MilesBeyond
Prince
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2011
- Messages
- 446
No, two queues would probably involve two separate resources, civil production and military production. They could either be generated independently, or derived from raw hammers by a slider, like commerce. IIRC Age of Wonders 4 does the former, GalCiv does the latter, but I could be wrong. Either way you're still making a choice between the two, that choice is just nuanced instead of binary.For two queues I assume you mean both units and buildings have access to the same hammers and don't compete for them? Doesn't that reduce strategic choice if you can always have both with no tradeoffs? Not to mention as of now often the best choice is to build neither (e.g. build wealth).
Some buildings have bad ROI like market at 150 production and not made cheaper by any leader trait, but a mod could just fix their cost for better balance.
That being said, you're probably right that balancing less viable buildings via modding is a simpler and possibly better solution.
Buildings being bad is just not true. It's extreme advice geared towards beginners who just build all the things as soon as they're available without fully understanding how they work in relation to the slider or what alternatives exist. The only never-build buildings are in the modern era. The key thing to understand is that most buildings are not worth it as soon as they're available. Aqueducts and courthouses are common enough builds but post-Lib, not at math and CoL. Heck even granaries often come too early at pottery depending on your happy cap and how much expansion you have left. Other buildings are situational. Walls are incredibly good, but rarely and only in one critical city at one critical moment. Castles are great but only if going espionage, etc.This is all good design not bad. I don't want some cruddy mobile game designed so that no matter what I do I'm a winner. If everything's a good choice, it ain't a strategy game it's FarmVille.
Agreed, which is why I talked about buildings being "poor ROI" rather than "bad" - many buildings are eventually good or situationally good or both, but for many of them the gap between when they're unlocked and that "eventually" feels a bit too large. Aqueducts are a great illustration of that - I love me some Aqueducts getting into the back half of the tech tree, but because the game snowballs so hard that feels a little underwhelming. Like something that's a good ROI in Renaissance may not benefit as much as something that's an okay ROI in Classical.
So it's not that buildings are bad, it's that where early turns are more valuable than later turns, IMHO it's a little underwhelming for a building you unlock early to not give good ROI unless you build it much later, whereas the units you unlock will usually give you better ROI the earlier you get them, synergizing with the snowball nature of the game.
That being said, I'm not sure how effective my proposed two-queue solution would be at addressing that.