Mod idea - Buildingless Mod

[Mylon]

While reading "A Big Vision for Civ 4" (specifically, the PDF), I thought about something... The document says "If one choice is always the best, then the choice doesn't really exist". Where does this apply? With forges. And factories. Two changes can be made: Either the forge/factories be altered until they aren't as attractive (massive health penalty, anyone?) or the choice removed altogether.

Which made me think about how buildings work. The beginning of most turns tends to revolve around the boring process of selecting which buildings cities will build, usually either in a pre-determined manner or in some cases context specific, which is still a pre-determined manner based a small number of contexts. So, how about removing buildings altogether? Instead, a city produces generic infrastructure according to several possible paths which increase the respective modifier.

Science, with every X amount also providing a scientist slot.
Gold, with every X amount also providing a merchant slot.
Culture, with every X amount also providing an artist slot and increase happiness.
Industry, with every X amount also providing an engineer slot.
Military, with every X amount resulting in an additional experience point for military units built. This one might decay...
Infrastructure, reducing the upkeep of this city, increasing health, increasing happiness. This one probably will decay.
Priest slots can be granted by a combination of culture and commerce, culture and industry, or all three.

Buildings, which are quantative and limited, are instead replaced by abstractions to represent them. Technologies, instead of revealing buildings, would increate the rate at which the different kinds of infrastructures are built.

This model does not need to replace wonders, either: Wonders can still be built, ect.

 

[Mylon]

Industry is improved based on base production rate: No exponential gains here.
Culture is improved based on production rate and city size. The number of religions present will also factor into this.
Science is improved based on production rate and commerce rate.
Gold is improved based on production rate and commerce rate.
Infrastructure is improved based on production rate and culture rate.
Military is improved based on a combination of everything. Culture represents quality of training, science represents refinements in equipment and technique, and gold rate represents quality of equipment. Infrastructure represents the effeciency of the process. Industry doesn't factor in here: Instead industry merely produces the units faster.

Other possibilities for build options include:
Food. Increasing the farming infrastructure (equipment, developing techniques, landscaping, or in later eras artificial growing environments) to increase food yield, allowing a city to better utilize specialist slots and increase base outputs.

Attached is a "proof of concept" mini-mod. The game starts off with 5 processess available. The first two are rather inaptly named, but you can infer their meaning from the icons. Each hammer produced under the concept adds to an invisible counter, one for each of the processes. Your city will now produce additional yield/commerce based on this invisible counter: If you invest 2 hamers into Culture, the city will forever produce +2 extra culture per turn. If you invest 2 hammers into production, the city will forever produce 2 more hammers per turn. These invisible counters are based on _base_ production rate, just in case you thought you could invest lots of time into production, and then into the other areas.

Keep in mind that this mod only a proof of concept: It's not meant to be meaningfully playable, just a little demo for those interested in the idea.

 

[Colonel Kraken]

I've always found it interesting that the player controls exactly what non-infrastructure businesses are built in a city. I believe it should be automatic that certain types of buildings should come into being given the size of the city, the trade taking place, and the type and involvement of government.

Obviously, in a Theocracy, the government will make sure that temples and other such religious structures are built. In a command economy, the state will decide to build most types of major structures (manufacturies, etc.).

I like the idea very much; I just don't know exactly how it would be implemented that (given certain types of civic choices) the citizens automatically build certain structures automatically based on infrastructure, economy, etc. I would think windmills, watermills, markets, forges, etc. would automatically be built by the citizens.

How this could be implemented, I don't know.

 

[The Great Apple]

I would think windmills, watermills, markets, forges, etc. would automatically be built by the citizens.

I agree with this 100%. When you think about it it does seem rather odd.

 

[mayonaise]

it just baffles me how people try to reconcile a game that squishes 6050 years into a few hours with reality

ITS A GAME NONE OF IT MAKES SENSE IF YOU "REALLY" THINK ABOUT IT

 

[dh_epic]

Hey Mylon, I'm glad you enjoyed the Big Vision and found it enlightening. We are not purists by any means, so let it inspire you, feel free to embellish, and chart your own path in the modding world. (You're doing a good job already.)

A few thoughts:

The choice isn't always "X or not X" -- forges or not forges. The more interesting choice is usually "X or Y or Z"... Metal Casting + Forges, or Feudalism + Longbows, or Theology + Theocracy, or Literature + Great Library, or Civil Service + Bureaucracy. Each of these can be powerful moves in their own way.

Still, the idea of abstraction is a good one. I had thought of something similar, but me and my colleagues agreed it would be too radical a departure for Civ 4 itself. But for a mod, why not? The only objection to abstracting this kind of thing is that most people like building names and it gives the game more character. (Oh, that and the fact that some buildings have a dual function, like grocers that offer health in addition to cash.)

Take science. Every so often, you get to 'level up' your city's science output. But rather than levels in abstract, you give them names. Level One: Library, Level Two: University, Level Three: Observatory, Level Four: Laboratory.

Why would you do this? Well, by streamlining the building system into seven basic types (Military, Science, Culture, Commerce, Production, perhaps Religion, and perhaps Civil Service like health and law) you make this part of the game less tedious. I suspect you might shave off 10% of the game time. That's at least a half an hour of time that could be spent on anything else -- a new combat mechanism, more detail to culture, or the ability to be diplomatic with individual 'barbarian' city states.

Mind you, not everyone sees the need to simplify / abstract portions of the game to make room for new concepts. Most people on these forums take the attitude: "more is better!" And why shouldn't they?

 

[TBox]

This is what sucked some of the fun out of MoO3 for me. All the cool buildings, like biofactories or automated laboratories, were technically still there, but they were buried under several layers of interface and I never got emotionally invested in them, the way I did in MoO2.

I mean, yes, if you are at the higher levels of play, and your only objective is to beat Deity level (or, at the *highest* level, get *beaten* by deity level), then a theater is just so much culture and happiness. But down here at Noble level, I'm not funding a culture increase, I'm building a theater, with a tiny little Aristophanes bedeweling beards with eyeballs.

There's something viscerally satisfying about having to *tell* your city to build a theater that just isn't there when you tell a city it needs culture and it tells *you* it's going to build a theater.

I agree, however, that the whole question about buildings right now is when to build it, not if, and wouldn't mind at all altering the buildings to be more iffy.

<threadjack>
My first idea was simply increase the bonuses of existing buildings, then add a penalty s.t. when all buildings were built, the result was the same as it is now. For example, a Market is +30% Commerce, but -5% science, and a Library is +30% Science, but -5% Commerce. So if both are built, you're status quo, but if only one is built, you can specialize.

An actual mod of this type would have to be more carefully balanced against existing bonuses -- like the Market also giving added health -- and do some rock-paper-scissorsing along multiple "lines" of buildings. And the penalties would probably have to be carefully thought out to make specializing actually tempting. But that's the idea.
</threadjack>

 

[maxpublic]

I agree with your approach whole-heartedly, Mylon. The abstraction of buildings into a 'ratings' system of sorts is not only logical and easier to deal with, but it's actually a step back to much older games that did things the same way, and did them well.

Civ's insistence on taking the ratings and turning them into specific buildings is annoying. Do I really give a rat's ass if it's called a theater or a coliseum or a museum? Why are we stuck with a single intepretation of culture generation until tech X is reached? Civ's approach is also much less flexible than a combined ratings sytem would be which, if properly implemented, would allow all kinds of scaled and mixed effects.

In my own mod I took some steps in this direction. For example, I no longer have named techs of any kind. There are seven categories: Science, Production, Agriculture, Military, Commerce, Government, and Culture. There is one level of each tech per era. That is, Science I shows up in the first era, Science II in the second, and so on. All the techs are interrelated so that although you can get a local advantage in time, you can't get a global one; eventually you *have* to go back and research what you skipped, else you're stuck. No ignoring culture or production to race ahead in science right to the 7th era. You can't do it.

I've tried to match the buildings with tech advances, and added upgrades to those buildings so I wouldn't have to come up with new structures (and new rationalizations) for why they're there. So Barracks is available at Military II; Barracks II at Military IV and Barracks III at Military VI. No attempt here to make up new stuff just because that's the Civ way of doing things. A barracks is a barracks is a barracks, and every barracks has the same effect on an increasing scale across tech developments.

How to abstract these buildings into even farther into ratings, however, is something I can't see you doing without direct access to the executable. You'd have to rewrite chunks of the code itself, something even the SDK won't be able to do.

Still, you could retain the buildings but use them as an expression of your ratings, perhaps along the lines I've been exploring. It's not as clean or simple but I think it's about as close as you'll get in Civ IV.

Max

 

[Mylon]

While there may be some interest in specifically building a theatre, what if you're at the end of the building list for the current era and the only thing you have left to build is military? You have one forge, but what's really stopping you from building or another one. Or it's fairly late in the game and you're out of culture options and you need a little oomph to flip a city. You have a theatre, several temples, a couple cathedrals, a library and university, and whatever else applies. You're out of options and the Build Culture isn't attractive since all of the other options kept producing culture after you stopped building them. Abstraction means your city can build a couple more 20 screen movie complexes, embellish the theatre and turn it from a small stage to a Performing Arts Center or go all out and make it a Broadway.

One idea I was thinking of with my original mod was to include a ton of different buildings with the idea of, just as an example, universities requiring 3x libraries each, and maybe observatories requiring 3x universities and laboraties requiring 3x observatories. And do this for all of the different buildings so cities become really specialized and the choices become more meaningful, like where to build a building, given limited availability. Of course, this would require a ton more buildings to keep cities as they are now from quickly running out of options, but this makes building as much of an array of interesting choices as technology.

 

[TBox]

I like this second idea better than the first or my own, although given maxpublic's opinion hard on the heels of my own post, I'd say there was room in the community for a buildingless mod.

As for "running out of things to build," and the Build Culture option being unattractive, before you go through the effort of recoding the whole game to be buildingless, you may want to make a test mod that lets you build "Free specialists" and see what it does to game balance. Make a unit that's like a Great Prophet, except buildable, and can only join a city as a specialist. Of course, specialists are flat-rate bonuses. I don't know how that compares to the percentage bonuses you're proposing. At a glance, better for young cities, worse for older ones.

 

[maxpublic]

you may want to make a test mod that lets you build "Free specialists" and see what it does to game balance.

That's actually something I'm trying with my next playtest to see how it affects balance, although through philosophy/religious buildings. Free specialists are an excellent way to add small boosts which you can increase over time and tech advancement in connection with buildings. Like so:

Market - Commerce I, 1st Era, +1 free merchant
Market II - Commerce III, 3rd Era, +1 additional free merchant
Market III - Commerce V, 5th Era, +2 additional free merchants

This isn't quite the way I've done it, but it's a close example. The merchants are a flat rate, but you can stack them over the 'upgrades'. So you have one free merchant in the 1st Era, two by the 3rd Era, and 4 by the 5th Era. If each merchant generates 4 gold then you have +4 gold, then +8 gold, then +16 gold.

And so on with the other specialists. The sytem is very tweakable (within the context of having buildings, rather than removing them altogether). But since it isn't possible to actually remove the buildings and rewrite the code, it's a way to simulate what's being discussed.

You can also use SpecialistYieldChanges to make these specialists more effective over time (improving technology, directly related to the building being constructed at tech level x).

Max

 

[MikeC]

it just baffles me how people try to reconcile a game that squishes 6050 years into a few hours with reality

ITS A GAME NONE OF IT MAKES SENSE IF YOU "REALLY" THINK ABOUT IT

Of course it's a game, and of course it has to make sense. Even if you're playing tag with a gaggle of small children, there are certain rules that must be there to make the game function. As for how real must a game be to be fun, that varies from individual to individual.

I've always found it interesting that the player controls exactly what non-infrastructure businesses are built in a city. I believe it should be automatic that certain types of buildings should come into being given the size of the city, the trade taking place, and the type and involvement of government.

Obviously, in a Theocracy, the government will make sure that temples and other such religious structures are built. In a command economy, the state will decide to build most types of major structures (manufacturies, etc.).

I like the idea very much; I just don't know exactly how it would be implemented that (given certain types of civic choices) the citizens automatically build certain structures automatically based on infrastructure, economy, etc. I would think windmills, watermills, markets, forges, etc. would automatically be built by the citizens.

How this could be implemented, I don't know.

One idea, I suppose, would be a massive revamp of Civics, Religions, Civ's, Leaders and Tech. Instead of a city having a certain base values modded by buildings, you'd mod by the interaction of all those revamps.

Take the Theocracy - the gov't doesn't have to autobuild structures; it simply enforces their use. The city has a base "religion" value, based on population; the Civic Theocracy boosts that base value. Add in a Spanish Civ led by Inquisitor Torquemada for yet another boost, etc. And the same for other areas - science, commerce, culture, all base values for a city calculated by the type of surrounding territory in the fat cross, with assummed (non-built) city buildings & improvements as Science makes them available.

So as you learn new techs, certain values are increased or decrease. As you change Civics, the bonuses change; the same with Religions. And of course, the starting Civ & Leader grant their own bonuses.

Of course, it'd leave a lot less personalization to the player - all you could really build would be units & wonders, while adjusting the city workers & specialists.


Hmm, actual mod thoughts... if the city could be made to self-improve over time, like Cottages... give each building type a looong improvement time, limited by access to certain techs, and civics decreasing build time for certain types.

Lets take Religion:
Temple (req Priesthood, religion, city size 2; build time reduced +10% for state religion; build time reduced +15% in Theocracy; build time reduced +10% for Spiritual leader)

Cathedral (req Music, religion, city size 6; build times reduced +10% for state religion; build time reduced +15% in Theocracy; build time reduced +10% for Spiritual leader)

So, you've got a size 1 city with Christianity & Islam present. When the population hits 2, temples start going up, to be completed in 100 turns (time chosen for simplicity); if Islam is a state religion, the Islamic Temple is finished in only 90 turns. If Islam is the state religion & the civ is a Theocracy, then that temple will be done in only 75 turns. For a spiritual leader, the numbers would be 10 lower.

That city chugs along on it's own, and then grows from 5 to 6 pop - and the building of Cathedrals start, in the same fashion, although with a longer base build time than for temples, say 250.

 

[Mylon]

Okay, the preliminary code is in place for the abstract building method. I don't imagine it would be difficult to modify this into a finished, playable product. The hardest part, I imagine, would be modifying the formulas to be usable. That is, maybe each 20 hammers = 1% boost in production, with certain technologies improving this. Or just a flat 10 hammers = 1% boost across the board, with the exception of production, which uses base hammer rate, as opposed to the new hammer rate.

As for all of the other ideas floating in this thread, I had a really wicked idea to really make my main mod the ultimate mod. On game startup, a player can choose between building types: Nested (Specialized, possibly generic), traditional (existing building types), Abstract (this mod here). They can also choose between technology trees: Traditional (normal), or abstract (broken into levels, like you mentioned above). Further, there is the ability to choose between new cultural model or old cultural model.

I can also imagine breaking down units similarly: Traditional units versus abstract units, generic infantry, archer, cavalry, and air units that instead of having different strengths/special abilties get free promotions to represent their equipment or special training.

I'll have a mod move this thread to the completed modpacks forum once I develop v0.10, which will include the removal of the existing buildings (except wonders), additional processes, and hopefully GUI displaying of these values.

 

[Mylon]

I like this second idea better than the first or my own, although given maxpublic's opinion hard on the heels of my own post, I'd say there was room in the community for a buildingless mod.

As for "running out of things to build," and the Build Culture option being unattractive, before you go through the effort of recoding the whole game to be buildingless, you may want to make a test mod that lets you build "Free specialists" and see what it does to game balance. Make a unit that's like a Great Prophet, except buildable, and can only join a city as a specialist. Of course, specialists are flat-rate bonuses. I don't know how that compares to the percentage bonuses you're proposing. At a glance, better for young cities, worse for older ones.

I've already done exactly this in my existing mod. Mylon Mod includes two new buildings: Hydroponics Farm and Automated Assembly Plant. Both add a +5% bonus to food and production respectively by, when the building is built, immediately removing it and adding a free specialist, which is checked for during the normal bonus food/bonus production calculations. Since these are +% bonuses and not flat bonuses, this doesn't favor ICS like flat bonuses would. However, as I'm using the process method this allows the different values to be calculted at very fine levels without breakpoints. That is, though it may be 10 hammers for a 1% increase, just 5 hammers will give a 0.5% increase, or just one hammer would give a 0.1% increase.

 

[DickieBear]

To Maxpublic: Have you released the mod with the tech-tree that you describe? It sounds really cool.

To Mylon: I don't know why I never realized it before, but the system you describe is exactly what I want. I hope something comes of this.

 

[Mylon]

From here I need some ideas on mixing these up. I would really like to introduce a set of sliders so a player can split their attention among all of the fields as they like and walk away, but I'm not sure if that's possible. The idea of choices that decay means a player must either be able to build these choices passively (dedicate, say, 10% towards infrastructure) or constantly switch between the decaying production means and other such ones, which would be annoying. Or, remove the "decaying aspect". Since a city can increase it's food production, for example, +health and +happiness may not need to be something maintained and and thus decay.

This just brings a bunch of questions of how to manage such a radically new building method and keep it interesting.

 

[maxpublic]

To Maxpublic: Have you released the mod with the tech-tree that you describe? It sounds really cool.

Not yet. It turned out to be an enormous amount of work. I'm close to being finished with the rewrites, then I have to run it and watch it crash and burn repeatedly until I find the (inevitable) syntax errors. After that I figure I should do at least a bit of playtesting before I release it.

Still waiting for someone to do a huge North American map as well, but that could be in vain. It might just come out as a mod instead of a North American scenario.

P.S. The tech file is finished, as is the associated text files. Nearly all the files are finished, in fact. But I'm not sure what value it would be out of context. It's just the techs, e.g., Science I, Culture III, etc., and their linkages. Nearly all of my techs express their bonuses through buildings and units, so the techs themselves are just carbon copies with the necessary prereqs, costs, etc. changed. It's not the techs that're interesting but what they allow a player to do.

Max

 

[Mylon]

There's a small problem with this mod... The AI won't know what to do at all, so even I developed this mod into a playable stage I'd either have to leave buildings in and balance it against them for the AIs benefit, or I'd have to rewrite the AI to understand the new building processes, which would require the SDK and possibly more programming expertise than I can manage.

 

[Colonel Kraken]

There are some really great ideas in this thread, but it's difficult to know what direction to go. Abstracting things too much takes some of the fun and emotion out of it. Ultimately, my ideal would be to combine a sort of Sim City (not that detailed!) with Civ, but instead of 'zoning' for commercial, residential, and industrial you institute certain policies and other governmental interference based on civics, etc.

The odd thing would be to allow players to build specific buildings with a civics choice of say, Command Economy --because, indeed, in history some governments did direct massive building projects: Egypt, Rome, U.S.S.R., etc. How do you reflect this in this kind of mod?

I would love to be able to have hamlets/villages/towns spring up automatically based on civics, trade, and the local economy. Is this possible?

Wow, great stuff. So complicated though.

 

[Colonel Kraken]

Another thing that kind of bothers me is I have to make a choice between working tiles and having specialists (more or less). In real life, the concept of cities was the result of specialization and the growth of a city that allowed for artisans, scribes, religious leaders, etc. Check this out.

I think cities should get a number of free specialists based on city population, the types of infrastructure buildings present, and the type of trade and resources available. Obviously, this is done to a certain extent now with wonders, but I want to take the concept further. Large cultured cities should be FULL of a myriad of specialists. Obviously, this would have to be balanced for gameplay so as not to become too powerful a force.

It's just a thought I've had for some time.

Honestly, I'm not sure how it could or would be implemented in the game.