Number of building slots - What's the point?

[Ultranoob]

The number of building slots in a province is mainly related to terrain and development. As such, a richer province will have more building slots than a poor province. Isn't this a contradiction?

I suppose the purpose of the number of building slots is to give the player a choice in prioritizing different buildings. However, you should focus your investments in rich provinces, because they will give the most returns. And in rich provinces, you have plenty of building slots, you have enough space to build every building that is worth. On the other hand, you can only build very few buildings on poor provinces, but you shouldn't build much there because the returns for must buildings are crap.

In the end, you can customize your rich provinces with as many buildings as you want and in poor provinces you have space to build, not that you should use it.

However, the AI doesn't understand the game this way and spams buildings in every province by mid game, so you end up with all building slots filled with worthless buildings. So you have to scan every province you conquer trying to make space for good buildings (manufacturies), and if you conquer a lot this process is excruciating.

Anyway, the idea I want to put forward is why not remove the number of building slots? If you could build every building in every province, you should still have to prioritize. Buildings are very expensive, and their returns are not worth in most provinces. Moreover, in the new update there will be even more buildings. So, what do you think?

 

[Runite Drill]

Last time I travelled through rural New Zealand I did not see a:

• Church,
• Workshop,
• Marketplace,
• Dock,
• Barracks,
• Courthouse,
• Manufactory, and
• Castle

All in one place (to be fair there are no castles in NZ).

Point being that it makes sense for more developed areas to be able to support more buildings.

Perhaps what we are looking for instead is some more depth to the building system, such as specialisations and more intricate relationships between buildings. Like temples being mutually exclusive with universities (as a way out there example) and T3 which requires a huge investment and gives a state-wide effect (e.g. +100% local tax). Maybe one T3 per state? Would also require some rebalancing of course.
Another possibility would be to make the T1 buildings have a flat, additive effect and apply the multiplicative modifiers to T2+. That would make T1 buildings very strong for low-dev provinces, but not so great for high-dev. For example:

• Temples; +1 tax income, +1% local missionary strength
• Cathedral; +1 tax income, +50% local tax, +2% local missionary strength

You could also make buildings take up a number of slots based on tier. So either super-charge your province with T1, or super specialise with T3.

All just thinking out loud now. Personally I think the system is okay as-is, but any improvement would be more than welcome.

 

[Piotrzeci]

It's so you can't have a Manufactury+Workshop+Regimental Camp+Shipyard in every 1/1/1 (coastal) province.

 

[lolada]

Building slots add nice layer of strategy to the game.. Thats why i also really like those new building additions we have .. next to manufactories.. and also reworked Courthouse is very interesting. It adds more depth to the game.

For example.. usual economic combo is workshop + manufactory (provided that trade good is valuable) + temple if tax is decent.. So thats a lot of slots and it makes sense to squeeze somewhere +manpower building, or force limits.. or shipyards.. so there's some planning and tradeoffs to it. And developing to 10s to get new slots.

Now for example we'll be able to fortify more some provinces.. or to extract more manpower/sailors from grain/fish..other crap goods provinces.. even sailors might be useful for some marine strats. And these were provinces with trade goods that are hardly profitable for manufactories.

Then there's courthouse/town hall spam for very wide play.. it comes on expense of taking slots from economic buildings for example. So building slots are good.. its just up to devs to find a role for every building we have.

 

[Weyird]

I'm curious, what are some buildings that you never build?

 

[gasior]

Builing slots make higher dev provinces more important thus boosting tall play and give stretegic depth with development.

 

[MagentaPhoenix]

I'm curious, what are some buildings that you never build?

Never:
Sailors buildings, courthouses/town halls

Rarely:
Manpower and force limit

Occasionally/Situationally on certain provinces:
Church, Marketplace, Workshop, Fort

Almost Always (If I can afford it):
Manufactory - starting with highest value trade good in best trade node and working down

Always:
Furnace - it gives stupid levels of dosh

I probably forgot something, if so, it counts as ‘never’ because it was so irrelevant I couldn’t even remember it.

 

[lolada]

I'm curious, what are some buildings that you never build?

Courthouses are useless.. apparently if playing tall they can be used if you keep edicts on most if not all the time. Still quite useless in 99% of cases.. building slots are better used for economy buildings, manpower or FL.

Docs obviously... there's rare occasional use for them if you have very little coast and need some sailors. 1% case again. AI builds them.. so you end up with some anyway. They are first building to be destroyed tho if i need slots.

I rarely build force limit buildings.. but they can be good/useful and people in MP say its impossible to compete without them.

Cathedrals.. temple upgrade.. Its actually good for conversion strength.. but humanist is better 10x than religious so this building is as rare as docks.

 

[Cancerofthehead]

I have had a few cases with stupidly high development states that courthouses saves a decent amount of money (and had enough building slots for everything) without edicts. Generally it is because I developed 3 or four institutions in a state.

 

[PhoenixG]

Courthouses are decent building if you state something far away. Something like having capital in europe and stating stuff in Japan.

 

[Tricubus]

Building manufactories in low dev provinces makes sense, as the bonus from a manufactory is flat and does not scale with the development of the province. It just adds +1 goods produced to the province.

 

[lolada]

Building manufactories in low dev provinces makes sense, as the bonus from a manufactory is flat and does not scale with the development of the province. It just adds +1 goods produced to the province.

Yup tried this with Novgorod a year ago, got tons of money from all the fur provinces, 100+ ducat income in their north sea node staying just in that russian area. Bascially, upgrading 1-1-1 Fur into 1-3-1 is already great.. + manufactory it turns a province into 1-8-1. It doesnt even matter that much if its territory 75% autonomy land.. it hurts production obviously, but trade income is great nonetheless. Picking up trade ideas also helps a ton.

 

[KaiserJohan]

Yup tried this with Novgorod a year ago, got tons of money from all the fur provinces, 100+ ducat income in their north sea node staying just in that russian area. Bascially, upgrading 1-1-1 Fur into 1-3-1 is already great.. + manufactory it turns a province into 1-8-1. It doesnt even matter that much if its territory 75% autonomy land.. it hurts production obviously, but trade income is great nonetheless. Picking up trade ideas also helps a ton.

It works even better when building them in Siberia as Russia, since you should be controlling the interim trade nodes completely and the trade value increases per trade node jump