Puppets and defensive buildings, part 2

Based on the replies here (https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...to-build-walls-castles-arsenals-first.668984/) I thought that a more nuanced poll/discussion was in order, so here's attempt number 2 to gauge the opinion of the community.

 

just a heads up, i tried to improve the AI's handling of gold, so i stopped puppets from building anything that costs maintenance while the owner is running a deficit (experimentally). this affects human owners as well!

but then that would mean that puppets sometimes never build walls; so i allowed defensive buildings even in deficit. which now leads to a situation where negative GPT can lead to a "better" outcome in puppets.

i'm open for suggestions ...

edit: maybe a simple solution would be processes only, independent of deficit or not, plus defensive buildings from two eras before.

 

I've felt that a little more control over puppets might be warranted in general, perhaps allowing a city focus selection. This isn't a direct response to the question of city defense buildings, but rather a means to better guide what buildings get built.

 

I voted other. The tension is like this: on one side, the very notion of a puppet is that you can't select production, and I like that. It's an interesting tradeoff. There are already powerful reasons not to annex cities, so there should be something that matters on the other side of the scale. On the other side, an empire should have some means of directing energy toward protecting its conquests. So, what I'd suggest is allowing empires to protect puppets in a dynamic way, not by hard coding. It should require some investment, and still leave puppets relatively more vulnerable than self-founded or annexed cities, just not as much as currently.

I suggest that a puppet should gain production toward walls and castles whenever resistance has ended and a great general is stationed in it. The amount of production could be a balance element, but as a starting guess I would make it 25% per turn for walls and 12.5% for castles. This would mean you could create a castle by keeping a GG in a city for 12 turns. Another possibility could let GGs build a citadel in a puppet and automatically create all era appropriate defensive buildings. These options would let a player defend territory, but at a cost, not just by buffing puppets generally.

 

Hehe can I have a vote where the entire concept of puppets should never have existed in Civ 5?

 

For me, puppets only serve two purposes: prevent the AI from (re)settling the spot and secure strategics. Yields are strictly a bonus. With that in mind, city defense is my only priority for a puppet, meaning I don't care what it builds so long as it has a wall/castle. My problem is that it's inconsistent in what it decides to build. Sometimes it goes for a wall straightaway. Other times it takes 20 turns to build a bank first. Rarely it never builds a wall at all, and I don't really know why.

 

Does deficit here mean negative gold per turn, but still gold in the bank? Or just negative gold per turn and 0 gold stored. I just want to note that it's not uncommon for your raw gold per turn to be negative but your overall gold to increasing due to bonus yields.

I would suggest factoring older buildings as a high priority for puppets. This build order would be consistently 'just okay', never terrible, but never amazing either. Puppets adding a random expensive building, like an opera house or bank, that takes 25 turns to build is my largest frustration with them.

 

they look at the average income of the last X turns ... don't know X, it comes from the database ... but for reasons too stupid to elaborate, instant yields are not considered here.

but the point is moot, i went for the simple solution: no buildings, independent of deficit or not, except for defensive buildings up to the previous era.

 

I do want puppets to build buildings though. Keeping cities as puppets until they've built most buildings has been my playstyle when I'm playing tall (and conquer to eliminate threats) or warmonger.

 

in fact i think it's an interesting tradeoff. the longer you wait with annexation, the further your puppets fall behind. and tradeoffs are what a good game is about, no?

 

Puppets already have a big tradeoff as is. You're trading gold, happiness (sometimes), faith (and faith buildings), supply, golden age points, ability to produce units and building priority for a tiny bit of culture, science and tourism. The culture and science net gain decays into a net loss as the puppet builds more buildings, at such a point you should annex it. If they never build buildings the annex button is essentially worthless unless you suddenly decide to raze the city.

I vote for a slightly higher weight on defensive buildings, btw. Nothing hardcoded. I think this applies to liberated City States too?

 

Walls should be hardcoded to be built as soon as possible, imo. It's just too gimmicky and weird without them, even if you garrison the city it dies to getting slammed once by a melee ship, which is awful. There should be a trade-off to making a puppet instead of an annexed city, but it shouldn't be that big. Puppets shouldn't be too weak imo because puppets are convenient. A lot of players would rather not micromanage a 16 city empire, but can stomach it if they can at least puppet conquests (or going wide Venice). Puppets already do reduced yields, and you can't build or buy in them, it shouldn't be a complete random crapshoot if the city falls to a single trireme or not.

 

The puppet cities should focus on building all available defense buildings only if there is a non vassal, non DOF/DP civ's cities within 8 or so tiles. That way it won't waste time building those if there are no credible threats nearby. Exceptions would be naval cities, in which the determining distance should be doubled, quadrupled, or quintupled depending on era.

 

Though I voted Walls and Castles, I can respect the simple idea of just:

1) Walls is always first, period, no exception.
2) Puppet logic remains the same otherwise.

Seems to fix the majority of the concern with minimal adjustment.

 

I'd prefer if they build older buildings before newer ones and nothing else really. This would ensure their yields are most in order and walls would be build fairly soon. I normally might build something other than walls too, so I disagree with any hardcoding. Maybe building walls is almost necessary mostly on highest difficulties. Seeing them build a bank or something quickly feels bad however.

 

Agreed in principle, I'd just specify that "older" should mean "cheaper" to remove ambiguity.

 

Vote: Other, because I like this.

If possible, with an option to choose in setup between this and the old puppet behaviour.

 

Is this going to totally explode Venice though? Maybe they should use different logic.

 

I'm down to try it for a patch, but it's a very large change.

The processes will yield very little. You get a puppet production penalty applied, then the process is only 1/4th of your hammers, then that amount would get hit by the puppet penalty again. Also venice exists.

 

If puppets can only produce defense buildings and processes maybe they don't need a hammer penalty at all?