[Gameplay/Balance] Buildings Should Cost Something

Interesting ideas, but IMHO the trade off between wide (city spam) and tall (highly developped cities) is already leaning way too much towards wide. If you make buildings more difficult, they need to provide more benefits.

There is no trade off, and the armies + research move too fast to sit around and stall, maybe difficulty level is the problem.

That said, I would like to see more incentives to go tall by having some buildings with limits of 3 per faction or 5 per faction. I also like having more buildings that depend on settlement type, however there is one problem.

I will never build a unit outside of a fortress once I have my first fortress up, and I don't want unit enhancers on non-fortress settlements because it discourages my choice. I do like the building that gives 5% hp to all units, however that is technically an upgrade so its different. (However, the second reason I build a city is for that).

One possible restriction is "either or" buildings.

Shaman's Hut: +1 Essence, may not build Warriors Hall.

Warrior's Hall: +1 attack and defense for all trained units. May not build Shaman's Hut.

This is okay however the restriction is better moved to city/fortress/conclave mechanism which takes care of it.

Another possible restriction is having a building require 2 prerequisite buildings instead of one, creating a pyramid instead of a ladder. This is only fun when BOTH of the first buildings have synchronicity and the third ices the cake.

Warrior's Hall: +2 Attack for all trained units.

Guardian's Hall: +2 Defense for all trained units.

Honor Hall: +1 Attack and Defense, +1 Initiative per level for all trained units. Prerequisite Warrior's Hall and Guardian's Hall.

This would only actually be fun if there were 1 building in each tree of fortress/conclave/city. You don't want players to have to memorize prerequisites, you want them to jump in and play.

Another option is to increase the costs of buildings, which provides less benefit per resource investment and forces a militant war game without much else.

Finally, you can make a building dependent on something like a technology or a resource; which is already the case.

interesting ideas thadianaphena, I am sticking by my vote for a Wood resource, along with Metal and Crystal to add some Material cost to buildings. That way City building and Expanding can potentially be more interesting and players develop a building strategy that works for them instead of just building everykind of building. The highest tier buildings could be buffed a little and given the highest cost to build. So when you can actually afford to build say a War College it feels like an achievement, I'm sure everyone remembers how expensive Starbases were, especially if you built a Death Star.

I am aware of the problem that could arise from making Wood a resource required for buildings, what if a player spawns without a nearby forest? I haven't seen that scenario yet but I am sure it could happen. A simple algorithm adjustment on the random generator could fix that and a spot check on the static maps would address them. Also I just think it makes sense to have Wood as a resource for building stuff because 90% of the building art ingame seems to contain wood in the design. Anyways I'd like to see a little extra depth/strategy in the city building besides building all buildings available. As for how to obtain it, convert the lumber mill into a +Wood building line(or wood and production) and make it buildable in all city types.

This game is so awesome with so much potential. I would also like to see bigger battlefields and more melee/ranged combat abilites(Magic is already so well fleshed out) for extra depth/tactics in combat but that's for another thread and another time, maybe when LH hits .60

I'm strongly against maintenance costs for buildings. However I don't mind up front costs if they make sense and are balanced against the buildings usefulness.

I have modded the game so each building requires some population. When there is not enough population the city gets a penalty for under population. I like the result, but I am partial so probably I can't be trusted to judge this modification

That is similar to the end of E:WoM mechanics which to be honest I kind of liked.  I would be interested to see the specialists pool implemented with the FE food system.  But on to the buildings.

Lumber and stone can be added into the game but then you can easily run into the same problem as with iron and training units.  So this is something you should consider when adding new materials to building requirements.

Actually I like the sound of each building costing pop. With the more extravagent buildings costing lots of pop. I am also partial to the specialist idea myself, loved that in Civ 5 if that's what you were intending, or even the old method some oldschool 4x games used assigning certain citizens to prod., research, and commerce. If anyone makes a full-blown mod containing any of this I would love to try it out

Agree with you.  Every time I build a study in a fortress, I cringe a little...but still build it because I want the research.  And what settlement doesn't have a workshop?

Against per turn maintenance of buildings, as it wouldn't really fix the build everything everywhere dynamic.  I think the upfront cost would be more meaningful.

Agree with you here.  On the right spot, specialization doesn't really matter.

I'm a strong advocate of classing units (settler, melee, ranged, arcane), and providing production incentives for a particular class to a town specialization, and disincentives on the other classes for the same town specialization.

A possible solution may be to remove all build-me-everywhere buildings (we're still in beta after all).

The problem with the everywhere buildings is what they are.  Study, Workshop, Bell tower, Lumber Camp (If next to a forest), Dock (If next to a river), and a few others I can't think of.  Currently the ability to create unit classes is a bit complicated, it can be done but it takes a lot of effort and recoding.  When I mean a lot trust me I have considered doing it but its far too much effort for one person, well unless you are Heavenfall.  The point is with the current game system for units it would be difficult.  There is also the problem of restricting items to classes which is possible but also very painful.  So be very careful before suggesting classing units.

For the buildings maybe remove the necessity to have the base buildings by reimplementing the production/research/gold per population and then have the base buildings effect those variables along with having the base town values making up for the losses in totals for those area.  So the base town production would be higher as towns usually have more people, but a fortress with its reduced amount would be increased by the blacksmith who could give a 50% (just a number) bonus to production so that while a fortress might have less people (if you set them up to have lower population increase points) it would still have a higher production level.  A conclave could then have a similar building for research.  This leaves shards which would be the only general buildings.

Buildings already cost a resource. It is called production. Every turn spend on building, you are not training troops.

Most buildings provide relatively small bonuses by themselves, so I do not really see a problem here.

Like in all similar games, it's a choice between building up your army or your economy.

I agree with Fallenchar - the opportunity cost of buildings is already enough to balance them. While your cities construct buildings, they aren't building troops. and LH introduced the options to build growth/gold/research/mana, so that's another opportunity cost of buildings.

Sure you can build all the unrestricted building in every city, but it's not necessarily a good idea to build that study in the fortress when that fortress could actually build armies or growth (to reach the very powerful level 3/4/5 upgrades faster)

I don't really see a point in introducing wood/stone as a resource. they would serve as an additional restriction (and maybe as an alternate currency for rush buying buildings?), but i have a feeling that adding this resource is really just adding complexity for the sake of complexity. i don't think it introduces meaningful decisions to the game. instead of starting new towns with workshops/belltowers, you'd probably start them with the logging camp to provide the wood for the buildings and that's it basically?

maybe the different tiers of buildings could be tied to the actual city levels to reduce building spam a bit (so you can only build the study/workshop/garder tier in villages andthe city must grow to level 2 before for the 2nd tier [school/mason/granary] and level 3 for college/mill/storehouse )

I agree with Fallenchar and Azunai_ There is really nothing I can add that they have not already said.

Disagree that they have little cost, time is everything in this game, sure you can sit in your armchair building a glorious civilization but you really need to balance that with your armies. You have to be careful what buildings you make in which order and each time you make a building that is time you could be spent making units.

It's already a struggle to keep finances under control early on, putting a cost on buildings would just make the game frustrating. Not to mention having to try and link all your settlements with outposts (cost of population and time).

If you can beat the game on hardest difficulty with max monsters then I guess I can understand why you would want to make the game more difficult, but personally I think the game balance vs a.i. is pretty well tuned atm.

I feel the buildings could benefit from being more expensive to build, but more powerful when completed.

Giving the player tough choices in city development, and army production, and rewards for players who prefer to do one or the other.

+!

If I want to build every building in every city, it's my empire. That means I should be allowed to build it like I want. While requiring specific materials to build something sounds cool, it may very well mean that I can't if the RNG hates me. We all ready have times where we can't build troops that require metal/crystal/horses/wargs because we couldn't find some. That is fine, but additional complication in building buildings would be over the top.

This is also a good point, if buildings were "stronger" they could be more expensive.

It is worth noting the design theory of adding bonuses in a game.

If you have small bonuses, the core unit is the primary variable, and added abilities are enhancements.

If you have big bonuses, the core unit is secondary to any abilities you can put on it, and the abilities are primary.

There is a means to have both ways: have some smaller impact abilities built into core units and have a few bigger things here and there units can get.

FE allows units to be designed, in game units to be modified and sovereigns to be created. Thus, it already does this to an extent. The only "problem" (for me) is that many of the abilities are smaller in impact. For example, the EXP perks in the command tree could be combined into one perk that gives 25% and placed at the end of a tree.

I whole-heartedly disagree, this game is not that intense that time is "everything". You can make quite a few horrendous mistakes and still win the game. I know I did the first playthrough. Compare that to Civ5, where on the higher difficulties every turn counts. The AI is pretty pathetic at conquering your cities. Even with the best algorithms 4 out of 5 times they seem to just pass an unguarded city right up (wandering monsters) and the faction AI, even when you are at war with them they rarely send armies to attack you. Finances(gildar income) would have nothing to do with Wood, that would function as a seperate resource like Metal. The cost wouldn't be static, you could get discounts through production buildings, or researching a certain tech. Also it would be scalable by difficulty. So on Insane the buildings would cost the most, and Easy the cheapest. Also some games give you a certain amount of starting resources so for example a 100 starting Wood could also be an option.

As it stands city-building is rather bland, and we are not forced to make difficult decisions, it's usually a no-brainer what to build next instead of a hard choice. Considering City-building occupies almost all of your attention when you don't have any army, and a good deal of time even after you have several. I think it could benefit from some Dev attention. Raptarius good games are supposed to be frustrating/challenging; not a walk in the park. Easy, non-challenging games will keep someone's interest a week or two at best, unless it's massively fun with tons of replayability. I prefer a game that's challenging. The combat in FE:LH can be challenging at times. It is on a completely different level than the city-building. That's for sure. "Well it should be, it's the main focus of the game!" Well if that's true, shouldn't city-building be downscaled even further so it occupies barely any of our time and more time can be spent on the combat? As it stands, it's takes up about 40-50% of your time depending on how many cities you are overseeing.

Also addressing the person who pointed out the "production" cost. That's a turns-to-build cost, present in every Turn-based Strategy game. The only difference is most TBS use something else along with turn cost to build things, this is usually either an upfront resource cost, or a maintenance cost, and in Civ5's case some buildings won't function period without a Specialist assigned to them. I like that idea.

Now if the majority are of the mind of leaving city-building bland and easy, then I would request the option for Governors, another feature many TBS have. For those who are absolutely bored or in some cases overwhelmed by city-building you can allocate that task to a AI controlled-governor. Stardock please implement this feature, so I can just focus on the questing and combat and not complain anymore about "City-building" which is just me filling up my entire building queue with every building available in the order of what I need first and what I can build simply because I can.

Thanks for your comment. I am on Easter holidays right now, but will try to release an stable version of the pop mod next week as I see that there could be interest on it. 

That would be awesome thanks Oliver and enjoy your holiday

The problem you run into ADDING things to cost of anything is the AI starts to lose MORE GROUND in PICKING the right method of development path. Also having the resources around you suggest (other than metal) isn't always possible. (Civilization III anyone?).

So, no there doesn't need to be MORE things to cost of buildings for the AI to have to decide and deal with. The key to a successful game is K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple Stupid).

The ONLY thing I might agree with would be metals as the AI does seem to get more and stockpile more of this resource, but, don't add trees and/or stone or any other crap materials.

It depends on th nature of what you add. if you add something completely unrelated then you are making things more complex for nothing. But if you expand naturally what you already have it can be understood (even by the AI) easily as it fits with what was in place already. Adding upkeep costs to buildings (gold, money or wathever) is just a continuation of the idea that you need a wealthy empire. The rule is simple: Don't grow too much too fast. Don't spread too thin. 

About the AI not being able to handle it, even Nintendo DS' Age of Empires implement a simple yet effective upkeep system that the limited capacity of the DS has no problems handling. 

Making the game more COMPLETE does not have to be equal to making it more COMPLICATED. So your KISS approach still applies. 

Derek Paxton has commented on this in an earlier thread back in FE. He was very clear that cities should be considered resource PRODUCERS. The trade-off for creating something is measured the production necessary to build it. In LH you also have indirect tradeoffs from focusing a town on something like growing.

I really like the building system in this game. Its not over-complicated, doesn't try to do too much, and doesn't have excess mechanics, and deciding which buildings to build when is a big decision. Even the "build me everywhere" buildings are not always trivial. Settle a new city late game? Do you want to wait 50 turns to put up a dozen "build me everywhere" buildings before the new city does anything useful? Buildings also take time and that's a valuable resource. If you can win this game while making a number of terrible decisions then up the difficulty. If that doesn't work then its an AI problem, something the devs will be working on. Adding more mechanics will only make that worse.

But troops cost maintenance and buildings cost no maintenance. I think it would be balanced if both cost maintenance or none of them.