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.
"Disbanding units returns the population to the nearest city"
Units could be used just to move population from one city to another - and would promote the use of 'population farms' to boost more prestigious cities.. What a dark future that would be......
I think that disbanded military units should reappear as farmers/workers in their city of origin, to prevent this from being possible.
But they are seasons.
Rebel would be the next logical step up from criminal as now they are an active threat working against the state instead of a benign criminal one that produces nothing of value and lives off of the fruits of others. Bullies, tax dodgers, and thieves are a tiny problem but overthrowing the state?
IMO is criminal sounds more Empire fitting and rebel runs closer to Kingdom.
Derek specifically mentioned the Civilization tech tree path for turtlers and that warfare is expensive. One of each building type will cause you to hit a ceiling eventually. The question is will you hit the ceiling sooner or very later depending on how much brainpower got dumped into the civ tech line. Also when you hit that ceiling and finish the next military the queue creates wealth so maybe a lesser nation can afford a sizable army without being forced to invest in cash buildings 100% of the time.
Expensive warfare is probably the way to balance it out for magic and hero focused strategies.
I like this a lot. You could also add a cool mechanic for an evil faction. They could sacrifice one unit of rebels and for a while turn all rebels in that city to useful members of local population, but after that time passes, one unit of farmers or workers becomes a rebel. It essentially gives you an increased production for a while but that city loses one unit of useful population (also, the city does not get more population until rebels don't turn into rebels again).
Wow, just WOW! On paper this is sounding very close to my ideal game.
With proper Mod access, it may obsolete my Civ4 install. Which is huge from my point of view.
It all sounds great.
Some suggestions:
I like your approach to the so called city spam problem. It's nice to have options to choose, decisions to make, and workarounds to devise. But it seems odd that a powerful empires core cities should suffer decreased population growth, simply due to the existence of far flung conquests and outposts. I could see an economic drain imposed on the big cities. And I could see a rise in the Disaffected (Rebels). So the higher your empire wide costs become, and the more disaffected citizens you have, the slower the growth of your core cities will be... Increased global costs are paid for by increasing local taxes, resulting in decreased local productivity; therefore slowing local population growth. So it amounts to the same thing. Just explained, and managed by the player, in a different way. Of course it has to be assured that it actually will be the core cities which bear the greater burden of expansion.
I like how random city specialization increases variety from one game to another. But I wouldn't choose complete randomness. I'd prefer that player decisions have some bearing on specialization. And I'd like for the random choices to reflect whats happening in-game. This game does foster role play afterall. In AOW:SM I've been frequently frustrated by the total randomness of spell and trait availability. Here I am playing the role of a war wizard, but I'm only getting summon spells. Or I'm developing a ranger classed hero but the rng isn't offering any ranger like traits. I'd prefer to have some input over the roleplay. And I'd like for the options to make some of sort of sense.
I suggest basing the random list on pre-existing conditions. So a coastal city in which the player has built a large commerce infrastructure, has some different random options than a coastal city focused on materials production. Which are a little different than the options presented to a forested city with similar focus. And a city which has built an Apothecary, Infirmary and University, might unlock Alunia's Institute of Advanced Healing (allows tier 3 healer unit). And so on. Just done in a way that has some bearing to the in-game reality.
EDIT:
And how about capital city specialization based on the sovereigns actions/behavior. Warmongering increasingly betters the chances of getting a capital specialization that relates to warring. Successful diplomacy increasingly betters the odds for something diplomatic. A diplomatic faux-pas decreases the odds. Flags would have to be set for specific decisions and actions. A player that has built lots of libraries and universities has a bunch of the "science guy" flags checked. More science flags get checked as the relation of science techs outnumber war, magic and adventuring techs. Get enough Science Flags checked, and you've got good odds to build an advanced learning institute in your capital. Ignore an allies request ~ check a bad diplomat flag. End someones war ~ check a good diplomat flag. Capture N cities ~ check a warmonger flag. etc.
Love White Elk's suggestions on city improvements. Sounds like a more complex version of GC2's alignment meter except I would make it invisible to the player... might also be a way to unlock particular quests:
Your best healer comes to you with an exciting idea to boost healing potion efficacy... but you must gather three dragon scales, ogre's hearts... etc.
Or certain actions attract a sage who joins your cause...
awesome.. this system seems so much better already...! i'm probably one of the few who likes ICS because i think it imitates real town/village/city locations on a map and i really like this simple but effective mechanic of reducing growth by city numbers..
this year i've already attempted to mod an acceptable growth model in Civ5 that replicates multiple city empires whereby one city (capital) is big (and maybe x amount more special cities) and outlying villages are simply that.. mainly for the realism factor of taking over multiple villages/towns in war..
imo, city placement,proximity,growth and size just needs to be done properly rather than simply just reacting to anti-ICS sentiments.. the base terrain, growth/citynum and farmer/worker/vagabonds idea seems better suited to meeting these issues..
What about rogue instead of rebel?
If the disbanded unit returns the population as rebels it would work, too, and the production time for military units could be removed, too, because they already reduce the population, as suggested here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/411840/page/3/#2995385
Hehe yeah, but the military units start at level 1 and are not professional soldiers...
I think that is a great idea.
Yes exactly, I was thinking this. A disbanded military unit would probably be a tad unhappy at being sent straight back to the fields, to pull up potatoes. It would be good if units could have a morale rating, modified by any Champions in their stack, victories/defeats in battle, and time 'in the field' without R&R in a city. If their morale gets too low, there would be a chance that the unit would become rebels (or rogues) - with the same stats and equipment, but hostile to the player. A unit of knights would become Rogue Knights, looting and pillaging until they were either defeated, or appeased and brought back into the Kingdom by a Champion or an offer of gold. High morale would give the unit bonuses in combat. I'm not sure if it will be included in FE or not, but I think that morale is an important factor in any game that relies heavily on battles.
Very big post, replies to replies (By the way, I never found yet how to quote somebody inside a nice gray square).---
Even 2 separate training queues is 2 times more stuff you have to fit into the interface somehow
Having multiple queue of the same type is not necessarily a problem on the interface since you are doing the top 2 or 3 or 4 items at once. It's a bit like an FTP software queue. You do not need an extra space to place the extra queue, you just add a flag to the item to mark that it is also beign produced.
---
Training units faster with more population does actually make sense
One thing that annoyed me in MOM is the time it took to be able to create an army and attack your ennemy. If an ennemy declared war on you, it took almost 20-30 turns before you could have a chance to attack his first city. Second, since the damage were very volatile, you could lose your entire army on the first battle. Since you did not want to restart the whole 20 turn process again, the only way to avoid this is to reload the game
more production to the military queue and vice versa
What people have to understand is that you do not produce units, you train units. Yes there is some equipment production in unit training, but it's minimal compared to what a building needs. This is why fixed training time makes more sense for units. This is another reason why produciton would not be split between 2 queue.
You Should always be training something. And in lieu of that a city could focus training production on upgrading experience of garrison units.
Very good idea. There is no need to bother about empty queue, they should even be a strategic part of the game (not producing anything is a strategic choice). You can make that empty building queue improves the city: more growth, less unrest, etc. Empty military queue would increase unit experience (I really like this Idea)
---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.
Completely Agree with this. Another annoying thing in MOM I have realised last time I played is that I constantly needed to adjust the food production of every city to make sure I have nor surplus, or I am not it the red. THis is very annoying.
In any case, Derek and I will always err on the side of gameplay over realism.
I will always promote gameplay instead of realism. The problem right now is that a single queue affect drasticly the gameplay of the game. This is why we are pointing out this problem.
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?
Suggestion: I would rather have a pool of mercenaries that players can hire from. Unhired mercenaries moves from an empire to another for seeking a job.
Civs work wonderfully with one build queue
I do not really find civ games that wonderful. This is why I found MOM so superior to CIV. SUre MOM only had 1 queue, but at least there were no worker placement (what a relief).
Umm... Please tell me you have automated the damn caravans? I hate these things in WoM.
Caravan sucks, personally Roads between cities built in 1 click "like Civ Rev" is the best. Beign able to build road with opponents (if they agree) should also be an option.---
but that rather assumes that all people are equally good smiths/military trainers/stone masons etc, which doesn't make sense.
That was a weird thing in Master of Orion 2: "Ok guys, we have nothing more to build, everybody change profession and become scientist".
Again, from my point of view, that makes absolutely no sense. It annoys me and would make me enjoy the game less. (I think I copy pasted the wrong thing here, I had this problem at least twice. Anyways, it was about repeating buildings.)
A quick idea I had for a mod is that you can only have 1 of each building, but there are multiple buiding levels. So for example, if you want to focus on science, you could build a level 3, 2 and 1 library. The disadvantage is that it would cost you more space and you would get less bonus every time. But it could be your choice to have a less optimised but more specialised city.
Personally, I think the game would be more fun if people had epic armies of elite warriors in shining plate, dragons at their side, beautiful cities with walls and towers rising high, and wizards raining down death every turn.
Totally agree. THe game should promote a certain level of luxury and power. You do not want a backwayd fight between peasants, you want large, beautiful and shiny army to reinforce the impression of might. You want to have meteor shower spells that can take out dragons in a single click. Think lord of the rings ... with more magic, big stuff with impossibly big cities. So yes, luxury should be accessible earlier in the game. Right now, in WOM, it is really hard to get something basic like a METAL ARMOR. Common on, it's not that hard to make. Past 1/4 of the game, metal armor should be common.
The devs could overkill it by giving 10 queues per city and then we could have a slider saying how much % of the effort should apply to each queue, adjust over time, etc. But that's a hell of alot of micro.
Multiple queues does not increase micromanagement because you do not chose in which queue it is going to go. The only thing you decide is the order. Multiple queues of the same type only makes things get built faster, it does not increase the amount of management. Worker placement does increase micro management, this is the case of CIV.
Cities will be a lot smaller without unlimited improvements and housing.
Personally, I suggested for a mod to have only 8 large building surrounding the city. What is interesting about it is that you can see the city's production capabilities in a glance. You do not have to search for the "Real" buildings. It also reduce the amount of management to do for each city.
But it seems odd that a powerful empires core cities should suffer decreased population growth, simply due to the existence of far flung conquests and outposts.
A suggestion that was made in another thread is to add administration cost.---At least, if you really do not want 2 queue, only deactivate the feature and make it possible to reactivate it though modding.
Thank you!
This is exactly the kind of dev journal I have been asking for, something to address one of the big information gaps on FE - the strategic / realm management stuff. Sounds like some major changes from WoM, many of which I have been playing with modding in. Thanks for saving me the work!
Interesting discussion on build queues. I'm fine with one queue, as long as we can pause something being built. This is really essential. It is ridiculous to spend 10 turns on some big project, and then loose everything because you need to switch over to train some defenders to stop an impending attack. Maybe add in a decay process where you lose x% of build project each turn that something is paused, if you really feel the need to have a penalty for doing so.
The tile use is interesting, and a good idea. This will make exploration and city placement far more interesting and will make all terrain have value. I'm very curious to see how this plays out. Since we don't have food / hammers / etc. what will the bonus be? What terrain will do what? I would like it for grassland to provide a growth bonus, rivers to provide an income and/or growth bonus, hills and mountains to give a production bonus, etc. Basically the civ system adapted to FE. Looking forward to hearing more on this.
I'm concerned about the population loss when taking a city. This sort of thing always bothered me. So my big capital city of 100,000 people gets taken over by 10 enemy peasants, and somehow 50,000 people are slaughtered? Silly and really breaks immersion for me. Same problem in some versions of Civ where a city would culture flip and every single unit in it would be annihilated, regardless of whether it was 1 Rifleman or 100 Tanks. Also, what if you are playing a 'good guy' and you take a city? You are forced to massacre the population. Instead, give us an option to raze the city, enslave population, loot, or leave intact. This creates more interesting player choices. It would also be interesting if you could only do certain actions on each city level if you have enough troops occupy the city. So if you have few troops and go after a giant city, you can't kill everyone. But if the same number of troops go after a Level 1 town, you have free reign.
I second this. I hate when games force you to cancel your build completely. Pause should be a standard feature.
This thread is really getting some important issues out there. I agree that a level five city either needs to spawn peasant defenders when attacked or city level needs to confer a large defense bonus. This is good for gameplay and realism. I could get by with losing half the population though. It makes sense that many of them would flee when the city is captured.
About multiple queue, there might be some clarifications to make.
There is a difference between Queue and Queue type. I would suggest at most 2 queue type. For example the queue type could be Buildings and Units like in the original WOM. This is pretty simple to manage, building and and units gets queued in their respective category.
Then you could allow with upgrades to have multiple queue in the same queue type. In fact there are not really multiple queue, there are multiple items produced in the same queue. So for example you could have:
Building queue: Barrack, Library, Tower.
Unit Queue: Swordsmen, cavalry, archer.
IN the example above, if each queue type has 2 "queue", it means that both barrack and library and both swords men and cavalry get produced at the same time.
Now some people mention production split. Why take 10 turns for 2 buildings instead of 5 turn for 1 building. The answer is that the resources does not need to be split, it could be parallel production. For example, if you have 20 production points, both buildings in production gets 20 points each. That is another idea I used for one of my BG design because it allow the possibility to add and remove stuff to build in the game without changing the resource balance.
So my first idea would be that:
Building queue: 1 building at a time, production time relative to production level
Military queue: Fixed production time, can train multiple units at the same time (with upgrades or by default). Could eat a bit of production for equipment.
My second idea
Building queue: produce 2 things at the same time (maybe upgradable to 3), Production is not split between buildings. Time relative to production level.
Military queue: Produce 2 units at the same time (maybe Upgradable to 3), Time is fixed for each unit. Maybe a minimum production is required to build a certain unit (especially machine), but there is no production point reductions.
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As for capturing cities: I would reduce the population drop but instead, like in MOM, you could have some buildings destroyed randomly after a capture.
I can't wait to try this, I love the MoM style population.
If I may, I'd like to recommend some features:
On paper, most of this sounds good. However, I dislike the removal of multiple buildings. One of the things I loved in WoM was that I could specialize a city. If I founded a city near two (or more) food sources, I could tailor that city to get the most out of its nearby resources. The same could be said for gold, iron, magic, etc. By removing this ability, you actually restrain choice and make it more like Civ, where you eventually build everything, for no other reason than because its there. Removing that specialization removes a layer of that strategy.
This I dislike. Building a building and training a unit should be split. I can *maybe* see this in a younger/smaller city. Perhaps tie in a second queue with a specific upgrade, be it barracks, a command post, or something else. This is one thing I have always disliked about Civ, and have liked about Stardock games. The ability to build city (or planetary) improvements while queuing up units in a separate queue improves the flow of the game. If you do choose to stay on this path of one queue per city, at least code in the ability to split the queues via modding.
While I don't dislike this change, I feel it might take away from the questing aspect of the game. I enjoyed having to run around and seek out quests/monsters/bandits to kill in order to help fill my pockets. It's not a bad thing, it just feels like the focus is changing, but I may be over-analyzing this. Actually, now that I think about, I would rather see less (or no) gold on roaming monsters, but to have more monster lairs on the map, which contain gold/treasure/etc, accompanied by a good battle. Of course, bandits should always have gold on them.
I like this. I think it will add a little more to the city side of things as compared to WoM. The WoM bonuses were nice, though probably a bit imbalanced, but I think these will add a bit more flavor when combined with the above changes to the population. My only concern are the rare bonuses. Hopefully some of these bonuses, even the rare ones, take into consideration certain factors. The bonus to fire spells is great, unless you have 3 water shards and no fire shards. (I know you choose from a list, but to see a rare that has little to no benefit would be disheartening)
I think this will add a little more thought on city placement, which is a good thing. Like you said, a city in the desert near some nice resources will still be worth it, even though there aren't any nearby tile bonuses, but a city near a river may have a few more options when you look at tile bonuses as well as nearby resources.
After reading these changes, my only concern is that it seems like you are trying to turn Elemental into Civ. Personally, I enjoy WoM over CivV, even as buggy as it is (though 1.39 has made it a bit more stable). If I want to play Civ, I'll play Civ. If I want to play Elemental, I don't want to play Civ with magic, I want to play Elemental. Granted, this is only a single slide in a presentation, so I can only comment on this as it stands alone, and not how it fits in with the rest of the game without knowing more.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about WoM was the city building aspect and how you could tailor your cities to the resources nearby. The only thing I would have liked to have seen different was to have culture over prestige, as there was no cultural victory in WoM, something I missed from the GalCiv games.
I would like FE to be more Civ like in a number of areas than EoM. Could we have cities defend themself like Civ 5 too? Could we have minor factions play like the city-states?
I'm surprised they haven't given minor factions some love given the emphasis on "the world" in EFE. Minor factions would have been the perfect addition to a more interesting world. For example, an adventure bravely explores a mountainous region and finds the "Mountaineers". This minor faction grants 20 ore to the first one that finds it and access to the Mountaineer shop which produces special axes that can only be purchased here. Another adventure searches a forested area and finds a minor faction of "Tree Huggers". The first player to find this faction gets a free Earth spell and armies that stay in this city can heal twice as fast as they normally do because of a special healing salve produce by this faction. And so on....
I will admit, I do like the City-States in CivV. I think that, if fleshed out a bit more, the minor factions could be utilized to a greater extent in Elemental, due to how much more robust the questing system is. They could request a boost to X (via city-spell), clear out monster lairs, request military presence/aid, tie in with dynasties, etc.
Not sure I like the cities defending themselves. I guess you could allow them to create a militia based on the population, but these would need to be taken away from the three population types, farmers, workers and unruly SOBs, to create a fourth, militia. Personally, I'd rather just train up a basic troop, but with the removal of the split queue, this may end up being a better solution for the smaller cities, especially early on.
MInor factions could be interesting, they could be the equivalent of natives and splinter colony in master of orion 2. You integrate them to your city. Else you could make neutral factions. Like In MOM, you can have neutral cities on their own, not controlled by any player.
I like the new citizen system with farmers, producers, and rebels; there is a lot of possible depth there. However the thing that bugs me about taxes is it sounds like something a computer could do automatically without any input from players. It seems to be just a production versus gold slider. I hope you could just set it to maximize production and not have to change it a bit every few turns. From the sounds of the economic model your production will be more important then gold most the time anyway, since more buildings equals more gold.
If minor factions don't make it into the release then I'm sure they will be added in a patch. The thing is that they have to be unique, interesting ,and have a real effect on the game world. They could issue quests in order to improve their relationship with you, on top of normal diplomacy. With a final quest of say "rescueing the princess/prince and inheriting the kingdom" which allows you to take them over peacefully, instead of fighting them. Still they have to be worth taking over. Maybe they have unique buildings, units, items, or resources?
I love the caravan system, so no touching!
One thing I would like to ask for is some sort of luxury resources. How can you copy the CivV system so much and not steal the best part by far? I would at least like the ability to mod them in. I have a post about a uniquely Elemental take on the system here. Just add the ability to create resources that not only boost the city that controls them but can transfer that bonus to all the cities with a trade route to the city with the resource. I would really appreciate it. Something like <SpreadBonusByRoute>True</SpreadBonusByRoute>.
Great update but I have question about the above. "forever lost" is a really long time. city growth won't replace these citizens over time. I guess I am not sure how this part works.
Well now I'm gone.
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