Negative Maintenance Buildings

[Quintillus]

I don't recall having read about or encountered this before, and a search of the forum didn't turn anything up (titles only; with full posts I got any thread that had negative and maintenance, no matter how far apart), so here's the news. It appears that one can have negative maintenance buildings in Civ3, with no ill effects, and if they have some other good effect (culture, happiness, etc.), the AI will build them. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear the AI will build a building whose sole purpose is to reduce maintenance - or if they will, it's very low priority.

You can download a BIQ with negative maintenance Temples from here (CFC hosting down, so using Google Sites). You can both see the AI building them (it's in Debug Mode), and build your own and witness the negative maintenance effects. The Domestic Advisor even handles it well enough, displaying, for instance, - -1 maintenance costs if you have a net maintenance of -1. Unfortunately, there's no graphic for negative maintenance costs as there are for positive ones in the city screen, so it would be essential to mention the negative maintenance in the Civilopedia were any scenario to use this.

The AI will build Wonders that spawn buildings that provide no benefit other than negative maintenance, at least as long as the Wonder provides some culture (i.e. they'll build The Temple of Artemis to spawn Temples that do nothing other than provide negative maintenance). So one AI could build a wonder that gave them a building that gave negative howevermuch maintenance in each city.

You can make your own negative maintenance buildings using my Cross-Platform Editor, available here. After opening the file, click the "Overall Safety Level:" button, and change the BLDG level to "Exploratory", "Minimal", or "None". That will unlock limits beyond what Firaxis has set. After making the necessary changes, you may safely modify the file using Firaxis's editor as well. Just don't bring up any negative-maintenance buildings in Firaxis's editor, as if you do it will insist that you set their maintenance somewhere in the 0-100 range and you'll have to reload the BIQ without saving or re-do the negative maintenance change.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Great discovery! It will be interesting to see what scenario-specific implementations people come up with.

 

[MeteorPunch]

Nice find. I can definitely imagine some uses for this.

Just don't bring up any negative-maintenance buildings in Firaxis's editor, as if you do it will insist that you set their maintenance somewhere in the 0-100 range and you'll have to reload the BIQ without saving or re-do the negative maintenance change.

I'm planning on importing my scenario to the hacked editor to add teleportation as a last step, so now I think I would need your editor (or Steph's) to include both teleportation and this new maintenance mechanic for both to be implemented?

 

[Quintillus]

Nice find. I can definitely imagine some uses for this.


I'm planning on importing my scenario to the hacked editor to add teleportation as a last step, so now I think I would need your editor (or Steph's) to include both teleportation and this new maintenance mechanic for both to be implemented?

I'd recommend still leaving teleportation as a last step. Firaxis's editor (and thus the hacked one) will still save files with negative maintenance just fine, you just can't bring those buildings up in the Improvements and Wonders tab. So you can create the BIQ in whatever editor you prefer, then add negative maintenance in my editor, and then add teleportation in the hacked editor, and it should work fine.

I did notice in Steph's editor thread that it appears neither of our editors support teleportation and was able to verify that mine doesn't work properly with teleportation. I don't know why yet, but plan to do a binary comparison between a BIQ with teleportation created with the hacked editor, and an identical one created with mine (which won't actually be identical because of the bug), to figure out what's wrong. Then I'll patch my editor to add correct teleportation support.

With Steph's editor (0.82), opening a negative maintenance building in the BLDG tab will cause a fatal crash (ArgumentOutOfRangeException). However, you will have an opportunity to save the file.

 

[tom2050]

I did notice in Steph's editor thread that it appears neither of our editors support teleportation and was able to verify that mine doesn't work properly with teleportation. I don't know why yet, but plan to do a binary comparison between a BIQ with teleportation created with the hacked editor, and an identical one created with mine (which won't actually be identical because of the bug), to figure out what's wrong. Then I'll patch my editor to add correct teleportation support.

Negative maintenance is very interesting!

BTW, Steph recently mentioned that he may have already fixed the teleportation issue, but just hasn't uploaded the new version. Perhaps he can say/help with what needs to be done.

 

[timerover51]

It is possible to set buildings to negative pollution in the Firaxis editor, and I have been doing that for a while. It would be nice to have revenue producing buildings in the game, the courthouse comes immediately to mind as a candidate for a negative maintenance building.

 

[Gojira54]

You can also have negative culture buildings, but these only subtract from the culture your other buildings produce - you can never actually shrink your cities cultural value, just slow down the growth with these...

 

[AnthonyBoscia]

Quintillus, have you tried messing with other values like decreasing production and combat values, or increasing corruption and war weariness? If possible, it might also help those who love the cost-benefit analysis improvements.

 

[Quintillus]

Negative maintenance is very interesting!

BTW, Steph recently mentioned that he may have already fixed the teleportation issue, but just hasn't uploaded the new version. Perhaps he can say/help with what needs to be done.

It is possible that it's the same basic issue. That would be helpful; I have not yet fixed it in my editor.

It is possible to set buildings to negative pollution in the Firaxis editor, and I have been doing that for a while. It would be nice to have revenue producing buildings in the game, the courthouse comes immediately to mind as a candidate for a negative maintenance building.

You can also have negative culture buildings, but these only subtract from the culture your other buildings produce - you can never actually shrink your cities cultural value, just slow down the growth with these...

Both good to know. It's unfortunate that you can't have negative culture, but at the city level it kind of makes sense.

Quintillus, have you tried messing with other values like decreasing production and combat values, or increasing corruption and war weariness? If possible, it might also help those who love the cost-benefit analysis improvements.

I haven't, beyond what I've already posted here (this, wonder traits for regular buildings, maps with > 362 tiles in one dimension, re-enabling scientific leaders for Conquests 1.22 [one of the patches made them not enable-able in the editor], and having more than 7 flavors). I've also determined that you must have exactly five world sizes. Corruption I do not think would be changeable. That is because it is stored as an integer, but consecutive integers are not treated similarly. 3 is Rampant, 4 Catastrophic, and 5 Communal, and all those are very different. So just adding a "6" option wouldn't work. War weariness I doubt would work for the same reason, but it is slightly more likely. Combat values ought to work beyond the 1000 limit Firaxis has, although negative combat values seems a bit dubious and might not work in practice when a unit engages in combat. Negative production I would guess would work, although it may cause some crashes if it's ever possible to have buildings that total -100%, or possibly -125%, production.

Thoughts on others (no testing yet):

• Negative population cost for units might work
• Negative cost per unit (for governments) may well also work.
• Negative assimilation probably will not work. Although it would be interesting if it caused citizens to change to other nations' (or barbarian) nationality.
• Settings the Chance of Rioting (when their is unhappiness for 2 or more turns in a city) above 100% might allow multiple buildings to be destroyed by the rioting. I wouldn't say likely, but until tested it can't be ruled out.
• Setting Citizens Affected By Each Happy Face to negative might allow for 'anti-luxuries'. Unfortunately you'd have to have either all luxuries or all anti-luxuries, and this would probably make entertainers and luxury slider produce unhappiness too. So you might get cities stuck in riots. OTOH, if entertainers still did their job it could be useful in scenarios where there were adequate other sources of contentedness to counter a few anti-luxuries (slavery, unhealthy water, barbarian invasions, etc.).
• It probably will work to set Cities Required for Army to zero, allowing multiple armies for OCC
• I don't see why cost-zero worker jobs would be an issue. You'd just have really productive workers who could build two improvements per turn (or more if there were rails or higher road movement)
• You probably could set the additional AI unit support negative for a difficulty
• You could probably also allow corruption above 200% for a difficulty level if you wanted that for some reason
• And negative citizens born content for a difficulty might work, it would just require quite high happiness efforts on the player's part
• Zero hitpoint experience levels probably won't work. I'm guessing someone's already de facto tested this one, by testing a unit with a hitpoint bonus equal to negative the lowest experience level
• Zero road movement might not cause crashes, but I think it would be rather pointless. Well, unless it prevented units from moving on to it. Then it might actually work in a scenario where you wanted only some Mountains or whatever to be impassable, and didn't mind not having the ability to build roads (rails would probably have to be disabled too, to avoid pillaged rails leaving units trapped on a zero-movement road)
• Zero worker rate governments probably would work, unless it would cause problems with the AI deciding what to do with workers. My guess is the AI would just send workers to cities while in such a government, but maybe not.

So there's a good bit to test, and that doesn't include stuff where it's quite likely that it will work, such as buildings allowing > 100 content faces.

 

[Takhisis]

Neative maintenance gives gold… interesting. Is there any limit to how much gold they might add?

 

[Abaddon]

Has it really taken till 2011 for someone to think of this in Civ3?!?!?

 

[Takhisis]

How odd! You haven't thought of it either.

 

[MeteorPunch]

Really it's about having an editor that allows breaking Firaxis' rules so that things like this can be done.

 

[Goldflash]

Hmm! I like this idea.

 

[Quintillus]

Neative maintenance gives gold… interesting. Is there any limit to how much gold they might add?

There probably is, but it's probably either 32,768 or a bit over 2 billion, depending on where integer overflow would occur... well more than the maximum amount of gold a building can subtract in Firaxis's editor.

 

[Ogedei_the_Mad]

Interesting. This would add a whole new dimension to the management level. It always was disappointing that the editor didn't allow us to set the amount of gold bonus an improvement generated.

 

[Ozymandias]

Hi Quintillus,

This might be the wrong forum to ask a question, and if so my apologies.

That having been said: Have you any idea if there's a way to turn off the automatic growth of a city to Size 2 if there's H2O nearby?

Thanks,

Oz

 

[Quintillus]

Hi Quintillus,

This might be the wrong forum to ask a question, and if so my apologies.

That having been said: Have you any idea if there's a way to turn off the automatic growth of a city to Size 2 if there's H2O nearby?

Thanks,

Oz

I don't know of any way to do so, and my guess is it's hardcoded.

If there were a way to do so in the BIQ, I would guess it would be in the General Settings (RULE) tab. There are four unknowns there, which can be modified with either my or Steph's editor (maybe the hacked one too), but the only one whose value looks like it could possibly deal with this is "Unknown 2", whose value is 2. I still don't suspect that's what it does, but it's been there since Vanilla, so that would have to be my first guess as to how to turn it off if it is BIQ configurable.

Failing that though, I'm afraid it's hard-coded .

 

[Ozymandias]

I don't know of any way to do so, and my guess is it's hardcoded.

If there were a way to do so in the BIQ, I would guess it would be in the General Settings (RULE) tab. There are four unknowns there, which can be modified with either my or Steph's editor (maybe the hacked one too), but the only one whose value looks like it could possibly deal with this is "Unknown 2", whose value is 2. I still don't suspect that's what it does, but it's been there since Vanilla, so that would have to be my first guess as to how to turn it off if it is BIQ configurable.

Failing that though, I'm afraid it's hard-coded .

Hard-coded. What a surprise ( )

Thank you for giving the matter thought

Best,

Oz

 

[Takhisis]

Back to the forum, this has given me the idea that we could have a Bank building, then 'Bank +1' 'Bank +2' and so forth, each of them giving you a bonus gold for each 'upgrade' -i.e. building on top of it and replacing the original one- you make. The original one would cost a number of shields and all the upgrades built upon it would cost a fixed percentage.
This could also be done for Culture, Happy Faces, etc. Maybe different civs could have different levels of upgrade for each improvement enabled somehow…