Food, food, and more food

[Cruiser76]

First, I love R & R. It is one of the most immersive games I've played. After quite a few games I've noticed that food is just too easy to produce. The early colonies all struggled with food production. I'd like to raise a few points.

Point 1: Base flat agricultural terrain (grass, plains, savannah) produces 3 food, but colonists eat 2 food. So an untrained colonist produces a surplus without even a farm being present. It's even worse on river tiles (4 food). I don't think this is realistic at all.

Point 2: Food resource bonuses are too powerful. For example, a single corn resource provides a bonus to (1) the terrain, (2) the farm and large farm built on it, and (3) the expert farmer assigned to it. This results in a large farm, river tile, on corn, producing 16 food from an expert farmer. Perhaps a food resource bonus should only increase the base terrain or farm output. This is also an issue for food bonuses on water (expert fisherman gets a "double" bonus).

Point 3: Plantations should not affect food. A plantation should be a choice of maximizing cash crops over food production. Perhaps farms shouldn't affect other resources either. The farm/plantation bonuses really minimize the differences between farms and plantations, except for bonus resources. In the end it doesn't matter much which you choose as they both produce lots of everything.

Point 4: Fishing is too powerful. This is also related to the fact that water tiles offer no alternative production. You simply plug in expert fishermen for tons of food. I wish there was a way to limit colonist fishing to coastal tiles and require fishing boats for ocean tiles.

These are just some thoughts. Thanks again for a wonderful mod!

 

[Nightinggale]

1)
When you start, you need buildings. This mean you have to have one lumberjack and one carpenter. Each consumes 2 food, meaning they will require 4 farmers if each farmer produce 3 food. Making farmers produce even less food than that will make the start much harder while at the same time the change will be more annoying than fun.

2)
I don't think it's severely overpowered. First of all, it's not like it's all the plots, which have bonuses. Also the time and effort it takes to bring one up in production mean by the time you get the really high outputs, you have a high number of plots being farmed and not really good one will not change the average significantly.

3)
So you are saying growing corn in a cotton plantation should be no more efficient than growing corn in the wilderness? I would assume making fields and remove trees, rocks etc would benefit.

4)
I don't see a problem with this one. Fishing used to be a major food resource until industrialized fishing started to catch fish significantly faster than they reproduce.

It should be noted that I play with 1 plot catchment area. Using 2 plot radius will provide 3 times as many plots to the same number of building slots. I haven't really given much thought into 2 plot radius balance. I assume the people who made that version took care of that.

 

[Cruiser76]

Thank you for your response! You make some excellent counter points.

Remember, the settlement tile will provide free food at the start, so I think a farm should be necessary to really start producing other surplus food. Under current rules, you get 6 free food for settling on grassland river!

The problem with farms and plantations is that they result in no significant differences between them. They both cause big production bonuses for all plot resources. It ends up not mattering much.

I do play with the 2 plot radius option. The food issue really builds over time. I didn't even mention windmills and watermills, plus butchers!

 

[Marla_Singer]

Food offers two purpose in the game. The first one is of course to feed colonists, the second one is to emulate natural population growth.

As such, feeding your own colonists should only be a struggle in the earlier times. As told by Nightinggale, an early colony needs many mandatory professionals which has to be fed. Furthermore, it's not only we build docks that ocean tiles really becomes productive. Later in the game, the intent is that the population of your colony grows more by natural fertility rather than by immigration. That's why you get massive food production later in the game: to "farm" citizens. I think this is all done on purpose, or at least I use it that way.

From my own perception, the things are rather balanced the way they are. The game may turn out very different though if you have a native village nearby training farmers/fishermen or not. I remember that when I got none of them, I was forced at a moment to spend a lot of money in buying fishermen and farmers from Europe before I had a decent schooling system.

Thinking about that, maybe native training is too fast. It's true a citizen is trained much faster in a native village than in a school. As a player I kind of find that convenient as sending colonists to distant villages may take time, but maybe this could be improved, I don't know.

Anyway producing the most food as I can is actually one of my main objective when I play the game as it's really one of the key to develop my colonies. The thing though is that it pressures for continuous expansion as you need to put your citizens at work somewhere.

 

[devolution]

Just some quick thoughts:

- I think that tile yields are generally too high
- The free yield from the city center is just excessive. It's even worse that you get two kind of yields, no other tiles gives you that. This further encourages spamming of cities IMHO.

As a consequence, in my own modmod I have nerfed all tile yields (-1 to every non-city tile and removed the additional food from the city center. This means that when founding on plain hills, there is no food production at all)

I would favor a rebalance that made tiles rather unproductive unless improved. I'd also nerf ocean fishing to require a specific building as well as reducing its yield.

How to balance the 2-plot radius is bit of an open question, I think there's just too much of a benefit to large cities as of now, the health malus is not enough. Maybe we should consider introducing negative health points caused by industrial buildings (like civ4) ? Another option is to introduce happiness as well, this would give certain buildings that I intensely dislike (tavern etc.) an actual purpose rather than giving out "more free stuff". The tavern-line of buildings would then consume alcohol and generate happy faces

 

[Cruiser76]

Marla, I agree concerning native villages. The expert farmer/fisherman village can make a substantial impact in the early game. I also wonder if the initial event of choosing a food/rebel/cross bonus should perhaps be limited to rebel/cross?

devolution, I think we are on the same page with respect to the unimproved tiles. I just find it odd that an expert farmer can produce 6, 7 (with river), or more (with bonus resource) food on an unimproved tile. If there is no farm/plantation, then how can the expert farmer increase production? Wouldn't he be more of an "expert gatherer"? I also don't like how expert fishermen can gather from ocean tiles. But I would also unlock coastal tiles from the beginning.

Nerfing unimproved tiles would also make use of the free tools more important in the early game. A lot of games I don't even need to use a colonist as a pioneer in the early game. This allows the exploit of selling the tools back to Europe.

If you read histories of the early colonies, it was a continual struggle against starvation, disease, the elements etc. I just think it is too easy to produce surplus food in the early game. I agree that food should not be an issue in the later parts of the game, except for outpost type settlements. Food should flow from improvements and infrastructure, not raw land.

I agree that the health malus should be examined. It could serve as a better check against growth. Happiness would also be an interesting (and relevant) issue.

Thank you all for participating in the thread and generating ideas.

 

[Nightinggale]

I also wonder if the initial event of choosing a food/rebel/cross bonus should perhaps be limited to rebel/cross?

Sometimes you have to place your first colony on a plot with limited food production. Starting with nothing but hills can be a challenge, but it will be even harder if the option to pick food production bonus goes away.

Generally speaking, it seems that people assume the colony plot is always a really good one. That is most certainly not the case. Particularly with 1 plot radius you often have to make due with what you can get, both early and while you expand. To go to an extreme, I have placed a colonies in the middle of deserts or mountains, meaning none of the plots provided any food whatsoever. The reason for this is that is sometimes what it takes to access silver/gold bonuses. More common is ending up placing colonies in swamps or hills because the good farmland is already taken. Later in the game when you can beat the natives hugging all the good land, you usually have enough farmers to not care too much about the production from the colony plots.

 

[ConjurerDragon]

Marla, I agree concerning native villages. The expert farmer/fisherman village can make a substantial impact in the early game. I also wonder if the initial event of choosing a food/rebel/cross bonus should perhaps be limited to rebel/cross?

devolution, I think we are on the same page with respect to the unimproved tiles. I just find it odd that an expert farmer can produce 6, 7 (with river), or more (with bonus resource) food on an unimproved tile. If there is no farm/plantation, then how can the expert farmer increase production? Wouldn't he be more of an "expert gatherer"?

When a farmer produces food he obviously is already tilling the field and farming. A "farm" as a building on top of placing a farmer unit on that city square means to me the same as a "plantation" built on cotton - an improved, larger, better equipped, more organized form of farming. More like moving from a one-family homestead farm (like the one in Little House on the Prairie in the first episode that they later abandon) with one field to a fully established large farm planting a variety of crops.

 

[Morlark]

I agree that there is a problem with food, but I'm not sure if fiddling with tile yields is necessarily the solution. The problem, as pointed out by Cruiser, is that large food surpluses (and therefore rapid population growth) can come extremely early in the game. Natural population growth far outstrips immigration right from the outset, making immigration useless except for the random change of maybe getting a specialist that you actually have a use for.

The way I solved this in my personal game is to increase the food required for population growth by eightfold. That's an absolutely huge increase, but it's the amount that I found, after many test games, to be balanced. This allows immigration to be the primary (or only) method of population growth in the early game, while in the mid-game, with well-established improvements and multiple farmers or fisherman per settlement, internal population growth becomes important.

Unfortunately, (at least the way I did it) this also causes the time required for education to also be increased, which is highly undesirable. It'd be nice if there were some solution that didn't have these side effects.

 

[Nightinggale]

Maybe it would be a good idea to make food need for growth act like crosses needed as in it has a base and then add for each unit created. It has an upper limit to prevent it from being insanely expensive in late game. This way it is reasonably easy to get started "growing colonists", but you will not be able to rely on one or two bonus plots to severely outnumber immigration in early game. It should be a matter of changing CvCity::growthThreshold().

 

[Randomsheep]

Since we are discussing balance here, can I bring up the issue of lumber?

Lumber was already too easy to get and the lumbermill bonus is a bit too much.

I don't really understand why the lumbermill was added at all. If it affected unimproved adjacent tiles it might make sense, but it seems wrong that so much lumber can be achieved from one tile with no depletion.

I really think you should revisit this and tone done lumber gains.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Since we are discussing balance here, can I bring up the issue of lumber?

Lumber was already too easy to get and the lumbermill bonus is a bit too much.

I don't really understand why the lumbermill was added at all. If it affected unimproved adjacent tiles it might make sense, but it seems wrong that so much lumber can be achieved from one tile with no depletion.

I really think you should revisit this and tone done lumber gains.

I wonder if that wasn't thought as a solution to solve the AI issue, which is that it basically chop all forests surrounding the city, without keeping a single tile to be exploited by a lumberjack.

As we all know, vanilla Civ4Col was a kind of rushed project with a poor result, and the AI is probably what was the most badly executed of all. Many great modders, from AOD, AOD2, TAC and eventually RAR did a great job to bring the game where it should have been from start. RAR is the final results of several thousands of modding hours. Unfortunately the AI is really the core issue which still remains. I'm really glad to see that Devolution has put his hands on it for 2.7 but it's really hard to make it work out of AI concepts which are (in my humble opinion) broken from start.

 

[Randomsheep]

That is very feasible Marla.

Personallly, I don't think this kind of 'fudge' is worthwhile.

I think it is a better idea to concentrate on the player from a building point of view and just accept the AI is limited and let it cheat.

 

[Nightinggale]

I wonder if that wasn't thought as a solution to solve the AI issue, which is that it basically chop all forests surrounding the city, without keeping a single tile to be exploited by a lumberjack.

Maybe, but it's a poor solution, which doesn't really solve the problem. Getting +X% hammers from each lumber is still 0 hammers when all forests have been cleared. The problem is that the AI has no strategy planning code, meaning it can't figure out that it requires lumber to produce buildings and it can't figure out it requires forests to produce lumber.

As we all know, vanilla Civ4Col was a kind of rushed project with a poor result, and the AI is probably what was the most badly executed of all.

Luckily the problem resides in the DLL file, meaning it is possible to fix it with a mod. However it's the hardest part to code and is often skipped by modders because it seems more interesting to code something the player can see right away. There are two functions, which might benefit from a complete rewrite and redesign and they are planning for which yields to produce in a colony and planning which improvements to build around a colony. The yield production is aimed at getting the yields, which sells for the highest price in Europe. If tobacco is low priced, it will not produce it and without tobacco, it will not even consider cigars. Also the price of lumber is rather low. As for improvement planning, each plot is viewed independently and the improvement is the one, which will provide the highest value of yields. This mean for each plot, removing the forest to grow cotton etc is the best option. There is no planning for maintaining a minimum lumber production in a colony. It also looks like it's not acting correctly regarding 2 plot catchment area.

I think it is a better idea to concentrate on the player from a building point of view and just accept the AI is limited and let it cheat.

Luckily it seems that nobody involved with modding shares that point of view. A proper AI will greatly improve gameplay and the cheats feels game breaking once the player discovers them.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Well, to be a bit more optimistic, all "AI" in RAR isn't total crap. First and foremost, and that's probably the most important, the AI is a challenge for the war of independence. Granted, that's just because you need to face an insane amount of units, but the player still has to build very productive land and sea military capabilities in order to face it. In that regard, the game is very challenging (this easily requires a good 50 hours of gaming).

Similarly, the natives do affect gameplay in interesting ways. You have all interests to get good relations with them first in order to train your citizens into experts, and if you get into a war too soon against them you may not be prepared and directly lose the game. As a matter of fact, even if you engage in a war later against the natives, it can be a real challenge as it has spent about 300 turns to do nothing else than producing braves at such a point that their sheer number makes of the war a challenge.

So the only AI which does have problem is the one of the direct rivals: the European colonists. Now, it's also the most complicated, as it's supposed to play the same game as the Human player. The natives and the King actually play a much simpler game, and that's why it's easier to make them fit with what is expected from them by the player. But if we want European colonists to play the same game as the Human player, then what game plays the Human player in the very first place?

Checking the list of all which is needed to be done in order to ultimately beat the REF will give you an idea about how hard it actually is to get an AI able to do that. I mean, hundreds of developpers needed years in order to develop an AI able to beat the Human in chess, and chess has a lot less rules than RAR: it's only about 6 different kind of units in a 64 squares chessboard. I just don't believe our little community has the ressources for that, and I'm actually very happy to still see it being alive!

So if we want the European colonists to offer a challenge for the Human player, maybe the first idea is to wonder which challenge we would like them to offer, and program it so that it can be offered? But after many years of playing the game, I ended up thinking it's not really that necessary in the meaning that the game does offer a rather big challenge as it is nevertheless.

 

[Cruiser76]

I tweaked food, plantation resources, and health and so far I like the results. The beginning is tougher and settlements grow much slower. It creates more of a challenge balancing professions, population, health, and resources. Farms and plantations are now significantly different. Major changes:

Food and resources:
Raw tiles produce 1 less food
Ocean tiles top out at 2 food without bonus
Coasts top out at 3 food without bonus
Bonus resources only apply once
Plantations top out at 1 extra food
Farms top out at 1 extra plantation resource
Farmers and fishermen x2 production, like other experts, and farmers +1 plantation resources
Plantation professions +1 food
Windmills and watermills moved to town hall and city hall
No bonus food from other buildings like butcher (need to actually butcher something)

Health:
Health threshold 6, pop increase threshold 2
Village well +2 health

The health change creates a real challenge. 5 free pop and then you need health infrastructure.

 

[devolution]

@Cruiser76 : Your changes look interesting and they correlate quite a bit with my view on game balance. However, lower tile yields means slower development and hence you'll require more time (as will the AI) to prepare for the WOI, so other stuff will likely have to be balanced as well. Also note that the AI ignores negative health (it still benefits from positive health!),so this will be a pure nerf aimed at the human player. I'm sure that this will nerf large 2-plot cities significantly, to put it mildly. I encourage you to play a game with these settings and then report back with your findings!

 

[Marla_Singer]

Yes indeed, as told by Devolution, your changes will make the game slower.

Just to give a sense of scale, with the current RAR rules (I'm playing since version 1.9), I always won the war of independence with over 1,000 citizens and over 30 colonies. That would be a capital with a population of 100 and 4 or 5 other cities being at 65, then the population gradually decreasing in other colonies.

It's true though that I never felt "in a rush" to reach the war of independence. I always take the time to develop my economy first, then focuses of producing guns, cannons and military ships only afterwards. Maybe other players achieved it quicker?

 

[Randomsheep]

What about lumber?

Lumbermill with a lumberjack produces far too much, and if there is a lumber resource it it a ridiculous gain of lumber all without any depletion.

Surely there is a fundamental balance problem if multiple cities can be supplied by ONE tile with no depletion.

The game should work so lumber is rarer, and there are settlements set up in forrest areas specifically for creating lumber and exporting it.

 

[Sarin]

One tile? Two river flatland tiles with sawmill are, with 100% rebel sentiment, just enough to supply fully staffed Great Wheelwright's Workshop.