New Shield/food Output System

[eddie_verdde]

Shields essentially represent raw materials, that's why forests yield more shields (wood) than a grassland and that's why mountains yield more shields (stone, minerals) than plains.

However, the classical concept of shield output ignores the fact that different communities explore different resources depending on their environments and on their needs...in other words, different civilizations came across with different solutions to the same problems.
Maybe egyptians lacked wood, because they lived in desert areas...but they were able to build things using other materials, such as clay (houses) or reeds (small boats). So, by classical standards (i.e. previous CIV games) a floodplain would be poor in "shields" but for egyptians, floodplains were as rich in "shields" as a forest for romans.


What if non-essential techs could increase the output of various terrain types? If you lived in a desert, you would research 'mud bricks'(avaliable with Pottery), which woudl increase shield output per desert tile. If you had lots of forests around, you could research 'lumberjacking' to get a shield bonus from them. That way you chose what to research based on need.


This would turn the game even more realistic and would present the civers with an interesting and flourishing tech tree...each civ would find a specific path to reach the same goals, depending on the resources available and terrain types.

This would emphasize even more the idiosyncrasies of each civilization and culture just as it happened in the real world.

What was said for shields can be also applied to food.

 

[CurtSibling]

Wouldn't this affect the need for conquest?

The idea has merit, but might impact trade and demands for resources...

.

 

[eddie_verdde]

in my opinion, in previous CIV games you don't conquer lands to have access to food and shields, but mostly to have access to bonus, luxury and strategic resources that simply don't appear everywhere.

You conquer lands for the value of physical space...once you have that space you can what you want with that space...build cities, build fortresses, create "buffer" zones to put the enemy and rival culture aside, etc...

And the fact that you can get by on your own land doesn't mean you don't need to conquer lands with extraordinarily productive terrains such as wheat, cattle, game, etc...

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Just for starters, I always believed that shields are an amalgam of both raw resources and manpower-with technology intervening at the interface. In another thread, this idea was dealt with by making a city's maximum shield output much more dependant on manpower and technology factors.
Back on the main topic, though, I once suggested that you should still get the base shield/food output from a tile, but that you should also be able to MANIPULATE it! For instance, a plains tile produces 2 food and 1 shield, but it should be possible for a player to increase the shield output to 2, or reduce it to 0. The presence of a resource and/or building a terrain improvement on said tile would increase the range to which you could modify a tiles output. So, as an example, the previous plain tile could adjust its food output to 4, or reduce it to 0 (+ or -2) However, if a farm were built there, then the output could be increased to 5 or 6. There is a catch, however. Increasing output reduces the labour pool of your city (thus potentially decreasing shield output overall) and increasing tile output also produces pollution from that tile and/or increasing the risk of that tile becoming DEGRADED. A degraded tile initially gains a -1 food ouput, then a -1 shield output etc, etc until said tile produces nothing at all. If left alone, the tile MAY eventually recover, but until then it performs at below par!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[dh_epic]

Personally, I don't think a shift towards more raw resources is such a bad thing. I'd like to see many more types of resources. And to keep that number manageable, those resources could become obsolete / become "infinite" as a new age approaches. By the time you hit the middle ages, you can assume that marble, iron, and limestone are around, whereas saltpeter and hardwood become the "king maker". That's not to mention the numerous luxuries that you could play with throughout the game.

This emphasis on resources would allow you to be one of the world's largest economies while still having relatively small borders. And ideally, the resources would be balanced out dynamically to encourage gameplay balance, so no empire can become totally self sufficient. Even the largest empires would have to trade for those last 2 luxuries/resources -- or find a way to coerce them out of a smaller nation.

Would this take the emphasis off of acquiring physical space? You're damn right it would.

 

[eddie_verdde]

Aussie_larker your idea is good but what you are suggesting doesn't seem to be very different of the classical concept...I mean, you suggest that the output of tiles could be increased through the construction of improvements in that tiles, but that's the idea behind the road, irrigation and mining improvements...

what I'm suggesting is a way of emphasizing the adaptability of human communities to different environments...the adaptability and "plasticity" of human behaviour in different environments has been the major force that shaped different human cultures and civilizations...

why should we be limited to "improve" the terrain if we can also find technologies to improve the outputs of each terrain?

This emphasis on resources would allow you to be one of the world's largest economies while still having relatively small borders

dh_epic I didn't quite understand if you approve or disapprove this, but if you don't like the idea of seeing small civs with strong economies maybe you should recall some historical facts. Rome started as a group of 7 villages and managed to expand its borders throughout europe. Smaller doesn't necessarly mean weaker...Furthermore when I had this idea I was thinking of basic resources such as food and shields...strategic and luxury resources would still have an important role and would still drive trade and conquest...

 

[sir_schwick]

I think most terrain should start out as low-output, and you decide which techs to invest in making terrain better.

On a sideways go, there are some special worker functions that should be able to be used on rivers. The most important would be damning, avaliable with either construction or engineering. Here are the different types:

Stone/Wood Dams(Engineering) - Create flood areas along two to three tiles upstream.
Reinforce Dams(Mass Production) - Creates flood areas along three to four tile upstream.
Concrete Hydroelectric Dams(Computers) - Creates flood areas along five to six tiles upstream and provides power plants to all cities within three tiles.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

You misunderstood me, Eddie. What I meant was that in the city screen you could click on a tile you are working, and it will bring up the production value of that tile (say 2 shields and 1 food) with an up and down arrow next to each icon. You click the up arrow to boost the shield or food output on the tile, or click the down arrow to reduce it. This would essentially represent either an overexploitation or underexploitation of the tile. My point about tile improvements is that they give you much more LATITUDE over the extent to which you can increase/decrease the output of the tile! You see where I am coming from now? Here is an example, a desert tile produces 1 shield in the present system. Well, a player could CHOOSE to boost said tile to produce 2 SHIELDS instead (this could represent the citizens digging a little bit deeper for the requisite stone/minerals).


P.S: Oh and, trust me-like myself, DH_Epic does want to see a partial or total seperation between empire SIZE and empire success (be it military or economic or both). This reflects our deep dislike of a thing called the 'Snowball Effect', where more territory=more success=more territory=more success etc etc!!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[dh_epic]

Eddie, absolutely, I want to allow small nations to have huge economies, even huge militaries. Sorry if I was unclear. And it's as much a realism issue as it is a gameplay issue -- cancelling out the snowball effect that Aussie is talking about.

 

[eddie_verdde]

sorry guys my mother language is portuguese

anyway...Aussie_Lurker I guess I understand your idea know...but would your so-called "tile improvements" be dependent on optional technologies as I was suggesting?

 

[eddie_verdde]

Just for starters, I always believed that shields are an amalgam of both raw resources and manpower-with technology intervening at the interface. In another thread, this idea was dealt with by making a city's maximum shield output much more dependant on manpower and technology factors.

hmmm...yes, perhaps you're right (shields are raw resources AND manpower)...to be more realistic, the shield production should ultimately depend on the quantity of the resources available but should be limited by the number of people working or by technology...

In other words...you could have a city with lots of trees available but unless you have enough people to cut the wood or unless you have the tools to cut it, you wouldn't be able to optimize woodcutting on a particular tile...

 

[Synergy67]

I really the food/shield system should be entirely revamped for Civ 4, and I hope they are doing it. Firstly, irrigation should be much more difficult to employ for much of the earlier ages, making by the the best farming areas to be fairly near fresh water sources. Perhaps irrigation could only extend so many tiles from its source before it taps out until the discovery of electricity. Actually, inbetween, a tech or a number of techs could enable further and further transportation of water for farming. Also, some areas (like green grassland instead of plains I suppose) obvious have higher rainfall. Some areas should reflect more diversity of climate. Some grassland areas rather than single tiles with wheat on them might have an extra food through a zone...a green belt, the breadbasket area of a country. This would make it a strategically important area to cultivate to help feed not just a local city, but communally your whole nation.

That’s the second change I would love to see in Civ 4. Make food a transportable total national resource with loss (like corruption) the further it has to be transported from a harvest area to a big city. Food can’t be shipped infinite distances until modern refrigeration (it still can’t really). This way, you can build a city in a place that may be a great commercial center (on a coastline by a river which gives commercial connetions to two other nations upriver, etc. Nearby farmland outside the city radius would be very helpful to facilitate the population of that city, but what would drive its growth more than sheer food supply (which is now communal anyway) would be cultural, locational, and commercial factors. Cities with prime commerical/trading locations (along rivers and coasts between nations, etc.) would grow more quickly and larger than some town in the high plains with nothing else of interest around. Culture would make sense or only be possible to add to cities of certain sizes (popularity).

This way would more accurately (and fun-ly) reflect how you can have a farming region in your nation which feeds towns and cities a ways off rather than only the immediate radius feeding the city. This would make location, climate, commericalism more important in determining which towns become cities and where your powerhouse cities are going to be. It means more careful construction and planning of what are to become cities. Farming settlements might make decent mid-sized or small towns throughout the grasslands and prairies, but they would not be good or feasible places to build Wonders or many cultural items like cathedrals. They will never grow large, not due to lack of nearby food, but due to the fact that most people are drawn to commercial centers after very early eras, not farmland. I’d love to see colonies, settlements, towns, villages, and farms in wilderness areas and farmland, but have cities a bit more rare and only able to grow truly large in more specialized locations.

I have some thoughts about shields I'll post separately.

Doug

 

[Synergy67]

Geez, sorry for the dropped words in my last post. This one gets proofread once before posting.

Like food and farming, I hope shields and production will get revamped and redone entirely in Civ 4. First, some thoughts about mines.

The over-mining of all grasslands and hills and mountains to increase production in Civ III is boring, ugly, and unrealistic. Mines specifically should be much rarer and specialized improvements (and expensive) used to increase commerce primarily. Tapping a vein of gold you discover in a mountain would make building a mine worthwhile. Many diverse minerals, metals, coal, and gems, etc. should be discoverable in various hills and mountains, but rarely if ever in plains or grasslands. Maybe gold could be found in river areas too though. There would be no reason to mine unless there was a specific resource there to mine. Metals like Copper, Gold, Silver, Platinum, Uranium, etc. would appear in different eras and randomly either as some kind of surveyors or explorers go across areas or just over time within your cultural borders as they are uncovered. Depending on the substance, it might add commercial or production value, much like it already does. Coal and uranium would both add shields or production as well as gold perhaps, and also enable the construction of relevant things like railroads.

Building roads to locations with minerals, etc. would enable their use and commercialization, just like the resources and luxuries do in Civ III, but many of them should be much more plentiful, common, and diverse. Different regions will have very different resources, but with common value (gold or industry). Some will still be vital and rarer like iron or horses or whatnot and vital for construction and trading. Many others will just be for local/national commercial and production value added.

Like I was suggesting about communalizing food resources instead of making it strictly local city by city, I think production resources should also operate in a similar way. I think shields/production should not reflect the nearby landscape so directly for a city. The size, culture, and improvements in a city (like mills and factories) would increase production which would be tied to population as it is now. But not by making mines all around the city. Nearby forests would add good production value, not by being chopped down and removed, but as a renewable resource (forests can be maintained and regrown every few decades.) Forests would only be chopped down permanently to create farmland. Perhaps building a road to a forest square or hill or resource would increase its natural commercial and production value, but mines would be reserved for resources which normally are mined.

Shields/production for each city could be determined by 1) how large you are able to make the city (population = workforce = production multiplier) 2) City improvements which increase production 3) Tech discoveries which reveal new minerals and resources in nearby areas which go to the most logical city (a farming village is not going to put coal to use without a factory, but a marketplace there would enable it to be shipped to your large city with factories or coal plant, etc. farther down the road. Other cities farther off would be basing their production on their more localized resources and population. Maybe it would be possible to determine a far off city to ship resources to, but at higher expense/loss. 4) If I want to shift my farm village to be a more productive industrial center because coal is found in nearby hills, I could build a factory or coal plant and use the coal there and make an industrial city out of it, but it would still not grow as large as other cities which are more locationwise and commercially and cultural desirable. It would be up to me to shape that town and decide if it makes sense to industrialize it or leave it a farming center primarily. The coal might be much more useful sending it to a bigger city that I want to be more productive. But building too much industry in one city would also increase pollution, unhappiness, and begin to cap or even negatively affect its population growth over time.

Coal would also still enable the building of railroads with iron (but each tile where you build a railroad should cost money as well). Coal otherwise would be a quantified resource...each coal lode offers so much shield/production increase to a particular city or my overall national supply if I wanted to trade it abroad. How much money I could get for trading coal would depend on how much I have to sell, not whether I have one resource of it at all.

 

[eddie_verdde]

Synergy67

you might be right but if some of those suggestions were implemented, the game would require lots of micromanagement and could turn a bit boring and drive your attention from what's really important: conquest and expansion...I think it depends on the way your ideas would be implemented, but I agree with you, though...

 

[Synergy67]

Eddie,

Yes, you're right. I'm throwing out rough ideas and concepts which would need a lot of thought and refinement to work well. I am for minimizing the micromanagement and repetitive tasks in the game rather than increasing them, so I would think most of what I am suggesting would be done automatically unless I elect to alter the normal way it works, which might be far less commonly needed...you know, like normally using the city governor to emphasize production and happiness but occasionally manually overriding him for a city when necessary. Maybe villages/towns/cities should have larger circles of land they can access for their production, building roads to them being the primary way to tap that productive value. The cultural border would not determine if I was able to use that hill over there with gold in it, merely that it be within some number of tiles from my town or city and within my overall sphere of influence and control (in my lands). The City Governor would normally be maximizing on whatever available production is within its range and closest to it rather than to another town or city. Population would affect which city has claim to a resource between two cities. The sphere of influence and need productionwise would extend farther from the larger city, much like the cultural border expands in Civ III. I'd like to see the range of a town or city increased in what it can access for production.

And I still think food should be a national communal resource with losses and/or expense factored in by how far some of it has to be shipped to feed all your towns and cities. This would all be mathematical formulas operating beneath the gameplay and not requiring any micromanagement.

 

[eddie_verdde]

yes, there are many threads about food. For instance, many people suggested that food could be traded between cities which is equivalent to your concept of "communal food"...

 

[Trade-peror]

Food and shield trading would be fun gameplay additions, besides paving a path to allowing more in-depth economics in Civ.

As for the original terrain-boosting techs suggested at the beginning of this thread, I support their inclusion in Civ4. These techs would allow for civs to become specialized, according to their environmental conditions, and would be far more flexible than the rigid and superficial system of using traits and UUs to do so.

Such a system would not be unbalancing, however, because these techs have a significant cost--they use up science beakers, but do not get the player any farther along the tech tree. In other words, overall scientific progress is delayed while these techs are researched, and too many of these delays would clearly be detrimental to the civ. In addition, these techs boost the generic production of terrain, not specific resources, so the fundamental incentives for conquest to gain certain necessary resources are not affected.