Another idea regarding food could be to make it a global resource, so that all cities will share it from the same basket. Maybe give the possibility to custom the share of food to direct to each city. This will give the option to create bread basket cities to support all the empire growth, which is also realistic, avoiding the need of exploits. Also, unit upkeep should require food and money rather than only money.

Crunbum wrote:

Well, first of all, you can disband units to get back their population. Therefore, it is a perfectly reasonable strategy to recruit units in multiple small cities, towns really with a scarce few farmers quarters, agricultural infrastructure and nothing else - while producing only industry (which we already established serves the roles of itself, gold and science in one, and provides greater yields in the latter two, than they do themselves should one have built their own districts).

Let me give you an example. I was playing a game on endless speed, where I had 2 cities of three territories each, both around 3000 food in the red. A giant malus you might say. Well, due to the pop growth/decay formula, you cannot actually lose more than one pop per turn. So for all the pop decay that caused, the six other mini "cities", each with a 100-200 food surplus, provided me with 3-4 pops a turn, which was quickly converted to cheap units and sent to the two cities to disband there.

Therefore, I was making a total balance of around -5000 in food production in the red, and yet I was growing pops. At a record pace, which was greater than what I would have gotten, had I made an equal amount of cities with half their districts being made of farmers quarters, each solidly in the green - since, due to the current diminishing returns formula, a big city, even almost emptied of pops will grow new ones seven times slower with a 1000 food surplus than ten small cities will with a 100 food surplus each which sums up to the same amount. This is a crucial flaw, but a separate issue from the recruitment/disbandment exploit still.

You can also just build 1 pop cost settlers to construct 3 pop cities, then build units in them in 1 turn then downgrade to outpost, while disbanding the units in your capital to get pops, after which you repeat the circle, converting industry to pops even more efficiently because you are skipping food production entirely rather than just abusing the growth formula.

Ok, this is complete and utter bullshit mechanics. There is no way this sort of interaction is intended and it should be fixed immediately. Large enough food deficits should definitely bring city pops under -1 per turn.

I generally agree with most of the issues raised and the proposed solutions, with the following exceptions:

1) While I agree it does make a certain amount of sense that units should cost gold to produce, I disagree that it should be only gold. It could be a hybrid of gold/industry. The industry cost could be relatively low for ancient units, and scale up as the units gradually switch to require much more equipment and manufacturing to actually utilize. It makes sense to me that the primary resource for warriors is combat training, whereas the primary resource for tanks is industrial capacity.
I feel it would also make a certain amount of sense for units to have a food upkeep as well as a monetary upkeep. Considering that units population if disbanded and part of a city would cost food per turn, it makes sense for units in the field to also be hungry and need food. I suppose that food upkeep would need to be subtracted evenly from every city (perhaps weighted toward cities with higher surplus).

I would also like to see unit hitpoints scale up as population requirement increases at a rate of 100hp per pop. It would allow for potentially interesting choices to be made in the later game, do I want to build more 1pop units that might be more easily killed, or fewer high pop units that would have a greater chance to survive and return to a city to heal/disband.

2) I disagree 100% with increasing territory size (though I would not be against giving a slider control in map generation).

The issues you highlight and are trying to solve by increased territory size are REAL issues that need addressing, but I feel like artificially increasing the territory size comes with many other undesirable issues, such as reduced number of overall territories on the map. Unless you are also proposing to expand the overall map size by 9x... which would obviously have performance issues.

The main issue as I see it is district spam. The territorial size is not bad, if cities/admin-centers only end up filling up 1/3 of the available tiles. I believe that severe steps need to be taken to address blanketing the entire world with districts of any kind (let alone makers quarters). I don't pretend to have the best solutions for this, but rather than simply scaling up the cost of producing each district, which is easily counteracted by how fast industry scales up from spammed makers quarters, there needs to be more organic limits. Maybe shift the production focus more toward specialists and away from the districts themselves? Maybe each district requires a certain number of population to be functional (a size 1 city with 15 districts... who is working there?) So you could say, each district constructed requires X population to provide its primary bonus (all or nothing), and an additional Y slots for specialists. Inactive districts would start to decay to ruins. In this way it would be more similar to civ where population works the land directly.

I am personally in favor of shifting the balance of FIMS production from districts to the surrounding terrain. A district should only be as productive as its supporting resource extraction. So toning back all adjacency bonuses between districts, and increasing the importance of building districts next to suitable terrain for exploitation, seems like a good start to me.

Additionally you could solve many of the military (and calvary) problems associated with cities by restricting city-walls a bit. Rather than have city walls automatically surround all attached districts, could have city walls surround the city in a roughly circular way. So if you have a cluster of 4 districts (city center + 3) you get walls around all 4. If you have some districts snaking off toward a forest, those don't get walls, unless and until you fill in the gaps to make it roughly a round shape.

This would also open up more opportunities for pillaging districts since they won't automatically be surrounded by walls. Maybe you don't have enough troops to take the city, and they don't have enough troops to drive you out... but you can roam around pillaging the cities tiles until one side or the other musters enough troops to do something about it.

This also makes city fortifications feel more organic, in that historically cities often out-grew their walls over time, until someone came along and built new and BETTER walls.

3) Food should absolutely allow for more than +1 population point per turn, but I think a reasonable restriction would be that total population (across all cities) should not be allowed to exceed lets say 25% of the current population. A size 1 city with 1000 food surplus should not be able to grow to size 100 in a single turn... unless you're overall empire has a huge population... at which point it makes sense that people from other cities would migrate there. So this food rich city would be sapping the growth of your other cities potentially. I would say that migration from other empires is a thing (and thus their pop counts toward your growth cap), but that starts to get much more complicated it design rules for.

However there should be no cap on starvation. Theoretically a city could lose all excess population over its food production in only a few turns. Exponentially decaying down to a population level that its food capacity can support makes sense.

It also seems eminently reasonable to me that each additional pop in a city takes more food to produce than the previous one, however I'm not certain that each pop should consume more each turn than the previous one.

4) I'm not sure what the fix for infrastructure is, but I think that reducing district spam will help tremendously with finding the turn cycles to actually build some. I definitely agree though that it seems really odd how settlers interact with infrastructure.

5) I agree 100% with your proposed change to Land Raiser. I would go so far as to say that the -50% to other yields should persist beyond when the bonus to industry lasts. So you get bonus for 5 turns, and penalty for 10 turns. Make it more of a tradeoff. Or it could be restricted just to industry. +100% industry for 2 turns and -50% industry for an additional 8 turns. (hypothetical of 100 industry gets +200 bonus over 2 turns, and -400 over 8 turns) Kinda front-loading production... more right-now and less overall later.

6) I really like your proposed change to tech cost scaling based on accumulated knowledge. It seems much more effective than what I had proposed before where techs in eras past get significantly cheaper, while scaling up the cost of next-era techs significantly. It very conveniently solves the prerequisite problem without hard-locking the whole techtree behind an intricate web of requirements. I am uncertain how to convey that in the game UI though. The other issue is, you don't necessarily want to set the scaling so hard as to make it always beneficial to fill in tech tree holes in order to gain a discount on other technology research. Perhaps each technology should contribute different amounts to overall knowledge level? So certain baseline fundamental technologies contribute more than obscure ones.

Examples:

high value: Wheel, writing, hydrology, movable typeface

low value: city defense, fishing, conquest, heavy infantry

While I'm not completely against the idea of forcing anyone to research all the techs of a previous era before advancing to the next era (so all ancient before moving to medieval as per your example), I feel by fixing osmosis mechanics and implementing your accumulated knowledge mechanic would probably fix those organically. You would either
A) slowly complete techs you had skipped passively by trade/war with other empires
B) you would choose to complete them in order to raise your general knowledge level and thus discount techs you're currently working on.

Of your proposed changes to Collective Minds I like the concept of grand discovery best.

rendymonyab wrote:

I feel it would also make a certain amount of sense for units to have a food upkeep as well as a monetary upkeep. Considering that units population if disbanded and part of a city would cost food per turn, it makes sense for units in the field to also be hungry and need food. I suppose that food upkeep would need to be subtracted evenly from every city (perhaps weighted toward cities with higher surplus).

This. Historically, feeding troops was a big problem. Troops remaining at home were a burden locally. Troops in ennemy territory need to find food or come with their own. Logistic was always a key factor, and we don't see that in the game. 

Deep thoughts, everyone. One aspect I would like to mention: In a gameworld where everything and everyone is against you and trying to outperform you, it is nice to have some aspects of your empire at your disposal, such as industry, where you can gain your strenght and prosper. Not everything should be against you, you should have a strength here and there. Industry is OK by me.

Crunbum wrote:

teatimeG wrote:

There are lots of balancing effects to be considered, for instance, making units require only gold to buy would make the Huns / Mongols either super dominant or irrelevant, depending on whether those units stay as they are or get a giant nerf bat to the side of the head.

Just gave up on a game where I didn't pick any industrial civs -- only the Zhou were left when I was ready to move into the ancient era and I wanted to see if I could win with the non-industry civs. Turns out, no. Probably it could be done with perfect play, but as the thread above illustrates, it would have been by ignoring what my chosen civs are supposed to do and buying extra makers quarters with no bonuses.

The insane thing that happened is as my industry puttered to a sputtering irrelevancy, my farm outputs were better than all the other civs but that meant just a small smattering of extra farmers. Nothing useful. Every new employed person had to be a farmer if I wanted to grow at all. And I desperately needed to grow to fill my land with the makers quarters I needed to balance not having picked an industry civ.

But do I want to do all the things in this thread? No. I think that would destabilize the game to the point of forcing an embarrassing rollback.

Instead, the devs should acknowledge the obvious. Industry is way better than the other things, so giving the influence civ +1 influence is not similar to some builder civ getting +1 industry.

Food --

Proposal: Food civs need much bigger food values depending on Era^2.

It seems Food is evaluated as 2:1 or 1.75:1 vs. industry when looking at what the farmer civs get. But at this point I don't think I'll pick a farming civ unless it's more like Era^2 better. So in the Ancient era, the Harappans are fine, but the English are up against builder civs that get +5 industry advantage to their districts and so need at least +45 food to make a higher pop civ competitive against a lower pop builder civ.

Influence --

Proposal: A civic that lets you use influence for buyouts instead of gold (gold is roughly 2:1, influence would need to be more like 1:2)

I either have all the influence I could ever need, or I just pick the "buy things instead of influence them" and ignore influence for the rest of the game. Influence needs a buff in the form of something useful to buy with all the extra. Most of the civics are fine, but the remainder are pointless and the cost of buying them increases geometrically, but influence increases only linearly. The point of my comments is to change things that don't have huge destabilizing impact on the game, so we don't want to just "make all the civics better lol." I think there could be a new early game civic where you can choose to do unit / building / infra buyouts in influence instead of gold similar to how inherited land changes outpost creation from influence to gold; then if you wanted or were forced onto an influence path you'd have something to do with that influence.

Science --

Proposal: +100% science for 5 turns, no collective minds.

Letting science cultures turn regular industry into science is so insanely unbalanced compared to "throw a party so the neighbors like you more." But worse than that, it's more of a buff to INDUSTRY than it is to science civs! Pick 5 industry cultures then 1 science culture at the end but lol ignore anything special about them because you're just using the special ability anyway. Just making the science bonus something like "+100% science on one city for 5 turns" would put it more in line with all the other special abilities. If you can't turn industry into science directly, you still can indirectly by building extra research quarters. It's not like industry needed a buff in a game where it's already the most brokenly awesome thing to have.

Money--

Proposal: Replace investor button with Ignore violence on trade routes button.

I don't agree with the general consensus that money needs a buff or that the buyouts are too high. I have had a lot of fun with money civs and buying out a few makers quarters totally works. I don't generally play on Endless, and if money is weak in Endless mode that to me seems like a problem with Endless mode, and not with money per say.

Where money falls over for me is market quarters are garbage unless you have a lot of trade routes. So when the world goes to war, the money civs are trash. But the builder civ says "lololololol here's some elephants rofl!" The unique "investor" ability of money civs is fun... as the Chinese... to get oil. Otherwise I don't find it handy.

I would prefer the unique ability allow merchant civs to ignore violence by pressing the "ha! I can trade during war!" button This is what actual merchant civs have been able to do during war since forever. It's how they get their reputation as merchants. Sending traders into war zones because the money must flow is the singular trait that causes everyone to say "man those people love money."

Food - You do realize that more food does nothing? 100 Excess means 0.67 pop/turn. 1000 excess means 0.95 pop. 10000 excess means 0.97 pop or something like that. Meanwhile you only need everyone employed as farmers to get any food excess because pop consumption scales with pop count, meaning the more pops you have, the higher the % of them that will need to be farmers to not enter a deficit.

Getting more food does not change anything much on that front. If you get 1000 industry, you are building stuff 10 times faster than if you had 100, but if you have 1000 food, its just 1.5x faster, its also why pop buyout is pretty worthless. Its a formula problem. not a "number" issue, that makes farmer's quarters and the agrarian approach pointless, and that's even ignoring the numerous exploits the current formula allows for (like feeder cities allowing you to grow crazy amounts of population while sitting deep in the red in overall food produced, via recruitment in small city and disbandment in a big one).

Influence - So we are doing even more inter-current conversions now? At that point, why not have everything be one currency you buy everything for /s ? Influence could use a sink sure (despite there being plenty of way overpriced things like merging cities), but what no currency whatsoever needs is a way to convert it to another - that's why the entire industry issue is an issue in the first place!

Science - I think it'd be fine, sure.

Money - "I don't agree that money needs a buff or that the buyouts are too high" -> glances at crossbowmen costing 5 million gold to buyout lategame but three digit industry -> yeah... sure. Money does not need a buff, money needs to be disjointed from industry - it needs its own niche that it, and only it, can fill. Units cost gold to upkeep and to heal, so why not have them cost gold to recruit and get rid of the gold buyout entirely, thus removing one of the overlapping currency problems that sadly plagues the game?

Trade does not really matter in Humankind at the moment, which it probably should, though the goods are certainly nice, but in the end more money for the sake of money, which you can't really use anyway? Quite pointless. So while I find that merchant ability you proposed quite interesting (though I think it'd be better as a passive trait of "can trade while at war" rather than an active ability), I think fundamental changes to what money can be used for absolutely necessary.

I don't get what y'all are on, never have i ever seen a unit cost scale like that, if anything the most ive ever paid for any unit is when i was buying thermonuclear missiles for 40k each, it's the most expensive unit in the game btw. I this an Endless speed specific issue or on post-win games? I am aware it increases with time, but from my experience going up in eras is way more brutal.

Gold buyout is indeed absolutely fine, market districts are ofc currently borked tho they somehow give a lot smaller numbers than makers quarters while money is all around less valuable, make it make sense. By it being fine i mean 10-20k gold per turn (an easy to reach amount on industrial/contemporary) lets you buy a dozen districts on any new settles, in a handful of turns a new territory is filled with districts ready to be absorbed/reattached by the nearby parent city. It actually feels like the most efficient way to feed a capital late game, not only in terms of pops as stated before, but districts as well. (ofc eventually the capital will outpace this eventually with Mughal bonuses, usually when you hit 100k production, ofc you just do both same time)

The reason ppl ditch money strategies is mostly because makers quarters are the district that scales the best for the majority of the game and builder cultures consistently the best FIMSI increases of their eras (only exception i can think to that is Australians and maaaybe Maya)(The affinity being op is obvious ofc). I mean seriously the Mughals get to enjoy +3 per worker while the dutch suffer at a +2 per trader even though money is less efficient???

We also need to address smt, turn 60 space race is only possible because influence and city cap is currently broken. It was literally achieved by settling every single territory, completely ignoring any city cap and just tanking negative influence stability drops by sheer speed. And ofc makers quarters only runs are only viable cause of current affinities, which by themselves already allow sub 100 victories even if you deliberately don't break the influence economy, without those it becomes way more in line with everything else.

Besides all this im mostly on agreement on everything, Food desperately need a rework rn specially and im still salty they nerfed pop buyout into irrelevance, just like they nearly did with money buyout.