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Post by Gmr Leon on Oct 16, 2014 23:31:41 GMT
Curious to see what others think about this. Currently settlements suck for a variety of reasons, some of the main ones we seem to like to call out are a mixture of single-profession settlements being kind of silly and the balance being awful, making production of specialized followers an infuriating roadblock. My thoughts are kind of towards resolving both of those issues by revisiting the foundations of settlements. At first, we had "fiddly" follower profession assignment. Personally, I didn't see it as being that bad, with the exception of one of the professions appearing useless. What was nice in this system though, was that it acknowledged unemployed followers, leaving them open for assignment to anything. My thoughts are, restore them to avoid immediately having to wait for the training of breeders/[settlement profession]. Breeders would produce a certain number of them based on the general settlement capacity, as they do now, but at a more rapid rate (untrained and all) until the capacity was full. From here, you leave assignment to the settlement info window, sort of like this:  Instead of distributing professions on a 10% of total breeders basis as is presently the case, make it so that 0.08% of the population is unemployed (resulting in above number, rounded down [or up, whichever makes it fit the existing amount of inhabitants) which may then be switched to breeder/settlement profession. The max capacity of those (breeder/settlement profession) would be 46% of the total settlement population, so again, what you see above (rounded up). Those figures may be subject to change, but I think the general idea of having a low unemployment capacity, high employment capacity, and the ability to distribute it around as you please would be a good way to handle it. Also, if unemployment were to bring unhappiness, keeping a low cap on it to avoid an unexpected exponential increase from not assigning followers to any role would be a good idea. Also, having the unemployed around to replenish abodes from where your followers are converted by the Astari or more rapidly fill in new settlements to get it off its feet would give them a good purpose. Not to mention if nothing else, they can make perfect sacrifices or targets for Astari conversion, creating a good buffer against losing all your workers. An alternative I thought up that I realized would be very rough around the edges was to distribute 90% of the total population across these roles in an even split, and whatever was left over was either added to the unemployed or divided and added to the different professions, but I think what I describe above might be slightly better. The reason for that is that I think many would prefer to have useful followers as opposed to an abundance of relatively useless ones, which I suspect may be part of the reason they removed them in the transition to the new settlement system to begin with. |
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Post by Danjal on Oct 17, 2014 2:58:38 GMT
I'm not sure I'm following - how would making a percentage of the population utterly useless speed up population growth?
Moreover, how would this make sense, if the unemployed birth faster - then the number of trained workers would grow at a similar pace untill the cap was reached.
So unless I'm missing something here about how that scales...
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Post by Gmr Leon on Oct 17, 2014 4:15:14 GMT
Breeders, if I'm not mistaken generate belief (as well as more of themselves, and only after they hit max cap do they begin training settlement workers), and are considered their own little profession. This makes them weigh the balance with that in mind and makes them take longer to produce. Unemployed followers, being mostly useless, would barely factor in in this way and would thus be able to be produced at a much faster rate and could allow for rapid assignment into distinct professions.
Instead of hours and hours stacking up with those professions, it could be minutes/seconds for each side-by-side. So while yes, the numbers would remain relatively low and it would grow along the same lines as the unemployed, it would arguably be better than the existing state of auto-assignment.
How I think of it:
Initial pool of breeders from settlement formation, no more breeders are produced unless a follower is assigned to it.
Instead they begin producing unemployed followers.
Unemployed followers are assigned to the settlement's profession by the player.
Ex:
Unemployed followers produced every 5-10 seconds till their max cap hit.
Once assigned, that tickdown begins again for the unemployed and starts anew for settlement profession they were assigned to.
Settlement professions are produced in 12 seconds let's say (this would allow the unemployed to replenish in sufficient time to begin assigning more).
When scaled up, if you were to use all the unemployed up in the example I present at the start, it would amount to 1 minute 40 seconds for unemployed to replenish. 2 minutes for all of those unemployed to be trained, at which point you'd have a fresh batch of unemployed to toss over. By keeping the settlement profession timers consistently behind the unemployed timer you'd always ensure that there more ready to be assigned, even as you had some being trained.
Either way, the thought is, you should have control over how followers are assigned as well as more control over how the timers are manipulated. In this example, you determine what the timers are ticking down for (breeder or builder/farmer/miner?) instead of having your hand forced by the game to go through all the breeders then to farmers. Adding to this, this would provide more nuance to the current settlement capacity distribution that acknowledges the player's interest in managing it in a few ways themselves. (Still determined by percentage of max settlement population, but only automated assignment is to a null category for you to then decide where they go.)
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Also, if we go by the numbers I provide up there, keep unemployment at a lower number than the rest, and scale it up to a hundred, the worst it comes to is 16ish minutes before their fully replenished. Where it may break down is at around a thousand (2h46min timer would emerge)*, but by keeping it to .08% of population, that wouldn't come around until the max cap of a settlement hit 12,500 followers.
*(First hour long timer would hit at around 400 capacity for unemployed, but that wouldn't emerge until a 5,000 high settlement.)
...However this is if we're concerned with staring at that bar/number as it fills up and/or waiting for it to fill up. They'd still be popping out every 10 seconds.
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Anyway...Does that maybe make more sense now? I realize I didn't go into too much depth in the OP on that, because I had been busy crunching these numbers, but this is more or less what I had in mind. It seems somewhat counter intuitive on the surface, I'm sure, but so are the existing timers to me. This change, while still mostly arbitrary, would at least make sense of the balance if the concern is that breeders are a major profession and thus need to be balanced in the same way as the settlement's own unique profession, but then bypass it by providing an untrained, rapid output option to then be assigned. You could still make the professions take longer but not as substantially as present.
(The best reason for this to not appear in abodes too, I think, would be due to overdoing micromanagement. Besides, the raise family then send out to learn metaphor that I think they're going after works better on a smaller scale than it does larger.)
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Post by Danjal on Oct 17, 2014 6:22:34 GMT
The thing is, how does upping the birthrate of breeders and *profession* (builder/farmer/miner) differ from what you are suggesting here.
If as you say a fixed percentage of the settlement is breeder, a fixed percentage is *profession* and a fixed percentage is unemployed.
And these unemployed pop out of the ground every *short duration*, then by that very extent, every 5th or 10th unemployed would tick over the clock for a new breeder or *profession*.
Untill the cap is reached. Depending on your balancing, it would either change nothing about the current birthrates - OR it would speed up the current birthrates and add a convoluted additional layer that serves no purpose.
Unless you ofcourse make unemployed serve a purpose...
Even if you would rely on manual allocation, with unemployed being born at a much faster pace, you would effectively increase the "trained" workforce at the same pace as long as you kept reassigning them (which would mean more tedious input that nobody is waiting on, collecting belief is bad enough.)
So either you add a bunch of manual intervention - or you would basicly just scale up the pacing...
Whichever way is your goal, I don't really see that adding much to the game except a layer of effectively useless data?
While I recognize the problem of breeders always being "first" - that would be as easily resolved as working on a percentage basis or even giving the player a direct control over assignment. (I.E. default 10% of the population is *profession*, or a manually determined percentage can be determined) and the total population automatically gets distributed between the different groups.
You don't need this third group of unemployed to facilitate that without additional manual maintenance.
Now, the unemployed DO already exist within the game - so adding the possibility to add 'outside' unemployed followers or to "reassign" followers from abodes to empty settlements would be a theoretical possibility to manually fill up the gaps.
However that also means manual intervention. (Which I believe is something we want to avoid, we want to reduce micro-management needs not increase them.)
Alternately though, there is an option that may work.
In the real world families get kids, kids move out. So why not allow the abodes outside of settlements generate kids - and have these kids on a pre-defined age-interval move to nearby housing (be it empty abodes or settlements).
That would mean that houses don't just randomly stop and start giving birth as you as a god "remove" people from circulation.
And it would interconnect the settlements with their surrounding abodes. (A potential sphere of influence may be applied so that houses in the middle of nowhere don't randomly add to the nearest settlement all the way across the map.)
Anyway, I think you have a decent idea that could be worked into something. I just have a hard time grasping the exact results you're trying to achieve just by reading your text. =/
Moreover, I don't really see how higher populations necessarily need lower birthrates.
Unless a situation of excess is achieved (overpopulation, overcrowdedness, famine, disease etc) birthrates generally are quite stable throughout...
And a key point here, God, not civil servant. I don't think we should necessarily be addressing the day-to-day business of individual followers with exception of perhaps a few chosen "conduits". The extent of our control should be limited as much as possible and have the followers primarily self-manage.
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Post by Gmr Leon on Oct 17, 2014 16:38:06 GMT
I think the reason I'm stuck on the manual assignment idea is from playing other RTS games. What might seem annoying here seems the norm to me, as in other games the unemployed invisibly exist (the remaining untrained capacity of your civilization) with you constantly assigning them to different roles (worker, soldier, priest, etc.). The reason I go out of my way to make them visible here is because while you say they exist, they only exist as a profession (e.g. builders in abodes or unused professions at settlements), and make it easy to botch up their redistribution to empty structures.*
Similarly, by keeping them as a profession, it makes their loss more troublesome compared to if it was a solely unemployed follower (see: serve as conversion buffer against Astari). There's also the possibility of them as replenishers of empty abodes or settlements or to help jumpstart settlements a little.
However, I think we may have incidentally struck a better approach, which is the manual adjustment of percentages for automatic distribution of followers into the various roles. This could automatically change the numbers that would emerge from the percentage tweaked to present immediate, clear information of how it may affect the numbers, and then once enacted would proceed on its own without further intervention (until you may decide to change it again). Regarding the unemployed in abodes, I think a better alternative than a child system would be to transfer uemployed followers into structures only when they hit empty status. Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I think that your approach would cause too many calculations to be occurring at once and possibly slow down the game, albeit I do think it would generally be a good idea in some respects.
The basic idea as I initially saw it was simply to reintroduce choice by creating a momentary null unit that could become whatever and control through the manual assignment of this unit into whatever. However, if you simply introduce percentage adjustments to the profession distribution and automatic assignment into those numbers, you might not even need to bother with the reimplementation of a null unit, but personally, I think such open/flexible capacity/units like that are valuable if something goes awry. (E.g. I made my entire civilization settlements of farmers/miners and now I've lost my builders!)**
*Which is why I've also thrown that feedback into my Weyworld thread to reemphasize the need for better audiovisual feedback for follower assignment to structures, immediate verification that it has been done properly.
**Also it puts me in the mind of last ditch Age of Mythology scenarios, where Atlanteans' citizens could all suddenly become champions to try to help fend off your opponent, or the Norse's villagers all being able to whip on a bearskin to become ulfsarks. Even with the aforementioned open capacity of untrained people, villagers/citizens remained a sort of null unit capable of transforming into something even more useful in the event of being backed into a corner.
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Post by 13thGeneral on Oct 17, 2014 16:53:52 GMT
Interesting ideas from both of you. Wish I had more time to think it over and comment further.
As for Profession assignment - as I believe they've stated they plan to remain with individualised settlements - I think a way to allow control without all the fiddly clicking micro-management would be better suited to having an adjustable (+/-) maintenance menu where desired distribution could be set with weighted percentages controling the focus; e.g. 10% Builders, 40% Miners, 50% Farmers, where-as each profession settlement would auto-assign jobs based on that out of the available unemployment pool.
I like the idea of unemployed being utilized as part of the happiness mechanic.
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Post by Danjal on Oct 17, 2014 17:30:12 GMT
I definitely think that there's a lot of space to work with, be it through complete manual assignment, percentage control or otherwise.
Aswell as the concept of aging (birth, children, adults, elderly and eventually death) resulting in a population growth aswell as eventual equilibrium reached depending on a variety of variables.
Starting with pure aging.
Then adding in the food element.
Perhaps spreading onto diseases and other aspects in later ages aswell as more generic adversities.
22cans could do a lot of this within the existing concept of settlements and abodes and to enrich the current system both aesthetically aswell as mechanically.
With the eventual purpose of enriching gameplay and adding more value to your followers - afterall, why would we currently be attached to our followers? They are mere self-replicating germs with no identity meaning or use except for perhaps the Pit of Doom and unlocking the timeline.
Adding layers and functionality aswell as outside usefulness to their existence is key to making Godus better.
Assuming the reliance remains on the follower as "base currency and driving force".
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