building notes, weaker ones

[mystikx21]

An incomplete list for reference later.

Food:
Water mill (reduce upkeep, add more production instead of food)
Med lab. Costs a lot for what it does.
Garden could be built anywhere?

Lighthouse, Granary, Aqueduct are good. Hospital is okay.

Faith
Temple. beliefs/policies help, but other than the Grand Temple, I find little reason to build these. Faith is easy to come by with shrines and beliefs/policies and the purchase cost reduction in piety is also.
Shrines are fine at 1 upkeep now rather than zero like GEM. Religion is more useful and it is easy to get policies or beliefs to make shrines better still.
Pagoda is still way better than the mosque. Cathedral is arguably okay.

Gold
Market. The luxury bonus on canvansary helps it but weakens markets, which were already a little weak in BNW other than trade hubs. Maybe better to combine markets and caravanarsei, and push it back to currency.
Mint. Almost useless. Especially if reduced to +1 gold rather than +2 (text error). Make it cheaper and apply to gems(copper)?.
Bank-Stock. Markets are better than both. Banks are often good only if you can predict where AI trade will go. Two merchant slots help, but not that much. Stock could use gold on late strategics (oil) for flavor.

Harbor is basically okay except roads are about as good for some ports (one advantage is at railroad, especially since RR doesn't offer any bonus move over roads).

Gold building adjustments should be modest at best as they could have very large impacts on trade routes and gold balance. BNW gold is not bad already.

Production
Forge. Slightly less useless. Helps that it was fixed in CEP. Extra production on mines makes this less important though. 20% would help.
Windmill (costs a lot)
Factories. They're probably fine either way with the +2 bonus on late strategics.
Remove Aluminum requirement on Hydro plant (water mill)
Remove Recycling Center.

Stable is good. Workshop good. Etc. Seaport is okay with CEP +2 production (maybe raised to 20% for sea?)

Military
Barracks-line is marginal in most cases (Hero Epic is worth building a few) but that's okay. Cost reducer in Honor helps but comes a little later (I mostly use it to put up armories and m.academies).

Walls line seems fine if the HP scales like in GEM (hard to tell if that's working yet, combat is not common outside of early game and there's no UI function). Consider lowering building defence across the board to reduce healing slightly and reduce city strength (especially with unit strengths being reduced in 3.18).

The spy buildings still are terrible. Nothing to see here...

Happiness
Zoo/Stadium +1 (+2 on stadium). Zoo is fine as is in CEP at +3 happy. Stadium costs a lot to add only +3.

Culture
Opera House is a little weak next to it's tier. Theaters add culture to resources and museums have 2 slots for theme bonuses. Possibly add +1-2 culture to the building?

 

[mitsho]

I'd say it makes more sense to look at them by type:

River:
Water Mill: Yes, production > Food

Religion:
Temple: Yeah, something needs to be done to make Temples more worthy than Shrines, says my intuition. Maybe move a few of the Shrine Beliefs to Temples is enough/make the temple effect comparatively bigger? + the buffs on social policies. A whole revamp of the faith costs like what we did with culture is also an option, but not my preffered one?

Gold:
Markets&Caravanserais: The roles here should be that we want markets everywhere, but only a few Caravanserais. Right? The latter might become rather useless though. If they buff land routes comparatively more than harbors do with sea routes, that seems still okay with me. I'm not sure we want ressource buffs on both of those buildings.
Mint: Will it get reintroduced into the market - bank line in CEP?
Banks and Stock Exchanges:
Why was the National Treasury cut btw.? That might be a way to boost Banks again sensibly?

Production:
Forge: It's situational. The Production line has a general booster, a unit booster and a building booster still (+ Factories and Seaports)?

Army:
Barracks (and Armories etc. ...) have always been marginal. Maybe if we move the "garisoned units gets xp-per-turn here, we'd want to build more of them. But is that desirable? A good buff for a military leader would be either reduced upkeep or policy-related, but not on the barracks, the higher ones imho.

Sea:
We'd want one City connection + Trade Route bonus (harbor?), one Food (Lighthouse) and one Production (Seaport), am I right here? Do we want the warehouses again (they could provide another bonus to both riverside and coastal cities?
It's the same "problem" as with markets vs. caravanserais...

Culture: They seem all fine to me?

Spy: Yes, the GEM-system seems a step up here...

... and what happened to our discussion earlier on regarding Rivers, Trade and (early) Gold Income? (Ferry?)

We will get to "Trade" after the leaders/UI changes, right? (or are we doing policies, religion and espionage or happiness management first?)

 

[Ahriman]

Agree with Mystikx in general.

Some proposed fixes:

Watermill: reduce the gold upkeep cost.
Temple: reduce the gold upkeep cost or increase faith production to 3.
Market: maybe add another +1 base gold? Banks have the same problem.
Mint: Make it +2 gold, make it affect gems, reduce the production cost.

Removing the unnecessary extra mine boost will help to make the forge and others more meaningful. It could also potentially have a slightly larger unit production bonus.

Barracks I think is fine. I never liked how GEM tried to make it something you built everywhere.

Harbor I think is probably fine as is. The domestic trade route connection effect is very useful.

Windmill production cost coming down should be sufficient.

Agree that Zoo/stadium should have boosts, as long as unhappiness increases somewhere else.
Opera house seems fine to me. But that's in part because I just enjoy great works. It's hard for me to ever make myself use a great artist for something not a great work.
Recycling center could be removed completely.

 

[EricB]

The mint is a completely useless building.

I'm playing a game as Egypt. My capitol city started with 2 gold resources next to it. Even with that start, I was hesitant to build a mint until many other key buildings had been built. I would up the mint to +3 gold on gold, silver, copper, or gems.

If it was just +2 gold, it may not be worth building in a city with just one of those luxury resources. I don't think it needs to be a multiplier building like in GEM. There's already enough gold floating around as is.

 

[mystikx21]

@mitsho, I think the luxury bonus is supposed to be just on the canvansary and not both it and the market. Having it on the canvansary makes that useful at least (I might build one most games, similar to the constable/police station), and makes the banks-stock exchange compare more favorably to the market. Which is fine. It does mean you could need two buildings in some locations to raise gold early on, but these are both pretty cheap buildings.

I think the harbor would be fine if the road cost reducer in the commerce tree was -25% instead of -50% yes. It costs two plus production to make it, so other than overseas connections and the port hub(s), it really doesn't do much where you can connect a city of 4-5 spaces away with a road at the same price plus internal move speed for land units. I don't think the warehouse is necessary, but we might consider spreading out the lighthouse bonus (food +production), or giving the harbor some raw production.

Mint I think is intended to impact gems, gold, silver, and maybe copper. I could live with it being cheap and only do that certainly. The question was the design pushing toward +1 and then doing something else in the market-tier. I'm not sure this is necessary.

The market trade boost is generally better than the banks one, which is passive. Base gold increase on markets and banks might be acceptable, as this largely helps the non-trade cities. Stock exchanges could get gold on some late game strategics (oil, alum?), and maybe a small base gold or percentage increase. A "Wall St/National Treasury" style wonder instead of East India might help on banks but without other gold changes (unit upkeep, opportunities, fewer barbarian camps, some changes to building upkeep), I don't think we want to add very much gold income. BNW and so far the early CEP experience (as of 3.17) seems about right.

Opera House uses "Great Musicians" not "Great Artists". I find those are better, at least personally, when not used as slotted works because of their tourism offensive potential. But that may just be early opinion with tourism games. The balance question is this though: Museums get two slots (Artifact/art) and amphitheaters get a writer slot and extra culture on resources in CEP. Opera Houses just give raw culture and the music slot. I think the Opera House could use something else on it as a result, based on comparing it to the tier. Possibly more culture.

(as a related point, France's UA is really underwhelming).

 

[Teholb]

Mint: Make it +2 gold, make it affect gems, reduce the production cost.

The mint is a completely useless building.

If it was just +2 gold, it may not be worth building in a city with just one of those luxury resources. I don't think it needs to be a multiplier building like in GEM. There's already enough gold floating around as is.

I think that +2 would be appropriate for the Mint. It really annoys me that it doesn't qualify Gems, though. Perhaps Copper would be appropriate as well, but then, I'm not sure if +2 would be balanced, having so many more opportunities to grant a GPT bonus.

The fact that it doesn't cost maintenance doesn't make up for it being a waste of time/gold to produce. It's simply not worth it, and as someone who loves building up my cities, I hate seeing "useless" buildings cluttering up the available build options.

Recycling center could be removed completely.

This, however, I do not agree with. When I get to the late game, and I simply don't have access to much aluminium (<=4-6), the recycling center is always there to save my bacon. I would be very sad if this were removed . . . but then again, I'd be forced to make more deals with the CS and other AI, which could make for more interesting play.

 

[EricB]

Maybe +2 gold on gold, silver, gems, and copper for the mint along with reducing the production cost might be okay.

If it was a cheap building to produce and provided a modest benefit, then it may be worth building.

Most of the time a city is going to have only 1 of those resources, if any, so you have to consider how much is +1, +2, or +3 gold in that city worth? Not a lot. So, the benefit of the building needs to increase or the cost of the building needs to go down. Maybe prefer the cost of the building going down. Maybe 50% the cost of what it currently is.

 

[mystikx21]

Mints would mostly only apply to a handful of cities with clusters of precious metals (copper does this the most I find, at least from GK experience). So I don't think +2 would be too overpowering that you would build it everywhere immediately, only in a few places where it would be +4-6 or so would it be a higher priority. Other places where it is +2 and cheap it might make it into the list, but we might not care. Lowering the upfront cost would be noticeable in making it easier to build at some point. Possibly a base gold amount (+1) if it is still perceived as too weak.

This is similar to the stable, where it provides a higher priority in a couple of high pastured cities (3-4+ production) and lower in others where it might add +2 total. Plus the mounted units bonus.

 

[Ahriman]

I think I'd prefer to see copper bonus on the forge than the mint.

 

[Stalker0]

I'd say it makes more sense to look at them by type:
River:
Water Mill: Yes, production > Food

Religion:
Temple: Yeah, something needs to be done to make Temples more worthy than Shrines, says my intuition. Maybe move a few of the Shrine Beliefs to Temples is enough/make the temple effect comparatively bigger? + the buffs on social policies. A whole revamp of the faith costs like what we did with culture is also an option, but not my preffered one?

Gold:
Markets&Caravanserais: The roles here should be that we want markets everywhere, but only a few Caravanserais. Right? The latter might become rather useless though. If they buff land routes comparatively more than harbors do with sea routes, that seems still okay with me. I'm not sure we want ressource buffs on both of those buildings.
Mint: Will it get reintroduced into the market - bank line in CEP?
Banks and Stock Exchanges:
Why was the National Treasury cut btw.? That might be a way to boost Banks again sensibly?

Production:
Forge: It's situational. The Production line has a general booster, a unit booster and a building booster still (+ Factories and Seaports)?

Army:
Barracks (and Armories etc. ...) have always been marginal. Maybe if we move the "garisoned units gets xp-per-turn here, we'd want to build more of them. But is that desirable? A good buff for a military leader would be either reduced upkeep or policy-related, but not on the barracks, the higher ones imho.

Sea:
We'd want one City connection + Trade Route bonus (harbor?), one Food (Lighthouse) and one Production (Seaport), am I right here? Do we want the warehouses again (they could provide another bonus to both riverside and coastal cities?
It's the same "problem" as with markets vs. caravanserais...

Culture: They seem all fine to me?

Spy: Yes, the GEM-system seems a step up here...

... and what happened to our discussion earlier on regarding Rivers, Trade and (early) Gold Income? (Ferry?)

We will get to "Trade" after the leaders/UI changes, right? (or are we doing policies, religion and espionage or happiness management first?)

Watermill: I don't find them that bad myself, but i would be fine with 1 f 2 prod or a reduced maintenance cost. I don't think we need the old 1 f 3 prod or engineer slot back.

Temples: I agree that they are very underwhelming.

Gold: I would hold on any changes here till we see how trade routes changes (if any) shake out. Except probably the mint since it doesn't get affected by trade routes, i would be fine with a cheaper building that applies to more resources, i don't necessarily need a stronger effect.

Forge: Its okay, i build them once in a while, but a small buff wouldn;t be bad.

Barracks: They are fine imo, sure i won't always build them everywhere but i am going to build them in a few cities, the xp is too valuable.

Sea: I am generally happy overall with sea buildings as is and wouldn't support a change yet. The lighthouse is a solid building that is basically necessary to get a sea city off and running. Harbors have good trade uses, seaport is decent enough.

Culture/Tourism: I've been trying a few tourism games and so far i'm just underwhelmed on tourism. The bonuses seem so fiddly and has basically 0 impact until late in the game. So i'm the opposite of Ahriman, i would burn GAs for the culture bump everytime. Although i will say culture seems to come at a decent pace for me right now in the games i've played.

Spy: There are spy buildings!!! I always forget them

 

[mystikx21]

Agreed on watermills at 1f-2p with 1 upkeep. 1f-3p was good even without an engineer slot. Making them a requirement for hydro plants instead of aluminum would be fine too. You're more likely to build the watermill anyway (as it just affects the city, not the river tiles).

The gold change so far seems to be shifting around the gold on luxuries/precious metals and not changes to the underlying mechanisms. I doubt that will fiddle much with the economy. Trade routes seem basically fine to me. I don't think we need to mess much with them other than through UA effects for leaders and then the change to make the caravan cheap.

I do find that the gold buildings in BNW are much less important other than in trade cities, where they are essential. That's a very different design from something you'd want to build everywhere, but might prioritize more highly in a heavily villaged city or port in GEM. I think the ideal setup is that we build them immediately in a trade hub or high village/luxury city, and then might park them 2-3 things back somewhere else (a science or wonder city), and very low on a military production city.

In general if we can ignore something or it only has brain-dead style priorities (always build under these exact circumstances) attached to it, then it ends up just clogging the build options up. Right now gold buildings feel like they are pushing in that direction. I think of markets as a little higher "this will be in every city, eventually" decision than a barracks, which is a more specialized building. A commercial center is essential to having a modern city, an army base is not.

 

[Teholb]

I think I'd prefer to see copper bonus on the forge than the mint.

Copper could be so many things, it's difficult to understand why it was selected to be a luxury resource. Copper in early weaponry, copper in currency, copper in modern electronics . . . but no, it was made into a luxury

Is there an unwritten rule against having resources be used for multiple buildings/purposes? Perhaps Copper could be a sort of hybrid resource that would be retained for happiness when necessary, or it could be "consumed" for unit production (would work nicely early and late game, not so much mid game, though). I've always liked the idea of that sort of trade off. I'll stop being OT now, I just thought it was a fun idea.

 

[Hawawaa]

Market- Get rid of the caravansary building (benefits go to stable and market). 25% range bonus for land caravans and +1 luxuries.

Stable- 25% bonus to land caravans and +2 gold for caravans from here.

Bank- extends range of trade routes (land routes more valuable and another trade route?)

Barracks- (add one of these or few of these small bonuses) small bonus to city defense, small reduction to barbs spawning around city, small reduction to enemy spy chances? similar bonus to other defense structures in some shape or form. You invest in your nations security so you should get pay backs with having lots of defense structures.

Religious structures shield cities from conversions (grand temple applies a civ wide bonus to lower enemy conversions) Priests slots.

Constabulary- Anti spy structures free spy (only 1 can be built) city its built in gets anti spy bonus -25% and civ wide -5-15% anti spy bonus. All trade routes and enbarked units get +1 sight.

(sec figuring what the hell to do with police station...)

 

[Hawawaa]

National Public Safety Agency- (replaces police station and only 1 can be built) +1 spy, anti spy bonus -25% in built city, civ wide -5-15% anti spy bonus, +1 happiness, trade routes move +1.

National Security Agency- -20-25% civ wide anti spy bonus, lower barbarian spawning around your empire, small science and production bonus. 1 free great person of your choice ie great general or great admiral.

Naval Academy- new great admiral UB. Uses up Great admiral and gives small bonus to production, science, faster building for naval units and 15xp to naval units constructed in this city.

 

[EricB]

I really like your ideas for the market and stable getting the benefits of the caravansary. I'd also recommend making the market available at Currency instead of Trapping. Trapping already has trading posts, which are very valuable, and camps. Currency just has mints (next to worthless) and Petra, which is very situational and only 1 civ gets. I've been playing with that minor tweak and it works nicely. It's how the vanilla game has it too.

As for the bank...
Adding a new trade route per bank would be too much. Extending the range of trade routes would be a nice effect.

I'm not sure if the religion effects can be done or not. Would be nice if possible.

 

[Stalker0]

I really like your ideas for the market and stable getting the benefits of the caravansary.

I like it to. Consolidate a few situational buildings to create a more powerful, general one. Makes sense!

 

[mitsho]

I second the loss of the Caravanserai. Land Trade Route do get replaced by sea ones so it's kinda redundant in the later game. It really makes sense all along.

I'm not sure we should give it to the stable though. Other options:
- Giving the whole effect to markets (probably too strong then)
- Make the mint again part of the gold line and spread the effects on market and mint
- Buff barracks or walls with the effect (not linked to terrain mostly, but same problem as stables and doesn't necessarily make more sense...)

If we do move the effect to stables, they will be all over the place with their effects, ranging from extra production (useful for wonders f.e. as well) to military (faster build time or extra experience for mounted units) to trade (extended routes). Isn't that a bit much?

 

[Ahriman]

I think we should leave the stable as it is, but I quite like the idea of merging the caravanserai into the market, bank and/or mint.

 

[mystikx21]

Stable is currently a situational building, that you can't necessarily build everywhere (in theory you can, but there are cases now where there are no stable resources to be improved). I doubt I would build it more often for land trade route bonuses, as those are highly limited themselves. I'd prefer that stayed a cheap military/production building that's occasionally great (3-4+ early production+mounted bonus). I don't think it needed any help from there. This applies also to barracks and walls. Walls should be quite good enough with the HP and defence bonuses, and barracks are basically fine as is. If either of those are too weak, we should adjust their military capabilities before mixing them as economic buildings too heavily (outside of policies).

Second moving market back to currency. Villages at trapping (renaming it trade again?) is fine. I could certainly see consolidating it with the caravanserai. (I'm not sure if its a problem with Firaxis or with us that they keep adding buildings in expansions and we keep finding them to be mostly useless and redundant and remove them.)

Banks should make trade routes more valuable, with a bigger bonus on passive trade (from AIs). The extended range should come earlier as land routes are not viable very quickly against harbors and cargo ships. Definitely should not add a trade route (per bank?, very easy to get 10-12 of those). We should look into scaling range of trade based on map size more so than offer a lot of range bonuses on buildings (something for civup to look into?). I find on a standard map there's few cities I can't reach from a centrally located port. This is already ideal. Further range bonus availability just makes city placement for trade irrelevant, that you can trade from anywhere.

Mints could offer a trade route bonus as well (passive one?), but should be limited where you can build them. I don't want to see them part of the gold line tier really but they could work as something to offer a precious metals center a little bonus in gold and trade. (I'd suggest that each mint adds +1 to all of your trade routes globally, but this could be easy to exploit and reward wider playstyles a bit too much. Maybe just +1 to trade coming and going from a mint city).

I like the idea of passive defence from faith generation. The biggest issue in the game is the Prophets first shot ability to massive conversions, but basically this just means parking an inquisitor in the holy city and using others tactically when others convert large border cities in an unwanted manner. Easiest way might be to have faith add directly to religious pressure once a city has a religion. I'm not sure how that interacts with conversion rates already though or if it just spreads it faster in the absence of pressure (I shall have to investigate religion's mechanics).

Lower barb spawning on a late game building isn't much value, and isn't really a bonus anyway (easy to top off xp pre military academies or older units laying around). I find barbarians don't keep pace tech wise enough to be a threat by the time you'd have any sort of national intelligence tech.

I don't think trade routes can get sight. They're on a different layer already. I'd be curious if they can get speed bonuses, but this is mostly irrelevant. They're not going to earn more money and are still vulnerable.

An admiral UB would be nice. They're pretty useless otherwise. We've been kicking that around for a long time now though.

 

[mystikx21]

Initial easier proposals then:

Windmill cost dropped to 150 (was 250). (270 in mod instead of 450).
Watermill upkeep dropped to 1, food to 1, production increased to 2
Mints effect gems (don't currently in mod) Cost reduced to 75 (was 100, 140 instead of 180 in mod).
Stadium and zoo add +1 happiness. (stadium is only 3 happiness in mod, zoo is probably fine at 3. Stadium is really expensive for 3).
Temple faith increased to 3. (probably paired with some increases to faith cost deltas?)
Drop aluminum requirement on hydro plants (watermill instead?)
Forge +1 production, +20% land units.

Major changes to trade routes, eliminating buildings, and any changes to spy buildings could wait. Those above could done immediately.