I completely agree with the OP. A good strategy game is one where choices matter, and they do when you have to sacrifice something significant to get something else. Every city growing to be a super city isn't very enjoyable I think. The ability to have even one super city should come at the price of something else, or result from a whole game of sound choices you made.



Anyway, just my 2 cents.

Everything is too plentiful. And the upkeep costs on buildings are so low that it's a joke. So mill gives + 6 industry and 30% bonus on top of that and only costs 1 dust upkeep. So basically 1 worker earning dust can pay for mill, seed storage and some more. That creates a situation where you really don't have to weigh the costs against the benefits because the costs are so low anyway.

I agree that there's the possibility that this could be a little too micromanage-y for the game due to its complexity. That's part of the reason for the limit on city improvements that I suggest, so that there isn't automatically a ton of decisions you have to make which would bog down the pace of the game. In addition, you would only be able to assign workers to tiles with improvements on them, and once you do, they'd be locked in for a little while.

"lynxlynx" wrote:
What is funny, is that while tile improvments are minimal, every other bonus is on mass. Buildings are too multipurpose. For example:

Aura of Empire, +5 prestige per city alone is great, and backbone if i want sustain epire plan. But we get massive worker bonus again.

Dust rafinery, +10 dust +30% dust production, is there a reason i shouldnt spam it in every city?

Exactly. We do get a lot of benefit from these kinds of buildings (the Tier I buildings included) for free. Most of the terrain productivity ones (like Quarry) are totally negligible (+1 Ind. on a specific kind of tile) compared to the aforementioned buildings, I would like to see these be a little more profitable. Maybe something like +3 to Ind. on forests, and to add in my suggestion, a bigger bonus based on how many workers are on the Quarry.

"lynxlynx" wrote:
Im not sure if early decisions being fatal is desired mechanic. Sure decision should have effects, but more like repeative and strategical, not like "i builded wrong building in turn 5 so 100 turns later need to reroll".

I'm not saying it needs to be to this kind of severity (as it would be extremely limiting), but I think early decisions should matter a little more than they do at the moment.

To some degree this system with creating workplace, and then filling it up when we have limited space is quite cool. Just different.

The question is, if such level of complexity is needed, or it could be simulated with less rules and limits, and more floating numbers?

The problem i see is that we have not single enterprise, but multiple cities. And while moving some workforce among 6 pools is micro enought, applying each worker to tile/building could be too much.

And i think it could be done, after all we end with some static value - can't be moved around, depends on terrain - and mobile - comes from workers. In the end it is very similar.

And it is more about balancing each numbers, for now i think that there is not enought ways to buff tiles production (in theme), and it is too easy to buff workforce. And initial impact of terrain should be greater while labor increase over time. Rivers are good example, since we have 2 building to buff them. And it could be fallowed in other tiles, like forest could have lumberjack (I) and huntsman (F), desert could have caravanserai (D) and pottery (I), or any other fancy name. In that system you possibly could build it in every city since why not, it is just pointless to build river buildings without river.



Im not sure if early decisions being fatal is desired mechanic. Sure decision should have effects, but more like repeative and strategical, not like "i builded wrong building in turn 5 so 100 turns later need to reroll".



What is funny, is that while tile improvments are minimal, every other bonus is on mass. Buildings are too multipurpose. For example:

Aura of Empire, +5 prestige per city alone is great, and backbone if i want sustain epire plan. But we get massive worker bonus again.

Dust rafinery, +10 dust +30% dust production, is there a reason i shouldnt spam it in every city?









For startell i would just try with more techs buffing tiles, some cuts with worker power (at least till age IV), buyout price increase, and cut of % component from tier I buildings.

Glad to see the thread doing its job.



To add to the discussion, I made some diagrams that might be helpful in explaining what I was thinking. I had Propbuddha's comments in mind here.







I agree that the bonuses the Tier I buildings bring to the table are probably a bit too strong, and when this is combined with workers, it makes for fairly large snowball. I thought it might be interesting to separate the flat bonuses from the %'age ones, since the buildings having both kinds of bonuses makes them not only very potent in the early game very strong in the late as well. That seems out of character for research you can get so early. I'm not much for straight up buffs and nerfs though, I think it would be much more interesting if you had to dedicate workers to the improvements to get the kind of bonus we're currently getting for free in just building the thing. Higher tech buildings could provide a greater bonus through workers than the lower tech ones, perhaps in number of workers you can dedicate to the improvement and possibly also in different kinds of bonuses, such as greater productivity from hexes, maybe supportive buffs to other improvements, etc. Perhaps even extractors, minor faction villages, and watchtowers could even have workers dedicated to them for greater functionality.



@lukemacu

Originally, I thought that EL might benefit from the same sort of system that ES uses in selecting a way to exploit the planet as well. However, that is also fairly simple in that the population only adds numbers to your total resource count after exploitation, and I think there's room in EL to make for a slightly deeper kind of mechanic than that; that's why I like the idea of having to choose where to put my workers and having their effect be based a little more on what I have built.



I made another one to detail what placement of improvements might look like.







To get at lynxlynx's concern, the way I see it is that if improvements were more tied to terrain (or maybe certain city conditions like produces x amount of dust per turn or something), you'd have to make sure that your city is on track to meet those requirements. It shouldn't be that you would be able to make every single improvement on every single city, which is what we have right now. Part of the reason why I think buyout is so strong right now is because you are able to do this, and it makes Dust very easy to come by without even having to specialize the city or being the Broken Lords (and if you are the Broken Lords, it gets even more ridiculous.) If you weren't able to make an Empire Mint because the terrain didn't allow for it, or one of the higher tier Dust city improvements because you don't meet its conditions to build, Dust might be a little harder to come by unless you really did set up the city for it.



I think the limits would do a lot more early game than late game, and I think such a progression is probably OK, because it makes how your early game pans out more important. If you went about it thoughtlessly and later got screwed because you didn't build the things you needed to when you needed to due the limitation on city improvements, that would be the game's way of punishing you for not thinking about it that much and you would have to revise your strategy a little bit. That doesn't really exist right now, so bad decision-making in city management isn't especially punishing (I would argue) currently.

On worker placement: Even with the current implementation there are some flaws here.



I know it is traditional in many 4x games for your population growth to halt while building a settler or colonist. The mechanics for doing it here don't really support, in my opinion, the zeroing out of food during settler production. The one point drop to your population on completion should be enough.



What happens currently is that no matter how big or small the city is, you should pull all of your workers out of the food category as soon as you start building that settler. You get the same end result whether you kept four workers in food as if you reduced it to zero thereby getting a boost to research or whatver you moved them to. If anything this acts as a discount on settler production rather than the traditional extra penalty to growth. This is especially true considering how steep the growth curve is past 7 or 8 population.



If I normally need 4 workers to keep a city stable and avoid starvation, I shouldn't suddenly need zero just because I am building a settler.



I agree with your points on needing some limitations on worker placement, but I think the above just makes it worse.

Some thoughs about building limits. It may not solve the problem, or may be overkill.



Check your end city, and how many buildings you really need there.

Assume 10 pop, 5 boroughs, so 12 slots.

Seed, Foundry, MInt, Library, Sewer, Marketplace, Dust Printer (dust per worker), one that gives prestige and more food per worker, advanced laboratory.

Thats 10, and it is hard to find much more. :-/ Probably 2 river buffs would be nice.



So the it will only matter with starting city prohibiting buyout tier I buildings in one turn. However maybe kickstarting city is not so bad.



Maybe the problem is not the lack of per district building limit, but the effectivness of tier I FIDS building, power of buyout, and general lack of fallow up buildings to specialize.

Very good points are made, would be glad to see the game heading in that direction.

Propbuddha wrote:
These are Stockpiles, they don't infinitely loop (of course you could just add a dozen to your queue) but are a replacement for the "resource converter" mechanic.

Hmm...you do have a point there. I shall rethink this, if I come up with nothing then you shall hear nothing, if I do come up something I'll respond again.

Hello all,



I wanted to have a discussion about what appears to me as one of the lower points of the game currently, namely, city management. The thread is inspired by the kinds of things that various users have mentioned over the course of discussing the state of city economics; things that I think are related in some fashion to the way that city management plays out in the current version of the game. Before I begin however, I just want to say this: It could be that what I will describe may be completely outside of the vision of the game and/or unfeasible. This is because what I would propose would revamp of the current way that worker units interact with the city, how a city's population factors into the city's growth, and how various city improvements would work as well. As such, this is to be taken with a grain of salt.



1. A summary of current design



When it comes to making a city, I think the game does a good job of tasking the player with finding a suitable spot to settle without making this an easy decision; there are a number of mechanics involved which makes a thoughtful choice out of this, like considering faction traits, anomaly bonuses, terrain features, minor faction villages, and so forth. This is all very good and I feel follows the vision of the game: Auriga is a world to be explored and exploited to the best of one's ability.



However, beyond the planting of a city, managing the city itself is much less thought-intensive thing. For all the thinking the player needs to do in planning the placement of his city, once the city has been plopped down, the rest is just auto-pilot -- all I do is click a bunch of things and wait for (or buyout) a bunch of city improvements to finish, maybe move my workers around a bit as need be. There's a slight difference depending on where you are currently in your game, early on it might matter a bit more as to the order of the improvements you complete or where my workers need to be placed which requires a little forethought, but this is overshadowed by the fact that later on, you hardly need to worry at all about this, especially if you've already built up a strong economy.



In fact, because city management is so simple, building up a strong economy is a relatively easy thing to do. The current state of things mostly revolves around building a bunch of FIDSI related improvements and then having a large population to go with those improvements. What this makes for (I think) are rather uninteresting cities because they all become the same or very similar, as any given city is able to build the same improvements as any other city, not to mention the ability to become large. Furthermore, once a city has a good number of improvements on it along with worker bonuses, the terrain becomes much less important, which to me seems at odds with one of the core mechanics of the game; namely, that it matters what kind of terrain surrounds your city.



2. Why this might be a problem



I think that city management being "brain-dead" is detrimental to the game in a few ways. For one, it makes it very difficult to actually cripple another player's economy. If I lose one large city, it might hurt a little since I will no longer be receiving income from that city, but if I have 5 other large cities that produced just as much as the one I lost, it's like a drop in the bucket as far as I am concerned. The only reason I might care more lies outside of the city, say if the region had an important luxury resource such as Wine, or some strategic resource I needed.



Related to this is the fact that city specialization is almost non-existent from a city management point of view. There is almost no consideration to make when selecting city improvements outside of whether or not the city is currently exploiting specific kinds of terrain (forests, rivers, etc.); as such, you don't really build a city for a specific purpose in mind with the current mechanics, you just build it to do everything because you can. For instance, no matter what the city or where it is placed, I will always take Seed Storage, Mill Foundry, Public Library, Sewer System, Empire Mint, Forest Management, Mining Rights, and so forth. Obviously, this changes a little bit depending on your faction but not by very much. On the whole, this is very limiting in terms of trying to strategically attack your enemy's cities in order to cripple his resource production in an area of FIDSI, as all cities are essentially very apt producers of every single category of FIDSI. In addition, there is no real incentive to attempt a different "build" within a faction because there's no need; if say you were playing the Broken Lords and you wanted to go science-heavy, why do that when your cities essentially allow you to produce as much science as you do dust anyway?



Actually, since cities can become so well-rounded, it takes away significantly from the original choice you make when you put the city down in terms of the terrain around it. There's no limit to the number of improvements you can build on a city, so you can easily overcome any kind of deficit the terrain might serve you if you placed your city poorly; especially so if you have other cities already up and running. The only time poor city planning can hurt you is in the placement of boroughs, and to be honest, I think you could easily side-step this in not creating any boroughs at all and not suffer too large a detriment to your FIDS (though your Influence would probably suffer) production. This is because currently, a single city center can hold as many units of population as can a large city with many boroughs attached to it, with the same number of improvements built on the 1-tile city as the larger one. And given that you take on a penalty to approval for each borough you add on for a rather minuscule gain in FIDSI until you have many (well-connected) boroughs, your incentive to build one is rather low, because maintaining a high approval rating in the city improves its production by so much more than a single borough will. This is a shame because the borough system is actually quite interesting, but the only reason you'd want to do it is to gain a leveled city center or district for your faction quest; it isn't connected very well to other aspects of city management.



In sum, managing your cities isn't really all that interesting, and being that a significant part of the game is focused around city management, this means a good chunk of the game isn't all that fun. I do however think that there is some incredible potential for it be so provided a few changes, and that is what I'll shift my attention to next.



3. A few suggestions



In giving these suggestions I aim to address these things:

• Terrain doesn't matter very much later
• Cities can be so well-rounded that specialization doesn't exist or comes with no disadvantage
• There isn't very much thought to put into city management
• Borough building can be largely ignored
  
  

City Improvement Limitation

Perhaps it could be introduced that cities would only be able to build a limited number of improvements on them which would increase as city size increased. So, instead of being able to build all the improvements you like on, say, a city you just started, you would have three slots for improvements you could build on the city. Once you have filled those slots, you would not be able to build any more of them until you expanded the city; perhaps each borough you add on would increase the number of slots for city improvements by two, except for the Necrophage, for whom it might be one per borough due to their fast expansion. In this way, you would have to grow your cities in order to make them better, and because there is a limit, you would have to pick and choose which improvements are important to the city in question/what is best for your faction.



Improvement Placement

In addition, the kinds of improvements you could build on the city would depend upon the kind of terrain that you have settled upon. How specific it gets might depend on the research level of the improvement, where the lower on the tech tree it is, the more general the prerequisite is, and as you get higher up, the prerequisite becomes much more specific. So, an improvement like, say Mill Foundry, or Seed Storage, might require you to have a hex that provides industry or food, and later, Forest Management might require you to have a hex that provides food and is a forest, or something. Each improvement would also have to be placed on a valid hex on the world map, much like you have to place extractors on resources and rebuilt villages on destroyed ones. The rules for placement might be one city improvement per hex, and they could be built on top of boroughs as well, provided the hex allows for it. What might also be interesting with a mechanic such as this is if certain kinds of improvements could provide a set bonus of some kind when placed together, like having Seed Storage, Forest Management, and Refrigeration Plant together in a city would net you a 30% bonus to food production, for example.



For an idea of how it would look like:







Worker Interaction with City

I'm not sure how popular this will be but, I think I would change the way workers work in EL. Instead of assigning workers to individual resource categories, I'd like to see them interact with the city a lot more. To this end, perhaps workers would have to "staff" the various improvements you build on the city, where the improvement itself would provide its bonus on being made but if you add workers to it, you could have it function at a higher capacity than unstaffed -- sort of similar to the way modules get a boost from hero wit in DotE. Perhaps each city improvement would have a worker limit, so you couldn't just pile a bunch of workers into a Mill Foundry and call it a day; some improvements could hold more workers than others (for a larger boost), and perhaps some wouldn't require any (no boost at all). Maybe the city center itself could hold workers to provide a general boost to FIDSI production at a modest rate, to encapsulate any worker overflow. To discourage tedious micromanagement by constantly moving around workers, perhaps they would be locked in for 5 turns in a position like a hero is when moving from one assignment to another, so you would need to give some forethought when assigning your workers.



For an idea of how it might look:







Population Disapproval (Overcrowding)

Perhaps it could be that you would begin to accumulate a malus to the city's approval rating when your city is functioning past its capacity to hold the population it has. The threshold for this could be something like the city center being able to support 4 units of population, with each city borough being able support an additional 2 units, so a city with 1 borough attached to it would be able to support 6 units of population before population disapproval sets in. Again, for the Necrophage, it might be different. Once you get above that, the malus could compound on itself per population unit above the threshold, ie. -10 for 1 unit, -20 for 2, -40 for 3, -80 for 4, and so forth, so building a borough would greatly ease the malus.



4. A reality check



As much as I would like to see some of these be implemented, what I suggest might be outside what the devs have in mind. A lot of this is seems like changing whole systems, and so I don't know if that's even possible given this stage. Ultimately this is still their game, and regardless of what this thread amounts to, I'm probably still going to enjoy it. I thought I'd take the time to write out what I think would improve it in the spirit of the alpha.



If you've read through this all, thank you for taking the time to do so. I hope it garners some useful discussion.

lukemacu wrote:
... is that we take a page from ES's book and allow cities to do something similiar to explotation mechanic in ES. Perhaps if the city has a high amount of industry nearby you can choose to make it a manufactoring center which further boosts its industry or maybe scrap that and allow the cities to build what I like to call "Idle-Infinites" which are the constructions that never end, you know like the Industry -> Science constructions, once again, from Endless Space.

These are Stockpiles, they don't infinitely loop (of course you could just add a dozen to your queue) but are a replacement for the "resource converter" mechanic.

I see what you're saying here and I agree with you potential fixes. Reading this I was reminded slightly of Endless Space and how in that you could have planets and to a greater extent systems that focused on producing something where as, as you say, you don't have this in Endless Legend. Perhaps, to suggets something other than what others have suggested(very good suggestions I should add) is that we take a page from ES's book and allow cities to do something similiar to explotation mechanic in ES. Perhaps if the city has a high amount of industry nearby you can choose to make it a manufactoring center which further boosts its industry or maybe scrap that and allow the cities to build what I like to call "Idle-Infinites" which are the constructions that never end, you know like the Industry -> Science constructions, once again, from Endless Space.

Have to agree. The largest problems seem to be



1) All cities become identical (no need to specialize)

2) Very little interaction with terrain/anomalies (they give trivial bonuses)

3) Mid game+, most fids come from just focusing all population into resource of choice

4) Districts. Start off painful, but quickly give unlimited approval and some decent fids because of how the levelling interaction works. Promotes always blobbing cities.

Very nice analysis, I completely support this.

The OP conteins some good writing, and interesting feedback.



My thoughs:



Problems:

- There is not much city specializacion, mostly due to dominant role of worker power (easy to switch), the effectivness of initial buildings (seed, mint, foundry, library), and lack of good fallow up buildings for specific FIDS.

- Workers are always essencial, and they very fast rise to pop6, so tiles are not so important. Also later in the game you can improve worker effectivness by various means, but you can't do much with tiles. So localizacion dosn't matter other than liking rivers, disliking sea/lake, or dead tiles.

- Hardly ever i split workers, only when this 1 worker will cut a turn from pop, or need to round up prestige.

- Some tiles are dead while should not. (ruins)

- We prefer vast plains when we can build a big pancake city (or wall city) without obstacles, every time. Boring. Also city slowly consuming region does not look so good.

- Region size matters more, we prefer just round regions, not long one, or with complex coastline.

- The whole mechanic, build city big enought and city will become happy on their own is not intuitive nor fun. Part of reason is that option for coast cities are limited.

- Buyout is super effective, and cheap, sometimes cheaper than building. (with slaves and policy) It is very tempring to switch any faction to dust production, and just buyout everything. (perfect mobility)

- There is pleanty of everything. Pleanty of food, of research. So it is more matter of speed than managment.



However i am generally ok with floating workforce, lets imagine it is just representacion of free people, and the rest is working tiles. In the end allocation to specific building will end with same gameplay, but more complex UI.

I am even fine with workforce producing 20 FIDS (actually more including % bonuses), but maybe in specific condicions in Age VI, not like now in Age III without much effort. That would add some immersion value if initial effectivness of worker would be lowish (like 2) and land will rule, but as technology improvess it will rise (to 20 end game).



What is worth a try:

- limiting number of buildings to broughs x2. City hall, founder stone do not count. That would be frustrating (aaah cant build as mad everything), but also creates some choices.

- Removing happiness from level up districts, cities are not like black holes, and balancing it around something else. Maybe eras, maybe buildings. Sample system: adding tile to city cost 5 unhappiness but building brought adds 5. So typical 3 tile expansion will cost -10 happiness, while rounding up just -5. And broughts give prestige, and with buildings possibly more. It could start from beggining, so 1st city will have 70 happiness (100-7x5+5 from city walls)

- Some other aproach is to remove happiness from baronies completly. But aff the 6th worker assign pool "idle" where each worker provides 5 happiness. So in theory we could build broughts as we pleased, but our workers will be occupy by idling around.

- Lower the workforce power, half of current productivity, so tiles, buildings will matter more.

- Increase the number of ways to increase tiles effectivness, some of them could be passive techs. So our location will be more important.

- Do something with buyouts. Like buyouts are x5 industry cost or something.

- Leveling districts: automated, level as much as number of tiles around, but not more than your Age.



That would be really nice and easy system. You start with happiness of 100, but each city drops it by -10, and each tile in city drops by -5, buy you can assign workers to idle for +5 each. So starting city will have 55/60 happiness. And players would have almost perfect control over happiness. Add to that that each barony (tile inside city walls) provides just 2 not specific buildings slots.

Nice thoughtful analysis. I find myself doing the same thing, build Seed Storage, then Mill Factory, then my city is well fed and productive and I can build what ever I need externally.



I think the main issue at the moment is two fold...



1. Early city buildings (Seed Storage, Mill Foundry, Empire Mint) give you too too much of a boost.



2. Workers are too effective, even without the techs that increase worker production.



Since players have easy access Food and Industry ( or Dust for Broken Lords), terrain bonuses don't matter as much as they should and cities quickly grow to the point where you run out of buildings to build. Before designing complicated systems of building placement and penalties, I'd like to see the building and worker FIDS output toned down as it would be an easier to implement. If this doesn't help the issues, some of your suggestions may help...



One observation you made that I agree with is the min/maxing of workers by shifting them around every turn. It feels like a chore more than strategy. Not sure if reducing the overall output would solve the problem (as your basic needs would not be met just with basic buildings) or if locking them in place would be required. Another thought would be to allow a worker to be placed only once (as a "specialist") and locking them in for the rest of the game...

For those less inclined towards walls-'o-text:



5. TL;DR Version



First, I don't know if what I suggest will be possible/feasible with game's vision.



Current Design

• Placing a city is a thoughtful process, many factors you have to consider; terrain, faction traits, anomalies, minor factions, etc.
• City Management requires much less thought -- just point and click improvements, move workers from time to time
• Economy mostly about building a lot of improvements on city and having large population to boot; makes original placement decision less important
  
  

Possible Problems

• No city differentiation; surgical strikes to cripple economy not really possible
• Also means no difference in "build"; all factions build cities similarly
• Because all cities end up so well-rounded, terrain does not matter that much
• Boroughs, though interesting, can be completely neglected outside of completing your faction quest; aren't connected well to city management
• For these reasons, city management, a large part of the game, is not very interesting; thus, not very fun (I think)
  
  

Suggestions



1. City Improvement Limitation

• Cities can only have a limited number of improvements built on them; maybe 2 per city expansion (the city center would allow for 3), except for the Necrophage
• Limit means you have to put more thought into what your city needs/what would benefit the faction the most; also need to grow the city to add more improvements
  
  

2. Improvement Placement

• City Improvements you're able to build depends on the terrain you settle
• Research level of improvement might determine how general/specific the terrain prerequisite is for improvement
• You would place improvements, like extractors/villages/boroughs, on a valid hex; can place on top of boroughs provided a valid hex
  
  

3. Worker Interaction with City

• Rather than assign workers to different resource categories; assign workers to improvements on city or city center itself
• Improvements would provide bonus that could be improved by having workers "staff" it -- like operating a module in DotE
• Improvements have a worker limit; different improvements may have different limits
• To discourage micromanagement, lock in workers for 5 turns at assigned position; requires a little forethought as to what you need
  
  

4. Population Disapproval (Overcrowding)

• City would only be able to support a certain number of pop. units before disapproval sets in
• Threshold could be 4 units on city center, +2 for each borough (maybe less for Necrophage?)
• Disapproval malus exponentially increases per unit of pop over capacity; makes boroughs necessary and useful to combat pop. disapproval
  
  

Again, I don't know if any what I suggest is possible/feasible with game's vision.