Difficulty vs. Game speed

[Dancing Hoskuld]

1) I have never found corporations to be profitable. They have always reduced my income!

2) There is no upkeep for routes only initial build costs.

 

[teakbois]

Yes... we could certainly thing things through more... wonders I think are one of the main sources of causing HUGE % modifiers - was meaningful when we had less of them but now we should perhaps pull them back a little (not too much or you could kill the profitability of corporations.)

Just talking the early eras here, not the modern wonders as I dont have a lot of experience with those

I dont think the number of wonders is too much of an issue. Most of the wonders are city specific. Whiles its possible to stack up some science wonders in a city to create a huge science city, i think thats good game design, and one city doesnt tend to overpower things.

Some wonders probably need a look though. For example, Great Lighthouse. 2 trade routes per coastal city sounded innocent at the time, but with all the ways we can boost trade route yields, especially in coastal cities, its a huge boost. There are wonders with a main draw of getting 2 trade routes to just one city.

There is one big exception to all of this, and that is religion. Religious wonders are among the most powerful in the game. That is where you will find a lot of % to all cities modifiers. I do know religion is being looked at though

 

[teakbois]

Okay, it looks like trade route commerce may be a culprit to the fast tech issue.

Look at this trade route

Spoiler :

kind of an extreme example because its my best trade route in the capitol, and it has a 50% wonder boost. But its still 650% without the wonder boost

Switching to a non capitol but well established city for the rest...

Spoiler :

That 297 base commerce is adding up all the inflated trade routes for the city. then we put these through another % modifier where buildings, civics and traits give it an 18% boost at which point it gets converted into science

Then after the buildings get added on we get the big science % boost, another 85% to get to our output.

The average trade route in this city goes through a 300% modifier because it doesnt have any foreign trades yet.

So here is the journey of 1 point of trade route commerce in an ordinary city: 1 X 3.00 X 1.18 x 1.85 = 6.55

Once Im able to do more overseas trading its going to be much worse.

 

[Faustmouse]

Um... why do you guys believe it's impossible to use one of the most basic building tags we have - CommerceChanges? This should lead to a flat rate modifier of the indicated commerce rather than a % (which is indicated by the term 'Modifier' rather than 'Change'.)

% adjustments should represent investment capability adjustments for the city and the facilitation or impact on the economy city wide. + base changes should represent the taxation of the profits that building is bringing in. - base changes should represent the gold upkeep for the nation to pay - such as what is taking place on military and other publicly maintained buildings.

Yes... we could certainly thing things through more... wonders I think are one of the main sources of causing HUGE % modifiers - was meaningful when we had less of them but now we should perhaps pull them back a little (not too much or you could kill the profitability of corporations.)

I also think we may want to consider making all units a bit more expensive for nations to field. Try increasing the base cost per unit by +1 gold. Unfortunately, this would probably hit the AI harder than the player but it would be more rational for military spending. Increasing gold penalties for public buildings would help too. Particularly looking for ways to inject more -% modifiers rather than just - flat rate gold. Anything that scales to the size of the city/economy should really be based on a % factor - like perhaps road upkeep for example.

In my BuildingShema their is only BonusCommerceModifier and BonusCommercePercentChanges (I don't know what the latter one does).

And "anything that scales with city size" would be covered well with a CommercePerPop tag since CitySize is mainly PopSize.

 

[Thunderbrd]

In my BuildingShema their is only BonusCommerceModifier and BonusCommercePercentChanges (I don't know what the latter one does).

And "anything that scales with city size" would be covered well with a CommercePerPop tag since CitySize is mainly PopSize.

I'll take a look at the coding itself later and let you know what tags are available for flat rate commerce adjustments.

@DH: Hate to say it and don't mean to be disrespectful by it but... if you're finding corporations never profitable, you're not using them right. It takes some strategic placement of the corporate headquarters but even the most costly corporation can be extraordinarily profitable, even if you're not spreading it to your opponent to drain him with it.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

@DH: Hate to say it and don't mean to be disrespectful by it but... if you're finding corporations never profitable, you're not using them right. It takes some strategic placement of the corporate headquarters but even the most costly corporation can be extraordinarily profitable, even if you're not spreading it to your opponent to drain him with it.

It is probably the messages and corporations screen that are at fault. I usually get messages that say I will get +20 in my corporate headquarters and -88 in the city it is being spread to. Total loss -68 per turn!

 

[Thunderbrd]

It is probably the messages and corporations screen that are at fault. I usually get messages that say I will get +20 in my corporate headquarters and -88 in the city it is being spread to. Total loss -68 per turn!

To some extent you're right. What you're not compensating for is what +20 in your headquarters becomes when all the +gold % modifiers are applied. Once you've got that up to +500% then you've got +100 for each city then those cities are getting -88 (in the case you've mentioned) which doesn't get further modified. -88 would be an extreme case where you have a LOT of the resources that the corporation uses but then the city is getting a HUGE benefit. Many times it makes up for itself there too. For example, if you're getting +50 production in a city for having the corporation in there then when (not IF because with that much production it's impossible not to) you get to the point where that city has built all useful buildings you can simply put the city to building gold and convert all that added production (again heavily modified in the later eras) into what... 80-100% production to gold produced? Easily makes up for itself.

In Vanilla, it simply required about a 150% total gold modifier to make your corporations profitable. In C2C it does take a bit more but it's also possible to have a lot more % modifiers in your financial center as well. And again, any corporation that doesn't get a lot of resources fed to it will be usually directly profitable in the extreme because the expense of running the corp in the cities its spread to is much less, allowing the headquarters to easily outweigh the expense.

 

[JosEPh_II]

@T-Brd and DH,

Your posts are prime examples why I gave up on using Corps a long time ago. Overly complicated in mpo, so I just quit using them.

Maybe Corps need to become a bit more transparent in how they work and how they display their results. A "future" project perhaps.

JosEPh

 

[ls612]

Looking at some in-game examples (granted, from a game I last played back in March) I think that Yudishira is right to a certain extent, the +1% from *bonustype* is a bit unbalanced given how many bonuses and buildings which give the +1% we have. I still think that the main issue is the AI not being good enough, but until Koshling is back that won't change too much. I would suggest in the mean time that perhaps the +1% from bonustype be non-stacking (ie, if you have two buildings which give +1% with Pearls you only get +1% from Pearls).

 

[Faustmouse]

I would suggest in the mean time that perhaps the +1% from bonustype be non-stacking (ie, if you have two buildings which give +1% with Pearls you only get +1% from Pearls).

Is this possible?
But if it would be really that easy to have a tag that gives +1 from bonustype rather than +1% I'd definetly prefer this method.

 

[ls612]

Is this possible?
But if it would be really that easy to have a tag that gives +1 from bonustype rather than +1% I'd definetly prefer this method.

Sure. It just requires a change in the algorithm which processes those tags.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

I would suggest in the mean time that perhaps the +1% from bonustype be non-stacking (ie, if you have two buildings which give +1% with Pearls you only get +1% from Pearls).

That will just cause lots of bug reports as people do the math and see that they have 3 buildings that add 1% but only get 1% not the 3% they expect.

Is this possible?
But if it would be really that easy to have a tag that gives +1 from bonustype rather than +1% I'd definetly prefer this method.

Sure. It just requires a change in the algorithm which processes those tags.

As Tbrd says why not use the CommerceChanges tag (+1) instead of the CommerceModifiers tag (+1%)? IE we already have the mechanism available. Someone just needs to check to see if it works as expected by changing the XML tags.

edit @Thunderbrd I can only find CommerceChanges for techs not for bonuses.

 

[ls612]

That will just cause lots of bug reports as people do the math and see that they have 3 buildings that add 1% but only get 1% not the 3% they expect.

Add something to the tooltip that says 'These bonuses don't stack' then.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Add something to the tooltip that says 'These bonuses don't stack' then.

Still will get questions from people who play other mods asking why it is different etc. Not only that but the tag will no longer do what it says it does in the Modiki, so you will confuse modders as well! IMO Just use a different tag and leave the one that is there as it is.

 

[Faustmouse]

As Tbrd says why not use the CommerceChanges tag (+1) instead of the CommerceModifiers tag (+1%)? IE we already have the mechanism available. Someone just needs to check to see if it works as expected by changing the XML tags.

edit @Thunderbrd I can only find CommerceChanges for techs not for bonuses.

As I said earlier, there is only a BonusCommerceModifier but not Changes. I guess it wouldn't be too hard to add this tag.

 

[ls612]

Still will get questions from people who play other mods asking why it is different etc. Not only that but the tag will no longer do what it says it does in the Modiki, so you will confuse modders as well! IMO Just use a different tag and leave the one that is there as it is.

But making a new tag will mean so much unnecessary copy-pasting in the XML. And besides, since when have we been too concerned about making something work differently from vanilla?

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

We have not yet changed the meaning of anything. Plus adding the new tag lets us use the old one still for wonders and projects.

 

[JamesBC]

Here is BonusCommerceModifier. Coded by SaibotLieh.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=341521

This modcomp allows to modify the output of beakers, gold, culture and espionage of buildings relatively by certain resources, similiar to the already existing BonusYieldModifiers, that does this for food, production and commerce. All changes in the code are marked with "BCM". As examples the market, grocer and bank have their gold output increase modified by some resources.

 

[Thunderbrd]

That will just cause lots of bug reports as people do the math and see that they have 3 buildings that add 1% but only get 1% not the 3% they expect.





As Tbrd says why not use the CommerceChanges tag (+1) instead of the CommerceModifiers tag (+1%)? IE we already have the mechanism available. Someone just needs to check to see if it works as expected by changing the XML tags.

edit @Thunderbrd I can only find CommerceChanges for techs not for bonuses.

AH... yeah, ok, so I thought it was being stated that we can't have a building give a flat 'change' value at all, not one that was based on a given bonus.

It's gimpy but I s'pose you could have an autobuilding that emerges to add the +1 (or whatever) that emerges when the prerequisite building (like a jeweler for example) is in the city and the city has access to the bonus. In this way we COULD get around the factor of not having the tag at the moment - such a tag would be very complex to design and might take up to a full week of work just on that one tag alone. Not that it wouldn't be worthwhile to have I'm sure but for now we've got a possible workaround.

But making a new tag will mean so much unnecessary copy-pasting in the XML. And besides, since when have we been too concerned about making something work differently from vanilla?

I think I agree with you on this ls612 but I also agree with DH in that such tags should keep to basic assumability on the way they function. For example, it'd be kinda messed up if we had a tag that gave +1% Research for each source of bonus available in the city (rather than what we have which I believe is +1% if a source of the bonus was available at all). These kinds of simple adjustments to function can open up so many differing effects that words and terms start to lose some value and they just get confusing to further modding efforts, even though they may seem like a great idea at the time they're made. Perhaps better to try first to stay within the realm of the tags and the effects they currently have than to overexpand our functionality into the confusing zone.

Just my opinion though... not a strong one either. All's I'd say is if we do start adding tags just to vary the dynamic of an effect of a similar tag or we start having some tags deviating from the standard assumable effect of similar like tags employed elsewhere than we really need to deeply consider how to term them to make them clearly different and we should really ask ourselves if it's necessary.

Again, just making discussion on the matter.

Here is BonusCommerceModifier. Coded by SaibotLieh.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=341521

I don't think we need that. We have that already. The gap we apparently should be seeking to fill is a BonusCommerceChange tag. Not terribly difficult (I'd find it easier to create from scratch than to try to merge in the work of another modder who didn't have the complexity of C2C's code on his plate during his design anyhow.) But it would be rather a time consuming project for the scope of one tag. I think we have a lot of other ways to address this issue in the meantime.

 

[Faustmouse]

It's gimpy but I s'pose you could have an autobuilding that emerges to add the +1 (or whatever) that emerges when the prerequisite building (like a jeweler for example) is in the city and the city has access to the bonus. In this way we COULD get around the factor of not having the tag at the moment.

Uhm... then we not only need an autobuilding for every "+1% with Bonustype" building, but for all bonuses of given building. For example:

Jewelry: +1% with Pearls, Gold, Silver.... would require:

1: Autobuild, +1 , requires Jewelry and Pearls.
2: Autobuild, +1 , requires Jewelry and Gold.
3: Autobuild, +1 , requires Jewelry and Silver.

etc...

This could end up in a few hundert new needed buildings which is WAY too much and easily takes longer than a week to add. Not to mention the increasing game loading time and memory usage.