Building chains - Are they too long???

[idomeneas]

Hello,

I've been playing Lux Invicta since early stages and allthough I tremendously enjoy it, there is a small detail that annoys me. There are too many buildings in the chains!!! Managing more than 3 fiefs is a constant exercise in micromanagement. I understand why the chains were designed like this (Shaytana didn't want people rushing to latest building since there were no technology requirements) but given that nowdays there are technological limits to what you can build .

Most chains take many steps (and there are many of them) with some of them having negligible results while other provide significant bonusses/mallusses. I propose that we limit the ammount of buildings per chain on long chains (more than 15 steps) and replacing them with fewer more expensive buildings that take longer to build. Say for example minor control - village elders chain could become a 900 day/ 150 gold building.

This would most certainly make the mod a little more new user friendly.

 

[Jaidal]

The new tutorials explained it fairly well though.

 

[tsf4]

I personally love the building chains. Vanilla's are WAY too freakin' short, and I could even have Lux's a bit longer. The only thing I don't like is how long it takes for each building to be built.

 

[riknap]

I personally love the building chains. Vanilla's are WAY too freakin' short, and I could even have Lux's a bit longer. The only thing I don't like is how long it takes for each building to be built.

this much, I've been experimenting and balancing.
I'll probably tweak them down in general in the future.

Hello,

I've been playing Lux Invicta since early stages and allthough I tremendously enjoy it, there is a small detail that annoys me. There are too many buildings in the chains!!! Managing more than 3 fiefs is a constant exercise in micromanagement. I understand why the chains were designed like this (Shaytana didn't want people rushing to latest building since there were no technology requirements) but given that nowdays there are technological limits to what you can build .

Most chains take many steps (and there are many of them) with some of them having negligible results while other provide significant bonusses/mallusses. I propose that we limit the ammount of buildings per chain on long chains (more than 15 steps) and replacing them with fewer more expensive buildings that take longer to build. Say for example minor control - village elders chain could become a 900 day/ 150 gold building.

This would most certainly make the mod a little more new user friendly.

one of the main consistencies I've found when I first started working on buildings is that they almost uniformly (save "special" building exemptions) have 7 steps per chain, and one of the tweaks I made is that only a maximum of 3 chains are directly connected to each other. this is one of the fundamental designs of the original mod and one I do like to keep, as it

but for the sake of argument, as for having many steps, its certainly possible (and I have indeed been contemplating) to make a version that "compresses" the number of steps by merging/reducing the number of buildings per chain to approximately/variably 3~5 (though some might still have 7 anyway), since many of them are quite empty anyway as you noted (the early Control chains come to mind)
still, a benefit of more steps/tiers for mid/late-game (or any/every in general) buildings though is that it allows upgrades to be incremental to prevent massive bonuses from popping up once you finish a building (that way, the power increase is comprised of more gradual upward steps rather than very discrete steep steps).

if I do end up making a module that compresses buildings into fewer steps, I'll do it after I've completed the majority of the polishing and balancing of buildings (since that way, I'll only have to compress them once, rather than having to redo two versions every time I rebalance something)

 

[Bismarck1899]

The building system is one of the main reasons I stopped playing other mods. In my opinion Magnate Lords had the best building system and a cool economical system too but I guess most Pc's would explode if you'd implement that.
What I don't like about the building chains is that there are buildings like house I, house II ect. Oh well the magnate Lords building and eco system are gone and we all have to move on *sigh*

 

[Sarosh]

I love the building chains, I really do, but I also have trouble with managing anything more than two provinces. I doubt there's a way, but if there was some way to automate building...

 

[DarkReborn]

I love the building chains, I really do, but I also have trouble with managing anything more than two provinces. I doubt there's a way, but if there was some way to automate building...

I believe that was Shaytana's whole point with this design; you must centre your attention to 2-3 main holdings in your realm, much like how some of the superpowers of antiquity were centred around the power a single city (Republican Rome, Carthage)

 

[L Lawliet]

I love long bulding chains and the possibility of nearly endless improving of your capital with buildup over time and a few more secondary provinces but it all takes way too bloody long, you can't build several buildings simultaneously (even if Constantinople was built out of a village in one man's lifetime) though this is probably hardcoded, some of the buildings and their effects are almost completely negligible even when viewed together as a whole (no administration-top of the line effects being IMO not worth the gold and time price at all - 21 tiers of buildings for 1.5 taxes, 9% levies and 80 retinues) and I usually choose to inflate my demesne and use the income to expand my realm instead of my capital.
None of the buildings are reflected in any way (to the best of my knowledge) in the survey province events (which btw are way too few in number and way too few in appearing per survey) and there's no benefit to directly administering one castle as an Emperor or King (again, to the best of my knowledge) over blobbing on two duchies since administration counts only for your entire realm instead of having realm-wide modifiers separate from demesne-wide modifiers. Also descriptions are somewhat lacking with up to five tiers of buildings having the same descriptions.

I love having a billion buildings to build, but the difference between one fat province and several raw ones is fairly underwhelming, at least at at start.

Don't get me wrong, I love the mod for its ambition and scope, but I'd love it more if it were more fleshed out. But that comes with time I guess.

 

[Ezumiyr]

I believe that was Shaytana's whole point with this design; you must centre your attention to 2-3 main holdings in your realm, much like how some of the superpowers of antiquity were centred around the power a single city (Republican Rome, Carthage)

I don't know if you can call the Republican Rome and Carthage superpowers (or perhaps local superpowers, if it makes sense?), but it doesn't really matter. On the other side, if indeed the Republican Rome focused only on Rome, it doesn't mean that civilians from the allied cities (who were de facto part of the Roman territory) were not improving their own cities. That's quite similar to how liege and vassals work in CK2.
On the contrary, Carthage is perhaps more similar to Republics in CK2.
So the system we have now is perfect for states that are the heirs of Republican Rome, Carthage, or even all these barbarian states in the north. But for the Sassanid Empire or the Ptolemaic Cyrenaica, it's not really the same... Personally I like the chains as they are, but I would like to see more personalization. Now, if you want to upgrade your land, you barely have to build every building you can in the county (even if there are a lot of different buildings). I would prefer to have to choose (if I build one, I can't build the other, or I must pay more, or I must build other administrative buildings before having the choice between this building anf others...) between different buildings that lead to different and specific bonuses.
I don't know if it's possible though. But it would be "realistic" in the way that a ruler seems likely to focus on, for example, the religious or judicial building, or the offensive or defensive buildings, cultural buildings, scientific buildings... All these buildings would take a long time to be built (monasteries, great walls, sacred groves...) and could be built only after administrative structures. It would allow to specialize provinces in a way that would look like ancient Egypt or Persian satrapies, I think.

 

[DarkReborn]

Yeah... building simultaneously in the same province is impossible, hardcoded AFAIK.

I agree on the build time though; it should be lessened, and some of the stats should be buffed, but the end decision belongs to Riknap since that's his area of work.
Increasing the pace and number of the survey events would only overload the game, and since the AI also uses the decisions, it would result in bursts of extreme lagginess every 5 months or so... I don't believe we'll ever add survey events concerning the buildings in the province; survey realm is meant to be a flavour decision... the name can be misleading though, you're not surveying the realm in the sense of, let's say, assessing or inspecting your infrastructures or buildings; it's more like an outing, you're simply checking how your people and kingdom are faring in a general sense.

We know most of the things are not fleshed out (nor will ever be, I'm afraid, every mod should be considered in perpetual beta); whenever we try to rough the edges, Paradox releases a new patch, with it's share of bugs and new features. Since we're at most 2-3 team members intermittently working on the mod between our studies and jobs, you can imagine that the time we can spend ironing out everything and balancing everything is fairly limited.

 

[DarkReborn]

....

On "specializing" the holdings (that is, focusing on one specific tree at the expense of not building the others), or superbuildings that better the province as a whole, through modifiers (I believe that's what you suggest, yes?), that's an interesting concept, but again, it's Riknap decision since the buildings are his territory.

I mean... if it were for me, I would have rewritten the building system from the ground up already to a simplistic form, but riknap would pick the fastest flight here and bash my head against the counter.

 

[L Lawliet]

Increasing the pace and number of the survey events would only overload the game, and since the AI also uses the decisions, it would result in bursts of extreme lagginess every 5 months or so

It is possible to make separate AI and human survey decisions?

it's more like an outing, you're simply checking how your people and kingdom are faring in a general sense.

Peoplpe and kingdom are related with infrastructure and the state of the realm, I would argue people in Rome during Pax Augusta would give fairly positive feedback to Augustus in relation to what people of a random baltic village would have to say to their chief after a Viking raid.

 

[DarkReborn]

It is possible to make separate AI and human survey decisions?

Yes... but I see no reason in doing so; the paces would still be the same unless we made different versions of each event, each with different MTTH.
I prefer the actual pace of events though; more than that would be overdoing it, and I know many people who don't already like our too frequent random events.

Peoplpe and kingdom are related with infrastructure and the state of the realm, I would argue people in Rome during Pax Augusta would give fairly positive feedback to Augustus in relation to what people of a random baltic village would have to say to their chief after a Viking raid.

The problem is that those are too specific; the events are like what they're (generic) so that they adapt to every culture and situation; if we made specific events for an overbuilt Roman province or a raided backwater tribal village, then they wouldn't fit for the rest of the cultures, the other cultures would feel under-represented or we would have to make events for every specific location, culture and situation, and that's just a waste of time.

 

[Saishuuheiki]

As for specialization, this already exists to a point in the selection of Castle/Church/City.

It already exists that culture influences the buildings (the levies particularly) so I think this is good enough.


I would agree it's worth considering combining some of the longer building chains like administration. Even if you applied two levels of upgrade at once the boost isn't large even compared to other building types and there are few times the odd-numbered upgrades of it unlock other buildings. Cutting the number of upgrades in half while doubling the build time / cost should be do-able with little negative consequence.

 

[riknap]

On "specializing" the holdings (that is, focusing on one specific tree at the expense of not building the others), or superbuildings that better the province as a whole, through modifiers (I believe that's what you suggest, yes?), that's an interesting concept, but again, it's Riknap decision since the buildings are his territory.

I mean... if it were for me, I would have rewritten the building system from the ground up already to a simplistic form, but riknap would pick the fastest flight here and bash my head against the counter.

more accurately, I like to preserve shaytana's building system as much as possible, minimizing edits to back-end stuff like balance and linking

Yeah... building simultaneously in the same province is impossible, hardcoded AFAIK.

I agree on the build time though; it should be lessened, and some of the stats should be buffed, but the end decision belongs to Riknap since that's his area of work.

aye, I've been planning on doing another pass over in terms of balance once I finally implement the theocracy buildings.

We know most of the things are not fleshed out (nor will ever be, I'm afraid, every mod should be considered in perpetual beta); whenever we try to rough the edges, Paradox releases a new patch, with it's share of bugs and new features. Since we're at most 2-3 team members intermittently working on the mod between our studies and jobs, you can imagine that the time we can spend ironing out everything and balancing everything is fairly limited.

except this. in the coming weeks, I really need to work my arse off in the finals month to recover, so my modding recently has been very intermittent, not to mention my free time has lately been spent playing shooters and/or watching anime instead of coding, so sorry about that :|

we really need more manpower though, that much I agree on :laugh:

I would agree it's worth considering combining some of the longer building chains like administration. Even if you applied two levels of upgrade at once the boost isn't large even compared to other building types and there are few times the odd-numbered upgrades of it unlock other buildings. Cutting the number of upgrades in half while doubling the build time / cost should be do-able with little negative consequence.

not to mention something I've been wanting to do for a long time, though I've simply been avoiding it in the past since I didn't want to remove any buildings.

in the future, I've been planning to make an optional module though that does cut down the number of buildings. it'll have to be done surgically though, as localisations also need to be taken into consideration :laugh:

 

[Conservatron]

to make micromanagement easy, i slow down my demense buildup till everything is about the same level, once I get what I want (like for Neapolis, I'll make my demense Capua and Latinum)

Obviously Tusculum and Neapolis are far more built up than Gaeta and other holdings, but I'll try to get all the controls to the same level, then I'll build up hearding as far as i can, then agriculture to get the coin flowing. I haven't gotten to late game buildings yet though, so I don't know how well this will work on the long term.

 

[Kakafika]

I also really like the idea of "Just keep building," as I believe the intro tip on building says... Personally, I find warfare in CK2 can be a bit tedious/routine once the realm reaches a certain size, and monitoring the improvement of my demesne is fun during peacetime.

I'm still enamored with the mod and jumping around trying different religion + culture combinations in different parts of the world, so I haven't played any longer than the early-mid game. So I have no idea what building is like at the late-game, but it seems like some of the 'tedium' that some players feel about it may be lessened by moving towards a more exclusive approach, such as Ezumiyr suggested.

As L Lawliet pointed out, the administrative line doesn't give huge bonuses. I'm actually fine with that, because I build the administrative buildings not for the bonuses, but in order to unlock higher level buildings. This fits the flavor and could make for interesting player choices between immediate reward buildings vs unlocking a more desirable building to be built next. In fact, I already do this in some cases (e.g. shrines for piety after my ruler dies so i can go back to holy warring sooner).

What if development continued down the road toward exclusivity (present now in the very short-term, as there are almost always several buildings to choose from at any given time) while keeping the 'just keep building' focus of the current system? I'm imagining a system with perhaps the same amount of buildings but with somewhat larger effects (to make building choices more consequential) and longer build times. Again, I apologize for not knowing the end-game as it is currently, but I imagine a situation in which a player may just be able to finish all buildings in his/her original holding by game end (if feasible; that might require too much work/too many changes, sorry I don't know the system very well yet). This would mean that the build order the player chooses would have a more meaningful effect on him/her for a longer period of the game.

Also, this may already be present in the current design (I focus on admin and herding/farming first so I can't really tell), but perhaps a couple more (and maybe more costly in terms of time and gold) 'gate' building lines should be introduced. Right now it seems like everything needs a certain level of admin building and usually one other building. Maybe use admin just for economic buildings and then a new line(s) for other ones? This way it takes longer to 'switch focus' in a particular county. This may or may not be desirable, given your design goals.

Thanks again for all your work on this mod, which has quickly become my favorite mod for CK2! Hopefully this post gives you some inspiration for when you take another look at the holding improvement system

 

[Hopit]

My first impressions of the new building system (My first and second game were/are as that Carthagenean leper guy and made me cry for adopt option xD) I like how much stuff there are, the costs and technology seems fine, buuut the time to build them feels kinda long when I remember how much there is to build...

 

[Lady_Sinful]

Smaller and more powerful buildings chains would be far better then the sheer amount there currently is.
I normaly just build it in the main province and with my steward making them build faster.