Sawmills

[Nelphine]

Correct. 

It's what I want, but as i, and you, have said, it probably can't work.

An average high end city has, what 15 pop out of a max 25?

The same city might have 4 farmers and 11 workers. 20% production from terrain. Stables sawmill miners foresters mechanicians guilds.

Total production is ~65. Trade goods gives ~32 gold.

Therefore housing needs to increase tax revenue by 33+ gold.

Assuming bank and merchants guild and... i have no idea actually, 40% from road and water? and 2g taxes, that means each population earns 4.1g, so housing needs to add to population fast enough that, before the city reaches the cap, each of turn of housing adds 8 turns of taxable (i say taxable because often new population will be rebellious at these population levels) population.

I would want housing to stop meeting this at pop 20 for this example (so at Pop 20, two things would have happened - industry will have gone up by 13, adding an extra 7 gold to trade goods, and the housing formula will be reduced based on the 5 population and increased by the 13 hammers).

However, in order to add 8 or 9 turns of taxable population to the city, that standard growth does not, that would mean our pop 15 city would need to get about .. 1500 growth (1.5 population) in one turn? Which is probably simply too high and I'm on a bus, so I'm not coming up with the actual formula right now.


Would probably have to base housing both on population, and on hammers but cap hammers based on population (I'd guess it would be a cap of 3 hammers per population, which a pop 1 city gets (with our proposal of 2 free hammers for a city) without a sawmill, so building a sawmill wouldn't help pop 1. A pop 2 city would also have 6 hammers without a sawmill, so it wouldn't help there either.
On the other end, my pop 15 city already has more than 60 hammers, so growing to pop 20 the housing formula would get no increase from the extra population which would actually work out to the housing naturally decaying with pop growth.
However, I feel like there would be a good chance that in the mid range, whatever formula works for the high end, would end up being too good, and pop 5 to 10 cities would prefer housing over various buildings, and since I already feel your formula makes housing too attractive to pop 3+ cities, that would be an issue)

[Nelphine]

On topic of free money to the human:
*Shrug* we've already shown we can do the same with various fighters guilds (which we want humans to build early anyway). I think the AI has too much money at the start. I would prefer reducing AI gold, rather than increasing human gold. For instance, paying them for the 2 starting settlers I think is a mistake. I don't want them to snowball before the game even starts, I want them to start on the same footing and then start snowballing. 

But I do think for the majority of the playerbase, the easy lairs will be AMAZING, so I vote to do it this way anyway. If armorers guilds turn out to be an issue again, we can reexamine that at the time.

I say if, because unlike actual free gold, this gold has a time delay in, which means it will be much harder to ensure you get that gold on the exact turn you need it to build the arnorers guild early enough to walk over the AI. Additionally, you will end up not affording your two sawmills, which will significantly delay your empire - so while you may still get an AI or 2 with armorers guild, you may actually be worse off against all remaining ai.

[Seravy]

Additionally, you will end up not affording your two sawmills, which will significantly delay your empire - so while you may still get an AI or 2 with armorers guild, you may actually be worse off against all remaining ai.

Except, buying sawmills will not really be a thing anymore. I mean, you still can, and if the location has a high production bonus and bad max population it will be worth it, but in most cases you'd want to do the housing, and spend gold on either marketplaces, magic markets, granaries, shrines, farmer's markets or libraries - because those produce resources that aren't going to get wasted during housing, while the hammers do.
(of course you can also opt for not spending the gold, and buying the sawmill after you did the housing, but that won't really be all that much better than just buying the marketplace right away.)
Ultimately, even without spending that gold elsewhere, your secondary cities will develop as they do now.

Fortunately we don't care about the secondary cities, they are not a risk to game balance. Gold going into the capital towards higher tier buildings is a risk though. And we have already concluded we have no real working solutions to the Armorer's Guild problem. (also, FG coming 10 turns earlier for the human would be just as bad.)

On the other hand, we did decide it's not a problem if that's all that the human can find. It only becomes a problem if they find that, plus a good map with already good treasure. However, hitting that many targets would require some economic investments, possibly slowing down the development. So many it's ok? idk. I feel it's not ok. In the previous system you couldn't rely on that money. Yes, it was a "bad start" but the possibility of those ensured you wouldn't go with picks that can't survive on 0 treasure. If treasure is guaranteed to get you to your Fighter's Guild for basically free (yes you need to summon like 3 hell hounds but that's about it), most rush strategies would be a lot more reliable.
Ideally, we could have this and raise Fighter's Guild costs (by about 150-200), but the AI relies on the fighter's guild so that would hurt them a lot. Unless we give the AI even more starting money and teach them to buy Fighter's Guilds...

[Nelphine]

I don't think we should be changing anything in standard game play. I'd much rather reduce the housing formula so that it's still a net befit to buy your sawmill right away; I'd rather have housing as just better than it is now, so that it's viable if you don't buy the sawmill.

Doing that means the gold still 'should' go to secondary cities or you'll fall behind which means standard play still won't see that armorers guild.

Heck just spending the money on other economy buildings like magic mart should still be important enough to make the AG too big a risk.


Why would you ever buy a marketplace? 160 gold means that's always a loss unless you cant build it in 20 turns; just 2 free hammers on your city mean you'll always build it in 20 turns. You shouldn't ever buy a marketplace (except maybe high men...)

[Seravy]

Why would you ever buy a marketplace? 160 gold means that's always a loss unless you cant build it in 20 turns; just 2 free hammers on your city mean you'll always build it in 20 turns. You shouldn't ever buy a marketplace (except maybe high men...)

You do realize Sawmill used to be the ONLY building in the game where ROI was lower than the turn count for building it and we wanted that gone which started this entire discussion?

Yes, it's a "loss" in opportunity cost - you don't have that gold back until the ROI time expires. But that's how investing is supposed to work...

Fighter's Guild is probably fine as is, armorer's isn't though (but it already isn't, the easy lairs would just escalate that problem a LOT).

What reason did we have against Armorer's Guild requiring a set amount of population to build?

[Nelphine]

Right, but in the particular case of marketplace, all it provides is gold. Spending gold, to get a lower amount of gold is not worth it. On the other hand, buying anything else COULD be important depending on circumstances, since you're spending Gold to buy a different resource.

[Nelphine]

If I recall, having a population cap for only one building wouldn't make intuitive sense, and the risk of it being a problem is too low (the biggest offender was golems, which don't even require an armored guild - by modifying golems, it's now much much more difficult for any unit, even requiring an armorers guild, to be truly problematic), so making an unintuitive change wasn't worth the gain.

I believe that still holds in this case - just as you've asked me to wait to see if lunatic AI can actually steal these lairs, I'd also ask that you wait to see if the extra gold actually causes balance issues. I don't think that will occur; except if someone builds a lunatic strategy completely around it, in which case it will be highly documented and we can see if this factor is actually the real problem.

[Seravy]

Yea but this needs to be implemented first and it's a lot of work, so "wait and see" isn't really a good plan if there is a chance the feature needs to be removed afterward.
...and I don't believe we want to commit ourselves to "nerf armorer's guild at all costs" either.
(also you are right, Golems are a unit which doesn't require the armorer's guild and can STILL do the thing. But it's the only one, everything else is armorer's or fantastic stables.)
I guess "at all costs" can be as simple as adding +250 to the cost of AG and FS to match the 500 gold we are adding. It's inconvenient if you need them in multiple places but by then 500 gold shouldn't be a significant issue. (not sure if we had any other reason against that?)

It might be necessary anyway - it's a fact that with the new sawmill system, the consequences of failing with an Armorer's Guild strategy are much less severe (your secondary cities will be mostly unaffected), so it might get more popular. (especially if we define "failing" as conquering on half the empire of the enemy using those troops instead of their capital first)

[Nelphine]

The reason we didn't increase the cost last time was the same - you do end up building multiple and a race like lizardmen simply can't afford that much in standard play. Trying to fix a problem that (even though it's possible now) doesn't actually seem to occur - I've never heard of anyone doing it with any unit except golems - doesn't seem worth the huge priens it causes for standard play later in the game.

[Seravy]

So basically we first need to decide if we do want the 3 easy lairs "at all costs", without knowing what those costs will be.

We also need to decide on AI gold and starting settlers. Since the human gets 500 free gold worth of treasure, the "neutral" solution would be to give the AI 500 gold. However without sawmills the AI doesn't really have any good way to spend the money in the early game. So either we give the a Fighter's Guild instead or teach them to buy fighter's guilds more (currently set as a "buy multiplier" of 4. So they'll buy if they have 4 times the required money unused. Meaning they need over 2k to instantly buy and over 1k to buy when halfway done. Sawmills were a 1 and will remain so. Considering the maintenance reduction and the production bonus, and the lack of housing bonus, the AI will still do sawmill first. But at cost 68 they are much less of a gold sink then before, 500 can't be used on those. Alternately we could make the AI prioritize spending on a few more buildings : marketplaces, magic markets and libraries, but honestly, those get build quickly enough so it might not make a difference to buy them.) or do nothing and go with "this will let them buy things a few turns earlier due to higher unused gold", so instead of aiming for instant snowballing potential, just let them use it in a generic way.
For settlers, on the human side 1 fewer settler would be reasonable(you can buy it from the found treasure). This would mean the AI can also lose 1 settler as well (they produce them anyway). This slows down city spam on both sides, but does encourage the player spending on military and stealing troops, while also reducing the weight of the starting race decision and reduces the number of cities you have from your home race. We can also reduce AI starting gold, the part they gold as compensation for that settler. Also, fewer cities do mean losing any hurts more, so an early attack against the AI will cripple that AI at a much more efficient manner, and it'll be easier to hold the conquered cities (AI has no third production center), while also having fewer own to defend.
Overall, I think I'm against reducing settlers despite the advantages. I didn't like how in the old system I usually had only 1-2 cities of my starting race, and all others were stolen from the AI.
Also, we did want to give the player the extra gold to increase possible choices and make peaceful expansion more playable. Taking away that settler would reduce that choice to "buy the settler, or buy military and start a war".

Conclusion :
We add the sawmill change, basic production and the proposed housing formula. (unless someone suggests an even better housing formula, but with all the mathematical limits I don't expect that to happen)
I'm fine with adding the extra lairs but then we must commit ourselves to do whatever it takes to fight the "armorer's guild tier rush" if it becomes a reliable strategy. Even if that "whatever" will be less than ideal.
I'm against reducing starting settlers. (part of me is wishing we could but let's face reality)
I'm fine with not giving the AI any increased starting gold (they'd suck at using it and it has low relevance), but I'm against reducing it. Ultimately the AI starting condition seems to be fine as is (long term advantages might not but that's a different story.