Darkodinplus’ assessment of the beta version 0.299 (Long Post)

You kind of covered why the food stockpile thing isn't done on your own. Food is a "perishable" resource, it's got a limited shelf life. The current model for it is that the food resource you see at the top is excess production. It's food you can grow but don't need. So to "use" it, you're just increasing the size of your population to eat that food. The last line in particular that I quoted is exactly how the current system works. If the food number is > 0, you have excess food and can grow your cities.

It takes a bit of getting used to, but it actually works pretty well.

I too like the new food/housing system, although I wish my games would last long enough that I could research Civilization heavily and start testing out how complex high population economies work.

Accidentally double posted.

Yes they explained it the food and housing is already explained by poster above me. And race customization and clothing etc. is for later when they enable the empire as well as make more touches.

Also their considering reequipping the sov to change appearence *armor weapons etc.* so yes oh and of course you can customize your entire empire/kingdoms people from races to colors etc.

Also their going to allow high moddability.

The A.I isn't on fully yet this is why creatures are not aggressive.

One thing to note when beta testing this is an EARLY Beta do not expect so much so quickly.

Finally to address one last thing your mention of MMO style dungeons...I sure hope not I hope they do it old school RPG like Baldur's gate style MMO games lack depth and feel when you compare them to the older RPG's and even to newer one's.

I mean no offense to you with my reply and i know i may have misunderstood or seemed to be mean when stating things such as the A.I i know you mentioned the A.I i'm simply reaffirming that that is the reason indeed why creatures are not aggressive.

I don't really like how they handle food and population too. Using food to support housing is kinda lame as you could have a ton of empty houses that are using up food?!? That doesn't make any sense. Also R&D increases the amount of people that can fit into a house so you magically get more people for less food? Does housing tech included a diet program? Must be cause their getting thinner they can fit more people in the same space hehe.

I do like the global aspect of food though but I think it should be used to support the population not the amount of houses which are two different things. Food production and population would actually be more closely linked as right now many population buildings such as huts, houses, and villas all have the same food cost. Which doesn't make much sense as usually nicer and larger houses hold people who prefer to eat more food. But that's just some of my ideas which I'll go more indepth in a later post.

Here is my quintessential problem with the current housing / food system.

In this game I built 4 farms thus giving me a total food amount of 12 (3 X 4). I then built 3 houses and destroyed 3 of the 4 farms. My population however continued to increase despite my food amount being -9.

 As you can see my starting city was able to go from LV 1 to LV 2 despite clearly not having enough food to feed everyone. If food was the limiting factor for the population of my city I would have had a negative growth rate to the point where my city’s population was within the number of people the solitary farm could feed.

 The current system just makes gardens, farms, etc seem pointless since after you get your cities to LV 5 or whatever LV you want you can go back and destroy all the farms & gardens thus freeing up tiles for structures that provide a constant bonus. One would think farms and gardens in a post apocalyptic world would be extremely valuable and high priority targets. In the current system however if someone had a city with essentially nothing but farms / gardens losing such a city would have no real impact on the player unless they hadn’t spent their food supplies yet.

 After thinking about this a bit more and reading some of the responses I think it might be a good idea to remove player built housing all together. By this I mean the player would only be responsible for designating X number of tiles (and their locations) per city LV which could only be used as residential land. Farms and gardens would provide X amount of food per turn (which wouldn’t stockpile globally) and your city's population would be directly controlled by how much food was available with the citizens themselves building and upgrading their homes to match their income (AKA have logically placed low, medium, and high income housing within the residential tiles).

 A few alterations would have to be made to some building  such as the granary. Instead of increasing a % of the food it could increase food production. The research of improved housing really wouldn’t need to be changed just a visual graphic to show more people can now live in the same area of land. Some type of food storage building might need to be introduced to allow a city to keep so much food on hand in case of emergencies like sieges or the destruction of a major food producing city.

 At any rate this is my opinion on the subject.

Well population should eat food i do agree.

It's pretty obvious that population loss due to negative food isn't implemented yet.

As to the other point... yeah, it would make more sense if food worked on population instead of housing instead, but at the end of the day the results are similar. If you can build houses, your population will grow. The feedback is just faster this way. If you tie it to people instead of houses, you'll build houses, and the food level won't change until those houses fill with people (which takes some time). So you might go build more houses, then discover you built too many and the last three are going to stay empty.

It works out the same if you do it both ways, but tying it to housing just tells you where you stand more quickly. So in that sense it's pretty nice.

As brought to my attention by another topic (found here) I believe changes should be made to prestige and population in addition to food and housing. I understand your point Tridus but I feel a significantly more meaningful system could be implemented that would both feel natural and provide greater strategic depth.

 Population- Population should control the total productivity of a city. With the base population for a city’s LV used as 100% (AKA no penalties to production). A city let’s say needs 250 people to reach LV 2 if this LV 2 city’s population falls below 250 the current population (170) divided by 250 would give you the total productivity (170/250 = 68%) of this particular city. Now the city would produce things 32% slower then a city that was 250/250. No positive bonus would be introduced for having more than the base number of people required.

 Housing- Housing as I suggested before shouldn’t be directly controlled by the player. The player should assign tiles of his choosing to be residential land. These tiles could house X number of people with research available to increase how many people can live in a given tile. As population moved into the city people would construct their own homes. The player would have a major decision about how many tiles he should flag as residential each city LV since that would be one of the limiting factors on a city’s population.

 Food- Food as stated before should have a per turn income which controls how many people your nation as a whole can support. Food would be a global resource but it wouldn’t stockpile globally. If a nation is producing more food then what its population consumes the population can increase. If on the other hand you have more people than what you can feed the nation’s population will drop. A building would be added to allow individual cities to store a reasonable amount of food for emergencies like a siege or the loss of a major food producing city.   

 Prestige- Prestige should provide a productivity bonus to a population in addition to controlling how many people want to move there each turn. For an example let’s say every point of prestige granted a 1% productivity bonus to every 200 citizens to a max of 20%. So if your city had 5 prestige and 1000 citizens everything produced, built, or earned in the city would increase by 5%. I also think prestige should be harder to increase.

 City Level- I’m pretty sure this will be changed eventually but I’ll say it anyway. The city levels should require more population to advance in level. The last level should also have a soft cap where your total population can continue to increase to a point. So in my proposed system if you got a city to LV 5 that city’s final population would be equivalent to the number of residential tiles X 1000 X prestige at that moment (to a max of 20). Example, if one my LV 4 city just advanced to LV 5 and I ended up having 9 residential tiles and a current prestige of 11 this particular city’s maximum population would be 9 X 1000 X 11 which equals 99,000. Perhaps once you get a city to LV 5 your residential tiles could automatically support this soft cap limit leaving the player to only be concerned about having enough food.

Good work on sticking with the beta so determinedly. I wouldn't have been able to discover all these issues because I get worn out and discouraged by all the crashing and restarting. I need a working autosave, or else I can't even begin to express how I think things are progressing.

This could create some situations where a Productive City, special Built, that supplies other Cities their special needs, that then needs to be tapped for Armed forces and thus butchers that Cities Productivity and defeating the reason it was specialized in the first place.

We don't want to face a game play mechanic that directly offsets the building of Specialized Cities, for 3/4 of the game, only to have to burn them down, suck the productivity out of them, in order to defend the Realm.

I don't totally disagree with the premise but would urge caution when coming up with the math, if it gets implemented.

I would say that if you need to tap for Armed Forces in a city that is specialized, then you have not well played. You want a really productive city ? Just prepare yourself for that : you should do whatever you need to avoid building units in that city.

Great stuff.  I'm pleased to see that we're starting to get far enough along that we're moving towards the game itself.

Just remember, until beta 3, everything is up in the air. Beta 1 and 2 are about putting in the plumbing for the features and making sure they work without formatting your hard drive.

The original poster didn't really define "productivity" - what if it includes "speed at which you train units"? I think that's the problem John foresees; if your unit production is tied to population, but training units drains population.. well, we've got a problem. Now your best unit producing city shoots itself in the foot when it actually trains soldiers, and quickly loses its production ability. I think that's the opposite of the direction we want to go in - it would punish players who take some effort and planning to create a specialized unit production city, and rewards players who just build a ton of generic cities that can each slowly train a few units, thus spreading out the population/production loss.

By the way, I do agree that population should be more meaningful; right now it doesn't seem to do much aside from bumping your city up to the next level occasionally and giving you warm bodies to convert into soldiers. I would like to see population provide some kind of direct benefit, but you do have to be careful what kind of benefit that is - linking gold production to population would be great, you could create specialized tax-generating cities that boost their population as high as possible and never need to train soldiers. But linking unit production to population would be frustrating, for the reasons already mentioned.

Well Austinvn, Brad has already said population will be tied to unit production so it only seems natural to me that if you go crazy recruiting people there should be a major penalty incurred for the city. I believe Brad already has something in mind in regards to this but he hasn't said what exactly.

The only real problem I see with a system like this would be coming up with reasonable math to support it. I concede that having 100% of a base population for a city to be 100% productive might cause problems. Mainly in a situation where a city just leveled up but you need to immediately start training a legion or something. So making the 100% city productivity mark at 97% of the base population or maybe even lower could be a good idea.