Free buildings revisited

I find it funny that you refuse to have basic buildings that people may want in their city to protect them and then complain that because there are only good stuff it is too good.:lol:
 
It's really the point that neither approach is good imo. There should be no free buildings based purely on tech achievement. The whole concept bothers me because I like the challenge, delay, cost and risk involved in having to build up a new city and feel none of our buildings are unnecessary in the mod. I like them all and how you can use a neverending supply of buildings to address whatever problems you're currently facing.

I can't think of any buildings that can be autobuilt without taking something away from the enjoyability of the process of this growth.

If the building is positive than it takes away from the pleasure of earning it. If it's negative then it frustrates that getting it was forced on you.
 
So that would be a permanent modifier in that city that would exist for as long as the city exists so after a while you'd want to abandon all your cities and rebuild them?

Furthermore this is taking away the point for those who are FOR the whole autobuild on tech concept which is to reduce the amount of buildings one must queue while at the same time harming one of the major points for having NO autobuilds in the most direct way possible - causing cities to graduate faster!

It's not going to hold back the steamroll if we can't make new city planting's a costly and somewhat risk filled investment. If they come into play with a head start on anything it's going to support national growth and growth stability. This would not be so bad if it were limited so some selectable options and added some interesting decisions to gameplay.

Yeah it would probably make the steamroller worse. And I would hope people would not want to rebuild their cities. Yeah so nevermind on that idea. :crazyeye:
 
I am finding it interesting that my Free Buildings mod has been changed because people don't like what is in yours.:lol:

If I may, I rather think most people weren't aware of the Free Buildings before and more or less (re)discovered it when I made the list of current Free Buildings ;)

That said, I do like the Free Buildings concept. I tested this modmod in a new game, my feedback up until now is:
- Cities are reasonably productive from the start (~15 :hammers: IIRC)
- I have to give a bit of thought to decide what to build first
- The immediate impact of building new cities on maintenance is much less drastic, mainly due to the stone tools maker and the absence of upkeep buildings (sentry post, etc.). Basically, it reduces the delay until you cities are (nearly) financially self-sustained.

The latter I'm not totally satisfied with; I'll probably increase the maintenance costs or something.

In summary, my argument is to make no free buildings apply to the main mod at all, but I'll work on getting it setup as a Settler's unit ability with promos to support it. The free past a tech concept, imo, simply takes too much out of the player's control no matter how it's applied.

Either that and/or I can add a gameoption that allows players to turn the free buildings off and then y'all can figure out whatever you want to do with the mechanism's application.

I'm not totally convinced with the Settlers promo approach. I assume that it would mean adding buildings that give xp to settlers, which in turn will bring free buildings in new cities.

If your main issue with free buildings is that it allows a too fast expansion, it won't really solve it, because you only have an initial fixed investment cost in a city and, provided you always build your settlers in that city, you get the benefits for every new city. I just delay a bit the "steamroll expansion", but do not prevent it.

That's why I think a variable cost per settler would be more relevant, which could even be higher than the value of the free buildings you have in the city it builds (as it's faster to build in a developed city rather than in a new city). Here are different (mutually exclusive) ideas in this direction, by increasing order of complexity:
- Increase the cost :)hammers:, but possibly also :food:, population, :gold:...) of the tribe/settler
- Have a different, more costly, settler that would be the only one to get the free buildings
- Have a building you have to build in a new city to actually unlock the free buildings. Think of it like a "Basic functionalities" buildings, which has no other purpose than to give you those free buildings. You'd get the same "initial cost" delay as currently and, in time of emergency or if you don't like it, you can always skip it.
- Have a different unit, kind of a "furniture wagon", that, once deployed in a city, autobuilds the free buildings. You then have a choice to expand faster (send settlers without furniture wagons) or to do it slower, but safer (spend resources to bring furniture wagons with settlers). You might even want the furniture wagon to have drawbacks to make things more interesting: only 1 move (vs. 2 for settlers), maintenance cost (2 :gold:/turn, so you don't want to go too far with it), have a chance to spawn barbarian bandits near it... And there could be different types of furniture wagons to bring different initial setups (production-oriented buildings, growth-oriented buildings, defense-oriented buildings...).

I'd say the 3rd one has probably the best "fix/implementation time" ratio ;) If there are existing tags to make a building autobuild other buildings in a city, I could even do it myself.
 
Edit: wrong forum :p
JosEPh
 
@DH & TB

Well do you guys think that the YIMBY should be put in the MyMods(Unloaded) too and have it be a totally optional setting that one would need to turn on themselves to make work?

For now I suggest to put each set in their own new modules that can be turned on or off (probably best off by default but with clear documentation for players somewhere in the pedia and/or here connected to the player's guide first post). The MyMod name is pretty vague for them so giving them their own mod folder names makes it clear what they are for - modularism in its finest expression as an option setting.
 
With regard to free buildings. The concept RI uses is National Wonders. In the later stages of the game certain techs allow you to build a NW. When built the NW gives a specific free building i.e. 'Ministry of Agriculture' NW provides a Granary etc. to any existing city that does not have one. Also all new cities now get it as a free building.

The player and AI has to choose wether to build the expensive NW or other cheaper builds. It seems to work in RI.
 
With regard to free buildings. The concept RI uses is National Wonders. In the later stages of the game certain techs allow you to build a NW. When built the NW gives a specific free building i.e. 'Ministry of Agriculture' NW provides a Granary etc. to any existing city that does not have one. Also all new cities now get it as a free building.

The player and AI has to choose wether to build the expensive NW or other cheaper builds. It seems to work in RI.

This is a standard approach in many mods. We were working on it in RoM before AND came along. they were the infrastructure national wonders. The current Guilds in C2C almost do this but they go obsolete so are mostly useless.
 
Yeah that method works when you have a small amount of buildings but C2C has a HUGE amount of buildings and making a national wonder for each would be crazy.

True - a one NW per building may be crazy. But what stops you providing more than one free building when you build a NW?

Example A NW-Agriculture could auto-build 5 or 10 earlier buildings. Maybe those that are 2 or more era's behind.

Using that approach will need more than one Agriculture type wonder, as you progress through the era's. So that they add the correct free buildings.

But IMO - is better than getting lots of free buildings the moment you found a new city.
 
True - a one NW per building may be crazy. But what stops you providing more than one free building when you build a NW?

Example A NW-Agriculture could auto-build 5 or 10 earlier buildings. Maybe those that are 2 or more era's behind.

Using that approach will need more than one Agriculture type wonder, as you progress through the era's. So that they add the correct free buildings.

But IMO - is better than getting lots of free buildings the moment you found a new city.

The only thing stopping this is that the XML tags only support one free building at this time.
 
Is it possible to just delete the unwanted free buildings? For that matter, is it even possible to delete any building that has already been built?
 
If you mean delete from the city Ctrl-A in the city opens the demolish panel.

If you mean in the mod, sure. The free buildings are not even on unless you add them via the mlf control panel. Turning the 0 under My_Mods(Unloaded) to 1.
 
If you mean delete from the city Ctrl-A in the city opens the demolish panel.

If you mean in the mod, sure. The free buildings are not even on unless you add them via the mlf control panel. Turning the 0 under My_Mods(Unloaded) to 1.

The whole point of having a My_Mods and a My_Mods(Unloaded) folder was that you could activate a module by moving it into My_Mods and deactivate it by moving into My_Mods(Unloaded) as there is no MLF in there.
 
The whole point of having a My_Mods and a My_Mods(Unloaded) folder was that you could activate a module by moving it into My_Mods and deactivate it by moving into My_Mods(Unloaded) as there is no MLF in there.

Not meaning to be rude - but it would be usefull if you told players about this. Instead of keeping a secret. :p I am sure there are loads of options in this mod that no one but the modders know about.

A simple readme.txt or thread would be usefull. It should just point out all the options available and how you activated them. :)

When I previously saw those folders - I thought they were a modders development/testing folders.
 
The whole point of having a My_Mods and a My_Mods(Unloaded) folder was that you could activate a module by moving it into My_Mods and deactivate it by moving into My_Mods(Unloaded) as there is no MLF in there.

We should probably turn on the My_Mods folder then since it's now correctly empty.
 
Top Bottom