Turned off buildings and unit production

It is a bug, but fixing the bug itself will not fix the exploit. We may decide to just prohibit to turn buildings off and maybe to give opportunity to destroy them completely with some reduction of the city population instead.

give opportunity to destroy them completely with some reduction of the city population instead.

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I think this is a better solution.

How about timers? A delay of 1-2 days or of an amount of time needed to build it originally, between clicking at interface button and actually turning it on\off. In example, if player want to turn off vampire mansion, he'll need to wait a 1 or a few more days till it will be turned off. Then if later SUDDENLY he needs to hire vampires, so he turn it on in the interface and waits few turns before it can became functional.
Or maybe this suggestion only adds useless micromanagement

I would like the ability to destroy buildings outright, but without the population penalty. Or a minimal population penalty? If it was, say, 500 population that is many, many turns of growth for a larger city you've captured- especially if it is a different race.

I also personally like the time delay option, but if implemented I foresee a lot of complaints about micro-managing and "remembering" to do things. This game prioritized fast turns and decisions- the time delay reactivate/deactivate runs counter to that. There are already complaints about how long it takes to manage 30+ cities, after all.

Polite_Orc said:

How about timers? A delay of 1-2 days or of an amount of time needed to build it originally, between clicking at interface button and actually turning it on\off. In example, if player want to turn off vampire mansion, he'll need to wait a 1 or a few more days till it will be turned off. Then if later SUDDENLY he needs to hire vampires, so he turn it on in the interface and waits few turns before it can became functional.
Or maybe this suggestion only adds useless micromanagement

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For sudden units there are summons. I doubt this will be an issue. Also, I'd say upgrade buildings are much more likely target for temporary disabling and you don't need them suddenly.

My vote for ability to destroy buildings. It's also very useful for tuning conquered cities.

stealthnsk said:

My vote for ability to destroy buildings. It's also very useful for tuning conquered cities.

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Alexy mentioned a population cost to destroying buildings. What do you (and others!) think would be a good cost and why? I would think 3 or four turns of population growth would be fine (so it would scale to the city affected), but wonder if others think that too low...

I like the idea of being able to destroy your own buildings but it needs to have a cost associated with it and losing say 500 pop from a city is not enough in many circumstances to not make it an obvious strategic choice. For instance you might decide in the early game that you only need and can realistically only support 3 vampires in the middle game, so you build the mansion and churn out the 3 vampires (takes 12 turns) and then you junk the mansion and build a bank, thereby saving a load of gold from the mansion upkeep and gaining a load from the bank to fund the upkeep and perks you want to buy. I don't want to feel I have to go through this procedure every time I play Undead to "optimise" my strategy, I want another more tangible cost than losing a few population for a city that is still growing at a fair rate at say size 7.

I suggest that junking a building should either have a gold cost as well (for instant destruction) or a time cost which slows down the rate of changing buildings in a city. The gold cost could be (say) 10 times their upkeep cost (so farms cost nothing but a military academy costs 100 gold). The time cost could be that it takes the same time to demolish a building as it does to build it, and you can only either build or demolish a building at any one time, not both. That way big expensive buildings which usually have the highest upkeep also have the longest demolish times. Maybe both these disinsentives are needed and we should have a gold cost (based on upkeep) and a demolish delay based on build time, what do others think?

JJ

EDIT: I think that having all three costs of population loss, gold cost and time delay is the ideal way to stop players doing this too frequently. The different costs all impact on diffent types of cities in different circumstances making the choice not an obvious one in every situation.

Large cities will be most impacted by the population loss as the value of the other buildings with their nultipliers make the cost trivial and building things is rare in large cities that have been owned for a long time, so waiting a few turns to demolish one building and build another is not so bad.

For small cities with fast growth then the loss of population is easily recovered but the delay in demolishing and then building another building could impact on normal building.

The Apprentice said:

I would like the ability to destroy buildings outright, but without the population penalty. Or a minimal population penalty? If it was, say, 500 population that is many, many turns of growth for a larger city you've captured- especially if it is a different race.

I also personally like the time delay option, but if implemented I foresee a lot of complaints about micro-managing and "remembering" to do things. This game prioritized fast turns and decisions- the time delay reactivate/deactivate runs counter to that. There are already complaints about how long it takes to manage 30+ cities, after all.

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One of the problems is when you capture a city, and find that the building that survive are all things you don't want such as forts, and high level buildings without their required building - not much point in a mint in a city that has no other money producing buildings.

Given that building buildings is free - you just need the population - there needs to be some cost to destroying a building, otherwise you can freely re-develop.
I would be inclined to say
1. You can't destroy a building that is required by another building you have unless you have more than one of the building.
2. It takes time to destroy it - the same time to build.
3. While it is being destroyed you don't pay maintenance, you can't use it, you can't build something else and you can't knock down another building.
4. You loose a small amount of population, say 10 for each building you have. If a building is missing any prerequisite then there is no population cost.

Then fixing a city you have just captured is relatively cheap, but a moderate change takes some time and slows growth, and a significant working of a very large city takes a substantial amount of time and may cost it a population level.

The Apprentice said:

Alexy mentioned a population cost to destroying buildings. What do you (and others!) think would be a good cost and why? I would think 3 or four turns of population growth would be fine (so it would scale to the city affected), but wonder if think that too low...

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The building destruction will lead to some exploits like building Mine on Gems first and replace it with upgrade building once your economy is in shape. So, I think the penalty should be large enough to let people think before doing this. 1 city level would be good to try and see.

Interesting~
-The Time Cost makes absolute sense. Tying the time cost of demolishing to the original build time is simple, and would reduce confusion among players. It also prevents players from inst-changing a unit production city into a mana-producing one, for example. Another benefit of allowing only one "demolish" action per city is to keep the turns brisk.

-For the gold cost, I think a flat amount is better for simplicity. Depending on map size, 100 gold can mean a decision between starting a unit, upgrading a unit tier, buying an upgrade, or demolishing a building. That would help make it a real choice as opposed to "something you always do to play well."

-For population cost, 500 seems way to high to me. For a larger city (where players will be more likely to demolish), that could easily be 10 turns of growth! More if the city is a different race. On the other hand, a loss of 10 seems too small to matter.

It should be possible to destroy buildings whose prerequisites have been destroyed for no cost. However, turned-off buildings should not allow their units to be build or the next building in their chain to be built. To be honest the best thing to do here is probably to tweak the destroy-buildings-when-city-falls function to remove higher-tier buildings before their lower-tier prerequisite.

I'm not sure any other buildings should be destroyable, too many exploits. Perhaps you could be allowed to destroy buildings the turn you capture a city at some small cost. I don't think you should be able to turn off buildings like you can now either.

I don't see how the ability to destroy a building = "too many exploits." It would enable more efficient city optimization- but if that is allowed by the game mechanics, how is it an exploit? Part of the game is balancing resource production cities with unit production cities.

Allowing players to mandate urban renewal as conditions across the empire change is another tool to tweak that balance. I can see concerns that it will slow down the game (players can revisit decisions that were previously set in stone), but exploits?

stealthnsk said:

The building destruction will lead to some exploits like building Mine on Gems first and replace it with upgrade building once your economy is in shape. So, I think the penalty should be large enough to let people think before doing this. 1 city level would be good to try and see.

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I don't see this as an exploit, but efficient use of resources over time.

The Apprentice said:

I don't see this as an exploit, but efficient use of resources over time.

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If it will be cheap to destroy building, it would be no-brain choice, requiring a lot of micromanagement. That's not fun. Switching building on resources should have some pain, so players will consider this carefully.

stealthnsk said:

If it will be cheap to destroy building, it would be no-brain choice, requiring a lot of micromanagement. That's not fun. Switching building on resources should have some pain, so players will consider this carefully.

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"No-brain choice." Hah- I like that.

Yes, if the demolish option allowed for instant/single-turn swaps, it would add a lot of micro to play "optimally." Over time, I wouldn't find that fun, and I suspect many others wouldn't either. I wouldn't call it an exploit per se, but I see what you mean.

I think UncleJJ is right on, the costs need to be high enough to prevent abusing the feature to gain big advantages. Or, if not high costs, then some other method to prevent things like his example of producing units from high-cost buildings and then junking those buildings.

But absolutely the ability to demolish buildings, if implemented in a balanced way, would be pretty cool and useful.