T4 "Guilds" buildings balancing (city improvements dev diary)

[Seswatha]

Is it just me, or many of the t4 guilds are not that useful?

-Famers guild - gives a ton of food. Food is great, but it usually has diminishing returns in these types of games and by the time you're t4 you're probably already looking at a large city so adding more food at that point is most likely just squeezing out a few extra pops before the game ends.

-Workers guild - usually industrial cities are a thing in 4x, however that was when unit and building production were not separate. With them being separate, we're looking at a similar situation as the Farmers guild where by the time you build it you've probably built most of the other buildings you wanted anyway, so getting it now doesn't really help much and at the end will just be converted to gold, but with lower efficiency.

-Smith guild - ok a city with high Draft for spamming units is probably useful well into the late game, the problem is that it's 50% food 50% draft so not that efficient. Would probably be more attractive as 50% gold 50% draft if 100% draft is off the table for some balancing reason and why do the smiths produce food anyway?

-Merchants guild, Mages guild, Scholars guild - these are the guild that actually give you the things you want to build armies cast spells and win games so I expect them to be the go to specialisations.

-Seafarer's guild - gives a bit of everything and is most likely exclusive to port cities, Overall the naval aspect of the game will probably be a gimmick as it usually goes but could be a thing in some niche situations with experienced seafarers cultural trait and just spam as many fisheries as you can if there's a way to guarantee a coastal start (they'll give +5 food, prod, draft and gold effectively with the guild and trait, on top of whatever their base income is).

So, to summarise, my speculation is that Merchants guild, Mages guild and Scholars guild will be the go to city specs and others won't be as useful.

[blackhand_lost]

In PF you could export food from one city to others, making your new cities grow very fast. I wonder if this feature is in

[Rhalius]

If you conquer a city and convert it to your culture you might have more you need to build, or the population might have been wiped out or something. Then the production or food bonus could be useful.

[Burjis]

I share the OP's concerns.
However, there are some facts we need to consider:
1. Merchant's guild, Mage's guild, and Scholar's guild affect fewer and rarer provinces (mines, conduits, research posts) which require specific resources to be present within that region to be built, unlike farms, foresters, and queries which are more common. So, these guilds cannot be built in every city. That said, if a city manages to annex 3 or more of these special provinces, these guilds are certainly preferable overall.
2. If they introduce food sharing similar to planetfall, and add production sharing too, then I guess many of these concerns will be alleviated. In planetfall, I specialized many cities in food production and shared their surplus, which allowed me to grow newly found cities to grow extremely fast. If Triumph applies the same mechanism to production and implements them both in AoW4, I will be quite happy!

[Seswatha]

I agree that having some kind of trade system between cities to exchange surplus food and production should solve most of these issues.

[Shadowhal]

It would be great to some dev opinions on this. The OP made a valid point that guilds that focus on food and production income may not be very useful by the time they become available (late in the city development) because by then most useful structures will have been built.

Unless of course there is something else that these resources could be used for. For instance the food (or production) sharing with other cities, to let those focus on other things. Or maybe there is some victory condition linked to building something massive where big production cities are valuable? If not, that also cascades down to the lower structures, to an extent. Why should I bother that much with production and food if I only just need enough of either to get the provinces and structures up to churn out good units more quickly, and be able to cast many spells?

Also, curiously, there don't seem to be many structures directly affecting the unit starting ranks. In AoW 3, there were typically specialised buildings for unit categories. Maybe that's culture-specific or carried more through spells, but I still found it curious.

[Gaius]

I believe this is really hard to guess without actually playing.

First, as many discussed, we don't know if cities can trade resources.

Second, in the late game each turn is more relevant, so even if the number of turns "saved" by producing extra food, production or draft isn't impressive, it will probably be very relevant (i.e. in Planetfall often the diference between your worse city and the best to buy a T4 unit is 6 vcs 2 or 3 turns, and it changes everything).

And, perhaps as important, now we have draft and build queues split. That makes me wonder if buildings are not balanced to be built slower (thus making endgame production bonuses more important than in AoW 3 or Planetfall).

Time will tell. Release is really close now and I'll sure test those things like the mad theorycrafter I am.

[blackhand_lost]

At this point I think cities can't trade resources. It has never been mentioned, and the city interface is clear and minimalistic, I didn't see any additional functions there

[BBB]

Cities cannot trade resources. So, in a way, things like research, gold and mana are more useful, as they go to a global pool.

Depends though, if for example you specialise a city for draft, getting the appropriate guild might be nice to quickly produce t4 units, like the Warbreed.

[redfuryau]

This predictive thread has turned out 100% correct imo.

The workers, farmers and smith guilds all need a bit of help - primarily for the reasons outlined in the OP.

Thoughts?

Side-note: There is something weird and undocumented going on with mana guilds. They aren't always available to be built when they should be.

[Anarchy Burger]

It would be cool if the farmer and worker guild had a bonus to neighboring cities or something like that, or they could give bonuses to receuited troops like the farmers guild gives +10 health

[Burjis]

Originally posted by redfuryau:

This predictive thread has turned out 100% correct imo.

The workers, farmers and smith guilds all need a bit of help - primarily for the reasons outlined in the OP.

Thoughts?

Side-note: There is something weird and undocumented going on with mana guilds. They aren't always available to be built when they should be.

I agree (for worker's and smiths' guild) and disagree (for farmer's and seafarer's guild). The initial assumption of this thread was that by the time you unlock guilds, your city is fully grown and has built every building already! This is far from the reality. Let me elaborate.

In a standard game, I usually unlock farmer's guild at 13 pops and a lot more ground to cover with a typical city. With city expansion rate slowing down as your population grows, farmer's guild lets you expand faster. Seafarer's guild is also really good for port cities.

On the other hand, I never go for worker's and smith's guild because I've found production and draft to be useless past a certain point because gold is a much more limiting factor with city development and training of units than production and draft respectively. If those guilds reduced the cost of buildings and units, that would be a different story.

[Seswatha]

Seafarers is a-ok imo, and the original assumption was that it can be situationally useful, which I think is what it ended up being. It makes the most it terms of raw output, and it makes some gold which is almost universally good, though likely not as much as merchants would (depends on nr of suitable improvements).

i still think farmers guild is ass, while your pop may not be maxed by the time you unlock it you should be gunning for closing the game anyway, magic or military victory, and food is too slow roi to pay off at that point.

Workers is actually surprisingly ok with Materium affinity and industrious culture though, you get +2 gold per quarry with Materium perk and 35% prod to gold conversion instead of 25% of Industrious you can make ok money with quarries and in some cities it can be tough to get enough mines to compete (also depends on the number of "special" mines you've unlocked).

[guganda]

I miss the food sharing feature from Planetfall, it helped you see your cities as a collective empire instead of "how do I optimise this individual city?".

[Midas]

I never go with Farmer's guild, but the others all have their merits. Draft for a city that builds your units is a must. Gold or Mana otherwise, unless it doesn't have enough to meet the requirements, in which case production city for increased gold income anyways, and fisher's guild on any city that has 4+ coastal provinces because it's just overall excellent if you're leaning heavily into water areas.

Farmer's guild would have had a use if you had food sharing like planetfall.

[AnemoneMeer]

Remember that there are nature tomes to do stuff with your food.