The very very very short form: FIDSI -> FMDSI.



This proposal is somewhat aimed at reducing the tyranny of Industry, but also represents my general preference for how to handle military production in 4X games.



My proposal: what's currently Industry is only applied to building, upgrading, and supporting your military.



Implementation:

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City upgrades and outposts just cost time, not Industry.

Ideally, there'd be a separate build queue for military units... but more realistically, when a city is building a military unit, it's spending the city's Industry output to do so.

When a city isn't building a military unit, its Industry production goes into a pool (like Influence and Dust currently do).

Unit upgrades are paid for from that Industry pool, not from Dust.

Unit upkeep is paid from that industry pool. If unit upkeep exceeds the contents of the pool, military production is halted.

Military unit production costs are considerably reduced from their current levels; upkeep costs are dramatically higher. The target is for there to be a practical limit on the size of your military based on your Industry.

(Settlers, ideally, aren't produced from Industry.)

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Why do I think this would be a good idea? Because I don't think every city should depend upon both Food *and* Industry, as that leaves little room to differentiate them. Because I want to reduce the extent to which you have to tank your economic bootstrapping if you want to build military -- that tension generally seems to be overly done in 4X games (particularly Endless Space), leading to degenerate gameplay. Because I think that once combat gets improved/fixed in EL, it's going to be much more attritional than it is now... which means that build costs should be reduced. Because if you want military upkeep to be interesting, you make it count against military production.



This proposal isn't entirely standalone -- in particular, I think that other improvements to the handling of city evolution would dovetail nicely with it.

This is interesting, though I wonder - might this not unbalance Dust production? Since now keeping a large military force costs dust, which is no longer the case. So this might turn the game into a "buyout every improvement"-fest as that will end up being the mayor use of dust.

Besides, the new acronym would be too hard to pronounce.

Dalwin wrote:
Besides, the new acronym would be too hard to pronounce.

Pronunciation seems pretty straightforward to me.

adder wrote:
This is interesting, though I wonder - might this not unbalance Dust production? Since now keeping a large military force costs dust, which is no longer the case. So this might turn the game into a "buyout every improvement"-fest as that will end up being the mayor use of dust.

It's not been my impression that running a large military adds up to much dust upkeep as things currently stand, but possible I've just not noticed.



Regardless, it would be easy to tweak -- just shift the cost of buyouts, or possibly of all dust expenditures (going at it from the supply side would presumably be more complicated and annoying).

If you turned city improvements to cost time though, all cities would be abe to build as fast as each other, whether they be outpost or capital. maybe you could make it tied to population?

This looks like a really complicated solution to the "we have too much FIDSI at the moment" problem. I'd like to see some (major) cost/production adjustments before something like this was implemented.

I think this idea would work great. It shouldn't completely replace the dust cost though, just lower it (military is used to upkeep the weapons and armor while dust is used to pay the wages). The cost to produce military shouldn't be lowered too much either as currently it only takes 1-4 turns for a core city, with it's population set to production, to produce a military unit at mid game and that is plenty fast enough to me. Lastly I think instead of halting production, it would instead just send your military into the negatives and for every -25 or so you'd lose 1% combat effectiveness or something like that.



The tying improvements to population so each city doesn't produce at the same pace would be a very good implementation. Also making sure that at least some of the buildings currently producing production would also decrease the time needed to build improvements would allow even further variation in city builds in my opinion.



Sadly, this would require much too great of an overhaul, remaking almost every building (and with it half the tech tree) and many of the core mechanics of the game in addition to turning production into military, an extensive task in it's own right. While I think this could be added in a smaller sense, similar to using strategic resources to build units but requiring the resources also be used to upkeep and other small tweaks, fully adding this would be a pain and change the game completely. I do however wish to see this mechanic very much, I just don't think this game is the place to do it unless we want to add, at least, another half a year to the time needed to release the game.

Adventurer_Blitz wrote:
If you turned city improvements to cost time though, all cities would be abe to build as fast as each other, whether they be outpost or capital. maybe you could make it tied to population?

I don't immediately see a reason why it's good from a game design perspective for a large city to build, say, a Fish Farm faster than a small one. Could you elaborate on the reasoning you're working from?

dustin1819 wrote:
The cost to produce military shouldn't be lowered too much either as currently it only takes 1-4 turns for a core city, with it's population set to production, to produce a military unit at mid game and that is plenty fast enough to me.

Conceivably. It's my current impression that if you lose an army, one of two cases holds:

• You're so far ahead it doesn't really mater
• You've just lost the game.
• 
  
  

To me, this says that replacing lost military is currently too expensive.



On top of that, my experience is that the AI almost never actually attacks a city, such that there's no point in spending time building garrison troops. As long as you have a stack that can get to a city before a siege resolves (however long that is), you're set for city defense. In the rare case where you actually lose a city, you can take it right back, and I haven't noticed any degradation in a city due to conquest. Now, some of this might be me having not yet paid enough attention, but overall I'm pretty certain that there's little reason to defend your cities at the moment. I have to assume this will be fixed before release, at which point everyone will suddenly need to build militaries much larger than they currently do.

Lastly I think instead of halting production, it would instead just send your military into the negatives and for every -25 or so you'd lose 1% combat effectiveness or something like that.

I agree with the fundamental point, while thinking that the suggested implementation would be a suboptimal approach. (My first instinct here is that the right solution is an asymptotic decrease in combat effectiveness based on the ratio between the deficit and the upkeep cost.)

I just don't think this game is the place to do it

Oh, I had no illusions about the likelihood of my proposal being adopted.



After spending a lot of time playing 4X games over the decades, however, I'm coming to the conclusion that some of the standard tropes are flawed and could bear being reexamined. The extent to which you have to tank economic bootstrapping in order to build a military is at or near the top of the list -- that generally means you win or lose in the opening of the game based on whether or not you get your exponential growth kicked off before you get stepped on. (I think you want some tradeoff there, but I think games like ES and the Civ franchise miss the sweet spot by a considerable margin.)



...and the way for me to get games published that don't take those tropes as a given is to raise questions about them.

visage wrote:
Conceivably. It's my current impression that if you lose an army, one of two cases holds:

• You're so far ahead it doesn't really mater
• You've just lost the game.
• 
  
  

To me, this says that replacing lost military is currently too expensive.

I haven't noticed replacing military to be too expensive but we won't be able to argue about that until we have seen functional AI or multiplayer so we know how large of a military is generally expected.



I would reply to the rest but I'm new to forums and don't know how to quote multiple times in one post...

with multiplayer at least, i'll expect some people to try and build up a huge army, neglecting infrastructure while others build up a smaller defensive army and try and build their cities up.