Sawmills

[Seravy]

1 free food

I don't want free food unless is absolutely unavoidable.
(aside from everything I already said, 1 food feeds like 6 AI units as well...)

...okay if I read this right, Housing with a current pop of 1 will be at least 420 (max pop of 2, second half I ignored as it's a nonnegative number) but usually around 600 or higher.
That's a big no.

So the first half is basically 500,125,55,31 for the first 4 units of pop, past that we can pretty much ignore it, as the amount will be so low it becomes irrelevant.

"(max pop-current pop)/(max pop)" this goes 0-1 as population gets further away from max.

So we take the smaller of production, or a number between (2-3)*current pop (which roughly correlates with production). Then multiply it with a 1-50 value depending on how far we are from max (further is better). So for the middle we'd have roughly 25 for production, times roughly 25 on the other = +625 people.

Another crazy number. I assume I'm too tired to understand the formula...it's 4am here right now. Could you please make a similar table (excel, openoffice, anything) like mine where the result is filled for each pop/max pop pair? (if possible, two of them, one for ROI and one for actual growth amount?)

I'd like to point out that you aren't meeting " Sawmill turns to build much less than ROI (preferably half or below)" according to your own explanation. You also added a "hidden" extra 0.75 hammer in so also not meeting the "total 8 hammers". Yes, the 1 food is a resource convertible to hammers.

In other words you added +0.75 base hammers, and reduced the goal in hammers to get away with less early housing. (and contrary to that, I see a housing formula that consistently gives 500+ results when we needed 170, maybe I'm misreading it)

[Nelphine]

No, I disagree that you want only 170. You've got the numbers correct. If you're going to do housing, it needs to be a major impact. If it takes 4 turns for housing to grow a population, then you're better off spending the 16 production (at pop 1 in my suggestion, 1 worker + 2 free hammers, for 4 turns) actually building something, because at pop 2, you're only getting 1 more hammer (from the new farmer), so it's not worth doing (you get 1 extra hammer for the 12 turns that you would otherwise wait for normal growth to increase to pop 2. so you get 12 extra hammers over a longer period of time, and you lose 16. Not worth doing.)

Similarly, at high population, if you compare it to trade goods, you need to make up for 30+ gold that one turn of trade goods would do, per turn that you are using housing. In order to do that, you have to drastically increase population growth.

I'd be fine dropping sawmill to 5 and decreasing maintenance to 3 in order to reduce that 0.75 to 0.25.


If you don't do 1 free food, the pop 1 formula will definitely be way off, because you'll go from 1 farmer, to a worker and a farmer which is a much bigger change in hammers. You wouldn't need as much growth to actually make it worth it. However, pop 2 to 3 will go from 1 worker + 1 farmer to 1 worker + 2 farmers; and as the stated goal is that you want housing to be worth it for population 2 (you actually want it worthwhile even higher, although I disagree with that for the early phase), then dropping the free food doesn't fix the problem; it just means pop 2 housing needs to be ridiculously high instead of pop 1 (or more likely, they'll both be quite a bit higher than pop 3, but much closer to each other than my formula proposes).

If you don't care for anyone to ever use housing past pop 4 (or 5 or 6 or whatever you end up with) then you also can drop the entire second part of the formula (but in that case, I think you should make all cities default to trade goods in all cases except when turning into a hamlet from an outpost. Leaving a city on housing under current formulas and your proposed formula (past those early stages) is a trap worse than not building a sawmill first right now.)

[Seravy]

You've got the numbers correct. If you're going to do housing, it needs to be a major impact.  

And that's one of the reasons why I don't want housing to be effective at high population/production. It'd need to have ridiculous numbers to be worth it.
What's the point of pestilence, plague, battles destroying population etc if you get 500/turn back?
How would a city ever shrink if you could housing your way out of a -500 loss/turn due to lack of food?

(note to self, I should make housing only work if existing growth is positive)
(also reminder, I need to make housing switch everyone to workers)

If it takes 4 turns for housing to grow a population, then you're better off spending the 16 production

4 turns would be +250 people.

2*ROI*0.250 = 4, ROI=8, so no you aren't. In fact you are at least twice better than spending the hammers.
2 people have the same economic power as the (new) sawmill. So you miss 32 hammers but get what the 68-70 cost sawmill would do. That's a gain, not a loss.

If you don't do 1 free food, the pop 1 formula will definitely be way off, because you'll go from 1 farmer, to a worker and a farmer which is a much bigger change in hammers.

I don't want to use hammers in the formula, I've already explained that too.

Sorry but I very much dislike this formula. Our goals are completely different on what we want housing to be good for.

Housing aside for a moment, we still need to pick one of these three :
-New sawmill and housing, lairs, player has extra gold they can decide to spend any way they want.
-New sawmill and housing, no lairs.
-Lairs, old sawmill and housing, lairs pay for sawmill costs, so player has no extra gold to spend.

[Nelphine]

4 turns would be +250 people.

2*ROI*0.250 = 4, ROI=8, so no you aren't. In fact you are at least twice better than spending the hammers.
2 people have the same economic power as the (new) sawmill. So you miss 32 hammers but get what the 68-70 cost sawmill would do. That's a gain, not a loss.

Ok, i'm missing something here. Return on investment is being able to do the same thing as it cost you. 1 turn of housing (given 1 free food and 2 free hammers) costs you 4 hammers. Therefore, Return on Investment, is when whatever you are doing will get you back 4 hammers. 250 people is 1/4 of 1 population. 1 population (going from pop 1 to 2 or any other case when the new population is 1 farmer where the hammer rounds up) is worth 1 hammer. Therefore RoI is 16. Going from pop 2 to 3 (or any other case where the new population is a worker) is worth 2 hammers, but it now costs 5 hammers per turn. Therefore RoI is 10. You can't arbitrarily say every population is worth 2 hammers, because they aren't. When you choose housing, you look at what the next population gives you; it's also not costing you the same for each population - the cost in hammers keeps getting higher as your city becomes more productive, so the RoI keeps going up.

Heck, its worse than that: going from population 3 to 4 (or any other case where the 1/2 hammer from the new farmer won't be rounded up) gets you 0 hammers. RoI? infinite. Well, more accurately, the RoI is now the time for that population AND the next population - one population isn't good enough. (8 turns to get 2 population, costing you, at this point 7 production per turn, in order to gain 2 hammers; RoI is now 28! AND that assumes that unrest won't be a problem, but population 4 (sometimes even 3!) is where unrest starts actually kicking in. It might take you FOUR population to get that next increase in hammers, meaning RoI is 56!!)

Which is why hammers SHOULD be part of the formula - the opportunity cost of producing housing changes constantly - it's not a building with a set cost, instead, it simply uses up all your production. Given that, if you don't have some method in the formula for accounting for the extra hammers eaten up (including all the ones you get from non population sources), it simply won't be worth it. Put inspirations on your pop 1 town with wild game and +50% production from terrain currently? Never ever use housing. Its costing you 6 hammers per turn.

I've broken it down in my formula so that it's 'when will you build the sawmill faster than if you had simply started by building a sawmill instead of doing any housing at all'.

Would you need to modify things like plague etc? Sure. Cut housing to 1/4 as well. Or leave it, and make those spells specifically into 'control what your enemy produces'. Right now, if a plague impacts your city, what do you do? You.. keep doing whatever you were doing before. The CITY has no way to combat those things. So you still build your magicians, or your amplifying tower, or what have you. Which means those spells have only one impact - population (and indirectly through that, the speed you are building things, and gold collected). Turning on housing is literally useless, even though it grows population.

With this, turning on housing would be an option. It would slow the spell down without forcing the wizard to get involved - which means the city becomes 100% non productive during that time. The plague is still stronger than housing (and if it isn't, you can do small modifications to one or both so that it is), but if housing makes a noticeable difference then that would be an actual counter; but at the cost of the magicians, or buildings, or whatever else you were going to build.

It becomes the equivalent of trying to solve a super nova in MoO, where all science generated by that colony is used on the event, instead of actually contributing to the empire.

[Bahgtru]

I like the easy lairs idea, but one minor issue: easy lairs give free undead to ghouls making ghouls even better than they already are, which is pretty good.

Solved by making the lairs only contain phantoms and skeletons/zombies.

...Or by just giving the gold out but I like it less.

[Nelphine]

True..

But ehhhn.

Ghouls that make common summons into undead haven't really added to the humans ability to actually do anything. Ghouls become a problem when they get higher tier targets.

And if you're using ghouls to conquer these lairs, each ghoul is going to be worth more than half the gold from one lair anyway. And since things like war bears beat ghouls 1 on 1, you'll need multiple.

So simply using ghouls at all will cost you a large portion of the treasure you would have gained.

[Seravy]

1 population (going from pop 1 to 2 or any other case when the new population is 1 farmer where the hammer rounds up) is worth 1 hammer.

1 population is worth 2 hammers. (this is already calculated in the old topic, you need to consider the taxes, the food and the production for them, the net result is ~2 hammers. Don't do this on a case by cases basis, it's not worth it. Even that 2 is an already rounded down value, the true result is like 2.25 or higher depending on tax rates but overall 1 unit of pop makes you ~2 gold and either 2 food or 2 hammer, while also costing 1 food. That averages around 2.25-2.5 depending on tax rate, or less if tax is below 2 gold because 1 food = 0.75 hammers.)

In ROI you have to consider all the consumed and produced resources created by the completed building (or population) - food, gold, hammers, etc.

Since you calculate ROI wrong, the results are wrong.

It can be confusing because in ROI calculation you need to consider all resources, but in hammers lost you only care about the hammers, and you are using both of these in the same calculation.

((resources produced by 1 pop)*ROI*(popgain/turn) >= hammers lost)

[Seravy]

By the way I haven't yet mentioned this I think but housing has a "hidden" drawback.

Assuming you made +1 population, you now have 1 higher population. That means you get +5 people fewer per turn, as your growth rate is 10*(max pop+race-current pop).
That means in 200 turn, the population gained from the housing will naturally cease to exists. So while short term ROI is good for housing, on longer term it's like a building that automatically destroys itself. How much of this is relevant is hard to guess but I'd consider using housing instead of buildings a risky maneuver if the ROI difference is not significant. (like anytime except the early game, unless having Steam of Life/Pop Boom.)

[Nelphine]

Ah, yup that would do it. Farmer is worth 2, worker is worth 3 (assuming taxes at 2, although that may be high at the point in the game this topic started at).

All right disregard my numbers entirely.

[Settemio]

Once again, thank you Seravy for all the work you put into this mod; I'm always impressed by the level of planning you put into each balance change. Your formula makes it very clear exactly what we need he new Sawmill and Housing to be.

One side effect that I think is actually a good thing but I don't know because I'm not very good at this game: more effective Housing buffs different races more than others. The three races I believe benefit most from extra population are probably Halflings, Dark Elves, and Klackons, although I don't know if the Klackons already grow quickly enough to ignore Housing after pop 1. I remember seeing people here generally feeling that Dark Elves and Halflings were some of the weaker races, although that was several updates back so I don't know if it already changed. If they are still weak, this would help them catch up to the other races, yes? Or am I misunderstanding what the impact of the new Housing would be?