Buildlist spam makes the game less interesting

[Thunderbrd]

I thought that AIAndy's build stuff was supposed to fix this? But i personally have tried it and can NOT figure out to work it either, so i take it everyone else is having the same problems, not knowing how to use it, doesn't do much good in C2C, if nobody knows how to use it???

My wife has figured some things out there... I'll try to get her to log on later and explain how to make it work. There's some issues with it working as intended but there are some workarounds.

 

[Hydromancerx]

I am giving in and going to experiment with Auto-Build buildings. At the moment I am starting with all the Animal Traps. It will work like this ...

1. Build Animal Trap as you have done before.

2. If the conditions are right then it will auto-build a Rabbit Trap or Beaver Trap in your city.

3. You cannot normally build Rabbit Traps or Beaver Traps now.

In short there will still be buildings to build, but less of them. Some of which will be trigger buildings that unlock sets of Auto-Build buildings. I plan to do it for other groups such as ...

- Hunter's Camp = Unlocks all Hunting Buildings to Auto-Build
- Fisherman's Hut = Unlocks all Fishing Buildings to Auto-Build
- Mining Camp = Unlocks all Mine Buildings to Auto-Build
- Farmhouse = Unlocks all Crop Buildings to Auto-Build
- Ranch = Unlocks all Animal Farms to Auto-Build

This will be the first step. If this goes will I will expand it to other buildings such as Shops and Factories.

 

[Athmos]

Auto building at tech X is a good thing I think.
Another interesting mechanism is building getting better (or worse) with the unlocking of certain techs, like the stone workshop building in the prehistoric era; it represents a lot of evolutions, and it could make certain building more central, and other possibly less relevant and thus could be removed. some kind of agricultural building could be the focus of the ancient era, maybe the forge for the classical era, factory for the industrial era, power plants for the modern era, etc

We could then have less smelter/forge factory type buildings, power plants (specially successive generations of the same plant, like the coal plantm modern coal plant etc...).

Building could become more productive, require less citizens (for factory and plants), generate less pollution, etc... they could also have a smoother progression to obsolescence. As it is, one may want to sandbag some critical tech to delays some specific buildings obsolescence for as long as possible, which is often quite gamy.

 

[Faustmouse]

This will be the first step. If this goes will I will expand it to other buildings such as Shops and Factories.

Be carefull with factories since they produce a lot Flammability and Pollution! Not everyone wants to have them in every city!

Also, this Autobuild-thing is not the way to go I think... I usually don't care about auto buildings so if you make a building an autobuilding, it gets "lost" from a gamers point of view. Free at tech (in every city) would be MUCH better (and adds more strategic value) then plain autobuild.

 

[Hydromancerx]

@Faustmouse

That's why I am only testing with the bonus buildings groups. People have already complained about say building a Copper Mine on the map and then having to build a Copper Mine in the city. Having these set of buildings auto-build should solve some complaints.

Also you still have some control. Hunter's Camp, Fisherman's Hut, Mining Camp, Farmhouse, Ranch, etc are trigger buildings. If you don't want mines to auto-build in your city don't build a Mining Camp.

As for out of view there are Messages at the top of the screen that tells when an Auto-Build building is made. Likewise you can still see them in the city screen.

EDIT: Note that if this doesn't work out then at least the buildings will have a slight filter on them. Being if you have the only show available building filter on that all the crops will not show up until you build a Farmhouse. Thus making your building list a bit less cluttered (until you build the trigger building).

 

[Faustmouse]

But if you do the same for factories, keep in mind that people might not what all Waterbottle Factories, Nylon Factories, etc... but the normal Factory is a MUST.

And of course they say when an autobuilding is build. And you can look at it in your city screen. But keep track of which buildings were autobuild if you have 100+ cities... And I look at them in the city screen maybe the first time I build them, but after that I forget about them and will never look at them again in any game. Like I do with the Tradepost now. No idea what's it's stats are, but I really don't care

 

[Sparth]

How's about buildings tree (similar to skill tree in some rpgs).

 

[Hydromancerx]

@Faustmouse

Like I said its only the first set of stuff Traps, Hunting, Seafood, Pets, Crops and Minerals. Note not all in those mods will be be auto-build. The way I see it working is like this ...

1. Build Fisherman's Hut and it unlocks any Auto-Build buildings such as Tuna Nets.

2. At Guilds you can build a Fisherman's Guild that gives a free Fisherman's Hut in all cities, thus letting all Fishing related Auto-Build buildings to build everywhere in your empire.

Note that Franchises can do the same thing with more modern buildings.

As for Factories it could possibly work like this ...

- Build Heavy Industrial Zone building it auto-builds Heavy Industrial type factories. If you do not want those in your city then don't zone for that type of Industrial building.

How's about buildings tree (similar to skill tree in some rpgs).

There are a lot of dependency trees already in the game. But yes such an idea could work. Like I suggested above.

 

[Hydromancerx]

In my test game having them auto-build seems like cheating and like Faustmouse hard to even tell they built. I am undoing my reverting my chnage to those buildings. This is apparently not a good solution.

I will still have to decide if I want to keep the Mining Camp, Farmhouse and Ranch or not.

 

[strategyonly]

I will still have to decide if I want to keep the Mining Camp, Farmhouse and Ranch or not.

I say keep on these, looked "kinda" neat ingame, maybe put some stats behind each.

A mining community, also known as a mining town or a mining camp, is a community that houses miners. Mining communities are usually created around a mine or a quarry.

Farmhouse, a dwelling on a farm.

Ranching is also a method used to raise less common livestock such as elk, American bison or even ostrich, emu, and alpacas.

 

[Sgtslick]

How's about buildings tree (similar to skill tree in some rpgs).

Yes this is where the game needs to go imo. There is no point having all these buildings if you can easily build them all (or the vast majority) in most of your cities. There is no real choice in that, you can see that can't you hydro? I kinda understand people wanting to experience and appreciate all the buildings.. but I mean come on.. Its totally at the expense of gameplay.

Its fine to have tonnes of choices and alternatives, and even if you manage to build 50% of the buildings is most of your cities thats probably ok for me, but beyond this, all you do is shift-click your way through them all.

When players choose certain avenues to go down, such as a production tree, with smelters and tanneries and forges and factories and blah blah blah, its a choice and its satisfying to accomplish.

If you can fill out ALL the trees in ALL your cities, there is no point to it anymore really. Your just kinda waiting for it to finish. I know I am sidestepping other parts of the game (such as war and stuff), but regarding buildings this is the essence of the problem to me.

Essentially you could boost the cost of the buildings so that it becomes difficulty/impossible to fill out all the building trees for that era (which would be a huge boon to gameplay imo).
You could also keep a lot of the 'basic' or buildings that don't necessarily fit into a 'tree' and players could focus on building them for a smaller over-arching benefit, or spend their hammers on drilling down a specific tree. This way you could keep buildings that have a similar benefit (like +1 +1 ), they either lead down a tree and act as a pre-requisite, or are apart of the generic benefit tree, which doesn't lead to something. Anyway, hopefully you get what I mean, hard to explain..

Oh and let me just say in terms of how to implement this, I think all that really needs to be done is boost the costs and the prerequisites would need to be tweaked a bit so people couldn't cut corners.. At the end of the 'trees' you would have 'reward' type buildings, like um stone tool workshop, elder council (for prehistoric), ancient could be ones like riding school, maybe library or something (you'd know better than me). The higher up the tree the bigger the cost.

 

[Sparth]

Using building tree also increase resources trade between civilizations. If you cant build everyting then you must import some resources from other nations.

 

[Faustmouse]

Maybe we should limit the amount of Special Factories per city to 1? Then you need to make decision on what to build depending on your enemies trading offers and once you build one factory in your city all the others would disappear from the building list.

But personally, I don't really like it...

 

[Hydromancerx]

@Sgtslick

The thing is people have already complained about arbitrary rules limiting what you can build and what you cannot. We do have some limitations in place such as vicinity, city size, resources, tech etc. And as you said every city can build more or less the same thing, but only if you fill those requirements.

Likewise we have some negatives attached to many of the buildings such as , flammability and air pollution. These are to make you think twice before building EVERY factory. Then people complain "but my city has too much air pollution, it keeps having fires and its all sick!" Well then you should not have built every factory in every city.

What I am saying here is there are balances already in place to motivate you not to build every building in every city. Be it hard limits like resources or city size or soft limits like and flammability. It seems that many players are obsessive compulsive and MUST build every building on the list to build. And if a building is there its like a itch they need to scratch.

If that's the problem then perhaps there should be some sort of way to mark buildings you never want to see off the building list. Such as mark "never show".

On a side note many do have "trees" its just not shown visually so the player is going though them blind rather than visually like the tech tree or unit upgrade tree.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

If that's the problem then perhaps there should be some sort of way to mark buildings you never want to see off the building list. Such as mark "never show".

I think we do need this at both the city and nation level.

On a side note many do have "trees" its just not shown visually so the player is going though them blind rather than visually like the tech tree or unit upgrade tree.

This is the sort of information I think we are missing. This and a similar set of trees for the resources showing which resources are used required and produced by buildings. This sounds like some new pedia pages are required.

 

[Hydromancerx]

I think we do need this at both the city and nation level.

I totally agree.

This is the sort of information I think we are missing. This and a similar set of trees for the resources showing which resources are used required and produced by buildings. This sounds like some new pedia pages are required.

I also agree. In fact when I asked for a building tree from Afforess back in RoM/AND he made the Building upgrade tree. Which was not exactly want I wanted but did help you see what building was replaced by what.

 

[Faustmouse]

It might be a bit early to make a manually building tree. If you add one building you might have to redo a lot of the tree.

 

[MantaRevan]

I totally agree.
.

Same here.

 

[Sgtslick]

@Sgtslick

The thing is people have already complained about arbitrary rules limiting what you can build and what you cannot. We do have some limitations in place such as vicinity, city size, resources, tech etc. And as you said every city can build more or less the same thing, but only if you fill those requirements.

Likewise we have some negatives attached to many of the buildings such as , flammability and air pollution. These are to make you think twice before building EVERY factory. Then people complain "but my city has too much air pollution, it keeps having fires and its all sick!" Well then you should not have built every factory in every city.

What I am saying here is there are balances already in place to motivate you not to build every building in every city. Be it hard limits like resources or city size or soft limits like and flammability. It seems that many players are obsessive compulsive and MUST build every building on the list to build. And if a building is there its like a itch they need to scratch.

If that's the problem then perhaps there should be some sort of way to mark buildings you never want to see off the building list. Such as mark "never show".

On a side note many do have "trees" its just not shown visually so the player is going though them blind rather than visually like the tech tree or unit upgrade tree.

I think your missing my main point or simply don't agree with it, and that is that despite all the limitations to the number of buildings you build, such as city size, access to resources and detrimental side effects. Despite all this, its the cost that is the main problem. Choosing to spend hammers on something should mean its at the expense of other things.

Its kinda like the more buildings the game gets, the cheaper they get, so we are able to build them all.. this is the big problem. Just because some buildings might not get build that much, they will still add more to the game than what they do now imo, because players would be making a conscious choice between options. Rather than building them without any real consideration, just see the +1 food and add it to the list, not even really looking at the name of it.

 

[Thunderbrd]

First off, one 'Tree' concept we aren't really capturing with buildings is that which forces the city to make real choices that then bar the city from the other paths. It may require a new tag for this... but I don't think so. I think we already have a tag that allows us to say, "if you've built this building, you can't build these buildings". I feel that a truly clever way to enforce some stronger strategy in our building 'trees' then we should look at more ways to restrict cities to particular 'decision points' and enforcing that one decision to go down one branch will keep it from being able to go down another.


I do not feel that this:

Its kinda like the more buildings the game gets, the cheaper they get, so we are able to build them all.. this is the big problem. Just because some buildings might not get build that much, they will still add more to the game than what they do now imo, because players would be making a conscious choice between options. Rather than building them without any real consideration, just see the +1 food and add it to the list, not even really looking at the name of it.

Is very accurate at all. What I'm finding is that I really do need to strongly consider what is MOST useful right now. Even a production point may not be as valuable as another benefit if significantly expensive enough in production to get it. I also feel that this has really only emerged as a factor DUE to the great number of buildings we have in the mod. It really challenges you to prioritize among your normally unquestionable order of priorities when it comes to when to train new settler units and spread your nation... it never gives you a break from having the ability to continuously push your capital to faster and greater growth.

Mind you, I say this from the experience I'm having in the multi-player games. In part, I've been very successful there at accelerating my research rate which I usually hold off on so I can stay on top of my buildings but I've also got a fair production advantage over other civs going by the game reports and I'm still not keeping up with the buildings enough to ever find a point where I have no way to improve the capital much farther before building a settler... I MUST choose a point at which to accept slower growth and development locally to grow my nation nationally by expanding out another city. This experience, I feel, directly contradicts that above statement.

Then again, it's possible that we've tweaked the balance out of this status and should probably try to bring the tech costs and production costs back to a little closer to the versions as we had it when we last updated the multi-player games we're involved in.