Design: Buildings

[QES]

Sentry towers do pretty much the trick. I don't know if they're implemented as improvements or a resource, but anyhow they have a non-yield based behaviour so I guess it would be possible to add unit commands that create pseudo-improvements like you suggest.

Then again, there's the same old question : how will you make the AI use all those new pseudo-improvements ?

This is TRUE! I had forgotten about sentry towers. I think they're a "resource" but still, if you did X, Y and Z things, a % chance might allow you to have a "resoure" randomly appear in the appropriate city radius. This little Resource would/could be tied into a improvement for workers to build, but resources can be anything, right? Any kind (not merely yeild) of bonus? WIth the AI, one could simpply attach some non-specific building (like the ancient temple) to the resource to access it, then the access would provide the neat little bonus. Though we dont want its trading, so however the "sentry" tower is done would seem like the best option.

Mayhaps this little idea is not yet dead.
-Qes

 

[BeefontheBone]

Well, there's already code in place for resource appearance when you "pop another one" from a mine, so that could be workable. The downside is that the resources themselves get cluttered - f'rinstance, Ancient Temple shows up in trade windows (and hopefully has an AI value weighting of 0). It ought to be possible to flag resources as tradeable/not tradeable without too much work, I'd hazard. Resources at present can provide 3 kinds of benefit - a health or happiness bonus if they're connected to the trade network (which necessitates an improvement in their tile), a tile yield bonus (which can be enhanced by an improvement) and the strategic benefit of allowing access to buildings/units (or speeding their construction), again when connected to the trade network. I guess you could also count the ability to trade them with other players in there, too. The ideas you suggested on the last page would seem to me to be better implemented as buildings to provide localised benefits, but the buildings list is already very long - how much that contributes to load times I'm not sure (I suspect they're mainly dictated by art assets but you never know).

 

[QES]

Well, there's already code in place for resource appearance when you "pop another one" from a mine, so that could be workable. The downside is that the resources themselves get cluttered - f'rinstance, Ancient Temple shows up in trade windows (and hopefully has an AI value weighting of 0). It ought to be possible to flag resources as tradeable/not tradeable without too much work, I'd hazard. Resources at present can provide 3 kinds of benefit - a health or happiness bonus if they're connected to the trade network (which necessitates an improvement in their tile), a tile yield bonus (which can be enhanced by an improvement) and the strategic benefit of allowing access to buildings/units (or speeding their construction), again when connected to the trade network. I guess you could also count the ability to trade them with other players in there, too. The ideas you suggested on the last page would seem to me to be better implemented as buildings to provide localised benefits, but the buildings list is already very long - how much that contributes to load times I'm not sure (I suspect they're mainly dictated by art assets but you never know).

Yeah i agree with you. This is why i wanted to avoid "More buildings" Its a long list, and means you have to build them, etc. Or if their free, then theres no flavor (you dont see it built). The idea of improvements or resources was strictly for flavor, with a Small but inconsequential bonus added so you can "feel the impact" of your reign. I wonder how the "sentry towers" work. Because they provide a promotion whilst in the tower. If they are considered resources (as their scattered around), then clearly resources can have other attributes attached to them. I dont know anything further, so im hesitant to guess as to what possibilities are, but perhaps someone who knows could suggest how this might be accomplished.
-Qes

 

[Maniac]

Apparently other people do, but I never 'build' Wealth/Science/Culture. Converting your hammers into half their gold/beaker/culture value sounds like a louse deal to me. I'd want to receive double, not half, the amount of gold/beakers/culture to make it worthwhile.

So I was wondering, how about increasing their usefulness, but also make them religion specific to add flavour?

Wealth: can only be built by the Runes
Science: can only be built by the Veil
Culture: can only be built by the Fellowship

To make sure the Octopus Overlords aslo have something to do in cities that have everything else build, how about a merchant vessel that can do a trade mission to foreign cities?

Don't know anything in flavour for the order though.

 

[Jono]

Isn't culture more of the OO's speciality?

 

[Sureshot]

ya, Fellowship would be more healthiness if anything (lol, building health )

and what about order?

 

[Jono]

Higher rate of religious spread?

 

[Maniac]

Would it be possible to 'produce a building' that turns hammers into Great People Points?

Perhaps that fits for the Fellowship or Order?

Or eg:
Order can turn hammers into Great Commander points
Runes: great merchant
Fellowship: great prophet I guess
Overlords: great artist
Veil: great sage

 

[QES]

Would it be possible to 'produce a building' that turns hammers into Great People Points?

Perhaps that fits for the Fellowship or Order?

Or eg:
Order can turn hammers into Great Commander points
Runes: great merchant
Fellowship: great prophet I guess
Overlords: great artist
Veil: great sage

While i agree that this in general is a good idea, i disagree that function = concept.

Overlords while being culturemongers, are not "artists" persay. Their cultural influence does not spring forth from artistic endevors.

Id say that the Fellowship should have great artists, Overlords perhaps great engineers (Engineers have slaves a plenty to work with), I'm not sure anyone should have a great prophet.

-Qes

 

[BeefontheBone]

Don't know if you saw the news update for today, but the Resource Conversion building mod looks like it could be very valuable to you guys

 

[Jono]

Fire Mana and Stones could create Hellstones ... that's awesome!

 

[ydejin]

The Armorer and Weaponsmith buildings would be more interesting if they had an impact on regular units as well as allowing the player to build the Spartaitoi and Shield Wall. At the simplest level you could have simply have any troops built in a city with Armorer get a magic armor bonus and any in a city with Weaponsmith get a magic weapon attack bonus. You could make these dependent on the availability of Mithril, which could make Mithril more important.

A fancier alternative would be to have these buildings capable of building an Armorer/Blacksmith unit and a Weaponsmith/Blacksmith unit. These units could move around the map and could upgrade a unit with either a magic armor upgrade or a magic weapon upgrade. Upgrading a unit would consume the Blacksmith. This mechanic would allow us to upgrade our heroes and already existing experienced units with magic/mithril weapons and armor. If you wanted to you could limit the number of active Blacksmith units to the number of Mithril resources the player currently had access to.

The actual amount of the bonus would probably depend on how expensive the Blacksmith units were to produce. Personally I would go for more expensive Blacksmith units with relatively large bonuses. It should be hard and time consuming to equip an entire armor with Mithril weaopns and armor. Just off hand maybe start off by trying:

• Armor or Weaponsmith Blacksmith unit takes 240 hammers to build
• Mithril Armor gives 30% bonus to defense
• Mithril Weapons gives 30% bonus to attack

 

[Sureshot]

it'd be nice if all unit-allowing buildings had the +5% city defense bonus like the Archery building has.

 

[Kael]

The Armorer and Weaponsmith buildings would be more interesting if they had an impact on regular units as well as allowing the player to build the Spartaitoi and Shield Wall. At the simplest level you could have simply have any troops built in a city with Armorer get a magic armor bonus and any in a city with Weaponsmith get a magic weapon attack bonus. You could make these dependent on the availability of Mithril, which could make Mithril more important.

Yeah, this was the way the buidligns origionally worked but that ability was moved to enchantment spells when they were created. I wouldn't want to have redundant abilities or any more stacks than currently exist.

Maybe I should have them reduce upgrade costs?

A fancier alternative would be to have these buildings capable of building an Armorer/Blacksmith unit and a Weaponsmith/Blacksmith unit. These units could move around the map and could upgrade a unit with either a magic armor upgrade or a magic weapon upgrade. Upgrading a unit would consume the Blacksmith. This mechanic would allow us to upgrade our heroes and already existing experienced units with magic/mithril weapons and armor. If you wanted to you could limit the number of active Blacksmith units to the number of Mithril resources the player currently had access to.

The actual amount of the bonus would probably depend on how expensive the Blacksmith units were to produce. Personally I would go for more expensive Blacksmith units with relatively large bonuses. It should be hard and time consuming to equip an entire armor with Mithril weaopns and armor. Just off hand maybe start off by trying:

• Armor or Weaponsmith Blacksmith unit takes 240 hammers to build
• Mithril Armor gives 30% bonus to defense
• Mithril Weapons gives 30% bonus to attack

That sounds a lot like mages that are trained in enchantment magic.

 

[ydejin]

Maybe I should have them reduce upgrade costs?

That's not a bad idea, but at that point in the game, is there that much upgrading left? It would also be nice to have Armorer and Weaponsmith to have somewhat different flavors. Personally I'd prefer to have specific bonuses on units built on those locations. It helps differentiate units and makes units built from specific cities "special" compared to other units.

It just seems like there are a couple of buildings in the late game that serve no purpose other than the ability to build a specific unit. The Grove is similar. Seems like perhaps the Grove should give some sort of additional bonus, maybe a +1 to or or maybe automatically conferring a forester I promotion.

My thinking is at this point, the end game techs on the top two lines of the tree (the cavalry line and the metal crafting line) start focusing almost exclusively on enabling specific unit builds and building whose only purpose is building those units. Since those are national units, it would be nice to having the buildings be a bit more versatile.

That sounds a lot like mages that are trained in enchantment magic.

The armor/weapon blacksmith's would be somewhat like enchantment mages, except that they would get expended when enchanting, so as a tradeoff they would give potentially more powerful enchantment. With the enchantment mages, they basically end up upgrading a very large number of your units. With this idea, you would only be able to upgrade a small number of units because it was relatively expensive.

I originally came up with these ideas in response to a number of threads I was reading. Some people where saying that the end game seems a bit bland. Also there was a discussion on how the Mithril resource wasn't that useful. This proposal is meant to address both these issues.

It all might be a mute point anyway, depending on how you're planning to address weapons in the "Shadow" design.

 

[Jono]

Armouries and weaponsmiths use to give promotions, but I think they removed because existing units couldn't get them (atleast this was what made me delay creation of heroes and such). I was happy to see them go.

 

[ydejin]

Armouries and weaponsmiths use to give promotions, but I think they removed because existing units couldn't get them (at least this was what made me delay creation of heroes and such). I was happy to see them go.

That's actually why I came up with the Blacksmith unit idea. For me the cool thing would be to equip my top, highly experienced units with Mithral weapons and armor, rather than having some bonus just available to new units coming off the line. I suppose the simplest thing to do would be to allow any unit which goes to that city to get a free mithril armor/weapon upgrade.

More complex mechanics could make having multiple mithril resources more useful though. Also if the ability to upgrade is more limited (by for example requiring a lot of invested in building a blacksmith unit) the upgrade could be correspondingly more powerful without skewing play balance.

 

[loki1232]

I was thinking about the golem buildings. Perhaps the gaurdsman one could be named Foundation of Law.
Could we have a way for golems to become siege weapons? Or at least replace the Luchuirp siege weapons with "Siege golems"(extra strength but can't level).
I would also really like it if there was a way for a golem to sacrifice itself and either summon a powerful unit, or distribute his hp among the rest of the golems in the stack.

I think that the Grigori Adventurers guild should give +1 happy since sometimes the Grigori have happiness problems.

 

[QES]

EDIT2: Moved to the Units thread.

 

[QES]

Building Ideas:

City Manor - (Available With an economic mid-game tech) <Expensive to build>
+1 Specialist in City (may make any citizen a specialist)
+1 Happy when in Aristocracy

Ivory Tower - (Available with science mid-game tech) <Expensive>
+ 2 Beakers per Sage, -2 Culture per sage (Unlimited sages)
+ 1 Happy when in Scholarship

Conscription Office - (Available with Nationalism) <Cheap>
Conscripts incure less unhappiness. Concripts Gain +2 Experience.

Catacombs - (Available with Sanitation) <Expensive>
Reduces the chance of disease being spread to units in city.
+1 Healthy
City remains in revolt longer if captured.

Gem Golemmacher - (Available to Lurchruip Early/Mid game) <Expensive>
Allows production of Saphire Golem, Ruby Golem, Diamond Golem, and Emerald Golem (with appropriate techs early - late)

Spoiler :

Saphire Golem - (Requires Gems) Str 4ish, bonus against fire, water walking.
Emerald Golem - (Requires Gems) Str 7ish, bonus against recon units, Drill 1.
Ruby Golem - (Requires Gems) Str 10ish, bonus against water, blast furnace grants "meteor" instead of "Fireball"
Diamond Golem - (Requires Gems) (National Unit- 3) Str 13ish, Has permanent stone skin.

Cheese Maker - (Early game) <Moderate Expense>
Cow's are considered luxury resources in this city (+1 happy)

Psionic Mediator - (Grigori Early/mid Game) <Expensive>
Decrease chance of religious spread to city.
+1 Happy Per mana type available.

Psionic Thrall-Master - (OO Mid Game) <Expensive>
+1 Free Specialist in city.
Citizen/worker Specialist produce +1 Hammer

Quartermaster (Available with Monarchy) <Mid-expense>
Reduces Maintenance in city by 5% for each unit stationed in city.
+1 Unhappy (Military gets first dibs on goods)

-Qes