Locking district costs

[DanQuayle]

Dynamically changing the production cost is probably not very easy to do. Changing the production modifier is very easy to do on the fly. Although, It wouldn't make players very happy to see a -90% production towards districts at the end of the game hence it's locked on placement. And the original mechanic behind chopping calculations and it's magical overflow would have made a growing negative modifier extremely easy to circumvent. Stop being so observant of costs!

Also, afaik they haven't changed it in GS, but the multiplier that affects both districts and chop value is based on the number of techs or civics you have, not the game era specifically. It's actually:
Multiplier = 1 + 9*(max(#ofTechs/max#oftechs, #ofCivics/max#ofCivics))
In other words, it starts at 1x and as you progress down the tech or civics tree, it scales up to 10x once you researched everything in one of the trees.

Also, districts and chops aren't the only thing that scales 10x - units and buildings do too. (A heavy chariot costs 65, a modern armor cost 680. Etc) They scale in a very similar way, units are just set based on their column in the tech tree, which roughly tracks "farthest progress in either tree" that districts go with. (Ever wondered why units and buildings have costs that don't seem to correlate at all to usefulness? This is why.)

The core issue of production vs cost scaling is actually entirely localized to the post industrial eras; Because the tech tree has a roughly similar amount of techs per era, the era costs end up looking like this:
Start: 1
End of... Ancient - 2
Classical - 3
Medieval -4
Renaissance - 5
industrial - 6
Modern - 7
Atomic - 8
Info - 9
(obviously slightly rescaled but the concept is the same.) See how the costs go up essentially one unit per era? Well productivity effectively caps in the industrial era once you have industrialization (since that gives you the last mine bonus + factories+coal plants) but every era, like clockwork, costs rise. From the end of the renaissance/start of industrial to the end of the game costs almost double, but your mines, factories, and cities only get more production from the combination of population growth + unworked mines.

I am currently trying to figuring out a way to mod district costs with a hybrid model mixing previous copies and tech progression.
Indeed, with a production modifier penalty it is too easy to simply chop a building/unit with 1 turn left and complete the district avoiding the production modifier penalty altogether.

 

[acluewithout]

Dynamically changing the production cost is probably not very easy to do. Changing the production modifier is very easy to do on the fly. Although, It wouldn't make players very happy to see a -90% production towards districts at the end of the game hence it's locked on placement. And the original mechanic behind chopping calculations and it's magical overflow would have made a growing negative modifier extremely easy to circumvent. Stop being so observant of costs!

Also, afaik they haven't changed it in GS, but the multiplier that affects both districts and chop value is based on the number of techs or civics you have, not the game era specifically. It's actually:
Multiplier = 1 + 9*(max(#ofTechs/max#oftechs, #ofCivics/max#ofCivics))
In other words, it starts at 1x and as you progress down the tech or civics tree, it scales up to 10x once you researched everything in one of the trees.

Also, districts and chops aren't the only thing that scales 10x - units and buildings do too. (A heavy chariot costs 65, a modern armor cost 680. Etc) They scale in a very similar way, units are just set based on their column in the tech tree, which roughly tracks "farthest progress in either tree" that districts go with. (Ever wondered why units and buildings have costs that don't seem to correlate at all to usefulness? This is why.)

The core issue of production vs cost scaling is actually entirely localized to the post industrial eras; Because the tech tree has a roughly similar amount of techs per era, the era costs end up looking like this:
Start: 1
End of... Ancient - 2
Classical - 3
Medieval -4
Renaissance - 5
industrial - 6
Modern - 7
Atomic - 8
Info - 9
(obviously slightly rescaled but the concept is the same.) See how the costs go up essentially one unit per era? Well productivity effectively caps in the industrial era once you have industrialization (since that gives you the last mine bonus + factories+coal plants) but every era, like clockwork, costs rise. From the end of the renaissance/start of industrial to the end of the game costs almost double, but your mines, factories, and cities only get more production from the combination of population growth + unworked mines.

Units actually get cheaper over time, in a sense. With a few wacky exceptions that they don't seem to want to talk about, unit strength goes up 10 points per era almost universally. Because combat is relative, +10str = +50% attack & defense. This virtually guarantees every unit upgrade is cost effective over the one before it - so in that sense advanced units are "cheap." There is no point in the game where it's more effective to fight with an outdated unit.** Unfortunately, the cost to upgrade units is so cheap that economically speaking, building new units is extremely punishing vs upgrading. But developed cities can easily churn out an army of a unit as fast as early/midgame cities were building single units.
*select UUs that don't replace anything like redcoats can, if you include their combat bonus, be more effective than infantry while being cheaper, but that's why those units don't upgrade to infantry directly.
**The only time this was true was on release of RF; the Georgian Khevsur was so bad (modeled on the pikeman's combat stats, so it had 40str, cost 200) compared to a swordsman (36str, cost 90) that it was actually worse than a sword. A group of Khevs was about 70% as good in combat as an equal production group of swords. That's why those Military tactics UUs all got buffed.

Buildings are abjectly awfully balanced. As I said, their costs are strictly tied to their location in the tech tree. A library costs 90 (used to be 80), provides 2 science. A workshop provides 2 production, but costs 195. (It used to be 175.)
They change da bunch of building costs in the february update. Even if production was worth the same as science, does it make sense that two buildings that both grant +2 cost wildly different amounts? This is a big reason why many consider IZs to be pretty bad; their buildings are ruthlessly priced and give relatively little yield that cannot be boosted by any card.
They tweaked a lot of building costs and almost universally raised them. Single Buildings are often more expensive than districts!


I sense that if one were to play the game relatively similarly at the end as they do at the start, the build times aren't all that bad; especially given that new cities in the late game can be boosted with trade routes, have great improvements, all sorts of stuff.
If you try to win as fast as possible and efficiently then yeah, return on investment will almost always kill late game stuff.

@Sostratus Say, hypothetically, one was very slowly trying to create a lite mod to address some of these balancing issues, then how would you price units and buildings?

To my mind, Melee and Naval units should sort of end up cheaper to produce over time - so you can have larger and larger armies and feel like your increased production actually achieves something - but there should also be new high end units that are very production intensive to produce. The game sort of does that already - eg GDR.

I think buildings should probably just be the same cost across tiers generally, although perhaps their maintenance cost should increased based in Government Level (so, you either have to hold off more buildings or taking higher government levels if you don't have enough gold).

 

[Mahi]

While the discussion of modifiying the whole production cost vs districts is very relevant (I do believe it needs tweaking somehow) my main problem with this setup is that the AI doesn't use it. I feel like it's plain cheating. However I guess the AI do chop districts?

Regarding chopping I always hear people saying "just chop till you drop", even when talking about late game. Depending on the map type, forests can be sparse at the end game since you already chopped alot in the early/mid game. Do people plant forest to chop late game or where do people get all these forest tiles from?

I mean when someone asks if people actually hard-produce a military unit instead of chopping that must mean he/she has loads of forest tiles at disposal, if his claim is that you never really have to produce a unit since you can just chop?

 

[Archon_Wing]

Do people plant forest to chop late game or where do people get all these forest tiles from?

Planted forests don't give anything when chopped. You can settle any remaining random spots that have forests, especially those in unwanted tundra, or capture cities that have forests/stone.

But yes, by the time late game rolls around, I just upgrade older units or buy them.

 

[Victoria]

I have even bought 3 biplanes before.

I have played non chopping games before but the bottom line is they just take a lot longer and I struggle with the long game concentration. Also it is the only real mechanic that keeps pace with these inflating costs.
I have chopped in loads of redcoats quite a few times but did not really need to, I just wanted the industrial era to fell like England again, that’s why I miss pax, I expect to see redcoats aplenty rather than 1 for era score but that UU argument is another old fish.

 

[Sostratus]

@Sostratus Say, hypothetically, one was very slowly trying to create a lite mod to address some of these balancing issues, then how would you price units and buildings?

I posted a response here so as not to clutter up this thread.

I mean when someone asks if people actually hard-produce a military unit instead of chopping that must mean he/she has loads of forest tiles at disposal, if his claim is that you never really have to produce a unit since you can just chop?

At higher difficulties, players are usually quite efficient at killing the AI's military, so their standing armies are smaller than they would be in the hands of an average player. (They build 'just enough' to take out their opponent.) Units also almost never die and thus don't need to be replaced. This means that their military production is already very front-loaded because they don't have to build replacements, so they are only chopping in a handful of units (and they actually do build some things like warriors early.) The old chop overflow mechanic in vanilla and RF pretty much ingrained the reliance on chopping because you could magically multiply production. But even without that, why would you pay 100% of the unit cost in production when you can just pay half the upgrade cost using the cards - the upgrade cost which, by the way, is already much cheaper than buying a unit outright.

It's very counter to the RTS mindset where you should boom/focus eco right up until you physically NEED an army on the ground, then produce one as fast as you can. Instead, upgrading units is so cheap, that it's better from a pure economic perspective to build the army you need in the past and invest the savings from upgrades into your economy. For example, it costs 2600 gold to buy a mechanized infantry unit. It costs just 1230 gold to upgrade a warrior to a mechanized infantry, or 615 gold with the card. FYI, the base upgrade cost is 2*(prod cost difference between units) +10 gold, while the cost to rush buy anything is four times its production cost in gold.

 

[DanQuayle]

Can anyone confirm this: districts now cost 54 to 540 hammers?
I am pretty sure it used to be 60 to 600 hammers.
I am not sure when exactly the change happened?

 

[criZp]

Can anyone confirm this: districts now cost 54 to 540 hammers?
I am pretty sure it used to be 60 to 600 hammers.
I am not sure when exactly the change happened?

I think the district base cost was reduced a bit in a patch soon after launch of the base game

 

[Victoria]

I think the district base cost was reduced a bit in a patch soon after launch of the base game

Nope, 60-600 about 1.5 years ago.
May have come on with the new era, I can check out in a days time if no-one else does.

 

[smvalentine]

Summer 2017 update (v167) patch notes mention:
• Reduced the cost of the Aqueduct by 30%, and Sewers by 50%
• Reduced cost of all other districts by 10%
• Increased the discount for districts you have less of from 25% to 40%
• Increased costs of district buildings by 10% (except Aerodrome buildings), and increased per settler cost bump by 50%

 

[incroc]

This mechanic actually helps me plan my districts better. I'm forced to think about what and where quite some time before I finish it.