Production

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Although I had no major beefs with the production system in Civ II. I feel that there are a couple of ways in which the system can be tweaked to make it much less clunky for Civ III.

1) Build Queus: An obvious one, 'nuff said!

2) Multiple Improvements: The thing that always bothered me at both the beginning and the end of a Civ II game was running out of things to build!! To overcome this I feel that Firaxis should take a leaf out of the book of "Birth of The Federation" and allow a city to build multiples of a certain improvement (eg 4 factories or 6 libraries etc). Obviously the number of a certain improvement that you can build would be dependant on City Size and available resources, and the number of each improvement you have should also limit the number of specialists you can have in that city! Obvious classes of improvements that you should be able to build multiples of are: Financial (Banks/Market Places etc), Production (Factories, Mfg. plants etc), Research (Libraries, Universities etc) and Power (Nuclear, solar, coal power etc). Obviously some improvements (like aqueducts and city walls) could only be built once per city

3) Improvement Upgrades: Again, one straight from the pages of "BOTF". Improvements should not be static, but should be upgradable, with each upgrade giving the improvement a slightly better effectiveness. An upgrade could be done in lieu of building a new improvement, and failing to upgrade an improvement could result in it becoming LESS effective (eg. failing to upgrade a factory could make it more polluting and less efficient!)

4) Multiple Build Queues: Something else I always disliked was being forced to choose between building military and civilian production, which I thought was very unrealistic. Instead I think that there should be different build queues for different types of production-these could be civilian, army, naval and aerial queues. In order to get any of the latter 3 build queues, you would probably need to build an appropriate improvement (barracks, port and airfield), and building in multiple queues at a time would reduce the build speed of all of them (as they would partially draw off the some production base!). However, some improvements and tech advances would overcoming this slowing to some extent.

Anyway, these are my thoughts on the issue. What do you all think, do you also believe that the production model can be improved and, if so, how?

Yours,
The_Aussie_Lurker.

[Alex 14]

The idea of building more than one city improvment in a city is an excellent idea and realistic too. I also run out of stuff to build easily with high production levels.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Hi Again,
I just thought that I'd qualify a few of the above remarks:

1) Nothing new to add on this point

2) I think that even happiness/culture improvements (Temples, theatres and churches) should be able to be constructed multiple times (within the limit of population and resources)
Basically the # of prod. improvements would limit the number of labourers you can have,
the # of financial improvements would limit the number of Tax-men you can have and the # of happiness/culture improvements would limit the # of entertainers you could have!

3) No more to say on upgrading improvements, except to say that it should probably only apply to production, research and power improvements.

4) Basically, when you first build a city, you would have to build military units/improvements on the same queue as civilian units/improvements. When you build a training ground/barracks, you can partially de-couple production by gaining a new build queue, but if you have both operating at the same time, it will slow build rates of both queues. If you have a coastal/river city, and when you build some sort of harbour improvement, then you should gain a 3rd queue. Lastly, when you get flight and build an appropriate improvement, you get a 4th and final build queue. Improvements such as Armoury, Recruitment centre and Naval yard would help to increase build rates in the appropriate queues.

Thanks,
The_Aussie_Lurker

[Brad]

I like the idea of building multiple improvments in one city, but there should be a limit on how mnay improvments of the same type you can build in a city, and each improvement should have less effect than the first (eg the first library built in a city gives +50%, the second +40%) because if a city that was producing heaps of science had 6 librarys, getting +300% science it would make the game less chalenging

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Hey Brad,

It's interesting that you should mention that, because that is exactly what I had in mind. The "Law of Diminishing Returns!"
I'm interested, however, to note that no-one has responded to my idea of Partially de-coupling military from civilian production. I'd be interested to know what people think.

Yours,
The_Aussie_Lurker

P.S: I think that, for science improvements and Research, they should once again take a leaf out of "Birth..." and have research improvements give you Research Points (RP's) which you could then allocate to different fields of scientific endeavour (thus allowing you to make your own research priorities!).

[Provost Harrison]

Build queues are a definite must, I would find a game such as civ3 difficult without them as I have grown accustomed to them in SMAC.

I suppose the idea of what you say about multiple improvements is good. Perhaps different levels of a structure; each progressive increment costing more, eg level 1-5 or something.

[Frugal_Gourmet]

I wholly support idea #1 and I'm completely opposed to ideas 2,3,4.

For 2 &3, the last thing I want in the game is to increase the maximum upgrade-ability of cities and hence unbalance the game. There should be limits (based on technology) as to how powerful individual cities could be.

Furthermore, it's pretty exciting when you build your aqueduct, factory, cathedral, etc in your city. How boring would it be just to turn out factory after factory (idea #2)? If your city has nothing to build, so be it.

And upgrading structures? That system actually exists right now. A bank is an "upgraded" marketplace that you build. A cathedral is an "upgraded" colluseum. I see no need to change the system as it is.

As for #4 (multiple queues/city) -- too complicated. Wouldn't want to mess with the beauty and simplicity of the game, IMO...

[meriadoc]

I agree that having my cities run out of things to build is annoying. I usually end up building caravans or capitalization improvements (?). I personally think that being able to build multiple improvements, like 4 factories, may be interesting. However, unless we get a diminishing returns model as Brad suggested, I don't like it because I doubt that the AI would make full use of the whole thing. Really, though, this is not a big issue in my mind.

The idea of build queues, which is something that CTP did prove was a good idea if properly implemented, is an idea that CivIII will benefit from and I really hope that they use, especially since I often times will forget what I want to build before I get a chance to tell the city to build it.

[Grumbold]

I would like to see a Civ game designed along those lines but it won't be Civ III because it would mean a total shift in emphasis away from the current model. The whole thing would have to be carefully planned and balanced to make sense. To use the BotF approach most buildings would have to be subsumed into agricultural, productive, commercial, scientific categories etc so a basic bank would effectively be a level IV marketplace upgrade. Since this would mean that each building must take only a short time to build if you need to build five times as many, splitting a military build queue from the social one is not quite as vital.

A really old Atari ST game I loved did link your productive capacity to your factory infrastructure. Your factory queue could be expanding its own capacity, building a new queue from scratch(max 3 per base) or actually building something useful like a unit or new settler. You had to juggle the ability to build a single item fast (separate queues could not share the same job) with the flexibility of multiple builds and also the desire to build up your home base capacity with the need to expand and create new bases. I have not seen a game that better put these opposing needs into practice since.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Hi Guys,

I'd first like to say that, though I'm an advocate for multiple improvement construction, I don't think it should work exactly like BoTF (where you have discrete catagories, and man them with population). Although I liked this in BoTF, it isn't really right for Civ, as Grumbold has suggested. It can still work if you applied the follwoing rules and limitations.
1) "Law of Diminishing Returns"
2) Max. # of each improvement based on city size (say 1 extra improvement for each Pop. point)
3) Resource limitation on multiple improvement construction!
4) No. of each improvement types limits # of specialists (eg. no. of research improvements limits # of scientists; no. of Production/power improvements limits labourers and # of financial improvements limits tax collectors.)

In hindsight, it probably wouldn't be neccessary to have actual physical upgrades. Instead you might have a situation where, upon gaining an appropriate tech advance, you have the chance to apply it, causing all of the effected improvements to be automatically upgraded (like units in SMAC), at a cost, of course.

Lastly, the reason why I like the idea of a multiple build queue is because I get tired of situations where I was building a critical improvement, and then was forced to abandon it in favour of a military unit because the AI just declared war on me. I just find it ridiculous that civilian production should cease just because you build military units (especially in peace-time).
As for it being too complex, it would just mean the addition of 2-3 extra screens within the city status screen. The default screen would show the list of civilian units/improvements you can build (and a build queue below it). Above this screen would be 3 buttons marked "Army;navy and air-force (if and/or where applicable)", clicking on these buttons would then show you a seperate build list and build queue. All units and improvements assigned to each queue would be built in parallel, though each queue you have operating above the first will slow down all of your production times. When you mobilize for war, the military queues would speed up, but the civilian queue would slow down even more. That doesn't seem very hard to me!!

Anyway, just another 2 cents worth (plus inflation)

The_Aussie_Lurker.

P.S: I have often seen on this forum people saying that an idea is very good, but isn't Civ. I could respond to that by saying that neither is the Culture and Resource models, or the great graphics. The truth, however, is that what truly makes a Civ game is the influence of Sid Meir and the Firaxis team, nothing more nothing less. Everything else is open to negotiation!