[Suggestion] City Building Upgrade optional

from Elemental Forums

When a city reaches the required level or you get the required tech it automatically upgrades the buildings. It would be nice if there are an option to not upgrade, especially for modding in the future. But I also noticed a potential balance issue as when I unlocked university tech it now replaces the schools automatically and the university buildings cost 10x as much.

While I have no real issue with that fact that the buidling cost more and produces more the fact that you get the upgrade for free does seem unbalancing. Before this it seem the buildings such as housing cost the same regardless of level. Which I've also always thought was a little off since villas house over double the amount as huts yet cost the same. But given the free upgrade system it would be a bit unbalanced to have them cost different just like it is with the university. Yet at the same time it seems rather limiting to not have the option to choose upgrade and pay the difference.

I can think of 3 ways to potentially handle this.

1) The way the school and university were setup before but that is really not "upgrade" as you simply have to demolish one and replace it with the other.

2) A city wide upgrade option where you pay the difference to upgrade the buildings. This could potentially be automatic and simply withdraws the funds when your meet the requirements and have resources. Though players might find this annoying as a city leveling would suddenly automatically start spending a lot to upgrade. So a manual option would probably be preferable.

3) A mix of the current build system with the way resource terrain tiles work. What I mean by that is take housing for example say you have a hut and can now build housing in the city. When you select housing both the empty tiles and the hut tiles are highlighted. If you choose to build on a tile with a hut it cost the difference in time and resources. If the buildings take the same time to build then some arbitrary minimum of maybe 1 turn or some % of the original build time.

 

Though another potential issue does arise from this. It's likely the auto upgrade is a way to get around the buildings of the same grouping sharing the same limit. Since your only allowed to build as many buildings of a curtain type as the level of the city before you could have 5 schools and 5 universities in a city. Since they are now on the same upgrade path with auto upgrade it means you can only have 5 of which ever is currently allowed in the city. So the addition of of an over arching building limit would be nice as well. Such that you can only have a total of 5 schools & universities in any combination. Again this would be very handy to have for modding and could allow for city specializing buildings kind like national wonders in Civ4.

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I think that it is primarily a balance issue.

This seems like a more quantitative issue ... however ... you DO have a good qualitative point that most Auto-Upgrades seen thus far have both proto and contemporary forms cost the same amount of resources (Hut, House, Villa).

It is an interesting Qualitative discussion to see how Auto-Upgrades will be handled when the prices of the proto and contemporary forms are significantly different.

For instance, say Markets -> Forums, or Schools->Universities, or Vault -> Bank -> Exchange.

In these cases, it might be better to have a bit more choice, and for the differences in cost to ultimately be paid for by the player. In this case you could have the option of individually upgrading each building, or clicking on a city and say "Upgrade as many of X in this city as we can pay for" or by clicking a domestic button and say "Upgrade as many of X nation wide as we can afford."

With this system, once you discover the technology you first get the pop-up that asks if you want to "Upgrade as many of X nation wide as we can pay for." It should also state how many buildings need upgrading, and how many upgrades the current treasury (+ materials) can pay for at this time.

Under this system, you will probably have the option of building both X and X+1 in new cities ... although some games (like Civ with units) decide to make X obsolete after a certain mile-marker has been reached.

Now, key for this system ... it only relates to buildings that are qualitatively the same in every way, and where the upgraded form is better in every way than its predecessor.

If there are two (or more) possible upgrade paths ... a similar method can be used, however Auto-Upgrade must never be used. Even if Auto-Upgrade is still used for more expensive upgrades of the same caliber, Auto-Upgrade should never be used for buildings with multiple upgrade paths. The idea here is that the building can be "upgraded" via a difference in cost by building one of the new upgrades atop the previous building ... as if it was an expansion project. Then the building will cost exactly X materials less where X was the number of materials used to build the original building.

In this case, lets say a Market can upgrade into either a Forum (direct upgrade) or an Exchange (alt upgrade). If you have a market, you can build either a Forum or an Exchange on top of the market, and you will be discounted by the cost of the market. If you were to build a new Forum however, then you would pay full price.

Another example of alternate upgrades would be if a Town Hall could upgrade into either a Courthouse, a Civil Engineering Office, or a Bureaucratic Lodge (office). The Courthouse would lower maintenance (possibly added commerce), the Civil Engineering Office would either increase housing of local Housing structures or add more buildable squares to the city, and the Bureaucratic Lodge/ Political Office would add (more) prestige and possibly commerce.

Most of these alternatives would at least keep the base 2 prestige of the Town Hall, with perhaps the exception of the Civil Engineering Office.

(As qualitative building suggestions)- the presence of at least one courthouse within a city changes the prestige value of local jailhouses from 0 to 1.

-In the city of the Palace, the presence of each Political Office would add +1 to the Palace's generated prestige (cumulative)

-The presence of at least one Civil Engineering office may (or may not) add +1 prestige (locally) to certain housing improvements ... namely house, villa, (and slums?)-only if slums are still -2 prestige/ below -1 prestige

//Speaking of Slums, they are slightly better now although that is debatable. At -2 prestige the slums *require* a Town Hall, and thus really take up 5 squares. If this is the case, then the Slums should realistically house *MORE* than 5 squares worth of housing. Doesn't have to be even 6 squares worth, just more than 5 villas. On the point of req. 5 squares (with Town Hall) and needing more housing than 5, it doesn't matter how much food it costs as its simple math with relation to prestige. Now, if any 1 square improvement can net more than 4 prestige by itself, then Slums are fine as they are.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree that upgrading should be paid for. After all, no one is remodeling my house into a villa with state of the art appliances and expensive furniture and art for free!

slums should be compact. Each tile housing more than a house. In fact, it should be the densest housing tile in the game, period.

Slums should be practically free, but give the pretige hit it currently has.

you can ugrade a hut to a house on the same tile

villa should perhaps be two tiles - one for the villa, one for the land

estates should be 4 tile as it would be mansions and fancy landscape, stables, fountains and lakes.

The idea that everyone's hut can go all the way to an estate on the same patch of land for free is just crazy talk.

The same thing applies to other buildings as mentioned in the other posts. The idea that if I build something right before I discover a new tech, then it becomes something much better that I don't have to pay is gaming a bad system IMHO

 

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Excellent points.  Have an option to "build over" a previous building of the same basic type, and for example, houses with more population should cost *more*.  Who's paying for buildings to magically upgrade, and why can't buildings built later magically upgrade too? ;-) ;-P

Best regards,
Steven. 

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

When the City maintenance costs are Balanced with City Level(s) that should alleviate the need for more Upgrade costs being put in place. 

It would seem that "Micromanagement" requirements are frowned upon to a certain extent. Having to place the first unit, then have it auto upgrade from then on is one alternative. The current one actually. :)

Trying to balance what you Research in conjunction with what you want upgraded and align both of those with your current bank roll could prove a point of frustration depending on the situation at hand during any game play period... early/mid/late

One thing about "Buying" the upgrades, especially the Housing ones, would be the absolute slow down of a Cities ultimate growth though.

Imagine choosing between Houses for more Pop, to get a new level, or Leather armor for you peasants, who see a threat headed their way, and not having the Funds for both??

It is a very sharp double edged sword that...

 

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Personally, I'm a fan of the auto-upgrade, as it's detail I don't want to manage, and keeping it free for the same reason, though with the huge caveat this should apply in the case of same cost/benefit paths you outline.