I don't think Merchants are that good a deal anymore. 1 food for 3 gildars isn't good.
I could maybe buy markets with a buff costing 1 food, but not merchants/moneychangers.
Could you revert that back?
lol ... why are Merchants OR Markets costing food anyways???
do only farmers know how to sell things? And is this somehow different from Arcane Labs or Libraries?
anyways, I can see a gold upkeep, and I can see some things having even a Knowledge upkeep or a magic upkeep ... but food upkeep for Merchants and Markets seems silly.
I dunno, maybe if the population was taxable, then it might seem less silly (able to grow less pop, but able for existing pop to give more profit)
I'm thinking more on the gameplay- there's nerfing, then there's obliterating.
I'd have been fine with merchants just giving 1 or 2 gildar instead.
It's a farmer's market. Sell food, make money.
Yeah, food is scare, people need food. So, it just logical if you sell food for money to the population
Ironically, in most games a "Farmers Market" actually gives you food ... (sometimes at an expense of 1 gold or something)
i kinda like it this way - it makes food even more valuable than before - and it also maks you not just click -arcane-tech-money-mats- building on every city you make
Ok, then give me a materials market. I have tons of that crap laying around I would like to sell off. (It usually gets sold to the minor powers.)
Basically, we need to move away from buildings that conjure resources. It needs to be about converting 1 resource to another. Food was chosen because you are seeded with a fertile land nearby as well as a gold deposit.
If you have a resource that doesn't have some cost associated with it, what happens is that the route to victory becomes about creating as many cities as possible without regard to any strategic placement or consideration.
Personally I like it. What about other types of markets that would convert other resources?
E.g.: Magical Bazaar, converts crystals. Goods market, converts mat (and/or iron??).
Or: Markets that can switch to different goods?
I don't like the food cost for markets. The first thing I do is mod the file to remove it.
Some resource production from buildings is acceptable and realistic. If your going to put a food cost on it then make the benefit more worthwhile or give us an income based on ALL the city production (food, materials, iron, crystal = more gold bonus).
eh, if it costs food, then maybe make it give more than 3 gold? Say, maybe 5?
food is at a premium- hence the evil soveriengs produce marketplaces that exploit that said need and charge money for they glorious food bwhahah.
wait that actually makes sense to me .
I think a better solution would be to give penalties for larger nations; there are reasons why historical big empires had problems!
Being able to excange one thing for another is good, but some resource production should be allowed without the need for special tiles. Not all food is produced in fertile areas, it just yields less results for the effort. Similarly trade and taxes can fund the typical govermental needs, but if you have a gold mine your nation will become rich.
I think a lot of people who are new to Stardock's games are a little put off with the resource-based economics. I ran in to this when I first played GalCiv. Most empire-builder strategy games are all about 'build as many cities as you can anywhere'. GalCiv threw me for a loop because it was about grabbing resources. This game is the same way. Cities are really only productive when they are there to harvest a resource. It's a little bit counter-intuitive to the standard way of thinking. However, it makes perfect sense in space, where most of the place is just emptiness, and it makes sense here where the world is overcoming a cataclysm. Resources are all that matters. With this system, there are fewer cities to manage, but each of them is strategically important based on what it produces. That is a very real world concept. Consider Hitler's invasion of Russia. He didn't go to grab random land - he went to grab the oil-production areas.
With that being said, monetary wealth is always a measure of the overall economy of a place - it never comes straight from gold mines. I think it would be better to do away with gold mines altogether and make wealth come from taxation (giving us a reason to have people in the first place) and from selling resources in the markets. However, we need to be able to sell more than just food. I really want a market that sells materials. They just pile up, and the people could certainly use them in their everyday life.
Great ideas. I like the idea of taxation to fund cities, and the ability to sell materials and other resources in a market. It is a lot more intuitive and neatly solves some big gameplay problems too.
Best regards,Steven.
Inline with the second paragraph of your post, basic resources (gold, food, and materials) should not come solely from a "good" area, but to aquire it takes more tech and yields less. With the proper technology, food can be produced in less ideal locations (irragation allows farming in arid enviorments). The workshop already produces some materials, and it would not be that far fetched to believe there are lesser sources for material (non-old growth forests still are a source of wood, you just cannot take as much without depleting it quickly). The as you said, trade and taxes are the staple for monetary income for a goverment; however gold mines do have a place still as they produce large quatities quickly (coinage, though that would normally cause inflation but that is getting to complicated).
Rather than making cities without strategic resources worthless, the focus should be on making it less profitable and harder to mass produce towns as an easy means to gain resources. On suggestion is to have cities only buildable on revitalized land (which could be created with a spell or occur normally). Then a penalty could be applied for having to large of a nation as the real reason civilizations did not settle everywhere is not because there was no point, but rather it would be too much bother to protect and govern.
I love this post, I hate the merchant.
If you really want to solve city spam, how about not putting in mechanics that necessitate it? You want to know why I spam cities left and right in my games? It's real simple, I have to.
Resources are spread all over creation, so we have to build cities all over creation to utilize them.
Work is the one and only universal input into the creation of any good or service. As food is limited, population should be as well. It isn't. Cities don't consume any food until after you build housing to expand them, so level 1 is food free.
Prestige growth controlled cities are, generally speaking, really bloody slow growing. It's nice getting access to the higher level structures and whatnot, but I can end a medium map against ridiculous ai, without bum rushing them, making champion channeler stacks, summoning elementals, or any other cheesy homo tactic I've found, long before I ever pass level 4. I have to do something with the 15+ excess food I can't possibly use because it's doing dick to advance my population growth.
Influence spheres also grow nice and slow. I can absorb and connect up far flung resources over the next 200 turns, or I can just pop down new cities right bleeding next to each other.
The biggest hose job of them all? Trade routes.
Real great that, instead of a nice, demand driven supply system of actual resources from production to refinement, I got this whore factory for food production. How do I make my 15+ food I can't possible use? Real easy. I just build a few other cities and run trade routes from all of them to the place with a farm.
Merchants don't make free money, but they don't consume food. They're specialization of the workforce, easing market access to the producers by functioning as middlemen to the consumers. They sell food, and any other product people would produce for sale. A trading market should thrive off trade and commerce, being of variable benefit in conjunction with the amount of production the city has. Of course, we got stuck with generic "materials" after all those wonderful posts about our in depth economy, so...
Abstractions are necessary evils only when necessary, any other time they're just a mess to clean up after. This is just one of the many messes. Spending 15 turns to create an "untrained" squad of peasants is another caused by not being able to produce swords and armor. Remember all those wonderful posts you wrote about supplying them with arms and whatnot to get an end result on the time it would take to get them ready? Beautiful memories, but they cause painful reactions.
I think the merchant change is an improvement, but mostly misses the real problem of size one cities being free promoting city spamming. And caravans being too effective.
I am hoping that having all cities use an extra food takes time to implement, and the merchant thing is a quick fix until they can get it right.
Note: the merchant selling food and there by reducing production is illogical. He would be selling it to the people of the town and then you tax part of the profit. The only way it makes sense would be if he is selling it elsewhere, which is the caravans' job.
Um, actually the merchant change is quite the opposite of an improvement for city spamming in my experience. Although the reason isn't the merchants themselves, but rather the reduced profitability of hunting monster for Gildar. Let me see if I can explain this in a way that makes sense...
Before, merchants cost nothing, but only produces 1 Gildar. It was virtually worthless, I didn't even bother building them because I could make money so easily from hunting. So a spam outpost would produce me a bunch of food (from caravan), a tech point, a mat (I didn't bother building arcane labs).
Now hunting isn't profitable anymore (waste of time really), so I have to resort to building merchants. Since a caravan from a city to my capital will generate anywhere between 2-5 food (capital always produces 12 food, so even a 20% bonus is 2.4 good). This means building a spam outpost nets me at least 1 food (usually more), mat, tech, and 2 gildar every turn (arcane too, but that becomes pointless after a certain point). Which, if you look at from a certain point of view is actually more than what a spam outpost would have produces from v1.07.
The thing is, because hunting is no longer a viable way to feeding your economy, you end up almost HAVING to spam cities for those extra 2 gildar per turn. As a result, merchants are now great, and there are now more spam cities than ever.
Now, I think I know the problem of City building from, and why it is different than MOM / Civ franchise at general. It is the non existance of tile resource. If you play MOM / Civ game again, you'll find tiles resource like food, gold, and the others, and the people who work on that tiles. Then because the setting of EWOM is in a wasteland version of world, then the developer remove them. To substitute the lost resource, the Dev create Merchant, Study and the others. It is not a bad idea, as Elemental should be different than the CIV Games.
I think the problem is not the city spam. Even Civ games AI did city spam, if my memory serve right. The problem is that because we have multiple tiles cities (with each tiles has more sprite that any 4x game that we know), then city spam will only give more burden to the memory. Honestly, I don't against city spam. It just... not right because of the game background. Wasteland? Post apocalypse world? So why we have metropolitan cities here? Plus RPG world tend to have fewer but more important cities.
So my suggestion is these (just forget the number as it is only an example)
- Make the POP as resource to build the building on the city. For example, Merchant require 5 POP as resource. Study need 10 POP as resource, etc.
- But, also put the City POP as the number of POP the city has. So, now, beside having a resource called POP, you can also to see the number of POP your city has. For example, the an outpost has 10 POP pool, a study and a Merchant. Than, it has 25 POP total.
- For every a number of POP, you need 1 Morale Resource. If you don't comply, your city will stop to produce anything. Your sovereign is a natural moral resource, but you can build morale resource building like temple, etc. But it can only be built if your sovereign is on the city.
- To upgrade a City, you need a requirement total POP number (just like the original idea).
- Now, to add the POP pool you need a house, and a house needs 1 food to maintain. Every POP that used to create a building in the city will not be replenished (in POP pool), but every POP that used to create Pioneer and Unit will be replenished.
- Pioneer needs 20 POP to create. You can't create a pioneer in an outpost. Only Village and above City level can create Pioneer
- Pioneer can make road, build a factory / something on the world resources to generate the resource for the civilization (outside your influence) - just like Galciv Asteroid Mines
- Only a sovereign can build a new city by using his own essense. It will become a O (zero) POP outpost. You need to put pioneers to the new city in order for the new city to have POP resource.
This way, you'll prefer fewer cities than before. Because city spam is not required to win the game anymore. You can even build only one city and grap the resource by building a mine on it.
The function of a city will expand. From resource generator (and unit builder) to a more of centre of civilization. Here, you can buy equipments for heroes, heal their injuries, and even upgrade their power. But, you need required building to do so. To open the shop screen, you need merchant. To heal your units, you needs hospitals, to upgrade your champion power, you need training centre.
I can buy that argument. If you're going to keep the 1 food cost, maybe up the benefits? Tasunke's 5 gildar idea sounds good. That's about the value of 1 food to me.
If city spam is your concern- you could solve two birds by upping army maintenance costs to lower units fieldable dramatically. More cities+ fewer units= harder to defend. Don't allow lvl 1 cities to allow for more units.
Actually it is more a result of the global economy and was predicted when you moved to it. Quality of the land you build on doesn't matter any more, there are no shortcomings to the land because everything is global. Not having any strategic placement or consideration was exactly what was discussed when the move was made because you wanted to simplify the game and speed it up so it wasn't a war of attrition. The simple economy just doesn't offer the tradeoffs of a local economy based game because any deficiencies in a single city can be overcome by simply adding more cities to the global resource pool and so there is no reason not to just expand expand expand as inherent to the system.
Now you've got the obvious problems with simple is that there is no inherent check on just spamming cities regardless of location because location doesn't really matter. I understand you really, really liked the model you launched with. But it should be clear by now that Dog don't Hunt.
You're trying to build upon the economic model you have is doomed failure because it just isn't robust enough or offer any inherent trade-offs that simply buildling more doesn't overcome.
Actually, a better way to solve city spam (rather than up army maintenance costs ... are u kiddin me holmes?) would be to have Total Worldwide population (of your faction) to cost food.
Like, 1 food per 200 global population, or something. Then, like another poster mentioned, have each Specialist Building cost a certain amount of "free population" ...
so you have used population and free population ... and only free population can be used to recruit soldiers (and many new buildings cost free population, turning them into used population) ... and all population, anywhere on the map, uses 1/200 food.
//
if, somehow, a cities population dips through its "free pop" and somehow lowers the used pop ... then buildings that use "used pop" will lower in effectiveness.
Preferably at a % rate based on the entire Used population. (so if half of the used population die, then all buildings work at 50% effectiveness)
As far as City-Growth n Prestige go ... I feel that there should be not only Pop increase from Prestige, but also from Birth.
(Birth growth would start out VERY low or at 0, and then would slowly increase as the population increased, kind of like a shallow logarithmic curve)
I like this idea.
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