Starting production bonus

[Seravy]

As the starting production bonus seems to have too high impact on games, but cannot be regulated through starting positions well, two ideas that could be used to fix this problem.

1. Sawmill +8 production no longer benefits from production bonuses.
This is where most of your production comes from, so it reduces the impact of early production while not affecting late game that much, albeit it does make miner's guilds and mechanician guilds as well as inspiration worse.
It might be possible to only remove the effect of terrain instead of all production bonus though which solves that problem but isn't very intuitive.


2. Terrain production bonus capped at 3% / population like terrain/road gold bonus
Simple, effective and utilizes an existing game mechanic. It does make places with lots of mountains bad though as those won't have the population needed to utilize the production bonus.

Or we can

3. Leave everything unchanged, as many other factors have an equal or higher influence on games anyway. The higher food requirement and lower mountain production should reduce the impact of this problem somewhat, too.

[Nelphine]

I'm certainly willing to go with number 3 until I've seen the effects of higher food minimums,and less productive mountains.

If we did go with this change, I'd be fine with losing the tiny bonus from miners guild/mechanicians guild/inspirations.

[zitro1987]

I go with #3. I tend to find starting location 20+ food w/ rivers and wild game (or an average start with gold mile) more powerful than a +50% prod start (not that it's not great)

[Arnuz]

#1 makes the starting location issue worse because it removes a source for a static, independent production amount.

All in all I personally reached the conclusion that randomness is part of mom, its immovable determinism providing part of the allure.

I'd still like to have more useful oceans/coasts - because their total/half uselessness is really strange in strategy games - but it's not a top issue for me.

[Seravy]

Well, oceans are generally the "empty" tiles because we can't exactly have "void" or "space" as tiles on a non-space game and having lots of ocean feels natural. Their purpose is to fill the the gap between the 150-700 productive tiles and the 60*40=2400 total tiles on the map and not to produce anything. Their role is to increase distances and be obstacles to travel, nothing else.

[Catwalk]

#2 would be a lot of fun, but can you make the cap higher than 3% per pop or does it have to be the same as for roads?

[Domon]

3

[Seravy]

It could be anything.
I just need to add "if prod>X*pop then prod=X*pop", well assuming I can of course. Haven't actually checked but I'd say 90% chance it's easy to do.

[Arnuz]

That might make housing finally worth it. OTOH, it'd make starting in mountains a big problem - especially with races with an already slow growth, which are already shafted (dwarves excluded). I don't know.

How about that plus the coasts change? I noticed above that you answered for oceans, but not coasts. So at least if you start with only mountains and coasts you're not forced to restart.

[Catwalk]

If you can change it to any value then I'm all for #2, that'd be a great addition. I think 10x pop would be reasonable.

I'd personally like to see coasts be 1 food and oceans 1/2 food. I realize that'd be a big economic change, but coastal locations are just so disappointing. I'd have a lot more fun with slightly more valuable coastal locations.

I'd also suggest changing the road bonus threshold to 5x pop instead of 3x pop, it takes forever for it to kick in. It doesn't feel like an important part of the game at present. Nomads may need to be rebalanced slightly, they could be given a small growth penalty or something.