Should there be more building requirements?

[Willem]

So we finally have buildings that you need to have in place in order to build certain units, ie, Missionaries require Monasteries, yet surprisingly there's been no discussion on how little this is being used in the game. I've been thinking of modding my game so that this is utilized more often. For instance, it seems natural to me that you would need an Airport in order to build aircraft, modern ships should require a Drydock, and Tanks should be built only in cities with a Factory.

[Akaoz]

Forge for Swordmen?

[Willem]

I never thought of that one. But having the requirement come so early might screw up the AI, the human player would be much smarter at having the required building in place. I was thinking Barracks for any foot unit after Fuedalism though, or maybe at least Gunpowder. Forge might be a good one for Cannon/Artillery though.

[Locutus]

Presumably it's not done more because it severely limits warmongering. The current builder/warmonger balance is a very delicate one...

[Willem]

It seems to me that the game still favours a warmongering strategy. It might provide more of a balance having these extra requirements.

[Locutus]

From that statement I can infer that you, sir, are a builder

[Willem]

Yes indeed.

But just looking at the scoring system, it's heavily slanted towards having the most land and population, which a warmonger is more likely to have. I once won a space race victory and got a lousy 52 points for doing so. Granted I got it with only 3 turns left in the game, but it was still a very miserly score bonus.

[Locutus]

The scoring system isn't necessarily very indicative of how the game balance works out

In fact, I'm pretty sure it was very much influenced by the desires of the MP community, which is of course heavily slanted towards the warmonger side.

[Adagio]

Originally posted by Willem
So we finally have buildings that you need to have in place in order to build certain units, ie, Missionaries require Monasteries, yet surprisingly there's been no discussion on how little this is being used in the game. I've been thinking of modding my game so that this is utilized more often. For instance, it seems natural to me that you would need an Airport in order to build aircraft, modern ships should require a Drydock, and Tanks should be built only in cities with a Factory.

I'd say it shouldn't be requirements, but implemented a bit different:

You can still build aircraft without an airport, but having that building gives a +50% production bonus for aircraft units. And a Drydock could give +25%



A bit off topic:
I would also like to see the Shrine give a promotion to Missionary units produced in the city (for the religion of the shrine of course). This promotion gives the unit 50% higher chance of converting a city

[Adagio]

Originally posted by Locutus
The scoring system isn't necessarily very indicative of how the game balance works out

Nope, but it doesn't "look good" on the highscore table, as it's very difficult to get as good a score winning by Diplomacy than by winning by Conquest. My best conquest score doesn't even come close to an average Diplomacy score

The score shouldn't be calculated by how much land you own, how many people live in your civ and how advanced your civ is, but it should be calculated based on how you win the game:
Like if you win by Diplomacy, your score is based on how many % of the other civs are your friends, how many wars you have been in (the fewer the better)
Or if you win by culture, the score is based on how much culture all your cities have, counted together, and how many religions you have founded (holy cities taken by conquest doesn't count) and how spread those religions are

Of course this makes it impossible to show the score while playing, but as you all know, that score is more or less useless anyway

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Adagio
The score shouldn't be calculated by how much land you own, how many people live in your civ and how advanced your civ is, but it should be calculated based on how you win the game:
Like if you win by Diplomacy, your score is based on how many % of the other civs are your friends, how many wars you have been in (the fewer the better)
Or if you win by culture, the score is based on how much culture all your cities have, counted together, and how many religions you have founded (holy cities taken by conquest doesn't count) and how spread those religions are

You too are showing off the fact that you are a builder

The problem with the score (and every other aspect of the game for that matter), is that what it "should" be like depends on who you ask. As I mentioned, in case of Civ4 it was mostly asked to MPers (or rather, they were more fanatical in answering the question), who view it more as a tool to measure power in-game rather than as a way to judge the quality of a victory afterwards. There's been a lot of debate over it, and Firaxis have tried to appease the builder crowd by giving extra bonuses to early peaceful wins, but you're always gonna have a bias one way or the other. Civ4 is very builder friendly in most aspects (certainly much more so than previous Civ games), I myself don't mind too much that this one rather peripheral issue is a bit pro-warmonger.

And of course, if you don't like it, you can always mod it

[Adagio]

Originally posted by Locutus
You too are showing off the fact that you are a builder

Actually I'm more of a warmonger, but I guess it's mostly just because of the scoring system is favoring war


By implementing my scoring system as I gave an example of, it can still be used in MP the same way as now I guess. The ingame score can still be used as it is currently, it's just the end-score that should depend on other things, than just the size of your civ and how early you win (it's impossible to win a diplomacy/cultural/spaceship victory before 1 AD)

[Badtz Maru]

Part of the reason why this isn't done more is to make it easier to have a challenging AI. The AI has trouble determining which cities need defending and which don't, and lacks the human players ability to look at the map and get a sense of where troops need to be distributed, which is why the AI tends to protect every single city and why it gets to upgrade it's units for a fraction of the cost the player pays - it doesn't know which units need upgrading and which can be left alone. It also doesn't specialize it's cities.

All this would make it very hard for the AI to be competitive if it needed to build specific improvements to be able to build most units. In the hypothetical situation of needing a forge to build swordsmen, the AI would either try to build forges in every single city, or it would end up only able to build swordsmen in a few cities that might not be ideally located for providing offensive troops. We don't need to make it even easier to beat the AI, and the alternative would probably be to give them big discounts on the improvements that are needed to build units, which would make many players angry.

It doesn't really make too much sense for a lot of the units to need the improvement in the city they are being built in, anyway. Let's say you needed a forge in a city to make swordsmen. Considering the timescale of the game, with each turn being at least a year and usually a lot longer, it stands to reason that the civilization could manufacture swords in one part of it's empire, then ship them to a border city to equip the troops being raised there. And since every city would have many blacksmiths and other production facilities, the forge improvement probably symbolizes a large scale metal producing facility, cities that don't have one could still make swords. In the hypothetical situation of a civlization cranking out lots of swordsmen without any forge improvements in any city, it would mean that the government is buying swords from dozens or hundreds of blacksmiths across the empire and then transporting them to the cities that are equipping swordsmen.

That doesn't really apply to ships, of course, but since shipping is present before you have the technology to build the harbor improvement, it would be assumed that all coastal cities have docks and shipbuilding facilities, even ones without the Harbor improvement. Likewise, I lived in a small city that had a single-strip airport that would probably not qualify as the airport improvement in the game, but they manufactured lots of military aircraft there. I think the airport improvement means the city has a notably large airport, like DFW or O'Hare. By modern times, any city that would qualify as a city in CivIV would have an airport, but it might not be a big enough one to provide trade bonuses or airlift entire divisions from.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Adagio
You can still build aircraft without an airport, but having that building gives a +50% production bonus for aircraft units. And a Drydock could give +25%

I think a better approach would be to reverse it, otherwise it might become too easy to pump out units. So if you didn't have an Airport in the city, it would cost you 10 - 25% more to build the unit. That would mean that the AI wouldn't really be hindered too much. And it would put more relevance to having those buildings.

[Son of David]

The current system gives incentives, bonuses and options - that's why it's so fun to play.

When you start making *demands* on how people play the game it gets less fun.

And anyway, one of the reasons you need monasteries to build missionaries is so that organized religion becomes a more attractive option. It's all about options!