The major economic nerfs that were slipped into 1.08 have dealt a blow to the fun of this game, and there wasn't much to be had to begin with as we wait for 1.1.
Besides the absurdity of merchants consuming food (which is just a blatant attempt to limit the number of cities in the game), resources are less common, particularly materials and food. This reduces the size of an empire. Plus, it severely limits the number of cities that can reach the higher levels, which are required to start having anything resembling fantasy, rather than just medieval, armies.
Empires were already too small, with too few cities and too few armies even on large maps. Elemental has tried to impose its vision of "one city, one party" on us with an even heavier hand. I just don't understand how a game that supposedly takes its cue from MoM, GalCiv, and the Civilization games can be so determined to reduce player states to a handful of cities and one big stack that runs around using teleport.
I would try to mod some of these changes out, but the modding system is so cumbersome (and buildings can't be modded anyway, since mod effects stack with core/base game effects rather than replace them) that isn't really worth the time.
So I'll make one final plea to the devs to stop trying to limit the size of empires and states. Restore a more reasonable economic balance to the game by making resources more plentiful. And roll back some of the silly changes designed to simply made food and cities scarcer without remotely being logical.
why create a new mechanic to limit buildings by population when we have a perfectly good one already? ie, city level. i'd rather current game mechanics were better made use of and integrated than new ones added.
so now as well as checking back to level up my city, or every time a building is finished, i now need an update flashed across the screen every time a new slot is spawned as well? or will i need to keep checking myself? if it's anywhere near as fine-grained as brad implies, than i will have to do either fairly often.
if i literally get one slot/x number of citizens, that makes the number of slots between levels 4 and 5 vastly more than between 1 and 2, because the population requirements increase at an increasing rate. to me that implies either massive end game micro, or an even more limited and boring early game, because even more of the fun stuff gets locked away and hidden from the player at the start of the game. this end game micro will be more apparent if the population growth is still modelled with the same crude flat person/turn method, because we will still have a scenario where every settlement eventually ends up being huge when given enough time. far better to have populations level out at sustainable levels until circumstances change. that way we get a diverse range of settlements, with some places staying as small villages so i only ever have a few huge cities to manage.
far better to use the level system itself as a limiting mechanic, that way you neither get too many slots at high level, nor too few at low level (currently, you won't be able to get any before level 2) at the very least i would hope that if the specialist slots are implemented then they ditch the awful level-up bonuses, as they seem to be representing exactly the same thing. the level up bonuses are also arbitrary, obtuse and hard to keep track of. at the same time however, if they are removed then there is little reason to care about levelling up at all, except to qualify for the higher level buildings. which you could migrate that to the specialist slot mechanic as well (because it is representing the same thing), in which case why have levels at all?
in summary, either limit things by level, or ditch levels and add specialist slots. i don't see any advantage in having both. personally levels make more sense to me because they keep up with ballooning populations instead of getting ahead/behind them. if you want so say "you can only build two of the following in a level 3 settlement," then i'm sure there is an easier way to do it than creating a whole new mechanic.
personally i'm not that big on the idea of having demolish existing buildings to build more troops in any circumstance. nice bit of background and interesting theory in brad's post, but i don't see how it makes the game any more fun or balanced.
i realise that what i'm arguing for sounds like the unfun status quo, but the reason it's not fun is because of the method used to determine population growth and the fact that the production of that population is not related to how many of them there are. you CAN do that by saying "one merchant per 10 people," but it's much easier to do so by simply saying "merchant generates 0.05gildar per person." you then represent your increasing number of specialists by allowing this to be increased to 0.06 at the next level.
if you want to make people choose what to do with their specialists, then make them choose "one of the following" different level pre-req buildings. a new mechanic is not necesarry to do this. if you want people's production to suffer by taking people out of the economy to go fight, then do this by TAKING THEM OUT OF THE ECONOMY. ie, production goes down because it is dependent on population. if the numbers don't allow for this at the moment, then increase the population costs of troops (to 5 per guy or whatever) so that it does matter. this represents the fact that others are dependent on the guy you just took.
the value in being able to work together better on the battlefield should be in WORKING BETTER ON THE BATTLEFIELD, not in it's cost to society. inventing the phalanx or fire by rank did not allow us to field more guys. it just made them more effective.
personally though, i don't think making people choose between research and building units is fun, because it forces them to have lots of settlements to get a decent mix. if you really insist on speciation, getting people to rebuild their cities is not the way to do it.
in summary, stop trying to make abstract models for things and just have the game do them instead. stop trying to hit me and hit me.
https://forums.elementalgame.com/397639
My idea as another way to get what Brad wants done without as big of a change required, and easier for humans to handle.
It sounded like to me that he meant using the people like the CIV games do. I did not pick up this decrease of population when builing or creating units. But then I've played these types of games for a while now.
I found teleport.xml. Which value do you edit? i searched for "15" (want to change it to 10) but cant find anything...
Actully there should be a number that you can choose (number of Specialists) that you can use for the pioneer. That will be how many Pop the new city will have. For example: If I build a Pioneer with 5 specilist (50 pop) then my new city will have 50 pop. There should be no limit to this. However this will drain the base city the Pioneer is being built in.
Simple, make the first slot require 100 citizens, 2nd slot require 75 citizens, 3rd require 50, 2nd require 25, 3rd require 10, and all others require 10.
(or something else scalar like that)
I still don't get all this Anti Spam BS. I mean this is a game of conquest and empire building as well as a slight RPG. Part of that is building cities.
I just don't get it.
Um, I sorta have problems with the notion of you guys limiting the number of cities a player can create. I'm the Sovereign. If I want 100 cities . . . then I ought to be able to create 100 cities. That's my call as a player. As developers, it your job to anticipate that the meglomaniac inside each of us would want that. It's what being an Emperor or King is all about!
ESPECIALLY IN A SANDBOX GAME.
I see what the problem is with the AI. The AI needs to be extremely complex to handle nearly anything that we can throw at it. Is creating that AI beyond your studios ability? Is it too expensive or time intensive?
Cause, I gotta tell you, one thing long time gamers really despise is a CPU player that has a series of cheesy cheats that substitute for terrible AI coding.
Of course at some point your studio will have to lay down the final concept and stick with it, and hope you made the best choice . . .
Here's an idea . . . put some content in the game that will FILL UP the world. Have you thought that maybe, the world you've created is so dang empty that a natural desire for anyone who plays is to fill the vacuum. And I would bet that many here would agree that there is sooo little in your world that adding variety would probably get to your goal of less cities (as areas of interest/exploration/adventure would occupy space that could instead be used for city-fying the countryside). In this way you aren't telling the players that they cannot do what their natural inclination is to do, and empire building is all about.
But what do I know. <shrug>
I have to agree with you to a certain degree. How many TBS games can you name where you couldn't whip the AI simply by spamming a large number of cities? People act like this is somehow a new problem in Elemental, but they forget that this is the strategy we all used to beat the AI in Civ 1 and MoM as well.
I personally have no problem with the "quantity" of cities. I DO have a problem with the fact that there is no real trade-off for building them. To build a lot of cities you should have to sacrifice something.
I'm willing to try the specialist thing. It sounds a little too abstracted and gamey, but that's just my initial reaction to the name I think. It will be interesting to create true specialist cities, especially when those cities play off the resource availability. I'm not so hot on the idea of armies being tied to specialist slots (since there are training facilities out the whazoo in the game). It makes me think I'll get into a situation where I'm either building cities to have "drones" to turn into military... or having a military will seriously, seriously cut into your early game output, especially for those games where you:
a) start with crap resources
have lots of forests
c) get dropped next to a cheating AI in smaller games.
But I'll wait to see how it plays out. I didn't realize it until someone mentioned it, but yeah, I don't care about my military units unless they're extreme veterans. I don't care how they currently impact my pop, since I'll always have more pop than I could ever make into troops. So maybe having to make hard choices between military and production will be a good thing. And it will make the reduced monster spawns A GREAT THING since having 12+ monsters killing your highly valuable peasants would really piss me off.
(An aside, but I don't see how anyone misses the old monster economy. Yeah, the world fills up with monsters because of the catacylsm, yadda yadda. How much sense did it make that the MORE colonized the world got, the MORE monsters there were. It was completely backwards, and still is to some extent. But at least it's not insane anymore.)
And as someone else said, population growth seriously needs to get revisited. Royalty = broken in its current state.
Population growth should reflect several factors. Like:
a) How much EXTRA food there is, since people need to eat and be healthy to reproduce and have surviving children. Populations living at the margins of subsistence don't grow, they stay about the same.
Prestige. A city's prestige or an empire's total prestige should get them a higher share of population growth. That's modeled already by the current system, except it's the ONLY factor guiding population growth other than housing and special traits, and it's on a transparent, boring scale. (1 per turn, 2 per turn, 3 per turn.) It takes for freaking ever to grow a city from 2 to 3 without Royalty or some other perks.
c) RANDOMNESS. Cities should project how much population they SHOULD get next turn. That doesn't mean they WILL get that next turn. A simple RNG +/-, possibly even based on the total world pop values (to simulate people shifting their alliances between empires) would make it more interesting and more dynamic. You should always get AT LEAST 1 pop per turn, but there should be dry spells and boom times of population growth. Population growth is a boring linear scale right now that's easily exploitable, particularly by the AI.
Maybe this was suggested before but why not make every city use 1 food (without any houses). I mean there are people living there they need food. Then you don't need to put the weird food tax on the merchant buildings.
Transporting goods to/from tiny villages is inefficient, the larger towns have better infrastructure so you get for bang (population wise) for your food buck in the bigger cities. Makes sense to me.
The only weird thing you get into is you first city you don't have any food income so you'd have -1 food. Easy enough fix everyone starts with 1 food. Say its from foraging, it doesn't matter.
You could make pioneers cost 1 food, though that would make loss of a pioneer a disaster.
You could get caught without food and need to found a city though, so I'm not too sold on this idea.
If one is trying to limit the number of cities in the game, just make Prestige a global resource and make most Prestige enhancing buildings 1 per faction. So if I have one city with 1 prestige and I found a second city, now each has .5 prestige and only grows .5 people per turn. I can build a Palace and either have +7 in one city, or +3.5 in two cities, and so on. The diminishing returns will eventually cripple your growth rate if you build past the "optimal" number.
It's specialist supply. Not specialists. And they're global.
There's nothing to manage about them. They're not people per say, you're just deciding what you want to do with your population.
I found my kingdom which gives me a capital. The capital provides 5 to my specialist supply.
I can then build a merchant, workshop, arcane lab, study and each one will use 1 of these. Moreover players can, like in our original design, construct multiple merchants, workshops, arcane labs and studies as long as they have the people to run them and can afford the maint.
If I want to train a soldier, that uses one from my specialist supply. So I'm having to choose what I'm doing with my people. It's much MUCH closer to Elemental's original design document (in the original design players designed their cities in a much more intricate and fun way but we could never come up with a way to adequately limit the # of merchants and labs and studies because of the way the population resource was implemented).
The best improvements require higher level cities and because the core building blocks can have duplicates, it encourages players to use outposts for outposts (i.e. not small towns but just a 1 tile fortification to stuff units in which is why they're called outposts and not tiny towns) and makes having larger cities that much more compelling. The reason we don't have outposts cost food is because we want to encourage players to fortify their outskirts. Outposts will no longer providing any free housing so there won't be a reason to spam them out other than for strategic reasons.
Are city tiles going the way of the dinosaurs then, or will it be a combination of city/tiles and specialist slots?
Ah, few questions on the specialist idea, which sounds a lot better then what I originally thought.
a) If soldiers die, do you get the specialist back? Would squads count as 1 specialist or the size of the unit?
If specialists are good, why not spam cities to get more specialists?
c) Are specialists solely population based?
d) Do you think this concept would produce a bias towards quality over quantity? Would that be a concern?
e) Could or should sovereign charisma play a role in specialist production?
Hopefully these aren't braindead questions, and the last one was more of an idea, but I want to see where you're headed with this- it sounds like it could be a good change, but I can see potential for some kinks to develop also. I can also see this making more ways to get to where you want to be, which was a nice thing about GC2.
I can also see this reducing unit spam, which would be a very good change for how I like to play.
Hi Arstal,
a. Yes, you would indeed get them back.
b. Right now, we are leaning towards counting each unit as using a specialist supply to encourage "bigger" armies and allowing us to reduce the training time per unit.
c. Right now, specialists are purely based on population.
d. We are trying to address this concern with item B.
e. There's no specialist production per se. The idea is that in any society, N% of the population can be specialists. So future modifiers might increase the 10% of population being specialists to say 11% and so on but we don't plan to play with that in v1.1 (maybe in a future v1.2 and so on).
I'm not sure about the balancing as I haven't played in a while but the above is definitely something Elemental should have.
This concept sounds great overall, much better than current system. My only concern is AI's love to build houses in useless outposts, hope that will be fixed when specialists are implemented.
Thanks. If you garrison a lvl 1 city with 1 unit, that would be the specialist slot for the lvl 1, unless you put food into it.
One possible idea that might help with city spam some more: bring back estates which produce more housing for higher lvl cities, so higher lvl cities would be more efficient with food, and get more specialists. Maybe estates should be lvl 3 or lvl 4 city required, one per city?
Empires could either use the same mechanic, or a diffferent mechanic. Unsure here.
Possible side effect: fewer cities= fewer caravans= fewer roads. I can see potentially having to up caravan limits.
Idea on the Units: if the specialist is the cadre of the unit (which is what I'm imagining)- why not allow single troops to be upgraded into the bigger units, at a cost of experience, and equipment costs? (It's either that or single units will obsolete quickly)
brad, i've been thinking a lot about specialist slots since you first proposed them and would love a direct answer to this. the more i think about them the more pointless it seems as a concept. i would really love a direct answer to this. that would make my week.
i really don't see what specialist slots do that population and the city level couldn't do if reworked properly. it seems to be just two ways of saying the same thing.
as cities grow you get more specialists and once you reach a certain population you can build stuff to make use of them. alright, i'm down with that. but isn't that what city levels already represent? couldn't that just as easily be modelled by saying "once you reach level 2 you can build one of these specialist buildings, then pick another from the list at level 3 etc" if the numbers don't match you can change the number of levels, but basically it's EXACTLY the same thing. ESPECIALLY if you use increasing pop requirements for each slot like tasunke is suggesting, because that's exactly the way that level requirements increase.
similarly, soldiers can be modelled in the existing system, exactly as you want to, already. if the above mentioned specialist buildings end up generating gildar (or whatever) as a % of POPULATION itself, then when you take population out of the city to recruit as soldiers, that production will go down. when you return them to the pool it goes back up. exactly the same "guns or butter" decision you are talking about, within the current system. if the hit isn't big enough then you can multiply the population cost of soldiers to represent the fact that you are taking the specialists and the other people are dependents who aren't relevant to the equations. the best thing about doing it this way is that i don't have to rebuild my settlements, or fiddle around with slots to put my city on a war footing. the effects happen automatically, exactly as you seem to want. true, having soldiers doesn't prevent you from building things as you seem to want, but it will reduce the effectiveness of the ones you do build. and this way the hit of recruiting is spread rather than a straight merchants --> soldiers.
why make a system that seems to have exactly the same fundamental meaning as settlement level? why make a system to MODEL the assigning of specialists to different roles when you can ACTUALLY DO IT?
especially, why implement an abstract concept that will require explaining to players, when population requires absolutely none?
i am not arguing for the status quo. the way to fix this problem and add the decision making you're talking about is to make the current system better, rather than add a gamey extra mechanic. if production and military is governed by specialist slots instead of population, then what have you achieved other than replacing something with ITSELF, other than adding to confusion (since the specialist slots are a product of population). you effectively make population and levels a redundant legacy feature and replaced them with a more abstract and confusing system.
the problem is the way production is unrelated to population. everything else can be done within the level system if you change this and get the numbers right.
Uhh, no.
With the specialist system you can have multiple food producing buildings in "the" city with the major food production.
Totaly agree with Sethai! Specialists is the same thing, even worse.
City levels for buildings - it is the % of population, but is the % for the soldiers must be the same? I dont think so.
What is really really bad - is the new concepts, that was born not from the playtests but from the frogboy head. Please, leave the citybuilding/management alone, just balance it, make ai and magic and tactical battles, this is the sings players are worried about.
Not getting food free population zones anymore is good.
Being able to have a zero population settlement(I hope that's what you meant at least) that can be turned into a supply point or fortification is even better.
The specialist bit, meh. Sure would be nice if you'd just employ population with structures in order for them to produce. It's not a negative though, just adding another mechanic I don't like into a system I want to get rid of to begin with, so no real loss there.
Could influence get some love? Number one reason I spam cities is because I have to to access resources in a reasonable period of time. A faster expansion through those earlier rings would be a major deterrent. On the reverse, I have yet to play long enough to see it get hard to push my influence border out one more tile. If anything it speeds up as the game progresses thanks to upgrades. It's not actually a linear radial expansion is it? If so that's horribly broken.
Actully that is not a bad idea. It of coarse would be concedered "evil" to "good" factions in the game thus give a Penalty to dipomance with them but give a bonus when dealing with other slave stats.
And I do like your caravan idea for slave states. Shipping slaves around from city to city. The slaves could come from captured cities (when capturing a city you should get several options on of which is to enslave the population or portion of the populattion. You could also have the option after a battle to take some of the soilders as slaves or just kill them outright.
These slaves can be sent back to the city of your choice or even sold to other slave owning factions. And if you faction raids a caravan wtransporting slaves then you can take them. (If your a good faction you can free them and they will gladly come to work for you, If your a slaver then you have new slaves.)
RogueCaptain I think you have a good idea there.
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