This is the third post and in my series of "[New culture element] is underwhelming", and while I'm being critical about new content, it's only because I love this game and because I love the Paper Mill, the Reisläufer, and Communal Housing enough that I want to see them reach their full potential: to be balanced, compelling choices that I'm going to want to play.
For this writeup I'll try to refer to the culture as "Singapoeans" and to your capital city as "Singapore", even though it'll probably be called "Harappa", "Kerma", "Hàojing", etc. ;)
Singapore is meant to be the capstone of a "Tall Empire" playthrough: It has merge discounts, capital stability boosts, and benefits to owning many client states, and all of these will encourage you to merge cities near your capital into it, and liberate distant cities so you can patronize them. The moment you become the Singaporeans, your strategy is going to pivot enormously. It has the potential to become an exciting, frustrating, rewarding time at the end of the game. Is it worth it?
The Singaporean Emblematic Quarter, "Communal Housing" (CH) can make-or-break the Singaporeans, and at the moment it's fairly sub-par. There's a lot of nuance to the district, so I'll try to break down the three main parts of it:
First off, you can build this EQ a number of times per territory per city you are below the city cap. For example, if your city cap is 10 and you have 7 cities, you're 3-below-cap and you can build 3 Communal Housing EQs per territory. This isn't immediately clear, so if you're at-or-above cap, you just won't see your EQ in the build list at all, and there's no language that tells you that you can get more by going under cap, too.
This EQ must be built over a Farmers Quarter(FQ). This restricts the EQ terribly in three ways:
We may not actually have many Farmers Quarters in our city, so even if we're three or four territories below our city cap, we probably won't be able to build all of the EQs that we're entitled to because we don't have enough FQs to build over
Many of the FQs we need to build over might be Emblematic Quarters from our history as Agrarian cultures, which means we're sacrificing food quarters for generic quarters, and Singaporeans can't let up on food generation.
The yield of Communal Housing is heavily reliant on being adjacent to basic quarters, but because we have to build them over Farmers Quarters, we'll never be able to place this EQ where we want them to be.
Additionally, Communal Housing benefits from no adjacency to one another (except for a small +4 food because it is itself a Farmers Quarter), and it competes with Commons Quarters for stability, Swiss Watchmakers for specialists, and even just other basic quarters for better yield. They are hard to place optimally and subpar even when we do.
Redesigning Communal Housing
The idea behind Communal Housing is great, and we can make the district a compelling one with only a few minor tweaks. The intent seems to be that Communal Housing should be a "spammable generalist district" in a city plagued by (1)Overpopulation, (2)Stability Concerns, (3) High District Costs, and (4) Centralized Influence.
Each Communal Housing should add +1 Farmer, Worker, Trader, and Research slot.
As a post-merger city, Singapore is going to be overpopulated. Adding more worker slots eases the overpopulation food penalty and also puts your strength — a huge city full of people — to work.
Each Communal Housing should count as a Farmers Quarter, a Market Quarter, and a Research Quarter, but also not exploit any surrounding terrain.
This means the EQ can benefit from being clustered together as well as being put next to other districts, encouraging unique and dense "downtown cores" in Singapore. The +4 bonus we get from this EQ will never compete with better bonuses from placing a better district down in its place. Making the EQ count as these three basic quarters makes it a district worth the tradeoff of not having additional cities that would be producing money and science for your empire.
This also means that Commons Quarters can grant additional stability from its EQ to cope with Singapore's Stability Concerns. Place a Commons Quarter next to a Carthaginian Cothon to see what I mean.
I've left Makers Quarter off the list because communal housing is not an industrial district and shouldn't benefit from being placed next to it. That's mostly for flavour, but I think it's also good balance.
Loosen or eliminate the requirement that it has to replace a Farmers Quarter so we can place the EQ more freely. Either allow it to be built anywhere, require it to be built on an existing quarter of any type, and/or...
Strongly consider making it cheaper to build: Singapore's third weakness as a mega-city is the enormous cost of districts. Post-merger, Singapore can easily have 100-200 districts, making each new one expensive. Their EQ's bonus is that we can build a lot of them, but as it stands it'll be too expensive to do so. Consider a discount if we build over an existing quarter, or a discount per city that we are under city cap. @Cure_off suggested these discounts specifically in his thread on Tweaking Singapore's Numbers. Go read it!
Add a small influence bonus to the EQ: For example, each CH could give a +1 or +2 influence per adjacent FIMS district.
Why? Singapore has only one Central Plaza but potentially dozens of Administrative Centres from merged cities, and those Admin Centres don't generate influence post-merger. The bulk of your city's influence comes from a single central territory. A "wide empire" generates influence fairly evenly across its territories, but a "tall empire" like singapore generates most of its influence at the central plaza. Within a few turns of merging your cities into the capital, you'll start to feel influence pressure on your borders. Additionally, due to the nature of cultural osmosis, even a single territory in your capital flipping to another empire is going to be a real thorn in your side. So I propose either the Singapoean EQ generate influence or your LT generate influence from Administrative Centres. The alternative is for Singapore to rely on Cultural Eradication or Isolationism civics to keep your city's culture from cracking.
Frankly, Singaporean EQ is one that made me wish for return of synergies between quarters, so non-FQs neighbouring FQs (necessary for the EQ to work) would be something more natural, rather than clusters of same quarters everywhere.
As it stands right now, to optimally use Singaporeans, you need to start preparing for them almost since Era 1 and I'd argue it can cripple you to the point of whatever you could gain not being worth it. I like the idea of making it cheaper and giving more adjacency synergies by being counted as certain Quarters, without being able to exploit anything directly, encouraging it to get surrounded with infrastructure.
Playing the Singaporeans is sadly anything but optimal.
LT
is 1/3 about merging, which remains too costly, it is unusable,
is 1/3 about stability, which should not be an issue at this point in the game,
is 1/3 great (however I'm not sure it did apply in my game) or could be great as you can't make new city states.
EU
I'm more of a peaceful player so I kinda like it but if you see them while playing a one city challenge, you're probably going to get wiped.
EQ
Requires to have a lot of FQ
Requires to have few cities
so you need to have a big city or few big cities with a lot of districts, which seems to synergize with the LT, but the EQ are too expensive then to build
I feel it might have been tested too little as it required to play a full game to pick them.
I tried a run with only one city going
Sumerians » codified laws and a temporary (2 turns required) second city to grab Autarch
Mauryans » for the LT and to generate more influence
Swahili (I needed stability a lot and had many still unattached territories that could build the EQ with influence)
Venetians (everything better was taken)
British » for the LT and because I started to be unable to build districts
Singaporeans » I built 3 EQ in total, game crashed to many times, got few automatic saves missing and decided to jump into the next.
I played around my one big city and built it for that, grabbing Stonehenge notably. Issues were the following:
Right from the start, I needed too much influence compared to what I produced.
Starting in the second era, I had issues getting my agrarian stars (outposts a bit heavy on production maybe) and lost a lot of fame.
I had also issues to build all my EQ, missing on influence
Playing as the Swahili, I got the joy to build a ton of Bandari. However, attaching territories later made it impossible to build districts fast enough.
Starting in the fourth era, attaching territories began to take time
I grabbed some foreign territories and merged them into my city. They sadly came with many districts.
I forgot I needed FQ to place the Singaporeans EQ. It would not have changed much, they took forever to build.
Would it have been possible to play it better by going full industry? Maybe, but you still need 6 to 7 FQ per territory (so around 200 if you want to fill all territories) to really abuse the EQ. So it is impossible to go full industry, that's closer to at best a mix industry/food. There seem to be no culture that would magically allow to play fully the Singaporeans.
As I wrote in my thread, that RedSirus was kind enough to link in his, it is not an issue with the Singaporeans so much as one with the inability to play tall competitively. I was first on the scoreboard but not by much and for once I wasn't even playing at the highest level.
Considering what the EQ is meant to represent, I'm surprised it doesn't replace commons quarters and/or hamlets instead of (or as well as) farmers quarters. And it should honestly give stability similar to a commons quarter (or at least not give a stability malus), given both what it represents and the inherent stability issues with that enormous of a city.
I'm neutral on the idea of giving it extra jobs; while it certainly fits mechanically, making other jobs more productive or easier to create feels more on theme for the EQ. Maybe they could reduce the effective districts taken into account in calculating district cost in the city they're built in by 2 each (and not counting for it themselves), and be fairly cheap to build? That way it makes other districts cheaper to build for the mega-city, has effects immediately upon building one instead of taking 20-30 to matter like a percentage cost reduction would, and doesn't risk overflowing percentage discounts on districts if you have stuff like ancient Egyptians/Giza bonuses thrown in on top of 50 of them.
Considering what the EQ is meant to represent, I'm surprised it doesn't replace commons quarters and/or hamlets instead of (or as well as) farmers quarters. And it should honestly give stability similar to a commons quarter (or at least not give a stability malus), given both what it represents and the inherent stability issues with that enormous of a city.
I like that. The EQ needs indeed to be easier to place and easier to build. 90% reduction seems fair and could help a bit deal with the issue with high amount of district, as long as replacements count towards builder stars: then player will almost only make replacement in big cities but at least they'll be able to do something and use the EQ. I don't really care about the stability as the LT gives already a bit and it is rarely an issue at this point in the game but it's a fair point too. Having no malus will make it negating the previous malus.
Plainne wrote: I'm neutral on the idea of giving it extra jobs; while it certainly fits mechanically, making other jobs more productive or easier to create feels more on theme for the EQ.
I think giving it jobs ticks all three checkboxes of being on-theme, mechanically-necessary for Singapore, and in alignment with the existing "more jobs" districts and infrastructure: Singaporean Communal Housing feels a little bit like a repeatable (and prestigious) version of the "High Density Infrastructure" feature granted by the Social Housing technology, and also like "downtown Hamlets" based around adjacency yields instead of exploitation yields. There are a lot of other LTs and EQs that boost job output, but what Singapore needs once you start merging cities together is "housing" and jobs for its overpopulation. You can easily wind up with 100+ population in your capital but with more than half of that population without productive slots. "Rapid densification of your city cores" would be an interesting and on-theme way to solve the problems Singapore will face.
Amazing! :-) finally understand why I was not seeing EQ into the list of available quarters. more than a year after release and no explanation/comment into the game :-(
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