similarly, buildings don't pay taxes, people do.
this is another one of the silly abstractions in this game that i've never been able to understand. it is my belief that linking food and income to buildings rather than the people who live in them is the single biggest problem with the strategy side of elemental. moving to a population based system will be more intuitive, and prevent city spamming.
here is how to do it.
add up your total civ food production. divide this by your population. if it exceeds a certain ratio of food per person, that settlement gets a bonus to population growth (it has the means to support more people). if it is below a certain ratio, it receives a negative to population growth. further bonuses to growth (prestige, royalty, pubs etc) also apply. this way populations grow like they do in real life, gradually stabilizing at levels that can be supported. housing should just determine the hard cap that population cannot pass.
if income that isn't from gold mining (ie, taxes) is tied to population rather than merchant buildings, then it becomes beneficial for the player to keep his population in places where he has the infrastructure to make money out of them. instead of providing base income, buildings should apply a bonus to the amount of money you make from taxes. so ten guys in level 5 settlements with administration buildings earn you more than ten guys in some village you just founded. so you have an economic incentive not to found loads of settlements.
if you build too many settlements while your food production remains constant, population growth rates will fall and your settlements will stop growing (until you increase food production or build other bonus buildings like pubs). move any of the income increasing buildings into level 2.
the player has to choose between being a large sprawling empire that controls lots of resources, where few settlements reach high levels and less non-mining income is generated, or being a wealthy cosmopolitan nation like venice, with few resources under it's control. of course, if you have enough food resources you can be both large and developed.
this philosophy can be easily set to the following music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ83KXUloP8&ob=av2n
All new homes come with a full pantry and root cellar. If no one lives in the house ... the food just sits there. It is right on the Real Estate brochure tacked to the forest near your city, and painted on benches at the park.
Yes people eat food and they live in houses, shacks, huts, etc. It's all very well to build those buldings but if you can't feed the people they attract they aren't going to stay. Hence the abstraction in the game you see.
but if the people die the houses still cost you food! and if you don't link income to population there's no penalty to shipping people off to found new settlements. when you can easily build a self sufficient settlement at no real cost to the rest of the faction, then of course people will spam settlements to grab territory.
so far as i can tell, population currently serves no purpose other than meeting level-up targets and training infantry. i haven't tried it, but currently i should imagine that on conquering a high level settlement you might as well scrap all the housing and save yourself the food, since troop training consumes so little. it's possible that this might revert the settlement to level 1 and stop all your high level buildings from working, but i doubt it.
in theory, at the moment an empty settlement makes as much money and consumes as much food as a full one. that's messed up.
Also, what happens when you recruit half your citizens to the army? Does your food requirement cut in half because half your people are gone? No, it doesn't, and this is what the OP is getting at.
Last I remember soldiers still need to eat after all an army marches on it's stomach. Of course you could argue that that should lower the population cap of your town, since they can't refill thouse houses unless they also have enough food to feed the army and the new people, but I think they are happy to leave that absracted out for simplicity.
i was about to say the same thing. however you do it, the behaviour is unrealistic so long as you link food consumption to the buildings not the people. but this is far from the worst problem it causes: see OP. linking consumption and income to population instead of buildings is no more complicated, far more intuitive, prevents city spamming and makes the game more fun.
currently it's not even clear that the food at the top of the screen is a measure of excess production/turn. putting it at the top of the screen with everything else implies that it is a gross amount stockpiled (like all the other resources that go there). so new players think they are spending one unit of food to build a house rather than it costing them one unit per turn. this is what i thought when i first played the game.
as was pointed out in the "brainstorming city spamming solutions" thread, spamming cities currently GAINS you food because it allows you to construct more caravans and cast more nature's bounty spells. this is totally messed up.
With the kingdoms (I am only sure this is not true for the 5th city level for the empire) the "base" population provided by a city exceeds the amount needed to get to its current level (4th level kingdom city requires 1250 to get to level 5, and a 5th level can support 1500 people without housing). I have an thought which I have posted before and will be posting soon in my city revamp thread in the Ideas board.
link -> https://forums.elementalgame.com/397365/#2780756
City Spamming is an aspect of the game....
You revive the land by building those cities, expand your territory more (makes the world more safe -- also good for teleporting around), etc.
I can relate.
I was hoping for demand driven population migration and and employment driven production.
Merchants should not consume food!! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
yeah, this was a silly workaround that attempts to fix a problem that needs to be fundamentally rethought.
interesting. so in theory once you get to a city level you're happy with you can just scrap all your houses and save a ton of food. what a joke.
Think of it this way: the food and housing is place in the open to attract people to the city. Basically you build a house complete with food on the table in order to say, "Hey, you guys walking around in the swamps over there, we got a place for you to stay and food on the table, come join our city." Then you put them to work in w/e sweat shop you got setup beside that house.
Yes, though with the Empire (I have not played them, only taken there cities) 5th level cities need to still have 2 to 6 or so houses to maintain the 1000 people needed. I think that when you are not building stuff, the population cap should slowly rise (effort goes from building special stuff to expanding the city).
The whole city building and management needs to be re-thought. As it stands it makes little to no sense that there is no food anywhere besides plots of land that grow all of one kind of plant. Oceans are dead and rivers are non-existent.
In any fantasy world there is food everywhere except for deserts, barren land, tundra and frozen wastes but in Elemental the whole world is a desert besides a few plots of land that have bees or fertile ground. If this was done to support the lore it is bad bad lore. Lore should be made to back up the game not the other way around.
Now I have been suggesting to have food more like civ does it and that every piece of land has food but some have more of it. Plus food would be directly related to growth and population and housing would be automated. Eventually by the end of the BETA (1.1) they will have figured out a way to implement pop growth and city management a little more fluidly.
If you want cities to be different introduce a building tree and pick and choose which buildings to build and allow them to focus on different things like research or military. Have the option of destroying those buildings so you could rebuild the major buildings to have them focus on another direction. You can still pick where to place the major buildings but things like housing would just spread from the middle outwards like a real city grows.
I agree with much of the sentiments and ideas in this thread.
Is it simply the modus operandi for Stardock games to feature simplified economic systems? I didn't think much of it in Gal Civ or Gal Civ2 because other 4X games were mostly just as abstracted.
However, with modern processor power it seems unnecessary. After playing Distant Worlds, it's clear that the genre can easily support highly-detailed and semi-realistic economies if enough effort is put into coding the underlying equations. Bringing things down to Earth, the model suggested by the OP is similar to those utilized by Dominions or Total War: all land produces varying degrees of food, food grows population, populations pay taxes. They use it because it's a good system and it works.
We probably wouldn't be discussing this if it weren't so easy to beat the AI with city spamming. I think food is a reasonable abstraction on limiting how much you can develop certain aspects of your cities economy. Also food directly contributes to your pop cap via housing, so even if it's wonky (market, merchants), it's still like 75% "not wonky."
Wow, I thought I was the only one feeling this game needed a severe does of 4X 101.
I've been trying to validate my claim that terrain should have an impact on the cities it surrounds. Thing is though, that from what I could see, apart from Mountains, Hills & Forests, all terrain reverts to whatever your faction is. For example, if you go up north and build a city in artic tiles, they will transform to 'barren' terrain. (Sorry I always forget the name of the terrain for Empire)
See -> https://forums.elementalgame.com/394050
Or -> https://forums.elementalgame.com/394324
But now that you talk about population, it's even more obvious that there are major holes in the current system. Also, someone did bring up the fact that armies don't require food. I guess it could be argued that the money costs cover food. If everything was turned upside down it would really help pacing the game. I think the OP's idea is quite well fleshed out, and based on other 4X games. Excess food production should be tied in to population growth, and population should be reflective of more than giving you a "level" up and giving you new buildings.
If we take the civ model, when you have early settlements, if you send off a settler, you know you'll lose the ability to 'farm' one city square. So there is a definite drawback, and it prevents quick expansion. You need to balance things so that you don't end up hurting your cities progress too much. As population (in civ) is linked to economy, research & luxury. Currently, as some have mentioned, you can city spam, quickly dish out the buildings that pop out money, tech, materials & arcane.
And the fact that population growth is solely based on prestige, I find that a little weird. I guess it's supposed to reflect the lore of the book it's based on, where people rally to entities with more presence I guess. Like the OP said, I think the lore of the book shouldn't warp the genre or playability of the game. I really don't think that everyone that plays elemental will read the book, I'll admit myself I have no interest in reading the book. Not that I don't like fantasy but it's just not in my list of things to do.
I really hope we more and more take a look a civ, *cough cough* Master of Magic and all the top 4X games for inspiration on spells, city building and game mechanics. I find it weird how a few people on the forums start waving the book and saying "but this wouldn't jive with the story of the book". Look, when they make a rendition of a movie in a game, the reason it's not 100% accurate it's to make sure that you make a game out of that movie. Same goes for elemental, I understand it's taking it's inspiration from it, but I shouldn't do so at the detriment of playability and greater enjoyment/challenge.
Keep the good suggestions like this coming! I'm sure the dev team is ready to listen.
Regards,
V.
I have several replies floating around that basically say this very thing ... although having *some* buildings that actually produce raw gold wouldn't be bad.
I actually had an idea of 3 types of buildings.
Class A would give raw product.
Class B would give raw product based on # of citizens in the city
Class C would give a percentage to anything made by Citizens, Buildings, Resources, etc.
So in other words ... WorkShops could be Class B and give 1 materials per 100 people living in the city. (rounded up)
Markets and Banks could be Class C and give percentage bonuses to all produced gold.
An Arcane Labratory could be Class A and give raw product. While an Arcane Cathedral/ Dark Cathedral could be Class B and give +1 Arcane points per X amount of population.
A School could be Class B (X per population) while a University could be Class C ... and an Archive Institute could be Class A.
...
most building types could simply have a maintenance in gold, so spamming buildings in small cities would only *lose* you gold ... while a big city would pay off with its People Taxes and its Markets n Banks. (Civ III also used this system)
however ... some buildings could cost gold AND materials ... like an Arcane Lab or a University that uses up alot of research supplies.
Heck ... some buildings could even consume population ... like they Kill X people per turn for Dark Sacrifices (hence Dark Cathedrals doing this)
I'm sure you could have buildings consuming anything, but (at the moment) it only makes logical sense for buildings to cost gold and/or materials in upkeep. Sure Civ III and MoM (like many games) abstract upkeep to ONLY gold, and while an only gold policy is fine, a multi-resource (potential) is fine too ... however I don't see a resource like "food" coming into the equation.
There is also a way for buildings to use Population as a maintenance fee ... without killing people. Basically, they require X population to function. There are 2 good ways to do this off the top of my head. One, is something I've already mentioned regarding storing population as two flavors ... "occupied" and "Free", with some/most buildings turn free (usable) population into occupied. With only free population being available for military purposes. If "occupied" population goes down for some reason, the buildings that use pop stop working (or lose effectiveness) until the occupied pop count is restored.
The Second way ... would be for each building to have a "population minimum" to function. Not only that, but to even to be selected for building. It would still show up on the build-list, but it would be grayed out, and hovering over it would say "needs 500 population before buildable". Something like that. So basic buildings can be built with any population, and specialized buildings would require higher populations ... if the pop dips below their "minimum population requirements" then the building stops functioning (but still costs maintenance fees), until the population is restored.
With the new patch I change my strategies a bit =O quite exciting =D
While everything can be different or better to everyone's own wishes ( and it can >.> ), personally I do not want something the same as civ iv and v cause I have those games too >.>
There is just too much possible, I guess...So far I am enjoying the ride of the changes~
If it is going to be population based, I guess we need more tech and buildings that improve food or lands for food production to maintain all the people and armies (>)
perhaps, but there's no good reason for it to be.
the food issue may be only slightly flawed, but the income model is completely broken.
@tasunke: i think the level limit should be sufficient for limitting buildings to locations that have the manpower to run them. buildings should be the main reason you want to level up your settlements. the game currently fails to do this. thats why they felt the need to slap on those arbitrary level-up bonuses that you can't keep track of: they had to find another way to make people care about levelling their settlements. this is wrong.
and there's no reason you can't have prestige and other buildings contributing to growth too: i allowed for that in my original model. just have food and all other positive and negative growth factors shown in a clear list, like in the total war games.
i think the whole concept of the sovereigns reviving the land with their magic would be better incorporated into food, rather than replacing it as a factor (because food works, as we've seen in almost every other game). you could argue that the sovereigns magic has been used to found the first settlement in the first place, or to produce your starting patch of land. if you wanted to extend this you could even add a mechanic for producing fertile land by sacrificing essense. but that's not necesarry.
i just can't see any lore argument why food should not determine population growth.
personally i don't like the idea of building maintenance at all, but that's an argument for another day. especially the inconsistent way it is applied: why does a wall cost money to maintain but a library does not? i thought after the "Industrial Sectors killed my economy" debacle in GalCiv2, stardock would have realised this.
I don't think anyone is saying to copy Civ IV or Civ V's model
In fact, the "buildings cost maintenance" is fairly common among many strategy games ... including Master of Magic and Civ III
do we need corruption/waste? No. Do we need citizens to actually work land tiles? No.
Do we *probably* need a taxable population? Why not?
Firstly, we should determine how much population creates a "face" (cause pop=soldiers so it matters) ... and determine how many "faces" is normal for a big city. (in Civ its usually 10 a big city and 20 a huge city ... so 10-20 is the normal city range)
Each face in Elemental should probably be a linear increase (as opposed to exponential in Civ) due to our "economy of population" with soldiers.
Then you balance how many taxes you can get with X population vs how many soldiers X population can make (or something like that) ... and also you'll want to know how many soldiers can be paid for by an X population city with all your economy gold-producing cities.
You can even have a "Refined Taxes" that gives +0.1 gold from each face (in taxes)
IF you want to add depth from such a simple system, add happiness/unhappiness, and a tax slider (sorta like MoM).
In that case, you would need to calculate how many soldiers could be paid for by an X population City with all gold% bonus bulidings and all Unrest Reducing/Law increasing buildings ... and max tax slider (also to balance Unrest production with Unrest reduction ... IE law buildings vs taxes)
So with a simple faces system (without Tile-working, or even happiness) can add to the existing system in a simplistic matter.
For instance, you could have "1000-2000" being the normal population for a "big city" and have it produce say 10 gold in taxes. (5-10 gold).
If you wanted such a system, you could make each 200 pop being "1 face" and each face producing 1 gold in taxes. Or each 100 pop being "1 face" and each face producing 0.5 gold in taxes.
In such a system, you could either round up to the next integer always, round to the nearest, or simply cut off the decimal. Either way could be balanced into a workable system.
Basically ... if you add this, plus buildings costing some maintenance in gold, then you would have a system where small-pop cities couldn't self-sustain a LOT of buildings.
You could even have non-gold producing buildings *repeatable*, and each copy costing +1 gold in maintenance. (probably not the magic buildings though ... just buildings that produce materials or metal)
I'd honestly like to see some Arcane buildings that consume population (as in killing them)
additionally, the simple model in the OP also allows for a more city-state type approach. you can found a few outposts to control resources, but prevent them from growing too much by not contructing housing. so that way though you're still making less money from the people there than those in the big city, they only represent a small fraction of your total pop and you can take that small hit so you control more resources.
that way power remains concentrated in the capital and the strength of civs is much less proportional to their area. even when you've conquered half their kingdom, so long as they retain their capital they can still put up a good fight. that way the epic battle in a war comes at it's end, rather than it's beginning.
this is also much more fun.
Well, I think some buildings should be more effective in high pop cities, and other buildings should be just as effective in any city (yet all costing maintenance of some kind)
I'm pretty sure most developers should know that using building-based maintenance is a *primary* concept consideration when your using a global system without distance modifiers.
There were simply too many simplifications and corners cut during the "design process" for this particular version of the game.
If buildings are not going to cost anything in the way of maintenance, and can be built in any city, and can't be duplicated in a high level city ... and no form of city-number-based maintenance costs ... then ofc ya might as well spam small-time cities for the basic production.
And the way to counter this??? make resources WAY more effective than any city could possibly be ... oh wait ... they are scattered all over the map. And more of them pop up ... leaving no empty space. Were we trying to prevent city spam? We seem to have just made the game more *boring* and not stopped city spam at all.
Honestly it was more fun when we all tried to make all our cities Level 5s cause it actually *mattered*.
How about make a self-sufficient Giant Super city be a viable strategy (with ur first food resource) ... as well as divide your food among the population (as opposed to housing), and have pop growth in each city be relative to current pop * (logrithmic ratio based on extra food).
So that all cities grow in population based on how *much* extra food their is, but bigger cities do it faster. With housing as a "hard cap" of course.
With a *building maintenance* of gold, you would be able to justify the tendency of all your food going (essentially) to any big city with extra housing. Because those larger cities are *more effective*.
Also, since Pop and Food are directly related (but soldiers and food are not) ... Excess Gold will allow some of your population to be converted to soldiers, and the new *lack of food consumption* will cause your Cities to once again fill up. Therefore, excess gold in any one particular "state of economic existence" can lead directly to an increased Military.
Of course, the more soldiers you employ the less quickly your coffers will fill up, so you'll have to wait longer to outfit new troops, which will lower your income even more so ... making you wait even longer to outfit new troops.
This would lead to a Logarithmic Progression of Faction army sizes related directly to the availability of food. From turn 1 to the end of the game.
*It would also make Larger, more central, cities be able to produce troops much faster* - for instance, an outpost may be able to produce 5 pop/turn for new soldiers, while a Capital may be able to produce 100 pop/turn for new soldiers. (in other words, limited only by Income and Equipment costs).
This would lead to more war-like nations fighting over sources of food ... because population makes more money, money makes troops, and to get all this you need food. Of course, Gold Resources will also be important to such factions, but food will become important as well because of the speed their cities will grow AKA new soldiers ready to train.
If you add to that the ability to throw "unorganized" soldiers into the field with 1 turn of training, at a penalty of combat, you can try to go Barbarian Horde on someone you feel would crush to enough of your numbers.
The only resources you would be losing would be Materials and Gold spent on the equipment, but every time a stack of your died your gold-income would sky-rocket, and by the time your gold re-filled all the extra food created by your massive recruitment would have filled your cities with more willing recruits.
MEANWHILE ... someone that doesn't focus on the "burn and churn" meat-grinder approach to warfare could simply keep small armies w/ big cities, and pour ALL their gold into elite units and well-equipped heroes ... not to mention better buildings that cost more maintenance.
.. in this way Gold Mines would still be Very Important but not ALL important. Food would, in the long run, prove to be much more important for the maintaining of an army.
Prestige could still provide a raw increase to population, being thus more important in the early game. Alternatively, you could have Prestige count as *extra food* for pop-growth purposes to last its importance throughout the entire game. (or some system in the "middle" of the two)
With enough gold and food, each faction would have *Free resources* to actively fight over the important resource sites of Lost Libraries and Arcane Temples.
I believe this model also, somewhat indirectly, supports the model of larger battles w/ more soldiers ... if you consider specialty buildings like Dark Cathedrals or Universities costing as much gold-maintenance as 100 soldiers. (a decision between lots of gold for elite soldiers, or spending that profit on large armies or nice buildings)
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