CITY IMPROVEMENTS (ver1.1): Hosted by CyberShy

[Robert]

This thread continues where <a href = "http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum28/HTML/000031.html">ver 1.0</a> ended (51 messages)

And it stops where <a href = "http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum28/HTML/000117.html">ver 2.0</a> continues

Currently this thread is closed. Move to the new version to continue discussing.

<font size=1 color=444444>[This message has been edited by CyberShy (edited June 15, 1999).]</font>

[don Don]

Cybershy: I don't want to re-post all my ideas, so let me just put a link to ideas I posted months ago: <A HREF="http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum6/HTML/000433.html">Advances</A>. (I thought I had done this in v1.0, but obviously not.)

[don Don]

I should elaborate. The critical things are:

•Clearer distinctions between the epochs.
•Better modelling of industrial revolution via when improvements become available (earlier!) and what effect they have (cumulative doubling!).
•More improvements that effect trade directly (that's what drives city development in the real world).
•Better modelling of sanitation/health as effecting city growth.

[wheathin]

I really like Ecce Homo's idea for more of a SimCiv style game. Part of the problem is the fundamental tension between the desire for players for a "god game", and the realism concerns about governments that order EVERY conveivable aspect of a civ.

Up until the advent of the modern nation state and the industrial revolution, I think EH's idea works fine. See below for a list of further suggestions. However, after that point, so much of what goes on in industry, entertainment, and finance (and, earlier, religion) is left almost totally to the citizens, not the government (communist or fascist regimes aside).

I think part of the solution is to provide more government organs or programs to "build". I think, though, as much as I like the idea, it becomes unworkable for the late stages of the game.

wheathin

List of suggestions (note that these would be for items that the ruler would not build directly, like a Granary, City Walls, Public Schools, Sewer Systems, or Barracks):

- Religious beleivers ask to begin construction of a Cathedral.
- Scientists petition for the establishment of a Royal Society.
- Professors and Academics demand that you found a University.
- A learned scholar asks permission to establish an Academy for our Youth.
- The local merchants request that you sponsor a Fair.
- Local merchants seek a charter for a Bank.
- Financiers petition you to establish a stock exchange.
- The city fathers request that you grant them the powers of Justice and let them build a Courthouse.
- Traders seek a charter for their Trading Company.

Perhaps a solution to the modern era would be to just lift the SimCity idea altogether: groups petition for zoning changes!

Industrialists appear before the City Council to obtain zoning permits for a Factory.
Businessmen have submitted an application to your government for an Insurance Company.
Religious leaders seek county permission to construct a larger Church.
Local promoters want to build a large Auditorium.

thoughts?

[Ecce Homo]

Thank you, Wheathin, for developing my idea! I think your suggestions can reduce mmmt (short for micromanagement).

The idea brings up other issues.

Maybe a religion should work like an AI (or maybe even human) player that can build improvements, collect tithes and hire military, as long as the leaders agree? Religious communions have always been dominant roles in international politics!

And maybe the same for corporations!

[wheathin]

EH:

Several problems with this model of "independent actor improvments" need to be worked out, but first, some of the advantages.

First, more realism.

Second, it offers an easy way to allow increasing or decreasing government control over the society by allowing certain governments different IAImps. Thus, communist gov't would not have IA Imps for banks or factories or churches. Or much of anything... Theocracies would have gov't control over religious improvments.

Problems to be solved:

1. Timing. When do these supplicants approach the government? Are there set conditions that if fulfilled will always result in the construction of an improvement? Example: instead of spending production and gold, you accumulate "Improvement potential points". When you get enough for "Industry", the industrialist build a factory. When you get more, they want to build a refinery. More would equal a power plant. Etc...

This timing issue needs to be closely tied to city size. If a city is too small, it can;t support the improvement because the market is insufficient (and the whole point of this is to acknowledge that the market operates independently of the gov't to a great extent). Smart CivII players never build marketplaces and banks in cities until they get gold production of 4 (or 9) because to otherwise the improvement won't pay for itself. The same should happen here too. Nobody would put a Fusion Plant in a town of size 2, or build Cathedrals in cities of size 3.

2. Cost. What is it the gov't expends here? Obviously, the gov't won't pay maintenance or the building costs. In fact, these things allow the gov't to make money thru taxes (or fill "Defense Contracts" for military units at a faster rate, i.e. faster production from a larger industrial base; or they make more people happy; etc). But there needs to be some cost to the player for building these to keep the game interesting. After all, any enlightened ruler would choose to build the improvements at the first opportunity if they were free; what is needed is a way to force the trade offs and choices that make Civ interesting. Building improvements needs to compete somehow with building units or cities or keeping people happy or researching techs.

Option1: Again, the "Potential" points. You accumulate them in addition to tax revenues. Abstraction: the economy can only expand so fast based on the available resources, so the choice to build one item prevents building of others.

These could be a global pool, like Public Works, or purely local (or a mixture of both, with the level determined by the government type; more advanced governments can have more diverted into the national pool).

When a player has been petitioned to allow the building of something, and then refuses, we can assume that the demand would remain unsatisfied, so that the player could "build" the item later in the game. The item should go into a "build" (or "allow") list the player can choose from later.

Of course, this just gets into questions of timing again: when do the demands first appear? For this, you''d almost need a complex set of conditions and equations involving factors like:
Population of city
Current tech level
Government type
Economic base of city
Industrial capacity and resources

Option2: direct tax expenditure. But this is just back to the original problem.

Option3: explicit trade offs. I.e. if you had clear factions in the government that had to be appeased, then you might not want to allow an improvement to be built yet. Examples:
- Building the university might anger the religous types.
- Allowing merchants to organize would upset the nobles.
- Factories (without the appropriate regulatory/courthouse improvements - which the gov't would build directly) would upset the citizens by explooiting them, and might also cause pollution.
- Building lots of churches and cathedrals and mosques would give too much power the the religious elements at the expense of the crown (but being a democracy could reduce this effect with Freedom of Religion).
- Happiness improvements present an unusual problem. Perhaps they would require a general re-appraisal that everybody is natually unhappy (but more on that later).

thoughts?

Bottom Line: there has to a reason why a player wouldn't always pursue a strategy of granting every request that is made. Otherwise, the game is boring.

wheathin

[SnowFire]

I would like to see more governance type improvements, and less general type.

Why should I, as president/emperor/king build a shopping mall? Or a pharmacy?

I like the idea of having the religions themselves build the churches. Perhaps this should
be entirely out of our control, perhaps even doing away with these alltogether.

NLT: "As governer, we should be building the millitary structures (city walls, baraks, etc), public services (grainaries, aquaducts, etc) and that's pretty well it. Other improvements should be controled only second hand, by influencing religions, city planners, etc."

Hmm.. first there was blind research, then there was blind building. Just as the money made in colonization more represented the wealth of your empire rather than the wealth of the colonial government coffers, it IS the religious groups mobilizing the community to build a church already. You're just the invisible hand of the civilization, as well as it's government.

[ceebs]

The idea of the churches Building their own Buildings could cause you all kinds of problems, i can see individual cities rioting because you manage to upset the local religious leaders, or maybe due to religious uprisings the units arround a particular city turn Barbarian. as an alternative the church could start creaming your income off from the city where it has built buildings. then all you would need would be a Henry VIII style dissolution of the monasteries type wonder.

the Idea of Muslim nations not being allowed to make churches strikes me as Odd, dosent that religion have Mosques?, i've always taken the cathedrals in Civ to be a Generalised religious building

[Alexander's Horse]

How about prisons/gulags/concentration camps/penal colonies/slave labour facilities. I know this is getting on the dark side, and would need to be sensitively handled, but these things were important to the development of many if not all empires (Romans, Brits, Russians, Chinese, etc. etc.). My country (Australia) started out as a network of British penal colonies. Some of these "improvements" could be linked to particular forms of government with rewards and penalties for building them. For example, nasty ones such as gulags could be built under nasty forms of government such as communism. They could give some benefits in terms of population control but have a high maintenance cost (and even made a "must build" so you have to bear the cost because its hard to have totalitarianism without them). Under democracy, gulags are automatically disbanded and you get cashback like with barracks currently (an incentive to switch back). This could be optional, however, with their existence creating citizen unhappiness under higher forms of government. Get rid of them and citizen happiness improves.

Prisons and the like should be more neutral because its hard for any civilisation to function without them. For those who baulk at this idea, consider the existence use of nuclear weapons in the game. Its also an example of an unpleasant fact of life reflected in the game.

[This message has been edited by Alexander's Horse (edited May 26, 1999).]

[don Don]

OOOOhh, "civilian" improvement construction sounds like a can-o-worms.

When you build/pay support cost for a Cathedral, just think of it as the government giving tax breaks to the religious organization, write-offs for individual donations, royal warrants for timber or other controlled strategic resources, etc.

[wheathin]

"Religions that build their own churches/mosques/synagogues" gets into the question of who the player is.

It also gets into the question of what Civ3 is supposed to be (and what we want it to be):
A "God Game" or SimCiv?

It sounds as though posters to this discussion want to see more of the SimCiv aspects. Much like zoning the land and building infrastructure in SimCity, the Civ player will set the government parameters and provide civic functions, but it will be up to the Citizens to do most of the wealth-building, manufacturing, entertaining/praying, and even some of the research.

After factories and banks etc... the most important thing to consider are improvements. It is NOT the government that builds farms or fisheries, or, except for the earliest govts (where a truly valuable mine would be a royal monopoly) and communism, mines.

Upgrades in agricultural production, land clearing, mining, and fishing were rarely done at the sole behest of lords. Most western lords, until the mid 16th century, couldn't care less, as long as they received income. While very large irrigation projects are usually organized by the local government (as in Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, and China), the real agricultural revolutions were the results of millions of individual peasants responding (very slowly) to new methods and technologies. Three field crop rotations, and newer rotations involving legumes; cheaper iron farm tools (which appeared MUCH later than iron weapons - even in the middle ages, a typical manor might have only two or three iron axes; not NEARLY enough for large scale forest clearing); use of fertilizers; cash cropping and growing for a market-based money economy; etc. Fishermen were usually even farther outside the control of local authorities and landed aristocracies because their livelihoods were not tied to the Lord's main asset: land.

If CIv is going to incorporate features that involve non-player constructed city improvements, it seems odd to ignore the equally unreal existing system of tile improvements.

wheathin

[Cartagia the Great]

What if you have the ability to create city improvments which only work in certain forms of government. For instance a patriarcle residence might work pretty well under a theocracy, and even a Monarchy, but would expire with the changing to a Republic or Democractic government nas the churhc loses influence. In a Faschism there might be a Re-education camp, but it woudl be shunned, and destroyed by any other form of government. Also the abiltiy to create new units of this kind, woudl be great.

[AgedOne]

I would be interested in seeing a 'Military Academy' city improvement, which would control the upgrading of units. I know that at first sight this seems to clash with Leonardo's Workshop, but I would see it working like this:
Units must be moved to a city with an Academy, and stay there for (say) 1 turn, and they would be automatically upgraded to the most modern military unit of their strategic type. Leonardo's would still exist as a wonder, but would act as a Military Academy in every city.
I feel this would get rid of one of the more amusingly unrealistic events in CivII - where units upgrade during a sea voyage. Like a trireme with a chariot sets off on a voyage, and arrives at the other end as a caravel carrying elephants! Love to see how they make the change
Suggested with some misgivings. I do really like the magic upgrade when it works in my favour.

[ember]

An Idea just came up in the regional menu thread. What about regional improvments? Not every city builds a stock exchange for example, they serve a region...

Remember to make the number of improvments keep pace with how quick you can build them... you should have some military resources left over and still be able to keep up with infrastructure...

------------------
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[wheathin]

I had suggested something similar earlier in this thread (older version): improvements that could only be built in one city but that would affect the whole civ. Sort of mini-wonders that a civ only needs one of, but which are reproducible (that is, there is no reason that each civ can't build their own).

Examples:
- Hoover / Aswan / Three Gorges Dam
- Space Program bits (launch centers, etc...)
- National Defense Command center (a la NORAD)
- Super Particle Accelerator
- Royal Court (may or may not be built in the Capital - Versailles is outside Paris)
- Regional Weather Control station (futuristic, would help with crops and food production)
- National Museums and Galleries (modern happiness improvements)
- Olympic Stadium (there must be 15 or 20 of these around the world!)
- SDI / BMD
- Stock Exchanges or other major financial improvements

wheathin