Myrran retort

[Nelphine]

In my dwarf rich games, I don't settle unless there are at least 2 minerals. I average 3. Some cities have 6.

Ores absolutely are a large fraction of your income on rich.

More importantly ores are front loaded. Which means the dwarf trait is front loaded. Anything front loaded is far more powerful - and therefore needs to be a much smaller amount. See concerns about archmage where +5 or +10 was too powerful, because it was front loaded. Even sage master had to be reduced, and research is the least impactful resource.

5 cities with 3 ores each, at +100%, average of 7 per ore, means you have 105 extra income for however many turns it would take another race to match that income through populations or buildings. Assuming growth is perfectly linear (it's not, its weighted toward the end, so the average should be higher), then that's an average of 52.5g for however many turns it takes. That could easily be 100 turns. That's huge.

And on rich it won't be 5 cities. It will be 15+. Even with a 50% bonus, you could easily be talking about 8000 extra resources over the next race - which us enough to research very rare spells, let alone rush to arnorers guild.

Getting very rare spells that much earlier absolutely is a huge impact. 50% therefore is huge, even if its worse than 100%.

[Seravy]

More importantly ores are front loaded.

Yea that's the problem we can't fix. We can't make the mineral bonus turn into a non-front loaded one like we did on Archmage. You suggestion on halving mineral if applied to Archamge, would mean it becomes 25% and +5 at start.

Archmage and Sage Master were easy to fix - we removed or reduced the front loaded portion which wasn't relevant in the greater picture anyway (except for early game abuse), and kept the rest. People would still pick Archamge for +50% SP without the +10 extra.

But a mineral bonus is always front loaded. And we can't change it without ruining the whole thing - there is no major late game component here. (Even if you put every city on 3 ores, a lot of your empire won't even be dwarves as you expand...so in the big picture it won't be a large amount past turn 100-150. Halving it would just make it not matter at all past the early game. It's still be front loaded, but it's not be anything else anymore. )

Well, actually dwarves are kinda like Archmage in that they have a front loaded and a normal component (Mineral bonus, and tax+production bonus.) so if we want to do what we did for Archmage and Sage Master, we need to cut the mineral bonus drastically and leave the others alone. That works - but means (almost) completely losing the mineral bonus which is something I do not want. Especially because the mineral bonus contrary to how it looks like, is not a real advantage. AI players naturally have +100% or more on minerals due to difficulty settings, so it merely means the player can get an EQUAL benefit from playing rich as the AI. The difference is, the AI doesn't know how to abuse that benefit to do cheesy wins through early golems and hammerhands.
What's worse, the "normal" component is already inefficient and "overbalanced" by low growth - you do get more out of dwarven population but you get much fewer population so in the end so it's not that good unless you can accelerate your growth with Stream of Life. So, as is, Minerals are both the main "selling point" for playing the race, and the most important "lore" component at the same time. Cutting it down is not an option even if that is the obvious correct solution from a purely gameplay approach.

Unless we somehow change the entire "mineral" mechanic in the game from a front loaded to a normal resource which would help with a lot of the balance issues on map generation as well but...not sure I like that idea, nor do I know how to execute it well. In fact it would be horrible - If ores can't  be important in the timeframe between building a city on them and a chaos wizard learning raise volcano, that's very bad for the game.

[Nelphine]

Right, but even later in the game (up until you can stop getting high minerals per city), the front loaded bonus is a huge bonus. Thus 15 or so cities. And at that, you can still drop the mineral bonus to 50%, and still get a major advantage over other races.

No it won't solve the problem, but it helps, and it doesn't remotely take away from the lore, character, and niche that dwarves have. Its just not quite as high.

[Seravy]

Except even with 50% minerals I would have had those golems too early. In that game this reduction would have meant 8 gold = 4 production per turn. Overall, about 1-2 turns later for the first unit. Remember I only had a single Crysx crystal, it wasn't won on minerals (albeit with more it's certainly a thing.)

(and, since we have proven you can do it too early even if not playing dwarf...any bonus would be too much whatsoever.)

[Seravy]

Updated the "Current tasks" list to include the AG and the Dwarf and the mineral problems.

[Catwalk]

kyrub disabled changing production when something has been purchased

Oh. I guess that works? Was that in insecticide? Do you have a patch? Or an address I can look at?

I do have some ideas how to do it myself, but there is a critical point. I need to be able to store "the player has bought something here this turn" somewhere...and I don't think I have free bytes in city data.

...meanwhile I'll look at the "buying cost" procedure and see if it's even possible to make it depend on the building type. (as that is the type of variable cost we actually need, not the original)

Edit : Good, BUY costs do get the town as the input parameter so they know which building is being bought. This part is doable.

I'm glad to see your interest in this. I have several ideas for implementation, I'll post more about this over the weekend (have to run off now).

[Seravy]

Well, assuming the "balance" option wins on this matter, this is probably the only thing we can do. Still think a solution of "armorer's guild costs 5x to buy instead of 2x" is super artificial and intrusive and better to avoid but it's the only thing we have.

[Seravy]

Actually I think we have one other alternative :
"Armorer's Guild and Fantastic Stables cannot be bought for gold".
But even for that we need the change production restriction.

[Nelphine]

Even that would be a mess - once uncommons are out, armorers guild units aren't an issue. So getting that 6th city up to military production would just become super painful.

[Arnuz]

Just chiming in to say that c=p log p (or a similar brackets solution as suggested by Catwalk) is different from variable costs. It doesn't imply that if you switch after buying you gain because the cost depends on the final building. So if you buy a ship wright (100 or so), then switch to AG (2400 or so with p log p), you still need to pay 2400-100 = 2300.

But yeah fixing the bought item ala MoM works very well

I'd love to be able to buy items from the city list BTW - did you say that buying has a city parameter Seravy? Could that be used to add a buy button from the city list?