Regional differences of cities (crops/resources)

[David]

And will there be a game setting for different level of natural resource dispersity?

What are your ideas for this in greater details?

[counting]

Will these new crops be treated as ingredients like they are now, or can be sold as consumer products in stores? I imagine they have to be products, otherwise you will have hell lot of new products to design (or allowing great degree of freedom for players to mod product's components)

The dispersity I imagine the easily way is to add a series of bottom of different level (similar to starting capital or AI aggressiveness in current game setting). The highest dispersity (lowest concentration) would be current game where each city has every type, and lowest dispersity (highest concentration) will be one type of material can only be found in one city along. And of course the options between them where they mostly can be found in every city, to mostly can not be found in one. The trouble is if there are odd number left out with number of city divided by number of materials, at highest concentration, it might be possible that some city will have more mine spots than others. (Say 7 minerals and 6 cities, one city is bound to have 2, and twice as many spots than other 5)

The solution more programming oriented description, is to set random seed percentage. Say at highest diversity, every time a mine runs out, the random generator give each city even chance to spawn. With a weight factor added in, the lower the dispersity (higher concentration), the odds are given to a particular city, say a gold city, has (w+1)/(w+N) chance of getting a gold spawn and others just 1/(w+N) chance (w is the weight factor > 0. and N is the number of cities. When w=0, it's even). Say 5 cities and w=3, gold city get 4/8 chance, and other 4 cities just 1/8. I think this will make designing the dispersity options easy, all you need to do is to decide how many levels and their associated weights. You can do normalization of 1, (w+1), (w+N) to a scale like between 1 and 100 integer before comparing random value, hence after certain large enough weight value (in the scale of 100 it's >99 when N=1, >98 N=2, so on), the chance of a non-specialized city will become zero. The work left is how you assign which city to specialize on what. (It can be random initial assignment, modding options, real world geographic data, even based on adaptive theory and "evolve" over time)

[counting]

I suppose there's another cheap way of implementing disperity without changing random generate process, by changing their "quantity" of reserve with weight factor similar to quality. So a low concentration city still has all type of ores but different quantity level, and to a point where it makes no economic sense to build mine over it, since it runs out too quickly. The only problem of this implementation is that you need to scale up the mining and output bandwidth along side the quantity of reserve. For example, one single 7-city-worth highly concentrated mine should really have 7 times throughput. otherwise there's no point to be dispersed.

[David]

We are currently evaluating the potential gameplay implication of implementing the regional differences of crops into the game and would like to get you guys' feedback.

Attached are screenshots of interfaces from Capitalism Plus that shows climate, rainfall and soil fertility.

One option is to implement the same in Capitalism Lab's CES DLC's world map (screenshot also attached below).

In short:
-The climate, rainfall and soil fertility of different regions on the world map will vary.
-But the climate, rainfall and soil fertility of all locations in the same city will be the same.

Would you like to see it implemented this way?

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As you see in the Capitalism Plus' screenshot, there is an interface for "Auto Locate Building Site" by selecting the preferred climate and rainfall level, do you think that we should have a similar interface on the world map?

Do you have any suggestions for providing an even more user friendly way to find the right locations for the crops you want to plant, to minimize the amount of micromanagement required?

[eleaza]

We are currently evaluating the potential gameplay implication of implementing the regional differences of crops into the game and would like to get you guys' feedback.
...
Do you have any suggestions for providing an even more user friendly way to find the right locations for the crops you want to plant, to minimize the amount of micromanagement required?

This mechanic works in Cap Plus because it is a open map, where the entire world is the map and players have to place farms outside "city tiles". But for Cap2 and Cap Lab players only have individual city maps to place farms within "city limit". and since initial cities are generated at random location right now, limited climate for crops might end-up making certain game can not grow certain crops or no farming possible at all. (until new cities are build ofc, however can AI even build new cities? otherwise it would be pretty unfair and easy to beat AIs in this type of game)

Is it possible to reintroduced the "pseudo world map" where cities are just one tile (or tiles depend on the map size relative to city size in the minimap), and allowing farms to be placed on the "rural land" between cities? Or some kind of "rural community cities" where it's cheaper to set up and smaller in size initially where farms or resources can be found there, but no commercial/high residential buildings can be built inside and no CBD? And these villages can then be upgraded in stages to towns and cities later on?

[David]

This mechanic works in Cap Plus because it is a open map, where the entire world is the map and players have to place farms outside "city tiles". But for Cap2 and Cap Lab players only have individual city maps to place farms within "city limit". and since initial cities are generated at random location right now, limited climate for crops might end-up making certain game can not grow certain crops or no farming possible at all. (until new cities are build ofc, however can AI even build new cities? otherwise it would be pretty unfair and easy to beat AIs in this type of game)

You have made a very good point.

[Spac3y]

I think this is a great idea especially in relation to commodoties available in cities.

Take south africa, great for Diamonds for example. Canadian cities could be good for oil, timber. Chineese cities could be good for about any comodity lol.

Do like the idea of this though

[eleaza]

I think this is a great idea especially in relation to commodoties available in cities.

Take south africa, great for Diamonds for example. Canadian cities could be good for oil, timber. Chineese cities could be good for about any comodity lol.

Do like the idea of this though

Perhaps we can somehow have a "spread out" method for the randomly generated cities on the CES DLC world map. Like some cities have to be the right "latitude", and some with the right "terrain".

Personally I'd like an enhanced version of the many small cities approach we now have in 4.4.01, where many "cities" can be no more than just raw resource "mining camp", or "farming towns", with little or no commercials. But the setup process might still be a problem, since the issue wasn't setup is too expensive, but rather these cities have to be generated from the start, and only human players can create new one. And once a city is built, it will never disappear, even if its going bankrupt or no one lived there anymore. Right now, it's very "player-centered", hence unless the players have already established their corporations and create their own "resource town", the overall differentiation won't occur on its own after the game started, no AI will create new cities for different resources.

[David]

One of the key questions is whether it is worthwhile to set up a city to take advantage of the region difference setting, if the crop/natural resource is only 40-60 points higher in quality than normal ones.

And to make the region difference apparent enough in effect, the quality range of normal crop/natural resources might have to be capped within a range, like from 0 to 60.

For example, without the region difference setting, now the player can produce crop/natural resources anyway from 20 to 100. With the region difference setting enabled, in order to differentiate those with the advantage from those without, the game will have to impose an artificial limit on the highest quality level that can be attained by crop/natural resources without regional advantages, and the cap may be set to something like 60.

And in those regions with the regional advantages, the player can produce crop/natural resources up to a quality level of 100.

But then this design will create 2 issues:
-Does it make sense to cap the quality value to 60 for those without regional advantages?
-Is the difference between 60 (those without regional advantages) and 100 (those with regional advantages) significant enough to justify the effort to set up a new city primarily for the farming/mining potential?

[eleaza]

But then this design will create 2 issues:
-Does it make sense to cap the quality value to 60 for those without regional advantages?
-Is the difference between 60 (those without regional advantages) and 100 (those with regional advantages) significant enough to justify the effort to set up a new city primarily for the farming/mining potential?

I remember back in Cap Plus, not only climate, rainfall matters, but there's also soil fertility right? And those don't just affecting the quality of crops, but also the yield. Hence it will make a huge cost difference if the quantity yield varied a lot. Will the difference in quantity much easier to calculate if the quality is purely determined by unit level? (with this then there might not need to have spread out cities to cover all the possible climate, rainfall, since the quality is still determined by unit level, just the yield varied a lot, thus cost per yield will be the determine factor for regional differences)

As to the setup cost, I originally thought it would be cool to have different setup cost for cities with different size, even different purpose where it will be cheaper for a "farming town" where it's smaller in size, and only agriculture zone and residence can exist, or only smallest general store can be built etc. However, these would also create issues like how would such "town" has a balanced city budget? Will it constantly have lower QoL? Will it needs to rely on bonds? Even constant "donation" from companies buying lands? How would it "upgrade" to a normal city? Would a poorly running town becomes "ghost town"? Lots of questions will arise. And as I mentioned above, the true issue is no AIs will build a town/city on its own, this will be fairly "city-building-like", no new cities created by AI corporations will make the environment of "business sandbox" quite stale for decades before players stepped up their own businesses to build new towns/cities. (however, with only quantity difference, not quality, this might be less of an issue, just some products with the higher cost crops will be less attractive in production, even pure losses)