Buildlist spam makes the game less interesting

[Hydromancerx]

@Sgtslick

Its kinda like the more buildings the game gets, the cheaper they get, so we are able to build them all..

This is semi-true. On the one hand the more production buildings you make and the lrger the city you get the easier it is to build buildings. However buildings also cost more as you go down the tech tree. So earlier building appear cheaper as you go.

One can see the huge gap when making new cities and newer buildings cost WAY too much and thus the city has to "level up" to be able to build the newer stuff. However this is a whole other issue of making it easier for a new city to "catch up" to the bigger city.

I see the addation of buildings as making the game "rounder" as in before each building had a HUGE impact upon the game and it was almost like stairs. However now with so many buildings its more like a ramp. One building has much less of an impact on the game, but together they add up.

I would like to think this shows that lots of little changes can make big changes. However like you said this makes for a more tedious game. I would like to help elevate some of this with say the guilds or franchises. And even the idea of an auto-build tech might be a good idea in the long run.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

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.

The trees in the pedia are built at the time you open the pedia. Nothing manual about it.

.. I think we already have a tag that allows us to say, "if you've built this building, you can't build these buildings".

Yes we have this ability but people who play the One City Challenge don't like it.

 

[teakbois]

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.

Its very easy to crap out 6-7 (snail speed) cities when you get tribalism. Unless you go after wonders, by the time you get Atlatlists your capital is pretty set. These are cheap, and you can prebuild all the Atlatlists youll need. I build a ton of them, and a lot of gatherers. Then when I hit tribalism i build a tribe, send tribe + atlatlist + 2 gathers off on their merry way, and build something while they get to their spot. Once city is founded time for a new tribe. Using this you can get 7 cities out before Sed. Lifestyle and have gaps in tribe building to strengthen capital.

And then you have a long gap until Bronze Working/Despotism to build all cities up. By the time you are ready for round two of expansion you have a bunch of mature cities that can produce what you need. Same holds true if you want to expand via conquering.

 

[Athmos]

IRL, the largest cities - for example many capital cities - are or once were Industrial, scientific, political and commercial centres. I don't really like the idea of imposing artificial limitations, where the specialisation should IMO come from the gameplay itself.

The first steps in the fight against "building spam" are in my opinion quite clear :

1) The most obvious is to just simply make the interface even better at coping with it. Ideas for that :
- the check not to display unbuildable buildings (like in not buildable at all) could be made a little bit smarter; in some cases a required building is not buildable and not displayed at all (for example a building requiring a city to be riverside or coastal on a large enough sea).
- some additional filter would be useful as well. for example, i'd really like one that would display only resource producing buildings, and even better one that would hide resource producing buildings for resources you already have.

2) just plain freeze the addition of new buildings for a few releases, and just focus the work on better balance concerning this part of the game.

3) regroup some of the buildings that are essentially upgrades of one another into a single one that get better at certain tech. As an example, the coal plant / modern coal plant / Hi tech coal plant is a prime candidate. It could just get more productive / generate less pollution / employ less citizens as you reach some critical techs. I think some of the production building from the industrial era and onward could also get regrouped in that way, like the factory/manufacturing plant/assembly plant maybe, or the part producing plants. Employing citizens (like the hydro plant does for example) is a neat game mechanism and could be used to great effect concerning these; modern factory don't need as much workforce as industrial era ones for example.
I don't think such upgrades should be automatic at tech when the effects are negative. I wouldn't want to have all my small innocuous toy carver workshop to suddenly start generating pollution without control over it. But overall, such a mechanism -inspired by the way the stone workshop evolves during the prehistoric era- could really help reduce some of the redundancies.


4) Balance work on the buildings drawbacks. As it is, from the industrial era onward, I only build one, possibly two factories building a certain resource, so as to avoid generating too much pollution (all these +5 definitely add up). One may either spread out the resource production, each town only producing a few, or concentrate pollution in a handful of industrial cities (That's what I do). This is a fine mechanism. I think some balance work on the drawbacks of buildings, the most obvious being pollution, is probably much better than artificially restraining the building choices.

Anyway I think the mod as a whole would probably benefit a lot from a content addition freeze and a focus on bugfixing and balance for at least one, if not several cycles. And really, REMOVING stuff wherever it can be replaced by better mechanisms would be a very nice idea, specially concerning buildings, even if I know this most obvious way to reduce building spam is apparently very hard to consider seriously or even think about for many people here

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

- some additional filter would be useful as well. for example, i'd really like one that would display only resource producing buildings, and even better one that would hide resource producing buildings for resources you already have.

Or even better highlight a building you can build that will provide a resource you don't have.

Anyway I think the mod as a whole would probably benefit a lot from a content addition freeze and a focus on bugfixing and balance for at least one, if not several cycles. And really, REMOVING stuff wherever it can be replaced by better mechanisms would be a very nice idea, specially concerning buildings, even if I know this most obvious way to reduce building spam is apparently very hard to consider seriously or even think about for many people here

While this is commendable it does sound like work to me. We have done one real freeze before, not just the freeze at the end of a version to allow final testing before the release. All in all it was not that successful as most of us continued to work on extra content at the same time so that when the freeze was over, boom a huge amount of content hit the mod.

 

[Sgtslick]

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:

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.

I'm not sure where you guys got the idea that by going down one line of buildings you are excluded from other building 'trees'. The notion is that if hammers were a limited resource, together with time, you couldn't 'waste' them on trying to spread them across all the trees. To be efficient, players would choose to concentrate their hammers in certain areas. That doesn't mean that they couldn't change their mind half way and go down another route altogether. It might not be the best thing to do 'locally' but might be what the nation needs. Such as getting some gold producing buildings because you are running a deficit. You wouldn't be able to unlock banks lets say, because some of the prerequisite buildings aren't built yet. But you could still get some of the basic building tree, thats the idea anyway.

Also, I agree that what your saying is true. and i'm not saying that the game doesn't force you to make decisions, or force you to select the appropriate time to make units or a settler for example. I'm just trying to say that it could do it better. Specifically with how you want your cities to spend their time when they are focused on constructing buildings. Rather than this time be about cramming in lots and lots of buildings from a long list. This time is instead spent with the city working towards certain construction goals and ambitions. If all of your cities are able generally able to fulfil these goals without sacrificing other 'construction ambitions' then its too easy, there isn't a real choice/strategy going on here.

I mean of course this choice and strategy exists, at least to some extent, but its just about how prominent it is. To me its barely even apparent, to others they may feel they have hard choices to make between which buildings to build. I just wish it came down to which buildings you could 'afford' to build, being that hammers and time are supposed to be a limited resource.

 

[Faustmouse]

Its kinda like the more buildings the game gets, the cheaper they get, so we are able to build them all..

This might be true up to the industrial era. Once you are in the Modern era, their costs explodes and your production is going up much slower. Which is totally contrary to real life...

 

[Athmos]

hum, I don't know how much I can take from my game concerning the balance itself, since I had easy settings for my first game and grabbed a huge empire, but from the industrial era onward, I started to generate more and more money. Giving a priority to the most efficient production building, cash buying them where I wanted higher priority to speed things up, I got huge production in almost all cities and then you can just set a very long queue and the cities will build all the cheaper buildings at a very brisk paces (many buildings each turn).

In that era, my cities also got huge (Most cities are well above 100 population), and generate a lot of production from specialists and trade.

DH: Oh but I understand that this is a lot of work indeed, but I think it is important. The content of C2C is already very, very large - some would say cluttered - and I was trying to offer some alternate way of making the mod progress without adding to that feeling.
Even if it's a few modifications at a time, I think the mod as a whole would really benefit from some measure of rework of some of the building families.

At least some of this work could relatively easily be split in smaller independent parts; for example, reworking the power plant family of building, or the factory one. Interface work is relatively independent as well. I think the "up/downgrading building X" at a given tech would be a nice way to replace some of the building "upgrades", and in some case to implement a softer obsolescence system.

 

[Faustmouse]

3) regroup some of the buildings that are essentially upgrades of one another into a single one that get better at certain tech. As an example, the coal plant / modern coal plant / Hi tech coal plant is a prime candidate. It could just get more productive / generate less pollution / employ less citizens as you reach some critical techs. I think some of the production building from the industrial era and onward could also get regrouped in that way, like the factory/manufacturing plant/assembly plant maybe, or the part producing plants. Employing citizens (like the hydro plant does for example) is a neat game mechanism and could be used to great effect concerning these; modern factory don't need as much workforce as industrial era ones for example.
I don't think such upgrades should be automatic at tech when the effects are negative. I wouldn't want to have all my small innocuous toy carver workshop to suddenly start generating pollution without control over it. But overall, such a mechanism -inspired by the way the stone workshop evolves during the prehistoric era- could really help reduce some of the redundancies.

I think this would work fine for some. I asked Hydro if we want a "Biological Research Complex" or similar buildings that replace and combine all Biological related buildings. But he said no, since then we could have just remove all and use the normal Laboratory for that. But I still think this would be a good idea for the late TH / Galatic era. Same could go with the sport buildings: They could be combined in a giant sport center building.

Your upgrade idea sounds instreting and I think this will work fine for a lot of buildings. I'd wait what Hydro says to that, but if you really want it to happen, it would be best if you'd come up with concrete ideas. I´We'd really appreciate it if we only need to review your ideas and implent the suggested changes.

 

[Hydromancerx]

@Faustmouse

I am on the fence. On the one hand some things do get combined together. On the other hand many things split apparent into even more disciplines. I think some can do as you say but not all. I also think there can be a middle ground. Such as I mentioned with franchises or other admin buildings that can help build groups of buildings.

BTW is there code to allow more than one free building in very city? If so what is it?

 

[Faustmouse]

But it makes sense to split up things and then combine them again. Look at sciences: Biology, Phyics and Chemestry split apart in the late Renaissance. But today, you you have biochemestry, physical chemistry, chemical physics, bio physics... Heck, you need even Quantum Physics for some methods in biology! It makes a lot of sense to have laboratories close to each other so the scientists can actually talk to each other face by face rather than via telephone.
Same with Factories: They are build in one area already. If you presume they are all state controlled and not private, it makes sense to combine them so you have only one big complex since a lot products are chains. And if not, they might use similar basic materials. If you have only one very big smoke pipe (not sure if this is the correct word), it's much easier to catch CO2 for example.

Giant Malls combine most shopping buildings already. When I was in Dubai, they even had a giant aquarium, an Ice Rink and an indoor ski piste inside the Mall!!

Note these buildings would be mid TH so you have a long time only the normal labs etc before you could combine them. It's more a thing for newer, less developed cities whose building lists ae cluttered with older buildings.

I don't think a tag for multiple free buildings is in place. What you could do is:

Building A gives free building 1 to each city. Building B,C,D..... are autobuild and require building A and they give Building 2,3,4... accordingly to each city. Not a nice solution, but a possible one.

I'd still prefer a "free at tech" thing that gives a building for free in EVERY city. It just need to be mentioned at the tech. That's actually a problem of some things, like the "+ from every Tumbulus" is not shown up in the building description! When you aren't here frequently, you have no idea what those wonders (or guilds) actually do and think they are just incomplete...

 

[Hydromancerx]

The thing is I like the idea of having one building have "modules" within them. Just like how the Megatower has levels some buildings have add-ons. Combining all the add-ons into one uber building seems weird/cheap. I can see core buildings upgrade and even add-ons upgrade too, but an all in one building that merges all, ehh I don't know. I use to think so, but now I don't know.

Note I use to want everything to upgrade into a Colony Arcology, but it never worked out that way.

 

[Sgtslick]

One simple but effective change you could do hydro is boost the cost of 'core' buildings. Buildings that perhaps have prerequisites and give a nice bonus. Make them cost a lot more so that players have to 'invest' time and hammers into getting them.

 

[JosEPh_II]

One simple but effective change you could do hydro is boost the cost of 'core' buildings. Buildings that perhaps have prerequisites and give a nice bonus. Make them cost a lot more so that players have to 'invest' time and hammers into getting them.

Hydro has done this before and ppl stopped building important bldgs like Libraries, forges and Markets and the complaints rolled in. This mod has already went down this path before with not good results. The ppl in this thread for the most part were not around at that time either. So with out any sense of History of this mod you all are just reliving what went on before.

JosEPh

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

We have tried a number of these "simple" solutions over time and a few in the last few weeks all have not addressed the problems or caused other problems bigger than what they solved. A recent attempt to reduce gold and increase research times had me zipping through the techs and having an excess of gold for the first time in a long time ie exactly the opposite result of what was expected.

 

[Hydromancerx]

Hydro has done this before and ppl stopped building important bldgs like Libraries, forges and Markets and the complaints rolled in. This mod has already went down this path before with not good results. The ppl in this thread for the most part were not around at that time either. So with out any sense of History of this mod you all are just reliving what went on before.

JosEPh

I agree. A lot of the time newer people who have not been around before bring up old issues that hey did not realize we have tried or altered. I find it funny too that one can spend like a year on something and finally get some resolution to it and then some new guy comes in and says how about we chnage that?

 

[MantaRevan]

I agree. A lot of the time newer people who have not been around before bring up old issues that hey did not realize we have tried or altered. I find it funny too that one can spend like a year on something and finally get some resolution to it and then some new guy comes in and says how about we chnage that?

Sorry, I mostly wanted just to bring up an issue that typically makes the post-classical game boring and more often than not causes me to restart in the less-cumbersome prehistoric era.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Sorry, I mostly wanted just to bring up an issue that typically makes the post-classical game boring and more often than not causes me to restart in the less-cumbersome prehistoric era.

Maybe an adjustment to your playstyle is the real answer?

Most players that post here don't find the mod boring after Classical Era. Medieval Era has been a hot Era for sometime.

Now it is true that Modern and beyond Eras are still "work in progress" and balancing can't really be maintained in them till the Tech tree, buildings, units, wonders, etc. for those eras are fleshed out. Once they are filled in so to speak and then played thru balancing will begin to get a grip.

Now with the recent new Preh buildings, techs, etc. just recently added balance is again under scrutiny.

Please continue to report incongruities and bugs but also realize C2C is not like any other Mod on civfanatics and old school Civ IV or even vanila BtS ways of playing are not optimal here.

JosEPh

 

[xartah]

I play on small maps because it keeps turn times down and limits the amount of cities you have to manage. I find that empires start to become unmanageable in standard or larger maps simply due to the amount of cities needing constant attention.

 

[strategyonly]

I play on small maps because it keeps turn times down and limits the amount of cities you have to manage. I find that empires start to become unmanageable in standard or larger maps simply due to the amount of cities needing constant attention.

No offense but if you only play on Small, you will NEVER get the true value of C2C what so ever.
Personally, i play on HUGE or larger. Only then will you get some value out of C2C. Yes turn times do play a part, that is WHY i play on Epic speed, sure it fast and you get techs fast, IN THE BEGINNING, but after classical it goes back to over 10 turns for tech and the AI more than likely will kick some butt here also. Not like playing on Immortal or Deity. Where i hear the AI is stupid.
In the current game i am playing at Epic speed i am 50 or MORE techs BEHIND the AI. And can only get near them if i do alot of trading. Then i am still 20 techs behind.
Again yes its fast teching in the beginning but after that its really alot of fun to play, IMPO that is. And again i betcha the AI will kick your butt.