i'm down with the save games thing. would you prefer the actual files or a diary of how we played or came to finish the game?

and i apologise if the title of this thread was a little strong; hopefully the post itself was a little more open minded. it may be the case that i need to play the thing, but if no one ever expressed their opinions before something was implemented that would mean a lot of extra work and i can only deal with the facts as i know them.

 

Ok, now tell me how to insert: it seems the attach file (edit link) control is greyed-out?

Well Frogboy, Here are two of my saves: http://depositfiles.com/files/ubxpwyf6x

One is an Empire game and one is a kingdom game. You will notice the evolution of my naming scheme to help me deal with the modal level up dialogs.

 

interesting, i think this idea should have its own thread.  so that they can be dissected, not just by brad(or even the whole dev team), but by other players too. 

The arguments about GC2 slider workaround all factory/lab strategy doesn't translate for this situation. That strategy was because your economy slider was split between factory and labs (and the reason many people asked to decouple it), and you could never have both producing at 100% capacity, so when the focus option was added, it made that whole slider system obsolete (if you were around when this was added in, you'd remember many people pointed this out). In Elemental, this just isn't true.

 

With the proposed slot system, you can build a city full of arcane bonus, build as many arcane labs as you want (or need) in it to make use of the bonus, AND build a city full of tech bonus, build as many studies as you want, etc... This allows you to make the most out of the bonuses, and thus make the cities different (specialized cities). Essentially, you might be able to compare it to a "fixed" version of GC2 with the sliders decoupled, where you can have both your labs and factories working at 100%, but not to the factory/lab only thing.

 

Ideally (if I understand Brad correctly) you would only really need 3-4 cities (gildar, arcane, tech, and maybe one for mat). But, as I've pointed out, having more cities is still very useful to grow more slots (and more build queues if you can afford to build many buildings at once). Which is the only real problem that needs addressing.

Kalin;

I question whether the doctrine of specialization is even a good one for this game. What was Minas Tirith specialized in? Or any other fantasy city example? Gal Civ 2 was a much larger scale game where players were expected to have ~ 10 planets before wars even began. Most elemental maps on the other hand, only have space for up to half that before you start running into the AI. I personally don't believe I should have to have lots of different cities to play the game competetively. If only specializaed cities are effective, i will need more of them, so i just have another reason to spam.

Personally, my vision for how factions should optimally develop was of each being a powerful city state, surrounded by satellite towns and villages which were mainly used to control resources. If you can grab resources without spamming cities than the game is much more fun i think. And if that city remains faily autonomous, with the resource outposts remaining small and providing mainly bonus production and revenue (with the bulk revenue coming from taxes), then factions will remain competetive for longer. The opening stages of a war will be skirmishes for these small towns, and the final epic battle comes at the end of the war instead of the beginning.

Currently this is not possible because of the (effectively linear) population growth mechanics. But it would be if you did it like this: https://forums.elementalgame.com/397376

I just personally don't see the point in getting slots that allow me to build things when i reach new population thresholds when we already have population thresholds when cities level up. I don't see the point in going back to build the same building over and over again as population increases, when you could just increase the production of one building in proportion to population. And i don't think that demolishing buildings to build units sounds fun. I don't see anything this mechanic adds to the game that couldn't be done in the more simple, intuitive way that i talked about. Even the specialiaztion thing could be done this way if you wanted it to be. And I would still like a direct answer to this, or defence from brad, though I will not cry myself to sleep if he doesn't.

I suppose you never played Monopoly then an enjoyed one of the greatest games of all time. I can't remember the countless times I built houses and then had to remove them and then build them again later on. Or hotels to replace houses only to go back to houses again later on and then sometimes even have to remove those houses back to basic property again.

So the mechanic works fine in Elemental as well. You build something and you want something else and you don't have the room then you remove something, later if you want something else you remove that something and replace it with something else.

The only difference is money replaces population in Monopoly. But a resource is a resource of course of course.

Quit being such a lazy gamer that just wants the game to play itself.

You wouldn't necessarily destroy thecshop. You'd just close them if you needed to draft people into your army.

 

How would the game determine what you closed?  (default behavior is important here, for the AI would likely use it I believe)

 

Also with this system, wouldn't it make sense to have a Civ 5-style town militia to help defend cities, at least lev 2 and above ones?

 

 

I being more and more in favor of a system with limits per city-level (at most one basic production building per level). This would be the easiest and most safe fix from the current situation.

 

If given free hands though, I would go more in a "colonization" direction. Simply define the concepts of employed and unemployed citizens. A basic building could then employ 10 people. A city with 10 people could thus have one mechants,  one study or one workshop etc. You could even get rid of city levels by giving higher level building higher worker requirements (a library or market 25 people, a palace 50 people). People could then also be employed by the military, but this would require keeping track of which city a unit was build in, so the employed personal could be removed if the unit died.

 

For city spam balancing there are many ways to punish multiple cities, but BEFORE punishing, we should start by taking away the freebies. Spaming cities is not only not punished in Elemental, it is encouraged by the game mechanics. Take a look at the list of freebies:

a) You can build more basic buildings (we are discussing fixing that now)

You don't need to feed people living in the city hub

c) You increase prestige.

I won't meantion increasing territory and getting new resources since this is the intended gain of city, but a gain that should come at a cost, and at least without being thrown other freebies.

But once you have solved the problem with scaling basic buildings, then follows the next issue: Feeding the city population. All cities must cost food, all pops much cost food. If you make the specialist system, you much make every specialist consume one food unit. If you don't have enough food, people will stop migrating to your empire/kingdom, or possible starve or emmigrate.

Second, solving prestige: This is easy, why the fuck is this a per city bonus in the first place? Make prestige global, and possible slightly bigger at game start, this will make the first cities grow faster and make it less and less important the more cities you have. You should also tie prestige somehow to sovereign level, or in other ways make it more "prestigious". If needed add a reproduction bonus to cities to increase without prestige, prestige should be an added bonus for having a famous sovereign and for doing cool things.

 

 

 

This is off topic but do you realize you just called one of the worse boardgames of all time one of the best? I played it a ton when I was a kid and had fun but looking at it as an adult in the cold light of day it sucks, bad. It was a random luck fest which lasted WAY longer than it needed to last for what it was. There's about 2000 better games you can find on boardgamegeek.

 

Anyway, sorry for the off topic rant. It's like he said McDonalds was some high quality cuisine for the discerning diner.

Please take time to make sure this works and is balanced. Doing it in a single two-week patching window, while thinking about the idea, sounds otherwise. If you take on board all of the above comments, especially regarding evolving it to deal with city-spam, late-game etc, then this idea Could be good. But if it's just left as suggested i imagine it being horrific. Some subtle tweaking please! And, if you do include it in 1.9 this week, maybe make that a beta patch? Constantly changing and re-changing game mechanics in the main patching tree seems a bit unfair on customers. Especially since the AI is likely to be a bit borked until you have a better understanding of exactly how the new mechanic changes the game.

 

If care and attention and beta patches are taken into account though then, yeah, good stuff!

 

Monopoly is one of the greatest games ever made. Yeah it's a game of luck, very little to no skill required, so?? So is yahtze, kismet, craps, poker .. all these games are majority luck, adding the sales of all these games together with playing cards and they probably multiply by 20 the combined sales of every strategy & PC game in existence (whether tbs, fps, rpg, whatever).

From the NY times, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/business/media/12adco.html

Although Hasbro does not discuss specific sales figures, Mr. Blecher said, the original version of Monopoly sells “several million copies in the United States every year.” Hasbro expects the new version to also sell millions of copies a year, he added, and expects only “a minor amount of cannibalization” of sales of the vintage version.

"several million a year" !!! is unbelievable for a game, and proves it's not the "worst boardgames of all time". In fact, the other guy was right, it is one of the best. I have a monopoly PC game that I got for like $7 and I play it every now & then. It's fun, quick & easy, I don't ever have to waste time figuring out why this, why that, or look up a rule. Sometimes I lose, so what? I don't care, it's still a fun game even if it's 95% luck. I can play the most difficult game ever made by man (ASL) or the easiest (checkers) they're all great to me. Sometimes I want to play difficult games but more often than not I prefer easier these days.

Monopoly is not a bad game.

End of discussion.

Well this is a matter of opinon. I do find it one of the better board games as well. To you it is the worst but for many other it is not.

I feel like this idea is good but imperfect. This could be hybridized with the specialist mindset, though I think the specialist mechanic is abstracted for no good reason, or at least none that I perceive.

So, make each building directly cost population. Change the population from a straight number to two numbers: Population, and available population. Just display is as aP/P.

Now, available population would be used to staff buildings and would be drafted for military. Each building would have a set number of people required. Early ones would require only a single person, later ones would require more, and particularly significant later ones could use lots of people.

So what about those unnused available population? People don't sit around and do nothing just because the Sovereign doesn't have any particular task for them. They find employ.

So buildings which should represent scalable enterprises get bonuses that are proportionate to the available population. Most production buildings should have this, or be spammable. In some cases maybe they get bonuses proportionate to total population, when that makes sense, but that should be the exception rather than the rule.

 

This means that your population is something important that you're thinking about, but it doesn't force some unintuitive and abstract contrivance on the player.

 

Some specific thoughts:

I'd say that the basic goods building should be spammable, as that encourages people to use up one person a pop dealing with the early goods shortage... but then late game that's a drain on available population, and you don't need the same level of goods. An inherent decision, and an interesting issue to consider when making your cities.

Markets should I think have a bonus for total population, they're the only that should, that I can think of off the top of my head.

monopoly is an awful comparison. monopoly has no research, only one resource to manage, no non accumulating resources (food), no population for streets, no levels for streets and no specialist slots.

another turn based strategy game would at least have been relevant.

 

can we get back on topic: what do specialist slots aim to do, is this wise, will they achieve it, do they introduce redundancy, are they a useful complication and can the dynamics they attempt to introduce be more effectively implemented within the existing system / or with another, simpler system.

The whole Monopoly comparison is moot, because Brad just stated that buildings could be "disabled" rather than demolished to make room for more specialist slots.

@ Cruxador

well, actually population is already displayed as P/P, because we have a housing limit as well. so what you'd actually need to display would be three numbers. personally i think this looks pretty intimidating to new players and, well, i just put myself in the position of someone looking at it for the first time and wondering what the hell "available" population means, or what a specialist is. but a stat for a Merchant that simply says 0.01gildar/person is pretty damn obvious. elemental is supposed to be about a war of magic, not a social study of large populations, exercise in economic management or anything like that. don't forget that a lot of the people who are going to pick up this game are doing so for the first time, if it manages to redeem itself.

this is not because i lack any desire to see the game improved, i'm just massively sceptical of any new abstract gaming mechanics. especially one that seems to be a middleman for linking production to population, instead of just making the link directly, which i think will solve this problem far more elegantly. why make city level more redundant when you can fix the problem by making it more relevant? this reminds me of the asteroids vs. resource starbases question in gal civ 2: two methods of representing the same thing, that make it completely obvious that one was tacked on at a later date.

@ GaelicVigil

why force the players to disable a building so they can build some troops? the whole idea of disabling buildings is a pretty bizarre one for a strategy game. if production was related to population, then recruiting would decrease production automatically when troops were recruited, without the player messing around disabling any newfangled mechanic.

Why are you debating it with me?  I didn't suggest it, Brad did.  I'm just saying that the Monopoly comparison is pointless.  Ask him.

 

on that we can agree.

You know how Master of Magic has those 3 sliders for dividing your mana income between Skill, Mana, and Research?

Could you make a system like that for each city, dividing population between Food, Production, Gildar, Technology, and Arcane Research? 

Buildings could just then give bonuses to the output/citizen for that city for a particular resource.

Troops should just subtract 1 population point from the city.

(You should also be able to convert your soldiers into population points at any city)

I don't know why we can't just do what MoM, MOO2 and Civ did.  Give us the option to assign citizens to city production or the military (guns or butter).  It worked fine in the past, why fix what ain't broken?

Housing could easily be separated out and labeled simply as housing. It probably should anyway, just for the sake of having an easily intelligible display. New players are not idiots. They will understand that available population means population which is available for them to utilize. Indeed, and going that route is a viable idea and is definitely better than the current implementation. It does lack details which could be modeled. This is true, but there's no real reason it couldn't have more detailed economic stuff for those who like that, as long as it's presented such that it does not become overwhelming. Yes, I know. For their sake, perhaps it would be good to add to these increasing displays a little thing in parenthesis that says "That'd be x amount of gold each turn if we had it now". That way, people can have access to the math, if they want it, and they have access to the endpoint of the math, so they can get a solid idea of what the improvement will do for their town if they build it, without having to think about it very hard.

This isn't really a middleman, or abstract. This is causing you to draw directly from a pool of citizens, and causing those citizens to behave in a realistic manner which makes them relevant, and lets other people go about their business in a way that profits your kingdom/empire. This is no more related to city level than your own suggestion; the only relation is that they both stem from population. To make city level more relevant directly, you would have to make increases in building output based on a cities level. That seems silly to me, and would have real purpose beyond increasing the level's relevance.

This seems very messy to me, and would require a level of micromanagement that many people would likely not feel inclined to indulge in. It also is very far from accurately representing how things work from a simulationist standpoint, which is not essential, but would be positive. I think that this suggestion is inferior to the current implementation.