Building Staffing

[Tholish]

I read a post in the main Civ 4 Suggestions and Ideas (ie pie in the sky Civ 5 ideas) forum about mega cities and it made me think of an idea that might just might be doable by modding.

Instead of allowing a specialist, all buildings require a ciitizen be diverted to become a specialist in order to make them run, ie have effects. These citizens could be moved around just as can peasants working this farm or that farm. So, you if you don't have enough people, you have to decide wether to make a citizen a Merchant to staff the Market or a Priest to staff the Temple.

Unstaffed buildings eventually vanish.

Later civics allow specialists to be fed with gold.

 

[xmen510]

Interesting. A lot more management needed. Could be interesting. I am not sure about the building vanishing over time though. It would deffinately go towards specializing your citites depending on the needs at hand.

 

[Ajidica]

Sounds a bit complicated, perhaps when you are running a specialist in addition to a building (for example, having a temple build and running a priest) the building gets a boost. (ie:The temple gets extra culture.)

 

[The_J]

Nice idea, would be interesting so see it implemented.

It can't be done in python, because there's no point to get directly access to the specialists, so it has to be a sdk component.

 

[Tholish]

Sounds a bit complicated, perhaps when you are running a specialist in addition to a building (for example, having a temple build and running a priest) the building gets a boost. (ie:The temple gets extra culture.)

That's pretty much what the current system does. The building allows you to make an additional specialist which gains additional benefits. Now that you make me put it that way, what I'm saying is have no benefits other than those gained by the specialist, but I want regular building effects, not just specialist effects, to be dependent on there being a specialist assigned to a specific building. So there would have to be a variable "bBuildingStaffed" that had to be 1 for building effects to even take place, and it would be set to 0 each turn, then set back to 1 by having a specialist assigned to it. The hard part might be the interface for assigning citizens.

Of course there would be an automated version of this just as with the countryside, so the AI would be able to do it and you could play by just letting the governor assign citizens.


Having unstaffed buildings crumble to ruin is a way of allowing destruction by neglect. Currently, buildings cannot be destroyed once built. Part of the purpose of this is to allow simulation of depressions and dark ages, as well as increased specialization with increased urbanization. So, if barbarians pillage all your farms you have to send more citizens out to work greater areas of less productive land, and decide which buildings are crucial and which can be sacrificed. It would require a little tracking. A variable for each and every building in each and every city: iBuildingIdle. If you leave a building empty for 20 turns it goes away. So if you leave it empty for 19 turns, then staff it for one turn, iBuildingIdle goes from 19 to 18. So if you only staff it that one turn, it still will vanish in 2 more turns. But if you staff it for 20 more turns iBuildingIdle doesn't go negative, it just goes to zero.

 

[Ajidica]

Sounds overly complicated, but also interesting.

 

[Kerran]

You mean like it's done in Colonization? (Disclaimer: I haven't checked the CivIV remake, just played the original). Working the land provides either food or a raw material; then you can assign a second citizen to work a building in the city to turn that raw material into a more expensive product. The big problem I can see is that either the base fod yields or the farm improvement must be modded to provide more food, otherwise cities without food resources will be much less useful than those that have em.

Maybe we could make it so that each population point can work one tile of land AND populate one building; Barracks/Stable/Walls/Castle can be manned by garrison troops instead of citizens. The 8 provided by the capital can be replaced with a specialist slot or two (so the first citizens have somewhere meaningful to work), in fact I think the easier way to code this would be to remove the passive effect from all buildings and add a new kind of specialist slot with some bonuses based on the building (ie, a priest working in a temple would provide 1 in addition to its normal bonus). GPPs might need to be rescaled, or the "normal" specialists will produce 0 GPP with a few buildings having "super specialist" slots that also produce GPP.

 

[Tholish]

Buildings acting as a modifier for specialists would be kind of neat too, and of course tweaking would have to be done to somehow provide more food (conditionally, like with extra buildings or imps or techs). But part of what I had in mind was a way to simulate depressions and dark ages and to dispose of unwanted buildings. Right now, there is only more and more. Once you build a University and a Hospital and all these temples and cathedrals, having full effect, even if your population goes to 1. The emergence of Civilization was largely ABOUT specializing in cities, made possible by technologies that allowed more food production, which urbanization further made possible boostrapping to more specialization and food production.

What you're proposing is more specialist centric and what I have in mind is more building centric. As a game I think it would work better since deciding what to build and allow to go to ruin, ie the design of your city, is a lot more involving than just designating a specialist, though it involves designating a specialist.

I guess this building idea goes hand in hand with my idea for having an extra commerce Education, so if you don't keep up the education technologies are actually lost. Just generally, I feel maintenance of a civilization should be more than just a tax, and entropy should be a constant drag. Civilizations have risen and fallen, and more often because the economy couldn't maintain the skills that built it or because the fields salted up from too much irrigation rather than from conquest, though military demands are an additional factor to the entropic force.

That education idea could probably be modded too, but I won't get to it right away. I have a feeling I'll be finally getting to making these great masterpieces with Civ 4 when the current thing is Civ 6, like these people that are still modding Civ 3 hot and heavy. I know that these things are possible to do, but am only now starting to learn beyond XML.

I've never played colonization, though I mean to try get it and try it one of these times, and I did try FreeCol once and didn't really understand it. I'd like to try and mod colonization to be about a space colony whenever I get around to it. I did watch someone play it and he was very frustrated because he couldn't get enough liberty bells before the British came and crushed him. I told him about civ fanatics, recommended he look up some strategy suggestions.

 

[mechaerik]

Colonization is all right, and uses population assigned to buildings, which is what your talking about. I prefer regular civ4 though.

Also, there's a decided lack of mods (but Age of Discovery II is good enough for now).

 

[Dom Pedro II]

The simplest way to do this I think would be to have buildings reduce the "free" population of a city when they're constructed. So if you build a Factory, it will pull one of your citizens out of the fields or from the specialist population automatically. Then you could have the Factory give a free specialist that wouldn't actually do anything and maybe call it Factory Worker. So in your specialists you would see a Factory Worker specialist or something.

Rather than shuffling around citizens into different buildings ala Colonization, the most reasonable solution to me would be to have a "Deactivate" button next to each building. If you deactivate a building, it no longer provides any function and will release that population to be used as specialists or workers around the city.

Of course, I don't think all buildings should do this because 1) it would probably cause the cities to shrivel and die very quickly, and 2) How many employees are really needed to staff some buildings? A population point represents, at the very least, THOUSANDS of people. Do we need all of them to staff a Bank or a Theater? I don't think so.

But what this would be good for IMO would be things like the Factory, Power Plant, and Marketplace. Having the buildings consume a population point would also be historically accurate too representing the voracious demand for workers industrial centers had and accurately show the process of urbanization as citizens get plucked out of the surrounding tiles to work the buildings in the city itself.

 

[Ajidica]

That way sounds nice, I could see it being very useful for industrial age mods to show the migration to the cities.