Better RoM: Improvement Balancing

[Afforess]

Proposed Changes:

Flood Plains:
First off, Flood Plains are the biggest unbalancing feature of them all. They appear commonly and give a huge bonus of 3 food. I plan on changing that to only a 2 food bonus, and changing the unhealthiness from 0.4 each, to 1.0 each. So, in the early game, it's only a net of 1 food, but as health improves, it will give 2.

New Worker Actions:

Burn Forest
Removes Forest (No Hammers)

Burn Jungle
Removes Jungle (No Hammers)

In addition, cottages and trading posts will need players to remove the jungle or forests before they can be built. Players will be able to remove forests and jungles, but with no hammers at the beginning of the game, but with bronze working, players will be able to remove forest and receive hammers.

Other Planned Changes:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ArGEV8QiVgM6dFFNMndKMEtnbGZWNWZGalZfT2VtckE&hl=en

see above link for spreadsheet of new improvement yeild values

The goal here overall was to categorize all the improvements into a few distinct categories:
Food Chain
Commerce Chain
Industry Chain
Forest/Jungle Chain
Mine Chain
Town Chain
Watermill Chain
Windmill Chain

The Food, Commerce, and Industry Chain specialize in the three yeild types. These must be built on flat lands and don't let you keep forests.

The Forest/Jungle and (low tech) Wind/Watermill improvements provide alternative when your surrounded by forests and want to keep them. Their yields won't be as good as the specialty improvements.

The Mine chain is an alternative to the Industry chain when you have more hills than flat land and/or have resources that require mines. Their Late game production yeild will not be as good as the industry chain yields

The late game water/windmill improvements are designed to allow the building of specialized clean power plants in your cities. And move away from traditional (low tech) minor food bonus to commerce bonus. However these will will not provide yields as good as the specialty improvements.

The Town chains purpose is to get them to grow up to a town, at which point in time, you can gain a free specialist, with certain specific building. The Town chain provides weak yeild gains compared to the specialty improvements.

Additional Things of note:

New and changed buildings:
Town Hall: Requires City Planning
Grants 1 Free specialist per town in city vicinity

Hydro Plant: Requires Civil Engineering and Electricity
Requires Hydro Dam in city vicinity, provides power

Wind Farm: Requires Ecology
Requires Wind Turbine in city vicinity, provides power

Three Gorges Dam: Requires X Hydro Plants
Requires Hydro Dam in city vicinity, provides power, +1 Commerce, +1 Production for all Hydro Dams

Other changes
Orchards can be built without a resource
Apple Orchard and Olive Orchard are combined into single Orchard Improvement
Lemons get moved to Orchard improvement instead of Plantation
% Chance of discovering Olive, Apple, Lemon on an Orchard much like finding a farm resource.

Wind Turbine & Hydro Dam are new improvements. Wind Turbine (Graphic-wise) is the Desert windmill. Desert Windmill and Wind Trap are removed.

Some of the intermediary Industrial improvements are removed.

Improvements which only exists for specific resources are not altered (Plantations, Silk Farm, etc.)

[Afforess Note: Edited]Industry, Mines and Trade centers etc. can grow into the next improvement up their chain only when the correct tech is researched.

The chart provides details for improvement yeilds and bonuses gained from techs and routes. I do not address Civic bonuses here.

Civic bonuses should give minor bonus to various improvements according to the flavor of the civic. However a civic bonus should NEVER tip the balance and make any improvement's food/commerce/hammer yield production better than the improvement which specializes in that yeild type.

Feedback would be appreciated.

 

[Hydromancerx]

I just wanted to say that Cottages (and their upgrades) totally should give negative Food. I never understood why they would give food. Now for my tangent ...

If we look to Sim City (which mimics reality in a simplistic way) we can see they have Residential, Commercial and Industrial Zones. These 3 factors work in a "rock-paper-scissors" way where each depend upon each other. Residential gives workers and consumes goods while Industrial and Commercial consume workers and produce/sell goods. Based on these I would categorize them as ...

Residential
- Cottage
- Hamlet
- Village
- Town

Industrial
- Farm
- Mine
- Industrial (Spare, Light, Medium, Heavy, Dense)

Commercial
- Trade Post
- Trade Market
- Trade Center

I am sure other improvements can fit under these categories too.

 

[Snofru1]

Maybe I am just too conservative, but this seems just a little bit too much change for my typical gamestyle.

Cottage:

• +1 production

Hamlet:

• -1 food
• +2 production
• + 0.25 unhealthiness

If you weigh 1 food equal to one production (maybe you can´t do that) then growing a cottage to a hamlet makes the net yield worse. If that´s true then I wouldn´t like it . Civ is about development and growing from something small to something big, isn´t it?

 

[Talin2009]

Maybe im missing something here but we have workshops and industry in game. What is the point in another production improvement?

p.s. totally agree on flood plains and farm changes. Also maybe make farms develop as towns/mines/tradeposts do?

 

[vincentz]

My thoughts were : (all in a relative way ofcourse.)

Farm (Raw Food Producer) +++ (Maybe -. Not much production at a farm)

Orchards (Raw Food Producer) ++ (Maybe -)

Mine (Raw Materials Producer) +++ (Maybe - You don't want to eat food from a mined area)

Industry/Workshop - (Process Raw Materials. Produce Tools/Goods) - ++++

Lumbermill (Raw Materials Producer) ++ (Maybe chance of deforrestation in earlier era's)

Cottage - Hamlet (Process Raw Food and Raw Materials. Produce Eatable food and Tools/Goods for City) + +

Village - Town (Same as Cottage - Hamlet, but able to Sell Food/Goods plus Taxes) + + +

Trade Post - Trade Center (Selling Goods/Food) +++

Plantations ++ (or ++ if food resource)

 

[Arakhor]

Woah. This is a big change, but I suppose it will cut down on cottage-spamming.

 

[kaltruhe]

I totally agree with you about flood plain things. It has been too powerful!

But it looks like that new cottage things have no advantage by comparison with mine. And there are no differences between cottage things and workshop.

I think vincentz's idea is good start point of our discussion.

 

[NBAfan]

I agree with the Flood plains.

What about workshops and watermills?

Why excatly do we need to change from what Firaixs had? Their setup already had an improvement for the different yields.

Maybe workshops should upgrade to Industry later.

I don't see why Trade Posts are needed excatly. It just seems like a different name for Cottages.

Those are my thoughts.

 

[Hydromancerx]

Ok here is a radical idea but what if ...

Cottage

• +1 to City Size Limit

Hamlet

• +2 to City Size Limit
• -1 food
• +2 production
• + 0.25 unhealthiness

Village

• +5 to City Size Limit
• -2 food
• +0.50 unhealthiness
• +1 commerce with Roads, Paved Roads or Highway

Town

• +10 to City Size Limit
• -3 food
• 1.0 unhealthiness
• +1 commerce with Roads, Paved Roads or Highway

In other words you would need to build Cottages (and upgrades) in order to allow your city size to grow bigger. Thus if you had 5 cottages your city could grow to size 5. While if you had 5 towns your city could grow to size 50. Note that all cities would have a starting city limit of 1.

And if you lost a town through looting or just replacing then your city would loose size and many people would instantly become homeless, causing mass unhappiness and unhealthiness.

What do you think?

 

[Sonereal]

And if you lost a town through looting or just replacing then your city would loose size and many people would instantly become homeless, causing mass unhappiness and unhealthiness.

What do you think?

But if you lose people while losing homes, how is anybody homeless anymore?

Of course, say that a town was leveled and that puts you 4 points over the population "limit", then you gain 4 unhappiness in that city.

What would the limit be at default?

 

[Afforess]

My thoughts were : (all in a relative way ofcourse.)

Farm (Raw Food Producer) +++ (Maybe -. Not much production at a farm)

Orchards (Raw Food Producer) ++ (Maybe -)

Mine (Raw Materials Producer) +++ (Maybe - You don't want to eat food from a mined area)

Industry/Workshop - (Process Raw Materials. Produce Tools/Goods) - ++++

Lumbermill (Raw Materials Producer) ++ (Maybe chance of deforrestation in earlier era's)

Cottage - Hamlet (Process Raw Food and Raw Materials. Produce Eatable food and Tools/Goods for City) + +

Village - Town (Same as Cottage - Hamlet, but able to Sell Food/Goods plus Taxes) + + +

Trade Post - Trade Center (Selling Goods/Food) +++

Plantations ++ (or ++ if food resource)

Interesting; but that's pretty much the way things are now. Why build anything other than towns? They provide everything.

For realism, in the early game, we need to force players to emphasize farming. Then, as farms become more efficient, they can specialize with cottages and trading posts.

Further, we need a very rigid trichotomy. 1 improvement needs to focus on food alone; one commerce alone, and one for production alone. There can be a few that do multiple yields, but they should be less efficient that using the above trichotomy.

Other things that need to happen is that we need more upgrade paths for improvements.

 

[Killtech]

ok, good to see this reworked as i realized the excess in tile improvement boni. so let's get started:

forests:
cottages, trading post, industry and mines must require to remove forest. the additional +1 renders them too much good in the end. as an compensation there might be a starting civic that grants +1 on forest tiles as they are quite useless otherwise (same may be true for jungle tiles). maybe an additional city building (forestry district?) that adds +1 on each forest tile could make them interesting enough not to cut them down before classic age.

cottages - towns:
we don't need another production improvement concurring with mines and industry. so i suggest an all-round improvement that has no real strengths: so maxed out they i suggest no modification, +3 , and +2 (with all techs).

mines and industry:
these should consume all food of a tile. maxed mines should give +5 and no . though undeveloped mines should not alter food but get only +3 so you still have a good production source in the early ages. maxed industry could look that way +5 , +2: commerce:, -all

trading post:
maxed should give no more than +5 and -1 .

farms:
if possible should consume one form city production (not tile ) since your total gain is still pretty high - though this should come form a tech in later ages, that just swaps one for one (or 2) . agree on the unhealthiness.

specialists:
although not a tile improvement they take one citizen as a tile to be worked on. so they should be taken into account when debating changes to tile improvements.

however do remind that many changes to tile improvements were made in RoM just to give the AI enough reason to build them. balancing these will result in the need to change AI.

 

[Afforess]

I've rewrote the OP. I decided to revert cottages back to a commerce improvement, and removed Trading posts. I like the idea of trading posts, but I don't see how they fit into the game.

I also added a bunch of other improvements, and their upgrade paths.

 

[konradcabral]

I liked Hydro's idea, although I'd use lower numbers. Maybe 1-2-3-5 or 1-2-4-8.

 

[Hydromancerx]

The Soylent Green Facility should not be just disregarded. It should give some sort of unique feature for building.

I liked Hydro's idea, although I'd use lower numbers. Maybe 1-2-3-5 or 1-2-4-8.

Thanks. And the number values were not really important. It was the fact of giving the "housing" improvements more of a unique purpose.

But if you lose people while losing homes, how is anybody homeless anymore?

Of course, say that a town was leveled and that puts you 4 points over the population "limit", then you gain 4 unhappiness in that city.

What would the limit be at default?

Hmm your right. Well somehow loosing those housing improvements should make people homeless.

And the default limit would be size 1. Thus you would need to learn pottery to get your city beyond size 1.

 

[Arakhor]

It has to be said that I like the revised proposals much more now. I particularly approve of late-game desert farming.

 

[Afforess]

The Soylent Green Facility should not be just disregarded. It should give some sort of unique feature for building.

You do know what Soylent Green is, right?

This is realism mod; keep hollywood out of it.

 

[Hydromancerx]

Yeah I know what it is. However in some screwed up society with over population you just might need to recycle people. I mean who is going to argue with you about recycling people once you have mind control tech?

 

[chrisj8804]

If these changes were made, specialists would definitely need to be addressed. There would be no reason to ever build cottages or industry. Just build farms everywhere flat for massive food production, and then mines on hills for production, and use the excess food for specialists.

The change from light industry to medium industry for example is completely undesirable. If you value food and production equally, then the addition of unhealthiness makes it a harmful upgrade.

In addition to the unattractiveness of it, it is not very realistic. Going from light industry to medium industry doubles the food cost as it goes from -1 to -2. So you sacrifice twice as much food to get a 25% boost in productivity (from 4 to 5 production). Along with a .50 boost in unhealthiness.

No company or industry would ever expand or grow larger if they were going to have to double their expenses (providing food for workers) to gain only 25% in productivity. It just doesn't make economic sense.

If towns and industry are to be reworked, and made to cost food, they need to be properly balanced so that the benefits outweigh the costs. I agree that currently the benefits may be too large, but an increase in the cost needs to have an at least proportional increase in benefits.

 

[0100010]

Flood plains (are supposed to) only occur on desert and is one of the few things that turn deserts into something usable. If a new feature types like 'scrub desert/cacti forest' which gave +1 food existed, then perhaps they could be more easily offset. You want a realist mod, well people settled on flood plains early on for a reason, they were the best at producing food. So I don't entirely agree with you nerfing them down as much as you are proposing. The main issue I think is that they automatically have a form of enhanced irrigation, which (in the real world) becomes balanced out against regular farms as technology progresses. The advantages that the seasonally flooded plain gave to the crops planted there is met and eventually exceed by agricultural and irrigation improvements in later eras. If you could somehow restrict the terrain + improvement type that gains Tech bonuses then you could just exclude flood plains from certain tech yield gains. (For the best analogy, flood plains benefit from the crop rotation tech gain automatically, because the purpose of crop rotations is to allow for the renewal of the soil on fallow fields. The flooding action of a river renews the soil, by depositing a new layer of nutrient rich silt, although typically of a higher quality than gotten from a single season of rotation, plus they don't have to leave them fallow for that season either) I think you can get away with increasing their unhealthiness to .5 but the current proposal (-1 food and + .6 unhealth) is too extreme. I would instead NOT want to start next to flood plains if that happens because it would kill an early city.

As for the rest, I think the main problem is there are too many improvements chasing too few yield types. How should we really decide what is better?
Vanilla BtS: Production: Mines and Workshops, Food: Farms, Commerce: Cottage - Towns, plus a few other in-between types (water/windmill, etc)

Now we have how many things changing yield gains,
Farms, workshops, the cottage chains, trade post chains, industrial parks.

Draw out a grid: Terrain types on one axis, improvement types on the other axis.
Tally them out and figure out how to balance them best in the 3 categories. Lets simply it a bit by deciding what they should be good in.

Improvement X: Yield type (commerce, food, prod) : Values (strong, med, or weak)

At present I think pushing production back into towns is going to make them too powerful again, even with a unhealth negative. And how will the AI handle it? Does it know how to NOT spam an improvement if gives unhealthiness? I don't really like the idea of attaching unhealthiness to general non-resource tied improvements.