Imperator - Development Diary - 5th of August 2019

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Arheo

Game Director - Hearts of Iron
Paradox Staff
Feb 13, 2018
1.165
21.879
Greetings all!


Now that the summer hiatus is over, dev diaries for the Cicero update will be getting back into full swing, starting with the explanation of a few features that we've been tinkering with recently.


To start with, we’ll be taking a look at the introduction of the categorization of Territories. Prior to 1.2, all our base level administrative units were known as Cities. As part of the redesign here, our collective noun for these will now be Territories.


A Territory can be assigned any one of the following categories:


  • Settlement: Representing a sparsely populated area of land, settlements have penalties to output, migration speed, and poptype ratio. Settlements will only support one building, but will have their own unique set of powerful buildings, so you can specialize them accordingly.

  • City: Cities have a large bonus to population capacity, and will act as focal urban centers for your empire. Cities will be able to support all the buildings you’ve grown accustomed to in the Cicero beta thus far, but will feel a lot more unique as a result of their scarcity. Cities will also have a penalty to trade good production - they will tend to consume, rather than create, resources.

  • Metropolis: A metropolis can be designated when a city reaches a large number of pops, and are considered the peak of a city’s urban evolution. A metropolis will not have access to any unique buildings, but will improve living conditions for certain pop classes.

Settlement Buildings
  • Latifundia: 40% Local Slave Output, 25% Local Population Capacity. Latifundia are limited to territories where Mines are not applicable.
  • Mine: -5 Local Slaves Per Good, 25% Local Population Capacity. Requires Marble, Stone, Precious Metals, Base Metals or Iron.
  • Farm: +50% Local Food Modifier, -5 Local Slaves Per Good, -10% Freemen Ratio, 25% Local population Capacity. Requires Vegetables, Grain, Fish or Livestock.
  • Hill Fort: 20% Local Freemen Happiness, 40% Local Freemen Output, 25% Local Population Capacity.
  • Provincial Legation: 75% Migration Speed Modifier, 20% Local Pop Assimilation Speed.


As is appropriate for the era, cities will be able to be founded from settlements, allowing you to shape the world to your own desire.


An important part of this rework is the visual appearance of territories on the world map. Whereas previously, each territory showed buildings appropriate to the population of said territory, only Cities and Metropolises will now do so:


upload_2019-8-5_11-59-28.png



To accompany the cities rework, we are introducing a Food mechanic, to simulate the importance of a constant supply in the ancient world.


A modicum of food will be produced by all territories depending on their terrain type. Food itself will be stored on a Province level, and consumed by the pops living within the Province, based on their type.


In the beginning of the game, most Provinces will likely be able to sustain their own population, however, as the population of territories increase and more cities are founded, they will start taxing the food supply of a Province greatly.

This brings me to the more intriguing aspect of the food supply system. Various trade goods such as Grain, Fish, Livestock, and Vegetables, will now provide a flat increase to monthly food. These will be traded in the same way as before, however, the importance of these goods to large cities should not be understated. As a burgeoning urban area such as Latium begins to grow, more and more food will be needed to sustain the population there.


upload_2019-8-5_12-1-24.png



Of course, food is not solely a negative consideration. Province food storage can be enhanced by constructing granaries in constituent Cities or Metropolises. Bonuses to population growth and local defensiveness within the Province will be applied for every 12 months of stored food present in the Province Food Supply. Empires focusing on ‘wide play’ will not find the need to interact with this to a large degree, or at most, to focus on the core Provinces within their realm.


Naturally, food ties in strongly to warfare, with friendly units who would otherwise take attrition instead consuming a relative amount of food within a Province. Additionally, if a Province Capital falls to an enemy, they will be able to use the food supply to prevent attrition for their own troops.


Sieges, blockades, and occupation will reduce the food production of a Territory, which, in the case of Provincial Capitals, will also reduce any imported food, eventually starving a Province of its food supply. If supply reaches 0, a severe penalty will be applied to all cities within the state, rendering them much easier to siege, and increasing the migration speed of pops within the Province.

upload_2019-8-5_12-4-55.png


As a secondary consideration, being over the population capacity in a territory will no longer be quite as severe as it previously was. It will gradually decrease the migration attraction in a territory, and can be considered more of a soft cap than before.
 
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Have you considered to change the buildings from multipliers to be more realistic, like providing jobs? Building more training camps should not make all freemen in the city produce more manpower but instead do something like 10 more freemen can produce manpower.

What is actually going to stop players from moving massive amount of slaves to the settlements and make use of the settlement buildings now that pop cap is more a soft limit?
 
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Wouldnt it be better that instead of needing a base of 15 slaves to produce a trade good. We could have 1 slave produce a base of 0.067 trade good each.

That way a province with lets say 2 territories that produce the same trade good and thave 10 and 5 slaves respectively could produce a single trade good instead of none at all.
 
I like it! Would be nice to see some Metropolis unique buildings like palaces and whatnot
 
This all sounds good, so does this mean that if i am fighting my enemy and i occupy his landsz that theirs pops will slowly die off from hunger?

A bit like devastation and nation ruining from eu4, or loot and pillaging from ck2?

This would make prolonging wars and sieging lands more tactical.
 
Looking very good! i wonder when te next beta patch will drop ...


What is actually going to stop players from moving massive amount of slaves to the settlements and make use of the settlement buildings now that pop cap is more a soft limit?

I think its all about oportunity costs. You will be able to set up local food production quite nicely in this way, but those farming settlements wont have any output multipliers on them; they would make you more money if left in a city with town hall buildings (and workshops?), further, non-food resoruces are also good, espcially with mines, espcially for the first 1-2 extra goods in capital province and for export.

... high food production gives a bonus to growth, but i dont expect that to be very significant (0.03 per year stored or something), unless you really focus on it in very fertile lands in witch case it might actually make population growth feel like it matters. (imagine several full provinces with 10+ years food stored each?) ... even then though, without any multiplicative parameters in the pop growth formula, it wil always be hard to compund its value.
 
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Its odd that food dropping to 0 doesnt has massive negative growth effects. It doesnt seem like that big of a problem except that pops will start migrating. Yes oncw city will be reduced in size but another just as big will instantly emerge. Food starvation led to massive disease and death problems, it should be a big issue.

Secondly, I wish Megapolis had some unique buildings. If at least in the capital. By the way, what are the requirements to build a megapoli?I guess you just cant spam them everywhere and will need a certain pop number.

Lastly, doesnt sound like food availabilty has such a big impact on atrittion and the other way around, army attrition on food availabilty.

Very cool about settlements requiring some tradegoods. I wish the same for other buildings (papyrus for academies). By the way, what do you mean by city building being more limited and meaningful now? Is the building cap system changing?


And the most important question. Update way? PLEASE release it this week. I cant play without the food system now.

Have you considered to change the buildings from multipliers to be more realistic, like providing jobs? Building more training camps should not make all freemen in the city produce more manpower but instead do something like 10 more freemen can produce manpower.

What is actually going to stop players from moving massive amount of slaves to the settlements and make use of the settlement buildings now that pop cap is more a soft limit?

VERY much agreed. Its a simple an elegant way of ending many of the problems with the gamr with cash flood and endless manpower. Also make buildings and city building more meaningful. Pops will just produce effects as long as there is a building that allowes it. And 1 building gives effects to X number of pops.
 
Its odd that food dropping to 0 doesnt has massive negative growth effects. It doesnt seem like that big of a problem except that pops will start migrating. Yes oncw city will be reduced in size but another just as big will instantly emerge. Food starvation led to massive disease and death problems, it should be a big issue.

yes and no

in peace time even if you have 0 food in depot you will still get 80 or 90 % of the needed food each months from you terretories. People would be unhappy, but would not get instakilled

I wonder if we will get a system with one big food income from farms once a year
 
I wonder if we will get a system with one big food income from farms once a year
That would be kind of interesting. However it could be quite wierd if not destroyed fields and such is represented.

I like it! Would be nice to see some Metropolis unique buildings like palaces and whatnot
It is a missed opportunity to make cities and metrapolis feel different.
 
Its odd that food dropping to 0 doesnt has massive negative growth effects. It doesnt seem like that big of a problem except that pops will start migrating. Yes oncw city will be reduced in size but another just as big will instantly emerge. Food starvation led to massive disease and death problems, it should be a big issue.

Read the thing again. Starvation is a bigdeal, popcapacity is something different, and no longer the same kind of big deal. for sure you will get nast unrest and growth malus when at 0 food.

Very cool about settlements requiring some tradegoods. I wish the same for other buildings (papyrus for academies). By the way, what do you mean by city building being more limited and meaningful now? Is the building cap system changing?
I bet he just means that cities cost gold and influence to build, and food to maintain, while producing goods less efficiently(?) than settlements with mines or farms.
 
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Have you considered to change the buildings from multipliers to be more realistic, like providing jobs? Building more training camps should not make all freemen in the city produce more manpower but instead do something like 10 more freemen can produce manpower.

What is actually going to stop players from moving massive amount of slaves to the settlements and make use of the settlement buildings now that pop cap is more a soft limit?

Slave revolts are still a thing, right? So if you dump lots of slaves into a backwater to have it produce massive amounts of food, the freemen and citizens who were there before will start to migrate out.
 
I bet he just means that cities cost gold and influence to build, and food to maintain, while producing goods less efficiently(?) than settlements with mines or farms.
Cities have a penalty to trade good production so they will produce less than settlements without any improvements.
City: Cities have a large bonus to population capacity, and will act as focal urban centers for your empire. Cities will be able to support all the buildings you’ve grown accustomed to in the Cicero beta thus far, but will feel a lot more unique as a result of their scarcity. Cities will also have a penalty to trade good production - they will tend to consume, rather than create, resources.

Slave revolts are still a thing, right? So if you dump lots of slaves into a backwater to have it produce massive amounts of food, the freemen and citizens who were there before will start to migrate out.
Since citizens and freemen get next to no boost in settlement it could work to your advantage and slave revolts have requirements that can be avoided.
 
This all sounds good and I'm really looking forward to try it out.

Two thoughts on this that come immediately to my mind;

1) I very much like this diversification with regard to territories and I only hope that you will manage to create enough room for variety to prevent all provinces following the same pattern of settlement with one only appropriate ratio of cities to rular territories for all provinces. In other words, I hope that the prrovinces can follow some historical patterns where, for example, the eastern part of the Asia Minor is much more ubranized than its interior.

Also, with regard to the aesthetics, it's great that the rural territories will look different to cities, but that would be nice nonetheless if you can create some other models for those tiles depicting their rular character instead of just leaving them bare.

2) I am really happy to hear that the armies will consume food in the provinces in which they are present and that this will have a direct impact on warfare. There is just one thing that is not so clear to me in this diary; how does an army supply itself in the enemy territory prior to taking the province capital? I presume they don't go automatically into attrition as soon as they cross the enemy border, right?

What I previously suggested here in this forum and what I would like to repeat now is that it's would be, in my humble opinion, an awesome feature to have if the armies have an ability to store their own food which thay can use in the enemy territory prior to taking enemy's food stores. The food supplies can be refilled in the friendly/allied territories, the fleets can be deployed to resupply the land armies while campaigning in the enemy territory and some factions can have their faction-specific traits that will allow their armies to store more food than normally, thus reflecting their superior logistics.