Gold should be more important

[Exsequien]

Right now, the main use for gold is upgrading units. Yes, you can also trade with gold and speed up production but at least I did never tone down research just to do that.

So here's an idea for another use of gold: Mercenaries.

Yes, I know there's already the Guild of Nine. But that's the only kind of mercenary and it's a rather cheap way of getting them.

How about neutral mercenary camps you can randomly find in the world - you have to visit them directly with a unit to enter them. Each time you enter them, you get an event in which you can choose to buy the offered unit or not.

The camps could be used by every civilization, all the time.

There would be different types of camps and each one of them would sell different kinds of units, like:

Slavers - Sell slaves of various races.
Beast tamers - Sell tamed animals.
Bandit camps - Bandits offer to fight for you but they can be unreliable.
Necromancer camps - Sell their undead creations to you.

To balance things, the mercenaries have a much higher maintenance cost than your units and cost a rather large amount of gold. Slaves already work much slower than normal workers afaik. And finally, there could also be "bad" events. There could be no available mercenaries at the time you visit. Or you could get scammed, like you paid a lot of gold for a very strong unit but get a useless, withered unit instead.

And you'd have to tone down researching to buy those units, so I think that would be a fair trade-off.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

this could be cool. reminds me of AoW, which was great

 

[Exsequien]

AoW?

10chars

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

age of wonders

 

[2Hydroclopse]

Off topic to posts, on topic to thread title:
I always felt that you should have to pay gold to implement researched techs into your infrastructure, rather than you researching something and immediately gaining all the benefits. I suppose in some instances buildings count as implementation costs, but perhaps production of buildings could cost money. Then again, the AI is a horrible accountant, so something of this nature would totally screw them up more than they already are now. I think that gold could be more important if the AI could understand it's value in trade, but that's the only AI friendly addition to gold I can think of.

On topic for both:
As for the idea of mercenaries, I get the feeling the AI would commit financial seppuku if it tried making armies of mercenaries to kill any opponent. I suppose if it were to be an option for multiplayer games then it wouldn't be a bad idea, or teach the AI to use them wisely; also, Lanun -or any sea based civ with a financial leader- would run the risk of being insanely strong if such a concept were to be conceived.

 

[MaxAstro]

Off topic to posts, on topic to thread title:
I always felt that you should have to pay gold to implement researched techs into your infrastructure, rather than you researching something and immediately gaining all the benefits. I suppose in some instances buildings count as implementation costs, but perhaps production of buildings could cost money. Then again, the AI is a horrible accountant, so something of this nature would totally screw them up more than they already are now. I think that gold could be more important if the AI could understand it's value in trade, but that's the only AI friendly addition to gold I can think of.

I've always kind of liked the way GalCiv II handles the economy - research and production actively cost money. Basically each point of research per turn and each point of production per turn costs 1 credit. So raw income is actually hugely important, as it is a limiting factor for your overall infrastructure. Of course in GalCiv credits are generated separate from research, there's no "research to gold" slider, so that kind of system wouldn't work in FF.

 

[Exsequien]

Off topic to posts, on topic to thread title:
I always felt that you should have to pay gold to implement researched techs into your infrastructure, rather than you researching something and immediately gaining all the benefits. I suppose in some instances buildings count as implementation costs, but perhaps production of buildings could cost money. Then again, the AI is a horrible accountant, so something of this nature would totally screw them up more than they already are now. I think that gold could be more important if the AI could understand it's value in trade, but that's the only AI friendly addition to gold I can think of.

On topic for both:
As for the idea of mercenaries, I get the feeling the AI would commit financial seppuku if it tried making armies of mercenaries to kill any opponent. I suppose if it were to be an option for multiplayer games then it wouldn't be a bad idea, or teach the AI to use them wisely; also, Lanun -or any sea based civ with a financial leader- would run the risk of being insanely strong if such a concept were to be conceived.

Well, would the AI really actively visit the mercenary camps over and over? I know they raid lairs and visit villages, but this is a bit different. The camps would act like Foxford, when you enter the tile, you get an event. So the AI would pass the tile a few times maybe and get a few mercs (does the AI even get events?).

As for financial leader - isn't that what it's supposed to do? I always thought more gold should give you the edge in the amount of units you can afford. Right now, financial leaders just get a boost to research.

Also, the mercenaries could be balanced by strictly specializing them. Like jungle fighters who have attack and defense bonuses in jungles, but are horrible at attacking cities.

 

[Brokenbone]

The "hire at camps" thing reminds me of a Barbarian trait only special that exists at the moment, regarding hiring goblin mercenaries at Goblin Forts. Expanding that to a wider group sort of waters down that one little trick Barbarian trait leaders have. It's still a neat idea though, mod to your heart's content, I'm sure testers will download to try it out!

 

[Exsequien]

I never modded for Civ4 before. I did some mods for Oblivion and Fallout 3, but those had really easy-to-use modding tools. Meh, I'll check out the stickies.

 

[Kjara]

One option would be something like the expanded merc mod for ffh(not sure what state thats in, but the idea sounds cool). No reason why they couldn't be avail from some sites on the map as well as from guild of the nine shenanigans(I think he changed it so that everyone could build the guild in some fashion, perhaps the first one who got the wonder got a discount or something).

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=285468

Edit: ah apparently its part of orbis now, mod itself is dead.

 

[Merddyn]

I've always kind of liked the way GalCiv II handles the economy - research and production actively cost money. Basically each point of research per turn and each point of production per turn costs 1 credit. So raw income is actually hugely important, as it is a limiting factor for your overall infrastructure. Of course in GalCiv credits are generated separate from research, there's no "research to gold" slider, so that kind of system wouldn't work in FF.

Well, when you think about it, that's basically how it works in Civ as well. You have your citizens doing trading and the like, which you get a cut of the taxes from (commerce). This is your gold income per turn. You can either set the tax slider to have all of it as gold, or you can set it so some or all of your gold income is diverted to research, or to culture.

The only difference here is that it doesn't cost gold for production per turn (which, like food, is still annoyingly city based), and that you can't use your stockpile of gold for research. Personally, I'd prefer it if you could, but it also represents that you can't pay your people to do more research than they have the capacity for.

Keeping these values separate, of course, allows for building that only affect the income of one or another, like the money changer or library.

 

[MaxAstro]

Which reminds me, one thing I've always wanted is for there to be a civic (probably Scholarship, but maybe Magocracy could be brought back?) that allows you to set your research slider up to 120%, effectively spending money to get an extra boost to research. Not sure how codeable that would be.

 

[Webrider]

Gold is important just try running short. It really comes into play with the unit upgrades and craftsman items to upgrade units. It is very handy to build a warrior and upgrade to champion for 250 ish gold. If you cant fund research at 100% you effectivly spend gold to boost research as is.
I think Killimorph is to unbalancing in that it gives 2 gold per temple. It is by far the best fastest religion to get. It should be limited to Dwarves or something.

 

[Iceciro]

I dunno, the 2 gold a temple is quickly squashed by the commerce you can generate with Social Order/STW/massive FoL cities.

 

[westamastaflash]

2 gold per temple happens a lot sooner than those massive cities of yours....

 

[Dean_the_Young]

Well, the new Great Sage Building Module certainly gives more use for gold.

 

[Valkrionn]

Personally, I find the temples useful but not overpowered... Tend to play a builder strat though, likely to be different for aggressive players.

 

[westamastaflash]

I used to have a mod that expanded the mercenary possibilities. Maybe i'll look into it again.

 

[Tarquelne]

I used to have a mod that expanded the mercenary possibilities. Maybe i'll look into it again.

Yeah - it was mentioned in a discussion recently on mercs, too. I like Expanded Mercenaries.

 

[deadliver]

Yeah - it was mentioned in a discussion recently on mercs, too. I like Expanded Mercenaries.

Same here. Expanded mercs is a cool idea. I wish someone could add a system where you either get a kick back everytime a side hires mercs. Rhys let you pimp out your units too. Very nice.

Back to gold. The unit upgrades for FF is good enough I thing. I regularly burn through my cashish upgrading as many units as I can. True you may end up with buckets o ducats, that is why i like efforts to expand CoE so you have spy like units.

Maybe there should be a few tiers of Pelemoc style units: basic, CoE and Pelemoc