Synergy and efficiency as routes to specialisation

from Elemental Forums

How do you make towns special and different? If the bonus for each building is always the same there are limitations. So, in conquest of the new world they had a mechanic where each production building gained an efficiency bonus for farms/iron mines equal to the number of tiles of that type, +n% per tile for the first few tiles, n/2% for the next few etc. capping at 40% bonus. The interesting point was that non-synergistic buildings (wood vs iron production) would decrease the bonus by n%.

For example a large farm would be 4 tiles, 4n% bonus to farming if it's your only building. Add in 4 tiles of something else and the bonus is gone. Build another farm only and you have 8n, say if n=2 that's a 16% bonus to production. Causing you to want to specialise your towns without forcing you to do so. It was still good to have say 3 general towns, but new towns you could fund to be only mining towns. Which makes sense.

Perhaps to make things more complicated than a town full of a single building type you could research synergies and then buildings would increase your bonus. So housing buildings wouldn't decrease your focus, and higher level research could allow you to have 2 focuses, massively increasing the production of your older larger cities.

I don't know if I'd like set techs with the set synergy options, or if you should be able to pick a synergy on researching it. Say high level housing could give a 'farmers cottage'/'wizards hovel'/'miners cabin' option on research. After that you can build versions of each form of housing with a 'wizards' prefix or 'of magic' suffix perhaps slightly more expensive but able to boost production of buildings that you can't spam like buildings on shards.

Another option would be which buildings gain from the synergy. If you make your barracks a 'magical' barracks should it gain a bonus for each alchemists lab in the area? if you make it a steel wielding barracks should it gain for every mine and miners hut nearby? I like the idea as a way of making towns feel like they have a simple identity, a mining town... rather than the town near the iron. or magic town, not just town with the fire shard.

Still, 40% is a low enough bonus that's hard enough to achieve that it shouldn't be overpowered. Perhaps racial techs/starting picks could raise the bonus or make synergy easier. Perhaps enough to be significant. Or reduce it to 0 to be complete generalists.

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Cool stuff (dunno why nobody else seems to care....) but one other thing I would like to see with this is the ability of techs/abilities to reduce or remove negative synergy and enable more specialization: also instead of each building "off-topic" reducing the synergy by a set amount, I was thinking of something more.... exponential? logarythmic?..... with "tolerance" level or % of tiles below which off-topic buildings have no adverse effect: it seems to me that in a town of 500 wizard libraries, two or three mines aren't going to do much of anything.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I can see that, if you get decreasing returns to synergy you should have decreasing costs as well for 'off-topic' builds. The only thing is that you could maintain your bonus indefinately by pairing buildings that are synergistic with constructions that are 'off-topic'. A flat rate for 'off-topic' buildings ensures that generalists don't have bonuses.

I suppose if the bonus reduces every 'n' tiles or every 8 buildings you could allow a free 'off-topic' build. So with 500 wizards towers you could have 63 free off topic builds. Or in game terms every other time your city grew to have open slots you could build a non-synergistic building without penalty.

Also, the ideas don't disappear if left unread, but there's always more interest just after a new build. Still, synergy... benefit or burden? overpowered? The Advent in Sins have alot of synergy without any obvious cost. They can have 2 beam platforms a hanger and a repair platform. The beams increase the power of other beams, hanger provides shields and the repair platform also increases survivability. That level of synergy is overpowered. The question is how should they stack and what should the cost be? If synergy in buildings causes increased production should it be enough that you'd have to build cities that relied on each other heavily for other products or should you have a penalty for generic builds?

Should the default production of each building be lower to offset the potential maximum being much higher? say produce 6 units of food not 10 (40% reduction), but be able to get a maximum 160% bonus to that, for a max production of 15.6 (I'm thinking that the penalty should only be 1/4 of the maximum benefit. But that's just for aesthetics. It could still be overpowered, depending on how much of a no-brainer the strategy would be. Perhaps enabling positive synergy would enable negative synergy? whatever the negatives of a building are (-n% influence in galciv's slave pits, maint. costs, increased negative event chance) would increase equally but without the initial decrease.

So, a hive/telepathic collective could work with synergy on all tasks. Each extra worker in the field would give it's experience to other workers in the field and boost harvests. Every mind busy working on poetry would distract them. But equally every worker suffering in the slave pits, sacrificing themselves in the temple or generally suffering would pass on their suffering. So yes if you have a city at peace you'll have massive production. But should you need to gear up for war and build slave pits or sacrifice your population expect to have massive penalties. (maybe offset in your captital or near your sov./queen of the hive)

There are obviously non-telepathic reasons to introduce synergy. Tools, spare parts and experienced labour will be cheaper and more available in a city geared up for that form of trade than in a generalist town. Still it would be interesting to consider the following: 'is synergy overpowered? is synergy sensible?' and 'what do you gain from it?'

I'd like to think that done well it can be overpowered if you want it to be a perk, balanced for a neutral pick if you give it sufficient costs. It makes sense to be used under normal conditions and can also be used more specifically with 'hive' style races. What I think you would gain is more specific towns, each with it's own focus. Rather than a "new town" default build order like MoM (requiring an early granary for pop, maybe sawmill for increased production and a market for tax) you'd at least have a "farming town, mining town, shard town..." up to the number of unique synergy types. It'd be a good reason not to have a market/granary/sawmill in every town despite those buildings existing.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion