Structural Integrity

[Thunderbrd]

hmm... that's what I thought we were discussing. What's the point of integrity tracking if it's not going to be tracked on each given building in a city?

 

[AIAndy]

hmm... that's what I thought we were discussing. What's the point of integrity tracking if it's not going to be tracked on each given building in a city?

What is the point of tracking it on each of the many buildings separately?
Are you really expecting the player to keep track of and do something about a kind of HP on single buildings in many cities?

 

[Thunderbrd]

It would enable us to change the way defenses are reduced. Bombard/attack particular defensive buildings (and civil when bombing raids) to take them down. Fires could cause damage but not completely take out buildings. Repair buildings could be a build selection... I'm not seeing much of a point to having a situation where we aren't tracking it by building...

Not all of that would happen overnight as its all a big project. But it'd be neat to see come to pass.

 

[Hydromancerx]

hmm... that's what I thought we were discussing. What's the point of integrity tracking if it's not going to be tracked on each given building in a city?

I was saying it worked like a Fire Event. Where the higher the building instability the more likely a building will fall down in your city.

Why? How do you think it should work?

 

[Thunderbrd]

I think each building in each city should have an integrity(damage resistance) and 100 HP (%). Then bombard attacks, fire events, earthquakes, etc... deal damage to the buildings themselves. The materials and tech used at the time the building is constructed along with the nature of the building itself defines the integrity of the building (obviously walls and castles would have some pretty serious integrity!)

The city can be set to rebuild its buildings, reinforce its buildings etc...

If we track it as a property on the city then we're talking about a total average of all integrities and that just doesn't seem right to have such a property determine much of anything meaningful.

 

[AIAndy]

I think each building in each city should have an integrity(damage resistance) and 100 HP (%). Then bombard attacks, fire events, earthquakes, etc... deal damage to the buildings themselves. The materials and tech used at the time the building is constructed along with the nature of the building itself defines the integrity of the building (obviously walls and castles would have some pretty serious integrity!)

The city can be set to rebuild its buildings, reinforce its buildings etc...

If we track it as a property on the city then we're talking about a total average of all integrities and that just doesn't seem right to have such a property determine much of anything meaningful.

Dealing with single buildings there adds an UI nightmare without adding meaningful gameplay.

 

[Yudishtira]

1. The only time the structural integrity of the building will be different from the default for the currently available materials and current tech, is if the fire/earthquake event coincides with a siege. Surely not worth the effort.

2. I will not be pleased with my catapult division if they only manage to knock down a shoddily-built fishmonger and brothel! I told them to aim at the walls!

 

[ls612]

Dealing with single buildings there adds an UI nightmare without adding meaningful gameplay.

It also adds a micromanagement nightmare. And still adds no real fun or good gameplay.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Dealing with single buildings there adds an UI nightmare without adding meaningful gameplay.

It also adds a micromanagement nightmare. And still adds no real fun or good gameplay.

Not really. We only need two added numeric fields on building displays in the city. It could be as simple as [symbolforintegrity]:Integrity(HP)

So it would show at the end of the building name something like:
Barracks : 32 (100) - then onto the rest of what it already displays.

And when choosing a Repair build selection, it simply pours hammers into HP and divides it across all your buildings. Furthermore, the city would naturally recover and repair their own buildings at a slower rate over time (healing basically) without the need for your intervention. The HP could be made to be yellow or red if reaching critical levels, so a brief scan through cities you know have been hit with some things would let you know if you need to possibly be worried enough to select the Repair build for a round or two to recover what's been lost. Some buildings could act like healers do for units, their presence in the city increasing the natural repair rate.

In a sense, this would mean that when you are under attack, you can set your citizens to immediately attempting repair on their bombarded buildings. A strong production level poured into this could keep an invading enemy facing strong defenses every round unless they bring enough siege to overcome the defensive buildings entirely.

Integrities on buildings that aren't at the best they could be at would be all that would show up on the list if you selected to have the city build Reinforce Structure, and it would be pretty cheap to upgrade their Integrities to the current best level - we're not rebuilding the building here. Building upgrades would obviously be one easy way to update too and for the most part, the only time you'd want to put too much emphasis on this sort of thing would be if you knew an attack was coming (and you had out of date integrities on your defensive buildings) or your city seems to be coming under repeated hits from floods, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc...

And truth be told, if we took away the Reinforcement mechanism entirely and made integrities to always be assumed to be upkept to the maximum automatically, no big problem there in my opinion and another way to streamline the system away from ANY micro-management necessary.

Would rarely require much thought or interaction but would enable a system that makes sense by making the loss of buildings no longer a pass/fail scenario.

Even from a programming perspective such a system wouldn't be all that difficult. It might ask for a bit of memory to have a couple new values to track on all buildings that have been constructed. Not sure if that would be all that significant though since its only two values we're talking about here.

And what's the point of having an overall city integrity when different buildings in the city would obviously be weaker or stronger than others? If the wolf huffs and puffs and tries to blow your house down, if your house is a straw hut, it's a gonner, but if its a castle? How do you rationalize a system that then says, if you have a castle and a straw hut, we simply average the two and get both being equally likely to be blown down - a likelihood somewhere around the chance the wolf has to blow down a stick house?

1. The only time the structural integrity of the building will be different from the default for the currently available materials and current tech, is if the fire/earthquake event coincides with a siege. Surely not worth the effort.

2. I will not be pleased with my catapult division if they only manage to knock down a shoddily-built fishmonger and brothel! I told them to aim at the walls!

I would see a fire or earthquake as targeting a random number of buildings to be damaged to a certain degree. Lets say a weak Earthquake deals 100 dmg(even this would probably be randomized during such events) to 1-10 buildings. If any of those 1-10 buildings has no or negative integrity (which is really just an inverse damage % modifier) then they're going to be destroyed. But if it targets a castle with (just tossing a number out here - might take some more consideration to establish actual integrities) a 200 integrity, the castle would only have taken 25 (or 1/4 of its maximum) damage.

Siege weapons would get an accuracy check to see if you're hitting the targets you tell them to hit (siege and bombing were once able to target specific buildings in CivIII and was one of my favorite features in that game!) which could have results ranging from - no complete miss, no - hits another random building, yes- glancing hit (taking a penalty to damage on the strike), yes - direct hit (standard damage), to yes - Direct Hit (bonus damage). They'd also have something like a puncture value that enables them to consider the integrity on the buildings they hit to be reduced when they strike it.

Then, some tag values the building brings to the table, like defense percentage, would be effective at a ratio according to the health of the building, thus my castle is only defending me with 50% of its contributing defense value if it has been knocked down 50 hp.


All this, in my opinion, would make things actually easier to track and rationalize. Random buildings destroyed with no consideration for the stability of the buildings in its selection method is kinda annoying and breaks immersion for me. Breaking down all defense value in a city but you somehow still have your castle? Again, breaks immersion. Random buildings being destroyed on invasion? Random buildings lost to nukes?

I just think there's a better way that would involve being able to look over your buildings a see the devastation in stages rather than as an all or nothing, the building is there or it isn't affair. And the game mechanics CAN be fairly simple for this.

Anyhow, that's just one opinion, I know.

 

[SilentConfusion]

I'm OK with individual buildings having individual integrity, so long as I don't have to select to repair them individually. The "Repair Buildings" build should go towards all injured buildings as Tbrd suggested.

 

[AIAndy]

TB, the important thing is that people do NOT have to care for the integrity number on hundreds of buildings. For most of those it is meaningless (what do I really care for the integrity of a simple shop out of many in a city out of many in my empire).
The decision what to attack might be meaningful for a small number of defensive buildings but only for those and even that might be too much if you have so many units and so much to attack later in the game.

So an easy way to simplify that is to assume that the buildings in a city are hit in a similar way by disasters and attacks and a total integrity value can describe that.
You might still add a value to the building type that describes how easy it is to destroy the building and then the easy to destroy buildings are more likely to be destroyed in disasters or attacks but the total structural integrity describes how well repaired your city is in general and is calculated in as well.

 

[Thunderbrd]

TB, the important thing is that people do NOT have to care for the integrity number on hundreds of buildings. For most of those it is meaningless (what do I really care for the integrity of a simple shop out of many in a city out of many in my empire).
The decision what to attack might be meaningful for a small number of defensive buildings but only for those and even that might be too much if you have so many units and so much to attack later in the game.

For those who appreciate being able to select all bombard units and hit a single button and that's it, then sure... agreed. I really liked how CivIII enabled bombard and bomb attacks on specified buildings, however. Thus, if you wanted to, you could go in and just ruin a city with bombards and bombs (much like what we did to Baghdad in the Gulf War), taking out strategic targets long before the troops were even in position to march in. Your suggested method could allow this still but it would be back to what I didn't like about that mechanic, which was that it was like CivIV's air raids on tile improvements - completely a pass/fail mechanic.

I suppose a basic bombard defenses command could still exist which would target the defensive buildings in any random or specified hierarchic order first to make things easier from the micro-managed tactical perspective.

So an easy way to simplify that is to assume that the buildings in a city are hit in a similar way by disasters and attacks and a total integrity value can describe that.
You might still add a value to the building type that describes how easy it is to destroy the building and then the easy to destroy buildings are more likely to be destroyed in disasters or attacks but the total structural integrity describes how well repaired your city is in general and is calculated in as well.

Under that proposal, Integrity then means 'Building Maintenance and Repair Response Capability' of the city rather than the actual resistance to damage. I suppose it'd work that way but I guess I would feel it would lack the same appeal and at that point the term 'Integrity' would be a little misleading.

And again, it gets back to being a pass/fail scenario. Two earthquakes in rapid succession would not make the second far more devastating as its hitting buildings that are already weakened.

 

[Hydromancerx]

So since new properties are being proposed again. the question becomes should Structural Integrity be added?

I personally think Structural Integrity would be a good companion property to Flammability. Just like Air and Water Pollution are companion properties.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

So since new properties are being proposed again. the question becomes should Structural Integrity be added?

I personally think Structural Integrity would be a good companion property to Flammability. Just like Air and Water Pollution are companion properties.

In all cases we are moving stuff that used to be covered in city maintenance into a more identifiable mechanic. This means that all these should have a component that reduces/replaces the default city maintenance.

 

[Azurian]

The Property could be called City Defense.


Also just thought of a Tourism Property.

structure integrity + % air pollution + % water pollution =Tourism modifer

 

[Hydromancerx]

@DH

So how would imagine it be implemented?

I was first thinking say a simplistic implementation where city size increases the chance a building gets destroyed and then a few buildings could counter it. Rather than saying adding +/- to all buildings.

This would even be more simplistic than Flammability in that there would be no anti-integrity buildings.

@MrAzure

Yeah but it is not just walls either. It would be any building that could fall down. However I think some psudo buildings could not be able to fall down such as Crimes, Diseases, Pests, Myths, etc.

Likewise events like Earthquakes should greatly increase the chance a buildings fall down.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I still don't like the idea of generalizing the strength of buildings as a city wide group. Each building would be weaker or stronger than the next. Please at least hold off til after the current focus on the combat mod for developing this as I'd at least like to play with some more building-specific concepts.

I like the idea of a tourism property a lot btw... would play into a lot of other things I'd like to accomplish eventually.

Guys... just keep in mind that properties are heavy in terms of processing so we may find we put a lot of work into some things that need a lot of streamlining. I really really really really really am looking forward to AIAndy developing out the 2D property mechanism he had in mind... and if he never does I'll have to figure something similar out of my own as it is.

 

[Hydromancerx]

@TB

Fair enough. If you think the combat mod could enhance such a property then I am open to you ideas. I mean this is why we have these kids of discussions. To share ideas and help plan them out on how they could work (or not work).

As for Tourism idea I think that is a great idea. I am suprised no one has brought it up before.

 

[Azurian]

@TB

Fair enough. If you think the combat mod could enhance such a property then I am open to you ideas. I mean this is why we have these kids of discussions. To share ideas and help plan them out on how they could work (or not work).

As for Tourism idea I think that is a great idea. I am suprised no one has brought it up before.

Its a really great game play element, you could have buildings increase tourism and others decrease it.

 

[Yudishtira]

Its a really great game play element, you could have buildings increase tourism and others decrease it.

@all I don't think Tourism existed before the Modern Era did it - certainly not on any scale. Before that the closest thing was pilgrims, and then various other people who had to at least pretend they were going "on business" - explorers, missionaries, merchants, mercenaries, trappers, possibly hermits, naturalists(?!), various criminals, umm...??? (must be more...)

I suppose the "Grand Tour" is a late Industrial phenomenon, but it was only for so few as to be insignificant.