City Development

[Seek]

[By units in the open, I didn't just mean open terrain, I meant units, as opposed to cities. Arty needs a ranged attack nerf. It should be a support weapon, not for blowing away infantry units.

That's what I assumed. Also assumed was that your 2 "options" were in reference to cats and trebs only. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I think what Tomice was saying is that you have to think carefully about whether +hammers per pop is a good idea at all before thinking about which building should get it.
In terms of which building, I think the factory makes far more sense, both from a thematic point of view and a coding point of view (its probably easy to code +hammer per population, its probably harder and more confusing to the user to code +hammer per population-while-constructing-buildings).

But I think Tomice's core point is; most yield boosters are designed to encourage specialization. Gold cities have lots of gold, rivers, and trading posts.
Science cities have lots of food and population.
Production cities have lots of hammers, and use lots of hill and forest and plains tiles.
I think his point is; do we really want a city with large population via lots of food to still have large production? Because doing so reduces the value of mine yiles and boosts food and population supporting things (including Tradition tree, Maritime city states, granary, etc.). And these balance mods already massively boost city growth relative to vanilla, through food boosts (slaughterhouse, harbor, fresh-water-farms) and through growth boosts (aqueduct).

I think a Factory might be late-enough to do this, and a good way of representing industrialization.
But is it fixing a problem that doesn't really exist? The factory seems pretty well balanced as is.

Yes, it seems we've gotten a little OT here. I get excited when dynamic buildings are proposed - they're much more fun, and very rare in Civ5. You're right, Factories are great buildings as they are.

Now back to business, should the per pop bonus go to the Iron Works?
j/k

 

[Txurce]

Now back to business, should the per pop bonus go to the Iron Works?
j/k

Only if there's something wrong with the Iron Works as is.

 

[Tomice]

Yes, Ahriman, that's what I meant!

I by no means want to kill the idea, I just wanted to show the possible pitfalls. It may well make the game better. It may solve the "plains is better than grassland" issue. It would surely make 1-tile islands with 3 fish arounds useful.

It's a highly interesting idea, just more risky for balance than changing archers from 6 to 7 attack.

 

[Thalassicus]

I understand your point Ahriman about the importance of recognizing where a change fits in with current values, but it's also important to think of the relative difference between "with a change" and "without a change," marginal utility.

Take the shock/drill promotions, for example. Back before 1.135, the drill promotion increased defensive strength 15%, while the shock promotion increased it 30%. Both might appear to be the same with a casual look at the tooltip, but are not when you actually consider the effect it has on units with/without the promotion. It's easy to see this visually by placing a few warriors in the map editor. The difference isn't as dramatic now but still exists.

A similar example is with the Demolish promotion in the Combat mod. Going from 10% to 100% might seem like a 10-times increase in effectiveness, while in actuality siege units are only 1.33-times more effective vs cities as before. Psychologically, this is a huge difference! This is why I put the "final" values in the details of the combat mod post instead of values of each individual change that sums up to that final value... otherwise people might have had gone bonkers.

The reason for this is Civ's bonuses/penalties stack additively instead of multiply. 10 to 20 is huge while 100 to 110 isn't.

Applying this to the discussion at hand, consider the workshop buff. You can think of it in two ways...

• 40% workshop modifier
• City yield increase:
  • +17% with workshop
  • +10% with workshop, factory, windmill
  • +6% with workshop, factory, windmill, nuclear plant, solar plant

Both are equally true but I find marginal utility (B) easier to understand the real effects of than absolute value (A).

It lets you conceptualize when and where changes have the greatest effect, and how much of a difference you will see. The workshop buff gives less-developed cities +15%, while a completely-developed city will see very little difference. It also lowers the base production threshold for building a workshop. Both of these effects target the change exactly where it's needed: making the workshop useful in the medieval and renaissance periods when the factory/etc aren't available or desirable.


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Now, on to the topic of per-pop bonuses...

It's tempting to make many things have this type of bonus. I've seen suggestions to do gold this way, happiness this way, now production... the problem is side-effects. It would alter balance of everything from terrain improvements to policies, as Ahriman pointed out.

There's two primary things I see that affect the value of broad vs tall empires:

1) Happiness
2) Growth rate

Altering /capita, /city, and early growth seem to be the most direct way of dealing with the issue with minimal side-effects, which is why I went with those options when tackling ICS in early November. I removed changes to happiness because of similar alterations included in 1.135, though I've been considering re-adding the former +/city and +/empire modifiers.


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Regarding city defenses, I agree... I also feel city healing is too high. It's why I kept base healing at the pre-1.135 value in the Combat mod (1.135 increased it from 1 to 2 and added the modifiers from city strength).

I still strongly feel increasing city hitpoints through defensive structures is a better solution than increasing strength or healing. Improving strength disproportionately hurts tech-inferior forces, while improving healing hurts long sieges while not having any effect on quick city captures. A boost to hitpoints for each defensive building affects all armies and attackers equally, improving city durability with minimal side-effects. Unfortunately, this isn't possible with current tools.


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About siege units, are you talking about them in vanilla or with the mod? If you're suggesting the vanilla values need work, you're preaching to the converted here in these threads, I gave artillery -25% vs units months ago.

 

[Ahriman]

but it's also important to think of the relative difference between "with a change" and "without a change," marginal utility

I'm an economist IRL, so I'm totally in favor of thinking about marginal impacts (when done correctly), since those are what drive decision-making.
My point is that the relevant marginal impact is "production without a workshop" vs "production with a workshop"; its not "production with a workshop in vanilla" vs "production with a workshop in this mod".

When the modifier of the workshop is 1.4, then the relevant increase is a 40% increase in production (while constructing buildings). If you already had a 1.5 factory, then its a 27% increase in production.
I don't understand where you're getting 12%, 7% and 4% from.

There's two primary things I see that affect the value of broad vs tall empires:

I think there are more than that, and I think it would be very wrong to try to balance using only those two mechanisms.
I think the value of large cities comes in large part from buildings; their ability to take advantage of percentage or pop-based yield increases that are not cost-effective for a small city. A huge part of the value of a size 12 city vs 2 size 6 cities is that I can build 1 university rather than two.
There's also the value of culture and tile acquisition; with ICS you don't have to invest in culture, because you get 6 free tiles whenever you build a city.
There's also the impact of specialist slots; one of the big drivers for ICS before was the 2 specialist slots on the library.
IMO specialist use should be designed to heavily favor large cities. You do this in part by making specialist use primarily about the value of the great people (which favor having GPP points concentrated in particular cities) rather than yields from the specialists.

Altering happiness per capita or per city risks getting very confusing to the player; 1 unhappiness per pop is easy to remember and deal with and understand.

I also feel city healing is too high. It's why I kept base healing at the pre-1.135 value in the Combat mod (1.135 increased it from 1 to 2 and added the modifiers from city strength).

I think 1 hitpoint healing per turn is too low.
I would ideally like to see something like: healing = 1 per turn, with +1 for capital, +1 for walls, +1 for castle, +1 for military base.

Improving strength disproportionately hurts tech-inferior forces

I don't see this as a problem, this is by design.
Increasing strength is the only way to get around the ability to conquer cities very rapidly if you have even slightly superior forces.
Remember in pre-patch vanilla, you could very often have 8:1 damage odds when invading, which meant that cities were not even a speed bump. Increasing hit points to 30 doesn't really change that; it might make it take 2 turns rather than 1, but that's about it.

The other thing I'd like to see is for terrain modifiers not to count when attacking a city; only city modifiers should count when attacking a city. I shouldn't get to use my open terrain advantage when attacking a city on flat ground. But I'm guessing these kinds of combat engine things are probably hard-coded.

I gave artillery -25% vs units months ago

Thanks, I had forgotten, my apologies. That seems like a very good change.

 

[Seek]

Regarding city defenses, I agree... I also feel city healing is too high. It's why I kept base healing at the pre-1.135 value in the Combat mod (1.135 increased it from 1 to 2 and added the modifiers from city strength).

I still strongly feel increasing city hitpoints through defensive structures is a better solution than increasing strength or healing. Improving strength disproportionately hurts tech-inferior forces, while improving healing hurts long sieges while not having any effect on quick city captures. A boost to hitpoints for each defensive building affects all armies and attackers equally, improving city durability with minimal side-effects. Unfortunately, this isn't possible with current tools.


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About siege units, are you talking about them in vanilla or with the mod? If you're suggesting the vanilla values need work, you're preaching to the converted here in these threads, I gave artillery -25% vs units months ago.

OK, I'm an idiot, I retested the worldbuilder scenario *with* the mod this time, and found it much more reasonable with the siege buffs in the Combat mod. The city still took 7 turns to take and the healing wasn't nearly so much of an issue. Not surprising.

 

[SlightlyMad]

I'd like to chime in as well that the workshop is now far too powerful. I appreciate the considerations in making it useful, but the increase is breaking a key design element in the game, which is to introduce tough decisions on what to build in a city. In my current game, I have several cities with moderate-good production capability, and was able to get a GS beeline (Babylon) to metal working extremely early.

I'm now about to hit the industrial era, and I've had every single building in almost every city for quite some time now. Even in my military city, which has been alternating cities and buildings about 1:1, I've been able to build all the military production buildings, and still had time for temple/colosseum/theater/etc.

I never felt it was too underpowered before, but your math seems good so I'll accept that, but there needs to be another way of balancing it that doesn't alter the game's core pacing balance. I think removing the maintenance fee or reducing the build cost would be better, or if possible have it be a flat production bonus, so it doesn't have such a steamroll effect in a city with good production.

 

[Ahriman]

I'm now about to hit the industrial era, and I've had every single building in almost every city for quite some time now. Even in my military city, which has been alternating cities and buildings about 1:1, I've been able to build all the military production buildings, and still had time for temple/colosseum/theater/etc.

but there needs to be another way of balancing it that doesn't alter the game's core pacing balance

This is what worries me a lot about the yield boosts and stat boosts on workshop, windmill, etc.
Increasing the total amount of production available seriously messes up the game.

There needs to always be strategic tension between investing in units or in infrastructure, there should always feel like there is something left to build, and you should be forced into city specialization, you shouldn't be able to build almost everything in anything except a very production-oriented city, which then shouldn't be benefiting much from science or gold boosters.

If you keep hammer costs constant while increasing production and yet don't add many more things to build, then you're going to mess up this balance.
So if you really want higher production, then you need to increase costs (which kinda removes the point) or add new buildings.

Also, with food boosts you risk canceling out the late-game tech cost increases through megacities, and you risk maknig specialists too powerful, and with gold boosts, you risk making city state purchase too easy and maintenance costs (unit, building and road) too low and easy to ignore.

 

[Seek]

Another idea for the workshop balancing issue: Give the workshop +1 per lumber mill (what the longhouse has), leave the cost and 20% bonus for buildings as is (or maybe with a slight increase), and remove the lumber mill bonus at engineering from the improvements mod. Perhaps with 3 maintenance instead of 2. Thoughts?

 

[Ahriman]

Dunno.
The Longhouse bonus is supposed to be a forest-themed bonus for Iroquois faction.

But why should a generic building favor just lumbermills, and not hammer of all kinds?

Feels odd.

* * *
Another thing to consider; the passive boosts to hammer yields for mines/lumbermills also end up being boosts to workshop type-buildings, since there are now more cities that are above the breakeven point, and the "slope" is higher, so the absolute marginal benefit for those cities above the threshold is even larger.

For example, consider, lategame:

City A: 2 mined hills, 1 lumbermill forest, 1 plains.
Vanilla: 10 hammers, gains 2 hammers per turn with 1.2x workshop.
Balance-combined: 14 hammers, gains 2.8 hammers per turn with 1.2x workshop, gains 5.6 hammers with 1.4x workshop.

 

[Txurce]

"I still strongly feel increasing city hitpoints through defensive structures is a better solution than increasing strength or healing. Improving strength disproportionately hurts tech-inferior forces, while improving healing hurts long sieges while not having any effect on quick city captures. A boost to hitpoints for each defensive building affects all armies and attackers equally, improving city durability with minimal side-effects. Unfortunately, this isn't possible with current tools."

My own game experience confirms every aspect of this statement. The key word regarding tech-inferior forces is "disproportionately." If anything it's too hard for such a force to win simply due to numbers and persistence (which, elitism aside, are decent tactics). A tech-superior AI blitzing a CS can still result in a two-turn victory.

 

[Tomice]

There needs to always be strategic tension between investing in units or in infrastructure, there should always feel like there is something left to build, and you should be forced into city specialization, you shouldn't be able to build almost everything in anything except a very production-oriented city, which then shouldn't be benefiting much from science or gold boosters.

I think boosting production was the FIRST thing changed both here and in the economy mod, and threads complaining about low production spammed CFC even on release day! Don't forget that.

Workshops might mess things up, but generally, in vanilla you waited ages to build anything. That's no strategic tension, that's a nuisance.

 

[Txurce]

There needs to always be strategic tension between investing in units or in infrastructure, there should always feel like there is something left to build, and you should be forced into city specialization, you shouldn't be able to build almost everything in anything except a very production-oriented city, which then shouldn't be benefiting much from science or gold boosters.

If you keep hammer costs constant while increasing production and yet don't add many more things to build, then you're going to mess up this balance.
So if you really want higher production, then you need to increase costs (which kinda removes the point) or add new buildings.

Also, with food boosts you risk canceling out the late-game tech cost increases through megacities, and you risk maknig specialists too powerful, and with gold boosts, you risk making city state purchase too easy and maintenance costs (unit, building and road) too low and easy to ignore.

Agreed on the need for tension, i.e. choice. Buffed workshops make the game much more fun. It seems to me that the simple way to create tension here is to increase their hammer or maintenance costs, so building one is not a no-brainer, rather than returning to the early vanilla days of dullingly slow growth.

Food boosts have a counter in increased happiness costs. At some point you run out of happiness buildings to construct, and have to quit selling all your luxuries. Specialists should be powerful... in mega-cities, as opposed to ICS ones. As for CS purchase, my recent games (including the WWGD mod) have confirmed that the AI competes for CS, especially in wartime, at Immortal level, and at least a couple have more gold than me. All that holds them back from pushing me off the playing field is the mechanic that limits how many CS they pursue, and how often they come right back to double your bet.

 

[Seek]

Dunno.
The Longhouse bonus is supposed to be a forest-themed bonus for Iroquois faction.

But why should a generic building favor just lumbermills, and not hammer of all kinds?

Feels odd.

* * *
Another thing to consider; the passive boosts to hammer yields for mines/lumbermills also end up being boosts to workshop type-buildings, since there are now more cities that are above the breakeven point, and the "slope" is higher, so the absolute marginal benefit for those cities above the threshold is even larger.

For example, consider, lategame:

City A: 2 mined hills, 1 lumbermill forest, 1 plains.
Vanilla: 10 hammers, gains 2 hammers per turn with 1.2x workshop.
Balance-combined: 14 hammers, gains 2.8 hammers per turn with 1.2x workshop, gains 5.6 hammers with 1.4x workshop.

My thinking regarding lumber mills was that workshops use lumber, so...

I'm just trying to think outside the box a little with this one and at the same time make the workshop more valuable to specialize cities. As it is, I usually build (and often buy) them in all my cities - not just for their inherent bonus, but for the iron works, which is fantastic.

Anyway, it was just a thought. TBH, the 40% boost seems like a good amount, so I don't know if it even needs further tweaking.

 

[Thalassicus]

@Ahriman
I'll try and rephrase. The basic question anyone asks about a mod is, "what effect will it have on my game?" Consider a player with workshops, factories, and windmills in their cities, and they're deciding if they want to use this mod.


They can think to themselves:
"My city had 14, and with the mod it's now 15."

Or in general:
"The mod increases my production in this type of city 7%."


14 to 15 is really a very tiny change, it does not dramatically alter the game. This is what I meant about two ways of thinking about it. You can think of the mod's effect on the building, or on the city. The first is local, the second more global, since it involves more elements. In this case, I feel "city production" makes it easier to answer the question of "what effect will your mod have," though it's just as accurate an answer as "X% workshop modifier." Both are right ways of looking at things.

This is why the Demolish promotion example is especially apt. Siege unit damage against cities is 33% higher than vanilla. You might not be able to deduce this by looking at just Demolish, which went from 10% to 100%. There's many other factors involved, such as strength and other promotion changes. Therefore, I discuss the more global concept of damage against cities.

I've got to head off to lunch and will reply to everything else since my last visit later... just want to try and clarify my thinking.


-----------------
Edit:

I was thinking this over at lunch and I think I finally get what you're saying now. If I'm getting this right... you're comparing the perspectives of "how the game is different" vs "how the game plays now"? Previously I thought we were discussing A) absolute vs marginal effect or B) global vs local effect. Now I recognize my earlier statement was not accurate:

The basic question anyone asks about a mod is, "what effect will it have on my game?"

I realize now that not everyone might ask this question. I see the mod can instead be thought of as an independent entity, without comparing it to Civ V. It's a different perspective that took me a while to wrap my head around.

In general, everything I put in documentation and discussion for this mod is in terms of what the differences are from vanilla to new. This is how most patch notes for games are phrased: how have things changed? The mods are basically a patch, a modification of the game. It's due to the iterative method of software development... take a program, change it, review the change, change again. As such, both "how is it now" and "how it's different" are equally important, both are right ways of looking at things. I make a change to the mod, playtest it for several games to get the "now", review "how it's different" and see what to do next.

What I'll do is add clarification in the mod details to hopefully make this issue less confusing. I did something similar for food buildings... explaining how each one increases city growth rate by 60%. In this case, the workshop change increases city production of buildings by 12% (workshop alone) to 4% (with many other production buildings).

Thanks for your help clearing up this issue Ahriman!

 

[Kamikater2]

I'm a bit confused....

I got a bug that the library don't have specialists anymore (workshop for example still have it) and that i can sell buildings. If i disable all mods, it still appears. If i delete the Assets -> Gameplay folder and let it download again it still appears. I tried to delete the modfolder in mygames, still nothing new...

Am I missing something or is this a know bug or something? I tried changing the number of specialist slots in the Balance - City Development file, didn't have any effect either.

Can anyone help?

 

[harry_flashman]

Well I've got up to the Renaissance now.
I have not found the workshop boost to be as overpowering as I at first thought, but have seen it change my build queue thinking from what shall I build in this city, to when shall I build it.
I'm also avoiding windmills. Since I started in an area uncommonly rich in production, the value of the hammer tile is reduced dramatically. I'm thinking of putting trading posts over my mines, then maybe the windmill will be useful. But then this would be tilting away from the farm and mine economy and back to trading post spam.
All in all I think I'll put it back to a 30% bonus or thereabouts in my next game, as I feel it's removing some interesting choices which I enjoyed making.

 

[Ahriman]

I'll try and rephrase. The basic question anyone asks about a mod is, "what effect will it have on my game?"

I understand what you're saying, I just think its completely the wrong way to think about balancing, and about conveying this information.

The right way would be (for example)
Workshop now increase production by 40% when constructing buildings (was 20%).

The wrong would be: Workshop increases production by 16.7% relative to vanilla.

The right way gives the player the info they need in terms of what has changed vs vanilla, but also conveys the marginal benefit from constructing the benefit.
Players in-game are thinking: should I build a workshop. They're not thinking "should I build a workshop relative to how I'd build a workshop without this mod I have running".

What we're trying to do is pick the level of workshop modifier that is balanced. We do this by considering the marginal impact of constructing the building. The vanilla values are irrelevant to this, except as a basic guide for what the designers thought were balanced.
So, trying to balance based on a yield change *relative to vanilla* is just confusing.

In this case, the workshop change increases city production of buildings by 12% (workshop alone) to 4% (with many other production buildings).

And this is what is so incredibly confusing.
Describe the impact of the building with and without the mod, don't describe a percentage change impact of installing the mod.

I got a bug that the library don't have specialists anymore (workshop for example still have it) and that i can sell buildings

Its not a bug, this was the result of one of the official patches for vanilla Civ5.

Since I started in an area uncommonly rich in production, the value of the hammer tile is reduced dramatically

IMO is is Not Good if hammer yields from tiles are so high that building boosters aren't needed anymore.

 

[Kamikater2]

Its not a bug, this was the result of one of the official patches for vanilla Civ5.

A thanks, good to know, especially when you dont see that it was updated with steam... That's also the reason why i can't add specialist with the mod, right?

 

[Thalassicus]

On the topic of tall vs broad empires, I agree there's many things that affect the balance of large cities vs small cities. All the things you say are perfectly correct: building efficiency, culture aquisition, specialists and so on. However, I've discovered in the past that changing these aspects tend to have more unforseen side-effects. Altering building efficiency changes balance between the buildings themselves, similarly with the balance between specialists and terrain.

Altering happiness, on the other hand, primarily affects how large cities can grow. It's very directed in its effects. This is why Firaxis chose to work with happiness when trying to deal with the ICS problem, and why many community members and mods have taken a similar approach, including this one.

On the topic of happiness-per-city confusion, you might underestimate the intelligence of the Civ player base. Civ IV had much more complex concepts than this. 4 per 5 is the same concept as 1 per 2, just fractions.

I think 1 hitpoint healing per turn is too low.
I would ideally like to see something like: healing = 1 per turn, with +1 for capital, +1 for walls, +1 for castle, +1 for military base.

That's what I did... have you actually played any games with the mod to see how things work out?

Regarding how improving strength disproportionately penalizing weak forces, I tried that route and it didn't work out so well. Citystates prioritize defensive buildings, so improving the strength of them even slightly could end up in situations where a 10-hp unit attacking a 1-hp city (decently promoted and both of equal eras) could die without doing any damage.

I don't believe terrain modifiers count when attacking a city anymore. I think it was an undocumented change in one of the patches. I haven't done enough testing on it to know for sure to remove the indicated display from the mod.


@SlightlyMad
I did reduce workshops from +25% to +15%, so it's a rather small modification now from vanilla. Basically workshops are now valuable for cities of 15+, down from 20+. Also, the purchasing power of buildings is nerfed, since I made AIs play with less than what they used to, and luxuries are more important to keep than before due to other changes. It's basically a small shift away from gold-purchasing to production-building.

If you keep hammer costs constant while increasing production and yet don't add many more things to build,

Four new things have been added:
Aqueduct, Agra Fort, Baths of Trajan, National Treasury

In addition, many things that were less-than-useful are now worth building:
Armory, stable, forge, walls, castle, military base, public school, research lab, granary, watermill, and the workshop itself.

A little more production is helpful to get some of this constructed and have a hope of a national wonder or two. I've found national wonders very challenging to get in the games I've played on immortal difficulty (unless going for a culture victory).

Also, with food boosts you risk canceling out the late-game tech cost increases through megacities, and you risk maknig specialists too powerful, and with gold boosts, you risk making city state purchase too easy and maintenance costs (unit, building and road) too low and easy to ignore.

Have you actually experienced these issues? "Risk" usually indicates theoretical possibilities that might occur... In my games techs have actually been somewhat slower than vanilla, for example. It's very difficult to get large populations due to happiness limits. The food boosts simply let you get to that limit faster. In addition, the benefits of high happiness were improved in both the Policies (piety) and CD (happiness ) mods, so capping out your population has added drawbacks.