"Build a builder" is not exactly optimal is it ?

[Naokaukodem]

So I propose that we directly improve tiles from the city queue. Or, that a tile automatically improves with time when it is worked. (similarly to the cottages in Civ4)

If this last proposition is adopted, I suggest to implement an earth decay system, to represent the over-exploitation of the land. Solutions could be cultures rotation, represented by half or quart farm not being worked and an affiliated reduction in immediate production, and fertilizers, be them natural or artificial. For natural fertilizers, they would be given by pastures like a resource. You could spend those resources for whatever farm you like. (say 1 fertilizer resource for 2 or 4 farm tiles.) This way, your production could be maxed out. Artificial fertilizers could work the same, you would have to build factories giving fertilizer resources, or even districts, with each new building adding up to your fertilizer production.

The downside of fertilizers, especialy artificial, would be an impact on pollution and diseases like cancers. (health)

If you have no fertilizers, especially early, you can choose to either reduce your food production, at a cost of a population hit, and establish crop rotation, or continue to exploit the land at full regime, which would have a negative impact on food production on the long run.

If you choose to exploit the land at max, it could decay into plains if it is grassland, and savannah if it is plains, desert if it is savannah, etc... (according to the climate) you could then have such a way of life : you start superpowerfull due to your high population, but you have to migrate in order to find new fertile spots. You sow desolation in your very place, and behind you, but you counter that by migrating or conquering. It's a little like a pastoral way of life, it is "migrating agriculture" and it has existed in History.

Note that at a point a land could recover its fertility if not cultivated during a certain time, but there would cases of non-return when deserts would remain deserts forever.

I also think we could implement a pastoral way of life such as this "Scourge" way of life. You would have to follow you beasts in order to exploit them, and of course your territory would be limited to grasslands and plains. Still to determine how exactly the boundaries of your territory, which i do not know.

Do you think it could open for new dynamic gameplay, especially in multiplayer ?

P.-S. : what if land production would increase periodically regardless of actual science progress, whereas still representing it ? After all, the longest peasants work the land, the highest chance there is for them to improve their methods and make the job less hard for them and their beasts. So, if a foreign trade route go through this city, there would be a small chance for it to discover the new agricultural techniques there is in this city / country. In the same way, improvements, it is to say the first farm tiles to be improved, would be communicated slowly around them, improving the other surrounding farm tiles slowly before they would have done it on their own.

 

[Ryika]

"Build a builder" is not exactly optimal is it ?

...uhh... care to explain why you think that? I think the system is great.

Your proposal sounds interesting as content for a mod (well, except for decaying land types, that's not possible), but the builder system seems like a very good system for the unmodded game.

 

[How to know]

Remove builders? Great. Improvement built overtime automatically? Excellent. Regarding fertilisers, they don't necessary all come from pastures; early sewers or even city centre and neighbourhood, may also provide a bit, for some obvious but rather less pleasant reasons.

And regarding desolation, I think such system can only exist if we have any kind of migration or nomadic system, which we don't unfortunately. The only possible way I can think of would be every time a city produce a settler, that got -1 pop, and the settler can then "join" another city but give it +1 pop, it would be way to tedious though. Added to that, there are much more possible content regarding terrains and features, like the growth of forest and jungle, rivers changing paths, etc.

 

[Naokaukodem]

...uhh... care to explain why you think that? I think the system is great

I would care if I knew how to. Actually, that's just someone who said the sentence, and it sounded absurd for me at the moment. Like "building a builder", seriously ? Why not build the thing directly ? I know human species have always done tools, and that's what precisely is "building to build", but it made me smile without further thinking. On another note, it always amazed me when people have to build things to build another, and always wondered intimely if this weren't a nonsense. (of course it's not) Like, we can know exactly how many time will last a calculation, without actually doing it ! Me, in my little head, can absurdely think : "yes, but how many times does it require to calculate how many time is needed to calculate this ?" :crazy: I know it's absurd, but I can't prevent myself to think those kinds of things. Cheers.

Remove builders? Great. Improvement built overtime automatically? Excellent. Regarding fertilisers, they don't necessary all come from pastures; early sewers or even city centre and neighbourhood, may also provide a bit, for some obvious but rather less pleasant reasons.

And regarding desolation, I think such system can only exist if we have any kind of migration or nomadic system, which we don't unfortunately. The only possible way I can think of would be every time a city produce a settler, that got -1 pop, and the settler can then "join" another city but give it +1 pop, it would be way to tedious though. Added to that, there are much more possible content regarding terrains and features, like the growth of forest and jungle, rivers changing paths, etc.

Yeah, I forgot about sewers but I assure you i thought about them. Just forgot to place them, but you certainly noticed how confused was the OP, right ?

I didn't think about a nomadic system to implement that, I just thought about new cities and particularly, I must say, conquest, considering growing a city from scratch after some game time may be too crippling, especially considering buildings / districts / wonders. But I guess that if one is considering to play such as, it wouldn't do all these things, and maybe even not build monuments. (a clever way of ICS) And, in order to help, the player should choose at the start or after some map discovering (to check if he has animals for example) what way he wants to take, so building useless things like monnuments, districts or wonders would be purely and simply impossible. (again, to help the player not to make mistakes)

 

[dunkleosteus]

If we want to talk about tile improvements, I think builders in general are a little silly. Having improvements take any time at all is silly.

Consider this: what do farmers DO? They till the land, plant seeds, harvest crops, let the land fallow, re-till the soil, plant seeds, etc. So what are the builders doing? Chopping down trees? Well if there was a forest, yes, but otherwise the land is open fields. Plowing the fields? But that would only be needed the first time, and it would be done automatically by farmers (ie regular citizens) forever afterwards.

Mines- what are the miners doing? Swinging pickaxes, breaking rocks, taking out carts of ore and stone, digging deeper. So what are the builders doing? Same for quarries- are the builders removing stone? Because that's exactly what a quarry does.

Really, I think it's silly that any worked tile can't just be improved by the citizens working it. The only thing builders could possibly do would be things that are specifically for or paid for by the government, ie builders would be the things that build wonders or forts (currently built by military engineers aka builders v 2.0), or districts or something. Government-funded workers really aren't needed for the majority of what they're used for.

 

[Infixo]

I think the general idea is that Builders 'improve' tiles i.e. build on them more complex things that allow that tile to yield more. The tiles themselves produce some yield, also you can assign citizens to that tile - like farmers. Basic tools, basic yields. But you need a farm to boost yields or a mine to get a resource.

 

[dunkleosteus]

right, but how do they do this? What magical ability to builders have that enables them to permanently make a tile "more" of a farm?? It seems like tile improvements are locked behind builders so that you have to invest production into them. I guess the devs felt this was a good way to handle this mechanic. But it isn't the only way to handle it, and I guess that's what we're discussing here.

We should adress that then- how would removing builders or shifting their use affect gameplay?

 

[Socra]

How bout we keep the happy builders, add your improved plot over time idea, but make it work through a status system.

Farm Example: Excellent Harvest +2 food, Good Harvest +1 food, Bad Harvest -1 food, Drought -2 food

And upon every X (maybe 20) turns a new status is randomly selected and enacted. Chemistry Tech (fertilizer) ends this cycle and grants a flat bonus +2 from there-out. Idk.

 

[EpicWestern]

Well, citizens can already produce resources without builders, we do have increases in tile production through technology (ex. apprenticeship), and we have increases in tile production through some buildings (ex. water mill). We can argue whether civ6 should be more or less focused in a certain area, but it already has all the needed mechanics in place. Removing builders entirely is just removing a feature from the game.

 

[1SDANi]

Why not make Tile Improvements Districts, maybe file them under a different section of the UI?

While we're at it, I'd love it if we could expand our cities, maybe build City Extender Districts, perhaps make the max number of City Center buildings rely on the number of city tiles?

 

[Amrunril]

The major gameplay difference between building builders and building improvements directly is that it allows the option of building a builder in one city to build improvements in a different one, which allows more city specialization and the kick starting of new cities. Whether these options are worth the hassle of managing builders as units is, of course, debatable.

The idea of building improvements automatically by working tiles is an intriguing one. As with many things in a game as abstracted as civ, its fairly easy to justify either system from a flavor perspective. From a gameplay perspective, it would mean not having to invest production in "improving" the land and increased importance of manually managing citizens. It sounds at first like less micromanagement than builders, but depending on how it's implemented, I could easily see it being more. It's also not clear how such a system would accommodate choices between improvement types (especially important in the case of unique improvements) or choosing whether to clear forests, jungles and marshes.

 

[Addersting]

I have always disliked the tedious nature of managing workers/builders. I would suggest that tiles improve themselves when worked but with a 5- turn delay til improvement. There should also be a 5-turn delay for the improvement to disappear after that tile is no longer being worked. This will help reduce the inclination to constantly micromanage city yields but still leave the option open short term production rushing. Of all the things I find most tedious in the game, micromanaging city yields and building/ management of builders are #2 and #3 respectively. #1 is still moving armies with a 1 UPT system. Unit stacking (even if limited) would help that.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

The mechanism to 'build' Improvements in a single turn, given that Civ turn lengths range from 1 to 40+ years, is Long Overdue.
But 'Building Builders' really just moves the time mis-match to the construction of the Builders themselves (which are an Abstraction in the first place, just as 'Workers' were in previous games) - and that time gets longer as the game progresses.

Let's go back to some faint connection with reality: The City represents the collection of people that include the 'workers' who are going to Work the Land. Working the Land includes 'Improving' the Land with whatever Construction you think you need, or the Workers think they need. Therein lies, I think, the solution: Each City provides 'Workers' automatically for what has to be done to Feed the City with resources, food, etc.

So, I suggest two mechanisms, both related. You can simply set a Priority for the City: Growth (the norm when first founded), Defense, Production, Resources (work the 'special' tiles first), etc. As now, the city can work a tile for each Population Point in the city, but the working of the tile, as others have posted, produces the Improvement automatically - the idea of a 'delay' of X turns is also appropriate, keeping the 'Bouncing Worker' from tile to tile from becoming the norm. You can, therefore, 'set' a city and then ignore the details until your (Empire) priorities change.
OR you can 'micro' the workers by specifying the tile(s) to be worked, just as you could move workers around in previous Civ games. There simply is no reason to 'abstract' the work force into units. If barbarians or enemies Pillage a tile, the game can assume that a certain percentage of the workforce/population also got carried off or slaughtered, without having to move Worker/Builder Abstractions around the map.

To retain the flexibility of Builders or Workers moving from city to city, as soon as you have a road between cities, a certain percentage of the Worker Points (Population Points) in each city can be moved to work tiles in another city. I suggest that at first this would be very limited: possibly only 10 - 20% of the population of the city, or based on the number of tiles Yet To Be Worked in the city radius - brand new cities generally do not have any excess workers to send away, whereas the 'established' cities may not have work for everyone, and so would be a source for 'migrant workers'.

Of course, once we have the Worker/Builder Time Scale worked out in practice, the fact that at present it still takes 100 - 250 years to produce a Slinger in the Ancient Era, or 100+ years to build a Market or Bank later on, will also have to be addressed...