Brainstorming for Building Specialization

ma_kuh

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I'm thinking through ideas for giving cities more ways to feel specialized. National Wonders and specialist-focuses are decent at this: you might spread your GWAM guilds across your capital and 6 expansions, and your GEMSD in a similar way. This can happen whether you are Progress or Tradition. Basic Buildings, however, tend to struggle with lending an identity to a city. By their nature they are generally useful, and they are better than working a Process most if not all of the time. You build until you run out of buildings, and then you look for stuff to do (wars being an exception).

A few general approaches stand out for giving buildings focus:
  • Direct synergies between buildings (Arena + Barracks/Forge/Armory; Baths + Temple/Amphitheater/Gardens)
  • Scaling yields that must be built into or fed (Gardens + Guilds; Harbor/Caravansary + Trade Routes)
  • Exclusive buildings or yields, often by terrain-gating or implicit terrain biases (Granary and Lodge; Well and Water Wheel; Seaport and Train Station)
  • Events which add a permanent new yield to a building type, or upgrade one of a few building types
What do you think about the current buildings available? A quick look suggests that each era tends to have a single building for each "main yield" (production, food, culture, science, gold, sometimes faith or great people). Are there synergies you don't see people mention often? Is there one of the above patterns you think works best for feeling like the city is "specialized"?
 
While city specialization is more interesting, I don't think we would ever get those ideas passed. It requires a lot of changes for the AI to properly make use of the specialization, and it goes directly against the needs-based unhappiness system we currently have. Unless you're a modder and did most of the work yourself before suggesting to congress for integration.

But just to entertain the idea, most of the time ppl specialize their cities because of the compound effect of getting 1 specific type of yield (like a lot of % modifier stacking to greatly improve the raw input) instead of getting the same amount somewhere else. Other methods like giving bonuses for unrelated yield or enforce exclusive building would simply limit your gameplay choices, instead of offering a better choice that encourage ppl to follow.
 
The way VP is currently set up, any new building you create will just be built in as many cities as possible, most of the time.

There are two effective ways to create specialization in the current system.

1) Exclusive Pairs of Buildings (Train Station vs Sea port, or the various Power plant buildings). By creating a building whose construction prevents the creation of another building, you have to make a choice as to which path a city follows.
2) Limited buildings (ie the guilds). By offering a limited number of this building, it forces you to decide which building becomes the most worthy of it.
 
A few general approaches stand out for giving buildings focus:
  • Direct synergies between buildings (Arena + Barracks/Forge/Armory; Baths + Temple/Amphitheater/Gardens)
  • Scaling yields that must be built into or fed (Gardens + Guilds; Harbor/Caravansary + Trade Routes)
  • Exclusive buildings or yields, often by terrain-gating or implicit terrain biases (Granary and Lodge; Well and Water Wheel; Seaport and Train Station)
  • Events which add a permanent new yield to a building type, or upgrade one of a few building types

There are two effective ways to create specialization in the current system.

1) Exclusive Pairs of Buildings (Train Station vs Sea port, or the various Power plant buildings). By creating a building whose construction prevents the creation of another building, you have to make a choice as to which path a city follows.
2) Limited buildings (ie the guilds). By offering a limited number of this building, it forces you to decide which building becomes the most worthy of it.
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By making buildings cost more production, some buildings won't be worth building in most cities, simply because of too much of an investment. Currently, almost all buildings are worth building in most cities, so there is no decision if to build a building. The decision is when to do it.
 
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By making buildings cost more production, some buildings won't be worth building in most cities, simply because of too much of an investment. Currently, almost all buildings are worth building in most cities, so there is no decision if to build a building. The decision is when to do it.
I think this touches on other threads pointing out that gold is out of control because you end up rich enough to invest in every building and you quickly are able to just build everything.

Maybe we need gold reductions AND production increases, at least in mid/late game, to make the player have to make meaningful choices again on what to build next.
 
By making buildings cost more production, some buildings won't be worth building in most cities, simply because of too much of an investment. Currently, almost all buildings are worth building in most cities, so there is no decision if to build a building. The decision is when to do it.
You would simply cause a huge backlog of available building and a city with permanent capped unhappiness.
The needs-based happiness system is what forces player to build everything, as long as we still have that nothing will changes regarding this aspect of the game.
 
You would simply cause a huge backlog of available building and a city with permanent capped unhappiness.
The needs-based happiness system is what forces player to build everything, as long as we still have that nothing will changes regarding this aspect of the game.
My thought as well, I think most people would just build everything eventually.

The other advantage to Exclusive Buildings/Limited Buildings....they eventually leave your build queue. For those OCD completionism players that hate leaving things in their queue, this can be a nice QoL for them.
 
I also think that the high production/gold output is one of the main causes of the issue: it is no longer necessary to decide which buildings to have in a city because it's possible to build all of them (while not neglecting military units at the same time).

I also agree that there is currently a problem with the needs-based happiness system, but I think that this is in part connected to the overall high production output: The AI players are able to build a lot of buildings in their cities. But if a building is built in many cities, it makes the median of the corresponding yield and therefore the needs thresholds increase. All cities without the building are then unhappy.

So, a decrease in production/gold output (or an increase in building costs), especially in the mid/late game, should be the first approach in my opinion, and we should observe how this will affect unhappiness from needs.
 
I don't think we should refrain from specialization over concerns on unhappiness. We already have culture specialization through guilds and Boredom is fine, so the others can also work with some tweaks. Also note that there's an interest for simplifying unhappiness further by replacing "needs modifiers" with flat unhappiness reductions, tweaking unhappiness can become much less painful if that gets passed.
 
The problem I have with making buildings exclusive is that it prevents creative or unforeseen synergies from emerging, and can feel artificial in why a certain distinction/grouping is made.

For example, an idea I had was to make Lodge and Granary soft-exclusive: on completion, they would each auto-build a special building (I think this is a trigger/mechanism that would work?), "Food Storage", which provides +2:c5food: and unlocks ITR. You are incentivized to build one of these structures to "define" your city's growth strategy: do they expand borders to work choice tiles, or do they just build up a big population and work everything? But you are also not rewarded (as much) for building both of them. If you find a perfect place where Lodge and Granary are both worthwhile, despite "losing" +2:c5food: on one of the buildings, you might feel bad that you can't build both just to keep the queue clear most of the time.
 
You would simply cause a huge backlog of available building and a city with permanent capped unhappiness.
The needs-based happiness system is what forces player to build everything, as long as we still have that nothing will changes regarding this aspect of the game.
It's already confirmed that current happiness is too harsh by mistake and will be tweaked.

And yeah, that's the point to have a huge backlog, so it effectively means that you decide if you build the building at all, not just when to build it.
 
By making buildings cost more production, some buildings won't be worth building in most cities, simply because of too much of an investment. Currently, almost all buildings are worth building in most cities, so there is no decision if to build a building. The decision is when to do it.
I don't think the current system suits that. Too many buildings have prerequisite paths to follow. You don't get a choice to skip forges because you have no mines and build a workshop. Science buildings are just direct upgrades building on each other. Dropping culture or science buildings in a city makes the expansion penalty that much more significant.
Power Plants are fun conceptually but they come too late.
I like the idea of specialized cities but I think this ship sailed long ago. I don't mind more guilds, but they probably ought to have more creative yield contributions than additional specialist slots.
 
It's already confirmed that current happiness is too harsh by mistake and will be tweaked.

And yeah, that's the point to have a huge backlog, so it effectively means that you decide if you build the building at all, not just when to build it.
Tweaked but still using the same base, I can guarantee you nothing would change regarding specialization (unless it became too easy nobody has to pay any attention to happiness anymore, thus there might be some freedom to pick what to build, and even then you would have only demolished the needs-based happiness system and haven't implement anything that encourage specializing yet)
 
This is not a proposal, nor a vote, so there's nothing to gain by spamming the same argument other than derailing the thread or demotivating people from coming up with ideas. It's supposed to be brainstorming about the ways to increase specialization, not brainstorming on the reasons not to.
 
I don't think the current system suits that. Too many buildings have prerequisite paths to follow. You don't get a choice to skip forges because you have no mines and build a workshop. Science buildings are just direct upgrades building on each other. Dropping culture or science buildings in a city makes the expansion penalty that much more significant.
Power Plants are fun conceptually but they come too late.
I like the idea of specialized cities but I think this ship sailed long ago. I don't mind more guilds, but they probably ought to have more creative yield contributions than additional specialist slots.
To me this sounds like the trick would be not affecting these "basic building" blocks. The sentiment being there should be a core set of buildings that every city is expected to build to be functional. I don't buy that this means peripheral buildings can't enforce specialization. So I'd never suggest Forge and Library become exclusive, for example, but something like Arena and Amphitheater, which are both "Culture" buildings, could share some bonus that doesn't stack (they could both grant -1:c5unhappy: from Boredom, doesn't stack with each other).
 
Hmm, just throwing this out there, another way of specializing a city would be in mitigating some sort of drawback. Unhappiness is currently just a weight on growth in several forms, followed by a combat penalty after a threshold (I think all of that is becoming granular with one of the proposal from last session). What if the types of unhappiness in your city affected different aspects of its growth? So there could be some types of unhappiness you just stomach for a certain city. The specialization then becomes, which types of unhappiness do you solve, and which do you sit with a small amount of.

Random ideas in this vein:
:c5food:/:c5production: Distress: -P% production for units
:c5gold: Poverty: -Q% production for buildings
:c5science: Illiteracy: -R% CS for units (or XP gain for units? for units from this city?)
:c5culture: Boredom: -S% effective production while working processes
:c5trade: Isolation/Pillaged Tiles: -T% gold from the city

Scaling of course TBD.
 
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A form of mutually exclusive buildings that I wouldn't mind:

Replace Monument with:
Monument of Erudition: +2:c5culture:, +1:c5science:, Culture cost of acquiring new tiles reduced by 25% in this City.
Monument of Provision: +2:c5culture:, +1:c5production:, Culture cost of acquiring new tiles reduced by 25% in this City.
Monument of Prosperity: +2:c5culture:, +1:c5gold:, Culture cost of acquiring new tiles reduced by 25% in this City.

Art assets would be much easier to source for these buildings (I'm thinking simple color tints based on the "extra" yield), and we don't have to reinvent the wheel with which buildings to showcase in each era. Even if we settled on a convention of <ORIGINAL_BUILDING_NAME>: <YIELD> , e.g. Monument: Science, the idea would be clear, you'd know why it's exclusive, and it would leave your queue after you built one of them.

Again, I think there's already an Event that basically does this, but this approach would work even if you disable events, and it allows a CITY to be customized, instead of ALL your monuments.
 
A form of mutually exclusive buildings that I wouldn't mind:

Replace Monument with:
Monument of Erudition: +2:c5culture:, +1:c5science:, Culture cost of acquiring new tiles reduced by 25% in this City.
Monument of Provision: +2:c5culture:, +1:c5production:, Culture cost of acquiring new tiles reduced by 25% in this City.
Monument of Prosperity: +2:c5culture:, +1:c5gold:, Culture cost of acquiring new tiles reduced by 25% in this City.

Art assets would be much easier to source for these buildings (I'm thinking simple color tints based on the "extra" yield), and we don't have to reinvent the wheel with which buildings to showcase in each era. Even if we settled on a convention of <ORIGINAL_BUILDING_NAME>: <YIELD> , e.g. Monument: Science, the idea would be clear, you'd know why it's exclusive, and it would leave your queue after you built one of them.

Again, I think there's already an Event that basically does this, but this approach would work even if you disable events, and it allows a CITY to be customized, instead of ALL your monuments.
That would be OP. Would production also increase? I don't like the idea, though. It's like a forced decision for the sake of decision, not interesting one.
 
So is an "interesting" decision something like "5% of city's gold output converted to production/culture/science"? The monument was just an example, the pattern could be applied to anything. If it wasn't clear, these would be mutually exclusive buildings, so you only get one of these options. I'm trying to hone in on what a "good" specialization looks like; is it a city producing more of a single yield than another equal city minus the one choice you made? Is it a non-yield modifier that leans you in a direction?

Consider these alternatives instead:
Council of Expansion: +1:c5science:, +5 :c5science: whenever borders expand naturally.
Council of Proliferation: +1:c5science:, +5 :c5science: whenever a citizen is born.

Is that an interesting decision?
 
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If you don't count artificial methods (like preventing player to build specific buildings or limit the amount of building that can be built by much higher cost), the way to naturally encourage players to specialize their cities is by adding bonuses that can stack higher than the total sums. There's no point in specializing if getting 1 science in science focused city is the same as getting 1 science in any other cities.

This bonus, however, can be either be or not be the same as the city's specialization (ex you can have city that gives a bonus of X science based on Y amount of science it's generating, or give bonus of gold or culture or food or production or all of them based on the current amount of science it's generating). Both cases would encourage players to focus all source of science into 1 city.

The choice of having either this yield or that yield isn't really specialization if there's no underlaying mechanic above in the first place, as there's no different in the total sums (assuming all choices are balanced)
 
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