Remixing Order and Productivity? Thread - Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension

Currently Order scales do three quite different things:

(1) They reduce unrest, which provides a boost to gold and blood-hunting.
(2) They decrease the rate at which random events, both good and bad, occur.
(3) They provide a big 5% gold boost.

Currently, Productivity scales do two quite different things:
(4) They increase the amount of resources available in each province.
(5) They provide a small 2% gold boost.

It is pretty widely agreed that Order is one of the most powerful scales, and that shifting to Turmoil is rarely worth the design points that gains you. It would make the game more interesting if Order were balanced more in line with the other scales, so it would be less of a no-brainer that one should pick Order. In a moment, I'll propose that the developers could achieve this mostly be reshuffling which of the above effects go in which lists.

Why are the current scales imbalanced?

Why is Order so powerful? Mostly because it gives the strongest gold boost, bolstered by the further gold boost from unrest reduction. Unlike resources, gold is very fluid. No matter which province you collect gold in, you can transfer the gold to a province that can use it, or you can even store it to transfer it to a future time that can use it. Furthermore, the many of the most important units in the game are mages who cost primarily just gold. The nation with the more expensive menagerie of mages almost always wins, and the nation with more gold almost always gets the more expensive menagerie of mages.

Since Order is powerful, and since Order synergizes well with Misfortune and poorly with Luck, people generally take Misfortune not to be that bad of a negative scale, and Luck to be a relatively weak positive scale. If Order weren't so strong, then people might not take Order so much, and if they don't have Order suppressing random events, then Luck starts to look better, and Misfortune starts to look worse, which again will increase the diversity in what scales people choose, which again would make the game more interesting.

In contrast to Order, Productivity is commonly taken to be one of the least powerful scales. It is useful mainly just for resource-heavy nations (esp. in middle or late ages) in the early turns of the game. But its usefulness quickly erodes as the game goes on, and productivity ends up being just the smallest of the income-boosting scales, coupled with the slight convenience of allowing you to focus your production in fewer provinces rather than needing to spread it out over more. However, after the early game, most of the effects you get from productivity often go to waste -- increasing resources in provinces where you didn't really need them. (In contrast, Order *never* produces gold in places where you didn't really need it.) Good players basically figure out the minimum amount of productivity their nation can take and still get acceptable early expansion or cap-only sacred production, and they almost always just go with that -- there's never any reason to take any more.

My proposal.

Here's my suggestion (though I seem to remember someone, perhaps Frank, suggesting something similar on some forum a while back).

Make Order have the following effects.
(1) Reduce unrest -- this is highly thematic for "order" and will retain some effective gold-boosting
(2) Reduce the chances of random events -- again highly thematic, and continues to complement the misfortune/luck choice.
(4) Increase resources in each province -- this is about as thematic for "order" as it is for "productivity". A well-ordered province should be better able to capitalize upon local resources and/or to ship them off to nearby castles.
(5*) Cheapen the purchase of Provincial Defense. This is highly thematic for Order and is a flavorful way of having it provide an effective gold boost without it seeming like yet another scale that provides some percent gold increase.

Make Productivity have the following effect:
(3) Provide the massive 5% economic boost that Order used to provide, but not coupled with Order's unrest reduction, nor with the ability to "pay for this" with misfortune. This economic boost is also highly thematic for the label "productivity". Indeed, since "Order" brings to mind an organized police or militia power that allows little free speech, dissent or innovation, then it's probably *more* thematic to think that bigger economic boosts should come from "Productivity" than from "Order" anyway. (I don't really care whether it's *more* thematic, as long as it's thematic enough -- I think it clearly is -- and as long as it makes the game play well.)

If the scales had their effects remixed in this way, I think Order would become much less of a no-brainer, and we'd instead see much more diversity in the scales that people choose. Nations that need gold but not so many resources will now probably go Turmoil-Luck-Productivity. Nations that need unrest reduction or heavy resources will feel pulled toward Order-Misfortune, with as much Productivity and/or Growth as they can afford. And nations with more balanced gold and resource needs can deliberate between different ways of balancing these scales, without there being a "clearly best" setting like there currently is. Seems like a clear improvement to me.

What do you think?

I absolutely agree that the current state of scales are really unhealthy, and I agree that order needs a nerf. I happen to be a large fan of the productivity resource boost, however. I'm not saying that productivity should not or cannot change, but I disagree with the statement that it is weak. Perhaps I have a tendency to play resource-heavy factions, but having as many as 45% more resources is potentially 45% more troops per turn. That seems like a very real advantage to me.

As for your proposed changes: I don't think order/turmoil needs to have four effects; at most I would pick three, which, in your scenario, means I would take the first three and leave PD out of the equation.

The trouble with this is that productivity-3 luck-3 would generate an absolutely huge amount of gold. Is that acceptable?

Any scale that receive the +5% income is going to be the new Order. Spreading the love among several scales might mitigate the effect, but would make negative scales even less attractive than they are.

I think it's a step in the right direction, for sure. Productivity becomes less powerful than Order was, Order is still useful, and misfortune isn't how you pay for your economic stat.

Order 3 gives -1 RP would be interesting.

The scales are almost fine. If Order was reduced to +4% and Growth to +2% income, things would be quite fine I think.

Productivity is definitely often underappreciated. Sure, you can't and don't want to use all your resources every turn. But that you can use them when you want and where you want, often is the differnce between winning and losing battles and wars. Sure, some nations simply don't need it, but for most It influences how fast you expand, how easily you gather troops for an early war, and throughout the game determines how flexible positionally, your recruitment is.
It's a really well balanced scale since most of the time it's a genuine choice, you don't want to max it nor trash it, but pick something between the prod-3 and sloth-3 extremes.

The main problem of productivity is not so much the lack of income than the fact ressource become plenty in mid game. Having something else more late in the game who require ressource would be fun (monument who act as a temple and only require ressources to be constructed ?). Also, ressources producers might be a tad too powerful ; for example LA Agartha can actually take sloth without too much problem.

Another option would be to have fort finished when enough ressources have been produced and not when X turn have passed. Like 100 ressources for a palissade for example.

I have nothing against TelosTelos's initial proposal, but I wonder if it'd be okay just to nerf Order. Lower the amount of gold Order gives and you make every other income-enhancing scale more attractive by comparison, including and especially Luck.

Well, if Order gets nerfed I presume Turmoil will get better and improving the bad scales will only serve to make Bless strategies even more appealing. Bless rushers don't exactly need help now do they?

That said shuffling the numbers around a bit could work out OK.

DegenerateArt wrote: The scales are almost fine. If Order was reduced to +4% and Growth to +2% income, things would be quite fine I think.

That'd be fine.

IMHO the simplest nerf would just be to have Order NOT affect random events chance (this effect doesn't make much sense btw..). So it wouldn't synergize with Misfortune.

Productivity losing the resource bonus seems...bad to me. Even if I do understand order perhaps needs a slight nerf.

On the whole issue with 'excess'resources in places you can't really use them and boosting Productivity... what if Productivity affected the time to build fortresses/castle? Not by 1 per scale(that's...a lot), but say Productivity 2 in a province shaved off 1 turn off fort building, while Sloth 2 added one.

I didn't see that they were a proposition to remove ressource from productivity and give it to order. It's mighty silly. I also propose that Growth get RP bonus and magic add purple shade to the game font.

Edited by: Ohlmann

Ohlmann wrote: I didn't see that they were a proposition to remove ressource from productivity and give it to order. It's mighty silly. I also propose that Growth get RP bonus and magic add purple shade to the game font.

Can you stop reducing every argument you don't like to the absurd? The sarcasm really makes it annoying to read your posts, even when I agree with you.

Ohlmann wrote: The main problem of productivity is not so much the lack of income than the fact ressource become plenty in mid game.

Not really true. Sure, if you're Mictlan or Kailasa you hardly need resources, not in any part of the game, but recruiting good units never gets obsolete. And more often than not good units are resource intensive.

vitruviansquid wrote:

Ohlmann wrote: I didn't see that they were a proposition to remove ressource from productivity and give it to order. It's mighty silly. I also propose that Growth get RP bonus and magic add purple shade to the game font.

Can you stop reducing every argument you don't like to the absurd? The sarcasm really makes it annoying to read your posts, even when I agree with you.

The sarcasm was especially out of place in this case, where the original post made a strong case for thinking that it would be thematic and game-improving for "Order" to increase available resources and for "Productivity" to improve one's economy. I don't see how anyone could make a similar case for silly changes like the ones Ohlmann proposed.

(Actually though, I do think it would be good if the game could provide better visual indicators of what scales were present in each province. Ohlmann's purple font wouldn't do much for me, but it would be awesome if provinces would look snow-covered in cold-scales, parched in heat scales, teeming with plants in growth scales, etc... I think this would take more work than the designers probably want to put into it now -- perhaps a change for Dom 5? -- but I think it really would improve immersion in the game if a territorial war between Abyssia, Pangea and Niefelheim really looked like it involved three very different dominions.)

If there's a problem with Order, it's the unrest reduction, not the +5% gold. That gold certainly isn't enough to crowd out Production from consideration. I think Production scales, in general, are much better than common wisdom acknowledges. First off, Production's gold bonus is not negligible. Order 3 only gets 8% more gold than Production 3, while Production gets 45% more resources. The most straightforward case for Production is when your nation relies on units so expensive that they essentially can't be built without it. But even if your nation is lightly equipped, Production has substantial benefits. The three I would highlight are expansion, upkeep reduction, and strategic mobility.

You always start the game with 400 gold. Order 3 has no effect on your first-turn wealth. However, if you're not a disciple, Production does kick in turn 1. It's the only scale that improves your opening recruitment options. Even if you are playing Mictlan, you are likely to recruit some warriors into your first two armies. If you can afford to put them in crappy copper armor, it really is a substantial improvement over nudity. Kailasa can use production to churn out a line of bandar swordsmen. They're not a great unit, they're not efficient in warfare, but they are a good way to mitigate casualties against independents. Or, you can use the resources to build longbows instead of shortbows. Production also allows you to deploy map-move 1 units on your frontiers, and save on upkeep by making your soldiers effectively POD.

I have no idea how much extra income the unrest reduction adds, but unless it's a really large number, the order/production tradeoff seems to be working. Order/Growth also works fine -- gold now, or gold later, with age-related perks and bonus supplies. If there is an imbalance, it's Luck being too weak. In dominions 3, the strongest scales by far were Order and Luck, but they had a strong antisynergy. You almost always wanted to run either Luck or Order, but while Luck/Order was an acceptable pairing, the dissynergy kept other positive scales in the game. Luck/Production and Luck/Magic were both solid builds. Traditionally, Luck scales gave out large amounts of gems to counterbalance the gold given out by Order. There are probably fewer gem-dependent nations now, and more nations need more gold for infrastructure. That said, I'm not actually certain luck isn't worth it. With the gem-gens gone, it's one of the only ways to get huge piles of gems in the mid-late game. The one thing that has changed is the scales for Blood nations. Because Blood Hunting ruined your province income, Blood nations used to benefit from running Turmoil and anything else that reduced income, because they were going to trash their gold income anyway. Now, Order's unrest reduction benefits blood-hunting nations as much as it does tax-collecting ones.

Turmoil and Blood magic go well enough together thematically, that I honestly think every nation could get the turmoil bloodhunting bonus currently unique to Lanka. If you do that and install Worthy Heroes, I think you'll find plenty of scale diversity in your games.

I'd be fine with order simply providing less gold. 4% instead of 5. Even if you are taking a bless rush you are almost certainly not tanking your order scale currently.

But then growth would be giving almost as much gold income per scale as order does, which seems dumb to me. I think growth gives to much short term gold anyway which is a problem, not even sure why it gives any short term gold myself. But nerfing order income by itself will just worsen scale balance overall, even if it improves the current order vs turmoil ratio being seen in MP games, The current imbalance in scales requires more than that to correct it.

David88 wrote: On the whole issue with 'excess'resources in places you can't really use them and boosting Productivity... what if Productivity affected the time to build fortresses/castle? Not by 1 per scale(that's...a lot), but say Productivity 2 in a province shaved off 1 turn off fort building, while Sloth 2 added one.

Then you end up with dead scale choices like existed in Dom3 with the magic scale. Meaning little point picking sloth 2 when you can pick sloth 3 and get no further penalty and no point picking production 3 when you get full bonus at production 2.

Forts also needing resources to build or a simple 1 turn bonus or penalty per scale would both work I think, but anything that creates dead choices by having hard cut off points for bonuses are inferior methods of this idea IMO.

Production should have something unique. Such as getting a200 gold reduction to fort prices at P1, one turn off the build time at P2 and then perhaps another 200 gold off at P3. Plus the resource bonus. No income gain. This would make it competitive on its own merits rather than trying to be mini-order.

It would also make Sloth 3 a lot less of a no-brainer choice for certain nations. You'd have to weigh the benefits very carefully.

This was actually discussed during the beta and Calahan ran some pretty extensive simulation tests where he either postponed starting a fort build or built a lesser fort in place of a bigger one (to get the one turn off). There are pros and cons to both, though the build time reduction/increase has a more pronounced effect on small maps and short games.

Forts are their own problem (nations with crappy forts have an advantage over nations with expensive, time-consuming forts) that is probably better off being addressed separately rather than awkwardly tying them into the mess with scales.

To me it seems like the big problem is that gold is too valuable in Dom 4 compared to other resources. The only solution I can think of to that problem is reducing unit upkeep costs, so that 15% more gold doesn't also mean 15% more researchers.

Someone wrote: If there's a problem with Order, it's the unrest reduction, not the +5% gold.

A heat scale penalty is -5% gold. A player can take a penalty of 3 heat scale and 3 order and be income neutral, but still get the 3 unrest reduction. I don't see this done.

having brought this up in the earliest luck/yomi threads im still of the mind that order is just to powerful. losing 2% per scale but gaining unrest reduction while losing tax sliders meant it really took very little of a hit.

i still think that productivity is lacking overall and to directly nerf bonus income on order would just shift the new scale to growth. i think those are 2 different issues should be looked at and addressed individually. so while i agree with your thinking on one scale being to powerful and 1 being a bit weak i dont agree that this is the way to go about fixing it.

One idea I've toyed with is somehow making forts have an effective resource cost. Probably best to make the contributed resources be some function of the resources in the provinces the fort will eventually draw resources from. Make the turns it takes to build the fort be largely determined by the rate of resources. E.g., if a fort takes 300 resources to build, and you draw 60 resources/month from the relevant provinces, then it'll take you 5 turns to build it, whereas if you instead draw 100 resources/month from those provinces, you could build it in three turns. (Perhaps still have some minimum time, 2 months say, that a fort requires, even if you have limitless resources.) This seems like a flavorful way of making more productive provinces feel more productive, and incentivizing people to choose production scales.

A simpler version of this proposal would be to make each production scale provide -1 turn to the build time of forts, and each sloth scale add +1 turn to the build time (though there may be issues figuring out what to do when scales change in the middle of a building project -- perhaps just have the "am I finished" test involve a comparison to current scales?).

[This proposal could be combined with the one in the original post, or it could be considered on its own.]

Edited by: TelosTelos

Edirr wrote: Production should have something unique. Such as getting a200 gold reduction to fort prices at P1, one turn off the build time at P2 and then perhaps another 200 gold off at P3. Plus the resource bonus. No income gain. This would make it competitive on its own merits rather than trying to be mini-order.

Isn't the resource effect already quite unique? Or, totally unique actually.

It's really just a handful of nations who will take sloth-3 without consideration. I think that's fine, compare how some nations are married to drain-3 and now turmoil-3 (the latter which I hate though).

TelosTelos wrote:
A simpler version of this proposal would be to make each production scale provide -1 turn to the build time of forts, and each sloth scale add +1 turn to the build time (though there may be issues figuring out what to do when scales change in the middle of a building project -- perhaps just have the "am I finished" test involve a comparison to current scales?).

[This proposal could be combined with the one in the original post, or it could be considered on its own.]

I suggested something like this before and I think it's great, except that +3/-3 turns could just be too extreme, so I'd be tempted to make it +1/-1, maybe +2/-2 at sloth/order 3
As for 'when' to check - could just check a 'turns spent building' variable for the fort, and call it done when you reach 'base cost' + prod/sloth modifier. ...which actually seems to be what you are suggesting

Honestly, in that case, taking productivity 3 with a nation that could build palisades would be extremely powerful. Two turns to put a recruitment center up? You could conceivably have three or possibly even four forts by the end of year one. That seems...like something to be avoided.