Feedback on v1.2c

One idea

Put a hard limit on buildings of the same type equal, with the exception of housing, at 1 per city level.

Have techs give a second building that requires a lvl 3 city, so schools would give +1 tech, +10% research but you can build 3 of them in a lvl 3.  This would force a tech choice.

Maybe reduce the rate tech costs expand since research amounts will be lower initially

There's also a side problem from the exploding specialist cost: if you conquer- oftentime you have to disband a bunch of building or raze, or you'll be unable to build anything anywhere.

I think it is ok to start with groups if there are more heroes available to recruit for the first turns. Now there's just the sov and maybe one other hero if you're lucky. Imagine if you had like 4-5 of them from the beginning, scouting, questing, picking up weapons from goodie huts etc, that would be more fun.

Nice to know i'm not the only one who dislikes citizens. There are only two possibilities for their effect on gameplay. Either 1) they are never relevant (as before), because gold main or the tile limit are more important or 2) they are annoying, and succeed only in forcing the player to check back on the settlements every 5 turns, to see if there are 5 more people yet so he can build his 30th study.

Here's the link again.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/409198

The whole point of a level system is to break up a continuous variable into meaningful points. The current level system does this, with increasing pop requirements for each settlement level. Using citizens to limit buildings effectively means you have an extra settlement levelling system running paralell to the main one (ie, you're effectively gaining a "level" every time you get enough citizens for the next building), only with a huge number of annoying stages, and no notification of when those stages are reached.

As i keep saying, the only solution is to ditch the citizen system and just limit the number of studies/workshops to a given number for a settlement of a given level. Add more levels if need be, but there's no point in having two different levelling systems for settlements. You'll never be able to design a citizen requirements formula that works as well as simply setting the level requirements manually. And if you could, what would be the point when settlement level represents the EXACT SAME THING?

The level up bonuses are a silly idea as well. They would work much better as buildings with a level requirement. That way settlements would level up without our help, then we could go back and choose how we want to make use of it in our own time, after reviewing the situation/info (AND the benefits of the level up bonus would be visible in the buildings list).

Pop = Levels. Levels = buildings. Why does the game need anything else? It's simple, requires less micro, and represents everything the game is currently trying to do.

A functioning city system is the most important part of getting this game right. Without it, the whole game just degenerates into a contest to manipulate the system and get decent cities before anyone else.

Your proposal to limit the number of buildings to the city level is nonsense in many ways. It completely negates choice. If you have lvl 3 and can build 3 studies in your system you do. In such a system why bother building them at all? Might as well have the city just start generating the tech when it levels up. You've not thought your proposition out. There are more flaws with it, but this is the most glaring one in my opinion. Not saying the current system is great, but at least it has a semblance of choice. unlike your proposition.

Sorry, I'm not being clear enough. You'd be able to build 3 studies, OR 3 workshops, OR 3 spell research buildings, OR one of each, OR 2 of one and 1 of another. Essentially the same choice that citizens give you, but tied to levels (which are easier to keep track of, and you are notified about) instead of population (which is changing all the time), which makes sense because levels are determined by population. Then at level 4 you'd be able to add another of any of them etc. That way it is easy for the devs to specify exactly what a city of a given population can do (and when they can do it), and it is impossible to get a citizen deficit.

You can include other (% bonus) buildings within that limit, or create a separate one (ie, at level 3 you can have 3 studies/workshops/archivists and 2 % bonus buildings).

Honestly, "population points" and "building slots" are pretty much equivalent in my mind.  I'm fine with either metric... so I'm not going to argue the point.

What I object to is this new "behind the scenes" scaling mechanic that actively penalizes me for doing what I should be doing: adapting to the map.  Further, I don't get to know if I'm hosed until *after* I've added the building to the queue, and the act of doing so is irrevocable.  That is the cardinal sin of the scaling mechanic, and why it must go.  That, and the fact that you must now raze every city you capture or else your carefully balanced production profile gets blown all to hell and you can't build anything for 50 turns. 

Please. 

This game is so broken now by this mechanic that it isn't funny.  It's just sad.

Please fix.

The real issue is that players are compelled to spam one type of building (studies) , because the effective value of the buildings aren't equivalent at all.

Maybe the problem is that instead of increased costs, you should be getting diminishing marginal returns per building in city, until you build a high-level building that reducess those diminshing marginal returns on a per-city basis, or gives you a second building to spam. 

The capturing issue is really what makes the mechanic broken (and I mean truly broken- it's choice-limiting and unfun).  I do think when you conquer a city there should be a loot/raze/keep option.

I'm not a big fan of the population system either, but that is probably because I don't fully understand how it works. It seriously needs to be more transparent. Right now I'm just placing buildings and suddenly I can't do anything because I've reached a secret cap...

But I do understand the point of it. The point is to connect the construction of buildings with the training of soldiers, which I think is a good idea at least on paper. If it makes for a fun game that's another question.

Another point with it is to limit city spam. If you have a fixed number of slots per city, all you have to do is build another city...

I thought that the majority of people were against city spamming (me included).  But it seems that now because of tile limiting being introduced again I am being forced to build more cities.  Then I find that I can't build anything because of the massive specialst increases.  This has taken all the fun out of the game for me, as I liked to build huge uber cities.  In my last game the map was filled with new settlements built by the enemy that were stuck at level one due to these limitations.

The game doesn't feel so sandbox to me anymore with all these restrictions and limitations.  I know that everyone has his or her own preferences and that you can't please everyone, but I'm not enjoying myself so much anymore.

Cheers,

Andy.

City spam (particularly by the AI) has become a problem again. But generally I'm in favour of the population concept once Stardock get it functioning properly and provide management tools to make it easier to gauge what is happening where. We need to keep telling ourselves that we are back in beta testing mode and not expect a polished system just yet. To me it doesn't look too far away before we have a balanced city building system.

This is where I would love to see the population/city building game mechanic end up:

Research no longer tied to a single building system (Studies). Instead each field of research is researched concurrently by specific buildings within the cities. Eg. Guard Post (level 1 building) increase Warfare tech. Shrines increase magic tech. Guilds increase adventure tech. Workshops increase civil tech etc.

No limit on number of level 1 buildings other than population. (Current system - sort of).

Each city growth level gives potential bonuses and one-per-city buildings boosting basic level buildings. Eg. Level 2 warfare tech building is Barracks and boosts output of Guard Posts by a select amount. Level 3 warfare tech building is Keep which gives a further bonus. Level 4 could be Castle and level 5 Fortress. All providing bonuses to the lower level buildings within their tech area.

Higher level buildings also provide city-specific bonuses. Eg. As each level of building in the warfare tech is achieved it shortens the time to recruit troops. Each level in Magic could provide a boost to spell research and mana income.

As cities grow with each level the choice of bonuses could be limited to the current level buildings within that city. Eg. A level 2 city that only has warfare, magic, and civil tech level 2 buildings can only take the percentage city growth bonus from those three areas.

As cities grow each level a permanent garrison (cannot be moved out of the city) of basic troops is added to the city. These are added to the population count. Eg. At level 1 there is a party of peasants. At level 2 a party of Observers are added. At level 3 a party of archers, etc.

This would promote city specialisation and city growth instead of city spam. Cities would still need to be built to capture important world resources but the focus would be on managing growth in a handful of specific cities.

Studies would not be the most important building any more and cities would be themed to focus on specific research paths.

Actually the system I was talking about (using levels instead of citizens to limit buildings) is all about stopping city spam. To beat city spam you need a system where

- 10 guys in a developed city are worth more than 10 guys in a hamlet, and are more productive because of improved infrastructure

- Pursuing that is made viable because getting 10 more guys in your city is just as (if not more) easy as getting them in a new town.

The first point is how buildings work. Limiting buildings by levels instead of population will mae the building system simpler, prevent population deficits and building endless copies of the same thing. It allows you to schedule all your buildings after level up instead of checking back all the time. But the next step is to replace flat production of 1 research per building with production of 0.1 research per person per building. That way you continue to gain more production as your population grows without having to spam buildings. Even after you've reached the max settlement size. So a city with 2x the population is more than 3x as productive because it has both more pop AND better infrastructure.

The second point is about population growth. At the moment population growth of towns is largely independent of each other. So if you have 2 cities your total population grows roughly twice as fast as if you had one. This is just totally wrong, and you can tell the devs noticed this because that is why they introduced the multi-city penalty to prestige. But it's a poor work around. The problem is that food currently works as the cieling for (rather than the driver of) population growth. In reality, it doesn't matter how flashy a place looks, people have kids or emigrate somewhere if that place can support them (ie, feed them). The way to do it is this: divide total faction food production by total faction population. If it exceeds a given ratio, population grows at 2%, if it is less then population declines. Where that population ends up growing is determined by housing. Food determines growth, housing determines where. So the game encourages a style of play where you have a few large cities surrounded by undeveloped farming hamlets/mining towns for resources. This is tempered by the benefits of higher level buildings (irrigation in larger towns), logistics and the desire to spread power and risk (isolated farmsteads will quickly fall to the enemy).

That's never going to work though. You end up making the citizen requirements suffocating, or meaningless. If population is the only limit, you WILL eventually reach the tile limit and have hideous, enormous cities eating up the map and eating up memory. And if you impose some other limit to stop this happening, then what was the point of the population limit?

The problem at the moment is that we have production scaling with population, but we need to keep building more buildings to keep up with it. That's never going to work. Meanwhile, we have the production of those buildings increasing with level (you get improved studies and houses at level 3 so long as you have the tech) which leads to ridiculous situation where you can't increase you population because you can't increase your population to reach the next level. It needs to be the other way around, with the production of buildings determined by population (and therefore automatically) and the number of buildings determined by level (and built at level up). That way there is a safe and reasonable limit on the size of cities (less than the tile limit), but cities keep getting better indefinately after they've reached this maximum size. You'd be representing the benefit of the same two things (settlement population and settlement level), but in ways that are more appropriate to each.

That's my best guess for fixing city spam and the mind numbing city system. I'll eat my hat if it doesn't work.

I'm trying to understand your system, Sethai, but I'm not quite grasping it (I don't think). Could it be summarised as follows:

• Food is an empire-wide factor that doesn't reduce.
• Empire-wide population growth is determined by (Food / Population) * Growth Factor
• Population itself is city-specific. The rate of growth in each city determined by number of houses within each city. Eg. A bigger city will have a larger share of the population growth than a small level 1 hamlet because it has the housing and infrastructure.
• Building goods production determined by city population. Eg. A workshop in a city with 10 people produces 1 materials but the same workshop in a city with 50 people produces 5 materials.
• Number of available buildable tiles determined by city level. Eg. A level 1 city may have 4 building tiles. Level 2 has 8 etc.
• Can still choose city bonuses at level-up.

The benefits being:

• Bigger cities give bigger production bonuses
• City size (tile area) is much more controlled making the map look better.
• Tile limits help to promote city specialisation
• Main population growth is in bigger cities which helps reduce city spam

I can see this working quite nicely.

Personally, I would still love to see the research system re-worked using city buildings but this is a different problem than getting the population mechanic to work effectively.

Didn't Frogboy hint that population would be reworked in E:FE? I think you're having an interesting discussion, but it sounds like it's beyond E:wom.

Why are there so many different difficulty types? 

Easy, Medium and Hard. Keep It Simple Stupid. 

If there are extra difficulty things, make them into individually adjustable options. In other words, go buy a copy of Mount and Blade Warband, look at their game difficulty options and STEAL THEM.

They did it right by creating flexibility. You can't block, but you can out earn the AI? Autoblock + hard campaign difficulty. You're terrible at keeping yourself alive, but you do fine with your army? 1/4th damage self, full damage to allies. You're obscenely good with a lance: Manual (hard). 

Broad difficulties aren't a good way to do things, especially when there are so many gradations. Some players are good at one thing, others are better at another. Let the players choose what they want in their game so that they can have more fun.

Yes, that's pretty much it, and it's pretty much how real life populations work. For a given amount of food, growing (or indeed shrinking) until the reach a point of equilibrium for the given resources. So long a food production keeps growing though, you can create the illusion of perpetual growth (as has been happening IRL for some time now).

The important part is faction-wide pop growth based on food. This would make the food system a lot more forgiving i think.

How you then distribute that growth can be done in a lot of ways. You can simply have all settlements growinging at the same 2% (or whatever) but only allow the ones with sufficient housing to grow. Or you can do what crystlshake suggested yesterday in another thread, where you first divide the total new citizens being created per turn, in the ratio of city prestige. I can see the logic in that.

Although personally I think it would be better to make the level up bonuses INTO buildings that had a level requirement. That way you could get rid of the screen that pops up and puts you on the spot, and let people make the decision in their own time. And that way all the information would be on the building list, in the same place.

It seems like it would work.  I kind of like the idea of the city leveling up- but I agree it would be prefferable to have the bonuses work as a building mostly since, as said, it currently puts you on the spot to remember what each city is best at. Could have it so instead its more of a notice as there are more build options available for that city.

I'm hoping that the event system would enable a 'tales' events where you could have a random adjustment applied to a city, region, faction, resource type, etc.  Say something like "Tales have reached your ears that the far city of Gladstone is having a festival (small bonus to gold production for a season)."  or "A spate of viscous storms (small loss on one of the production types for a few turns) have taken a toll in Fardale." or "Spring is in the air, sire, and also in our steps.  The bounty of flowers has made honey something for everyone (all apiaries worldwide produce more for a few turns."