Marketplace:
Cost: 120
Effect: +25% Gold in this city
Bank
Cost: 220
Effect: +25% Gold in this city
Stock Exchange
Cost: 650
Effect: +33% Gold in this city
Who the hell thought that this was a good design decision? The trouble is that Marketplaces come along when your city may well be producing 2-4 Gold a turn so their return is wretched. The other problem is that Banks and SEx cost so much and are quite likely to never recoup their cost because their effects simply aren't big enough. When I built my mod to try to make this chain of buildings decent I changed them to:
Marketplace:
Cost: 120
Effect: +3 Gold
Bank
Cost: 220
Effect: +33% Gold in this city
Stock Exchange
Cost: 450
Effect: +50% Gold in this city
Note the SEx is cheaper and better, the bank is better and the Marketplace is entirely different - a fixed Gold income is useful in the early game when the building appears. Firaxis apparently agreed with me that Marketplaces didn't work because low % returns on early game buildings are terrible (in the early game). Here is their solution:
Marketplace:
Cost: 120
Effect: +25% Gold in this city
Effect: +2 Gold
Bank
Cost: 250
Effect: +25% Gold in this city
Stock Exchange
Cost: 500
Effect: +33% Gold in this city
They lowered the cost on SEx, good. They gave the Marketplace +2 Gold, good. Wait a minute... the Bank is identical to the Marketplace except it costs twice as much and has a strictly inferior effect! What the *hell* guys, don't you look at your changes before publishing this crap?
The crazy thing is they made lots of good changes in this patch. I actually went through and deleted a ton of my code in my mod because they fixed things up so that my changes weren't necessary. This is a good sign! It sure isn't a good sign though that a single person can look over the new game for an hour and come up with a stack of ridiculous contradictions and bad decisions that they made with their updates. I guess I need to start hassling them to hire me to the coding team.
I'm not sure I agree with you that the bank needs to be superior to the marketplace. Because you're limited to exactly one marketplace per city you can certainly imagine situations where one might want more money than just a marketplace provides and be willing to accept a lower rate of return as a result.
ReplyDeleteIt costs more because cities just make more production later in the game and they wanted to maintain a similar feel in terms of turns per building which I think is good.
It only becomes truly terrible when the rate of return over the rest of the game isn't better than just using the production on cash, but since that's just a 10% return you only need to get 25 gold total out of your bank to break even. Sometimes you just want to turn production into cash and banks are reasonable at doing so. Worse than marketplaces, sure, but I don't see why they need to be better than something you can't build instead.
Take Starcraft 2, for example. Upgrading your infantry weapons to do +1 damage costs 100 minerals and 100 gas. Upgrading again for another +1 damage requires an extra building, 150 minerals, and 150 gas. The second upgrade costs substantially more and isn't any better. Is that bad design?
ReplyDeleteHaving several levels of upgrades where the higher level upgrades cost more isn't necessarily bad design. However, we aren't talking about comparable situations. In SC2 when you get the higher level upgrades you don't have other choices that are much better. In all other cases in CiV the buildings get better as you get deeper into the tech tree. Universities are better than libraries, factories are better than workshops, etc. If one particular building group goes the opposite way then either the opening building in that group is absurdly overpowered or the later buildings are a complete joke. If workshop and marketplace are balanced and factory is way better than workshop why the hell would I build a bank if it is worse than marketplace? The most useful measure isn't 'is Bank ever worth building in any circumstance' because you can construct a circumstance where building a bank is better than just turning to cash (which is 25% now, not 10%) but rather 'is building a Bank a reasonable choice during a typical game?'
ReplyDeleteIf Banks are total garbage and only get built if you have absolutely nothing of use to do then that is not an interesting choice - every game is the same, you ignore Banks. If Banks are good, especially so in cities with high Gold output and not as much so in other cities then you have a real decision to make about which cities build Banks depending on how much Gold you need at the time.
CiV is constructed along the premise that higher tech buildings cost more and have substantially more powerful effects. It is possible to construct a game where the game works fine and this does not hold but in a game where everything obeys that law any building set that goes against it is going to have real balance problems.
I think if banks are total garbage and are never built then there definitely is a problem. I don't think banks as they currently stand are total garbage. I built them all the time, though it has been a while since I played.
ReplyDeleteI think you'll see practically every city with a marketplace and some with banks and stock markets as it currently stands which seems to fit your requirement of having interesting decisions. Or if gold isn't needed at all then no cities will have banks but some won't have marketplaces either. To get to your bad design scenario you'd need marketplaces to be so good you build one in every city and banks to be so bad you never build them in any city, and I don't think that's the case here at all. Comparing to tech or production buildings isn't really valid since the need for those is entirely separate and can follow different ramping patterns.
If you built banks a lot at 25% for 220 production you made a real mistake. They are really poor and should only be built once every happiness building is done, every good production building is done, every science building is done and most growth/utility buildings are done. And then only after your army is fully stacked and if the game isn't going to end in the next 50 turns. That window of 'reasonable to build' is so narrow as to be a joke. Every building should at least be a real consideration to be built when it is discovered. Since some of them definitely fit this (and if they don't then the game seems really boring) any building that only fits in 'when everything good is already done' isn't an interesting decision at all.
ReplyDeleteI just found a website listing the abilities of other buildings...
ReplyDeleteHappiness:
A: 3 for 150 and a resource
B: 4 for 150
C: 4 for 300, needs B
D: 4 for 450, needs C
Science:
A: 1 per 2 citizens
B: +50% for 180
C: +50% and 2 per jungle for 200, needs A
D: +50% for 350, needs C
E: +100% for 600, needs D
Building Shields:
A: +20% for 100
B: +15% for 180
C: +50% for 300, needs A
D: +25% for 600
E: +25% for 600
Culture:
A: 2 for 60
B: 3 for 120, needs A
C: 3 and luxury bonus for 120
D: 5 for 220, needs B
E: 5 for 350, needs D
F: +100% for 600, needs E
Pretty much across the board the buildings cost more for the same or worse effect as the game progresses. This is how Civ works. It's not just a SC2 thing, it's a Civ thing.
And if I had tried to build all those other buildings before building banks I would have gone bankrupt. I was regularly disbanding units once wars ended to stay afloat. I would actively tech towards money buildings because I wanted to build them over the other stuff. My window of reasonable to build for banks was large.
Here is the thing: In classic CiV if you managed to have net negative income you were doing something horribly wrong. Remember that every luxury is 10g/turn from the AI and you can sell horses, iron and other strategic resources for a fortune. Having more than an 10 unit army was pointless most of the time, though you need a few more units for exploration (universally scouts and caravels, pretty much).
ReplyDeleteThe really big problem with your list above is that it includes incorrect data, incomplete data, and out of date data. For example, in the Shields category, the 20% is for buildings only, not for troops/wonders/misc. The two last buildings in that category were so utterly pathetic that nobody build them except those who simply didn't care that they were totally useless. Because nobody built them modders massively buffed them to make them competitive and in the recent patch Firaxis also masssively buffed them to make them useable - and did so by making them better than any other production building in raw output. The Culture line you list above works exactly as I say it does in that the buildings get consistently more powerful. The D option is the outlier because it isn't better than E, but again in the last patch D got nerfed to a 4 yield making the line a consistent set of increases. When talking about Science buildings you have to realize that the D option was considered horrible and underpowered and in the first patch last year they changed it to 1 for each citizen. The B option is an outlier because it requires a specific city placement (adjacent to mountain) and is not in the prereq chain. It is an optional building, rarely available, to maximize science in the city. Happiness buildings did not ramp up initially, but again the current values have them as
3 for 120
4 for 250
5 for 600
2 for 80 (requires local resource, often not available, not in prereq chain)
So although your website suggests a distinct lack of the trend I talk about, it is both misleading and completely out of date. If you look at the current values from the developers you see a constant, unvarying increase in power in every single building type *except* banks in the financial tree. I should particularly note that buildings that were at some point exceptions to the rule (notably D,E in the Shields tree) were so laughably bad that building them was considered a pretty silly joke on the AI - since doing so pretty much meant you were just disrespecting them.
It isn't a CiV thing, it is a 'a few buildings were obviously shipped before anyone really looked at the costs' thing. Note that I don't claim that the later buildings have a better benefit/cost ratio, particularly considering the time they are active, but they do have drastically more powerful raw effects across the board (again, with Banks being the huge outlier, hence my complaints).