Cottages?

[Rubin]

I think forests should grow whether they are worked or not.

However, there is one particular gameplay strength in the "cottage" effect where you have to work tiles. You cannot mass prepare tiles for future expansion--not without an economic loss. This means that the choices you make for terraforming are mostly going to make sense immediately.

The "opposite" approach, presented by GeoModder, of having the improvements "grow" faster and faster sounds like something that could reduce "cottage spamming".

 

[GeoModder]

I think forests should grow whether they are worked or not.

Now you mentioned it, this only makes sense.

 

[Wodan]

The "opposite" approach, presented by GeoModder, of having the improvements "grow" faster and faster sounds like something that could reduce "cottage spamming".

Real quick... how would you define cottage spamming and why do you think it is bad?

Wodan

 

[GRM7584]

I think forests should grow whether they are worked or not.

I could see it working either way; in SMAC, forests spread quickly and overtook fungus, but it doesn't have to work that way for Planetfall. Perhaps it takes active efforts by colonists to "uproot" and push back native flora to give the forest room to mature.

 

[Rubin]

Real quick... how would you define cottage spamming and why do you think it is bad?

Wodan

"Cottage Spamming" is where you have no other option but to fill almost all of your worked tiles with cottages in order to compete. I've seen the AI do this too.

The problem is that you really do not have other options for tile improvements; commerce becomes so important that you can leave production to a very few selected cities and the rest becomes "cottage farms"--as long as you have enough food output.

When I have no real alternative approach during the game, I think its bad.

 

[Wodan]

Gotcha.

There are two questions here. One, is the basic game mechanism not a good idea. Two, (assuming we get past One), is the specific mechanic balanced (that is, is it simply a question of tweaking the numbers)?

Thinking out loud about One... The basic concept is that "more is better". I don't think we can get away from that. It's inherent in the game concept... you build your city and terrain infrastructure throughout the game, and as a result you have more benefits.

We could encourage players to build a little of all terrain improvements by giving each mechanism a penalty. Like how boreholes had a huge benefit, but also a penalty. So, maybe, if you cover your land with energy collectors, you get more and more negatives to your Planet value, or it has a bigger and bigger "drying" effect on the surrounding terrain (turning it arid), or something. Same thing with Forests, maybe it also has a negative on your Planet value.

Another way to proceed is to look at the alternatives. The problem (as I see it) with CIV is that cottage spamming is obviously good, but the alternatives don't really compare. In other words, if you got invaded and Towns pillaged down, are you likely to say screw it, farm over the land, and run specialists? Not unless it's the very end of the game... Almost certainly you're going to re-cottage. The reason for this is the civ-wide Civics. You're running Emancipation and Univ Suffrage. Specialists only really compete when you're running Representation etc.

But, SMAC doesn't really have this. The "Civics" don't really impact your energy income (etc). So, there's no civ-wide incentive to go "whole hog" in a specific strategy.

I think I'm concluding here that it's not the nature of the cottage mechanism that encourages spamming. It's the nature of Civics that encourages spamming. And, I think we'll probably already avoid that (because SMAC didn't have it). So, all we have to do is to "balance the numbers".

However, now that I've said all this, what SMAC does have is tech-based encouragements. For example, if you go the Morgan route, you get bonuses to energy. So you're encouraged to spam energy collectors. If you go the Deirdre route, you get bonuses to Forests (and Hybrid). So, you're encouraged to spam forests.

I think I'll stop here and see what everyone else thinks.

Wodan

 

[Gerikes]

Gotcha.

There are two questions here. One, is the basic game mechanism not a good idea. Two, (assuming we get past One), is the specific mechanic balanced (that is, is it simply a question of tweaking the numbers)?

Thinking out loud about One... The basic concept is that "more is better". I don't think we can get away from that. It's inherent in the game concept... you build your city and terrain infrastructure throughout the game, and as a result you have more benefits.

We could encourage players to build a little of all terrain improvements by giving each mechanism a penalty. Like how boreholes had a huge benefit, but also a penalty. So, maybe, if you cover your land with energy collectors, you get more and more negatives to your Planet value, or it has a bigger and bigger "drying" effect on the surrounding terrain (turning it arid), or something. Same thing with Forests, maybe it also has a negative on your Planet value.

Another way to proceed is to look at the alternatives. The problem (as I see it) with CIV is that cottage spamming is obviously good, but the alternatives don't really compare. In other words, if you got invaded and Towns pillaged down, are you likely to say screw it, farm over the land, and run specialists? Not unless it's the very end of the game... Almost certainly you're going to re-cottage. The reason for this is the civ-wide Civics. You're running Emancipation and Univ Suffrage. Specialists only really compete when you're running Representation etc.

But, SMAC doesn't really have this. The "Civics" don't really impact your energy income (etc). So, there's no civ-wide incentive to go "whole hog" in a specific strategy.

I think I'm concluding here that it's not the nature of the cottage mechanism that encourages spamming. It's the nature of Civics that encourages spamming. And, I think we'll probably already avoid that (because SMAC didn't have it). So, all we have to do is to "balance the numbers".

However, now that I've said all this, what SMAC does have is tech-based encouragements. For example, if you go the Morgan route, you get bonuses to energy. So you're encouraged to spam energy collectors. If you go the Deirdre route, you get bonuses to Forests (and Hybrid). So, you're encouraged to spam forests.

I think I'll stop here and see what everyone else thinks.

Wodan

That's an interesting theory on it.

The problem is I don't see where that balance can come from. Because of the fact that cottages are dynamic in their cost while others are static, you can't really balance them out. Sure, at one point in time, you can easily say "this one gives +3 here, but -1 there, and the other one gives +4 here but -2 there", and if that works, great.

If a cottage gets better over time, then you can't easily balance it's entire evolution with others improvements, but only one part of it. If that one part is near the bottom (IOW, the "cottage" is relatively equal to other improvements balance-wise), then the later evolutions of the cottage will be overpowering. If it's near the end (IOW, the "town" is relatively equal to other improvements balance-wise), then the first X turns just to get there put you at a distinct disadvantage early in the game, which will have a domino effect and might make even the entire improvement worthless late in the game.

I think, if we looked at the mechanism, perhaps the best is that a "cottage"-style improvements starts out small and relatively weak, and quickly rises to a parity with other improvements, but the journey to going past this to a very overpowering improvement is very long and with large steps.

Another idea is that a cottage-style growth depends on a factor other than turns, such in order to make them reach their full potential, you have to do a lot more. I know this sounds like micromanagement, but if we tied it to something that people already do (such as increasing the population of their city) it shouldn't be. For example, say that the growth of a cottage-style improvement is directly linked to the population of your city and the amount of cottages within the borders of that city. If you place five cottages around your lvl-12 city, they would each grow at a fifth of the speed as if you were to place one next to that city, and grow at a quarter of that speed if it were a lvl 6 city.

 

[GRM7584]

I don't think any one improvement should really be overpowering at any one time; that's the question of balancing it. I think it can be balanced out, really, if we stick to only 3 stages per improvement. Resource-based food (and even flood plains food) is abundant in Civ; it will be a completely different situation for SMAC, since almost all food will be coming from improvements rather than resources. What that means is that all bases will need a certain number of food-based improvements just to be competitive.

Cottage spamming works mostly because it is so easy to find a nice city spot where you can easily build up the population to work all those cottage tiles, or at least a mostly-grassland city spot where the cottage tiles are self-sustaining. I think the key lies in making sure that *nothing* is self-sustaining, and I think we already have that with the food restrictions. By limiting food exclusively to farm and 'greenhouse' improvements, whatever those end up being called, it limits usable space and usable population. Further, if we are to employ cottage-style mechanics for all improvements (barring food improvements, which should only rely on sparse techs for yield boosts), it makes other improvements besides the basic "commerce-providing" improvement more interesting and likely to be built. It may also help to move yield-boosting techs for other improvements closer to the start of the tech tree, compared to civ, such that a player teching up to a goal may be able to produce better yields than a player who relied on other types of improvements to grow while pursuing other techs.

Edit: also important for energy specifically is providing alternate sources of commerce besides improvements; specifically, hammer-based sources. Make the construction of in-base reactors a viable, but production-intensive way of producing commerce, for instance; or provide several high-cost trade-boosting buildings. Furthermore, it would be interesting if we could make certain buildings (such as the above-mentioned) require production as maintenance, to keep people from mining up, building as many buildings as they can, and then solar-panelling-over...once those buildings are there, they use up some of your production to pump out all that juicy energy.

 

[GeoModder]

Well, in civ4 with the discovery of certain technologies, and certainly with the use of certain civics, other improvements then cottages (I especially think of watermills, windmills and workshops) keep on par with full-grown cottages.
The only breaker here I could find is this civic that allows cottages +1 .

Another idea is that a cottage-style growth depends on a factor other than turns, such in order to make them reach their full potential, you have to do a lot more. I know this sounds like micromanagement, but if we tied it to something that people already do (such as increasing the population of their city) it shouldn't be. For example, say that the growth of a cottage-style improvement is directly linked to the population of your city and the amount of cottages within the borders of that city. If you place five cottages around your lvl-12 city, they would each grow at a fifth of the speed as if you were to place one next to that city, and grow at a quarter of that speed if it were a lvl 6 city.

Wow, took me a second read to translate this to "solar panels", "mines" and "forests" for the mod, but the idea has its merits.
But since essentially (if the proposal to let the afore mentioned improvements grow over time goes through ) you should come up with quite a dedicated formula. I know that Warlords keeps track of decimals in the calculation of gold, beaker, and culture increase in civ4, but I don't know if the vanilla version from which this mod starts keeps track of that. Wouldn't it be a hinderance if it didn't and just rounded up or down the distribution of "cottage" growth distribution?

 

[GeoModder]

Edit: also important for energy specifically is providing alternate sources of commerce besides improvements; specifically, hammer-based sources. Make the construction of in-base reactors a viable, but production-intensive way of producing commerce, for instance; or provide several high-cost trade-boosting buildings. Furthermore, it would be interesting if we could make certain buildings (such as the above-mentioned) require production as maintenance, to keep people from mining up, building as many buildings as they can, and then solar-panelling-over...once those buildings are there, they use up some of your production to pump out all that juicy energy.

In civ, power plants (reactors in this mod) give a surplus percentage on hammer output of the city. Do you propose to change this to a surplus percentage on commerce? This doesn't follow IMO. What's your logic behind this?

As on the second part of this paragraph: if solar panel plots have a requirement to have a growing output over time, wouldn't that negate the effort of solar-panelling-over over leaving your production tiles and having to wait for 20-30 turns before full energy output of the solar panels is reached?

 

[GRM7584]

In civ, power plants (reactors in this mod) give a surplus percentage on hammer output of the city. Do you propose to change this to a surplus percentage on commerce? This doesn't follow IMO. What's your logic behind this?

In civ, power plants provide 'power' to cities, increasing the bonus that factories provide; however, in planetfall, all bases must have 'power' by nature, since commerce is translated directly into energy for planetfall. The mechanic for power from civ should either be excised or significantly rethought; there are a lot of paths for that but I think it should go in a different thread. In planetfall, what I am saying is that base reactors should not 'power' industry, instead they should represent energy companies boosting local commerce. In the culture thread, one notion was that reactors at bases powered an energy grid, but what I am saying here is that they could function much as the palace does in vanilla civ, providing raw commerce rather than a percentage modifier. Save that for energy banks and similar "economic" institutions.
Example: A city produces 5 minerals and 5 energy, with its currently worked tiles. A Fission Reactor costs 150 minerals to build and produces 5 energy when it is completed, with a 1 mineral maintenance cost. So, a 30 turn investment of minerals will create a building which permanently "converts" 1 mineral into 5 energy. If that base had filled its surroundings with more solar panels, it would not have been able to build the energy-producing reactor as quickly, but would have gotten more energy in the meantime. If that city had built more mines in the surroundings, it would have built the reactor more quickly, but wouldn't have been pumping out as much energy in the meantime. Thus, for a solar-panelled city, it would make more sense to spend that time working towards economic and trade buildings instead of direct energy supplying buildings.

As on the second part of this paragraph: if solar panel plots have a requirement to have a growing output over time, wouldn't that negate the effort of solar-panelling-over over leaving your production tiles and having to wait for 20-30 turns before full energy output of the solar panels is reached?

20-30 turns isn't that much, and while the panels are building up they're still providing energy. Its a suitable tactic in civ to mine/watermill/workshop extensively to build up markets and libraries (at least when chopping and whipping aren't options) and then cottage-spam over the whole area. I suppose you're losing more time if those other improvements take time to build up, though, so that's one of the reasons I like making most improvements use the cottage mechanic.

 

[Maniac]

Idea for cottages that ties in with elevation level and a Flowering Counter: A cottage terrain improvement (renamed of course) becomes available somewhere on the Terraforming tech tree branch (which currently is Ultraponics->Soil Terraformation->Atmospheric Terraformation->Ecological Engineering). I guess it would simply produce (lots of) food. Normally it can only be built on Highlands (reason: there the atmospheric pressure is closest to Earth... or something). However if the Flowering Counter can be kept under a certain level, they could also be buildable on Midlands. On an even lower Flowering level, also buildable on Lowlands. Also the speed by which cottages upgrade to the next improvement in line would also be inverse-linearly be affected by the height of the Flowering Counter. Could create some interesting Terra-versus-Planetmind battles as the game progresses if a faction chose to specialize in terraforming.

 

[Maniac]

Outpost->?->Settlement->...

 

[snipperrabbit!!]

Outpost >> Colony >> District >> Prefecture

Base still used instead of cities.

?????

 

[GeoModder]

Outpost >> Colony >> District >> Prefecture

Base still used instead of cities.

?????

This is not France, snipper (prefecture??? )

My takes goes as following: field lab -> outpost -> settlement -> base?

(to let things go completely crazy, how about making the end of the cottage-line a proper base/city with a pop of one?)

 

[Maniac]

Gotta agree re District and Prefecture.
As for Field Lab and Base: possible problems: Field Lab is what I've currently named the improvement that enables the monolith resource. Base duplicates the SMAC name for a city of course. And having a base is not always better than not having a base, so having bases popping up everywhere after some time would probably be very annoying. Of course all my nay-saying hasn't resulted in a good alternative name. Perhaps a name involving something like "fertile" "terra", "paradise" or something? Though that kind of naming might perhaps fit better for the Gaians.

Btw, perhaps Outposts could grow out of Farms. Though then there should be some code that prevents them from growing before a certain tech is researched.

 

[snipperrabbit!!]

My idea was about ROMAN prefecture and I went for ideas demonstrating the growth of civil service on the plots. It's OK if someone find something better but I can't see it in the two above posts.

 

[Maniac]

Farm->Outpost->Settlement->?->Eden (a concept name more in the sphere of the Conclave/Believers - unlike the Gaians they wouldn't hesitate to kill Planet and replace it by a terran ecology)

 

[The Beard]

I personally don't see too much of a problem with the idea of cottages--in order to maintain your lands, it is necessary to have transit stations for the people that work in the city to maintain those lands, and having people permanently manning small bases outside the city isn't a ludicrous idea. Certainly I don't see them expanding to quite the size they did in Civ IV, but small cottages spread about here and there could still find some use. I would probably make them harder to maintain than in Civ IV, just due to the nature that they would probably not be self-sufficient and would depend greatly upon their main city.

I do like the idea of every terrain improvement gaining in efficiency over time. Perhaps the presence of cottages could expedite the process.

However, as for the robots idea, I think something which might be easier (from the gameplay standpoint) would be, if anything, to just delay the next increase in productivity by 5 turns or something, rather than forcing you to have your formers rebuild robots, or pass over the improvement or whatnot. Of course, you can still say that there are robots, but this saves you the bother of actually having to code them in, and find a tech for them.

Ps, there are waaayy too many techs already in this mod, so in the future, there should be more trimming down rather than "fleshing out."

 

[The_Reckoning]

Along with using the cottage mechanic, what about having upgrades via formers?

Late-game techs give formers that ability to build a 3rd level thing [=town], but it takes 20 turns?

This would mean the penalties of not working the tiles and having them razed would be lower.

Can working a tile produce health/culture/espionage?

Ps, there are waaayy too many techs already in this mod, so in the future, there should be more trimming down rather than "fleshing out."

This.