Deciding on Building Production Costs

[LPlate2]

Hi,

I'm working on a mod and have just inputted most of the building details.

I'd appreciate modders' opinions on what are reasonable approaches to assigning costs to the production of buildings.

The simplest type of building that one could consider is one which provides a set number of hammers per turn. It is easy to see in such a case how soon a building will have paid for itself. How many turns is a reasonable payback time (for normal speed or at other speeds)?

This could then be expanded to buildings that provide a modified production rate or vary production based on available resources by applying some assumptions (what's expected average production boost from the building in the x turns after its built or what's the average number of applicable resources that will effect a city where the building is built).

To expand it further to buildings which boost factors, other than production should be a question of relating the relative values of the various yields and commerce. I'm aiming for a one to one ratio for the yields in the mod.

What rationale does anyone apply on coming up with costs for buildings which boost xp or give promotions?

If more than one building give similar boosts but are available at different techs, how should this affect the cost of the buildings? Should the building associated with the later tech be more expensive (and if so, by how much)?

Thanks for any feedback.

 

[omegaflames]

Since I've never designed a mod from scratch I can't answer most of your questions but I can say that whenever I've added in new units or buildings I took a look at what the costs for other units/buildings, especially those that achieved similar results, and based my costs as close to those as I could. My basis for that decision is that Firaxis has/should have spent quite a bit of time and money testing that and it simply would be more efficient for me to borrow from their opinion of balance instead. The one time that I had to go out on my own was when I added in a unit training feature to my personal mod of FFH2 that would give the unit experience and because of how slow experience gain is normally I didn't want it going to much faster so I slowed it down to be able to attempt an average of once every 5 turns and even then a starting chance of success of only 50%. I figured having it take an average minimum of 500 turns, and even then much slower once you take into account the chance of success, to gain 100 xp was slow enough to not be too much faster than xp gain rate from combat. But again that's looking at the something that's already in the game and trying to get somewhat close to what others have determined was good.

 

[LPlate2]

Thanks. I'll probably keep my costs as similar to Firaxis as I can for starters. As you say, they're the ones who invested in the play testing to come up with the original costs.

 

[Leoreth]

Another thing to keep in mind is that it's not just the buildings effect that influences cost, but also when it appears in the game. For example, a Library and a University provide the same effect, but the University is much more expensive because it comes later in the game where you generally have more production. It's probably a good idea for game design and for making your life easier to find counterparts to the default buildings from BtS and then just carbon copy them. Once you have that basic framework you can start making buildings more unique to suit your mod and tweak their costs and effects.