Myrran retort

[Seravy]

Okay, so economy.

On most normal races, you can have :
~6 hammers from population (~5 people)
4 hammers from marketplace
~4-5 hammers from taxes (8-10 gold)
8 hammers from sawmill
15 hammers from terrain (assuming many mountains for near 100% bonus)
4 hammers from a gold ore (assuming average start on rich)
10 hammers from magic power (20 power into mana into gold with alchemy)
8 hammers from Omniscient

So that's a total 60 hammers/turn.
A set of FG+AG+Barracks costs 450+250+125 = 825.

That's less than 15 turns if you pour everything into this to reach an armorer's guild unit with a barracks.
So I have to conclude this is not a dwarf specific issue to begin with. You can reach armorer's guild too quickly if you pour all three types of your resources into this goal (gold, production, power) and don't do anything else.

What's breaking the game is the ability to convert 3 different kinds resources towards a goal - a bit similar to retort stacking, individually nothing is wrong, but the player can decide to pour everything into the same stat, in this case production, and abuse it. Ofc if the plan fails you lose because you've given up on casting spells and building settlers in favor of the rush tactic, but if it's this fast, it still works...which is the problem. (Dwarves make it a lot worse so they still need special attention but as is, every race has the problem)

So...I went and ran a test game with Gnolls. Got the gold ore on start but zero mountains - only 27% terrain bonus instead of the 100% I had in my dwarf game. On turn 23 I had my barracks and armorer's guild ready which is still too early for game balance With this performace, I can still expect a fully buffed jackal rider (or nightmare or elven lord or pegasai etc) to hit the first enemy capital before turn 40, and all 3 before turn 50. My assumption that other races can't use armorer's guild units was wrong in the first place.

Aside from nerfing Mountains (they are a super huge contributor, get 3 and you have a free miner's guild worth of extra production bonus, get 6 and you have like 3 nondrawf gold ore's worth of it), I don't know what can be done, except maybe raising the cost on armorer's guilds and fantastic stables. Problem with that one, the units they unlock aren't THAT good in most cases to be worth paying 800+ hammers for the building.

[Seravy]

Speaking of Mountains, that Draconian lunatic win video also had a lot of mountains on the starting position I believe. I think we should cut the bonus down to 7% at the very least.

[Nelphine]

I think we've discussed before that mountains seem too good compared to all other terrain types (including plains). I'd be fine reducing to 5 or 6% for a mountain.

The problem is the comparison of cost between buildings and research + casting spells individually. Casting spells is just vastly more expensive. (Recall me mathing out that warlords college should be about 900 hammers in order to compare with land linking.)

That cost difference means that the best city units are going to come into the game between common and uncommon summons, but the human can stack things to make those city units as good as rares (or in some cases, very rares) without even needing spells to buff them. (Obviously common life buffs make this much easier, or lets them stack both to easily get to very rare level.)


By the way, why do you include omniscient and alchemy but not other retorts? (At least spellweaver also gives a bonus, albeit small)

[Seravy]

Okay, so looked up the "more expensive armorer's guild" from the other thread and found this :

More expensive ArmG, FanS + Magician requiring Alch. G.
+Ensures common and uncommons summons don't get obsolete that early
-Huge nerf to already underpowered High Men, other slow races

So there isn't really any big reason against making these cost more, aside from
-the expected huge negative impact on (slower) races very dependent on AG units.
-and some units simply not being powerful enough to be worth a larger investment.

Question is, how much can that help?
Well, it helps some - assuming the calculated 60 hammers/turn, a raise of 300 means 5 extra turns of delays. But it doesn't really help all that much, 5 extra turns is still affordable in many cases.

I think there is a very important game mechanic missing here that other 4X games have.
And that is having to research higher tech to build higher tier military buildings and units.
If we raise the building cost to match the difficulty of researching a higher tier spell, then the building will be overpriced - unlike technology, the building has to be built in every city and rebuilt when destroyed.
But if we don't raise it, you can get it much earlier than what is meant to happen.

So we need some sort of a mechanism that keeps armorer's guild (and other high tier buildings) locked in the early game - but we can't use research because this game does not research technology, it researches magic spells.

We can tie it to the number of turns, population, or something else, idk, but armorer's guild on turn 30 is just wrong and I don't think there is a way to change economy to disallow it.
(I'd prefer number of turns but that does feel quite out of place to be honest.)

[Seravy]

By the way, why do you include omniscient and alchemy but not other retorts?

I wanted a good but not maxed out setup to demonstrate the problem is not related to stacking everything and exists on its own. If you literally have to max everything, then it's easy to solve by removing one of the components only. If you have room to win without maxing performance, then that doesn't work.

[Seravy]

Thinking a bit more, the original game kinda required population for buildings through the "BUY" feature being so inefficient that you had no other way to build things than higher population. Not that I want to go back to that, obviously, it wasn't fun. But it's true that efficient conversion of gold to hammers is a contributing factor.

[Nelphine]

Yeah, you'll note, I specifically didn't discuss increasing armorers guild cost. The units it unlocks vary wildly, as do fantastuc stables. 

You've also already done most unit balancing against each other - which means despite the wild variance, the units themselves are in decent places.

Ideally I'd want to completely overhaul all unit balance to reflect economy better, but that's not really the point of where we're going, especially given how much balancing has already been done, and how well balanced things are.

I'd been thinking about a cost increase based on time myself, but I feel that's super artificial. I like the idea of having something based on population, as that will have a longer term effect as well. But I wouldn't want to end up in a civ position with hard caps in things.

What about making the efficiency of buying production based on population? Like if the city has population less than 3 it costs 4x, if it has less than 8 or 10 it costs 3x?

That would specifically make older cities better (but this would also make conquering much more important again). I haven't really thought about it enough, so it might be a terrible idea.

[Nelphine]

Or make different things have different purchase values? Units cost 2x, early buildings cost 3x, advanced buildings cost 4x?

[Seravy]

Agreed, I'd like to avoid too artificial things as well so a hard requirement of turns an population is not good.
Unfortunately buying cost based on population wouldn't work well - you need to be able to buy the sawmill at pop 1 otherwise your city remains unproductive for dozens of turns if it doesn't have good base growth.

...on the other hand, what if we required at least 1 unit of pop for each 100 production to buy? Nah, also wouldn't work. At pop 4 you can actually buy the AG that costs 450. Even if raised, it's possible to pick a 400 cost other building, buy it, then change the production and buy the remaining half.

In general, the ability to change production without losing it eliminates the possibility to do it through buying costs if it isn't global, and we don't want it to be global (you need to be able to buy sawmill, some early garrison units, settlers etc at the normal cost) so I think the buying cost can't be used for it.

Or make different things have different purchase values? Units cost 2x, early buildings cost 3x, advanced buildings cost 4x?

The above, I buy the cheaper thing then switch to the expensive building and build the rest through production. In the end I can still pay the cheaper cost for the first half at the very least. So this wouldn't work even though it would be nice.

[Nelphine]

Oh right. Could make it based on price then? The first 150 production (of anything) costs 2x. Then from 151-400 costs 3x. Anything higher than 400 costs 4x. That way even if you buy something else first the prices would be the same?