Idea about farming, trading and development systems

[Connacht]

The post is long, so please forgive me if there is any writing mistake. Just an idea that is buzzing in my mind, tell me if you think that it is good or bad, hoping that Rome isn't hardcoded so that it isn't realizable.

Just like many different temples can be built, I thought that there could be also different buildable farms, in example wheat farms, fruit farms... or livestock-focusized estates instead of agricultural ones.
And, if possible, different settlements won't share the same type of buildings, so in example Southern Italy will have grape or olives cultivations while Scandinavia won't allow them and Eastern countries will have typical local products. Different farms will give different results. Grain could improve only population growth, grapes could improve happiness and trading incomes.
I think however that there shouldn't be only one buildable type of farm, but a more complex system, in example the player could build 5 different level 1 farms, 1 farm increased to level 5, or 2 lv1 farms and 1 lv3 farm etc.

Besides, trading and development can be influenced by this system. In example, the region A has a marker that says that this region is famous because it has good quality wine-or-anything-you-want. So, if you build in the settlement of this region a grape cultivation with wineries, you'll get another trading bonus because of the high quality of the product. Furthermore: wine isn't something that fills people's stomachs, so if you build a lv5 grape cultivation you'll get some money from the wine sold, but inhabitans will starve! So balancing is essential and players should consider if improve this thing or that other one, and get so different way of development for their cities. However, by doing only 5 lv1 farms you won't get particular advantages, and everything will remain average.
That's different from the really simple system of Rome, where you only build a farm, wait some turns, then improve it and stop.

And what if the region A has poor small fields that make wheat farms insufficient? Unless doing long time and extensively upgrades (just like docks!), population can't grow quickly and the city won't become large and rich - but you can still exploit it for its wine and get trading bonuses.

There could be also "exchanges" between connected (by sea routes or roads) neighbouring cities represented by ad hoc buildings, so in example the A city could build a structure that decreases trading incomes and increases farming in order to simulate that wine is exchanged for food. Thus the settlement can still be developed in a particular way, however by losing other bonuses. You'll have to decide if doing this or not will give you advantages.

I also though about a sort of role-playing with characters that, when they get inside a settlement, receive a trait that tells what that particular settlement needs and offers, thus if, in example, Rome is training a lot of legionaries, the governor will receive a trait that tells that there is a lack of iron for weapons and armor that will be solved by upgrading the nearest mine or building one in a region, otherwise the player will get some penalties (however this particular example maybe is unrealizable with the engine of Rome).

Any of my games in the end had all the cities (even those in the desert or in the Balearic Islands) at a huge level with all possible structures built in a little time, this isn't historical at all unless you force yourself to ignore buildings and leave construction queues empty for many turns; different city development systems will allow to choose the way you create your empire, and maybe if you don't take care of what you're doing you could see your dominions grow badly towards poorness and/or inefficiency, corruption, squallor etc. (I think that this would introduce more complexity and "deepness" to the game economic/strategic side, instead of simply filling the cq with anything you can build and then wait turns and turns to see them completed and then build something else).

However I don't know if the game is hardcoded so that buildings can't have a regional-construction system as units-training, or so that anything I was thinking about is not possible to add in EB2. If the game is hardcoded, well, alas: this idea should be left away.
If not, what do you think about it? Is here in this post any fault? Or do you think that a more advanced development system like this isn't in your interests or in the spirit of EB?

[Foot]

While that idea is very interesting, the amount of resources it would seem to require looks to dwarf the rest of the mod. Very good however, and it would make for a very interesting foundation to another mod. EBII has developed in a different direction. You have developed the concept of the farm building in Rome and the TW series (as actually representing farms in the region), EBII will completely rethink this and hopefully make for compelling gameplay.

Foot

[Zarax]

TBH this could be partially represented by farming levels and trading resources even though the development idea sounds quite nice (although it would chew up on the building tree limits).

[Connacht]

Well, it depends by one's style of gaming. Even if EB is really great, I personally find a little boring to play when enemies are silent, nothing happens and I only have to cyclically press the end turn button and wait for something, then repeat. Expanding the settlement-managing part would give more complexity to the setting and require more involvement by the player into the mechanics of the game, enhancing his gaming experience. Besides, it could also avoid rushing empires that in less than 100 years have become strong, heavily developed and large... strategic game will be more long-living, hard and interesting.

Another possible add would be the fact that players should also consider that fields get poorer if exploited, so every year they will have to rotate them (i.e. one year grain-livestock-resting free field, second year resting-grain-livestock, third year livestock-resting-grain and so on) otherwise fertilty will decrease - however perhaps this is impossible with the engine of Rome, and I think that it would also be terribly boring and repetitive to do every year with a lot of settlement and farms to manage. I remember an old TBS/RTT of about 12 years ago, Lords of the Realm II, where this was possible because maps were small and provinces low, so one hadn't troubles in managing every settlement... but in a huger scale the matter is completely different.

[TWFanatic]

Good post, I love reading speculation like this. I myself have wondered if many things would be possible with rtw or m2tw, but most of the time I'm let down. Your idea actually seems plausible though (not that I know enough of this area to believe it is possible or not). If it is possible to implement your idea, it would certainly increase the depth and enjoyment of campaigns.

[Zarax]

The idea in itself is possible and not extremely hard to implement.
There is a downside though: it would take a lot of building trees, meaning that you would have less buildings of other kinds.

[Bootsiuv]

Doesn't M2TW allow for more buildings than RTW....I know you can have more factions, and more units IIRC.

I like this idea, but Foot knows what hes doing. :)

[muha]

If only the developers werent evil and didnt add hard-coded limits to everything...

Maybe Empire TW will be different? Would hate to play a game that represents most of the world with only 200 cities in it.

[Xtiaan72]

A lot of these are already implemented in DLV...... Certain resources in a region allow special buildings that increase trade ( as well as various effects on happiness, health, ect)...example Silk will trigger silk factory... The buildings vary by culture..And there are buildings for dozens of resources. In the building descriptions it will say something about "The region being known for it's silk" or whatever

I'm not sure if this improves the income of merchants on that resource...but that seems like it could be scripted if you wanted to take it to the next level...

The AI actually uses it's merchants much better than most players so it's a pretty good game mechanic.

And DLV simulates the ebb and flow of economic fortunes with economic events (examples : "Disaster on your roads", " Warehouse fire at your port", "Exceptionally good harvest")

and these events have pretty drastic economic effects on trade income which really adds spice to the game..

That abstract some of the effects of Connacht's "exchange" idea but is also much easier to implement..


Just my two cents on the topic

[Ludens]

If only the developers werent evil and didnt add hard-coded limits to everything...

Huh? Hard-coded limits are a product of normal programming. It's not like CA added a line that says: if factions > 31, then CTD. They simply designed the engine with 31 factions in mind, so 31 factions is what the game can accommodate. They could have made the engine more flexible, but at the cost of performance. In any case, given the tendency of modders to push the engine to the limit (like here, by trying to create a complex farming system through the building tree), no doubt they would have run into these limits anyway.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Yeah, when you program using as little memory as possible

which you really need to do to improve performance, and in case you're using C/C++ also because you have to manually prevent memory leaks, thus more memory requirements increases the complexity of this task

you will start thinking in terms of "how to make the most of n bytes".

So if certain bits are used for what is known as a "bitmask" (encoding a bunch of -usually true/false- properties about something using bits) and the rest is a unqiue identifier... 31 which is (2^5) -1, makes a lot of sense. One byte (which is by convention usually 8 bits), of which the 3 most/least significant bits can be used to encode culture, for instance (there being exactly 7 cultures or (2^3) -1). Simple, huh?

EDIT: This is not to say one byte signifying a faction also signifies its culture in RTW. I have no "proof" for such a claim as I do not have reverse engineered the save file for instance. Who knows what other memory requirements make 31 a useful hardcoded limit to prevent a complete re-write of the memory management code (which is likely in part a residu of RTW itself, seeing both games use the same basic engine) ?

[Parkev]

I think its also to keep in mind what buildings actually represent. Are they physical buildings that are built and run exclusively by the government? Industries built by others sponsored by the state? Buildings that represent policies of the state? Or the personal commercial interests of the ruling elite that are often one in the same? Keep pondering this (as I am on the fly) and it seems that buildings will represent different kinds of things depending on how the "government" operated in the day, feudal, republic, theocracy, empire...

What happened to the good old days of Age of Empires.

[Tellos Athenaios]

My little brother got hold of my old copy of Age of Empires. That's what happened. <_<

[Ibrahim]

My little brother got hold of my old copy of Age of Empires. That's what happened. <_<

sorry for ya.
just kidding.

[Gazius]

Interesting ideas not realizable for Total War

This seems like a very good idea for EU:Rome:Europa Barbarorum, which is what immediantly jumped to my mind. Has EB development for this game been suspended, or just died out?