 10 base yield). this point comes to every city in time.

the current problem is that the static gold income is too high. if it is lowered or evened with its counterpart the problem is resolved. percentage boni however are uncontrollable. guess this is why fireaxis added inflation to get rid off the excesses (inflation works also perceptual). they were just unable to solve it otherwise.

Planning a mod around AI instead of planning the AI around a mod is a total mistake. Don't create things with the goal of having the AI use them. Let me deal with the AI.

it's not that way. an script AI is hardly limited in its possibilities. it cannot plan. it can just follow a script. thus it will never be able to adapt to situations it was not programmed for. scripts also have the disadvantage of predictability which make easy to exploit. the more complex a game becomes the easier is an AI to script to exploit and defeat. the AI is now weak enough.

until now i've never seen any game or mod with an AI that could manage complex situations. thus all are easy to beat as long as they do not cheat.

well, maybe except for chess AI. but it's not a script AI to start with. and as an good example of a complex game writing a scripted AI for it is not even thinkable.

if you want the AI to be able to handle non trivial strategies you need a different type of AI and thus rewrite the code form scratch.

 

[Afforess]

my experience says otherwise. All cities will earn much more. when they reach 3rd radius and size of 30+ they come close to cause and integer overflow i guess. why should i get less gold? i don't understand. form a certain base yield +10% is always better then +1 (here exactly at the point of 10 base yield). this point comes to every city in time.

the current problem is that the static gold income is too high. if it is lowered or evened with its counterpart the problem is resolved. percentage boni however are uncontrollable. guess this is why fireaxis added inflation to get rid off the excesses (inflation works also perceptual). they were just unable to solve it otherwise.

Integer Overflow!? Hardly. Even assuming a worst case scenario, 3rd radius, working all tiles, all tiles produce 10 commerce each, and a 100% gold rate, and a 5000% gold modifier, that only adds up to ~18000 gold/turn. Integers go into the billions.

If you do want to keep the static bonuses - something needs to be done to the gold chain. Right now, it's very easy to earn lots of gold very very quickly from the static bonuses.

it's not that way. an script AI is hardly limited in its possibilities. it cannot plan. it can just follow a script. thus it will never be able to adapt to situations it was not programmed for. scripts also have the disadvantage of predictability which make easy to exploit. the more complex a game becomes the easier is an AI to script to exploit and defeat. the AI is now weak enough.

until now i've never seen any game or mod with an AI that could manage complex situations. thus all are easy to beat as long as they do not cheat.

well, maybe except for chess AI. but it's not a script AI to start with. and as an good example of a complex game writing a scripted AI for it is not even thinkable.

if you want the AI to be able to handle non trivial strategies you need a different type of AI and thus rewrite the code form scratch.

That true, but so what? AND's AI is the best it's ever been ATM. I have no problems writing even more AI to fix future issues.

 

[Afforess]

Oh, FYI, I have 2 new tags for buildings that might interest you for AND 1.75: "iHealthPercentPerPopulation" and "iHappinessPercentPerPopulation".

 

[Snofru1]

Please don´t focus only on the "master" players that are able to build every building in every city and have a perfect city planning leading to only having huge tree-tile-radius Mega-Cities in the end. And if those have a gigantic gold and science income in the end - so what, that´s fine, that was their intention. They must have made great diplomatic and militaristic decisions before to be able to build those many buildings (and less units) to survive. Some expert players can do this, many others don´t. I wouldn´t be able to survive an emperor game for long so I definitely don´t have the playing skills like Killtech.

Recently I introduced my 17-year old godson to Civ. I gave him a number of tips and hints but let him play on his own (on prince) unless he had questions (he had a lot). I suggested a builder strategy which he followed but although he is really clever he did quite poorly. Why? He made wrong military and diplomatic decisions, declared war before having built up a decent army, didn´t build enough catapults, left border cities nearly undefended and so on. His city built-up was fine but the other strategies were not good enough.

So please give those "average" players like me the chance to have a nice game (playing on low difficulties just cripples the AI too much). I do like most of the suggestions from Afforess except using up citizens to run buildings, that´s probably too complicated.

 

[Killtech]

Integer Overflow!? Hardly. Even assuming a worst case scenario, 3rd radius, working all tiles, all tiles produce 10 commerce each, and a 100% gold rate, and a 5000% gold modifier, that only adds up to ~18000 gold/turn. Integers go into the billions.

i need to earn 2'147'483'648 gold for an overflow. so lets play on easiest difficulty in a eternity game on a river rich gigantic map and it might be possible (new victory type: achieve 32-bit integer overflow!). you need al least 30 fully developed cities with size >= 30. most religions founded and nicely spread over the world, and of course most world wonders (on that difficulty you can get almost everything). need to conquer most resources of course to maximize base yields into excess. since commerce and gold modifiers multiply you get a huge factor out of this when building all buildings. let then your cities produce gold and then each should go over 1000 gold/turn (at least this was possible in the first RoM version i played at about medieval age all i remember). if you make constant effort to extend your gold income from that point of you should be able to reach an overflow since you have thousands of turns to accomplish the task.

If you do want to keep the static bonuses - something needs to be done to the gold chain. Right now, it's very easy to earn lots of gold very very quickly from the static bonuses.

this is because it isn't adapted correctly on the city maintenance.

first off harbour buildings produce too much gold as you stated correctly before. a reduction here is needed. however, as there are many port upgrades they can't give little boni - not for all the hammers they cost - nor can they concentrate on trade routes only as the boni will grow too large (this is why i mixed trade route boni with gold income originally).

next is to change the maintenance. best done via changing the maintenance formula. this allows to drop maintenance costs from most buildings. the formula should be somewhat like that: TotalMaint = BaseMaint*Fac_CityNumber*Fac_DistToCapital + CitySizeMaint. the city size term should not be multiplied by the regular maintenance factor otherwise maintenance will rise too high and in a bit uncontrollable way. for the start the maintenance for a 10 size city should be 2 gold/turn at max. and a size 20 city no more then 8 gold/turn. i know these numbers are negligible small but i start rather small then have possibly too punishing values. at the other hand i'd let only have the factory chain remain a maintenance increase (or maybe better turn it into a negative gold change?).

furthermore some experienced player should make a game through time and check city gold income through all ages listing the total gold income of his most developed cities and from which sources it comes from (modifiers, buildings, or commerce yield) and of course the same for commerce. this should allow to draw more exact conclusion and precise solutions.

Please don´t focus only on the "master" players that are able to build every building in every city and have a perfect city planning leading to only having huge tree-tile-radius Mega-Cities in the end. And if those have a gigantic gold and science income in the end - so what, that´s fine, that was their intention. They must have made great diplomatic and militaristic decisions before to be able to build those many buildings (and less units) to survive. Some expert players can do this, many others don´t. I wouldn´t be able to survive an emperor game for long so I definitely don´t have the playing skills like Killtech.

Recently I introduced my 17-year old godson to Civ. I gave him a number of tips and hints but let him play on his own (on prince) unless he had questions (he had a lot). I suggested a builder strategy which he followed but although he is really clever he did quite poorly. Why? He made wrong military and diplomatic decisions, declared war before having built up a decent army, didn´t build enough catapults, left border cities nearly undefended and so on. His city built-up was fine but the other strategies were not good enough.

So please give those "average" players like me the chance to have a nice game (playing on low difficulties just cripples the AI too much). I do like most of the suggestions from Afforess except using up citizens to run buildings, that´s probably too complicated.

i try to not focus on any group as a mod should be playable for both - the master and the casual players.

the maintenance change is intended to hit players with most developed cities most - thus i hope it will hit experienced players most and AIs the least as they have comparatively small cities.

and lol, who is 'godson'? a strange nick name. reference to jesus? ... wait, 'your' godson? who are you??

 

[climat]

and lol, who is 'godson'? a strange nick name. reference to jesus? ... wait, 'your' godson? who are you??

Off-topic, but I think he means this:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godparent

 

[Killtech]

Off-topic, but I think he means this:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godparent

oh heh, sorry. english isn't my native language. have i ever said that english terminology is very strange? ... i'm very interested in that words etymology.