Help me understand the costs of unit training

from Elemental Forums

Ok so I understand most the costs from training a unit but I am not sure I fully understand one requirement.

Training a unit requires

1) gold per turn after it is created (wage)

2) Time and opportunity cost as it takes turns to build based on your production in the city

3) Special rescources or techs (a unit might need horses or metal in order to be created)

4)?????? this is the part I don't understand, when creating a unit it says I need a certain number of workforce or something like that in order to create it. I am guessing this means population. However when creating units none of my population seemed to get used up in the training process. Is the game merely asking that my population is above the workforce number requested?

 

Please could someone clarify exactly how it works? If we only have to reach a population number in order to create units then I would feel the current system is a touch too simple. It would make more sense to me if population was used up to create the unit. So you would lose 5 population once your unit of 5 was built. I like the idea of needing a certain "workforce" number in order to train and equip a unit during training time. This would lead to interesting economics where while training a unit your population lowers by the workforce needed to train the unit. Once the unit is trained your workforce is added back to your total poulation (minus of course the population who actually become the unit).

For example last night I went to create a new city. I decided to create a settler unit but was unsure as to what the actual cost would be. Surely setting up a new city would cost me a lot in the short run. Looking through the units creation stat sheet on the training menu I saw that there was a high workforce cost of 60 needed. Great I thought, it seems I will need to consider if I want to sacrifice 60 of my population from this city in order to create a new one. This made sense to me and felt like a cool choice to have to make as population is a key factor in reserach and gold from tax you earn each season and I would have to take a short term hit to this in order to get an new city up and running for long term gains.

Well I made my choice and started to train the settler unit. I watched my population carefully to see if it would drop straight away as I began training the unit. My population number didn't move, Infact my population proceeded to increase a small amount over the next two turns as the unit was being trained. No problem I thought, the population probally gets removed once the unit is built. Next turn the unit is built and to my suprise my population is still the same. Well this confused me no end and has lead to my posting here. I just can't wrap my head around how and why the current system works. What is the actually cost (apart from training time) of setting up a new city or outpost if we are not using up a large amount of either gold or population?

5,768 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Where are you seeing this population cost?

That Total Labor Required value is simply the amount of production it takes to create one of those units.

See the Production number by the city? That's how much Production per turn your city can 'spend' to create a unit or building. It doesn't take any population.

Research and buildings you place can upgrade the production number, speeding the creation of training and building.

Pretty standard for strategy games, what's unclear about this? (not being snarky, curious)

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I guess I was confused by the fact it says "total labour required" to me this suggests population is involved. I would rather the tooltip said "production required" as this would be much clearer.

Even so my earlier feelings still stand. Production is just a number we must reach in order to build things but there is no real cost in building something. Do you not feel that it would be a more satisfying system if we keep production working as it is here (but changed the tooltip) then had two extra requirements added to reflect "workfoce required" and "population used"

"Workforce rquired" = Your population would be lowered by this amount for the length of training.

"Population used" = Population you would lose for good upon creation of the unit.

Seems silly atm that we only need to reach a certain level of production for a city and then the only cost in pumping out new citys/outposts is the time it takes to create the unit. Or is there another cost to creating citys or outposts I am missing here like extra maintainance on each new city? even if this is the case gold is hardly balanced well currently.

Thank you for the reply btw you did clear things up no end.

 

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Units require gold maintenence, as you noticed, and more powerful units have a higher gold cost, so fielding large armies does add up to a significant budget hit.

Beyond that, more developed units require horses/metal/crystal to build, which are all limited resources.

Finally, as far as Pioneers/cities go specifically, you have a resource called 'Prestige'. It's a growth bonus applied to ALL of your cities, but it is split up among them evenly, so if you have 10 Prestige and 1 city, you get +10 growth per turn. 10 cities? +1 growth in each.

So if you expand, you're slowing the rate of growth of all of your cities.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Ah I see, didn't know that prestige was split like that. So the choice is lots of slow growing cities or a few fast growing ones. Do outposts use up prestige?

With that all explained I can see that the current economic system works fine as it is. I would still like to see more upfront costs to makeing units and would like population to be considered as a resource but thats just a personal opinion and is neither here nor there.

For the record am I not the sort of person who believes there is only one "right" way for everything, lots of ways to skin a cat and all that. I do however believe in consistency of logic/philosophy. Sometimes with Fallen Enchantress I wonder if that is always there.

For example in the current system

  • You need to account for every horse you wish to use in createing a unit yet the same logic is not carried over for men and women.
  • iron is a resource that is collected to make things yet leather is not.

Sometimes I just find the choices made in this game fine in practice but jarring in terms of game logic.

Any how thank you for helping me out, things make alot more sense now. Btw out of interest do you know if there is currently a cap on maximum population for a city?

 

 



Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Outposts do not currently use prestige. There's a lot of discussion about Outposts right now because they have some weird strategic implications and not a lot of mechanics behind them right now (see: https://forums.elementalgame.com/416051)

Yes, level 5 is the highest a city can reach, don't recall the exact pop number.

Pop growth is used purely for leveling cities, so you can think of 'growth' as your 'horses' for cities. One is just used for domestic growth, while the other is used for military construction.

Iron being a resource and not leather is in place to ensure you can get at least a basic level of equipment for troops - everyone can get leather armor, but you have to find or fight for iron mines to build heavily armed and armored troops.