Building system

[D E C]

So I've got one complete campaign on vanilla and went back and tried to get all the buildings in each city to the last level. It's just a thing that I like to do with every campaign in every Total War game after I do the goals or whatever. I finished the campaign c. 180 BC. It took me 100 turns to do that with 140 cities. A hundred turns to to do the campaign and a hundred more to figure out how to do the buildings without destroying the public order or the food supply and tax all provinces at the same time. I had some libraries and got up to 1080% speed of research and had to destroy every single one of them just to get even. In the end I had like half of the stacks or less and maybe some 20 food for an empire of 140 cities. I had to do the exact same building pattern in every single province except one, the recruitment and upgrade center. Remember, that's Macedon, guys. You don't actually need lots of libraries since the main city building provides some research bonus. But what if you played with something like the Swebi? The main building doesn't provide research, actually I don't even know what it does, it took me an hour to figure out what do their buildings actually do cause it is pretty damn confusing, no barracks, no anything. I got the easiest, most straightforward culture for building and it still took me 100 turns to figure it out. So there are maybe like 15-20? building types or whatever but let me tell you this: you can't in any way possible hope to upgrade the buildings if you don't have the exact same ones in each province. In each and every province capital I got a food building, a public order temple, a food temple and another temple. In the minor cities - farms and a public order temple. And that's it. All the recruitment buildings and the upgrade buildings packed in one province, taxes off. There's no other way.

So whadya think about that? Is that the way the game is meant to be played? Is that what was intended to force you to do? Why? Is it flawed or just a micromanagement minigame or something? Why are there so many building optens when realistically you can't actually develop most of the buildings since the cost in food in each level gets progressively higher so you only have to build food and public order buildings?

[ABH2]

So whadya think about that? Is that the way the game is meant to be played? Is that what was intended to force you to do? Why? Is it flawed or just a micromanagement minigame or something? Why are there so many building optens when realistically you can't actually develop most of the buildings since the cost in food in each level gets progressively higher so you only have to build food and public order buildings?

Like everything in this game, it was poorly balanced. It seems like they really failed to test this game at all. The bonuses received from the higher level buildings generally aren't needed, and aren't big enough to offset the major food/squalor penalties.

I honestly don't typically build beyond level two for most buildings across the empire. That includes higher level barracks (usually) which I haven't needed to beat the AI, anyway. By the time I have them constructed, they are so far from where I'm typically fighting that there's no point.

I know what the defense is going to be. You should build up one or two main centers. You shouldn't be able to build-up everywhere. Only, it generally makes little sense to do it anywhere as there is little practical benefit.

[krisslanza]

You don't need to make a province food stable, you know. You just make a few areas entirely devoted to food to feed the rest of the empire. Naturally if you make every settlement food stable, your options are limited. But that's not the intended way to do it.

So long as your empire's food surplus is positive, everything is fed (unless it gets blockaded/sieged).

From the wording of your post, this sounds like the mistake you did.

[D E C]

Thaty's not correct. I didn't make a mistake. I developed every single building in every single city out of a 140 cities to the max. I ended up with 20 food.

[krisslanza]

Thaty's not correct. I didn't make a mistake. I developed every single building in every single city out of a 140 cities to the max. I ended up with 20 food.

In each and every province capital I got a food building, a public order temple, a food temple and another temple. In the minor cities - farms and a public order temple. And that's it. All the recruitment buildings and the upgrade buildings packed in one province, taxes off. There's no other way.

Why not just dedicate several regions to nothing but food then? You'd get more variety in choices, instead of trying to build food in every single settlement.

[D E C]

It's not possible! It doesn't work this way. If you want to upgrade the buildings, you have to build the exact same thing everywhere. You build only food and public order and that's it. You can't build anythign else.

[PeonKing]

It's not possible! It doesn't work this way. If you want to upgrade the buildings, you have to build the exact same thing everywhere. You build only food and public order and that's it. You can't build anythign else.

Well, seeing as I've played... 7 campaigns, I'm going to have to disagree with you. Kriss is describing in the right way. In fact. I build two unit recruitment provinces, and everything else is pretty much just food. Usually an infantry province and then a mounted province. Everything else gets devoted to food/economics, since that's really the only other option. I've played with Barbarian, Greek, and Roman factions, you definitely have some leeway with what you build. I even do the same thing with the library thing, where I'll stack libraries till I research everything, and then destroy them all, but you just have to hold off on upgrading other food consuming buildings in the meantime if you do that. Yeah I don't really like playing as the barbarian factions since they're research building is crap so they're going to be way behind on techs which makes the game a lot more difficult, but that's just how those factions function. Honestly the bardic circle tree is so useless I don't even bother. I stack +public order agents in my unit producing provinces to stop rebellions.

Food is a more flexible barrier than happiness is. Not every province needs positive food production, but every province needs happiness, which basically means temples/entertainment chain buildings in the provincial capital. You'll get the hang of it, it is possible.

[Razvus]

I think I understand the situation here:

So I've got one complete campaign on vanilla and went back and tried to get all the buildings in each city to the last level. It's just a thing that I like to do with every campaign in every Total War game after I do the goals or whatever. I finished the campaign c. 180 BC. It took me 100 turns to do that with 140 cities. A hundred turns to to do the campaign and a hundred more to figure out how to do the buildings without destroying the public order or the food supply and tax all provinces at the same time

From what I understand, he tried to have all the buildings fully upgraded because it's something he likes doing after a campaign. So with that in mind, I guess it could be possible that the only way to fully upgrade everything everywhere is to have the same pattern everywhere.

However, this isn't how the game should be played in the long run. You can, but it's no really effective.

[D E C]

Sooo... you did exactly the same thing as me then? What did I describe differently? Of course I had the ports as ports, a couple of wine markets and brick makers thrown in or whatever but the great majority of the buildings is temples for food, temples for public order, agoras for food and agoras for public order. I'm telling you that it's impossible to have libraries level 4 and all the other buildings to be level 4. And why would they add those levels if they're kinda useless in reality? During the time I fiddled with the buildings I didn't have a problem or something, this is after I've won the game, no revolts, no garrisons, no agents, no anything. I just switched the provincial taxes, changed the buildings etc., I anticipated every change in public order and food. But it's not possible to have a diverse selection of buildings in the end.

From what I understand, he tried to have all the buildings fully upgraded because it's something he likes doing after a campaign. So with that in mind, I guess it could be possible that the only way to fully upgrade everything everywhere is to have the same pattern everywhere.

However, this isn't how the game should be played in the long run. You can, but it's no really effective.

That's exactly what I was saying. And obviously it's not effective. But why do they have it in the first place then?

[Razvus]

That's exactly what I was saying. And obviously it's not effective. But why do they have it in the first place then?

because they actually didn't intend to make them work like that, with everything upgraded. You're not supposed to upgrade every province to tier 4 buildings. You upgrade your core provinces and leave the border ones as underdeveloped farms and such. Not even upgrading the city itself (in the border ones) because of food consumption.

To some extent, this was done in Shogun 2 as well. You couldn't expand every settlement into a Citadel because of food consumption. In ROme 2, you have food and public order to worry about.

[♘Top Hat Zebra]

I don't think I understand what you mean.


If you have a few provinces devoted entirely to food, then you do not need food production in every province.

Similarly, if you have one or two provinces entirely devoted to recruiting troops, there is no need to have any more.

I then would fill the rest up with industry, misc. temples, entertainment buildings, etc. My problem with this, however, is that it is incredibly boring. There's no life to it. Why am I building a giant recruitment center in this backwater town? Well, because it's inefficient to build it in the capitol, because you can build a barracks anywhere, but you can't build an aqueduct anywhere BUT the capitol.

That system is so... Boring. It destroys my immersion, because I am always well aware that the reasons for doing things are arbitrary. They feel incredibly gamey. Im not building a barracks in that town because it has a high population of able-bodied potential soldiers. Im building it there because it's efficient according to the rules of the video game.

Sigh, but I digress. This is simply one of my most hated design decisions for this game.


Back on topic to the OP, I don't really know what you're talking about, I must be misunderstanding you.

[D E C]

because they actually didn't intend to make them work like that, with everything upgraded. You're not supposed to upgrade every province to tier 4 buildings. You upgrade your core provinces and leave the border ones as underdeveloped farms and such. Not even upgrading the city itself (in the border ones) because of food consumption.

To some extent, this was done in Shogun 2 as well. You couldn't expand every settlement into a Citadel because of food consumption. In ROme 2, you have food and public order to worry about.

Top Hat Zebra - well I guess it's just you and kriss in that regard. Now - it's pretty obvious that you can build what you want in every province and leave it at level two and you won't have any problems. But what's the point of having an empire then? What if you're the Romans and you want to develop your provinces, to show the conquered Barbarians some big shiny marble buildings etc.? That's a pretty big role playing element here that for me turned into a minigame of micromanagement. And for Christ's sake already, it's not about winning the game, I know how to win the game - the game is won with planning and blitzing and agression and dodgy tactis in the first few turns, not with buildings. It's about roleplaying, you know - putting those graphics to work, the same way you developed your buildings in the first Rome and looked at the cool 2D cards.

[♘Top Hat Zebra]

I agree. That's why I don't like it. It went from immersive role playing feature, to minigame. And that's not fun.

[Razvus]

I don't know, I was able to roleplay the moment quite well. The conquered provinces are just smaller images of Rome, that's how I saw it. One province might have the tier 4 gladiator arena, but a tier 1 city because it's mostly farmland from there. A recruitment center would have a high-tier city level with military buildings and less space for proper industry or farms. I think I have a high-tier building in each province, but with different roles.

I look at my own history, Dacia. We were conquered by the romans but we don't have any ruins of a great Colosseum or Hippodrome, or other grand buildings. We had gold mines in the region and the romans took advantage of that, but they didn't build a city of Rome's level to show their greatness. The only notable structure was the bridge over the Danube.

It depends on how you see things. You want to roleplay the idea of showing the barbarians the greatness of Rome by building large cities in the conquered provinces. I saw it mostly about building Rome and Italy as a whole into great provinces, by milking the border regions of wealth and food.

[Keyser]

Yep, i agree with Razvus, the game wasn't designed to have maximum level cities and buildings everywhere. Quite the opposite in fact.
It's cool though that if you want, you can (albeit, with the same pattern everywhere).

IMO, while it's a limiting gameplay decision, it's better than the Rome 1 one where with enough time you could upgrade every city to the maximum. It could be a valuable achievment for a player a sense of being a great ruler, but in real life it didn't work like that.
Not all provinces were rich with an opulent city. Those could be counted on one hand, Rome, Carthage, Antioch, Alexandria and latter Constantinople.

There were big cities elsewhere, but in game terms they would be level 2 or 3 at best. For each roman archeological site with great buildings, there are countless small towns with the bare minimum and dirt roads.
In France we have great roman ruins in some places, but most of the country was rural estates with the minimum infrastructure.
Africa was full of rich cities (of wich we have many ruins in good shape to visit) but also full of adobe towns.

[AngryTitusPullo]

Yes. The game now is about balance. You can't have everything the same everywhere. Even if we look into history, why is Africa and Egypt important to Rome ? Because that's where the grain came from.

[SpinSta]

I agree with the people who feel the new system is a better representation of how an empire actually functioned. The main capital provinces and cities were the most grand and elaborate, with the border provinces having some structures that had the opulence of the capital, but was like a mirror reflection and reminder to the people about the greatness of the ruling empire.

Ancient day propaganda.

What I don't like is the lifeless-ness of the UI itself in regards to buildings and cities. It's just different colored cards with some stats on the side. I think something that could have been added was 'city view' (they had it originally in RTW, but I personally never used it until very recently). In that game it was kinda funny (also you couldn't do it as any other faction), but given this new game's MUCH superior graphics, I think it would be pretty cool to be able to go into a settlement and have a look around, with all the peasants and what not going about their business.

I would take it a step further and have that the player would be given control to actually do CITY PLANNING, and put down buildings in certain locations and such. Also if there were to be a general garrisoned, you could see the general in the game walking through the streets and stuff. I would love to walk into Alesia (modern day France) and just stroll around the markets, or maybe have my general patrol through the slums of Roma, with plebs.

It would not really change anything in the game, but would add to the immersion a lot, given how poor things are in regards to actual empire maintenance and not just expansion.

[D E C]

Alright, I can see your perspective. Personally, I think the fact that a FARM removes 10 public order is a beyond ridiculous way to limit your building options. It just doesn't really look like real city planning to me.

And yeah, the cards are pretty confusing, esp for the Barbarians, you can't understand what kind of building do they represent and what do those buildings do. The bardic circle is built from a farm? And it ads technology research? How does that make any sense?

[SpinSta]

Alright, I can see your perspective. Personally, I think the fact that a FARM removes 10 public order is a beyond ridiculous way to limit your building options. It just doesn't really look like real city planning to me.

And yeah, the cards are pretty confusing, esp for the Barbarians, you can't understand what kind of building do they represent and what do those buildings do. The bardic circle is built from a farm? And it ads technology research? How does that make any sense?

The different building types are meant to replicate how those factions would have functioned in real life, I think. Like the civilized factions get security against agent actions by buildings better wells and aqueducts (so poisoning doesn't cripple a lot of people) and the barbs do it through shrines (which reminds the populance of the ancestors and nullifies the effect of cultural propaganda).

Farms (and nature, generally) were the life and blood of the tribes of Gaul and Germania. They created vast and highly decorative pieces of gold, intricately carved and beautiful. This came as a shock to most people who single-mindedly followed the Roman history of the times, that these 'barbarians' can make so much stuff.

But the Gallic tribes thought that gold was the blood of the Gods, coming out from the womb of the earth, giving divine light. They were not seperated from the lands, and all wisdom and knowledge came from the lands. It's not quite hard to image that all their great technologies came about from druidic meetings in fields.

Also farms are one of the most important structures you can build in any settlement. I don't recall any faction being able to build farms in a capital, but the barbs can. Why? Because the farm is your starting point to creating anything. They can be upgraded to give more gold, more research, more provience growth, more food lol.

This new system of empire diversification is really innovative and I quite like it. It also means that if you capture an upgraded settlement from a faction not of your culture, all of it's buildings are pretty much useless to you. In the original RTW it was much more simpler, building A will give you outcome B, copy paste to all factions.

The only thing I REALLY cringe about is the presentation of all of this. Instead of giving guiding videos, or even good pictures with pop-up info which you could expand into a PROPER encyclopedia (god it's horrible), it just give you cards with different colors which you have to study to make any real sense of. And how does it reward your sense of curiosity. More cards. Oh the joy.