Does it make sense to have Ind. Revolution and Factories in a game without consumer goods?

[Uberfrog]

factory bonus, cost
civ1 +50% 200
civ2 +50% 200
civ3 +50% 240
civ4 +25% 250
civ5 4+10% 360
civ6 3 390/n

I think these numbers make the problem pretty clear. It takes 130 turns for the Factory to pay for itself in the city that produced it. That's not exactly a revolution.

i didn't like stacking factories. ics ruins the game.
if the goal is to help production-weak cities, they should make some production transfer mechanism (same for food)
possibly with a trader and a city project, e.g. if you send a trader to a city which is producing "building materials", the source city gets additional production

Stacking isn't the solution, but as it stands the regional effect of Factories is a badly implemented game mechanic that actively discourages the building of IZs. Compare it with pretty much every other primary district in the game, which encourage you to build them in as many cities as possible.

I think Factories need to produce a much larger amount of extra production in the city in which it was built. Even something like +10 is not ridiculous given how high production costs are in later eras. Then instead of (or in addition to, +3 is hardly a big deal) the regional production boost, you could increase the production yield of domestic trade routes to cities with a Factory. Though to be honest I'd like to see bilateral trade routes return — we should have breadbasket cities capable of exporting food and industrial cities capable of exporting production.

 

[Leyrann]

Are we talking consumer goods like blue jeans, cosmetics, and toys? Because they're all in the game.

Oh yeah, and those totally can't be improved upon.

 

[Arilian]

I agree.

Factories giving +10 local and +5 regional production would only still be useful for a 'builder', winning the game in deity, factories never actually make up for their production cost. Coal Pants should be even more. (And why there is not nuclear plants?)

 

[historix69]

I think Factories need to produce a much larger amount of extra production in the city in which it was built. Even something like +10 is not ridiculous given how high production costs are in later eras. Then instead of (or in addition to, +3 is hardly a big deal) the regional production boost, you could increase the production yield of domestic trade routes to cities with a Factory.

Factories should also provide more slots and a much higher ouput per citizen. The +2 per citizen is the same as for a workshop and it provides only +1 slot.

Though to be honest I'd like to see bilateral trade routes return — we should have breadbasket cities capable of exporting food and industrial cities capable of exporting production.

You could do that in Colonization back in 1994. I never understood why they kept this realistic exchange of Food and Goods out of Civ series.
In some games like Master of Magic or Master of Orion you had Global Food, which could be transferred at a cost. But these games do not use the Foodbasket-Population-Growth-Mechanism.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

the goal is to help production-weak cities, they should make some production transfer mechanism (same for food)
possibly with a trader and a city project, e.g. if you send a trader to a city which is producing "building materials", the source city gets additional production

The old caravan system worked fine. Build a caravan in your high production city, move it to a new city and transfer the production cost to whatever the new city is producing. The only opportunity cost was the time to move the caravan to where it was needed, plus the risk a barbarian / enemy captures it.

Want to build a wonder? You're no longer reliant on having a high production city. You can marshal the resources of your whole empire and send caravans from all over to the wonder city.

It worked great. I never understood why they got rid of it.

 

[killmeplease]

It worked great. I never understood why they got rid of it.

maybe to prevent building a wonder same turn you get a tech?
there were food caravans as well..

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

maybe to prevent building a wonder same turn you get a tech?

I didn't find that an issue. You had to invest in a lot of caravans as part of the planning process to get the wonder, and then once it's available, you start using them to build it. As long as the cost of the wonder itself is balanced with it's value, this was fine to me. It could be softened slightly by using the same rules as are used now for Builders contributing to projects: max one caravan per city per turn.

 

[MrRadar]

There just is no industrial revolution in the game.

My feelings exactly.
Industrial revolution fell seriously ill in CivV, and now, in Civ VI, it is comatose, as good as dead.

factory bonus, cost
civ4 +25% 250

and +25% if the city has any powerplant, which brings it to cumulative +50% as in previous versions

To be honest, there was. In the beginning, all factories stacked, which was an "industrial revolution". However, since people started to build many small cities close together, to get maximum numbers of factories, they removed that & had only one factory (except when you use Magnus). So, basically, in the beginning it was too strong & now it is too weak.

i didn't like stacking factories. ics ruins the game.

Stacking, at least, was more fun than no stacking, as it did give some impression of a "revolution". Maybe it was not the best implementation, but just removing it completely was even worse, in my opinion. Now there are all sorts of production sources, which have little to do with being an industrialized nation.

Factories should also provide more slots and a much higher ouput per citizen. The +2 per citizen is the same as for a workshop and it provides only +1 slot.

Oh, yes, specialist citizens are so insignificant, there's very little incentive to use them. I'd like to see them gaining much more importance.


And coming back to factory effect stacking, its removal quite saddened me as a very clumsy and hasty "nuke it all" decision. Instead the developers could leave it be or at least halve the spillover effect (1,5 cogs to other cities in the radius) and take their time to bring variety. We see more alternative building options appear in various districts, why not to make this with factories?

For example, there could be a number of possible and mutually exclusive factories: creameries for cities with cattle in their radius, textile mills for those who have sheep, steel mills, if the city has coal and iron resource in its range, furniture factories for cities with lumber-mills, canneries, for cities with sea resources, jeweller shops (gold, silver, diamonds), electronic factories (copper, also, sorry Japan, you'd have something else), aero-space complex (aluminium) and so on. The area effect of the same sort of factories would not stack or stacking would be limited, but the effect of different kinds of factories would add up.

Besides, the yields could be different, split between food-production-gold-and perhaps amenities elements, depending on the base resource and it's quantity worked by the city, maybe there could be alternative factory types for the same resource, for example, in a cattle rich city you could build either a creamery for more food, or a tannery, for more production. There could also be yield bonuses not only for the number of a particular resource in the city radius, but for their adjacency to the IZ - for more thinking about their placement - what do you want - better yields or more covered cities?

Making production buildings much more reliant on bonus resources, such as forests, fish, copper, etc. would also be a great help in reining in unrestricted chopping, which is now the name of the game, especially with Magnus, and is completely out of control.

There could also be more types of powerplants, bringing back coal plants, if you have coal, hyrdoplants, if IZ is on a river, nuclear plants, if you have uranium and coming with a small probability of a meltdown, of course , solar plants in deserts.

And, of course, railroads. That could be a tile improvement, buildable for charges by builders, increasing movement (modern roads movement could have a bit of a nerf) and having an effect somewhere along the lines of a permanent internal trade route, boosting production, food and gold in connected cities, also giving more cogs for connection of the IZ to the relevant resources and IZ to the city centre.

This could give a lot more production, so the production cost of later era units and higher tier buildings could be corrected to take account for it, if necessary.

 

[killmeplease]

and +25% if the city has any powerplant, which brings it to cumulative +50% as in previous versions

for another +25% the player had to build an expensive power plant building, so i havent counted it
also there was a manufacturing plant in civ1-3 available at robotics for another +100% (+50% in civ2 and civ3), cost 320

 

[historix69]

Industrialisation in Civ6 also suffers from the changes to military upgrades in the Civ series. With the possibility to promote and spezialise units and upgrade them with Gold rather than Production, the need for high production was reduced. To avoid players having nothing to produce, production costs were increased and production itself was reduced.
In earlyer Civ games you were busy building military units all the time, e.g. in modern age building tanks. artillery and bomber aircrafts or battleships.

By removing the possibility to upgrade units (like Knights to Tanks), the player would need more production and the devs could afford to grant the player higher production boni.
(There are other ways to collect combat experience than having a core army of highly promoted units from ancient to information age.)

 

[Uberfrog]

To avoid players having nothing to produce, production costs were increased and production itself was reduced.

This is another design decision that has absolutely failed. The paucity of late-game production actively dissuades me from producing anything — Tier 3 buildings, wonders, units, you name it! — in the late game because it takes too long to be worth the investment. I routinely find myself setting production to projects in the endgame just to keep the city quiet for a few turns as I approach victory.

 

[UWHabs]

This is another design decision that has absolutely failed. The paucity of late-game production actively dissuades me from producing anything — Tier 3 buildings, wonders, units, you name it! — in the late game because it takes too long to be worth the investment. I routinely find myself setting production to projects in the endgame just to keep the city quiet for a few turns as I approach victory.

Not to turn this into a 1upt thread, the fact that I can build my army in the early game, and only need a handful of units after that, I think is another reason why things really fail.

If they changed units so that they had a very high maintenance cost, but a relatively cheaper production cost, and also balanced the gold vs production cost to upgrade units, I think that would be for the better. But the fact that using cards properly means that I can spend less than 1 gold/production when upgrading a unit, but need to spend 4 gold/production when building a new unit, just makes it a no-brainer to keep old units around.

For example, a Knight costs 3 per turn maintenance. It's still cheaper to keep him around for 100 turns doing nothing and then upgrade him to a tank rather than deleting the knight and buying/building a new tank later. When you virtually eliminate the need to build any units in the late game, then yeah, production costs are weirdly balanced. They really need to make the math work out so that only your most highly promoted units make sense to keep around between eras.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

This is another design decision that has absolutely failed. The paucity of late-game production actively dissuades me from producing anything — Tier 3 buildings, wonders, units, you name it! — in the late game because it takes too long to be worth the investment. I routinely find myself setting production to projects in the endgame just to keep the city quiet for a few turns as I approach victory.

To be fair, under any game design, at some point focussing exclusively on the victory condition and the return on investment prior to the time you expect to hit that victory makes sense. I like projects, I think they're a good design feature, and knowing when to switch to them is a part of learning how to play the game.

It's the other aspects of your concerns that I agree with. Upgrading Knights to Tanks should cost the same as building Tanks from scratch (the bonus you get from upgrading could be simply retention of their experience). And Tier 3 buildings should not be useless, and they pretty much are, because they give a tiny bonus compared to their cost, specialists aren't particularly useful, and the time to game end when they become available is very short (at standard game speed).

Frankly, I think the whole military cost structure needs a fundamental rethink. I believe it should be very inexpensive to build military units up a certain number that is based on your military infrastructure (encampments, encampment buildings, walls, policy cards, etc.). That way you can field a decent military without needing to unduly impact your domestic growth. More importantly, the AI can build (and re-build if they lose their first army) a military without impacting their domestic growth. And as your civ grows and you add new infrastructure like Aerodromes, you can build some modern new units like an airforce cheaply. It would only be if you try to build a military above your infrastructure size that the production cost would then balloon to current production costs.

 

[UWHabs]

To be fair, under any game design, at some point focussing exclusively on the victory condition and the return on investment prior to the time you expect to hit that victory makes sense. I like projects, I think they're a good design feature, and knowing when to switch to them is a part of learning how to play the game.

It's the other aspects of your concerns that I agree with. Upgrading Knights to Tanks should cost the same as building Tanks from scratch (the bonus you get from upgrading could be simply retention of their experience). And Tier 3 buildings should not be useless, and they pretty much are, because they give a tiny bonus compared to their cost, specialists aren't particularly useful, and the time to game end when they become available is very short (at standard game speed).

Frankly, I think the whole military cost structure needs a fundamental rethink. I believe it should be very inexpensive to build military units up a certain number that is based on your military infrastructure (encampments, encampment buildings, walls, policy cards, etc.). That way you can field a decent military without needing to unduly impact your domestic growth. More importantly, the AI can build (and re-build if they lose their first army) a military without impacting their domestic growth. And as your civ grows and you add new infrastructure like Aerodromes, you can build some modern new units like an airforce cheaply. It would only be if you try to build a military above your infrastructure size that the production cost would then balloon to current production costs.

Yeah, as antithetical as it is to 1upt, I think building costs for units should be relatively cheap, but maintenance costs should be very high. I also think that maintenance costs in foreign/occupied territory should be higher than at home. So maybe the current maintenance costs are fine at home, but they should be something like 4X higher when at war and in foreign territory. If each unit is costing you 10-20 gpt when you're at war, that will definitely start to impact your main empire during a long war way more than the occasional amenities hit that you get now.

And it still amazes me how a research lab is barely any better than a university, for example, and can be worse if you get the scientist who gives +2 to universities. Most games it's just not worth the investment.

 

[MrRadar]

Not to turn this into a 1upt thread...

Ah, finally, the elephant...

Frankly, I think the whole military cost structure needs a fundamental rethink. I believe it should be very inexpensive to build military units up a certain number that is based on your military infrastructure (encampments, encampment buildings, walls, policy cards, etc.). That way you can field a decent military without needing to unduly impact your domestic growth. More importantly, the AI can build (and re-build if they lose their first army) a military without impacting their domestic growth. And as your civ grows and you add new infrastructure like Aerodromes, you can build some modern new units like an airforce cheaply. It would only be if you try to build a military above your infrastructure size that the production cost would then balloon to current production costs.

That is very similar how military is handled in Civ5 VP mod. To quote from their Wiki page:
>
Unit Supply or Military Unit Supply Cap is the the maximum number of Military Units you can field at any one time. This number, indicated on the Top Panel to your right, increases based on two factors: the total population of all of your cities, and the number of buildings or policies you have that increase your Military Unit Supply Cap. Some buildings, such as the Barracks, increase your Supply Cap by a fixed amount. Others, like Walls, increase your Supply cap by a percentage of the city's population.

Military Unit Supply Cap increases from static elements, like Barracks, and percentage bonuses from population decline over time based on your empire's technological level. You will need more and more percentage bonuses to overcome this and field large armies!

If, for any reason, you exceed your Military Unit Supply Cap, you will be penalized -5% Production and Food in all Cities (per unit over the cap up to a maximum of -75%).
<

From my limited experience with that mod I can say, units are quite cheap to build, unit upgrades (done in gold) cost your arm and sometimes a leg too, you get to do a lot of military activity and it does not always result in great gains, military AI can bloody your nose. Units die and get replaced by fresh troops, so it all looks and feels quite reasonable and does not leave you much time to realise that it is still 1upt.

 

[historix69]

In WW1 and WW2, military units permanently needed supplies, ammunition, replacement parts, replacement personel to keep their combat strength. Countries had to decide if they sent their population into the factories to produce arms and ammo or to the front to replace the losses. In the end, most of the men went to the front while the women took over war production at the home front.
In Civ games, there is no real corelation between population / workforce and army size. Production and Gold limit your army size.

The fact that units can fight and completely heal without any extra costs in supplies and replacements provides a smooth gameplay where the player can almost completely ignore logistics, but it is unrealistic and reduces the amount of production needed to make war. In fact if you have a good core army and a sufficient gold income, you do not need any production to make war in Civ 6.

Implementing a logistic and replacement system for 1upt would be difficult. You would need a way to merge damaged units or somehow rebuild them. The permanent need to build replacement units would keep your war industry busy. Juggling damaged units, supplies and reinforcements in a 1upt game without proper roads / railroads would not be a fun game but hard work.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

In WW1 and WW2, military units permanently needed supplies, ammunition, replacement parts, replacement personel to keep their combat strength. Countries had to decide if they sent their population into the factories to produce arms and ammo or to the front to replace the losses. In the end, most of the men went to the front while the women took over war production at the home front.
In Civ games, there is no real corelation between population / workforce and army size. Production and Gold limit your army size.

The fact that units can fight and completely heal without any extra costs in supplies and replacements provides a smooth gameplay where the player can almost completely ignore logistics, but it is unrealistic and reduces the amount of production needed to make war. In fact if you have a good core army and a sufficient gold income, you do not need any production to make war in Civ 6.

Implementing a logistic and replacement system for 1upt would be difficult. You would need a way to merge damaged units or somehow rebuild them. The permanent need to build replacement units would keep your war industry busy. Juggling damaged units, supplies and reinforcements in a 1upt game without proper roads / railroads would not be a fun game but hard work.

I think marrying a military infrastructure mechanism to the existing war weariness would work fine.

Then the production cost difference to rebuilding a lost unit versus healing a unit in the field would be minimal, and the main impact of destroying a unit would be that the winner gets to choose whether to push forward on the attack or delay while they heal, while the loser has to wait for the unit to be rebuilt and redeployed to the front and deal with the larger war weariness penalty that comes from losing rather than winning.

The opportunity cost to building up your military infrastructure is well represented in Civ 6 anyway with district selection: building an Encampment means one less slot for a different district, slotting in an appropriate Policy card means not using that slot for something else, etc.

 

[historix69]

There are many ways a unit can (temporarely) loose combat strength. Not all of them require a rebuilt.
- Hunger and Exhaustion -> Rest, Time and supplies
- Disorder -> Time to reorganize
- Lack of Supplies, Fuel, Ammo -> Time and Supplies
- Damaged Equipment -> Time (and stuff) to Repair Equipment -> Time and Supplies
- Destroyed or Lost Equipment -> Replacement of Equipment -> Replacement Equipment
- Personel killed, wounded, lost -> Replacement of lost Personel -> Replacement Unit (Strength Points, e.g. 10%, 20%, ...).

To replace Equipment and Personel, there are usually reserves following the main unit, e.g. at start of WW1 some German Armies had +50% reserve strength due to additional Reserve Corps (4 regular Corps + 2 Reserve Corps).

In Civ games all damage to a unit is regarded as temporary unless the unit reaches 0% combat strength and is destroyed.
It would be easier and more realistic if units actually were small stacks of maybe 10 (or more) units of the same type and players could move those separate Strength Points between unit stacks to replace real losses while exhausted and damaged ones would simply take a rest.

Military Infrastructure is necessary to have a working military, but a military also requires a lot of money (upkeep) to pay for everything and it requires an adequate industrie to produce all the supplies and the military equipment. Industry should be able to switch between peace time and war time mode since consumption of ammo, supplies, replacement equipment is much higer during actual war. Industry capacities need to be in line with number and tech-level of troops.

During WW2 Germany produced around 45.000 - 50.000 tanks, but they never had more than a few thousand tanks at the same time in the field, e.g. start of Barbarossa 1941 with around 4.000 tanks against more than 20.000 soviet tanks. Most of the tank production went into replacement of tanks that were damaged beyond repair, destroyed or abandoned. (The crew often survived, so they could continue with new equipment.)
In Civ 6 a player hardly looses any units and would only produce units to increase the total number of units. Repair is free when you manage to pull out a damaged unit.

WW2 Ammo Production :
"The major powers devoted 50–61 percent of their total GDP to munitions production. The Allies produced about three times as much in munitions as the Axis powers." (Wikipedia)
In Civ games Ammo is actually free or neglectible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_armored_fighting_vehicle_production_during_World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment_losses_in_World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_front_during_World_War_II


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

In war time production of ammo and military equipment replaces the normal consumer goods, so war is an alternative mass market for industrial manufactured goods.

 

[acluewithout]

There are some good ideas here, but some I think would create a lot of micro.

For military, I think a straightforward and flexible solution would be something like EU4’s force limit.

- eg melee, cav, and naval are subject to a ‘force limit’. Heavy Cav would use up more of this limit. If you have more than this force limit, units heal more slowly, war weariness is worse and or maintenance is super expensive.

- force limit is based on overall empire production. It can be increased by having encampments, encampment buildings, and maybe factories; also by government types and government buildings; and maybe also by policy cards.

- healing rates for units that require strategic resources would also be affected by your access to the relevant strategic resources, and maybe boosted by having certain buildings in your empire (eg armory).

- anti-cav and ranged would not be affected by force limit.

- the AI would be allowed to exceed the limit based on game difficulty.