Thalassicus
Bytes and Nibblers
Following from the discussion in the New Buildings thread, let's finalize the suggestions presented there. The basic revised idea is to expand gameplay by adding some new interesting feature with one or more of these lategame buildings:
Skyscraper
Skyscraper
- Industrial/modern era.
- Population or yield-per-population bonuses
- Uses iron (steel), or resourceless.
- Industrial/modern era
- Trade or diplomatic bonuses.
- Uses aluminum, or resourceless.
- Industrial/modern era
- Unknown bonuses.
- Uses oil, or resourceless.
Spoiler dropped plan :
I've dropped the plan below. The two concepts were:
Steel Construction
There's very little unused stuff in the game files right now. I look at something and think, "Oh hey, there's an idle tool we can create cool mod effects with!" Idle tools are so rare that when I find one, I want to figure out some way to use it to improve gameplay. This is why I want to focus on ideas for how to use tools, instead of saying, "we should not use this tool."
Lategame iron is an unused tool we can do stuff with. I think it's possible to improve gameplay with it while maintaining a reasonable picture of realism. In the vem lategame tall empires often had lots of happiness and needed growth, while conquerors needed happiness. I think a tradeoff of choosing happiness or population (or a mix of both) would be an interesting way to specialize our empire in the late game. Limited resources means we'll have only a few such buildings we can construct, like factories, instead of the capability to build one in every city.
- Buildings somewhat like national wonders, but can construct several. This is basically the factory already.
- Mutually exclusive tradeoff between different late game bonuses. We already do this implicitly when we decide to build one building before another.
Steel Construction
- Two buildings creates a tradeoff option between two opposite yields, like gold and science, or population and happiness.
- Uses iron.
There's very little unused stuff in the game files right now. I look at something and think, "Oh hey, there's an idle tool we can create cool mod effects with!" Idle tools are so rare that when I find one, I want to figure out some way to use it to improve gameplay. This is why I want to focus on ideas for how to use tools, instead of saying, "we should not use this tool."
Lategame iron is an unused tool we can do stuff with. I think it's possible to improve gameplay with it while maintaining a reasonable picture of realism. In the vem lategame tall empires often had lots of happiness and needed growth, while conquerors needed happiness. I think a tradeoff of choosing happiness or population (or a mix of both) would be an interesting way to specialize our empire in the late game. Limited resources means we'll have only a few such buildings we can construct, like factories, instead of the capability to build one in every city.