Do we really need building limit depending on devolpment?

[Reman]

On topic, I think we can all agree that the building problem is in reality a courthouse problem. Tall players want there building slot to keep it's value and wide players want to reduce click fatigue. A simple fix would be for courthouse only to not use a slot.

A more complex solution would be to have a checkbox in the bulding macromenu that allow new bulding to trash another one to make place for it. It should be made to always trash the lowest value bulding. Usefull for both courthouse and manufactories spam.

It's definitely not just a courthouse issue. Courthouses are merely the most obvious problem since you'll be spamming them so much in optimized play and the AI never, ever builds them.

A similar issue arises with cathedrals if you're going for a one faith. I did this in my most recent Mughals game, and I'd reckon that something like 30% of provinces didn't have room. This problem also cropped up for furnaces, although the clicking wasn't quite as bad there since coal is so rare.

Building limits don't do much of anything to wide players other than give annoyance. The simple answer would be to remove them. If the devs really think building limits are important for balance, I'd be OK with a building-deletion tab on the macrobuilder. Heck, I'd settle for a button that simply deletes every shipyard, dock, and naval battery in your realm.

 

[makaramus]

It's definitely not just a courthouse issue. Courthouses are merely the most obvious problem since you'll be spamming them so much in optimized play and the AI never, ever builds them.

A similar issue arises with cathedrals if you're going for a one faith. I did this in my most recent Mughals game, and I'd reckon that something like 30% of provinces didn't have room. This problem also cropped up for furnaces, although the clicking wasn't quite as bad there since coal is so rare.

Building limits don't do much of anything to wide players other than give annoyance. The simple answer would be to remove them. If the devs really think building limits are important for balance, I'd be OK with a building-deletion tab on the macrobuilder. Heck, I'd settle for a button that simply deletes every shipyard, dock, and naval battery in your realm.

and other than that I want to point out elephant in the room: Removing this limit does no harm since you will NEVER build anything other than courthouse to a shitty desert with 1/1/1 devolpment that is producing livestock
maybe you may build manufactory IF you built it everywere else or courthouse, again, if you built it everywere else

 

[Manwe_Sulimo]

Personally I think its a good idea to have such a limitation, as you need to make more strategic choices with buildings and cannot just build every building everywhere. While value for money is a thing, there are also a lot of flat modifiers - having a +2 / +4 force limit building in every province kind of makes that all non-sensical. I think the choice should go beyond "is the building worth the 100 gold"?
The new manufactories buildings where the choice is even harder are a very interesting addition.

Question is if the values are still correct - especially in terrain that is less favourable towards buildings. There are now more buildings available in general and most importantly courthouses are now far more important. Increasing the base value by one would reduce the problem.
I'd appreciate an option to delete buildings by type in the macro-builder as well.

 

[cetvrtak]

Why should a shipyard prevent me from building a courthouse?

Why should a shipyard prevent me from building another shipyard?

Buildings are a joke. Their value and usefulness assessment is either trivial (temples) or a pain in the ass (manufacturies).

Unless, you're not min-maxing. Then they're just pretty pictures.

 

[EarlKonrad]

Personally I think its a good idea to have such a limitation, as you need to make more strategic choices with buildings and cannot just build every building everywhere. While value for money is a thing, there are also a lot of flat modifiers - having a +2 / +4 force limit building in every province kind of makes that all non-sensical. I think the choice should go beyond "is the building worth the 100 gold"?
The new manufactories buildings where the choice is even harder are a very interesting addition.

Question is if the values are still correct - especially in terrain that is less favourable towards buildings. There are now more buildings available in general and most importantly courthouses are now far more important. Increasing the base value by one would reduce the problem.
I'd appreciate an option to delete buildings by type in the macro-builder as well.

As others have said, most of the buildings aren't worth building in most provinces anyway unless they already have 10 Dev and 0 Autonomy so removing building limit wouldn't change much, if anything. Ducats and ROI are already the main constraints when choosing what to build and where.

Now, regarding the ship/FL buildings, why are they an issue exactly? In SP you are never hurting for FL if you have enough ducats to increase your FL by buildings barracks (I think that's the name of the FL building). It could be different in MP but I have next to none experience with that game mode so I won't say anything regarding it.

Now for naval FL. It is an absolute joke -- simple as that. If you need more ships than your FL can support than you will either just build them anyway because the ducat cost for going over naval FL is so very small or you won't have enough sailors to support a larger navy. I find that sailors are always my naval soft cap and that I never have to worry about naval FL. You either have enough sailors or you don't.

So, how would removing the building slots really affect the game?

Why should a shipyard prevent me from building another shipyard?

Buildings are a joke. Their value and usefulness assessment is either trivial (temples) or a pain in the ass (manufacturies).

Unless, you're not min-maxing. Then they're just pretty pictures.

The building system is an absolute joke. I'm the type of guy who loves RTS' and city building games but I don't mind having an abstract building system if it better suits the game (like in EU4's case). That said, EU4's take on buildings isn't really an abstraction nor "immersive". It just is.

You can only build one of each building per province, meaning that you are either building A Building in a city (which brings up the issue that you deal with provinces and not cities) or you are building one heck of A Building in the province capital. I think that the first option is much more plausible when you take into account how City used to be part of EU's terminology and the line between city and province was much more blurred back in EU3.

Gameplay wise, buildings serve two functions: A) increase resources as time goes by (ducats, manpower, naval power, trade power); B) make stuff cheaper (Dev cost and GC). The existence of building slots constrain the system too much as it is always more efficient to build manufactury -> courthouse -> workshop -> temple/fort -> everything else. You already get a poor ROI and things like trade power and manpower can be acquired easier and cheaper by other means than buildings so why even bother with those options most of the times?

And then you get the issue of having to delete buildings per province and not having an easy way of knowing what is built where and having to navigate through menus to find stuff. Granted the macro builder is good but it leaves much to be desired.

All in all most buildings only exist to exponentially increase your ducat income and the rest as situational at best.

I still miss EU3's unique builds which you could only have one of each and they would give you some cool stuff like more diplomats, prestige, army and naval tradition, etc.

 

[cetvrtak]

EU4's take on buildings isn't really an abstraction nor "immersive". It just is.

Yeah, it just gives player the feeling of importance. "Ooh, look at that, I'm managing my empire". It fills the void between wars, but not much more than that.

I still miss EU3's unique builds which you could only have one of each and they would give you some cool stuff like more diplomats, prestige, army and naval tradition, etc.

Remember how the Embassy would get deleted if it was no longer in a border province. I loved it.

I remember making a mini mod to help out the AI calculate ROI and build the economic buildings via events. It was 1000s of lines of code.

 

[makaramus]

Personally I think its a good idea to have such a limitation, as you need to make more strategic choices with buildings and cannot just build every building everywhere. While value for money is a thing, there are also a lot of flat modifiers - having a +2 / +4 force limit building in every province kind of makes that all non-sensical. I think the choice should go beyond "is the building worth the 100 gold"?
The new manufactories buildings where the choice is even harder are a very interesting addition.

Question is if the values are still correct - especially in terrain that is less favourable towards buildings. There are now more buildings available in general and most importantly courthouses are now far more important. Increasing the base value by one would reduce the problem.
I'd appreciate an option to delete buildings by type in the macro-builder as well.

about that, we can make such buildings like force limit granting still require devolpment to be built and make them limited since they dont care about devolpment (smilarly manufactories.)
in fact it should take same slot with manufactories and cost smiler to them for much more man power
So if you got devolpment after building manufactory you can build other buildings that cost 500 too

 

[Manwe_Sulimo]

The question on what it actually represents - complicated. I don't think you could see it as a single building in some cases (there are probably dozens of market places, churches, workshops and so on in a single province), but in others it probalby only represents just one big building: shipyards, forts, .... If you want an explanation, it would probably need to abstracted as an investment in a specific type of buildings / infrastructure in a province.

For me its quite logical that you can't have unlimited buildings, as the resources are limited, such as staff (including food for them), power (firewood, waterwheels on a river, ...). In a 1/1/1 desert province there are not enough resources to have everything there.

The limit requires you to make certain choices whether you want to invest in one field or another. ROI might already make that choice in some cases, but not in all. Its also more obvious as ROI, without it especially newer players might be lured into dumping money into useless buildings. And regarding force limit buildings: force limits get already inflated by a lot as you grow, allowing you to have an additional +1 for every stated province would make it even less restrictive. The naval at least gives ship building / repair speed.
From my experience the Naval FL can be a limitation if you need to exceed it with something else than galleys, less often than sailors though.
Those buildings might require a rework indeed, making them a manufactory type seems to be an overkill though. Maybe just double cost + benefit? That would allow tall nations to keep up with the FL easier.

I also don't think the system is awful or "a joke", of course its not as fleshed out as in Anno, SimCity or Stronghold Crusader, but EU4 is a different kind of game and I think for that the level of detail fits well. Its not the most exciting feature, but fulfills its purpose about giving you some internal / economic management.
What do you mean with an abstract building system? Have abstract global (or state-based) numbers like "you have upgraded your taxation / conscription authorities to level 3 (in state X)?"?

 

[EarlKonrad]

The question on what it actually represents - complicated. I don't think you could see it as a single building in some cases (there are probably dozens of market places, churches, workshops and so on in a single province), but in others it probalby only represents just one big building: shipyards, forts, .... If you want an explanation, it would probably need to abstracted as an investment in a specific type of buildings / infrastructure in a province.

For me its quite logical that you can't have unlimited buildings, as the resources are limited, such as staff (including food for them), power (firewood, waterwheels on a river, ...). In a 1/1/1 desert province there are not enough resources to have everything there.

The limit requires you to make certain choices whether you want to invest in one field or another. ROI might already make that choice in some cases, but not in all. Its also more obvious as ROI, without it especially newer players might be lured into dumping money into useless buildings. And regarding force limit buildings: force limits get already inflated by a lot as you grow, allowing you to have an additional +1 for every stated province would make it even less restrictive. The naval at least gives ship building / repair speed.
From my experience the Naval FL can be a limitation if you need to exceed it with something else than galleys, less often than sailors though.
Those buildings might require a rework indeed, making them a manufactory type seems to be an overkill though. Maybe just double cost + benefit? That would allow tall nations to keep up with the FL easier.

I also don't think the system is awful or "a joke", of course its not as fleshed out as in Anno, SimCity or Stronghold Crusader, but EU4 is a different kind of game and I think for that the level of detail fits well. Its not the most exciting feature, but fulfills its purpose about giving you some internal / economic management.
What do you mean with an abstract building system? Have abstract global (or state-based) numbers like "you have upgraded your taxation / conscription authorities to level 3 (in state X)?"?

Reason why I called it a joke is because the buildings only exist to convert ducats into more ducats, FL, trade power or sailors/manpower, GC and dev reduction. They aren't contextualized at all in-game and there is next to none strategy involving buildings and build limits. Some buildings are generally far superior than others at making money, courthouses are a must and the other ones are either extremely situational or only useful in MP or if you don't want to expand. Granted, 1.30 shook it up a bit with the new manu. buildings but it also served to show the issues with the system and how much we need an easier way of deleting buildings.

EU4 does suffer from a lack of meaningful options when you learn what are the optimal strategies and nowhere is this more apparent than in the buildings. Meanwhile there is some diversity of choice when it comes to government reforms, idea group choices and even religions (to an extant) but buildings? There isn't really a reason to deviate from the manu. -> workshop/courthouse rule. Also, they are all tech locked so you always know when you will unlock the next big upgrade and can save your ducats accordingly to mass build the next upgrade which also incentivize you to rush certain techs.

To reiterate, buildings aren't contextualized. They have no description and the only thing coming close to describe what they are meant to represent is their name and, to a lesse extent, the tech in which they are unlocked. Again, compare them to the ideas. Each idea has a short description which helps the player understand why they are getting so and so bonuses. This is a very small thing but it helps to contextualize why you are getting that bonus. So, what is the act of building a market supposed to represent? Is it the government giving money to the locals authorities to build a market? A network of markets? Is it just a building or are you strengthening the local economy? Who knows? The game not telling you means that we the players can create whatever sort of explanation we want and can each have our now reasoning for why the building do what it does which I don't think is good as it makes it difficult for the players to agree on what the hell the abstraction (in this case building a building) is meant to represent.

Now compare the regular buildings to TC investments. Investments work much more like the old system from early EU 4's history (Oh, the irony) in that buildings have multiple bonuses and you can select a "super buildings" to build in the region (Trade Company Chart) that will give you some nice bonus but also lock all the other "special buildings" from being built in that region. I'd say this system is much more interesting than the one used for regular buildings but, in good EU fashion, it suffers from poor UI and bad balancing with most buildings not being worthwhile investments and it being hidden away in an obscure part of the UI.

Lastly, regarding the FL building. mid-late game FL is already rather high so I don't see how spamming FL buildings would be an issue even if they were slot free in the current iteration of the game. Keep in mind that by 1600 your main bottleneck is ducats and not FL so even if you could afford to spam 200 ducats everywhere that gave you +1 FL and had quantity for another +50% FL, you would still be limited by your army upkeep rather than your FL, to say nothing about how you could have spent those 200 ducats on 10 infantry units instead of increasing your FL by a whopping 2.

 

[Barbu]

The limit is fine. Wide play is too rewarding as it is already. The problem (it's been mentioned previously by another poster) is that there's no equivalent to the macro builder when it comes to destroying or checking your options in fully built up provinces.

 

[BlazeKnight_]

This is an awful idea because many buildings provide flat bonuses. If you want to extract the most out of your provinces, a building cap is one of the things that stops you from doing that. This is obviously broken in MP; you can get a Manufactory, Workshop, Manpower, FL, Sailors, Naval FL only after devving flat terrain to 30 and rough terrain to 40. Removing building caps lets players get stacked even faster and build more, like even courthouses, markets, and churches. Removing building caps solely because "micro" is a bad idea - it exists for a reason.

A building manager would be cool though, to prevent unnecessary clicking. You could just allow people to select the building in the buildings tab and destroy them by clicking on the blue provinces.

 

[Sidolowka]

A building manager would be cool though, to prevent unnecessary clicking. You could just allow people to select the building in the buildings tab and destroy them by clicking on the blue provinces.

I would gladly wait for an indefinite amount of time if the SEA/NA/Religion/whatever patch brings us a bunch of QoL upgrades like this. I've just about had enough of manually deleting drydocks in every single coastal province I conquer.

'Estate Diet Available' alert when?

 

[LSF]

That's the least of Talk's advantage over Wide. Tall doesn't have to deal with OE, AE, wrong culture nor religion, much less admin spent on coring, quicker government reforms, etc.

Well, I was thinking about econony.

Anyway your statement that Tall doesnt need to worry about AE is plainly wrong. Tall can be expansionist through vassals, marches, colonies and tributaries. For that reason the statement Tall doesnt need to worry about rebels is wrong as well.

My funniest WC was playing Tall, I just unified India and then I went making vassals like crazy. It was the WC in which I fough more coalition wars. I also had to deal with really many rebels (you know, because AI sucks and cant deal with them effectively when they are too many).

I also had to deal with religion, sending my missionaries to my vassals and spamming cathedrals.

You are right about saving mana because not coring or annexing. But still in my example, I had to spend a lot of DIP mana with conquests for my vassals, as well as lots of mana to keep my vassal happy. It is not easy to keep low LD of a dozen vassals when most have more than 1,000 dev.

It was my funniest and hardest WC.

Playing Tall just means the player's tag doesnt get too big. But player still can DoW, can generate AE, can generate unrest, can deal with religion... All of that in a way less efficient than a Wide would get.

 

[Styria]

If they removed the provincal building cap, maybe they could introduce a state limit for buildings. Like, only a certain number of certain buildings could be built in a state. One cathedral, one courthouse, up to three shipyards, etc. It would make states have a more important role in state management, anyway.

 

[Malecord]

Before emperor I would have said that although sensible (having a fortress in a city doesn't prevent you to build a market nearby) building limit is good because it forces choices on you.

However after emperor you now are restricted to one building among several manufactures with all kind of specialization. So yeah, building limit can go away. You're still forced to choose what a province will be good at (manpower, defense, production, governing capacity, etc).

A compromise would be to let defense building not consume slots like universities.

 

[EarlKonrad]

Playing Tall just means the player's tag doesnt get too big. But player still can DoW, can generate AE, can generate unrest, can deal with religion... All of that in a way less efficient than a Wide would get.

And herein lies one of my issues with the terms "Wide" and "Tall" -- the lack of a clear consensus in what constitutes wide play and what constitutes tall play. You said that to you tall is indirect expansion via vassals and not conquering much land directly. If this is your definition, faitlr enough but I'd call this playing wide but making heavy use of vassals (and here I'm lumping together all types of subject nations as vassals).

To me playing tall has more to do with not expanding much, both directly and indirectly. Rather than getting stronger via expansion you get stronger via deving.

I won't delve into this topic because it is outside of the scope of this thread.

 

[makaramus]

This is an awful idea because many buildings provide flat bonuses. If you want to extract the most out of your provinces, a building cap is one of the things that stops you from doing that. This is obviously broken in MP; you can get a Manufactory, Workshop, Manpower, FL, Sailors, Naval FL only after devving flat terrain to 30 and rough terrain to 40. Removing building caps lets players get stacked even faster and build more, like even courthouses, markets, and churches. Removing building caps solely because "micro" is a bad idea - it exists for a reason.

A building manager would be cool though, to prevent unnecessary clicking. You could just allow people to select the building in the buildings tab and destroy them by clicking on the blue provinces.

ok here are the all buildings with flat values I know
manufactories(all of them with same category)
force limit buildings
first of all:NO ONE BUILDS FORCE LIMIT BUILDINGS AND IF THEY DO THEY DO IT AT 0 DEVOLPMENT LANDS ANYWAY!
THEY ARE NOT GONNA BUILD A CHURCH AT SAHARA DESERT!
we can put a devolpment limit to buildings with flat bonuses I said this before too I am fine with it we allready got this in game(you can only own one MAJOR building... we can make force limit buildings give 10 forcelimit each and make them another major building too)
we can have both building limit AND not have it if we want. EU CURRENTLY, LITERALLY AS PART OF GAME, got technology to manage it. In fact I can make a mod of it and I never made an EU4 mod(I did modes for other games... but all I have to do is to unlock all building slots but remove forcelimit buildings and replace them with manufactory building that incrase force limit) I am just not confident if I can mod in the part that allows you to build more manufactories as you get more devolpment.
edit:Never mind, just realized I can do second part by removing their limit but instead of incrasing building slot permenantly I can just give a building slot to buildings themselves like univercities... yea... I myself can do it game has this inside allready its not even a rework question just balance question

 

[Manwe_Sulimo]

Reason why I called it a joke is because the buildings only exist to convert ducats into more ducats, FL, trade power or sailors/manpower, GC and dev reduction. They aren't contextualized at all in-game and there is next to none strategy involving buildings and build limits. Some buildings are generally far superior than others at making money, courthouses are a must and the other ones are either extremely situational or only useful in MP or if you don't want to expand. Granted, 1.30 shook it up a bit with the new manu. buildings but it also served to show the issues with the system and how much we need an easier way of deleting buildings.

EU4 does suffer from a lack of meaningful options when you learn what are the optimal strategies and nowhere is this more apparent than in the buildings. Meanwhile there is some diversity of choice when it comes to government reforms, idea group choices and even religions (to an extant) but buildings? There isn't really a reason to deviate from the manu. -> workshop/courthouse rule. Also, they are all tech locked so you always know when you will unlock the next big upgrade and can save your ducats accordingly to mass build the next upgrade which also incentivize you to rush certain techs.

To reiterate, buildings aren't contextualized. They have no description and the only thing coming close to describe what they are meant to represent is their name and, to a lesse extent, the tech in which they are unlocked. Again, compare them to the ideas. Each idea has a short description which helps the player understand why they are getting so and so bonuses. This is a very small thing but it helps to contextualize why you are getting that bonus. So, what is the act of building a market supposed to represent? Is it the government giving money to the locals authorities to build a market? A network of markets? Is it just a building or are you strengthening the local economy? Who knows? The game not telling you means that we the players can create whatever sort of explanation we want and can each have our now reasoning for why the building do what it does which I don't think is good as it makes it difficult for the players to agree on what the hell the abstraction (in this case building a building) is meant to represent.

Now compare the regular buildings to TC investments. Investments work much more like the old system from early EU 4's history (Oh, the irony) in that buildings have multiple bonuses and you can select a "super buildings" to build in the region (Trade Company Chart) that will give you some nice bonus but also lock all the other "special buildings" from being built in that region. I'd say this system is much more interesting than the one used for regular buildings but, in good EU fashion, it suffers from poor UI and bad balancing with most buildings not being worthwhile investments and it being hidden away in an obscure part of the UI.

Lastly, regarding the FL building. mid-late game FL is already rather high so I don't see how spamming FL buildings would be an issue even if they were slot free in the current iteration of the game. Keep in mind that by 1600 your main bottleneck is ducats and not FL so even if you could afford to spam 200 ducats everywhere that gave you +1 FL and had quantity for another +50% FL, you would still be limited by your army upkeep rather than your FL, to say nothing about how you could have spent those 200 ducats on 10 infantry units instead of increasing your FL by a whopping 2.

OK I agree with the contextualisation, there is really zero lore behind them.
From a gameplay perspective your first sentence says it though imo, you can convert ducats into more ducats (via several paths), or a number of other things. In principle that is a valid concept. The devil is in the details. The land force limit buildings just raise the FL far too little for whatever reason, could probably be tripled and would still be OK, or at least add some addtional benefits.

No one builds FL buildings? I find myself building at least a couple of the naval buildings in most games. Also forts are also a "flat" modifier and whether you build the trade buildings depends more on estuaries and centres of trade then on the province development. You will also often have provinces where the dev justifies production, tax and manpower buildings without enough slots for all.

 

[makaramus]

OK I agree with the contextualisation, there is really zero lore behind them.
From a gameplay perspective your first sentence says it though imo, you can convert ducats into more ducats (via several paths), or a number of other things. In principle that is a valid concept. The devil is in the details. The land force limit buildings just raise the FL far too little for whatever reason, could probably be tripled and would still be OK, or at least add some addtional benefits.

No one builds FL buildings? I find myself building at least a couple of the naval buildings in most games. Also forts are also a "flat" modifier and whether you build the trade buildings depends more on estuaries and centres of trade then on the province development. You will also often have provinces where the dev justifies production, tax and manpower buildings without enough slots for all.

I will ignore most of this since you also mentioned "you want to build devolpment based building" and people literally build them only if they are going tall(wide players dont run out of force limit either land or naval unless its first 50 years but even tall players expand during that years so doesnt count)
but... tell me, what does everything you wrote has to do with what I said? Yes I agree forts might be weird to balance but then lets be honest again:You dont spam them too since they defend their surroundings anyway. In fact AGAIN wide players, player group you think would benefit it too much so its dangerious to remove building limit, tends to not use forts and in fact DESTROY THEM so they wont consume more money. They only keep some forts at borders so AI cant siege their siberian region by being dumb.
so I agree forts are a problem but... are they really?

 

[Vohen]

Leaving aside my own opinion on the matter, I just want to point out that devs seem to consider building slots as very important, seeing how they are adding next patch the ability to add one to a single province for the cheap price of 200 GC (what a bargain!).