Forget everything you know about the WoM economic model. Food is gone (as it exists in WoM), housing is gone, global population is gone, specialists are gone (improvements don’t use population), materials are gone, resource multipliers on city level up are gone, fixed build times are gone, unlimited improvements are gone (you can never make more than 1 of an improvement in a city).
In Fallen Enchantress a city has one production queue. The amount of production a city generates is based on its population, with some modifiers. Small cities take a long time to produce big things. Since there aren’t specialists (ie: consumed population) or materials if you have the tech to produce a unit or improvement you can generally stick it in the queue*. It’s not hard to fill up a city with 60 turns of things to produce (or to cancel items out when something changes).
Population is local and a city’s population is broken into Farmers, Workers and Rebels (we may change the name for this last one, Dissidents? Angry Hobos?). Farmers produce food, a little production and pay taxes. Workers don’t produce food but they produce more production and pay taxes. Rebels don’t produce anything and don’t pay taxes. You cities automatically allocate enough farmers to feed your population and armies (meaning the more armies you have, the more farmers you need, the less workers you have and the slower your production is). Your goal is to have as many Workers as possible. Minimizing Farmers (by investing in food producing buildings and capturing food resources) and minimizing Rebels means more of your population is Workers.
The player can set his Tax Rate. The tax rate determines how much your population pays you each turn, but it also increases Unrest. Unrest creates Rebels. Although it never hits the point where more Unrest means less gold (higher taxes always give more money), higher taxes always mean less production. Life in Fallen Enchantress is expensive, monsters don’t all give gold (in fact few carry gold).
Growth replaces Prestige and is the rate at which population is added to your city. It is influenced by improvements, local resources, champions in the city, and the amount of cities in your kingdom (the more cities the slower your growth to balance small empires vs large empires). Since population determines your production and taxes, your high population cities are the backbone of your empire.**
Whenever you build a unit the population comes out of the city that produced it. In effect armies are population that isn’t contributing to production. Making a stack of 9 spearmen is a serious investment. Disbanding units returns the population to the nearest city (if you are in your borders). When you build Pioneers you can build them at all the same unit sizes as your other units, and the amount of Pioneers in your stack takes that amount of population away from the building city, and starts the new city with that population.
Improvements have fun with these mechanics. Slums increase the cities Growth and Unrest. Governmental type buildings reduce Unrest, the Mint of Ruvenna provides +1 Gildar per Worker in the city, etc.
Most importantly, from a city specialization standpoint, when you level-up a city you get a random list of improvements that you can unlock for that city. They are based on the city level so the improvements you get at city level 2 are a different list than those you get at city level 5. There are rare improvements that may popup in these lists, especially at higher levels. For example, when leveling a city to level 3 you may have the option to unlock any of the following improvements for that city:
Apothecary- consumes a little mana, provides research, champions can buy Healing and Growth potions.
Bazaar- +2 Caravans, the city produces +50% more Gildar when nothing is in the build queue.
Bell Tower- Improved Production and free Peasant defenders if the city is attacked.
Brewery- Reduces Unrest and reduces Production.
Infirmary- Small Growth bonus and all injured units in your city are completely healed.
The player can pick one, and it is only unlocked for that city. The player still has to build that improvement. We may decide to place it for free, but I like that the player has to build them because it allows me to balance them on build costs, but in general they have low build costs. This is how we specialize cities, and this is our reward for players that choose to run small empires so they can race to getting up to city level 5 unlockable improvements like the Onyx Throne (-50% Unrest, -10% Unrest in all cities), Pyre of Anniellum (provides mana and increases the power of Fire spells), etc.
Terrain matters. Terrain has tile yields, and a city gets the tile yields of the tile it is founded in and all surrounding tiles. In the beginning this is a significant amount, as the city grows this is less and less of the total food and production amounts. A city on fertile land by a river will get some bonus Food and Gildar each turn as well as having access to improvements that can only be built on a River. A city in a desert won’t get any of these base yields, but may be worth it to grab important resources. Tile yields don’t extend as the city extends, they are only those 9 tiles. Tile yields aren’t intended to be the root of the game. They are a boost to new cities, turning a city that may take a while to produce anything real, into a reasonable city relatively quickly (your capital gets free starting population so it skips the new city slowness). City on good tiles are better, but it isn’t game winning, especially later in the game.
* Metal and crystals are still resource requirements for some things, most notably advanced armies. So we still have the concept of “you can’t build that until you build up x resources” but its used for special things, not everything.
** When a city is taken in combat half of its population is lost. Also when units die their population is forever lost, giving us some outputs for the population system, it doesn’t continually build. And, although warring successful wars has its benefits, it can be costly too.
Very good read, can't wait for beta!
A lot of new info. Perhaps we're getting close to the beta.
Finally, somebody who knows something about game economics
You cities automatically allocate enough farmers to feed your population and armies (meaning the more armies you have, the more farmers you need, the less workers you have and the slower your production is)
That was a problem in the original MOM, you constantly needed to adjust your workers and your farmers to make sure you have enough food to maintain your army while not wasting people doing extra farming. I am not sure how well an automatic system would be, maybe the food cost will be shared between cities. In MOM, most of the time, new cities farmer were kept low to increase production and the high level cities were maintaining food. So I am not sure how efficient will be the automatic system.
Although it never hits the point where more Unrest means less gold (higher taxes always give more money),
That was also a problem in MOM, raising your tax too much and you were actually losing resources. So what happened in the end is that you set you tax to a fixed level and keep it for the whole game. You could add the option to add tax reduction for specific cities. Because when you have a lot of cities, some cities will be able to handle the unrest while others won't. It could be a way to temporarily accelerate the growth of a city. Second, you want to give the players a reason to have low taxes, else they will just raise the tax until there is no unrest. My suggestion is that having low tax to a point where no unrest is generated could give extra bonus somewhere else. A quick suggestion could be that it raises the research level or population growth, etc.
Another point, adjusting sliders in a turn based game is not fun. This is what happened in MOO3. Because there is not any real decision taken. You simply adjust your rate until you reach balance. I have a suggestion where maybe you get a budget report at the end of the year, or X turns that tells you how much income you received and what were your expenses. At this point, you can decide to set up the taxes, and give tax cut to specific cities. Then you need to wait a whole year be fore changing tax again. This gives to the player more decisions, to I raise my taxes now or wait another year.
You could always have an emmergency tax or offer the player to pillage their own city to take the missing resources, but it increase your city unrest of course.
Another thing, in order to have the possibility for cities to rebel, maybe special events, unrest and pillage increase a "Discontent people" meter that stays permanently. It can be reduces with buildings and with happy people with time. That level would increase or decrease every turn. Espionage actions would raise the ennemy's discontent level. When the level reach the maximum the city rebel it self. A war is taking place between militia relative to population level, and the garissoned unit. If the militia wins, the city revert neutral. Militia killed reduce population of course.
Tile yields don’t extend as the city extends, they are only those 9 tiles.
So you only harvest a 3x3 grid and building over these tiles "destroy" the yield?
When a city is taken in combat half of its population is lost.
This is just too much considering also that killing soldiers somewhat kill population. I would say at most 1/4th of population which could be reduced at let say 1/8th with city walls, but not more.
fixed build times are gone
This is one feature that I found interesting, because in MOM, you always had this problem where because you did not have any population or production bonus, a building could take 60 turns to build, and then if you add 2 workers, it takes 8 turns. So there was a high difference in the production time and cost of the buildings. Same thing for units.
unlimited improvements are gone (you can never make more than 1 of an improvement in a city).
This is another feature I found interesting because it allowed player to creatively design their cities. Maybe not unlimited, but maybe 2-3 copies of each building. Else in MOM, and other 4X games, it feels more like working, you need to build everything because there is no interest in not building everything. So there is not really any decision in city development, just build everything. Still, you specialized building idea, which looks nice, it adds some decisions. Another solution I proposed for a mod is to reduce the amount of buildings you can build. If there is more buildings to build that the number that can be built, players will need to do a choice which building to build.
Building on the tiles doesn't destroy the yield. The city has a permanent bonus based on its original tile yields. If you build on a river the city is better than one build in a desert.
In Fallen Enchantress a city has one production queue.
This is something I missed. This is a huge set back. I always found it stupid that you could not train soldiers and build something at the same time. I would have even added buildings which would have added production queue. For example, you build a 2nd barrack, you get 2 training queues. Even in Romances of the 3 kingdoms, you can assign people to develop the land, while assign other people to train soldiers, and finally give special jobs the the leftover officers (recruit, espionage, shopping, etc). Doing multiple things at once is logical.
It also reminds me of a civ 4 game where I was slightly more technologically advanced, so I started to produce units to attack my neighbor. THe attack took so much time and were so ineffective that I lost all the margin I had against my opponent because I could not develop my cities while I was building units.
It depends on the amount of stuff you need to build. If a city has a maximum of 8 buildings, and you are rebuilding from 0-4 times, You will not constantly build stuff and there could be a lot of period where you build nothing. (building nothing could give more happiness and prosperity to your cities). But if you need to build like 30 buildings, then your cities will always be constantly occupied which makes any unit production give you a huge penalty on city development.
So I really think you should reconsider the split queue because that was one of the few things that I considered like a real improvement in "War of magic".
Also consider that losing units make you lose population and units requires food and gold maintenance, so you will never have a situation where people train too many units.
One of the things to manage growth instead of having the decreasing returns with increasing # cities is to let us set growth by setting additional farmers over the minimum number needed to feed your population and armies. In MOM, this excess went to gold, at a rate of 1 food for 1 gold. Here, it could go to increasing growth. Since small cities won't have a lot of excess food (or will kill their production if they do), it's a strategic choice to focus on growth over production, even in the big cities.
I agree with the idea of a separate training queue. At least in theory I would like a system most where you had a building queue with flexible build time based on population, and a training queue with *fixed* build time, based on what kind of unit you build (and possibly time bonuses from city improvements).
To balance this so that you can have similar output levels regardless of number of cities, I would agree with Larienna's idea about being able to upgrade a city to have multiple training queues. If large cities could upgrade their training facilities to train a lot of units simultaneously, it would prevent city spam from overpowering single huge cities.
It's really annoying to not be able to improve your empire when you're focusing on training units.
Also, it doesn't make sense that you're able to train units faster the more people you have.
Also, it doesn't make sense that you can only train one unit at a time regardless of how big your city is, whereas it makes perfect sense that you can only build one building at a time when wanting to maximize finished buildings in the shortest amount of time.
I agree 100% with larienna about the combined queues and removal of unlimited improvements. A system where you had a maximum total of unlimited improvements per city level could work. For example a level 3 city could only have 2 workshops and 1 library. This would really improve city specialization while keeping cities small.
I like this idea, but there might be a problem with specializing cities to produce troops. Mainly that that any city that produces lots of troops is going to end up composed of mainly farmers providing food towards those troops, because as I understand it the troops produced in a city consume food locally. Thus forcing players to produce a few troops from every city. The easiest solution to this I think would be to have a option to switch the "home" city of troops. Or to automatically make any troops who are garrisoned in a city consume food from that city, which is kinda more realistic.
Training units faster with more population does actually make sense, but it requires some abstraction. Realistically, it takes x months to put marines through boot camp no matter how much population the local city has, but New York City can train more marines at the same time than TheMiddleOfNowhere, South Dakota. If Nowhere can recruit and train 50 marines in a year, NYC can generate 5000 easy. So technically larger cities should have more build queues as Sir_Linque and others suggest: same training time, but more units at once.
This would create a messy interface with more micromanagement, however - just imagine NYC with 100 training queues you want to keep full of unit training at the same time. Even 2 separate training queues is 2 times more stuff you have to fit into the interface somehow, 2 times more information the player has to keep track of. So for the sake of simplicity, it makes sense to have larger cities train a single unit twice as fast, which produces the same effect in the end - it's just a somewhat abstracted way of getting a realistic result.
I'm wary about combining military units and civilian buildings into the same queue, on the other hand.. Larienna has the right of it, I think: it depends on how many buildings there are. In Civilization there are tons of them, your cities are constantly improving themselves, so taking the time off to train even a single military unit can set you back. It's one of the reasons success in Civ absolutely requires rapid expansion, if you have a single city you just can't afford for it to be training military units, but with 5 cities and two of them specialized as unit producers, you can train up a military without hurting your economy too much.
But if Fallen Enchantress has relatively fewer buildings (or they are built faster) you'll spend more time with an idle queue than in Civ, so having your one city put some military units in the queue may not be economically crippling. Either way keep in mind that you're giving up population to train those soldiers, something even Civ doesn't require, we don't need the additional penalty of locking up your queue while you still have 5 economic buildings you could be working on.
I like this idea. This might cause players to build (and manage) a smaller number of cities by giving them a reason to grow the ones that they have. Level 1 and 2 cities can only concentrate population on one thing at a time, while a level 3 city and above gets a split queue. Or perhaps the military queue is tied to a certain improvement like a barracks that only becomes available at level 3?
However, I've never been a fan of the single queue model, I honestly don't see why you have to cripple your economic growth to field a military. Just spread the production assets out between them emply contruction queue = more production to the military queue and vice versa. At least in a war situation you still have the option of building some military units as well as trying to build that building that fights off starvation.
JMO.
Honestly, separate queues in my opinion is one of those things that look good and feel good but make the game bad. Why just 2 queues? Why not 10? With one queue, that means you are focusing every effort in that city to produce something. That just plain makes sense. If you have two queues, and you're not training something - what are the teachers doing?
Overall, I like these changes as they force the player (and the AI) to make choices (what to build or train, what tax level, etc.) and the random city improvements means that the development path for each city can be different.
It will be interesting to see how the AI handles these city development choices. Will it follow a single development path? Will it follow one of a variety of canned strategic plans. Will it choose the development options in a semi-random fashion? Will the AI fractions have racial specific favored city development & research strategy(s)?
I agree with this suggestion. I also mentioned this mechanic in my previous post as an additional means to limiting population growth but it is explained much better in the above quote.
The added choice of focusing either on production or population growth (or a mix of the two) could be an interesting dilemma and adds some depth to city management, especially when population looks to be such a valuable resource in FE compared to MoM and other Civ-type games.
I allways loved the two queues from Stardock games. GalCiv two ques (military ships and improvements in planet) makes sense to me a lot more than other 4X genre games, where you can build "guns or butter".
Please, don't take away this from us in Fallen Enchantress. I love Elemental War of Magic as a game. Sure it can be improved (and after the first patches, played). Fallen Enchantress is going to be better. Limiting the building of a city to a queues replicate the same problem of most 4X games: an early military path just means ruin of your empire unless you take several cities and dedicate just a bit to building units while the other mantain the pace at building improvements. This is a limiting strategy, and so, is not fun.
One thing that interest me the most in every 4X game is that you could have several paths to victory (how IA handled this several paths in GaCiv was just awesome). When you have a Civilization style where you have to build almost every improvement in every city, there are no real choices, so there is no fun in this. Limiting the number of building doesn't seem interesting to me. But limiting the numer of queue to one is DEFINETIVELY a stap back in the genre. Not forward.
I personally prefer a more automated system. I don't like to have to micromanage the people in my cities when I already have to place all the buildings. I like just being able to build a city and occasionally upgrade it without having to constantly check up on it. Increased growth is what food resources and improvements like taverns are for. I even have some doubts about how necessary tax rates really are.
Yes, but unless you plan on winning practically instantly choosing to invest in early game(or any time) military assets with diminishing returns instead of civic assets with increasing returns is not really a "choice". Especially since military strength is really just a projection of economic strength. As far as I know there isn't a economic victory, a larger economy just allows you to build a bigger army. Elemental is a little more warfare oriented then Civilization as well. There is point choosing between military and economics becomes invest in economics until you have an advantage and then spam a huge death blob and crush everyone else instantly.
There are much better ways then combined queues to force players to make choices. Like upkeep, and population costs. Combined queues is just annoying and really limits a players options instead of increasing them. I really can't say it any better then larienna, lycanthropos, and I already have so I will respect your choice and leave it at that until the beta comes out.
I can understand that reasoning. We do need a way to pause production to build something else though.
If I'm building something, and I need troops fast, I should be able to pause what I'm building, rush some troops, then get back to building.
Another option- a building idea: Why not a "Guild of the Nine" equivalent building in higher-level cities that allows you to rush-buy troops with a gold upkeep cost?
Very encouraging update.
I very much approve of some more Civ influence being added. Thanks Jon.
It looks like you will have to make some interesting decisions which I like.
I also like that an individual city will feel more unique and that there will be some balance between big and small empires.
Keep up the good work.
I totally agree that one queue could improve gameplay through decissions to make IF:
If not, the game just is: build every building (building pioners between them to not getting back in the taking usable land race), and then, build the largest army with the better relation quality/price (that usually in the TBS genre uses to be the more technologically advanced) to smash your enemies.
In that king of game, there are no choices regarding buildings vs. units.
One thing I loved from GalCiv2 was that you have a military race (building ships you can design) supported by an economic race (planetary improvements that you chose to build in each planet in function fo the bonus the tiles gives to you).
We will see your efforts in the Beta.
I'm wishing it releashed already
This is the general feeling on it imo. As Jon said, choice is the defining strategy in a game and honestly when you have multiple queues you are diluting the importance of that choice, in addition to devaluing core 'resources' such as time and production. Everything you put in the queue should be a weighted choice, with things you are going to have give up or wait on to prioritize others.
Beyond that it can be a lot for players to manage when you have two queues per city, especially as the game advances. It will cause a lot of micro or queues sitting empty, again devaluing your production and time.
I 100% agree with this, both have to be plausible avenues of play and there need to be a lot of options for the player with how to use their resources. Know that we feel the same way, you will not just be spamming workshops in FE
I definitely have no problem with a single Q. I agree with Heavenfall that a single Q feels better, but in actual play it doesn't always work well. In Galciv it just meant that instead of building a colony ship in 4 turns and then a factory in 4 turns, you were instead building both after 8 turns, which is far less efficient.
Ultimately realism is nice, but gameplay and balance are always more important to me.
Other then that, I love the idea of random building choices when your city levels up.
If you need units right away you can just conjure them. If that and your standard defenses are not enough, you lose and I win. No need to have a quick production option.
I like the one production feature. It makes management simpler. The AI will make or break this feature though; we can all agree on that.
I admit that there's so much more into this aspect that simplifying it into a discussion about what number of queues is best is kind of pointless. Both options are doable - multiple training/building queues or one combined. It doesn't matter which one is in place, as long as the one in place is utilized properly and the gameplay is built around it. Civs work wonderfully with one build queue, and GalCivs work great with two. I just tend to prefer having multiple queues in general, but I'll like a good game no matter what the system.
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