Gedemon's Civilization, development thread

[Gedemon]

I'm constantly being forced to change production if I try to produce anything other than a scout.

Is there something I'm missing?

Yes materiel, see the 3-4 posts above yours and try the latest build from 50 minutes ago for a first and rough balance pass

 

[1SDANi]

Yes materiel, see the 3-4 posts above yours and try the latest build from 50 minutes ago for a first and rough balance pass

Yeah, I'm using that exact build and 20 turns in I have yet to build a carpenter, despite working on one every chance I get. I am working a 3 Food 2 Production 1 Gold tile and 2 Food 2 Production tile

 

[Gedemon]

Yeah, I'm using that exact build and 20 turns in I have yet to build a carpenter, despite working on one every chance I get. I am working a 3 Food 2 Production 1 Gold tile and 2 Food 2 Production tile

The UI doesn't reflect that yet, but if you don't have enough materiel, you have to lower your production to consume less materiel each turn.

 

[1SDANi]

The UI doesn't reflect that yet, but if you don't have enough materiel, you have to lower your production to consume less materiel each turn.

How do I do that?

 

[Gedemon]

Assign your citizen to tiles that doesn't yield production.

What speed are you playing at BTW ?

 

[1SDANi]

Assign your citizen to tiles that doesn't yield production.

What speed are you playing at BTW ?

Standard

BTW, its a good thing to have low production early game? Thats a bit unintuitive.

 

[Gedemon]

Standard

BTW, its a good thing to have low production early game? Thats a bit unintuitive.

Coding is sometime difficult, but balance will be the biggest challenge for the mod, by far. There is no point at this moment to fine tune a mechanism, as any of the others to come may break everything, like you've just seen with introducing resources requirement to construction.

If you see "production" as "workforce" it is intuitive to reduce it if you can't feed it with enough resources to product something. But that's not the point, what's important is to allow the AI or a casual player to progress in the game. So yes, one way or another this will change.

 

[1SDANi]

Yeah, so if you found a city on a plains hill, you have zero chance to build any building.

 

[Gedemon]

Yeah, so if you found a city on a plains hill, you have zero chance to build any building.

Remember that you are not a player here, you are both QA and part of a design team for a long term project, that's the point of the releases ATM. If you want to play something balanced, you'll have to come back in a few years.

 

[1SDANi]

Remember that you are not a player here, you are both QA and part of a design team for a long term project, that's the point of the releases ATM. If you want to play something balanced, you'll have to come back in a few years.

I know, I didn't know if it'd be useful or not to point that out, so I took a chance and did so.

 

[Gedemon]

I know, I didn't know if it'd be useful or not to point that out, so I took a chance and did so.

Thanks. Any feedback on Heinous Hat solution to the problem ?

 

[Gedemon]

There might also be a problem where, after the 1st turn of an aborted build (due to materials), the build doesn't progress but still takes the materials. In other words, the item is dequeued on the next turn, but doesn't show as partially built in the list. This doesn't happen all the time though... continuing to look at it.

Yes, seems that the game keep the progression as long as you can still build the unit (ie if you switch production before the mod remove the hidden prerequisite building) but not if the production is stopped because the prerequisite building is removed.

That's settle the discussion about how to fix the materiel shortage during production, your solution is the best, losing the production is not acceptable (coding a workaround like storing the current production in a table should also be possible, but time consuming) and having to switch production is not user-friendly anyway.

edit: after some test, I'm not sure about what triggers the lost of progression, but the lost of materiel is confirmed.

 

[1SDANi]

How do you get materials anyways?

I've also always been annoyed by how cities on plains are so bad, what with cities on hills giving +1 production on the tile, I've always wondered why cities on plains don't have +1 food

 

[heinous_hat]

I had some thought about it too, the problem is a bit like the one I had with population variation in the mod making the "turns before growth" information something unreliable.

The UI will say 10 turns to make this, while it may takes 30 or 50 if the supply of materiel is lowered.

Well, the civ6 UI is a mess in this regard anyway. If you open the build list to see turns to complete some item, and then change the yield focus or manually assign citizens, it doesn't update the list until you close and reopen. The city banner, however, does update immediately. So you have to look in 2 places and do a lot of pointless clicking just to run "what if" scenarios. I really hope they plan to improve that at some point.

That aside, I think it would be reasonable for the player to get comfortable with the displayed build time as being an optimal number... based upon adequate supply. If there was a flag displayed in the city banner ( ) that indicated sub-optimal production, I think that would be preferable to knocking the build offline, even at risk of wasting a few turns before noticing. I suppose if supply is completely exhausted and not replenishing at all, it might make sense to poke the player. Can you do a notifier drop?

I see now why you were concerned about hassling the player with too much micro from turn by turn supply consumption... it can be touchy and difficult to predict, in certain situations. Hopefully that stabilizes with the new materials buildings.

Looking at civ6 cityBannerManager... is it problematic to update the display with a modified number? Such as... add to prodTurnsLeft, a value which is the product of itself and a percentage (derived from material shortage). I'm naive here, I've not experimented with it at all . Even if it's possible, I could see where it might not be that useful if supply is in flux.

 

[Gedemon]

my plan would be to have the number of units of resources consumed per turn in the unit/building tooltip in the production panel and a warning if the reserve with actual known supply sources won't be enough.

I'll have to hook in the notification files at some point, that could be it.

We can also change the display (icon, number, color) of the city banner, yes.

@1SDAN: materiel is made by the city itself (12*citySize/turn) and by the carpenter (using wood), stonemason (using stone) and the blacksmith (using copper/iron)

those buildings and city size raise the maximum stock.

 

[heinous_hat]

How do you get materials anyways?

The city will start producing some by default, based upon population. Production will rise gradually with population level, along with the maximum stock level. So building housing will indirectly yield greater material supply capacity. Aside from that you can receive materials from other connected cities, and some buildings will convert tile based resources to these generic building 'materials'. You don't necessarily need to work or even improve those tiles to start pulling the resource for conversion, though I think the flow is improved by doing either.

Look in the City Details panel (Gedemon's new section) and mouse over anything in those tables related to 'materials' (hammer icon) to see sources. Your stock variation from the last turn will show in the top portion, but also look in 'supply' and 'demand' sections to see what's driving that. You may be unwittingly importing/exporting materials just by having a city connection, or, damaged units may also be drawing materials.

You are correct that isn't intuitive (in civ context, anyway) to need to lower production in order to actually build something. But think of real world production efficiency problems... too many workers assigned to a single job will actually lower productivity, or possibly grind it to a halt. That's what's being modeled here. It's just that at the moment materials are too scarce, so the worst case scenario is on display .

 

[Gedemon]

Yes we need more sources and more stock.

Settlers/Builders use maybe to much materiel, I'll lower that

Some terrains should yield stone at a lower rate, even is the resource is not present (same concept as iron resource representing a rich deposit, but iron being also extracted at a lower rate in all mines)

(I'll need to give feedback on the UI for that too, ATM it's not clear at all that wood is collected on forest and jungle tile that are worked by a city, same for plants and forest/jungle/marshes)

I may also try to add separate requirement values for buildings (and specific resources for some ?), to be able to lower the materiel requirements for the early building producing materiel...

 

[heinous_hat]

A couple of graphical bugs to report...

- On reloading a save, city buildings with specific graphics will go missing. So, palace, monument, granary etc. Usually it's just one at a time. Reloading again doesn't fix it, just shuffles the missing buildings. I tried cache clearing, but that doesn't work either. It's just the model, the building still shows up in the list, and it's effects are active. This appeared with the recent update that added materials requirements.

- Less troublesome... during the turn transition, cities will briefly shrink in size by 1 population, and then return to the previous state (or grow, if it's time). The city graphic changes as this happens. This has been occurring since one of the updates that changed population growth (last week?). It isn't a big deal, but thought I'd mention it in light of the other problem.

 

[Gedemon]

thanks, I'll have a look.

another small update (that break saves for sure) on github:

lower materiel required for settler
do not stop but reduce production in case of resources shortage
show personnel supply in resource tab of city panel

the production efficiency when resources are short is shown in the lua log (1 means full)

 

[heinous_hat]

show personnel supply in resource tab of city panel

Was going to ask for this

Is it possible to show a continuous delta value somewhere for resources? The stock delta disappears when you're at maximum stock, so you have to do the summation by eyeball.

Also, maximum stock values always seem to be slightly above actual stock... you can never reach it. Is this due to internal consumption, or some other reason?