The Dominance of Multicultural cities

In a way I agree with you on this.  There is definitely an issue when it is advantageous to subjugate a race which is supposed to hate your own.  On the other hand I really can't see a simple solution to this.  Making it so you can't build any buildings of your own would be to severe and just promote a scorched earth policy towards the other faction.  I've seen someone suggest making a 1 to 1 between the buildings so you can't have both 1 tech producing buildings in a city but this 1 to 1 system breaks down at higher level buildings. 

There's also some problems (?) with empire cities requiring less population to get to level 5 when you are empire and so the city center provides less population.  When a kingdom player takes the city the center still only allows the amount of population it normally does but the pop required for leveling becomes the kingdom requirement meaning you need more housing.

I can't personally think of an easy way to resolve this without introducing a new mechanic (e.g. migration like AoW had).  Except with the way cities are built in this game without a 1 to 1 building set for empire and kingdom it's not possible to 'convert' a city as far as I can see.  Just removing all the buildings which don't have a 1 to 1 between the groups would create other problems like chunks of the city going missing.

Sorry to not offer solutions but I do agree with you that this is a problem, at least in so far as it 'feels wrong' when I'm playing, but in spite of having thought about this quite a bit I personally can't see a solution.

Just one possibility of many.

I think this is one of those things that doesn't have a quick fix so to speak, but really needs to be dealt with. Consider an conquest only MP game where there are 4 kingdoms guys and one Empire guy. Every kingdom player in this scenario has a huge incentive to immediately go to war with the Empire player simply because if they fail to do so, their opponents will gain access to a huge bonus over them.

Honestly, they probably should just implement building mutual exclusion and then just say, well if you have this building then you can't have this building. Yet, I think this should be in addition to what wintersong suggested, which is simply destroy buildings that under certain circumstances. Again though, that should be added to the game since it would allow mod makers to do a lot of crazy things if you could enforce buildings being destroyed at a particular moment.

As far as i was aware in 1.1 you can build any number of buildings within a city anyway, since they will have maintenence costs associated with them now. This should go somewhat towards fixing this problem. Maybe the best solution with be to massively increase the costs of buildings for the opposing side when you take them over, forcing the decision to either pay the extra costs (justified by the increased buerocracy needed to run them) or destroy them and rebuild your own buildings.

The problem is not the resource buildings in general. The real problem comes with the ability to get insane bonuses. Consider a city with a gold mine that has all all the gold bonus buildings for the kingdoms, and it is taken by the empire. This city can now build the empire gold bonus buildings too. So now, not only did you faction lose the resource and your bonus buildings, but now the enemy gets all the income from your bonus buildings, the mine, and his bonus buildings.

I did a mod called HostilePopulation that disabled building kingdom improvements in empire cities (except housing and buildings on resourcehoards in the world), and empire buildings in kingdom cities (and elves were on their own, too). But despite what the OP is describing, which is a huge issue, almost noone was interested in the mod.

Maybe I am misunderstanding the blurb for 1.1. But I thought that now you could build any number of the same type of buildings within 1.1. this is what i was talking about, rather than just building lots of buildings. Therefore you can already build more then one of each type gold improvement, so it won't be a bonus anyway if you already have the opposite style of building. This was done to make large cities better than several small cities, thereby reducing the benefits of city spam. Mainly because housing is more efficient per person in large cities than small ones, meaning more people from less food. I thought that each building now has a maintenance cost and a population cost that needs to be met to build and keep it. Obviously this wouldn't be a problem with gold bulding though because they would pay their own mainenance costs just by being built.

Come to think of it, this does seem rather overpowered anyway so maybe i am wrong. Hmm... maybe i should look up the topic i am thinking of.

If my thoughts were right then the obvious solution would be increasing costs (populatio/materials/gold/food etc) for each extra building to balance it out. If they were wrong just ignore me and carry on.

Some buildings could have a tag about "Only works for Kingdoms" or "Only works for Empires", in addition to those of who can build them. For some buildings it would make sense and you would have it there, taking space without providing you with anything. You could always destroy it and use the space for something you can actually benefit from.

And who says tag about "Only works for [insert Alliegance]", also says "Only works for [insert faction]".

I actually think this is a fairly elegant solution, and I think you have hit the nail on how to solve the problem.

From what I have read, there will be some buildings, ie the resource creation buildings like the workshop or study, that can be built multiple times. However, the crazier higher lvl buildings will still be 1 per city or 1 per faction.

That is the line i was thinking about. comes from a the journal entry by Frogboy from about a month back.

So i am at least partially right, it will be interesting to see what buildings it is limited to.

I would like it if this solution was implemented.  And it would be fantastic and very sensible to be able to use for custom faction types too - "Only works for Elves" (when/if they are made a separate faction), "Only works for Undead" etc.  It would be an elegant way of solving a lot of problems with capturing towns of different alignments.

What do others, players/devs, think?  Could this solution be implemented in 1.1?

Best regards,
Steven.

I was recently talking with the devs concerning the possibility of making a city hub auto-raze on capture, and this subject came up during the conversation. According to the devs, they have no current plans at all to deal with this problem, which is actually why I made the OP. I think a lot of people understand that these multicultural cities really are OP, though as HeavenFall pointed out, the average user does not want add a mod which uses work arounds to "fix" the problem, since it is fairly rare that they see the issue from the receiving end. More than likely, it will not be addressed until it becomes a significant problem, which it more than likely will come 1.1.

I REALLY REALLY WANT to be able to use the multicultural assets of a taken city.  That is huge fun for me.  IMHO, this is a balancing issue not a problem.

Some of the most fun that MoM provided was you could get access to new racial advantages and tools and units without limitations.  It becomes a strategic advantage to go for those cities.

In pre 1.1 play I haven't had many games where a city was unstoppable, because I used strategy tactics.  But I agree with OP that, if it becomes too powerful, then buildings that are taken could have one or more of the following limitations imposed:

1) less efficient production for the first X turns, with efficiency slowly returning based on new research lines

2) make you research the new lines, or research Kingdom language to be able to read the manuals

3) the local citizens force you to pay outrageous sums to operate the buildings, requiring you to pay a price to 'activate' a building's bonuses

4) decrease the morale of all units built from the city until you have researched a tech

I can see quite a wide variety of options to allow them in play but to be balanced.

One note: I do think you should have to break down a wall in the city's defenses (aka AOW2:SM) to be able to fight, and you should have to pay to repair it!

I will agree that this is fundamentally a balance issue and not a bug. Yet, the point is that it is a problem since it offers huge bonuses without any drawbacks. While I will say that it can be fun to get these multicultural cities, the current result is so wildly unbalanced that it is almost worth having another faction take one of your cities just to get them to add their improvements to it. It is one thing to give a player access to a race specific unit, it is another to allow them to get 150%+ resource bonuses, negative building times, etc.

I will agree that there is something to be said about the way Microprose used the hub cultures to add interesting dynamics to capturing various populations. The problem with references to MoM here is simply two fold. Firstly, MoM used various populations give access to special units and buildings, specific to that population. Yet, this is not at all the case for Elemental as populations are not handled by their various cultures, and capturing an Empire city does not allow a kingdom faction to building Empire buildings or units in that city. Secondly, MoM ultimately uses a single building list for all races, though each race has specific build restrictions. In the end, you are not really getting access to anything "special", simply modifying your restrictions for the particular city. In Elemental, each races has an unique building pool each of which is larger than the entire building pool from MoM, and most buildings are tied to a set of technologies. So even if they gave you the ability to build improvements based upon the faction of the city, you would be unable to build the vast majority simply because you don't have the techs.

As a mod maker, I can tell you that these cities make it almost impossible to balance new improvements, as you have to take into account that your new improvement could have to balance with both pools of improvements. It is doubly difficult if you make an improvement that is usable by both as you have to ensure that 2 of them will not completely unhinge the entire game.

I like that solution - or perhaps a combination: convert any buildings that have a direct equivalent, and disable anything that doesn't (or anything that has a one-per-player limit that you've already built somewhere else). Since there's no building limit, you might as well let the extra nonfunctional buildings just sit there, that way if the original owner recaptures his city next turn he doesn't find half his buildings have instantly disappeared.

Unfortunately I think this entire problem is overshadowed by other problems with the economy, which is changing drastically in 1.1 anyway, we may as well wait until after 1.1 to revisit it.

All that being said, I'm not entirely against bonuses for multicultural cities - it's just that getting to keep the old Empire buildings, and then build your Kingdom equivalents alongside them for double the usual bonus is awfully broken. If we want a multicultural bonus, it needs to be something different - start by disabling or converting these excess buildings, and then add in some other way to benefit from our exotic conquests. Ideally it should be offset by some kind of disadvantage, so that captured Empire cities aren't strictly better or worse than your Kingdom's home cities (or vice versa if playing Empire) - just different.

Part of the fun of capturing certain enemy cities is to be able to use things that your empire or kingdom could not use otherwise. Just figured I would point that out.

Regarding the balancing issue with multicultural settlements:  Two additional possibilities

1) an efficiency modifier, the more the conquered populace are 'different' or 'hate' the conquering /occupying SOV/forces, the lower the efficiency of all occupied buildings, multipliers of that settlement.  This makes pacifying, and then 'winning hearts and minds' important.

2) make it a set efficiency hit for all "conquered" buildings.  Anything else operates at 100 %.   good possibilities?

How about you can't train troops in the taken city? That way, you can take advantage of any resource bonuses (more than you could in any of your own cities), but can't train troops. 

personally i think they should just ditch the different tech trees for kingdoms and empires. almost all the differences seem to be largely arbitrary, different names and numbers for the same thing. all it does is introduce balancing problems. i appreciate the attempt to add a unique flavour, but in this case i don't think that's been achieved. to my mind in a game as in real life there is only one kind of science. faction variation is imho achieved a lot better through giving the species themselves much more different and meaningful stats (poorer morale, better hitpoints etc). there are a couple of buildings (like darkling recruitment etc) that only make sense for one faction (in which case just have them auto-destroyed when you take a settlement) but for all the other techs i would prefer it if the trees were actually just mirror images of each other with different names and visuals. because we're tbh so close to that scenario now anyway that you might as well go the full distance.

Perhaps there is a city-wide penalty to many things. The conquerer may build a special building (that must be researched). This building requires a decent upkeep of gildar per turn and also requires a decent number of specialists (say 5). For each specialist, the penalty is reduced until the penalty is completely gone.

In effect, you'd be trading people and money for 'other stuff'.