move fields away from the CC

[maroder]

Hello everybody,

For some time now I am bothered by the fact that farms are placed directly in front of the CC and after doing some digging in old tickets and reading the forums, it seems like I am not alone with this view.

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/4342

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1318

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/5415

https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/28757-forests-and-farmlands-a-new-idea/

https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/26701-city-building-mod-a23-a24/

I would therefore propose for A26 to finally move the farms away from the CC. I think from a realism standpoint the game could only benefit from that and it can also improve the ability of players to use different strategies (risky boom vs save turtle). So to get an idea about the general opinion on this is at the moment, I would be happy if you could indicate in the poll what your thought on the topic is.

 

 

_________________________________________

Just for context, here is a shortened version of my original proposal (remove dropsite capabilities and arrows from the cc):

At the moment, the CC serves as territory root, defensive building and dropsite and this combination seems logically very inconsistent to me.

• It leads to a standard build order that involves 8 fields around the CC, because that is the most defended area in the beginning of the game.
• The CC represents the center of the civilization. There is also no visual indication for the player, that a structure, that is elaborate and full of prestige, is also a big storehouse for stone, metal, wood and food.

The solution that I am proposing, is to split the functionality of the CC to the respective buildings. So defensive buildings do the defense and storehouses /farms are used to store resources. This means to replace the capacity of the CC to shoot arrows, with an aura of some sort and to disable it as a dropsite. This would hopefully lead to more realistic city layouts and to an more interesting early game, because players do have to think more about how they want to defend their farms, or if the just take the risk and do a straight boom.

 

Edited November 18, 2021 by maroder
update

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I tried removing dropsite from CC for a while in DE, but I found myself annoyed that I couldn't use it as such. I might try it again and see. 

[Lion.Kanzen]

1 hour ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I tried removing dropsite from CC for a while in DE, but I found myself annoyed that I couldn't use it as such. I might try it again and see. 

hyperrealism in an RTS is absurd.

The RTS are full of abstractions to eliminate impractical and unnecessary things.

 

Things like those are the ones that have removed the function for example to the outpost, The outpost is almost useless.

[LetswaveaBook]

8 hours ago, maroder said:

It leads to a standard build order that involves 8 fields around the CC, because that is the most defended area in the beginning of the game. But afaik it is historically not accurate that the heart of big cities was filled with fields.

Historically, I guess if there was fertile farmland somewhere, then some people would settle it. build a little cosy house in the neighbourhood.

In the game, players build farms at positions that are well defendable(in current meta around CCs). We build farms inside a fortified area. The defensive capabilities help our farmers, wheres houses and other buildings don´t need to be placed in areas that are well defendable.

When using this type of logic, it is understandable that it will never look like in real live. Building farms in defensive positions seems logical whereas CCs don´t give reason to build other buildings(to form a city layout) close to them. This is aided by the fact that some players build their buildings(esp. barracks) at the edge of their territory to get some extra territory.

[maroder]

6 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

hyperrealism in an RTS is absurd.

It's not about hyperrealism, I don't propose that people need to build an exact copy of ancient Rome. It is about the fact that the starting area around the CC is already extremely well defended, without having to use any actual defensive buildings. As @LetswaveaBook said, the farms are build in a fortified area, which is at the moment always the outside of the CC. But why not actually giving the player the choice? If you want to go for a boom you don't have to invest in defensive buildings and take the risk. If you want to be more safe and turtle at the beginning of the game, this is now a more viable options, because there is not already free defense build into your CC.

There is additionally the visual aspect. Our CCs are nearly as strong as fortresses in terms of shooting arrows ect. but they look completely different. Nothing indicates that they are actually used for defense/military, they mostly look like civilian buildings (see picture below).

7 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I tried removing dropsite from CC for a while in DE, but I found myself annoyed that I couldn't use it as such.

Yes, I thought that might be a problem. The quick fix would be to give an starting storehouse and a starting farm at the beginning of the game, to avoid situations where you spend all your resources and have no place to store new ones.

 

Example comparison, Left side standard build order, Right side my build order with the proposed changes:

Edited April 6, 2021 by maroder
typos

[LetswaveaBook]

14 minutes ago, maroder said:

I tried removing dropsite from CC for a while in DE, but I found myself annoyed that I couldn't use it as such.

If this is the problem, we could easily counteract it by making that CC can store wood/minerals but no food(or lets just make it wheat whereas meat and berries can). If you can store wood in the CC, you can build a farmstead and farms and you will still be able to get going.

Also I highly doubt if towns will start to look as idyllic in the right picture. The only way to really know is to let people play on such a mod as I can not judge how other people would make a layout for their base. However I do suspect there will be a lot more housewalling to keep your eco safe and map generation would become more decisive. I think it will hurt gameplay more than it helps.

[maroder]

23 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:

However I do suspect there will be a lot more housewalling to keep your eco safe and map generation would become more decisive. I think it will hurt gameplay more than it helps.

I don't think there can be more housewalling as it is already used at the moment Furthermore, you would need to build additional palisades / towers to protect the houses, as they are not longer automatically "safe" when they are in the arrow range of the CC.

[maroder]

fyi: I updated the topic to be more representative of my main objective.

[Lion.Kanzen]

We test many solutions in DE. I'm talking about what was effective, it is best to make bonuses outside the city, for famland, basically encourage build outside of territory.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

DE does it 2 ways. There's a "Civic Spaces" radius around CCs that doesn't allow Farm Fields to be built within it. There's also "Farmland" terrain where you get a 2x grain gathering bonus if you build Fields there. 

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

One thing Nescio earlier on proposed that I particularly liked was giving a bonus to building structures like markets and temples within a certain radius of the Civic Centre.  This would be a nice "soft" encourager for the player to migrate their farming economy to a different area.

[LetswaveaBook]

6 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

One thing Nescio earlier on proposed that I particularly liked was giving a bonus to building structures like markets and temples within a certain radius of the Civic Centre.  This would be a nice "soft" encourager for the player to migrate their farming economy to a different area.

If we want CCs to be a center of urban activities, we probably need some auras as in the current meta, people build barracks not near their CC, but at the edge of their territory. I would like to give two wicked suggestion(still need fine-tuning and such):

1: Give CCs a build speed aura like maurya elephant, so if you want to develop fast, you build buildings near the CC

2: Give barracks(and such as markets etc) a aura that gives nearby CCs +5 meter territory per barrack(or other building) to encourage building barracks close to CCs and get a city like infrastructure in the center of the map.

[maroder]

It is good to see that (at the moment) the majority of people who voted would like to see a more realistic city layout and I would support any option that finally resolves this issue. A few things to consider / discuss:

The main difference in the effect of "soft" or "hard" implementations would probably be in the early game. Soft encouragements like the farmlands or @Thorfinn the Shallow Minded / @Nescio suggestion would still allow the fields in the early game to be close to the CC, which means that the rushing situation is unchanged. On the other hand adding a hard limit that forces player to build outside of the CC's arrow range would encourage rushing.

One difficulty of the farmland idea is that all the maps have to be changed, which is much more work than just adding an aura of some kind.

 

49 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:

Give CCs a build speed aura like maurya elephant, so if you want to develop fast, you build buildings near the CC

I like this idea very much. I am adding the new suggestions to the poll, but keep in mind the result is skewed, as you cannot revote.

The positive aura idea is probably best explored in @azayrahmad city building mod, so maybe he has some insights on this topic.

Edited April 12, 2021 by maroder

[maroder]

Since most people seem to prefer one or both of the DE solutions:

On 09/04/2021 at 6:50 PM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

There's a "Civic Spaces" radius around CCs that doesn't allow Farm Fields to be built within it. There's also "Farmland" terrain where you get a 2x grain gathering bonus if you build Fields there. 

I could, if it is ok with @wowgetoffyourcellphone , try to make a patch that brings those things from DE to the base game. But as I have no experience with map creation, the patch would only include the farmland actors and auras, but no maps that use them, which would make the patch kind of hard to test. So this should be probably done by someone else.

Meanwhile, here would be the patches for the minimum distance, a positive aura, and one gatherer per field, if you want to have a look at it:

minimum-distance.patch

positive-aura.patch

one-gatherer-per-field.patch

I used

git format-patch

to create these, so I hope they work.

Edited April 17, 2021 by maroder

[ValihrAnt]

The positive aura bonus thing, which provides a build speed boost will only work to make setting up farms and houses around the CC faster.

I don't really see a reason to use some convoluted bonuses or debuffs to keep the player from farming near the CC. If you want players to farm in more exposed areas simply reduce the amount of farmers per field and appropriately reduce field cost.

[LetswaveaBook]

6 hours ago, ValihrAnt said:

If you want players to farm in more exposed areas simply reduce the amount of farmers per field and appropriately reduce field cost.

Remind: the original idea was to make towns look more like a city instead of CCs being surrounded with fields. So it was more a question about aesthetics than gameplay.

[maroder]

Indeed. But it could be combined with one of the other ideas, which is why I included it in the poll.

Edited April 17, 2021 by maroder

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

6 hours ago, ValihrAnt said:

I don't really see a reason to use some convoluted bonuses or debuffs to keep the player from farming near the CC. If you want players to farm in more exposed areas simply reduce the amount of farmers per field and appropriately reduce field cost.

I agree with the debuffs part.  Fields built near the Civic Centre having an arbitrary malus to collection makes little sense.  That said, having some ground be more fertile to incentivise players to farm in those areas makes sense and adds another layer to the area control aspect of the game.  

[maroder]

27 minutes ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

I agree with the debuffs part.  Fields built near the Civic Centre having an arbitrary malus to collection makes little sense.

Reminder that it doesn't have to be convoluted. Good old minimal distance (as in DE where that works well) or disable the cc as food dropsite are pretty straightforward. If something is arbitrary is debatable, but at least if they achieve the goal: "more realistic city layout without 8 fields around the cc" then they are not more arbitrary as any other limit that is used for gameplay reasons.

[Nescio]

Adding auras or minimum distances is quite easy to implement. The trouble is the AI: Petra does not understand auras, never builds more than one farmstead, and will try to place fields as close as possible to the civic centre. Forcing fields to be moved away from the civic centre thus leads to a poorer single-player experience (and also reduces player freedom). I wonder whether it's worth it. Also keep in mind the multifunctional civic centre isn't entirely realistic either.

[maroder]

4 hours ago, Nescio said:

I wonder whether it's worth it. Also keep in mind the multifunctional civic centre isn't entirely realistic either.

Which is exactly why my original proposal was to split the civiv center functionality (see top post). Defensive buildings do the defense, the farmstead is for storing food and the storehouse is for storage other resources. But it seems this is not the preferred option, which is why I included other options in the discussion.

To the problems with petra: this is a second problem that needs to be fixed.

If its worth it depends if you like a more realistic city layout. There are some people who would like that (again, see top post) but also people who are ok with the current unrealistic layout. I am just wondering why so many areas of the game are closely based on history, but the standard build order involves that the heart of the cities are turned into one giant farming area.

And again: the goal is not to make the game hyper-realistic. With the right solution we don't have to sacrifice a fun gameplay. The goal is to find a solution that is fun, but looks better/ and is more realistic than the status quo.

[chrstgtr]

11 hours ago, maroder said:

And again: the goal is not to make the game hyper-realistic. With the right solution we don't have to sacrifice a fun gameplay. The goal is to find a solution that is fun, but looks better/ and is more realistic than the status quo.

This feels like something that is a very small problem because gameplay diverges from historical reality, which already occurs in a ton of other places in the game. A lot of people don't even care about this "problem." Meanwhile, the change could potentially have huge gameplay consequences. I honestly don't think the game needs to be totally faithful to history insomuch as it should be inspired by history. For that reason, I prefer to keep the current setup. 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

4 minutes ago, chrstgtr said:

For that reason, I prefer to keep the current setup. 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

6 minutes ago, chrstgtr said:

This feels like something that is a very small problem because gameplay diverges from historical reality

It's not just historical reality, it doesn't make any sense at all. 

[Lion.Kanzen]

Some of us like roleplaying to play.