Should cities be able to build 2 things at the same time?

[The diplomat]

I was thinking: should cities have 2 build queues so that they could build 2 things at the same time?

Why not have a military queue to build military units and a separate build queue for city improvements, settler units, worker units and wonders. The player could allocate the percentage of shields that go to each queue. This could be done on an empire level to reduce micromanagement. So, for example, you decide for the entire empire that 20% of a city's shields go to the military build queue and 80% of the city's shields go to the civilian build queue.

This would allow players to build military units and city improvements at the same time, although they would still have to decide which is more important. So there would still be a "guns vs butter" dilemma. If you set the military build queue to 100%, you'd get maximum production of military units but you wouldn't be able to build any city improvements and vice versa. Or you could take a more middle of the road approach and cut your shields 50-50 between military and civilian.

[Adagio]

I'd like to see it, but I doubt we will...

[Spiffor]

That's an interesting idea (I think it was present in GalCiv btw), but I think there would be a need of a seriously good interface so that it doesn't mean too much micromanagement.

A general slider for the civ, and an ajustable, easy-to-access slider per city could be good. In the main map, both constructions should be displyed (like the construction orders are displayed under the city's name in Civ3), and the importance given to each construction should be seen as a colour.

For example, let's say that I am building a marketplace at 90% in Persepolis, and a pikeman at 10% (Perspeolis being in the middle of my empire, I don't really need to build too much military there). Under Persepolis, "marketplace" is displayed in bright green, while "pikeman" is displayed in dark red.

[korn469]

If implemented properly I think that this feature could have positive ramifications for the Civ genre. Doing it right though has two components, one is interface, and the second is purpose. As far as interface goes I think that there are numerous ways they could successfully build it into the interface, Spiffor's idea could work (though it sounds a little micromanagement heavy). There could be two queues in every city one military (units) and one civilian (buildings, workers, settlers). Then the player would have a guns or butter slider, which determined how much production went into either, though of course if you didn't have anything in one queue then the other would default to 100%. Each city could simply have a fixed number of items based on its size. Towns have one queue, cities have two, metros have three, and a player could build anything they wanted with production being split equally amongst the queues. Or having multiple build queues could depend on having factories or some other prerequisit building. As I said the interface has many possible implementations.

I think that purpose is the more important item to consider. If a player could go back and engineer Vanilla Civ3 or Civ3 Conquests so that players had two build queues, and nothing else changed it wouldn't have much of an impact. As it is currently in Civ3 it's quite easy to build all buildings without any problems in the important core cities, and unless your civ is actively at war, then most of the queues are wasting shields on capitalization because there isn't anything worthwhile to build. I think if done properly with unit costs, then having more than one queue would have a positive impact on strategy. Maybe buildings should have more of an impact and cost far more, also military units could be slightly cheaper. So if a city produced 120 shields a turn, and it could equally divide that production on a 900 shield modern sports stadium and a 60 shield infantry units then we have some interesting outcomes. Basically the stadium in 15 turns along with 15 infantry.

I think only larger more developed cities should have the ability to have multiple queues. So either city size (by that i most mean town, city, metro, but it could also be for every x amount of citizens a city have a seperate build queue), city size regulated by tech, or certain buildings that open this up. If at least some useful military units stayed fairly cheap so that megacities could turn out multiple ones per turn, then this could come in really handy. I see it as less useful for buildings, but that's just me.

[Boris Godunov]

Well, maybe, but doing so will require a significant reconsideration on the number of city improvements and their impact. One of the problems I have in lower-difficulty civ games is that I quickly run out of improvements to build and can therefore just churn out units to overwhelm enemies and amass great wealth.

So it would require slowing down the build times for both, I believe. Or else you'll quickly reach a unit overload in the game. We all know what having tons of units on a map does to Civ...creeeeeeep....

[korn469]

Boris,

The only problem to increasing the build costs for buildings and units is that it completely offsets the advantage of having multiple build queues. If I had a city with three build queues I would rather build one spearman a turn than to build three spearmen once every three turns. Same things goes for city improvements.

There is a solution, but it's not a tried and true civ idea, it is instead a RTS idea. Instead of simply having units build when the shield box fills up, make it so that you pay for units in shields then it takes x number of turns to build them after you pay for them. So that way more cities or build queues basically equal more barricks.

[lajzar]

That gives you an option of have a library in 3 turns and a pikeman 3 turns later, or having a library and a pikeman both arrive at the same time after 6 turns. Its really a no-brainer.

Like teh proposal to have 2 items researched at the same time, it doesnt really add anything.

[Trifna]

I know that it was done un GalCiv, and worked very well. No management problem, BUT:
- If you just don't WANT another building somewhere, ressources go to garbage I think (if you get attack, you don't want to produce for the enemy
- What if on a given planet you wanted to produce only military, or on another you wanted only civil stuff? Mmmm, hard to specialize... except if ressources don't get wasted.

I may be wrong... but it's really what I remember

[Adagio]

Of course it should be optional, so if you have one city where there's only one unit/building being produced then 100% of shields produced in this city should go to that specific building...

And would be nice if you both have a slider that works for all cities, but also a slider for each city (this slider is optional), so you quickly can have all cities (that is not custom set) use 50/50 while one city is set to 20/80 instead and another one 30/100

[GePap]

In MOO each planet had a slider and a variety of different priorities, and you chose which one to fund.

As the system exists today, multiple queues don't make much of a change- if the system was modified significantly, it would be great. But I doubt radical change is in the work.

[DRoseDARs]

I'll repeat what I said in a similar thread:
"A slightly different take is that in moo3 they've split a military production queue from a civilian production queue."

[korn469]

DRoseDARs

The only problem to implementing MoO3's solution is that unless Civ4 seriously increases the number of civilian buildings or somehow splits up civilian and military shields or attaches a build time to units and structures then Civ4 doesn't need a civilian and military build queue. They way Civ is now, until later in the game when some supercities overproduce and waste shields when they build military units, it's always better to concentrate shields so that you can build one thing faster. Having multiple build queues without changes seems like it could only have one purpose, which is making a supercity builder strategy have more of an edge against an ICS strategy.

[Urban Ranger]

This was brought up before.

The conclusion was it doesn't make a difference. A city could only produce so much a turn, so having two queues won't make building faster.

[Trifna]

Well... I did have the impression that it changed something when playing GalCiv. Of course it may ask some balance and so on, but everything does so it's nothing new.

Wherever we are on this planet, there is few cities that are bringing such an handicap as producing only civilian facilities in war time, or only military units in peaceful times. Right now, it may be a bit all or nothing, and you decide wether a city produces NOTHING for itself (except protection) or ALL for itself.

GalCiv may show an example, but the production should also be decided to be all on one side if preferred.

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
This was brought up before.

The conclusion was it doesn't make a difference. A city could only produce so much a turn, so having two queues won't make building faster.

Well, what I was thinking about was the slider on the Finance screen that determines how much of a planet's resources can be devoted to military production before causing unrest. We've always had sliders for determining how much of our tax income is divided between Science, Luxuries, the state coffers, and whatever's left in the people's pockets. Perhaps this can add a useful dimension. I never liked only being able to build one thing at a time as it is absurdly unrealistic.

You never really saw civilian projects in moo3 as they were simply calculation modifiers, but if this was adapted to cIV many civilian projects could still calculation modifiers (small but cumulative improvements to farming/mining/science) but this would be in addition to player-ordered projects. Same with the military production queue.