Gold?

[Rat]

Whats the point of gold? Feels like such a empty resource. It claims you can rush production with it yet I cant find the mechanic anywhere, anyone know?

[tiavals]

You need a particular tech to rush stuff. Bronze age I think.

Also, you pay for unit upkeep.

It's pretty bad compared to other resources though, especially since it seems to be treated as a 1.5 in worth for tiles, yet 1/10th of worth in events.

I'm sure it'll be rebalanced.

[alan_buchbach]

Ability to use gold to rush production, culture and claim territory comes in bronze and later ages with techs.

[TehJumpingJawa]

Originally posted by alan_buchbach:

Ability to use gold to rush production, culture and claim territory comes in bronze and later ages with techs.

Yet lots of Stone Age resources generate wealth. (replacing actually useful tile yields...)

"Rather than eat these Olives, let's 'harvest' them to make lots of 'wealth' that we'll be able to make use of in a few thousand years."

There are so many bizarre balance & design choices in this game, it doesn't seem to be anywhere near finished.
I'm starting to think its design was just a box checking exercise, rather than a carefully crafted cohesive system of interlinked mechanics.

I hate to say it, but I think I'm out for now.

I get the distinct impression the game is going to get pushed out of the door long before it's finished, receive bad reviews, poor sales figures, and that'll be the last we hear of it.

[alan_buchbach]

In the stone age, the gold pays for upkeep. All those warbands need to be paid lol. I find it's perfectly viable to just build a massive army and roll over the top of everyone around you :)

I also think it's important to remember Millennia is a 4x and the first X is for exploring. That's what you should be doing in the early game. Identifying which resources can be found nearby lets you plan out your builds.

For example, Olives don't just stop with the one tile improvement like in Civ. Bronze age adds the next level of the production chain: The press to create olive oil.

Almost every resource has a production chain like this. So you might plan to build an outpost near some marble and link it to a city which has a (bronze age) stonecutter. And then an (ironage) talisman carver etc. Multiplying the culture/gold/production at each level of the chain. You can also use the import/export features to send them to one of your other cities or trade internationally.

[TehJumpingJawa]

Originally posted by alan_buchbach:

In the stone age, the gold pays for upkeep. All those warbands need to be paid lol. I find it's perfectly viable to just build a massive army and roll over the top of everyone around you :)

I also think it's important to remember Millennia is a 4x and the first X is for exploring. That's what you should be doing in the early game. Identifying which resources can be found nearby lets you plan out your builds.

For example, Olives don't just stop with the one tile improvement like in Civ. Bronze age adds the next level of the production chain: The press to create olive oil.

Almost every resource has a production chain like this. So you might plan to build an outpost near some marble and link it to a city which has a (bronze age) stonecutter. And then an (ironage) talisman carver etc. Multiplying the culture/gold/production at each level of the chain. You can also use the import/export features to send them to one of your other cities or trade internationally.

Yeah, the production chains are a neat concept that's somewhat unique..... but the yields are absolute garbage.
A worker job several steps down the goods chain needs to be vastly more productive than a basic gatherer, otherwise the infrastructure investment just isn't worth it.

As with every civ-type game, production is king.
Without access to a rush mechanic, wealth is useless.
This makes starting location absolutely critical.... Something you have absolutely zero control over.

There are similar flaws in the war/peace balance, and the XP/production balance.
Warfare snowballs, peaceful development does not.

It's a wonky design that's almost unbalanceable.

[Xveers]

Originally posted by TehJumpingJawa:

Yeah, the production chains are a neat concept that's somewhat unique..... but the yields are absolute garbage.
A worker job several steps down the goods chain needs to be vastly more productive than a basic gatherer, otherwise the infrastructure investment just isn't worth it.

As with every civ-type game, production is king.
Without access to a rush mechanic, wealth is useless.
This makes starting location absolutely critical.... Something you have absolutely zero control over.

There are similar flaws in the war/peace balance, and the XP/production balance.
Warfare snowballs, peaceful development does not.

It's a wonky design that's almost unbalanceable.

As others have said, there is a rush mechanic that's tied to an early tech (stone/bronze age, I think?) that's pretty valuable on its own in addition to what it offers. From what I've seen so far, the goods chains actually provide some decent bonuses. In the demo you can (if you're fast) get a wheat->flour->bread chain that nets you something like 3-4 times the food output from just having more wheat from farms. Stone's even more powerful (I think raw stone is 2 production per, and then stone blocks is 5 production per, and it's a 1-1 conversion).

At a glance, the two basic chains that look the easiest to get going are logs->lumber (as that just requires forests, and those seem to be fairly common), and wheat-flour (as putting down farms seems to make them generate wheat as a default; at least it did for the last game when I was paying attention). Stone is a VERY powerful chain to get going, and I just had a nice one set up when I hit turn 60, but it requires luck to get it nearby (same as in Civ6). Iron looks to offer the same benefits. I didn't see any chains for leather, meat, or bones (though I think bones MIGHT have a chain that creates culture/art output starting in the Iron age).

If you couple that with some half-decent town placement and get a level 2 town or two, you can more or less double THAT in turn. In some ways it mimics the kind of pre-planning you see in Civ6 for getting good districts laid out, and for those you're just as reliant on the worldgen as Millennia.

I didn't look at trade or diplomacy at all, but it looks like trade offers a way to ship resources between cities to help maximise benefits.

I'll agree the balance right now is all kinds of out of whack (I think there's just not enough improvement points being generated for my tastes), but I'm feeling that some kind of balance IS doable.

[Ryu.82]

Originally posted by TehJumpingJawa:

Yeah, the production chains are a neat concept that's somewhat unique..... but the yields are absolute garbage.
A worker job several steps down the goods chain needs to be vastly more productive than a basic gatherer, otherwise the infrastructure investment just isn't worth it.

As with every civ-type game, production is king.
Without access to a rush mechanic, wealth is useless.
This makes starting location absolutely critical.... Something you have absolutely zero control over.

There are similar flaws in the war/peace balance, and the XP/production balance.
Warfare snowballs, peaceful development does not.

It's a wonky design that's almost unbalanceable.

I think the yields are fine, and that includes wealth. Every step up in the product chain gives you a large bonus, most of the time doubling the worth of the previous step. There are cases in which that is not the case, for example bricks. But in those cases you usually get another bonus out of it, like engineering points, culture, or something like that. And that is often more worth than the production or food output.
Also this is a game where you must think of space. If you can get the same output out of one tile you usually need two tiles for, that means you have one tile left to build something else, and since you later need to fulfill more demands, you will probably need this space in order to make your cities grow. Sending goods from one capital to another will probably be key in the later eras.
So I think this part of the game works just fine as it is, at least up to the third age, can´t know how it will be beyonf that, but I as far as I have heard it just gets better later.

And of course the starting location is important, as in every game in this genre. But even if you have no ressources around your starting town, that only slows you down a little bit in the beginning, you can work around that.

And I agree completely that warfare snowballs, because some of the warlike specializations are just broken at the moment. I really hope they fix that before the release, just a few changes here and there should do the trick. Like removing this stupid skills that negate upkeep for strong units. Water that down to reduce upkeep by 30% or maybe 50%, and you will stop the snowball the moment your wealth can´t keep up with it.

Of course the same is true for the peacefull snowballs, and yes, they do exist. Envoys for example. With the right setup they also are completly broken at the moment, since you can spawn them limitless for free, basically taking over all neutral cities on the map without having to spend anything on them except a little effort in the early game.

So, yeah, the balancing is not really good at the moment, but the reason for that is not that the ressource system is too weak, it is because some other systemes are just way to overpowered at the moment and need to be nerfed. At least that is my opinion.

[Seek Truth From Facts]

If you generate Chaos, you get Chaos events. These usually make you choose between paying a lot of gold (like 300) or having a bad thing happen. I haven't been in the Age of Blood, but I think you get more of them if that happens.

[alan_buchbach]

Originally posted by Seek Truth From Facts:

If you generate Chaos, you get Chaos events. These usually make you choose between paying a lot of gold (like 300) or having a bad thing happen. I haven't been in the Age of Blood, but I think you get more of them if that happens.

The *bad thing* from chaos events is hostile (barbarian) units appearing near cities. Which you can defeat for Military points. So it helps turn that tiny snowball into a mighty avalanche.

If you, for some reason, don't want to gain the free war xp that the barbs offer... you can always spend that gold you obtained from razing your neighbour's cities to pay off the chaos event.

[alan_buchbach]

Originally posted by TehJumpingJawa:

This makes starting location absolutely critical.... Something you have absolutely zero control over.

I agree, and my suggestion has been to make player created settlers spawn integrated cities, not vassals. By doing this you could allow the player to start with a settler and not a city.

This would also help balance the peace / war issue. At the moment it is a 100x better to conquer your neighbours in terms of government experience point efficiency.

Originally posted by Xveers:

I didn't see any chains for leather, meat, or bones (though I think bones MIGHT have a chain that creates culture/art output starting in the Iron age).

There is a chain for art culture from bones and ivory in the iron age. If you really want to exploit this chain, you can roll the dice with bow hunters.

The Bow hunters idea group can sort of snowball at least in economic terms via the leather/meat/bones/ivory chains. *But* you need to RNG elephants. They are placed on map spawn, not on someone choosing that nation idea group. If you have some nearby - great.

Elephant / sheep / cattle camps produce exploration xp. Bow hunter idea group gives +food for meat production lines. The bowhunter idea group also makes bones / ivory give tools to improve more tiles. It ramps up pretty quickly.

[TehJumpingJawa]

With influence growth being so slow, I was interested by the Exploration Domain's ability to buy tiles.
However experimentation indicates it scales in price, making it kinda crap as Exploration XP production doesn't scale well.

At least that's another starter perk I can slot firmly into the F-tier.

[alan_buchbach]

Originally posted by TehJumpingJawa:

With influence growth being so slow, I was interested by the Exploration Domain's ability to buy tiles.
However experimentation indicates it scales in price, making it kinda crap as Exploration XP production doesn't scale well.

At least that's another starter perk I can slot firmly into the F-tier.

When you research horses the rate of territory expansion increases (by increasing the coefficient of influence generated in the city to spent per tile) and presumably later techs also increase the rate of expansion.

There are also techs and boons which reduce the cost per tile. Eg Shipbuilding tech and Ancient Seafarer national spirit both reduce the influence cost of sea/deep sea tiles. Between the two, you'll have more tiles than you can improve.

Other national spirits modify other tiles eg Wildhunters reduce scrubland etc.

[Ryu.82]

Originally posted by TehJumpingJawa:

With influence growth being so slow, I was interested by the Exploration Domain's ability to buy tiles.
However experimentation indicates it scales in price, making it kinda crap as Exploration XP production doesn't scale well.

At least that's another starter perk I can slot firmly into the F-tier.

Wouldn´t be so fast on that, the buy tile option can be pretty good. Not to buy up all the tiles around cities, that would be too expansive, but I have used it to buy certain tiles to get a good placement spot for towns to get all the tiles around them afterwards. Together with the specialization of the town that can give a huge boost in some situations, that would be far less without buying some tiles first to reach the best position for the town.
Or you could buy up the tiles leading to an outpost you placed before to make it border the town so you can integrate it.

I think buying tiles is meant to be a tool to be used in certain situations in this game, and not something to spam like in Civ. Which is kind of fitting, since a tile in Millennia is worth way more that an tile in Civ I think, considering how much you can get out of one tile with some improvements even this early in the game.