[BNW] Is it possible: advanced tile improvements (minor cities)?

[Pawelec123456]

The idea is to add a special civilian unit, the Governor (cannot be bought, like VP Settler and Archeologist), who can construct a Hamlet tile improvement. Hamlets are satellites of cities, which work somewhat like Civ6 districts (but in a much less thematic and much more universal fashion), allowing to exploit the further areas of owned territory.

Hamlets would be very advanced tile improvements, resembling small cities, which:
- are tied to a specific city, but have their own names which can be changed (all the yields provided by that hamlet are added to that city's income),
- have to be built in the player's territory (or on coast in certain proximity of a City with a Harbour built),
- have to be at least 3 tiles away from another Hamlet or city,
- provide 1 tile Cultural Bomb effect when built,
- allow purchasing tiles up to 2 tiles away from them but don't let the borders grow beyond that (so one cannot conquer the world with Hamlets),
- can be converted but it has no effect on them except allowing to build certain buildings (when specific beliefs are chosen) and emitting Religious Pressure,
- have independent Citizen counter which drains Food from the connected city (start with 1 Citizen who works the Hamlet tile and cannot be ordered to work a different tile), the rate at which it happens can be adjusted, but in general Hamlets' population grow slowly,
- can have special set of buildings constructed in them (drains Production from the connected city), which can be location-specific (e.g. available only in coastal Hamlets) and affect the tile yields of tiles in Hamlet radius,
- can train certain units (e.g. Hamlet with a Shipyard built can construct warships) draining Production from the connected city,
- grow in size to Villages and Towns after certain Citizen count is reached and certain buildings are built, what provides additional yields from the improved tile,
- lose citizens when pillaged,
- Towns which reach 10 citizens and have all the buildings possible can be given city rights, what converts them to regular cities (disabled for City States).

One city can support a specific number of Hamlets, based on its citizen count.


This is huge and that's why I'm asking whether it is even possible and, if so, how would you approach that. Comments are welcome!

 

[Enginseer]

No you ask for too much. To even incorporate a simple element of this concept, I would have to change the UI and modify the DLL for AI processing.

 

[Pawelec123456]

Of course modding the DLL would be needed, that's a very advanced concept. The point is I'm ready to trim the idea but I have to choose what should be omitted. I guess the Hamlet's population and buildings would be the most troubling part, so let's assume I don't want that. Trimmed Hamlets:
- cannot be constructed closer than 3 tiles away from a city/another Hamlet,
- can only by constructed by Governors in the player's territory,
- provide Cultural Bomb of 1 tile radius,
- allow working, purchasing and expanding borders up to 2 tiles away from them (this would need them to be tied to cities as the game should know which city can assign citizens to Hamlet's tiles),
- grow over time, providing additional yields (+1 Gold on road, +1/+2 Gold, Production and Defence from Village/Town, +1 Culture and Science from Town), at Standard pace Hamlet/Village becomes Village/Town after being worked constantly for 15 turns, after being worked for 15 turns a Town can be converted to a regular city,
- pillaged Town/Village degrades to pillaged Village/Hamlet if repair works don't begin in 15 turns.

Seems simpler yet still powerful. Another option I see is coding a DLL module for handling tile improvements with production queues, but it's more demanding (and given how limited is the UI modding may not even be possible).

 

[orgrinrt]

Of course modding the DLL would be needed, that's a very advanced concept. The point is I'm ready to trim the idea but I have to choose what should be omitted. I guess the Hamlet's population and buildings would be the most troubling part, so let's assume I don't want that. Trimmed Hamlets:
- cannot be constructed closer than 3 tiles away from a city/another Hamlet,
- can only by constructed by Governors in the player's territory,
- provide Cultural Bomb of 1 tile radius,
- allow working, purchasing and expanding borders up to 2 tiles away from them (this would need them to be tied to cities as the game should know which city can assign citizens to Hamlet's tiles),
- grow over time, providing additional yields (+1 Gold on road, +1/+2 Gold, Production and Defence from Village/Town, +1 Culture and Science from Town), at Standard pace Hamlet/Village becomes Village/Town after being worked constantly for 15 turns, after being worked for 15 turns a Town can be converted to a regular city,
- pillaged Town/Village degrades to pillaged Village/Hamlet if repair works don't begin in 15 turns.

Seems simpler yet still powerful. Another option I see is coding a DLL module for handling tile improvements with production queues, but it's more demanding (and given how limited is the UI modding may not even be possible).

Not here to comment on what's possible and what's not, or anything to do with coding for that matter, but for me the concept feels very likely not completely thought-out. The problems with this lie in the design, really.

You suggest that the initial hamlet improvement can't be constructed closer than 3 tiles from a city, yet it has to be built inside a city's borders. This alone restricts the usability quite a lot, especially since the cultural bomb effect would really be - even in the most ideal situation - just half a bomb.

Anyway, that's a minor thing: It seems to me that the endgame for this improvement is to build it to be a city. Per your description, that's the actual endgame of this improvement. Now add that to the concept of restricting the establishment of this said hamlet inside an already owned territory, and it does seems like an extremely nerfed settler, basically. A settler, that can only settle inside already owned cultural borders, and on top of that takes a total of 30 turns of active worker building, while basically only yielding something around +1-3 gold, ~1 culture and ~1 science the whole time (and in fact needing further developing to even get there).

Now I'm not saying it's a bad idea - I personally would love to see something like buildings that could only be built on tiles as an actual visual element rather than just as bit of texts and numeric values in the cityview, but this concept clearly doesn't add up, at least to me. And really, something like that would essentially just be daydreaming. But as said, not a bad idea per sé, just needs more brainstorming. And even after extensive brainstorming, capabilities to make it actually happen, which would probably take quite a bunch of resources, time and frustration, which - not to be offensive - I somehow doubt you possess.

Either way, I did mention I like the idea, and I think we have that in common. No harm dreaming every once in a while, so why not pitch in to help flesh it out a bit.

Do you really want to see exactly these hamlets in the game, or just the capability to add more extensive improvement/new kind of building support? I believe I've already seen one or two mods adding hamlets to the game. That's not really interesting, now is it? But what is interesting, is the concept - admittedly loaning a little bit from VI - of having one-per-tile kind of city-relevance-free buildings. Maybe this is the way you really ment to go, but got stuck in the whirlwind that is the momentum of inspiration in a build-up. At least your title tells as much.

Now what would it take to make this happen? We already have improvements in the game, so the basics are there. Can we harness them to our complete control? I wouldn't know. But they are there. We know we can change tile yields, even with some rather complex rules, so that wouldn't really be the problem. The real problem would be provably working designs. How would these buildings/extended improvements fit in the game as it is? How could we implement them so that they'd be both interesting but also balanced? Well, civ VI definitely hit the jackpot there. Districts.

So: A district system to civ V? Is this where we're headed with this idea? That's just about the only thing I can think of to make it interesting, balanced and actually working, dynamic part of the game. And even so, the only reason why I now can think of it, is because of civ VI. Anyway, all of that is unimportant. What is important, is trying to find a reason why to implement the district system to civ V, now that civ VI is out and supports the dynamic in the base game concept level, as vanilla.

I guess there are reasons for and against it, but it really all depends on if someone is at all capable of doing something like that, and even if someone definitely is, can anyone be bothered to?

Dunno. This whole reply of mine is just complete nonsense. I lost myself halfway through and just kept typing. Sorry to anyone reading this far in. Didn't intend to waste your time. Oh well.

 

[Pawelec123456]

I'm surprised someone decided to write such a lot of text about my completely mad idea. Which is abandoned, by the way.

I did some math today because this was intended to be a part of a bigger mod. To add things up: you think of a hamlet-founding units as of nerfed Settlers, but you forgot that 30 turns of having less cities can be worth a tech or a social policy. Actually the main idea behind hamlets was to allow working resources which are 1-2 tiles too far away, but in your territory, so one can work them without increasing city count (and you should know Venice is my personal favourite). I considered abandoning upgrading them to cities as it could lead to abuse of the hamlets.

But that's all in the past tense because when I started adding up values and doing calculations in Excel I discovered why I am planning and searching for so many mods. I realised the game became extremely boring for me. Civ5 (and Civ6 too) is deeply broken. Forget hamlets and additions, it needs to be remodelled in order to be fun.

You can build only one building at a time, so what do you build? Of course the best building you can: a World Wonder. You can buy the rest of the buildings, don't worry (or funnel a lot of Production via Trade Routes to get both Wonders and buildings up in case of Vox Populi). But others race for the wonders too, so what do you do? Focus on increasing Production. Another thing is civs barely differ, and that's why Venice is my favourite one. City States are a pile of garbage. Forget hamlets, I need to consider whether I want to play this game any longer. And what's the worst part of it? That Civ6 does no better. Wonders are still in, civs still barely differ, City States are a bit better, but still nothing impressive. All you do is either leading a Wonder race, failing at it, or preventing another civ from gaining too much advantage in the Wonder race by releasing your militaristic fury. Wonders must simply go. If someone is interested in making a no-Wonder total conversion mod then I would consider forming/joining the team, but if the Wonders are in I am out.