Evasth,
Oh I forgot that I haven't replied this thread. Thanks for reminding me, Jojo_Fr, and also thank you for your efforts to write down such detailed feedback for the game.
Now, my opinion on your feedback:
1. Why unit supply instead of gold maintenance like in vanilla BTS/FfH?
Because gold is easy to get and that will lead to Stack of Dooms, which is boring since you just need to produce military units and do not need to pay attention to strategic choices of building which unit and of movement (where you should move the units?). Also, SODs will make late game become more unstable than it is now with hundreds of units moving all over the map.
- Easy to have, it's not sure. If you increase the upkeep to 2 or 3 gold per unit (after the maximal limit of free units supported), sustaining an extra force of units will not be easy.
- The problem with the maximum number it's the impression I have it's hard to increase it by buildings or regims, and due to that it's hard to plan a defense of two fronts point. How can you defend a front point if you divide your stack of 15 units into two stacks of 7 units ? If you are with the natural system, you can prepare yourself to this kind of war by buiding units in everycity, and trying to reach the same military power than the two civ which are coming to you.
- But if you cannot overproduce your ennemies, it can be frustrating to have a strong nation but cannot build the required units.
- But ok,
I abandon this conservative idea I have. I would need to explore the buildings and regims to sustain more units on the field, in this case of dangerous situation.
2. Why not limiting unit stack?
Sephi had tried to do that but AFAIK, the AI was worse with the system than with current system of unit support. Stack limit also introduces unnecessary hassle when moving units, just like how it is in Civ V.
3. Spells as the counter of SODs
Yes, true, direct damage spells will counter SODs and the spells will do even better work if they can target all units in a stack.
But don't you think this will make direct damage spells even harder to balance? Give them [target all units in stack] and high damage, and your spell casters can obliterated many units at once. Give them [spell only target a small number of units] and spell casters might be not useful enough to stop the SODs. This is precisely why Chalid is considered OP in vanilla FfH, because his Pillar of Fire can kill many units in a SOD.
- It's good that the spells only touch few units. I don't like the mass spells.
- In my mind, I don't really make a difference into an infinite stack of doom and a limited number stack of doom (of 15 units or more). Fundametaly, we use them as a stack of doom, not something different. And it's stack of doom at offensive vs stack of doom at defensive. But techniquely you have right, if stack of doom create OSS or slow down the game, it's very bard.
- To me, the best advantage of the MoM unit cap system, it's
the players (human players) have not to make a hard choice between military production and civ developpement. I like this in multiplayer, because in multiplayer there is often a point in the game, where a player only make units, then the second player only make units too, until the final confrontation where one stack will be wipe out, and the others will triomph and conquest the civ. These two phases : civ developpement, then full military preparation, has ceased to exist. Now you need to grow your military power and your general power at the time, it's more fluid, more strategical, and that is good in multiplayer !
So, what is the solution?
I propose that magical summons cost no supply value. Thus, the unit support value is exclusively for units built in cities.
This will provide a flexible option to increase your military might but at the same time still manageable since summons are already controlled by mana (they need mana cost and mana upkeep, and mana is not as easy to get as gold). You also can't mass produced summon; only one summon is produced at a single time in one civ, unless you have very high mana income.
We need to test this first but it is easy to do. I just need to change several lines in one xml file to make summons do not require unit support.
I am agree with this idea. As you said, invocations have already a mana limit. You can have potential some invocations, but in this case you don't have the spells. At the contrary, as gold can be mass produced (by reducing the science slider) it's still possible to have some units extra upkeep. With mana it's not possible because it's a non directely controlable ressource.
Evast,
4. Improvement
I think we are in agreement that:
- Encouraging players to think where they should put improvement and what type of improvement is good. It adds depth to the game.
- Improvement spam is not good to the game since it makes the game landscape less "fantastic" and wild. And, it might encourage city spam, which is boring.
- There are ways to limit improvements, you have mentioned some.
- Encouraging players to think where they should put improvement does not need any special system like that. A good player put the right improvements, at the right time, then he won worker timer, he does not need as much worker as a more mediocre player.
His developpement is faster, and that is a suffisant reward to encourage the performance. It's the bit as the difference between the free market and the controled market : in free market you are punished by the market (the game) if you do bad choices. In Civ, that is the same thing.
- What if a player wants to build farms first, to optimise his growth, then want to replace the farms by cottages ? It's not possible because it's too expansive -> no flexibility. Without cost system, the player still would have a cost : the cost for his workers to come and to change the farm to cottages. Each worker is crucial, it's not nothing as cost.
Now, I don't know whether you were there during these phases, but we did have the time where improvement mechanic changed with each game version, sometime changed radically to the point of a later version was a totally different game than the previous one. This version was considered the best since:
- It limits the number of improvements.
- It connects improvement system with global yields in two-ways (you need improvements to produce yields and need yields to build improvements).
- It offers strategic choices on how to use yields: for equipment, for improvement or for building?
- Yes I understand. But I am still not agreing with the advantages you see into a cost for each improvement. First, I am not convinced that a fully improved city is a problem for the fantasy ambiance. I think the infinit city sprawnl is a really more important problem for the ambiance. To counter the infinit city sprawnl, the solution to me would be to create more crap unfertile land bands, in random shape, to the world.
If we put more deserts, more moors, more unfertile land like that (it needs to be concentred in several small land, not clustered into fertiles lands), the players including the A.I, will naturally only colonise the fertile lands, and let the others to the barbarians and monsters (unless there are important ressources to grab).
- I think that there is already enough choice between equipement and buildings. Buildings in particular, drain a very big amount of ressources, and the decison making is high enough into the building choice and units equipement, no ?
- If you really prefer for the ambiance (I don't understand why but ok) a system with improvement limit per city, I would prefer to revert to the point where the improvement had a number limit per city, but not a cost. I don't know for the others (where are their opinion ?) but to me
it was more fun to not have to calculate each turn the ressources I would need to build the following improvement. Moreover, it tends to create some turns where your workers have nothing to do except building roads. Which is not fun.
Ah, and I don't like too the hasard when it's too much : now we can won
some gold (300) when we just build one improvement (farm for example). I don't like because it impacts much the developpement. To my taste FFH2 MoM has largely enough hasard factors, we don't need big hasard events like this. Too much hasard tend to transform multiplayer games as a hasard game, and I prefer it's stay very founded on mastery of the game, personnaly.
I agree that increasing the cost for each improvement built is illogical and we might remove that buf then we need to adopt one or more of these to avoid improvement spam:
- The cost of improvements is higher than now, making building improvements more expensive and early game is slower than it is.
- Makes barbarians more aggressive (CarnivalBizarre has been working on this for some time but has not achieved the expected result yet. Coding AI is tricky.)
- Limits improvement only on tiles with bonus. This means, less farms, pastures, plantations, mines, camps. But at middle game, we'll see more cottages, trade posts, workshops, windmills, etc in tiles without bonus. This requires total rework on improvements, yields and bonus to acquire balance but at least I can mod it through xml (easier than modding the AI).
Options 2 and 3 require much work, so I need more voices from the community before we can commit for such changes.
1) No please, don't slow the early game. ^^ it's already too slow. Keep in mind in multiplayer the time is limited, players tend to play classical era start because the early anciant game is too slow.
2) I think the barbarians are enough aggressives. Coming from their lairs they can do heavy damages, especially in high savage lair (giants, haunts etc.). The true threat must be the others civs.
3) I don't agree with this idea. It would create too liner and railroaded city developpement because everybody would only build the food improvement fist, then the other thing etc.
Again, if you want to limit the infinit city sprawnl it's enough to work on creating more unfertile land : with more "bands" of unfertile lands / small deserts, you will cancel any infinit city sprawnl. The fertility will severly limit the size of potential founded city in these regions.
In a logical term, I don't see why a fantasy kingodom would not build improvements to his cities, and build news city in good lands. But I fully understand he does not build city in a land of moors, mountains, mangrovian forest etc. Barbarians would not be enough to limit the size of a kingdom to a certain regions, because you can always kill the barbarians and reclaim their fertile land. But you cannot do this in any region with too much bad squares.
To me, it would be good to cancel any improvement cost or number limit. The limits need to be into the natural mechanisms : a slower developpement if you use badly your workers or plant badly your cities, mean you will be punished by another player because soon or later he will use his tech\faith etc. advantage or more city advantage versus you !
But, if you still want to keep the cost of improvement, please suppress the cost increase. Workin and others factors (the fertilty of the lands) would be better.
Psychodad,
4.Improvements
Nice summary. I suggest combining two systems.
1. Improvements have konstant ressource cost.
2. Number of improvements per city has a soft cap. Building more improvements cost double ressources. The cap can be raised by
- city culture level
- size of a city
- bought with empire culture
- technology
- traits
- politics
- guilds
- palace, wonders, districts, buildings
It would be a better system to have a soft cap for sure. But why do you want a cap ? As I said you always have the workers to manage, it puts some times to builds improvements, and replace them if needed. Do you really feel more the fantasy ambiance when a city has less improvements than fully improved, or do you think 90 % of the problem come from seeing close city, in a ICS way ? If it's the proximity of the city, the work should be done on the squares of the map.
Psychodad,
Corruption system
I don't like the additional upkeep for size 10+ citys. It makes me often turn of groth in citys becouse more workes don't copensate the high upkeep. Maybe some kind of corruption system would do better.
For exaple every city has a percentual corruption score witch hampers everything (culture, research, gold, produktion, spellresearch, food,...).
Base corruption is maybe ((#cities + city size)*2)% and can be altered by technology, traits, politics, guilds, palace, wonders, districts, buildings, events
- I did not known this special corruption system. I agree that it should be removed. It's never good to have a diminish return system, unless you got serious reason to do it.
- Base maintenance with empire size (number of cities) + distance to palace + building maintenance + regim upkeep + cost of improvement and cost of units equipement are not enough ? Why ?
). However, AOW III has separate combat screen where units battle each other until they died. In the latest alpha, combat was done at the same level with city/empire management, in strategic map, making the combat takes too long for my taste.
