[Suggestion]City Fallback Production and alternative to the store

Bloody Peasants think they can charge me hundreds of gold for a few bits of armor?!

from Elemental Forums

When a city has completed its last item in the Building or Training Queue, you have turns of wasted production until you manage the problem.

 

I propose options to spend these turns on something rather than seeing them wasted. I'm calling it Fallback Production. You set your fallback production option in each city and when its last building is constructed or its last item is trained up, it picks up the Fallback option rather than sitting idle.

 

Naturally a bunch of this can be tied to new technology and building requirements and they solve various problems in a variety of ways.

 

Some interesting fallback option examples:

 

Convert gold (or whatever) to material (or whatever): The idle city is essentially putting out a mandate to traveling merchants, to its citizens, etc to sell its unneeded material to the city for the good of the empire.

 

Produce metal (leather/padded/enchanted) armor/weapons/items: The idle workshops in the city are commissioned by the empire to make armor items. Gold and metal are consumed in the process and every turn a few bits of armor are made. These are then equippable by the sovereign, champions and warriors of the empire.

                -This one would solve one of my pet peeves with the game. The sovereign of the empire walks into a store and the peasant in charge of it demands hundreds of gold in exchange for a few bits of armor. Who does he think he is?!

 

It would take some balancing to keep this all fair and not really a way to get around normal unit upgrades but I think it would be a great option to have.

4,502 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Are you implying that one would build up a 'upgrades capital' that you would 'spend' at the shop in place of money.

Rather then spending 100gilder for a sword for your hero, you would spend 100guilders worth of build up upgrades capital which was leftover from not building stuff in your towns at various times in history.

You could still spend gold of course but this would build up as an alternative.

Just thinking aloud.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

That would be one way to implement it if you wanted to get abstract.

However, with the gold, metal, crystal, and material resources already in existence, you're basically just finding ways to convert them for what you don't have. The diplomatic option is great to have, especially if you have a good ally but if they have way more of something than you, its still pricey. Doing it myself with a hefty conversion sacrifice would be handy.

My biggest hope is to have the chance to rely on my own production to produce passable items for my champions. I hate seeing them run around in cloth when I have hundreds of metal and materials.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

If the city can produce troops with metal weapons then it should be able to produce the same items for your champions at the same cost.

Where's the difference? They are the same items. There is nothing special or improved about the "champion weapons".

 

Your troops wearing the finest breastplates and swords with the sovereign running around in rags... that just doesn't look right.
Yet, with shop prices being what they are that's what happens.

1.08 only amplified the issue by clamping down on early fund raising.

 

So you should be able to queue production for... just items.

These go into storage in the city.

There is already a trade screen for transferring items between champions so the city would just be another entity that stores items.
If the champion is in/near the city, he can trade items with it.

The simplest way to implement this would be to assign a special name to the designed unit, like "storage" or something prettier.
When a unit with such a name completes training, it is disbanded and all it's items are transferred to storage.
That way you already have a graphical UI to "order" production and can select (unit size) how many of each item to produce.