Hey, I've been thinking about city building balance off and on lately. I wanted to collect some thoughts and opinions on the matter so here we are.



firstly, delimitations: its compelling to consider aspects of wider / deeper design on this subject, for example, adjacent topics like city size efficiency scaling , governor policies and trade good bonuses. But for the purposes of the thread topic, l propose focus on existing mechanics, both for the buildings and the adjacent mechanics... presumably, it would be easy to change around and tweak the numbers and modifiers involved. (But not as easy to create new kinds of modifiers)



Try to underline the justification of why you would like buildings changed in the way that you do



My perspective:





City buildings:



Roughly speaking, the current city buildings in 1.3 come in three categories: pop ratio buildings, resource output buildings and utility buildings.



Resource output buildings are tax offices, academies and training camps. (and markets) the benefit of stacking one of these buildings is a huge part of what makes Pops living in one or few large cities more efficient than many small cities (in an exponential way!)



Suggestion : reduce the primary effect of resource output buildings, and add an additional effect to each of them to compensate:



For example, markets could give +migration speed, training camps could give recruitment speed, tax offices could give demotion speed, academies could give +base research points.



The justification for such changes to the resource output buildings is to harmonize the economic output between large and small cities through nerfing the raw output benefit of stacking them in very large cities - and at the same time adding some secondary modifiers to help promote building diversity.



... province-level modifiers on city buildings would be interesting as well, it would make these secondary building effects more widely useful, contributing to rural migration and demotion of tribesmen for example. but for now I'm assuming that would require some new code, in an area that's not a priority for 1.4.



In particular, the proposed change to academies would close the gap in research output between say 10 academies spread across five cities as compared to stacked in one city, allowing more or less rural academies that may have been built partially to promote local tribesmen, to contribute more meaningfully to research as compared to a significantly more dense empire capital with more happier citizens and more academies.



... this is by no means the ideal way to balance big / small cities, but its low hanging fruit.



... I might add thoughts about other buildings later.



Thanks for reading and please share your thoughts and opinions!