EN2 Economy and Pacing

[safe flower]

I know this topic had a pretty lengthy discussion when this was brought up on the insider program, but since EL2 is now released I feel this topic should be posted here.

Pretty much after about 50-70 turns it feels way to easy to snowball. district and by extension foundation can be spammed because it very easy to get a ton of production and influence, improvements further pushes the snowballing, etc. Meanwhile food in generally not that important.

I'm going going to repost what I said in the past and in my review.

1. Districts should primarily or only provide jobs. That means farms give citizen jobs, works give artisan jobs, etc. Communal Habitations should be changed to instead provide a new city mechanic which would be housing. So in theory you want to make sure your pop both has jobs to work and a house to live in. Seems reasonable. This also makes food way more important.

2 Cities should have a limit of how many districts they can have that is either tied to the cities total population or add a new system where you can invest influence in a city to increase the district limit for said city.

3. Improvements should have more of a focus on buffing job yields or a getting mix on what they do with a little bit lower yields. No more +25 production on a blasting furnace in era 2.

bonus point: this was not my idea, but I saw it once and I like the general idea of this. Have building districts/improvements cost industry and have military units cost "manpower". Then change Keeps to pretty much do that they do now, but add in a manpower increase. Then you can take my idea for having district providing jobs and add a new job which grants "manpower".

I really think these idea would make the economy aspect so much better then just mindless spam and snowball. Might even want to consider adding approval penalties to distracts.

Also ill admit the only issue with this idea is how it would interact with the attachment system with a distrct limit. Perhaps a district limit per region would be a soluation.

[safe flower]

Should also mention that maybe some council traits might also be causing some issues, but I don't remember most of them off the top of my head. lol

[safe flower]

Also just to add to this I really think either making districts, attaching territory, etc should effect approval. Or maybe do the idea in the OP and make it so if you over build it lower approval.

[rocky pond]

Number 1. and 3. Idea Sounds Fantastic!

[jolly pike]

I'd be ok with approval penalties for districts tbh. If districts were rebalanced to mostly give jobs, you could also give them negative approval adjacency ("urban density") that you need to avoid by spacing them out with housing

[stoic sage]

idea is ok...but will never happen...

[stoic sage]

and look...your main foundation for this change is "Pretty much after about 50-70 turns it feels way to easy to snowball" in fact you can snowball from very start but look, it depends on one crucial thing: war...it is a war game...do not argue with that plz...without war you can easily delete this game entirely...and the main thing here that you do not feel threat from your neighbors and opponents...as soon as every single army will become a threat for your existence, and you will be forced to prioritize army construction until you can finally get some air for a brief moment to build few building, only then you can get the right experience with this particular mechanics to make any conclusions...before that, it is just a whine...

[trail matrix]

The ideas are decent but before anything else, the AI needs to be improved. Only when enemies start to be actually threatening, we can think about issues with eco I believe.

[lusty hearth]

Wouldn't make much sense to make AI decent with current basic mechanics, only to completely overhaul them later on.

[lusty hearth]

We will make AI competetive, then we rework city management, making AI incompetent again, as it was adjusted to different gameplay loop.

[trail matrix]

Without competent AI it will get boring fast, and we dont know if the system really is that bad unless its tested on competent players

Its just my opinion ofc

If you rework eco first the exact same loop remains where eco will need another adjustment after making AI threatening

[lusty hearth]

I'm not entirely sure how these ideas solve the snowball problem. Wouldn't manpower system specifically make snowballing even more prominent, as less advanced economies would have much harder time combining self-defense and economical growth? It could be quite hard to catch up with leader when you need to dedicate some part of your already weak economy into manpower.

[lusty hearth]

Making economy more food reliant also could mean that economies in general will take more time and commitment to rev up as you can't really rush pops the same way you could rush crucial improvements.

And how would manpower system work with dust? Do we keep unit buyout and then dust just becomes op as it allows you to entirely ignore the need to keep balance between industry and manpower? Or do we remove unit buyout and then we lose on ability to rush unit production, which can make the game even more miserable to those who didn't do that well in the early game and do not already have big enough military to defend themselves sufficiently against bigger threats?

[obtuse pilot]

I agree about pacing.
+25 prod and +50 dust and other yields from T2 techs feel too power full.
Usually at the same time (T1 to T2) happened huge military jump from 4 unit army to two 5 men armies.
Feels like in 10 turns I got +1000% of everything basically doing nothing.

And about districts VS improvements. Mentioned blasting furnace equals like 10 districts for 5% of their production cost without Influence that spent on foundations.

Everyone like to snowball hard but I agree that in EL2 I can snowball really hard.

[safe flower]

They 100% would slow it down if implemented correctly. First by shifting the yields (or some) from districts to job it makes population more important which now should make industry/influence a tad less important. Then by adding a limit to how many districts you have by either of the methods mentioned (though i once again prefer population for this limit), then cities will look a bit more natural with their district numbers compared to their population numbers. Finally by taking another look at improvements, the general idea is to make their yields a lot less snowbal effect.

I think you are thinking manpower being a number you increase and then spend for your military unit this decreasing your total manpower like in ES2. Perhaps I was not clear, the idea of it is to work like production just it's own separate system. Maybe the wording can be different to make it less confusing.

[lusty hearth]

No, I'm not thinking about manpower being spendable, I understood that you want to implement training resource system from Old World.

Weirdly enough, it being spendable would probably be less snowbally.

[lusty hearth]

It's just that in Old World it doesn't really solve the problems you are talking about. You still can spam things, your power still increases exponentially.

[safe flower]

maybe that a better idea? 🤔

idk how people feel about mana system though.

[stoic sage]

look it is not that company/game you can ask for something global to change...only fix and tweak here and there...they are not here to last long and experiment with ideas...they ask for ideas for their future projects, not this one...they just want to test the weather in our minds...thats it...

[safe flower]

there is no reason you can't ask for a change like this or any other for that matter for this title or any other game in general. This is also still in EA, things could change a little or a lot.

the current system has a ton of issue and small little tweaks is not going to cut it

[stoic sage]

EA means nothing

[safe flower]

a lot of people where not even happen with humankind system because it came down to district spam

[safe flower]

well that your opinion, different companies handle EA differently

and testing, betas, etc

[stoic sage]

and it is not their first froject so you could have already have expirience their way to handle EA like 5 times already

they do not change method

[safe flower]

again this is a moot point lol

in case we forgot

EL1 did have the district system tied to population

for some strange reason both humankind and now EL2 has pretty much not used that system

so I mean they did kind of change their method, just not in the right direction in my opinion

I think this guy blocked me or something...kind of funny to be honest lol

[safe flower]

Also when we eventually get a system for influence like empire plans, laws, etc (something with an upkeep cost) I think the foundation system can be outright removed.

It's pretty much the same system like EL1 with its districts, but with an extra step. In case people don't know, when building a district in EL1 it automatically claimed all nearby tiles. I don't think the current system with foundations is even that interesting.

Also that is another change to the method fyi.

[safe flower]

even humankind had a penalty in the form of approval for districts...now I wonder why the change in EL2? Sure I know jobs give approval penalty now, but I kind of like district having the penalty. Could also do a mix of both.

🤔

[safe flower]

really? 🤔

im the samll percent then lol

[brittle gazelle]

so blast furnace is the most blatantly OP thing right now imo

outside of that, idk if spamming districts is necessarily a problem since their costs grow exponentially, there will always be a hard cap and if it's too high they can tweak the scaling

[restive glen]

One thing I think is kinda pointless is is locking districts to population count or similar mechanic. I have never had more districts than population do to district industry bloat(not counting communal habitation spam in super endgame)

[brittle gazelle]

foundation spam on the other hand might be too cheap

I don't like the idea of having to generate food to get pop, then building a district for what I want that pop to do and also build housing before that pop is productive

[restive glen]

You would have to majorly buff pop for that kind of mechanic to make sense

[brittle gazelle]

if I understand it correctly then if I'm missing any of those three pieces, my investment in the other two are wasted?

it's true that food is really not good right now, my crackpot idea is that they should just triple all the numbers

if you go food then you get bigass cities

[safe flower]

unless your necro which i have not spend a lot of time with this, this should never be the case for most other factions lol

and as for it be pointless it was like that in EL1 and it made popuation growth matter a tad more then it does now

[restive glen]

Even on broken lords it’s not hard to get like 20 pop easy on your city and its kinda hard to get more than 20 districts. The only time I might have more districts then pop is like first 20 turns maybe. Idk I only play broken lords ands necro. Pop is valuable enough at the start it just doesn’t scale well and farms do essentially nothing.

[safe flower]

They do nothing because they pop system has no interact with any of other other system. In EL1 there was a cap for districts based on your pop count (1 district per two pops) and in humankind population was used to train miliary units. The whole idea of the rework I purposed was to buff farms, having a little more thinking involved, etc. The Current system is just not interesting. Same with the foundation building system, it straight up from EL1 with a extra step now. Though I imagine this is only in because we have no other system that interacts with influence now.

[restive glen]

I’m not saying you can’t make changes. I just think there should be positive reinforcement with population rather than negative(adding more constraints). I personally think it would be good for instance if level 2 farms and works increased population yields in citizen and artisan categories respectively. This would make both the districts and pop better. I’m open to other forms of positive reinforcement with pop though.

[safe flower]

See that where I disagree. I don't see it has a negative thing. The general idea is if you do the idea correctly, in theory you can mess up any system, is its not to add any constraints but instead increase the strategic value and decision making when building a city. Right now it spam for days until you hit a cap at some point. There is not much thinking involved in the current system. You don't even need to think about specializing your cities in EL2 because of how the production cost is calculated.

[brittle gazelle]

it really doesn't seem that interesting to me, if you have too much food generation then you have to build housing and jobs or deal with a penalty

your build order is set out for you and you get punished for growing too fast without the industry or dust to support it

[jolly pike]

tbf it is already designed to punish you for growing your pops too fast with the shanty system, it's just that vocations are plentiful enough that it rarely bites

[brittle gazelle]

yeah it's really hard to see shanties atm unless you're trying to get them

but if districts provide jobs and are also limited by pop then how do you set the limit other than grow once -> you must immediately build a district

[safe flower]

Why would you have to immediately build a district and what do you mean by how do you set a limit other then grow once? The limit is based on growth. Maybe I am misunderstanding the question.

Also there is no discussion here about the balance of this idea be it how many pop you need per district, how many jobs do they provide, should district still give yields, the yields from jobs, how would improvement work, etc so it a bit crazy in my eyes to say what won't and will punish a player without the numbers set and stone.

Though it is 100% fair to say that maybe district should not be tied to population since in theory if most or all of your yields would come from jobs, then you don't have much of a reason to spam districts.

so it might be a moot point to have that system to begin with

but when it come to industry it always going to be super important no matter what design approach you take unless the concept of industry work very different then how most 4X game doing it with a base production rate divided by the cost of what you want to build

[brittle gazelle]

so right now pop is limited by job slots, and you're proposing making job slots limited by districts so that means that pop will be limited by districts

but if districts are also limited by pop, how do you set those limits?

[safe flower]

same logic applies to science industry since most of the timer when a player progress to a new tier the production cost of new buildings goes up so without industry you would struggle too.

[safe flower]

that why i said maybe forgot about the district limit since pop would be limited on what they can do based on your jobs anyway

like it would make no sense to have too many jobs with no one to work the jobs

[brittle gazelle]

is it 1 to 1? that would mean you immediately have to build a district for each pop
is it not 1 to 1? then the limit would be pointless

[safe flower]

the general idea is 1 to 1, but saying you would have to build a new district is wrong. Again it depends on how many jobs a district provides

do improvements give more jobs, do they improve the yields, etc?

but again maybe it would be better to just not tie district to population

but keep everything else

[brittle gazelle]

what is the ratio of jobs to pop? two cases:
it's positive (each pop allows you to build enough districts to provide at least one job)
it's not positive (you must rely on other sources of jobs or be punished)
both are pretty flawed

[safe flower]

it all depends on how it implemented really. I mean there are a lot of factors you need to take to consideration (again).

but the current system we do have has it fair share of problems too

be it the pacing, the district cost scaling interacting with the attach region system, etc

[brittle gazelle]

the ratio of jobs to pop is an implementation detail, if there's not a good answer here then it's relevant to the underlying ideas

[safe flower]

yeah i agree but it would require testing to see what feels right

[brittle gazelle]

on an unrelated note I think the current weaknesses of the live patch are that improvements are too strong, there are too many flat bonuses or bonuses that a barely developed city can immediately take advantage of, and there's no opportunity cost to boosting a specific resource (so you get a bunch of maxed-out cities that produce everything)

[safe flower]

how often you would want players to build new districts, how much do you want population to scale, etc. That would need to be tested

[brittle gazelle]

right now I don't build a lot of districts unless I'm going for a foundations/influence game or hydropump

I think if you're going to add more limits to pop, it needs to come with a food buff or a total rethinking of how improvements are designed because food is skippable and districts are somewhat skippable