Local population mod, for discussion

I like the idea behind this mod, as I had something similar after local population was put into place. According to Cari_Elf, most of the population stuff is actually hard coded and so one can't simple change it back. HeavenFall, I would be very interested to see what you come up with as I have always felt the whole commuting population idea just didn't work well and doesn't fit with the setting.

Well, the fourth approach is the best solution I can come up with.

I'd also be interested in this. Like kenata, I've never understood the global population system on a gameplay and suspension-of-disbelief level. I have a hard time picturing how your Option 4 would affect the feel of the game, but I'd certainly like to give it a try.

I think it actually makes a lot of sense - people will relocate (i.e. change town of residence) freely, but not comute (work in one town but live in another)  Only downsides I can see is it may make the leveling of towns difficult to understand, and i'm not sure how the UI will work.  Perhaps the former population is now the town's prestige, and its the prestige that drives the leveling.

Given the comments in this thread by draginol aka frogboy

https://forums.elementalgame.com/409157 

I don't want to do anything right now, rather see how it works out in the core game before I start modding.

Since Frogboy is having some trouble with the new population system and is probably going to remove it, I'm going to make two population mods that, I think, should make population and cities more fun to play with.

1) A city's buildings are limited by the upper limit on available housing room in the city. A small city that can house 15 people would be able to build 3 improvements that require 5 population. Note the difference here between ACTUAL city population, and housing room. So, population can still "commute" between cities, but only if the recipient city has enough room to theoretically house the commuters. This will make it impossible to build a level 1 city and then fill it with a hundred studies or workshops. The player needs both the global population, as he does currently, and the local housing room, to build any building in a city. Armies are floaters, they do not draw housing room from any specific city but still draw global population. They can still be trained in a city where all the housing room is used up.

2) Each city, except the first formed city (capital city) will require 1 food to build and maintain. In addition, the infinite rule of repeatable buildings is removed. Currently, in-game, a city can hold a near-infinite amount of studies, for example you can have 10 studies in a level 1 town. With this mod, you can only build a specific amount of repeatable buildings per city level.

Level 1 city can hold 1 of each building
Level 2 city can hold 3 of each building
Level 3 city can hold 5 of each building
Level 4 city can hold 8 of each building
Level 5 city can hold 11 of each building

Coupled with the food requirement for each new city, this should give a very clear incentive to produce mostly medium or huge-sized specialized cities (no more "city-spam"). The bonus granted from city level-ups will serve to give efficiency to food vs population vs location costs.

But, most importantly, these mods will work with each other if the player has them both installed at the same time. I believe this will create a situation where the player will pursue highly specialized cities, as the 1) mod will limit what can be done in each city (you can't build all the arcane and tech research buildings in the same town), and the 2) mod will force the player to build effective towns. I believe the end-result will be a sort of dead zone in the middle, where the player will want just the right amount of cities, as too many would be costly food-wise, and too few would give insufficient room to specialize each city.

In addition, an unrelated 3rd mod will be included to further give incentive to building larger towns.

3) In this mod, higher level cities produce buildings and train troops faster natively, without the aid of spells or special buildings.

Level 1 city = 100% training and building time
Level 2 city = 90% training and building time
Level 3 city = 80% training and building time
Level 4 city = 70% training and building time
Level 5 city = 60% training and building time

Existing improvements to these parameters will be tweaked so the player does not reach critical levels where buildings and training finish unreasonably fast.

sounds good, but it might also help the city spam issue for the influence range to be more like 2^city level(ie level 1 still 1 range, level 2 4 instead of 2,level 3 8 range,level 4 16 range and level 5 32 range), rather than the current which appears to be influence range=city level, as you can see from the example ranges I have suggested the bigger the city the ENORMOUSLY better  the resource grab range which also reduces the NEED for lots of small cities to grab resources.

harpo

I believe there is a hard-cap range beyond which no resource will link to a city. I will experiment with it.

I second this!

Heavenfall - fantastic! Thanks

I did some quick tests with the 2) mod and it's really causing every city to look the same. The improvements don't cost enough to demand that the player specializes. Since you are required to build housing room in order to level the city, by the time you have to choose what to build you always have the population to build everything. I'm thinking much higher limits would be in order after level 3. It is probably better to tweak the tile limits for cities, coupled with the 1) mod (and a +1 food cost for new cities) that should make it very hard to build low-level towns effectively.

I also tried increasing the Zoc, but frankly, I don't like it. While there wasn't a hard-cap on the range to the nearest settlement, it caused the land to become segmented way too fast. The game isn't balanced for a ZoC war, and the Ai REALLY isn't up to the task.

Current 1.3 beta tile limits for non-capital cities:

level 1 = 4
level 2 = 12
level 3 = 24
level 4 = 40
level 5 = 60

I guess I would change this to

level 1 = 2 (1 food = 2 tile per food)
level 2 = 6 (2 food = 3 tile per food)
level 3 = 12 (4 food = 3 tile per food)
level 4 = 33 (11 food = 3 tile per food)
level 5 = 62 (32 food = 2 tile per food)

However... this is really just doing what the 1) mod is doing anyway, but in a less elegant way. In addition, the tiles for improvements really aren't balanced for their efficiency. Some will cost 4 and do little, and some will cost 1 and do much.

I guess the beauty of the 2) mod drafted in the previous post is that it sets a pretty high limit on how many studies you can effectively build per food. But the downside is that it leaves room for a lot of other buildings to be built instead, which leads away from specialization.

Re-thinking the 2) mod from a perspective of food cost vs study cost, assuming the player always chooses the city to improve on tech research

Level 1 city can hold 2 of each building (2 per food) (max research: 2) (research per food = 2)
Level 2 city can hold 4 of each building (2 per food) (max research: 4*1.2=4.8) (research per food = 2.8)
Level 3 city can hold 8 of each building (2 per food) (max research: 8*1.5=12) (research per food = 3) (libraries can double)
Level 4 city can hold 22 of each building (2 per food) (max research: 22*1.9=41.8) (research per food = 3.8)
Level 5 city can hold xx of each building

This way, a specialized city can outproduce a non-specialized city in food per research cost, especially if secondary buildings come into play that boost % further. But... already at a level 3 city we have a city that uses a massive amount of tiles. Cities will grow huge and cover the map again.

Maybe the solution is to have each city level natively increase the efficiency of the food vs research cost of each built study. I will have to experiment some, brb.

Alright, please comment on this solution:

Citylevels automatically increase the efficiency of pop vs output of the repeatable buildings (through level-ups). But, consider that a level 2 city would automatically employ MORE men in a study and produce a higher output. For example

Level 1 city = 1 study costs 5 citizens, produces 1 tech research
Level 2 city = 1 study automatically costs 6 citizens (20%), produces 1.2 tech research
Level 2 city = 1 study automatically costs 7 citizens (40%), produces 1.4 tech research
Level 3 city = 1 study automatically costs 8 citizens (60%), produces 1.6 tech research
Level 4 city xxx

What does this solve? The cities will be reduced in size on the world map. Before, you needed 30 tiles to produce 1 base research. Now, at level 3 cities, you'll need only 19. So, a massive amount of studies won't cover the entire map anymore. This way, we won't end up in a situation where cities grow too big. Indeed, it is imaginable to further increase the city-levelup modifiers. The repeatable building limit per city would be tweaked for this, so that there is a situation where high-level cities automatically (without choosing levelup bonus) gives you a better FOOD per TECH cost, but with this solution the result is not huge megacity spam.

sounds like a workable solution, sorry my suggestion did not work, but then the AI bearly works anyway, at least till frogboy manages to fix it.

harpo

It's also a boost to building times for leveled cities. A problem now is you almost always build another city sp that you can max out your used pop faster with an extra building queue. With this solution, leveling up a city actually gives you a free increase, which makes it very desirable, particularly to level 3.

The plan is to make this auto-upgrade happen for workshops, studies and arcane labs. The upgraded version of the study the library, will be removed. I don't even know why that building is in the game, it is grossly overpowered.

Played a game using the following settings (on 1.2a elemental)

1) Local housing in effect, ie the housing room in a city represents the upper limit that particular city can employ citizens for buildings with

2) The repeatable buildings perpetually upgrade as your city grows (each city level adds 20% to the buildings)

3) The repeatable buildings are limited in number. A level 1 city can only build 1 of each, then 3 for level 2, 5 for level 3 and so on

4) Higher level cities gained 10% faster building and training per level above 1, for free

5) Each new city costs 1 food perpetually

Thoughts:

1) With the free upgrades of the repeatable buildings in larger cities, I never once felt the desire to build a small town just to gain another building queue.

2) Population limited my faction much more than building queue. In fact, it did not take long until my building queues were often empty. It may be necessary to remove the buildling time reduction in high level cities. Or, new repeatable buildings in high level cities would have a larger building time than the un-upgraded version.

3) Local housing was effectively completely pointless at city level 1 and 2. With the limit on repeatable buildings per city level (see nr 3 above) there was never any choice of spamming a low level city with many repeatable buildings. This was amplified by the food cost for each new city. At city level 3, many new buildings become available, especially mid- to late-game. However, I worry that the AI may be unable to build effective towns with an arbitrary housing room limit. I need to run more tests in the 1.3beta once that is in a playable state. Edit: I may build it so the AI can ignore the local housing room limit. If it impairs the AI in any way, I can not include it on a moral standpoint.

4) The min/max solution was efficient use of population, cityspam was ineffective in the short and long term. City level-up bonuses (the ones you choose in a pop-up, and the ones given for free from nr 4 above, and the ones you get from nr 2 above) ensures that high-level cities are more desirable by far than many low-level cities.

5) The pace of the game was largely unaffected. Even though the player controls fewer spamcities with studies and whatnot, this is offset by the freely upgraded repeatable buildings in the larger cities.

6) The AI needs to be tweaked to build more workshops. AI usually spawn these in lowlevel cities only, but that was no longer possible. AI lacked materials.

7) It may be a good idea to further tweak the prestige formula. Currently, cities start at 1.0 prestige and each city you control reduce that number by 0.1 down to a minimum of 0.2. I would perhaps change this to 2.0 default, then reduced by 0.5 per city down to 0.5 minimum. As population is hugely more important, I want to avoid players spamming cities just to gain global population in case they start in a position with much food.