Monastery level building costs as per tech (these allow the building of missionaries) - exception Mormon
There are two Monastery level buildings. The first is given the specialbuildingtype of Monastery and that assigns them all to have the same tech prereq. If you are saying that IF the religion is of a later tech than the building should be adjusted, that actually does make some sense and I happened across that thought myself. But I didn't know if we should establish that as a standard or not. In this case, then Monastery II type buildings (by specialbuildingtype), where the special building type info does not define a prerequisite tech, would make sense for them to have an assignment using the religious tech associated with them as a proxy tech for establishing cost as well and that makes them usually cheaper, which is exactly how they are assigned now.
Temples level buildings cost 1.25 time the Monastery - if at the same tech, or tech otherwise
Temple I SpecialBuildingTypes open up a bit earlier than monasteries and are thus cheaper and temples themselves are commonly much less rewarding across the board in almost all religions. Thus, if anything, they should be about 80% of the cost of the Monasteries... Perhaps whatever the standard tech access difference in ratio terms exists between the techs for standard temple access and the tech for standard monastery access anyhow. And then if the monestery access, proxied by the religion tech being more modern than the ... what is it? Meditation tech? that allows access to standard monasteries, then temples would be reduced just under the monastery costs in the same religion.
Thus, Monastery cost, being a standard of 216 by being on TECH_MEDITATION, showing up on X33 on the tech columns, and standard Temple cost, being a standard of 160 by being on TECH_PRIESTHOOD, showing up on X26 on the tech columns, shows us that the cost of a temple where the temple and the monastery are both accessed by the same religious proxy tech instead of an assigned tech prereq should be at about
75% of the cost of the monastery, which picks up the cost of the religious tech by X grid. (technically 74.074074 (with the 074 repeating, derived by getting the % of 216 that 160 represents by dividing 160 by 216))
That wouldn't be too hard to reconfigure. Cool.
Cathedrals level buildings cost 5 times the Monastery - ditto (these used to require a number of temples they probably should even if it is only 1).
This is a little trickier. The benefits are powerful, but arguably usually powerful for culture which is, even with Developing Leaders, hard to prioritize as much as even a much smaller benefit to research from a Monastery. They are supposed to be significantly larger buildings, and yes, in Vanilla they required 3 temples for each one you could build. I used to like that we took it down to a 1-1 ratio, and maybe have even gotten rid of the # of temple requirements but I'm kinda missing having to be more selective with where you build them and feel like 3 temples to 1 Cathedral is probably a good idea.
But they come up, I feel, a bit cost short in basing them completely on tech. TECH_MUSIC is in X-Grid column 40 and that has a base of 280. This is pretty close to the 300 they used to have. But 280 compared to 216 makes them a little cheaper by ratio than they were to original vanilla. Perhaps they should be, particularly since we have more religions, their benefits are still glutonously delivered to a commerce that isn't nearly as beneficial as research (with a FEW of them being really coveted because they do give some research), and they are a reward for having invested into what are commonly almost worthless temples. The ratio there, as it stands, is currently at 280/213 = 129.629 repeating, roughly 130% the cost of the Cathedral. I can see that as being fairly reasonable for assignment on non-tech standard religion buildings.
Under this analysis, x5 cost would be way overboard I think.
(BTW, even keeping Choose Religions in place, this enforces some balance! You wouldn't want to pick later religions because the build costs on those buildings would be hell.)
This approach would keep us at a baseline based on techs. However, you may be considering how beneficial the buildings are in terms of yield and commerce returns in part of your thinking. If that's the case, we may need to add to the costing formula an evaluation of the value of the building, as others have been suggesting we do across all types of buildings. There are also some further considerations we could make here too, as compiled on this thread earlier - some of these are already being suggested for consideration in your proposal:
1. In-game technology level (forms the base amount)
2. Real-world material
3. Real-world complexity
4. Game benefit factor
5. Enthusiasm - sense of priority from the community
6. Category - when 2,3,4,5 or other category specific consideration applies to every building in the category.
So I'm just trying to at first consider how the religions buildings can all adhere to some logic on consideration #1.
#s 2 and 3 may be subconsciously playing into some of how you'd like to see these costed, but then both would differ by the actual religion type right?
#4 seems to be a big factor in how you are looking at a lot of buildings and seems to form the core cause to adjust away from the tech as a base. If we can figure out how to numerically RATE, in terms of say, -90% to +100% modifier to the base cost based on some tally of the benefits of the tags used on the buildings, that's something we could apply to a lot more than just religious buildings! All types could be capable of being tallied up to a result that suggests it's ahead or behind a common curve. Of course, whatever the common amount is (no modifier) would differ based on expectations that are established by the era our building is in. This is much along the lines of what Noriad was pointing out. An early mine operation should probably give +1 :Hammers: but a later game type mining operation for the same material should have gone through upgrade stages and be giving much more than +1 :Hammers:, perhaps it should be giving +Era Count of the prereq tech in :Hammers: instead and there should be upgrades for every era for every mine type. This is where I'm leaning myself. At this point, just offering that and a small penalty to compensate would put the building at +/- 0% modifier to the base cost of the building from being at the 'standard of benefit for that era'. From those standards of benefits, we can plot out % modifier gradients to the base cost as the building becomes more or less beneficial compared to the modern standard for that building.
That's a lot to map out but it seems to be what the modder is actually doing in the subconscious (and somewhat inaccurately) when we establish costs for buildings with benefit level AND tech in mind.
Am I making sense here?
#5 is how much the people of the city would get behind the effort and chip in, making it potentially cheaper. This would certainly potentially apply for temples and possibly even cathedrals, no? We don't want to get TOO much into trying to measure how much by measuring the amount of religious influence in the city... or do we? With the Ideas project, once that's in place, we could create speed of construction modifier effects based on the % influence of the religion in the city so maybe as a base this shouldn't be a factor, just something that later we can include in our game structure.
#6 would be categorical catchalls for factors that simply apply to that category for some reason, such as Rmi's statement:
The town watch / patrol etc buildings are pretty good and upgrade your police. They can be 125 or 150%
Do we have any real reason for this that isn't considered in #1-#5 though? And those can vary by the building. A Castle may be a passive defense building by category, like a wall, but most walls are far less complex in terms of their engineering plans and construction efforts, so should the passive defense category have a flat adjustment for engineering plans and construction efforts or should this vary by building more than by category?
But say in the case of LE unit training and operations buildings as mentioned here in Rmi's post, one could endlessly speculate as to how involved the building itself would need to be and would it not then be easier to apply that +25% to all of them because they give access to the best LE units available (a quick proxy method of compensating for factor #4 across the board with an assumption that the buildings are balanced before the unit access factor is considered.)
So there's a lot to think about there. At the moment, keeping things to tech considerations alone, I think we've determined that the following process should currently apply to temples and monasteries and cathedrals:
1) If it's a type I specialbuildinginfo, then the tech prerequisite applies based on the standard tech that accesses, UNLESS the religious tech is more advanced (which gives us a lot of auditing work on these buildings!) in which case you use the x-grid of the religion's tech to assign a proxy new selection and recost to that new proxy tech column.
2) If it is a type II, then the tech prerequisite applies a proxy value based on the xgrid for the tech for the religion, whether the religion is earlier OR later than the standard tech prerequisite for the type I specialbuilding type. (most of these are good for monasteries as the baseline)
3) Monasteries form the basis where the non-standard costing based on the religious tech proxy prereq applies.
4) Temples -25% cost of the Monasteries
5) Cathedrals +30% cost of the Monasteries
Now we can discuss adjusting these modifiers to cost based on the other factors, #2-6.
/ +1
for each banana, coconut, papaya, guava, mango, apple, fig, date, almond, pistachio, etc. in city vicinity". This way, the building becomes more valuable the more bonuses you have and vice versa. Just an idea. It would mess with prerequisite chains, and there's no way to grant extra yields for diversity (ie, wheat + apples = strawberries), so there would need to be work-arounds anyway. But I think it would help clean up the build menu.
I'll get back to the rest after a rest.
