[request] better way for tile yield cap than my previous request

from Elemental Forums

So after the lengthy thread of my previous request, I think the consensus is that if the tile yield cap to remains,  give the option to flag a tile as contributing outside the cap. Then we could flag the special tiles on the wild lands as "outside the cap" and modders could do what they like with the rest of the tiles. I don't know if y'all follow posts after commenting in them, so I figured I'd post this revised solution as its own thread.  This would actually be better than just removing the cap.

 

This solution would give the most yardage for the least amount of code.  All the while keeping the cap in place.  

 

With this change, modders could:

  • remove the cap
  • make only special tiles that ignored the cap
  • make spells that removed the cap from certain types of land (by altering the land to different tiles)

<EDITED FOR CLARITY>

13,113 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Why the hard cap? Why is it so hard to put this in XML? For a game that is so customizable, WHY can't this moddable?

 

I am seeing almost no variation in tiles, almost no 3 essence tiles, and horrible other stats for food/materials for 2 essence tiles.

 

Again, WHY can't this be moddable???

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

NickPL, by adding it the way I described, it could be modded out completely if that's what you wanted to do.   All you would have to do is change the yield for the various tiles to contribute their bonuses outside the cap.  

 

This would give you the added ability of only making *some* tiles outside the cap.  This would make those tiles special.   By doing this you could set only tiles that appear in stamps to give outside the cap (this is what I think they should do with the core unmodded game).  

By adding it this way,  The modders would have full control of the cap, in an all, partial, or none method.  And the dev's could bring back the uber cool city locations we had before, add enticement to clear wild lands, and all the while giving modders control to do whatever we want.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Was there really a consensus that people like the hard cap? For me it is the biggest step backwards the game has made, I really, really dislike it.

If the problem is that good settle spots were too common without the cap then they could have a soft cap where high numbers need progressively higher base values from the surrounding terrain (eg a sort of Log relationship). That would be better, although I would still like the cap to be removable or modifiable by mods.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

No, the consensus wasn't that people liked the hard cap *as is*.  Mr Paxton pointed out how game breaking it was to get a phenomenal city start location for one culture, and none of us had a good argument against that.  Almost everyone agreed we don't like it as is, and it robbed fun.

I must not have made very clear what I was saying in my original post.

By allowing whoever is designing a tile to stipulate weather it contributes to the resources before or after the cap is applied,  Mr. Paxton can make the fix to the base game that we all want to see (being able to find really uber city tiles) and he can easily restrict those really awesome locations to things like stamps, or at bare minimum away from your starting location.

You COULD as a modder, go through and move all of the tiles yields to the "outside of cap"  setting, thus effectively removing it.  This wouldn't require any extra coding on stardocks part. (which they want to avoid when possible, for very good reasons as any programmer can tell you).

Simply removing the cap, would remove the ability to control tile yield in a way that would be unfortunate.  They went to a lot of work to concoct that formula, and it has very good uses.  

You could do so much with this by simply adding "out of cap". Here are some examples.

  • You could make a mod where none of the land is very habitable, but it *is* habitable.  By casting spells to change the terrain to "rehabilitated" you could improve the tile yield by moving resources outside the cap on specific tiles. You could set up an entire tree for a mage skill set that focues on land rehabilitation.
  • You could remove the cap on the current game.
  • You could leave the cap in place in the current game, and make things like those uber "+3 fire shards" tiles on stamps contribute their yield oustide the cap, thus making wildland cities the best in the game.  Fixing the missing "uber cities" AND the lameness of wildland rewards all in one fell swoop. 

And anything else you could come up with, those are just my immediate thoughts (the things I might mod in with the changes).  I will personally write a mod that removes the cap for people if they do this, for those that don't want it.  (even though I don't think I'd use it myself, I really think I'd go with the hybrid making wildlands cooler)

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

What I find irritating about the whole thing is that these things seem to get thrown into the game last minute and completely change the way we play the game. It is like they are throwing darts blindly to try and get a bullseye. I quote from Frogboy's posting on the 1.3 preview dev journal on Feb 12th:

 

"One of the new features is a pretty big change that you’ll notice almost immediately. Procedural tile yield generation.  Basically, it means that the tile yields will be a lot more varied and interesting (and generally bigger).  Way less 3/3/1 tiles (in fact, rare) and way more 5/2/2 tiles or 2/5/2 tiles or even 1/4/3 tiles."

 

In theory, it's great! In practice, I NEVER get good tiles anymore. Forests generally have 1/5/0 and grain/food supplies have 5/2/0 or 5/3/0. Rivers seem to never get any good essence tiles even when next to shards. Only if next to a shard and only sometimes do I see 3/3/1 or 4/3/2 MAX. The only place that gives more essence are the Order of Asok camps, if you are lucky you will get 3/3/3, or a Dragon Camp/Shard combo with 2/3/4. So now we have to bump up the resource and shard densities in order to actually get mediocre tiles. The system was changed completely in 1.3 FE to be different, so let it be different, remove the cap and get rid of the 1/5/0 and bring on the chances to find those epic spots!

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

When they threw in the procedural tile yield in Frogboy's custom build, for a brief time the cap was not implemented.   It made for the most entertaining maps I've ever played on in fallen enchantress.

I have considered changing the tile yield to exclude essence, and add essence to some of the buildings (like mana temples) to work around this, but the problem is that it would be too easy to get way way too much.   That's why I've been advocating for an "outside the cap" component to the formula.   It would look something like

 

UncappedProduction = (currentProceduralFormulaHere(TileYields));

CappedProduction = (capFormulaHere(UncappedProduction));

SuperTileOutput = (currentProceduralFormulaHere(TileYield of SuperTiles));

If(UncappedProdcution < CappedProduction + SuperTileOutput) then {TotalProduction = UncappedProduction;}else{ TotalProduction = CappedProduction +SuperTileOutput; }

 

Forgive the psudo code please.  But I felt this would be the easiest way to explain it to anyone with programming experience.