Sethai

Join Date 12/2005

+23

Brad's new idea: specialist slots and why they're an awful idea.

from this thread:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/397448/page/1/#replies

please give this some thought before you react and read my analysis. i apologise if i have not found all the right quotes.

For 1.09, I am lobbying to have something put in that goes way back to an original concept that got lost and that is, using your citizens as a resource (population is still a resource, it's just not used for anything). This way, we could begin migrating back to the original concept tha tyou can build multiple buildings in a given city as long as you have the resource (available citizens) to make use of it. This encourages fewer cities and makes players choose between using their population for building their economy or putting them in arms.

This really deserves a journal entry on its own but...

In v1.09, we will have specialists instead. So a merchant will use up a specialist slot. The number of specialist slots a Kingdom/Empire gets is the total population /10 (the idea is that 10% of the population are specialists of various kinds though historically it's a bit less than that but this is a game not a historical simulator <g>).

So your village with 80 people will provide your Kingdom with 8 specialist slots. A merchant would use 1 slot. A Study would use another slot. You could build multiple such buildings as long as you have available specialist slots available. Similarly, a military unit would use a slot (not 1 per soldier but rather 1 per unit giving the advantage to those kingdoms that can field larger groups AND get us back towards a more epic feel because if a unit costs a specialist slot, the base training time of training ONE unit can be lowered and thus allow training of much larger groups to be much quicker getting players back to fielding much larger armies).

e. There's no specialist production per se. The idea is that in any society, N% of the population can be specialists. So future modifiers might increase the 10% of population being specialists to say 11% and so on but we don't plan to play with that in v1.1 (maybe in a future v1.2 and so on).

So, as far as I can determine, every ten people (or whatever), you get a slot to spend on either building a unit or building something that produces production.

The principles behind this are good: population will be an important resource, production will be related to population and players will be forced to choose between units and production.

However, this is a whole new game mechanic we're talking about here, so it needs a bit more thought than this cursory glance.

The most obvious thing is the numbers. If it's every ten people, then a few things are evident: population brackets for settlements grow at an increasing rate. Right now you don't have more than ten people until level 2. You also have around a thousand people at the higher levels. so we're talking about a range from 0 slots, to 100. whatever you make the pop cost os a specialist, you get a massive disparity. either i get barely anything until i'm level 2, or i get an obscene amount at level 5. don't forget that some of these buildings might be ones like the workshop (which you currently depend on in the early game for your basic production. also remember i have to build something (or so it seems) to make use of each slot. so at level 5 i could have 20 merchant buildings. this to me implies

- lots of checking back on settlements every time they spawn a new slot, so i can make use of it (in addition to current checking back for levelling up and non-slot buildings). as population expands AND i gain more settlements, this micro will increase EXPONENTIALLY (well, quadratically actually). will i get a warning every time a population increases by ten, or will i have to keep checking myself? to my imagination, either sucks as a prospect.

- (even more) massive urban sprawl as i build the same things over and over again.

- i will have to demolish buildings to build troops, then build them up again when i disband them. recruiting has suddenly become much more complicated

both these things will be especially true if brad's (probably placeholder) numbers are an accurate estimate.

of course, you could always increase the cost of slots at an increasing rate (10 for the first, 15 for the next etc), but there's a problem with this that i'll get onto later.

but back to settlement levelling for a moment if you will. yes, that old meaningless mechanic, you'd forgotten about that now hadn't you? settlement level is currently used to restrict a few unique buildings. you also get a big arbitrary, abstract % increase to one type of production, or the chance to spawn a unit.

sounding familiar yet?

what's worse this % increase is not recorded anywhere nor are you given time to analyse the settlement before you choose. i hate the level up bonuses. to me they feel like a half-arsed attempt to make people care about levelling because as a mechanic it is poorly thought out and under implemented. from what i'm reading i have no reason to believe it will be removed or improved as a concept.

but back track a bit, remember when i suggested solving the slot cost by increasing pop costs at an increasing rate? you know what else increases at an increasing rate? SETTLEMENT LEVELLING REQUIREMENTS!

so we have a flawed old mechanic and a shiny new (apparently flawed) one, which is best implemented by making it more like the old one. this is what doesn't make sense to me. why introduce all this redundancy, for a system that sounds fiddly and annoying? isn't there a far better solution?

yes. yes there is.

so you want to limit buildings by population? fine. we already have a way to discretely chop up settlement sizes. it's called city level. far easier to say "you have reached level 2, you may now build one from this list: a merchant, a lumber mill etc" then have the player do the same thing at level 3. if the level requirements are out of whack with how many i need, then add more levels and reduce the brackets, but the principle remains the same. at a stroke you've removed the need for specialist slots, and made a redundant old mechanic relevant again.

at this point your asking how does recruitment come into this? and what happened to brad's concept of proportionality? well, both these ideas can be done far more intuitively, and with less micro than specialist slots.

make the production buildings produce in proportion to population. so a merchant generates 0.01 gildar per person, per turn or whatever. that's the key to all of this. this way i don't have to build a hoard of them to make use of my population. and the best thing about this is how it handles troop recruitment.

every time you recruit a unit (even at present), the number of guys is removed from the population. this means that if your buildings produce as a proportion of population, then removing population will cause production to go down. then when i disband them it goes back up. this is EXACTLY the kind of "swords or butter" decision brad was talking about, without the need for specialist slots. if the population cost of units is currently not significant, then multiply them up (ie, one guy cost 5 pop, to represent the fact you are taking their breadwinner or "specialist").

the point is that simply reducing the population of a settlement and having that affect production is: far more intuitive, works within the current system and totally removes any need to destroy and rebuild my buildings, or reassign my specialist slots just to recruit some guys. why make an abstract, gamey, slot based mechanic to MODEL "the boys going off to war," when you can ACTUALLY DO IT by simply reducing population?

the best thing about buildings production being tied to population is that it discourages city spam, which the specialist slot system does not do at all. in my system one 100 pop city is better than 2 50's, because not only does it gets more buildings, it gets more out of them because it has higher pop. a lot of this depends on how population increases (currently on a very crude model that also encourages spam), but that's a whole other argument (on which i have other equally strong opinions)

i would really love to have my worries dispelled, and i'd love to hear a good counter argument from brad. but currently the more i think about the specialist slot idea, the less i like it.

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GalahadtheElder

Wow your idea deserves serious attention from the devs. It's good I think. Don't have the time now myself to let my mind go over it all (Brad's and yours) but your arguments and such certainly deserve to be read

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I find a lot of the dev's post to be too vague. He mentions 10% specialist slots in that particular post, but he explains nothing of how this will affect the game from a player's (or practical) point of view. I kind of get the feeling he's at a level removed from the actual game application, kind of like a pharmaceutical salesman trying to describe how a microbe mates or something like that (which would be appropriate for a mircrobiologist and not a salesman).

There's no telling if the implementation described in this thread is even remotely close to the implementation quoted by the dev. The dev leaves out too much detail for me to even speculate how the new system will work in all practicality.

Whatever the new system or upgrage, I hope they just well-playtest it across a couple of hundred players & different systems before releasing it as a formal upgrade/patch.

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You don't have to "check back" at the cities, the slots are global. In other word, if you have 3 cities, one with 10 people, one with 100, one with 1000. As a whole, your empire would have 111 slots that you can use to build in ANY of those city. There's no management problem at all.

Essentially, this means you should level one city with gildar bonus, one with tech bonus, and one with arcane bonus, then build ONLY the appropriate building in each city. IE: One city will be filled with markets to make the most of gildar bonus, one city will be filled with studies, to make use to tech bonuses, etc... This is suppose to deter people from spamming outposts to build markets/studies.

It's really not such a bad system.

The problem is what will happen with prestige. If it stays the way it is now, it is still very useful to spam outpost just to grow people faster, and earn more specialist slots. The only difference is, you won't build any resource buildings in those outpost, but a house or two instead. But I've already said this many times on those posts you quoted, hopefully someone from SD saw it.

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I think the % should be less so there are less specialists

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Quoting cpl_rk,

reply 2

Well, that's the intention.
They haven't coded - not to mention tested and balanced - the new system, yet, so quoting exact numbers would require no less than a crystal ball.
I'd bet money that the 10 % are a ballpark value, too. It will have to be balanced against the city population levels (which in turn can be changed to make the system work out), what buildings can be built at which city levels, and how many specialists each building requires.

the best thing about buildings production being tied to population is that it discourages city spam, which the specialist slot system does not do at all.

I disagree. Population capacity in cities does not grow linearry. When going from lvl 2 to 3 (I think it was that conversion), the city hub itself gets like 200 bonus capacity that you don't need houses for.
This is apparent by the fact that you can raze 2 huts in the city at that point and still have capacity left to grow.
A larger city would have a lot more population than 2 small ones... and as a result a lot more specialists to power the buildings you want.

Sure you could still build more cities because there is no direct deterrent to city spam but exploiting resources would be far more efficient with one larger city that would also be easier to garrison.

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Not to nitpick, but:

A settlement grows to level 2 at 25 people; you are thinking of the fact that you need to build a hut/shack to get over 10. When you hit level two your settlement would have 2.5 "slots"

You can see the % increase your settlement is getting by clicking on the relevant resource on the settlement's overview screen; so if you click on Gilder (or metal, or food, etc.) for example you will go to a screen that breaks down all of the various modifiers. Not exactly intuitive, but it is there if you dig. I agree about it sucking that it doesn't give you a chance to review the settlement before you choose the bonus.

The only thing that concerns me about the idea of "specialist slots" is early game pacing. I think Brad said somewhere that a starting settlement gets 5 "free" slots, but I'd worry that my ability to produce vital early game buildings would outpace my population growth, dragging down an already slow-paced early game.

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The whole specialist stuff really smacks of GalCiv2, which Elemental needs to be moving further and further away from, not toward. Examples from this idea:

-Generic, ho-hum %-in-a-void bonuses.

-Lack of diminishing returns results in a linear specialist growth which becomes tedious. You really want us to manage 111 slots?

-No penalty to large empires = no point in not spamming cities for massive specialist slots.

Civ5 has a similar mechanic called "Culture." Your cities generate culture points. When you get a certain number of points, you get to choose a "value" that lasts for the rest of the game and affects your entire empire. Some are boring +- % bonuses, some really change the way things work.

Now, culture requirements increase quadratically. Getting to Level 1 culture might take 100 points, but Level 2 would take 150 and Level 3 could take 225. Kind of like EXP tables from RPGs: Base levelup requirement = Previous Level + Calculated value.

The twist comes with the fact that the "level up" requirements get exponentionally higher as you build/conquer more cities. The formula goes from pretty basic to more complex, because each city beyond your first adds an additional 30% to the culture levelup requirement. The formula becomes:

Levelup Requirement = (Base EXP table value) * [1.3 ^ (number of cities - 1)].

The culture bonuses are also "tiered," like a talent tree from WoW or Diablo. For instance, putting a point into a tier one bonus lets you move on to a more powerful -- and/or more specialized -- tier two bonus.

For this specialist idea to work and be interesting, you need a few basic mechanics to prop it up:

-Quadratic population requirements for the next "specialist."

-Upkeep for large empires. You might be raking in specialists with a huge population, but go overboard and you'll still be running in the red.

-Actually interesting, perhaps tiered ala Civ5/WoW/whatever, specialists.

(This allows for real "specialization." I can dip into, say, Combat and Adventuring if I want to focus on Physical Heroes and basic-unit Armies. If I just want large, well-trained, mundane armies, I can dump everything into Combat. If I dump everything into Magic, my overworld spells are amped up -- faster rituals, faster mana, etc. Combat + Magic could give me stronger tactical spells. If I add Construction to Magic, I could get massive discounts on magical gear, allowing me to field highly specialized, but smaller, armies. If I add Economics to Construction and Magic I could have have more money and resources to field more armies, more buff slots and lower mana requirements for buff upkeep, and somewhat cheaper magic gear. This would allow me to field more mundane armies supported by a few "Supercombatants" ala Dominions 3. These "Supercombatants" would be made super by gear, not by raw combat skill received by the "Combat" specialization.)

Yeah, it's harping on Civ5, but I think you're already harping pretty hard on it with the inbound specialist mechanic. The most interesting RPGs these days are "Talent Tree" (though there might not literally be such a tree) systems where you dedicate a certain number of limited resources to become a jack of many trades or a master of few. See: Might and Magic VI - VIII, Multiclassing in AD&D, Dungeons and Dragons 3e and 4e in general, every action RPG since Diablo 2, WoW and many of its imitators, Dragon Age, etc etc etc.

Maybe that's too much of a change, and for all I know I might be able to mod all this in by myself (leave the specialist code flexible plox), but I'm just throwing ideas around as to what I'd find impressive and cool.

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Quoting lord ebonstone,

reply 8

This. As has been said numerous times across countless threads, give me choices that matter and are mutually exclusive.

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I like Brad's idea best and yes this game should be moving CLOSER and CLOSER to GALCIV2 in play value and difficulty and AI approach. GC2 is the best scifi4x out there and I see no reason why Elemental shouldn't follow that path as well. I'm actually pretty sure it will but you will always have your naysayers no matter what you try to design and do. You will also have those that want to redesign the game for themselves like lordebonstone.

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For starters the military (and other) tech trees need to be far deeper.
I should not be able to research all possible weapons at this stage of the game in 2 clicks.

Lvl 12 sword tech should be far superior to having both Lvl 6 Mace and Lvl 6 Dagger tech.
There needs to be a reason for wanting to specialise.

Mutually exclusive research always comes across as a completely arbitrary GM decision.
You have researched Specialise: Sword so you will never be able to research Specialise: Mace. Because I say so.

Instead there should be positive incentive for not researching all.
The easiest one: make the tech trees so wide and deep that you will fall behind when researching everything at once, no matter how many cities you create.
Well, easy in principle. =P

Maybe your people are stonger than average. Then you might do better with maces. Just a random thought...

But there can be many sword related things to research. Ask the roleplayer / reenaccting / LARP nutcases and you'll get pages upon pages of topics from hilt bindings to smithing techniques to sword designs / eras / applications to scabbards to fighting maneuvers to weaponcare to training devices to... aaargh.

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Quoting lord ebonstone,

reply 8

The whole specialist stuff really smacks of GalCiv2, which Elemental needs to be moving further and further away from, not toward. Examples from this idea:

-Actually interesting, perhaps tiered ala Civ5/WoW/whatever, specialists.

(This allows for real "specialization." I can dip into, say, Combat and Adventuring if I want to focus on Physical Heroes and basic-unit Armies. If I just want large, well-trained, mundane armies, I can dump everything into Combat. If I dump everything into Magic, my overworld spells are amped up -- faster rituals, faster mana, etc. Combat + Magic could give me stronger tactical spells. If I add Construction to Magic, I could get massive discounts on magical gear, allowing me to field highly specialized, but smaller, armies. If I add Economics to Construction and Magic I could have have more money and resources to field more armies, more buff slots and lower mana requirements for buff upkeep, and somewhat cheaper magic gear. This would allow me to field more mundane armies supported by a few "Supercombatants" ala Dominions 3. These "Supercombatants" would be made super by gear, not by raw combat skill received by the "Combat" specialization.)

I agree completely that you should be able to go these different routes, but I don't think that specialists, as a global resource, will be able to support this. I think they're just going to be essentially like food- but generated by population, not accumulating, and "eaten" by most buildings much like food is "eaten" by huts.

Maybe they could go this route for champions. That's another system that really needs fleshed out.

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Quoting Kalin,

reply 3

... Essentially, this means you should level one city with gildar bonus, one with tech bonus, and one with arcane bonus, then build ONLY the appropriate building in each city. IE: One city will be filled with markets to make the most of gildar bonus, one city will be filled with studies, to make use to tech bonuses, etc... This is suppose to deter people from spamming outposts to build markets/studies.

It's really not such a bad system. ...

Gah, that sounds like they're deliberately creating an analog to the All-Labs/Factories exploit in GalCiv2. Much early talk about making cities distinctive seems to have given way to bland workarounds to tidy up a shifting econ UI. Maybe these new 'specialist slots' need to be tied to unique buildings, or better yet, champions who work best in town.

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Quoting rossanderson48,

reply 10

We already have a game like GalCiv2. It's called GalCiv2. We don't need another.

We haven't had a fantasy 4X in awhile. We need a fantasy 4X. Elemental can fit this bill.

Also, I really want them to stay away from GalCiv2 design because GalCiv2 is excruciatingly boring. Oh boy, a special tile with +3% military production. No. Maybe that has a place in number crunching sci-fi future, but fantasy is about raw, inexplicable power, not the spreadsheet style of design.

Quoting rossanderson48,

reply 10

You will also have those that want to redesign the game for themselves like lordebonstone.

Yeah, people like me. Oh, and, you know, frogboy. You're aware a ground-up redesign is (supposedly) going on, right? You're aware ideas and suggestions and criticism have been called for by the froggie himself, right?

If you're going to make GalCiv3, call it GalCiv3. Don't call it Elemental.

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Quoting JSJ101,

reply 12

I see what you mean -- I just don't want that to happen.

Specialists, even as a global resource, can absolutely support something like my example. Think of them like Empire EXP. If you want an RP reason, think of needing enough "specialists" to create a critical mass of talent in order to form a "think tank" for your desired area of improvement.

If you want to tie them to buildings... why not just make buildings? To add in this unnecessary, confusing change just adds in extraneous, flabby mechanics that a good design pass would weed out almost immediately.

Think about it. Every time 10 people are born, an 11th magically appears to go work at a blacksmith? What? Why not just make buildings you can manually assign people to like Civ and boost pop growth by 10%? You don't need a brand new confusing mechanic to fix a problem that doesn't exist, and wouldn't even fix the proposed problem if it did.

Why?

Quoting GW Swicord,

reply 13

Gah, that sounds like they're deliberately creating an analog to the All-Labs/Factories exploit in GalCiv2.

That's why.

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Also, I really want them to stay away from GalCiv2 design because GalCiv2 is excruciatingly boring.

Well Brad that statement right there should keep you away from anything lordebonstone has to input. He will never be satisfied about anything unless it's what HE wants and nothing else. GC2 was hardly boring as it's the best Scifi 4x game to date next to MOO II and they stand hand n hand in the MAJORITY of players books. So I would just ignore anything he has to say since he made that statement. As I said I like Brad's idea and I'm sure they will tweak it to be fair and balanced. I always did like maximizing in GC2 anyways with Factory planets, eco planets, etc. etc. that is what made it fun and NOT BORING. )

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i agree we don't know all the details, but i don't believe that we should avoid discussing it because of that. otherwise we risk it just getting in uncriticized and without debate. he's talking about putting this in 1.09

the problem i have with specialist slots is the fundamental philosophy.

population > slots > buildings > production

that's incredibly circuitous. is there any reason why it can't be

population > buildings > production

or even

population > production

my system is a hybrid of these two latter ideas.

@gyb: so they've already noticed that their system is flawed and put in an exeption/work around for low levels. i think that should tell you something.

@robert hentschke & kalin: i know what you mean about population capacity. however, that is not the same as actual population. how that grows i don't know (only that it's tied to prestige). all i know is that the population growth needs to come out of the shadows as well. at the moment it feels like it's linear (since i've never noticed it stabilizing). so if you have 1 person per turn in every city, settlement spam is encouraged because your population grows in proportion to your number of settlements. ideally i'd want population tied to total food production primarily (ie, divide it among the faction population so pop grows at a decreasing rate until reaching equilibrium, until production/other factors are changed or it hits the hard cap determined by housing). that would make it an actual game mechanic the player had control over instead of the current shadowy system. and it would mean that civs that spam settlements without increasing their food supply (or other buildings like pubs) would find their population growth slowing and stagnating at lower levels, stopping them from getting the cool high level stuff.

the most organic and balanced way to determine pop growth is imho like this: https://forums.elementalgame.com/397376

@GWSwicord: i really dislike this as well. even if it doesn't encourage mono-economies, it will still lead to a situation where you need lots of settlements to do anything well. this encourages settlement spam.

@lord ebonstone: the proportionality of specialists is what bothers me the most, as i discussed, and this translates to exponential growth as you conquer more settlements. level growth however, is a dimishing returns mechanic, so limiting buildings by level moderates this growth. and it makes use of an under used mechanic. to keep the growth in benefits (but not slots) exponential, you can then tie production to population.

there are a lot of things to love about gal civ 2, but the economy and big arbitrary % bonuses are not one of them.

BTW, no one's commented on the recruitment issue, which i think sounds massively fiddly compared to now, or the system i proposed.

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Quoting Sethai,

reply 17

all i know is that the population growth needs to come out of the shadows as well. at the moment it feels like it's linear (since i've never noticed it stabilizing). so if you have 1 person per turn in every city, settlement spam is encouraged because your population grows in proportion to your number of settlements.

Aye. Only with the current system there was hardly any need to care about population growth.
Population itself wasn't important in any way. Only the city level mattered and that was guaranteed as long as you had time and food for houses.

Once population matters, it's growth will surely become an issue.
I just won't make any plans on how a vague and largely mythical economy system will be affected by a population growth rate based on uhh... insert any number of features. =P

The GC system with building 30 buildings, each giving +10 % to Whatever is not very well suited to the fantasy setting but the principle isn't automatically bad.
The boni can work in a way that each building only adds 2/3 of the previously built. That way you can specialise your city if it includes a special resource but there are dimnishing returns to overdoing it.

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Quoting rossanderson48,

reply 16

obviously you are not aware of the all factories strategy.

essentially, this is the easiest way to win GC2, and it demonstrates how totally messed up the economy is.

build nothing but factories, put production to max and social prouction to 100%. get your research production by focussing a few planets on research (military production comes from not building, which funnels all your social production to military automatically. this way you can get 100% production out of all your factories and get equivalent amounts of all types of production just by changing focuses, whilst paying a comparatively minimal maintenance cost. you don't need to research labs and a lot of other techs, so you save there as well.

the economy in GC2 actually discourages specialisation. plus elemental is supposed to be a much smaller scale game. you can tell from the map sizes. i shouldn't have to have 5 cities to get a decent mix of production and military.

to be fair, i think brad was as unhappy with the GC2 economy as i was, from some of his recent posts.

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Would it be possible to do a slot per level size of the city. that way you would only have 1-5 specialists.

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I wish we could set templates and select them for each city. That way you can properly specialize cities without having to keep looking at each city every few turns.

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

I don't think the concept is that bad.

One solution to the problem you're suggesting is tying the most efficient housing and prestige enhancers to higher level cities.

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The major thing about it is that we don't know how other systems will be tweaked to accommodate. In my current 1.08 game, I'm running at an excess of 140 food after having 17 level 5 cities with my capital having an excess of housing. 125 x 17 slots means... my economy is in even better shape than it is now and I can steamroll the opposition and then instantly build up conquered cities.

It also, judging from what little information, still presents a disconnect between the general population and specialists. The general population still is not truly supporting the specialists. You don't care what the general population needs, just that you have them.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2412

One thing that I would request is if peopel coudl start posting their saved games. I would love to look at how people (real people) are playing the game. I would look at it from both an AI and game balance point of view.

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

Where would you want these posted? I'm willing to play up a (Scrubby) game, and post that. Might give you an idea of how I like to play- unsure if I'm a representative sample though.

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