Feedback and Suggestions

[Trade Winds]

Some more first impressions. And yes, your Viking turning is very noticeable.

I have posted a little commentary on the economy thread and I will post another commentary about a little couple of “buggishes” I have noticed.

But talking about general impressions, I keep on loving this mod. Fun has just increased. I have seen a score of new units that I have to investigate. Also, on this version, I have seen that the variety of units is overwhelmingly nice. On my current game, I had the impression that the units that immigrated to my lands never repeated. And as it gains complexity with the years, It doesn’t slow down.

I agree that the domestic trade must be studied with attention. I could learn that my wine is sold first to satisfy my city demand and the rest is sold to the plotgroup. But I need to investigate it further.

Civics also work very nicely. Some civics are better when you are expanding your market and your missions; and other civics fit better in latter stages. But I have the impression, though, that I have many options after little time. That would not be a problem for longer games such as WHM, or making M:C research JUST a bit slower.

Also gaining founding fathers is way easier. On previous versions I don’t know if I got the chance to get one or even two founding fathers. I don’t like investing on intangible commodities. But now, without much effort I think I have been able to attract most of the founding fathers.

I’ll play more games to bring more feedback.

 

[Kailric]

I agree that the domestic trade must be studied with attention. I could learn that my wine is sold first to satisfy my city demand and the rest is sold to the plotgroup. But I need to investigate it further.

One question is just how important should domestic trade be? We can think of it as a percent of the players revenues. Should it be 25%, or higher or lower? I personally would want this part to be small and concentrate more on diplomatic trades and Trade Routes.

Civics also work very nicely. Some civics are better when you are expanding your market and your missions; and other civics fit better in latter stages. But I have the impression, though, that I have many options after little time. That would not be a problem for longer games such as WHM, or making M:C research JUST a bit slower.

Yep, you gain your first Civic Options pretty quick. Making a good tech tree has been a challenge because of the times. It parts of Europe technology never digressed, in other parts it did, but to what extent did it? The GlobalAlt define TK_HUMAN_RESEARCH_COST_MOD_PERCENT can be adjusted to increase cost of research. It is currently set at 150% so basically an extra 50% is added to the cost. But there are plans to expand the tech tree so perhaps we can balance this more that way.

Also gaining founding fathers is way easier. On previous versions I don’t know if I got the chance to get one or even two founding fathers. I don’t like investing on intangible commodities. But now, without much effort I think I have been able to attract most of the founding fathers.

Yes, there was a bug in the previous version that allowed the AI to gain most of the FF's. I am not sure if FF's acquisition is based on the difficulty level and I am not sure how gaining FF's in M:C compares to vanilla, but there has been a few changes that can effect this. Like certain Civics gives you bonues to FF points. But, the AI takes advantages of this as well.

What difficulty are you playing at, and map size, and what map are you using?

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Domestic Vs Foreign Trade:

I agree with you on this Kail, I think foreign should trump domestic trade in terms of income (actually with the trade screens it already does) domestic trade is more of a necessity for keeping people happy/healthy and useful, as well as maintaining a basic level of life (maintaining wells and walls, paying guards, buying produce so no one starves etc.)but the big money is in 'international' trade, the romans bought and sold product from one end of the 'world' to the other, same as byzantium and the 'crown' took a piece of all the action.

Local demand should be more about sustenance and stability, people with full bellies and nice things generally have no real reason to get angry.

Tech Speed:
I don't really know how fast I am moving with my tech, I am not sure what peoples average speed is on this, I have three monasteries producing 12 each and tech seems to roll along at a good pace. I personally quite enjoyed the early choices in civics, I found myself really grappling with where my money should be going and where my civic focus should be, so I use the money to change two civics or buy a new boat, do I need to shift my civics, or is it already focussed in the area I need it to be.. these were all tricky questions to answer!

FFs:
Yeah I too felt a change in this with the new version, I felt like I was far more able to pick and choose my FFs (and have first refusal) than I had in previous versions, but also the other empires were getting a share of the action too, so it felt pretty balanced as far as I could tell.

 

[Trade Winds]

Well, I agree on this as well. Domestic market should be used to keep people happy and basic security; and international trade to buy faster advancements and amass strategic resources in case of scarcity. In the game, I like to be juggling to upkeep my people. This is real life as well.

About fluctuating prices, this is a fact I never cared about. I’ve read someone here in the forums who uses the same strategy as me. And two guys doing the same thing can be a common use. Before I want to sell anything, I take good care to stuff up a ship with the same commodity before setting sail to the markets. Once I have fed the buyers well up, I start producing another commodity so I don’t care if I have flooded the market.

My point here is that what if there could be a limit of sellable goods?

What difficulty are you playing at, and map size, and what map are you using?

I wanted so badly to start playing, that I ran the default sets when playing my first custom game. So stats were Pilgrim, against 10 teams at Normal speed. Map and map size I thing were tuned at random. But I usually like it big.

 

[Nightinggale]

First you wanted domestic marked to sell across cities using plotgroups. I wrote that (quite tricky) and now you want to sell in individual cities to generate happiness. We can't tell which city get the yield delivered when we use the plotgroups.

I''m not touching the code until there is a sound plan with a general agreement behind it.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

It doesn't have to be a city specific benefit, it could be something like per 10% demand satified = X Bonus of global fealty (or other bonus, science, culture, etc.) and the gold income is just enough to be in balance with our other future costs like unit/building maintenance etc.

 

[Nightinggale]

There is one potential problem with that approach. If you need to supply say 50% of the demand to gain the bonus, then you could have a unit you don't want to add because you will drop to 49.8% supplied. If there is a bonus like that, then it should presumably be a float where everything happens gradually. Going from 48.5% to 49.5% shouldn't mean less than going from 49.5% to 50.5%.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

that is why I said 10% as it is far more incremental than half, but the actual numbers are like 1 lines worth of code, so that can be any ptoential number. the point was that it doesn't have to work per city, but across a whole plotgroup.

 

[orlanth]

Historically a fairly decent part of the economy has been domestic consumption (still is today) with exports about 10-20% of GDP. But it would make sense for both domestic consumption, and trade with other civs, and special expeditions to distant Trade Routes to each have a good role to play. If TradeScreen price ranges and domestic demand-sensitivity are XML moddable, this could be easy to adjust for any good. Ie some goods such as Ale could be fairly commonly consumed by your citizens and Taverns, making it feasible to generate some cash flow from fulfilling demands of local populations. For other more sophisticated or luxury goods like Colored Cloth etc, you could make Demand for these more rare (only among higher-class citizen types) but have an added opportunity for extra profits from selling to certain profitable Trade Routes if you discover access to the right ones. If Trade Screens can have their own independent price lists this acts as an added "safety valve" or diversifying opportunity so you're not always overwhelmingly dependent on either domestic or foreign trade.

I agree it would be cool to get some form of added "side benefit" from accurately fulfilling domestic Demands consistently (or a slight penalty for badly neglecting them); though with the issues NG mentioned it could be hard to make this city-specific, also so many things are already piled onto a single Fealty meter that I'm somewhat hesitant to add even more and make it into a single huge "catch-all" or gemisch.

In /misc/civ4Fatherpointinfos.xml, tags for <iEuropeTradeGoldPointPercent> and <iNativeTradeGoldPointPercent> let you gain FatherPoints in a certain ratio depending on gold generated from Europe or Native trade sales. Maybe a similar tag <iDomesticTradeGoldPointPercent> could be added enabling you to gain a given FF point from total domestic sales.

That would be one thing that's probably more straightforward to add, though it wouldn't have locally-specific effect and wouldn't involve a penalty for badly neglecting your citizens needs and demands. Awhile back I had written up some potential ideas for letting the relative proportion of Demands within a plotgroup affect the local Prosperity counter of cities in that plotgroup; by building up Prosperity level successfully over long periods of time you could start to get bonuses to local Science/Fealty/Religion related to high Prosperity. But it could also have the side effect that very high Prosperity can have a chance to attract Bandits and Raiders who notice the wealth of local citizens . This acts as a natural counter-balance preventing runaway growth in easy income and keeping you always on your toes. If they successfully sack your city and disrupt local trade then Prosperity will go down; only if you fight them off can you continue to build it up, like the gradual building up of impressive domestic economy and trade infrastructure achieved by the Pax Romana or Byzantines.

edit: ooh look Kael is visiting our forum! I just saw his name under Active Users, and also sensed it magically through having developed a Mana Node on a nearby tile

 

[Trade Winds]

I''m not touching the code until there is a sound plan with a general agreement behind it.

Well, you are right, I have several ideas of what could be fun, and they may clash sometimes either with the code or with other features. You wizards can gather opinions but the last word is obviously yours.

In the case of plotgroups this is a fun addition that, for me, may enter in conflict with normal transport. Nitinggale’s idea is, if I remember, to keep large amounts of goods transport as usual; and little cities necessities through plotgroups interchange.
So we should decide when it’s fun to use one or the other, and when it is fun to change from one to the other, not to have system redundancies.

About the case of selling inside the city or selling inside the plotgroup, I propose that sales inside the city generate satisfaction and profit; sales inside the plotgroup generate satisfaction but at a cost of feeding system transport, that could be enabled or not; and could be taken care of with normal transport. But sales among native cities may generate profit if you have a mercantilist system or loss if you are buying peacekeeping. Don’t know, more ideas to be polished. And that way, this system could point towards Kailric’s idea of monopoly benefits from the trading league.

though with the issues NG mentioned it could be hard to make this city-specific, also so many things are already piled onto a single Fealty meter that I'm somewhat hesitant to add even more and make it into a single huge "catch-all" or gemisch.

City bonus/penalty on satisfying demand is hard to get; but what about citizen-specific demand satisfaction? The code is there, if they have no food, they are expelled from the city. So could it be possible to add other citizen demands to the mere food demand?

 

[mastrude]

Many professions can build their house automatically:

- Should a jester be able to build his theater?
- I think this still isn't working quite right, particularly for the Wily Trader. I think it sometimes tells me my trader can only build his house once, when he never has built one. We also know this message appears inappropriately, for example when a city's in anarchy.

 

[Kailric]

Many professions can build their house automatically:

- Should a jester be able to build his theater?
- I think this still isn't working quite right, particularly for the Wily Trader. I think it sometimes tells me my trader can only build his house once, when he never has built one. We also know this message appears inappropriately, for example when a city's in anarchy.

Hmm, maybe the Jester should.

Right, "can only build once" is just a help text to let you know that this is a one time deal. It will show up on all units who can quickly build a workplace. Maybe the color should not be red, but it is a warning message.

Ok, I just edited the dll so that now it will display the Building the unit can build with each help text.

 

[Kailric]

I am preparing to give the new develop branch a Play Through myself (just being doing AI runs), however I am wanting to make a few adjustments first. Some people may like a long drawn out game, but I for one like a shorter game, like around 8 hours to complete. I still feel the game requires too much town infrastructure Hammer production, which leaves you unable to focus on other parts of Hammer production such as Siege Engines and Ships.

Like I mentioned in other posts Vanilla was setup for several free buildings when a settlment is first founded, and when we take that away we make it take longer to build town infrastructure. To compensate we would need to increase the game length, which I'm not wanting to do, or ease the burden of having fewer buildings. My idea behind the Master/Expert units ability to "Build Workplace" was to help in this, but I still feel there could be more.

Whats worse is attempting to found a settlement later in the game, as there just is not enough time to make the settlement worth much. So, I am looking into having Techs give more free buildings.

When you found your first settlement you always get one extra free building, that usually depends on what the surrounding country side can support, lots of grapes you get a Winery, etc. So, I am thinking that certain Techs will allow you to get multiple Free Buildings this way. Such as Medieval Construction could have the effect, "1 extra free settlement building". Then when you found a settlement you get 2 free buildings and this would progress as you gain techs.

Like I mentioned in other places, to construct rudimentary buildings, workshops, storage houses, etc. was easy and inexpensive, so settlements starting with several buildings should not be a odd thing.

I also want to adjust a few other free buildings and techs. Such as:

Manorialism: Free Manor house
Code of Laws: Free Manor Court
Manorialism: Free Chapel (Boniface FF then gives Free Church instead of Chapel)
Glass Making: Free StoreHouse
Hunting: Free Butchery
Medieval Construction: Free Extra Building

 

[Nightinggale]

I still feel the game requires too much town infrastructure Hammer production, which leaves you unable to focus on other parts of Hammer production such as Siege Engines and Ships.

We could add a multiplier on hammers needed for buildings. That will make it a lot faster to scale all buildings at once and we can even have a game option to make the player decide on what kind of building game it will be.

Like I mentioned in other posts Vanilla was setup for several free buildings when a settlment is first founded, and when we take that away we make it take longer to build town infrastructure. To compensate we would need to increase the game length, which I'm not wanting to do, or ease the burden of having fewer buildings. My idea behind the Master/Expert units ability to "Build Workplace" was to help in this, but I still feel there could be more.

I completely disagree that the issue is too many buildings. Instead the issue is building speed and other balance issues like that.

When you found your first settlement you always get one extra free building, that usually depends on what the surrounding country side can support, lots of grapes you get a Winery, etc. So, I am thinking that certain Techs will allow you to get multiple Free Buildings this way. Such as Medieval Construction could have the effect, "1 extra free settlement building". Then when you found a settlement you get 2 free buildings and this would progress as you gain techs.

How about rather than giving free buildings, a newly founded city starts with X hammers. That way many techs/civics/events can provide small bonuses instead of the major leap it is to gain a whole new building. We may also have a building modifier modifier, like techs giving -2% hammers needed or something like that.

This building talk makes me think of Master of Orion. If you have a weapon, say a laser cannon, you add it to ships. The amount of building points needed decreases as you gain more weapon techs. The amount of space on the ship increases as you gain more construction techs. The steps are somewhat small for each tech, but because they accumulate effects they end up as an important factor. As it goes for the count of techs rather than specific techs, it will encourage to research techs you don't need anymore just because it's an early tech with low research cost meaning you will boost the researched tech count faster.

We have plenty of options and making a plan for what we actually want would be a good place to start.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Another alternative could be something like a percentage building cost discount.

Most of my major construction work is done by gold spending. (because I generally find the 'investment' of carpenters and lumber jacks to not really be worth the effort for most sites [which seems like a bit of a shame in some ways...])

So anyway, how about certain techs and/or civics, etc. unlocking a discount of like 5% less gold to rush production, so as you get more advanced major building projects become easier to complete, with things like guilds and new construction methods and tools speeding up work and reducing costs and wages.

I find once I have my trade empire established I can really start to make cities grow fairly fast and effectively (although the popes taxation can become an issue..)

 

[Nightinggale]

Most of my major construction work is done by gold spending. (because I generally find the 'investment' of carpenters and lumber jacks to not really be worth the effort for most sites [which seems like a bit of a shame in some ways...])

Sounds like a serious balance issue.

So anyway, how about certain techs and/or civics, etc. unlocking a discount of like 5% less gold to rush production, so as you get more advanced major building projects become easier to complete, with things like guilds and new construction methods and tools speeding up work and reducing costs and wages.

I think the cost is based on a price for each hammer meaning a 5% reduction in needed hammers would be a 5% reduction in gold needed to rush construction. Sure we could do both in XML and it would likely make sense to allow random events and civics to affect how much gold is needed to rush construction. If we add a float, we could do something like -0.05, but we could make the pope declare a holy period where we add 0.5 (50%) to rushed production cost.

If we start to look into that, we could have a production modifier as well like civic provides +10% YIELD_HAMMERS.

Perhaps we should start by looking into giving one or all players civics for X turns due to random events.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

With the gold over 'builders' situation, part of it is it is just more complicated to set up ( as you have to remember to build and send experts and get food etc. etc. when you have bought all the exports and got all the buildings and infrastructure sorted, it is usually just easier to pay for the buildings instead. (I don't know what the total cost from each system is, or the average time comparison of setup and build time, against acquisition of cash for rush jobs.)

 

[Kailric]

We could add a multiplier on hammers needed for buildings. That will make it a lot faster to scale all buildings at once and we can even have a game option to make the player decide on what kind of building game it will be.

I completely disagree that the issue is too many buildings. Instead the issue is building speed and other balance issues like that.

How about rather than giving free buildings, a newly founded city starts with X hammers. That way many techs/civics/events can provide small bonuses instead of the major leap it is to gain a whole new building. We may also have a building modifier modifier, like techs giving -2% hammers needed or something like that.

Testing things out, if you found a new settlement and drop in a couple Master Carpenters it takes about 2 or 3 turns to build each of the starting buildings. This is with no multipliers. If we add multipliers then we start to get 1 to 2 turns then with enough multipliers we will still always have at least 1 turn. This could end up just being a lot of micro management having to change Production every turn for any new Settlements founded later in the game. We could just que up the build order of course, but still you would have to focus on Lumber/Food/Hammers for several turns before your settlement is ready to start doing what you founded it for in the first place. So, I still feel that just giving the buildings for free will work out better.

This building talk makes me think of Master of Orion. If you have a weapon, say a laser cannon, you add it to ships. The amount of building points needed decreases as you gain more weapon techs. The amount of space on the ship increases as you gain more construction techs. The steps are somewhat small for each tech, but because they accumulate effects they end up as an important factor. As it goes for the count of techs rather than specific techs, it will encourage to research techs you don't need anymore just because it's an early tech with low research cost meaning you will boost the researched tech count faster.

This talk about Master of Orion makes me want to play it again. I loved that game and it was a joy to play. Is there anything modern that compares? Maybe we can use this concept in some part of the mod. We would probably need more "flavor" techs though as their aren't many of those.

We have plenty of options and making a plan for what we actually want would be a good place to start.

Right, and as you say we can make this a player option. I am quite excited about the new Victory Condition and I am going to make some tweaks as mentioned and play test for a while, and give some more feedback.

 

[Nightinggale]

Testing things out, if you found a new settlement and drop in a couple Master Carpenters it takes about 2 or 3 turns to build each of the starting buildings. This is with no multipliers. If we add multipliers then we start to get 1 to 2 turns then with enough multipliers we will still always have at least 1 turn.

Finishing buildings in 2-3 turns seems wrong. That would indicate the base costs are too low. I think the idea of having multipliers is good (it's for all mods) and that we should deal with game balance issues once we have the DLL core features to do so.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

to be honest 2-3 turns with a full roster of experts doesn't seem wrong to me, you are talking about an expert workforce completing a 'town' in around 10-20 years, that seems adequate for a medieval simulation.

My problem is I am just rubbish at remembering at what stage of a 'plan' I am at when playing, and forget what goal I was working toward... which is why I just end up spending the gold when I have it. Also because the Pope keeps stealing it if I don't!