Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

Brad's special people concept- and what I would like to see.

Edit: turns out the nuked post didn't contain this. My bad.

I think the idea was every 10th citizen of a city could be a specialist.

he idea sounds awful to me, for these reasons

a) Micromanagement nightmare. The AI will handle this just fine. However, humans will have real problems. Usually you want to build up a city to level 5, that would be 1000 people, and 100 specialists. It would be hard to control it all, unless you gave it over to AI automation.

That said, the concept might be able to work if you took it out of the players hands, but then would be it necessary or fun?

Multiplicative effect. I could see this really inflating numbers.

c) What happens when the population goes down?

I could be wrong, and I'm no professional at this, unlike Brad- but the idea just doesn't seem to be fun for players.

What I think could work and be a better idea

Basically don't re-invent the wheel, but use what you have now, and add in a Civ 4-style GPP system. Certain structures will produce "notable people points". Prestige would act as a multiplier to those points. A market might generate 1 notable merchant point. I think a city should have to be level 2 to generate notable people. Maybe make the bonus something like [city level-1] * [square root of presitge]

Adventure tech on the hero line should just spawn straight adventurers, and allow for the creation of adventurers guilds- which would generate adventure points. (or the pub could be converted for such a purpose)

Generate enough NPP and a hero would pop up, such as a farmer, merchant, sage, scholar, adventurer, or other types (bard). Those will appear in your area of influence, weighted by population. You then recruit them normally.

The Empire, with its focus on individualism, should be better at this then Kingdoms- at least in some areas, maybe have Kingdoms better at some- Empires at the other.

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Brad nuked the thread the idea was originally posted in

What?

https://forums.elementalgame.com/397448/get;2782949

https://forums.elementalgame.com/397448/get;2783428

Definitely still there

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

Ah, thought it did. Hopefully this still gets seen.

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I don't think you have any idea what brad is talking about when he was talking about specialist slot. It isn't a special person at all. It's just another resource, one that doesn't accumulate, like food. One that is derived from your total population/10. So if you have 1000 people, you'll have 100 specialist. This is then used to control how many buildings you can build in total. This means, in order to build lots of buildings, you have to make your empire contain lots of people. It has absolutely nothing to do with farmers/scientist or w/e else. The idea is to control your ability to expand by limiting what you can build based on a non accumulating resource (it just happens to be that this resource is based on your people). Right now the only one he has to work with is food, so that's why you saw the merchant cost food to maintain thing in 1.08.

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

Oh. That might actually work. What happens when you lose a city though?

Also would some buildings not count, such as housing?

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I'm guessing when you lose a city, assuming that city has tons of population and no buildings (odd, but I guess it's possible) and you end up with no more specialist spots, then you simply won't be able to build anymore buildings until you can get more specialist slots (by getting more people, taking said city back, or demo-ing other buildings).

Housing definitely won't cost specialist slot, that has its own non-accumulating resource -> food. Not sure about everything else.

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i think it's an awful idea as well.

why limit buildings by population when we have a perfectly good way of doing that already: building minimum city level requirements. if you want to force people to specialize, just say "choose one of the following level dependent buildings." why make me go back and check on my cities every time they build something, every time they level AND every time they spawn one of these newfangled slots.

the two concepts represent exactly the same thing: population growing to the point where you have enough specialists available to run whatever advanced building you're talking about. that's why we have no treasury buildings in small towns, etc. if the level up moments are too occassional currently for this to work, then make more levels with smaller gaps between them.

the names are even almost identical: choosing specialist buildings or choosing a level up specialization.

if all important buildings end up being slot dependent, then level will become almost completely meaningless.

the answer to this problem is to place MORE emphasis on levelling up, not to create a new mechanic that does the same thing. isn't it far better to say "you now have enough population to reach level 2, you can now build a merchant that generates gold/person," (then later upgrade it when you reach the next level) than to say "you now have ten more people, you can now build a merchant that generates 0.01 gold." and then send the player back every 10 turns to build another copy of the same building until the map is covered.

the worst thing about it is the scale. if you actually limit it to a fixed number (like every 10 people), because population increases at an increasing rate you will either get barely any at all until you get to the later game, or you'll get an obscene, unmanageable number once you get to the endgame.

or they make the people / slot get higher for each one. in which case it becomes EVEN MORE LIKE LEVELLING!

brad says that the problem with gold/population buildings is that not everyone can be a specialist, but fails to realise the entire point of the % is to represent the small proportion of people that can be specialists. and if the population is not big enough to allow any specialists at all then, just limit it USING CITY LEVEL.

kill it. kill it. kill it.

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