Proposal: Manufactory Buff

[pineappledan]

Hello everyone,

I think Great Engineers, including the Manufactory Great Person tile, are pretty weak stuff.

• Engineer specialists only give 3 base, which is easy to outdo with a Forge mine on hills (5)
• The Engineer bulb falls far behind in the late game, often only shaving a few turns off a wonder, but not giving a large enough contribution when compared to GScientists giving more than an entire tech, or writers giving most of a policy by late game.
• The Manufactory is only slightly stronger than a mine

I propose that we add a +5% production bonus towards wonder construction to a city for each Manufactory worked. This would mostly counteract the % penalty to wonders that you get for already having other wonders, but would give GEngineers another way to contribute that isn't just adding more flat production to the tile.

The code to add this bonus already exists. It's an easy database update.

I would also like to start a conversation on how G Engineer bulbing bonuses are calculated, and what we could do to make them more impactful in the late game. G Engineers are the only great person that I feel gets dramatically weaker in all options as the game progresses, and I think the bulb being so anemic in late game is a serious problem that we have tried to address with other minor band-aids, rather than addressing the problem directly (eg. Order's Spaceflight Pioneers increasing the bulb %).

Thoughts?

 

[stii]

This sounds like a good idea.

Like you said GE really don't scale very well at all

 

[amateurgamer88]

That seems too specific. Great Scientists and Great Writers are good for all playstyles while excelling more for tall.

Why don't we make Great Engineers more wide focused where each Manufactory give +5% Production to all Cities? We can also boost the bulb too. That way, you build Manufactories to improve all Cities while bulb them to secure a Wonder. If I don't have Wonders I want, the extra production can still be useful for things like Processes.

 

[pineappledan]

Because the wonder modifier bonus on improvements is the code we already have. I think a global % modifier on all production, unless as small as 2-3%, is much stronger than what we’re looking for.

 

[amateurgamer88]

I get that it exists but, if I don't have plans to get Wonders, then Great Engineers feel pretty useless to me. You bulb it to get Wonders and you build Manufactories to get Wonders.

5% was just a number I picked. I guess the question is how many Great Engineers do people tend to get in a single game. It's also the choice of getting a short term benefit (bulbing for a Wonder) or aiming for the end game (more productive cities in the late game).

 

[pineappledan]

If you aren’t getting wonders, why are you working Engineers in the first place? The policy tree that gives GEngineers is Tradition; that maybe is an argument that GEng are already the tallest, most capital-centric GP. More generally, Great people are a tall civ bonus that give relatively little benefit to a wide civ. Suggesting that GEngineers should be turned wide… just because, isn’t in line with their existing bonuses.

 

[Teholb]

The Royal Tromeak would be so much more satisfying with this change.

 

[lordrune]

Maybe give the manufactory improvement some other yields, like a tiny bit of science and some gold, similar to the way towns and holy sites give diverse yields? And buff the base production bulbing gives.

 

[DeAnno]

A 5% hammer bonus to wonders only is not going to really accomplish anything. It's a fiddly small buff that adds a lot of text and little substance: even if a Wonder would take 10 turns without the buff, there's only a 1/2 chance this would even reduce it to 9. I also agree with the position that since bulbing is already a function of Engineers to get Wonders, the Manufactory shouldn't be wonder based too. I often use them to prop up a very weak hammer city with no good access to mines, and in such a city this local Wonder boost is truly useless.

I think this is a case where I agree that what's needed are just straight buffs. As for Engineer bulb output, maybe the base scaling shouldn't be with with city size, but instead with Era, giving it a serious punch going into the lategame that it lacks now as cities start to stall out in height. Maybe 250 scaling with era, and +20% on top of that for each Manufactory?

As for the Manufactories themselves, while they can be good improvements in certain situations I agree the comparison to mines leaves them a little lacking. Maybe it'd be nice if they had a placement puzzle in the same way Towns do; what if Manufactories gave local happiness when adjacent to cities? Then that could be more of a benefit to wide Engineers, for civs that care less about fighting for Wonders.

 

[Grassland Farm]

I agree they need a buff - and I voted yes - but I'd rather just see a few more yields on them, especially sprinkled over the tech tree.

 

[AndreyK]

I think that manufactores need a bonus - I voted yes also, I think not only bonus to Wonders, but to improvement itself.

 

[Solic]

I agree that scaling of great engineer falls off a bit too much and it should be increased in later era's.

I never make manufactories actually, because I'm fairly risk averse in winning a wonder race.

I think that with the proposed buff we should be careful in bulbing still being the dominant way of winning a wonder race, because otherwise manufactories might become strictly better.

 

[Siege Tower]

I second adding yields across the tech tree. High base hammers are excellent early, but fall off hard as other sources (buildings, techs, policies, etc.) become dominant. I tend to put manufactories on flat desert and other yield-poor tiles if I am not bulbing for wonders and hope they will wind up improving mid/late-game strategic resources. I think the engineer specialist hammer yield is a more pressing matter, however. They are simply worse than terrain hammer sources across the board, while also boosting specialist unhappiness and higher food cost for a pretty underwhelming Engineer GPP boost. I tend to only work them in very hammer-poor cities after the early game, like island cities before seaports. This has certainly come up a few times before, but I think it was mostly left as-is. I think a +1 hammer base yield is entirely reasonable to keep pace with mines, considering the cost.

 

[andersw]

The tile improvement is too weak as you mentioned compared to mines on hills.
The bulb is a bit weak.
How much to increase it is the difficult question.

 

[pineappledan]

I think this is a case where I agree that what's needed are just straight buffs. As for Engineer bulb output, maybe the base scaling shouldn't be with with city size, but instead with Era, giving it a serious punch going into the lategame that it lacks now as cities start to stall out in height. Maybe 250 scaling with era, and +20% on top of that for each Manufactory?

if you math that out, era scaling will fall off even worse than population scaling, at least in your core cities. The population scaling also rewards players for using GEngineers in their main cities, rather than boosting up a late peripheral colony.

I think that adding some era scaling, maybe +100/era is not a bad idea, but it should not replace the pop scaling.

Another idea I had is that GEngineers could give their pop scaler, their base amount, the % manufactory bonus, but before that they give 25% of the production cost towards whatever you’re building. So whatever is in your build queue is 25% autocompleted, and THEN the actual bonus production is added. This rewards you for using GEngineers on big projects like wonders, and punishes you for using them on processes, and it’s guaranteed to keep up with the later eras, because it’s pegged to production costs.

 

[Kim Dong Un]

Along with a bulb/specialist buff, how about we make them do what they actually do in real world applications: increase a general area's efficiency and workflow of a specified item(s)/product(s) by utilizing an abundance of provided/surrounding materials. Each worked manufactory could boost tile yields for all resources -- bonus/strategic/luxury -- within city working range. Modern transport + shipping capabilities make this much less thematic by offloading production abroad, but for most of human history it logistically made the most sense to "set up shop" as close to home as possible with regards to many aspects of living. I know that when I play, I will thematically place GPTI in specific locations, but factories are kind of in a weird spot compared to the others. In their current form they're actually better to place off of resources, as you will get more value (production wise) from working the resource + manufactory, than if you just put the manufactory on top of the resource; it's kind of counter-intuitive and frustrating to penny-pinch yields like that.

My proposal (coinciding with whatever bulb buff you all deem adequate): a simple +1 to all (improved) resources within a city per each worked manufactory. Could have it scale through eras if it's still not impactful enough, though you might not need it. E.g., an early city has ability to work 4 improved resources ( 2 fish, 1 silver, 1 iron), so in Ancient that'd be an extra 4 hammers; place another factory in that city range and your looking at +8 hammers in the city from resources tiles in Ancient/Classical, and that's before including the base yields from the manufactories themselves. On average even a sub-par city will have access to at least a couple resources of any given type, and I can imagine these yields wouldn't be insignificant, yet still remaining reasonable.

This also presents an opportunity to make a given city's production less dependent on base terrain and more reliant on resource abundance/proximity, representing a civilizations ability to increasingly exploit lands regardless of it having 10+ hills or not. Throughout history there are many triumphs in war which teetered on the ability of one side to nullify and cripple the other's central lines of production/efficiency, and with this buff in place I believe it'd invigorate that feeling of accomplishment and impactfulness that comes with infiltrating and pillaging hammer heavy cities.

 

[wabab]

Perhaps manufacturies could reduce all building production (empire wide, depending) amount by a small percentage? Not sure how reductions to production costs work, but so long as there's little potential to reduce building cost to 0 hammers, then it would benefit wide and tall empires.