Learning to love Resources
 

The question has arisen - who wants Productivity?

Well, for productivity to be worth it, you want:
* An outstanding combat unit with a gold:resource ratio of ~1 or lower.
* When I say outstanding, it's not enough for the unit to beat the [censored] out of independents. The unit has to do that, and it has be tough, mobile etc. enough to continue to be relevant into the era where combat magic becomes relevant.
* The nation also needs (relatively) cheap mages, or you won't have enough money to use all these resources anyway.

Once combat magic becomes dominant, the only relevant stats are size and mapmove, because everything is chaff. However, you can have a lot more gems, income and money going into the late midgame if you dominate the early game.

Sinews and steel, the best stuff to spend a lot of resources on:
- Barbarian Heavy Horsemen (LA T'ien Ch'i). These guys are better than Knights and they cost *25 Gold*. Their bows help to overcome the drawbacks of being size 3, and being size 3 provides some resistance against the area of effect magic that first threatens to make them obsolete; more to the point, they're extremely swift.
- Various Jotun and Fomorians (LA Jotunheim, EA Fomoria). Have a little trouble eliminating chaff themselves, but are tough enough to remain relevant against magical enemies. The heavily armored ones cost a lot of resources. In the MA, unfortunately, your mages are too expensive to make this viable, and EA Niefelheim laughs at you.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

I do also think resource is important for many factions, as it allows you to make a bigger recruitment in a specific area of your empire/kingdom.

Not only will it reduce the micromanagement of putting your small armies together, you'll also save some months by recruiting directly in the fort who's the closer to the battlefront, being able to support a progresion in ennemy territory with rapidly set up armies, or to stop an invasion dead.

You also recover more rapidly of a crushing defeat, being able to transform your sudden increase in income into shiny new troops.

Even late game, it allows you to have a better equipped spell fodder, which can be usefull (apart against charm/domination spells).

After all, if your plans to crush your evil foes in a majestuous blitz fail (but it won't...), you can still expect to win an attrition war.(by recruiting more troops than he is)

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

Production would be way better if resources saved up in a province.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

Someone mentioned the idea of upgrading troop's weapons and armor. I really liked this notion myself.

The problem is that gold accumulates and can be spent on many different things, so more gold income is always a benefit. Production is lost when not used, so a high production becomes a waste towards the end game. Would be nice if it did something. I was thinking also that production could provide a small amount of "free units" that would be produced without cost every turn, not automatically, just as a couple in the front of the production que worth X amount of resources.

Jazzepi

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

What if unspent production slowly added to province defense? Up to a level of half the max resources, say? With a cap of something like 30.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

You mean 50% of resources would be treated as gold investment into PD? So 30 unspent resources would be like 15 gold put into PD?

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

And the conscription bonus of T'ien Ch'i increases the unspent resources by order * dominion strength for this purpose http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif?

This is actually a good proposal that would work well, I think. It would help to reduce the prevalence of small forces raiding, which I found annoying on a micromanagement basis.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

But how would Productivity work here? What base values and what bonuses? Just giving that with productivity 0 could really change game balance. And if it worked only with prod scale then what about sloth?

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

How's this for a proposal:

Sloth -3 =
-45% resources,
unspent resources do not accumulate towards province defense, province defense has a 15% chance of degrading 1 pt each turn,
building costs increased by 30%,
forts take an additional turn to construct,

Sloth -2 =
-30% resources,
unspent resources do not accumulate towards province defense, province defense has a 10% chance of degrading 1 pt each turn,
building costs increased by 20%,
forts take an extra turn to construct.

Sloth -1 =
-15% resources,
unspent resources do not accumulate towards province defense, province defense has a 5% chance of degrading 1 pt each turn,
building costs increased by 10%.

Prod +1 =
+15% resources,
10% of unspent available resources accumulate towards province defense,
building costs reduced by 10%.

Prod +2 =
+30% resources,
20% of unspent available resources accumulate towards province defense,
building costs reduced by 20%,
fort construction time reduced by 1 turn.

Prod +3 =
+45% resources,
30% of unspent available resources accumulate towards province defense,
building costs reduced by 30%,
fort construction time reduced by 1 turn.

Available resources exclude hidden resources and include resources brought into the province by forts.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

I definitely like the idea of unspent resources aiding the province.

I'm not sure it should only be PD, though--I would like to see them randomly improve anything that can be improved.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

It shouldn't effect forts. The discount is incredibly high.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

The PD change to sloth sounds like painful death by micromanagement to me. If I want 3PD in every one of my 120 provinces to prevent sudden loss of empire to a horde of scouts, that's painful to check and fix every turn. Maybe capped at a minimum it might not be so bad?

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

PD should never go down. Not ever - it might be thematic but as vfb says, it will just add micromanagment.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

I like the affect of the PD, but the discount on build time is to powerful at level 2 => why not, only at level 3 to make it attractive ?

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

Adding +1 turn of construction for each level of sloth should be all you need to change the "sloth3 = default" phenomena.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

That isn't generally my play style, but okay, no PD degeneration - I agree that anything which increases micromanagement is a non-starter.

KtB - let's assume that you build 20 forts over the entire course of a 50 turn game.

Furthermore, let's assume that every single one of them is a walled city. That's 24,000 gold. Each 10% is 2,400 gold.

Over 50 turns your income from your *capital alone* is 20,000 gold base, each level of order is 1,400 gold. So, assuming you have only that 1 province, and build 20 forts, the gold bonus would be slightly bigger than the bonus from Order.

I agree that it's a big bonus - and that 5%/level would still be attractive for anyone wanting to cover their territory with Forts, so maybe 5% instead. But it's hard to imagine circumstances where the 10%/level would be game-breaking.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

I'm not certain productivity needs changing, but 30% of unused resources is way too much.

At 400 resources, that's 120 gold a turn.
120 PD is still a long ways off, but 20 isn't.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

Well... this is gold that *must* be spent on province defense.

So take a standard empire, and add up all the resources you get, and compare to all the resources you get.

If 10% of your resources = 7% of your total gold, then you could claim that this is somehow equivalent to a level of Order.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

30% savings on forts is pretty huge since late game, everyone stocks up on forts to protect against remote SC/thugs warping in and running amock. Not to mention an early mage fort is a significant advantage early. Yeah on paper, it doesn't look too bad but trust me, it's pretty big because keep in mind, it will most likely be /combined/ with order 3. It's not about this scale vs that scale in the savings department, it's that you're able to do even more with the abundance of gold you have, not to mention the additional benefits of it. I like either increasing pd idea or just simply stocking up the resources. I mean, military engines don't just simply stop producing armaments during peacetime.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

I happen to think that you *should* be able to do more with scales in combination - especially in the late game.

If you read the other productivity whining thread, I suggested exactly the benefit you described http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

It is possible to combine a few really good scales with an awake SC God. Rather, I think, than punishing people for taking some poor scales (which some positions can get away with to a greater or lesser degree as things stand) that it would be better policy to provide a better, multiplicative reward for taking all-good-scales.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

Maybe a new summon spell that summons a mage that has more forge bonus the bigger the production scale.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

it's a good idea to index the forge bonus on the production scale !

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

+5% forge bonus per scale would give a good endgame interest to production (and boost a lot Ulm).

Or changing dwarven hammer efficiency with production (ie bonus = 40 with prod 3 - 5% per scale under 3).



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Re: Learning to love Resources
 

I also like the idea with the forge bonus. It would fit perfect for a productivity scale.

The devs would need to implement a negative value icon for the sloth scales or just lower the dawrven hammer bonus like twan said.

5% / scale should be fine.

This would make productivity different to the order scale and enables more good different builds!

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

I think you'd implement this as a scale-dependent bonus to *foo* on particular *units*, rather than a global forge bonus for productivity.

So like the philosopher gets +1 RP / sloth, you could give a unit +5% forge bonus / productivity, something like that.

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

Forge lord + hammer of cyclops + prod3 = 90% gem cost reduction. Throw in a Forge for 95%...

Re: Learning to love Resources
 

The bonus can be reserved to dwarven hammer, or the hammer of cyclops removed, this random loot never done anything good for balance anyway.
A cap can also be added (ie 50%, making a production forge bonus less powerful for units having already one).

But I see nothing bad with forge lord + production boosting forge, it would just become a logical choice if you take him, it's like ghost king or immortal + high dominion, mother of monster + high nature on her, lord of the wild + turmoil, prince of death with dominion and high death for max awe/fear combo etc... Many pretenders become better with some design choices to increase their special powers.