civ6 idea: civ specialization based on yield type ratios

[Hail]

Hi!

maybe my idea is not new, but i will throw in out anyway in the hopes that someone might pick it up and interweave it somewhere.

civ specialization based on yield ratios
works like this:

suppose there are 3 yield types: (f)ood, (h)ammers, (g)old.
now let's define yield type ratio(or ytr) for short as the ratio of the sum of empire-wide production of a certain yield type to the sum of empire-wide production of all yield types.

example:
a civ of 3 cities.
1 city -> total 3f1h4g;
2 city -> total 2f4h6g;
3 city -> total 4f0h3g;

that would give a ytr for food = (3 + 2 + 4) / (3 + 1 + 4 + 2 + 4 + 6 + 4 + 3) = 9 / 27 = 33.33%
ytr for hammers = (1 + 4) / 27 = 5/27 or 18.52%
ytr for gold is the rest = (4 + 6 + 3) / 27 = 13 / 27 or 48.15%

now what would ytr do?
1) propose increasing respective yields by their ytr %. in the example above cities would earn not 13g but 13 * 1.48 or 19.25g
2) add ytr as a prerequisite to techs, building types, etc. like to discover "Metallurgy" must have a hammer ytr >= 40%
3) traits? if a civ has food ytr > 50% it is agricultural. the concept of emergent traits can be expanded on, but it goes beyond the scope of my ytr idea.
4) add bonuses for cities with similar ytr. e.g. the less difference - bigger bonus. would make warfare less attractive because capturing cities with vastly different ytr's will be much less valuable.

what do YOU think?

[Sisu]

That sounds rather too mathy to sell as a core part of the game to a mainstream audience.

[zakalwe]

Yeah. You want simple rules on the surface, that yield complex math under the hood when you try to analyze it.

Not something complex on the surface that really just boils down to a simple rule of emphasizing the same thing across all of the empire. (And why should that be encouraged, anyway?)

[Hail]

That sounds rather too mathy to sell as a core part of the game to a mainstream audience.

any math will be done by the client. the player will see in gui something like "spec: none, agr, ind, com". the tooltop can state something like "to become ind you must concentrate on hammer yields". etc.

likewise for tech/building/improvemnt prerequisites. only agr civs can build desert farms. to become agr bla-bla.

the required percentiles can scale with difficulty. starting from 20% on chieftain to 60% on deity.
a chieftain player can(will?) become a spec in all "fields" and can build any spec specific entity. which is fine by me, since it's chieftain after all.

Yeah. You want simple rules on the surface, that yield complex math under the hood when you try to analyze it.

Not something complex on the surface that really just boils down to a simple rule of emphasizing the same thing across all of the empire. (And why should that be encouraged, anyway?)

long-term planning. emergent civ uniqueness.
say agr civs can farm desert, ind civs can mine mountains, com civs can build an analog of the trading post on coastal tiles.

see my thought on difficulty levels above your quote. an empire-wide uniform approach will only suffice on lover levels.

mm... i fail to see complexity.

[spellman]

My main problem is this promotes a zero-sum specialization system for the whole Empire.

In Civ 4 you have optimization on a per-city basis due to how the city improvements stack. In Civ5 they added more base production buildings, so you can still specialize or have a better opportunity to help round out your mega cities.

This system of specialization encourages tuning your whole empire to only produce one thing at the detriment of others. If I want to become Agricultural, I should look for a prevalence of Food resource generation and intentionally avoid Hammer and Gold. This applies not only to city placement but which tiles I work and which improvements I select on an Empire-wide basis.

No longer are you optimizing to get as much of everything as you can and trading off a balance. You now have a situation where 1F is better than 1F1H1G for purposes of this specialization. That runs counter to the entire gameplay basis of growing a civilization in both population, power, and wealth. It's an interesting thought experiment, but gameplay mechanics should reinforce one another, not run counter.

Pulling this down to a per-city basis (must be >60% to build Forge), it fixes most of the problems but still will tend to shoe-horn into hardcore specialization at the expense of other properties. We specialize cities to their strengths with improvements. We don't specialize at the expense of other traits.

[novice]

Agree with spellman. Having specialized abilities that are triggered by emphasizing something sounds intriguing, but it shouldn't come at the expense of working obviously good stuff. So I could see having a forge type building that can only be started e.g. if a city produces 12 hpt, but not a building that requires a city producing 60% hammers.

Also the whole mechanism sounds like a micromanagement nightmare the way you described it.

[SevenSpirits]

Interesting idea. I think it has a lot of problems and a couple possibilities.

First issue is, in a typical civ game you can alter your tile yields completely every turn. If you have some effect like, you can only research metallurgy if you are producing mostly hammers, then strong players might produce lots of food for a while, then switch to hammers for a couple turns to research metallurgy before switching back. If this kind of micro is possible, it will feel pretty gamey and it will mean that to play at a high level you need to be running a ridiculously micromanaged empire that turns on a dime. Therefore if you are to implement this idea I believe it needs to be alongside mechanical changes that you need to stay working the same tiles in normal cases, unless you expend resources to switch them around. That in itself is not a terrible idea, as civ games do already have this questionable aspect where you can do much better by microing every worked tile every turn.

Second issue is that monoculture isn't that fun to play. One of civ's great strengths is it has 3+ completely different kinds of income, which are used for totally different things (population growth, building permanent structures, advancing through the tech tree), and you need to balance all three of them. If you keep this structure of the different resources being used for different things, and add the heavy emphasis on specialization, you are effectively telling the players that they must choose just one of these things to focus on, and they can perhaps dabble in the others when strictly necessary. Mechanically, I think that's a whole lot less interesting. It leads to "alternate paths to victory", which is cool, but it's entirely at the expense of the original depth of the game. Casual players might like this straightforward simplicity, where the game presents them with three "strategies" and they have to pick one, but I think you would lose the more serious players.

Third issue is that of player motivation. I realize that this suggestion is motivated to some extent by a desire to simulate certain things: for example that different nations throughout history had different strengths, due to their accumulated culture, nearby natural resources, etc. I assume you would want to pair this idea with some mechanism for trade, where for example an agriculture-focused civ could give some of its food to another civ in exchange for gold or production. (Btw if you don't have this, the idea is just screwed, because you can't have civ-with-giant-army-of-catapults over here and civ-with-electricity over here and civ-with-80%-of-the-world's-population over here - that's just making a mockery of the genre and of history itself.) So OK, you have civs dependent on trade with other civs for basic needs like food. This is not going to end well in a competitive game. It literally will not work at all with only human players. So it only works as a single player experience.

Fourth issue is that of the mechanism. The "percentage of outputs" concept is bizarre and very gamey. Can you imagine? "Excuse me farmer, we're here from the government. We're going to have to ask you to go farm some tundra in the north instead, because the fertile land you're currently farming is producing just a little bit too much food. And well, our scientists can't work out the secrets of metallurgy because of all this goddamn food and gold you jokers are producing." It sounds really silly, right? That, plus its mathiness and encouragement of obviously negative actions, means it will be ignored by and/or annoy players, especially casual ones who I believe have to be the audience for this idea. A better mechanism IMO would be to give bonuses proportional to the yields, as opposed to the yield ratios. Example: if you are producing at least X hammers a turn empire-wide, you can tech metallurgy. Or, every mine you are working gives 1 beaker a turn towards the most production-focused tech you can currently research.

But at this point, maybe we should stop and ask why we want this system in the first place. After all it's an extremely ham-fisted way to get players to focus on one yield type. There are already ways to do this much more subtly, that are already part of the game. As a basic example, suppose there is a tech that gives +1h to mines, and a different tech that gives +1f to farms, and they are available at around the same time, but in different parts of the tech tree. It becomes naturally in the player's interest to focus a bit more heavily on either farms or mines, and voluntarily research the appropriate helpful tech. This accomplishes exactly what you are trying to do (probably to a lesser degree, of course, but that can be adjusted), without needing to add additional mechanisms to the game. So tell me, what value do you see in your suggestion, that can't be found in the game already?

[Ceiliazul]

1) propose increasing respective yields by their ytr %. in the example above cities would earn not 13g but 13 * 1.48 or 19.25g

what do YOU think?

This exact mechanic was implemented in another turn-based game called Conquest of the New World: Deluxe

The game encouraged specialization of cities by rewarding cities that produced a majority of one good or another. The maximum bonus was +50% of the 'ytr', so 48% gold would yield (1 + 0.24) multiples of gold. I like the mechanic very much.

The game also did many many other things well. Fully 3d landscape in 1993, exploration points for discovering a tall mountain or a long river... and the discoverer gets to name it for everyone else to see. The combat mechanics were very good, but not compatible with MP.

You have to be careful with specialization though, it's pretty easy to turn off casual gamers. You also have to clearly define city bonii and civ bonii... Punishing a civ (can't learn some tech) due to lack of specialization is probably not going to encourage new gamers.

Oh, and Conquest of the New World works on dosbox. Buy it from gog.com for $5.99.

[NobleHelium]

City specialization makes sense (and Civ 4 already does that via national wonders and just normal multiplier buildings). Civ specialization...

Side note, that looks like isometric 2D to me. Big difference between that and 3D.

[Ubercannon]

1) propose increasing respective yields by their ytr %. in the example above cities would earn not 13g but 13 * 1.48 or 19.25g

what do YOU think?

This exact mechanic was implemented in another turn-based game called Conquest of the New World: Deluxe

The game encouraged specialization of cities by rewarding cities that produced a majority of one good or another. The maximum bonus was +50% of the 'ytr', so 48% gold would yield (1 + 0.24) multiples of gold. I like the mechanic very much.

The game also did many many other things well. Fully 3d landscape in 1993, exploration points for discovering a tall mountain or a long river... and the discoverer gets to name it for everyone else to see. The combat mechanics were very good, but not compatible with MP.

You have to be careful with specialization though, it's pretty easy to turn off casual gamers. You also have to clearly define city bonii and civ bonii... Punishing a civ (can't learn some tech) due to lack of specialization is probably not going to encourage new gamers.

Oh, and Conquest of the New World works on dosbox. Buy it from gog.com for $5.99.

Hey I remember that game. Really unique tbs with a weird combat system. I remember it being really fun at first but really boring later in the game.