Are pop yields and building effects to situational/unpredictable?

[Tomice]

Disclaimer: The following feedback turned out to sound more like a rant than I wanted to! I love 2.0 and just want the game to continue on its successful way!
_____________________________________

I usually enjoy both expansion and peaceful building in strategy games.
Imperator is an exception.
While the peaceful part got a lot better with each patch (Arheo be praised), I often don't know what to do during peacetime. It's not that I don't know the effects of buildings and pops, I study the wiki and the tooltips thoroughly.
It's rather a problem of extremely situational pop yields and building effects. Many effects only help you if several additional prerequisites are fulfilled.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for complexity, that's why I'm here and not playing shooters or mobile games. But too often it is a huge effort to get everything right, just to have it all demolished by a single pop that moves away for various reasons. That the game doesn't warn you about losing a production surplus for example is another big problem.
Examples:

Slave production surplus:
By far the worst offender. There's no difference between having zero slaves in a city and 19! only the 20th has an effect. Sure, you can lower the number through buildings and tech, but it's always a sweet spot that you need to hit and the game doesn't help you. It's no problem to arrange things manually if you own only a handful of provinces, but expansionists will have dozens of provinces with hundreds of territories very soon. Keeping slaves where they have the most effect is a can of worms and also very expensive. Good luck judging whether the effort will pay off.
Oh, and there's another side effect: The more instances of "minus X slaves needed for local surplus" you stack, the quicker you profit. The exponential curve of return on investment is turned in the wrong direction IMO - shouldn't the first investment have the biggest impact with diminishing returns for further investments?

Trade routes from pops:
If you don't have the right combination of 0,15 from nobles and 0,05 from citizens, you get nothing. 4 nobles and 7 citizens give you 0,95 trade routes, which is rounded to zero. There's no in-game help to hit the right number more easily.

Science from pops and buildings:
There's is a hard cap on research efficiency, meaning additional nobles or citizens might not contribute to your science output at all. There's no info on how far you are above the cap either - it could be 1%, it could be 100%, there's no difference and the game won't tell you. A warning when you fall below the threshold or are too far above it would do wonders. Having to check for this manually all the time isn't great game design.

Science from libraries, trade routes from roads and markets:
It's a small percent modifier that won't help you much if you don't have a megacity (which we wanted to avoid for various reasons!). Also, the problems listed above apply as well.

Conversion from libraries, assimilation from markets:
The small % modifier awakens the illusion that these buildings help with these effects, but their effect is negligible without a strong base rate the right governor policy, or from great theatres/temples. While we're at it: there is also no warning that your assimilation governor policy did its job and all pops are your culture - it just continues without effect....

Buildings that often have a minimal effect and are rarely worth building:
Marketplace - see above
Library - see above
Ports - none of the effects will usually help you much
Tax office - hardly ever worth the building slot in the current commerce-based meta
Training camp - manpower is usually sufficient in the lategame. In the early game, there's more important buildings
Granary - Food stores rarely tend to run dry in my games
Earthworks - rarely worth the pop cap penalty in a city

____________________________________

I believe that these problems come from the lack of a trade/economy overhaul. Many buildings and pop effects lost their importance due to the constant balance changes.
A few additional warnings/popups/automatisms would also do wonders to more easily achieve what you want to do.

A new trade system with countable trade goods (a bit like in vic2) could fix some of the problems, especially regarding production and slaves (When each slave contributes to a production that is finished after a certain time).

I hope this will turn out to be a constructive discussion about how to improve the economy and trade part of this otherwise great game!

 

[Torugu]

Slave production surplus:
By far the worst offender. There's no difference between having zero slaves in a city and 19! only the 20th has an effect. Sure, you can lower the number through buildings and tech, but it's always a sweet spot that you need to hit and the game doesn't help you. It's no problem to arrange things manually if you own only a handful of provinces, but expansionists will have dozens of provinces with hundreds of territories very soon. Keeping slaves where they have the most effect is a can of worms and also very expensive. Good luck judging whether the effort will pay off.
Oh, and there's another side effect: The more instances of "minus X slaves needed for local surplus" you stack, the quicker you profit. The exponential curve of return on investment is turned in the wrong direction IMO - shouldn't the first investment have the biggest impact with diminishing returns for further investments?

Disagree. Slave resource surplus is the best way to make money in the game (roughly tied with getting trade routes, but those also rely on other country's slave output). Slave surplus also strikes the balance between a feature that allows you to really min-max when you are small or playing tall, without becoming annoying when you are large enough that you stop caring (this is what Stellaris has been trying to achieve since launch).

I do think it might be a good idea increase the slave surplus reduction for settlement, to make investing in rural infrastructure a bit more viable, but that's neither here nor there.

On a more general level, you WANT your bonuses to become more powerful the more you stack them. That's what allows different play styles. If there is no internal synergy within mechanics they just become a mess of random, disconnected modifiers. (This is why game designers keep tolerating the risk of creating exploits by going too far and allowing modifier to stack to the level where they break the game - like free buildings in 2.0.0).

Trade routes from pops:
If you don't have the right combination of 0,15 from nobles and 0,05 from citizens, you get nothing. 4 nobles and 7 citizens give you 0,95 trade routes, which is rounded to zero. There's no in-game help to hit the right number more easily.

I mean yeah, that's just an inherent problem of converting non-integers into integers. It also doesn't really affect the game at all.

Science from pops and buildings:
There's is a hard cap on research efficiency, meaning additional nobles or citizens might not contribute to your science output at all. There's no info on how far you are above the cap either - it could be 1%, it could be 100%, there's no difference and the game won't tell you. A warning when you fall below the threshold or are too far above it would do wonders. Having to check for this manually all the time isn't great game design.

Agreed. Though to be fair, your exact output is easy enough to calculate yourself. Still, I'm 100% with you that it should be displayed somewhere in the game. Especially since the biggest advantage of extra research output efficiency is the ability to accept research output penalties. It would feel a lot nicer if you could see how large your "research buffer" actually is.

I want to use the opportunity though to emphasise that the overall research speed shouldn't be changed. The innovation tree only works so well BECAUSE you're very limited in which innovations you can pick up during a particular game. (I know you didn't say that it should be, but I have seen that point floating around quite a bit.)

Science from libraries, trade routes from roads and markets:
It's a small percent modifier that won't help you much if you don't have a megacity (which we wanted to avoid for various reasons!). Also, the problems listed above apply as well.

• Science from libraries is okay, though not great.
• Roads stack extremely well as is, including the trade bonus. Though I would like it changed so that the road bonus doesn't scale linearly. Currently the meta is to connect literally every territory to every neighbour. That's just not terribly fun (micro intensive and doesn't look good).
• I agree with your point on markets. It's not that they are useless, it's just that by the point where a city is large enough that the market bonus matters I don't really care about adding a few trade routes anymore.

Conversion from libraries, assimilation from markets:
The small % modifier awakens the illusion that these buildings help with these effects, but their effect is negligible without a strong base rate the right governor policy, or from great theatres/temples. While we're at it: there is also no warning that your assimilation governor policy did its job and all pops are your culture - it just continues without effect....

Yeah, this one is pretty accurate too. It's similar to markets - the bonus CAN be powerful, it's just by the point you have invested enough to make it worthwhile, you probably no longer care.

Buildings that often have a minimal effect and are rarely worth building:
Marketplace - see above
Library - see above
Ports - none of the effects will usually help you much
Tax office - hardly ever worth the building slot in the current commerce-based meta
Training camp - manpower is usually sufficient in the lategame. In the early game, there's more important buildings
Granary - Food stores rarely tend to run dry in my games
Earthworks - rarely worth the pop cap penalty in a city

Pretty much spot on.

 

[fadi_efendi]

I will agree with the OP that the current buildings need some rethinking and finetuning. Foundries, temples, theaters, libraries (I disagree here), aqueducts - these all have a measurable impact on what a city produces (judging from the tooltips' reports at least). The rest - not really. Their bonuses don't scale well with the way the economy works, and with the finite number of buildings one can build.

Take the tax office: It's not even that it's useless because of the current meta. If you are playing a larger empire, by the mid-game your tax income will be larger than your commerce (as you and a few other blob, you will run out of small countries to sell your extra goods; which, btw, is why I disagree with the OP' take on slaves: they get you extra tax income, but optimizing their number to produce that extra whatever feels ultimately unnecessary). But even when built in a 120-pop metropolis, the tax office will only bump income by, say, 0.20.

Or marketplaces give 2.5% on trade routes; a single road segment gives 5%.

 

[IsaacCAT]

Interesting, I will not discuss your points as they seem valid for me and other posters (@Torugu and Todie ) have already done it. I am more interested in the rationale behind your points and why it seems Imperator is an exception from other games (this makes imperator exceptional).

There's no difference between having zero slaves in a city and 19! only the 20th has an effect.

This is an old one and there is an explanation for why you need at least X Pops to have a surplus. But this is not what annoys you, it is the lack of information and control.

Keeping slaves where they have the most effect is a can of worms and also very expensive

This denotes that you are micromanaging to achieve your objective.

If you don't have the right combination of 0,15 from nobles and 0,05 from citizens, you get nothing. 4 nobles and 7 citizens give you 0,95 trade routes, which is rounded to zero. There's no in-game help to hit the right number more easily.

More lack of information from the game, and more frustation on not being able to set a clear path to your objective.

CAVEAT: there are many things that can be improved on Imperator and I think your points are valid.

IMHO what makes I:R exceptional is this lack of guidelines nor warnings. The world is always changing (conversion, assimilation, promotion, migration, etc...) I like this chaos because it makes it more real and less a spreadsheet. If you want to improve your nation, the game allows it, you have the tools (governor policies, buildings, roads, cultural decisions, civic rights, laws, inventions, etc...) and the game does not require you to be a min maxer to win (I am beating the Heirs of Alexander in normal starting as OPM). Finally, the lack of alarms allows for this feeling that there is nothing wrong by not choosing one path in particular (that scorned family sign should go!).

 

[Todie]

Several good points - obvious as they may be.

I think the building-system is significantly better than in Previous patches... but!

The value of most buildings still scale with population-density on the city level and to some extent on the province-level. (Relics, wonders and province investment are also province level...)

The balance of the numbers hinges on how powerful the building is when built in a very large city, yet no mechanic exists to restrict city-size, other than the oportunity costs of getting inventions and other modifiers for pop-capacity and building slots.

Its also a matter of what alternative expenditures for gold are available... how compelling is it really to spend gold on making more gold long-term if they only thing you can spend money on later is more buildings and wonders?

... when the player gets large enough to surpass rival majors, issues of mililitary spending quickly falls to the wayside... matters of internal politics can also cost money, but IMO it doesn't demand much attention to get that under control quite cheaply in the current build...


..... but yeah, to your point, spending full-price gold on an uncapped building in a small city is almost always a shitty investment. Certainly if you compare it to buildings in other games.

... the pops and their demography is the meat of this game. Buildings are like afterthoughts. Cherries on top, that are sometimes nice to have.

The crux being, sometimes they are very nice to have. If you own the whole MED sea coastline and X number of metropolises, with city planning idea +popcap inventions while pushing migrants from rural coasts, you can have 10-20 cities of 120+ Pop each by games end, plus a very chonky capital province with several wonders, and holy sites filled with valued relics.

... the constraints to reign this playstyle in are kind of wonky, and the buildings and other parts available arnt perfectly designed, but in the end, the result can be kinda neat.

 

[Tomice]

Interesting, I will not discuss your points as they seem valid for me and other posters (@Torugu and Todie ) have already done it. I am more interested in the rationale behind your points and why it seems Imperator is an exception from other games (this makes imperator exceptional).

My favorite strategy games of all time are Civ 4-6, so I'll compare with them, Civ6 especially, since I remember the details best:

• In Civ6 every pop will give you a viable yield in most situations (except when there are only barren desert tiles left). It is rarely zero. Looking back at I:R, it is quite easy for pops to produce no science, trade routes, trade good, or manpower while the game lets you believe that they do (due to hitting a cap or not hitting the next threshold).
• In Civ6 most buildings or tile improvements will have a tangible effect most of the time. It might not be optimally useful in a given situation, but won't be zero. In I:R, something that seems like an obviously good choice (e.g. building an iron mine when you want more iron) will often only yield the desired result under very narrow circumstances. The game also won't let you know about "near-miss" situations (like having 9 slaves in a mine).
• In Civ6, you'll always have a lot of stuff to build that is at least somewhat useful and feels desirable. In I:R, you will often think about what to do next and only find trap choices or questionably useful choices. I find myself often trying to peacefully build up my infrastructure, only to find out that I'd have to hit several narrow parameters to (probably, maybe, dunno?) achieve something useful. The end result is often that I drop the plan and go conquering instead.
• It's very easy to understand what something is good for in Civ6. In I:R, even when I do something very obviously useful in real-life thinking, I often wonder if I just hurt myself more than it helped. For example, after I connected the cities in my capital province with roads and made a ring of roads around my capital to get +20% trade routes, I was wondering if this was worth the approx. 200 gold (not counting the extra legion maintenance!). And this comes from the perspective of a player who knows about the massive road discount from engineers, who knows that you should have exactly 9 cheap units plus an engineer in the legion that builds roads, and who knows that each connection from a city to it's neighboring tiles gives a trade bonus. Many newcomers might use a full legion of 50 cohorts to build roads (all getting a massively increased upkeep), might miss the 80% discount from engineers, and might forget to connect rural territories for the trade route bonus - a massive trap choice!

 

[Torugu]

My favorite strategy games of all time are Civ 4-6, so I'll compare with them, Civ6 especially, since I remember the details best:

• In Civ6 every pop will give you a viable yield in most situations (except when there are only barren desert tiles left). It is rarely zero. Looking back at I:R, it is quite easy for pops to produce no science, trade routes, trade good, or manpower while the game lets you believe that they do (due to hitting a cap or not hitting the next threshold).
• In Civ6 most buildings or tile improvements will have a tangible effect most of the time. It might not be optimally useful in a given situation, but won't be zero. In I:R, something that seems like an obviously good choice (e.g. building an iron mine when you want more iron) will often only yield the desired result under very narrow circumstances. The game also won't let you know about "near-miss" situations (like having 9 slaves in a mine).
• In Civ6, you'll always have a lot of stuff to build that is at least somewhat useful and feels desirable. In I:R, you will often think about what to do next and only find trap choices or questionably useful choices. I find myself often trying to peacefully build up my infrastructure, only to find out that I'd have to hit several narrow parameters to (probably, maybe, dunno?) achieve something useful. The end result is often that I drop the plan and go conquering instead.
• It's very easy to understand what something is good for in Civ6. In I:R, even when I do something very obviously useful in real-life thinking, I often wonder if I just hurt myself more than it helped. For example, after I connected the cities in my capital province with roads and made a ring of roads around my capital to get +20% trade routes, I was wondering if this was worth the approx. 200 gold (not counting the extra legion maintenance!). And this comes from the perspective of a player who knows about the massive road discount from engineers, who knows that you should have exactly 9 cheap units plus an engineer in the legion that builds roads, and who knows that each connection from a city to it's neighboring tiles gives a trade bonus. Many newcomers might use a full legion of 50 cohorts to build roads (all getting a massively increased upkeep) and might miss the 80% discount from engineers.

First of all, the roads are absolutely worth it. I'm not sure how you can worry about that. It's not even a comparison.

As for the rest: Civ, ESPECIALLY Civ 5 and 6 are very different games from Imperator (and PDS games in general).

Civ games are essentially "matches", you start from zero and you play until you achieve victory. PDS games are more like "campaigns", You pick up at some point of a country's history and you play until the game gets boring - usually because you have achieved your self-set goals and there is no more challenge left.

This affects how the two games have to be designed:
Civ mechanics are designed to allow you to snowball. In Civ it's less of a problem if the player gets too powerful - after all he is meant to win sooner rather than later. On the other hand, for most PDS games snowballing is the biggest problem that needs to be designed around. The game needs to continuously put the brakes on the player, otherwise the game becomes too easy too quickly, and the player gets bored of the campaign before he feels that he got his money's worth.


You can't design Imperator the way that you design Civ. If you made very action have a tangible positive impact the player would just snowball out of control far too quickly.
Instead, strategy in Imperator is all about weighing costs versus benefits. It's absolutely by design that you might not want to build buildings in all of your cities. Your challenge as the player is to figure out when building more buildings is worth the cost. (This is in direct contrast to Civ where you NEVER want your cities to be idle.)


All of that doesn't mean that buildings can't be underpowered - most of them definitely are. But the design philosophy you're proposing simply doesn't work for Imperator.

 

[Zander]

Disagree. Slave resource surplus is the best way to make money in the game (roughly tied with getting trade routes, but those also rely on other country's slave output). Slave surplus also strikes the balance between a feature that allows you to really min-max when you are small or playing tall, without becoming annoying when you are large enough that you stop caring (this is what Stellaris has been trying to achieve since launch).

I do think it might be a good idea increase the slave surplus reduction for settlement, to make investing in rural infrastructure a bit more viable, but that's neither here nor there.

On a more general level, you WANT your bonuses to become more powerful the more you stack them. That's what allows different play styles. If there is no internal synergy within mechanics they just become a mess of random, disconnected modifiers. (This is why game designers keep tolerating the risk of creating exploits by going too far and allowing modifier to stack to the level where they break the game - like free buildings in 2.0.0).

There's a difference between e.g. "+2 trade routes" and "+20% trade income" (reasonable synergy) and "surplus takes 20 slaves" or a hypothetical "surplus takes 4 slaves" (excessive synergy).

Really the fact that surplus is based on a DIVIDE by X has the potential to be severely problematic if X gets too low. It's just like the difference between "+100% AE reduction" and "-100% AE gain" - the latter would become too extreme even before hitting 100%.

 

[cristofolmc]

Trade routes from pops:
If you don't have the right combination of 0,15 from nobles and 0,05 from citizens, you get nothing. 4 nobles and 7 citizens give you 0,95 trade routes, which is rounded to zero. There's no in-game help to hit the right number more easily.

Not true though. It gets rounded up to 1 from like 0.9 or so.

 

[Tomice]

Disagree. Slave resource surplus is the best way to make money in the game (roughly tied with getting trade routes, but those also rely on other country's slave output). Slave surplus also strikes the balance between a feature that allows you to really min-max when you are small or playing tall, without becoming annoying when you are large enough that you stop caring (this is what Stellaris has been trying to achieve since launch).

I do think it might be a good idea increase the slave surplus reduction for settlement, to make investing in rural infrastructure a bit more viable, but that's neither here nor there.

I thought a bit more about this.
In a recent patch, a competition between two systems to increase trade good production has been introduced:

• More trade goods by amassing slaves over a certain threshold
• More trade goods by founding cities and metropolises

Judging by strategy advice found here and on Reddit, founding cities seems to be at least as popular for creating surplusses as slave movement is.
Also, slave movement might have other, more profitable uses like getting over the metropolis threshold.

I believe that many players are willing to pay the significant extra PI cost for founding a city due to its reliability and flexibility (At least monarchies and for trade goods that have no means of getting the number of slaves needed under 14 - it's surely different for grain on a farmland tile when you're a republic or tribe and get an extra instance for every 5 slaves during lategame).

I admit that I previously fell for the trap choice to move 15 slaves on a non-farmland horse tile in my capital province to assure a reliable surplus for my army. I should probably have founded a city and moved the slaves to my capital instead, where the academies were and where I could have made good use of an extra build slot. I was annoyed about having to constantly check slave numbers there (admittedly, the "disallow slave promotion" button helped). And I was disappointed to find out that the pop capacity will probably never be enough there for a third instance of horses.

Founding a city is simply the better mechanic because it reliably does what you hope it does. Slave surplus is just too uncomfortable, unreliable and "risky" in comparison. It also has the opportunity cost of often using the sole building slot for surplus generation, while cities can easily have other useful buildings, too. Cities also fulfill other useful functions like housing great theatres or generating science. IMO, investing in things like a slave estate feels like a trap choice, and an "empire builder" shouldn't present you so many seemingly good choices that only result in a questionably benefit.

 

[IsaacCAT]

I thought a bit more about this.
In a recent patch, a competition between two systems to increase trade good production has been introduced:

• More trade goods by amassing slaves over a certain threshold
• More trade goods by founding cities and metropolises

Judging by strategy advice found here and on Reddit, founding cities seems to be at least as popular for creating surplusses as slave movement is.
Also, slave movement might have other, more profitable uses like getting over the metropolis threshold.

I believe that many players are willing to pay the significant extra PI cost for founding a city due to its reliability and flexibility (At least monarchies and for trade goods that have no means of getting the number of slaves needed under 14 - it's surely different for grain on a farmland tile when you're a republic or tribe and get an extra instance for every 5 slaves during lategame).

I admit that I previously fell for the trap choice to move 15 slaves on a non-farmland horse tile in my capital province to assure a reliable surplus for my army. I should probably have founded a city and moved the slaves to my capital instead, where the academies were and where I could have made good use of an extra build slot. I was annoyed about having to constantly check slave numbers there (admittedly, the "disallow slave promotion" button helped). And I was disappointed to find out that the pop capacity will probably never be enough there for a third instance of horses.

Founding a city is simply the better mechanic because it reliably does what you hope it does. Slave surplus is just too uncomfortable, unreliable and "risky" in comparison. It also has the opportunity cost of often using the sole building slot for surplus generation, while cities can easily have other useful buildings, too. Cities also fulfill other useful functions like housing great theatres or generating science. IMO, investing in things like a slave estate feels like a trap choice, and an "empire builder" shouldn't present you so many seemingly good choices that only result in a questionably benefit.

You are right that all goods, except farming and mining buildings with the -5 slaves needed for surplus and -1 with Latifundia invention, are better off by founding cities. Specially, food that is generally lost when you found a city (except for salt I think).

I agree with you about the superfluous feeling and a trap choice for settlements production.

I think there should be a reason for the Player to invest in them because food and minerals were very important in that time. Food for survival and POP growth and minerals because they were the coin or repository of monetary value. The game has yet to implement them accordingly. The other goods should give tax revenue and happiness as they do now.

• Food is already implemented in game, but it should be changed how it is produced (there are other threads about this) to make it scarcer
• Coin is not yet linked to mineral extraction in game. Once, I suggested a debasement mechanism for the economy that could be reduced with minerals, financing nations that were in possession of those minerals. Other possibilities should be explored to make minerals more valuable for the player.

But all these leaves us with the same problem, how a non city province can be made fun to play?

I would like to implement three changes:

• Freemen should be able to count for the production of goods adding to slaves numbers
• Migration should be able to differentiate per POP type. Buildings will increase migration attraction depending on POPs ' type. This way, buildings will be essential for shaping the type of POPs reaching each territory. Holdings should also increase the migration attraction of slaves, a lot.
• Slaves paid movement should be removed and slaves migration should be increased to 2.00 from 0.05. This represents the forced movement of slaves by their masters to where they are most needed.

There is the governor policy Decentralize Population that gives a whooping -4,50 migration attraction to the capital and +0.90 migration attraction to the other territories. This applies to all type of POPs.

The problem now is that POPs start migrating to other provinces, and specially slaves start migrating with a very slow speed, blocking all the migration system:

The slave in Roha will reach Uikra in year 868, something impossible and it is blocking the other POP's migration to other territories. This should be solved by increasing slave migration to 2.00 from 0.05.

These changes will allow the Player to play with migration and allow for decentralized provinces to produce food and minerals by slaves and freemen, competing with cities for the same workforce, and buildings will be important to decide which POPs go to every territory.

 

[Todie]

I respect the opinion that slave surplus is a worse mechanic, but stacking slaves on mines is the best way to make money without using influence. Its just kinda clunky as a mechanic, yeah.

 

[Tomice]

Not true though. It gets rounded up to 1 from like 0.9 or so.

Oh, sorry! Thank you for clarifying.

I would like to implement three changes:

• Freemen should be able to count for the production of goods adding to slaves numbers
• Migration should be able to differentiate per POP type. Buildings will increase migration attraction depending on POPs ' type. This way, buildings will be essential for shaping the type of POPs reaching each territory. Holdings should also increase the migration attraction of slaves, a lot.
• Slaves paid movement should be removed and slaves migration should be increased to 2.00 from 0.05. This represents the forced movement of slaves by their masters to where they are most needed.

I like those suggestions a lot!
Tribesmen should also contribute to production though - but in a minimal way for civilized nations. Special tribal modifiers would make them worthwhile (as usual)