Feedback - upgradable buildings and others

[gfurst]

Hey, firstly thanks for the awesome game, and to opportunity to beta test it.

The game features great variability of buildings and units. For me there are two major aspects of game while playing.
The city building, which involves more on focusing the cities, assigning citizens and such, its awesome the way migration works, from larger convulated cities to smaller. But this somewhat faulty, because cities are basically limitless, the bigger they are the more they grow, and of course they could cripple the player( due to morale and losses with it) if you let them grow indefinitely.
Buildings present something similar, if you keep on building them it will cripple your empire due to maintenance, and they'll not always be profitable on unfocused cities.
My suggestion( finally) is to implement some type of upgradable mechanic for buildings, in the sense that the first era building will be replaced by the second era one.

• As it is now:
• First Era 25% resource +2 resource type 2 credits upkeep
• Second Era 50% resource +4 resource type 2 credits upkeep
• ... well you got the idea ...

As it stands these two buildings can be placed together and will greatly add to the output.
Mu suggestion is to increase the upkeep accordingly, but also create the mechanic that will replace the previous building with the modern one, optionally reducing building cost if the city already has the previously built one. But still keep the old buildings as option for the cities that didn't built them yet.
With this in place, the growth of city is much more controlled, and this mechanic will avoid the crippling effect of stack buildings on players that are not aware of it( eg the AI).

Additionally a MUST HAVE mechanic to the game is the group control of units. Where as they will not only receive orders but will remain as a group after orders are received.
For example if my troops are embarked, they are weak and easy targets, this requires a naval unit escort. But if I command the units+escort to a desired location, the naval( has additional movement) will get here quicker, thus, not defending the units it was supposed to escort.
Not only that but I, as a player, like to assign certain units to squads where they may be weak alone but can hold their own as a group. For example a sniper with fire-thrower.
Keep in mind, that this requires units to ignore surplus movement on certain situations.

Ugh, I wrote too much, just to summarize:

• Cities growing limitlessly
• Upgradable buildings
• Ability to group units

[Delta66]

- You can toggle 'City growth' on/off for each city independantly.
- I really think that you still need the older building even when you have researched the improved Version. It aloows you to fine tune what you buils with the resource available at the moment. Many times you really need building V.1 + V.2, on the other hand when colonizing new cities, the V.2 building could be an overkill (especially for pollution, morale, or housing), and it take much longer to build.
- there is alimited possibilty to move multiple units at once, but long time groups would be helpfull.

[gfurst]

- You can toggle 'City growth' on/off for each city independantly.
- I really think that you still need the older building even when you have researched the improved Version. It aloows you to fine tune what you buils with the resource available at the moment. Many times you really need building V.1 + V.2, on the other hand when colonizing new cities, the V.2 building could be an overkill (especially for pollution, morale, or housing), and it take much longer to build.

I'm aware of the stop city growth button, but the way it works with migration, is that all growth from non growing cities will migrate to allowed cities.
This is good indeed, that allows you to focus on which city to focus growth, and even without your control, citizens would choose smaller/better morale cities.
I do like though, the exponential citizen growth rate, but when you have a big empire with several cities contributing to growth of one it seems to get out of hand.

Just thought about it, but a good solution to this would be to allow the migration system to be global.
This would of course put an edge on growth and make world wide population more even. You would have to compete with your enemies for better structured cities.
As it stands now, I'd think there is a good resource+tech+demand balance to the game. Never it had too much surplus or demand, I am however, very good at managing the resources.

[Delta66]

Globalizing population could be good, but pop moving from faction too faction should be weighted by dyplomacy betwween faction (friendly/hated), pollution, morale, or more generally by faction starting traits. I mean a Terra Salvum pop, should be more enticed to migrate to a city with low pollution while a Solar Dynasty pop, won't mind so much about pollution. Similarly pops from the Scientist faction would be inclined to move to a city with high Science production.

This will also help flesh out the dipomatic side othe game. And allows for non military conquests, which is often now as influence/culture spread in other games. It would be more thematic, for the less militaristic faction, to try to attract pops by other means than warfare.

[Sabratha]

Global pop migration doesn't sound that bad, but it will require a lot of fine tuning and balance assesment to work properly.

I would not like to see pops moving from high-tech cities situated in good improved terrain, to smaller, low-tech cities of a different faction for example.

[Canute0]

You overrate the migration. I never saw a big city get smaller.
The migration just lower the growth of a unpopular city.

[Delta66]

If there were, some sort of global migration, only a small fraction of each faction pop should be taken into consideration.

[gfurst]

You overrate the migration. I never saw a big city get smaller.
The migration just lower the growth of a unpopular city.

Agree, the way migration works now, at least what it seems to me, is that its solely based on morale.
So to keep your population strong all you have to do is keep the city happy. The higher tech (with the better morale building plus reduced polution) would get the advantage.

I don't think it needs a complex system to weight factions to where migration goes, it would be too overcomplicated.
On the other hand some others city factors could weight in on morale pluses and negatives.

Another suggestion I'd just thought about, is that no city factors affect citizen growth, only migration alone.
Perhaps some factors can inflict on citizen growth on per city basis slowing growth of overpopulated cities, such as lack of habitat.