Make hospitals economically worth

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    • Make hospitals economically worth

      Hi everyone!

      Hospitals are primary used for healing units, but they also have an economic stat, increasing population growth. And that number seems to get very big: 75(%)! Yet it is entirely useless. That's because the higher your population is, the longer it takes for your city to grow. Yet for every population level increase the reward stays the same. Thus as your city grows, your production increases less and less.

      Here is an example:
      You got a city with a population of 6.0, it has 100 morale and already arms industry Lv5 and an airport Lv2 (or naval base Lv3). The city currently produces 2646 electronics but you want more, maybe a good opportunity to increase the population?

      If you didn't build a hospital Lv5, you would reach 7.0 population after roughly 14 days and produce 2772 electronics. If however you did construct a hospital Lv5, your city would have a population of 7.4, that results in a production of 2822. A difference of mere 50 electronics per day. Any lower level hospital would have even less of a difference. In all fairness, the difference in amount of electronics is a tiny bit higher: the city with a Lv5 hospital would've produced 528 electronics more in those 2 weeks than if it didn't have a Lv5 hospital. Still tiny compared to the 2500 electronic investment into the hospital Lv5 (and lets not talk about the other resource investments).

      The higher the population level is, the smaller the difference will be between hospital built and no hospital built for the city. And yet it makes little sense to build hospitals in low population cities because they grow fast enough already when their population level is low. Furthermore cities tend to have low population at the start of the game, that's not when you want to invest into population growth out of all things. The Lv1 hospital could have a population growth increase of 100%, and yet it would still be a terrible investment.

      I suggest increasing the population growth of hospitals massively across all levels and changing the way population grows (at least in the 8+ levels) // increasing the production modifier of higher levels of population.

      Currently each additional level of population after level 5 increases the resource output by 5%. These values could be changed for Lv8+, for example Lv8 population gives an additional 10% resource boost, Lv9 population gives an additional 20% and Lv10 population an additional 30%. These numbers are pulled out of my hat and I don't know if these buffs would warrant building hospitals.

      And this is how the population growth of hospital levels could look like:

      Hospital levelPop Growth
      150%
      2120%
      3200%
      4230%
      5250%



      This could allow the hospital to become a real long term investment that can pay off really hard and be more than just a healing building.

    • What problem does this solve? It seems a bit like a solution in search of a problem.

      Do ordinary-length games become out-of-whack / out-of-balance in some sense right now because production levels can't be boosted enough in absolute terms or quickly enough to keep up with some other aspect of sensible playing?

      It's always been intuitive for me (close enough) to believe that the current Hospital effects are purposefully limited to the effects you listed occurring at the roughly pace you listed.

    • There doesn't need to be a problem to make an improvement. Hospitals have a nice stat, its useless, it could be filled with a bit more meaning.

      Certainly this topic is not about a pressing issue, doesn't mean the devs can't change numbers if they wanted to nor does it mean we can't discuss it. If you only want to talk about real issues, like newcomers to the game asking questions instead of spending tedious time reading through dozens of old posts, then go look elsewhere :)

    • For something to be an improvement, it needs to make things better.

      I'm asking how you think the change would make things better, rather than simply different or perhaps worse.

      Changes always cost something and create risks. There needs to be an expected benefit that is substantially greater than the cost, and the risks also generally need to be low.

      What, specifically, will be improved?

      The post was edited 1 time, last by KFGauss ().

    • "This could allow the hospital to become a real long term investment that can pay off really hard and be more than just a healing building."

      In other words, give more options to grow your economy. Having more choices (until its too many) is a cool thing in grand strategy games.

      Same reason why its desirable to have tanks viable in high level of play. Of course tanks being unplayable is not a problem, but having the choice to use them is nice. Maybe one day I get to have fun with tanks in an alliance challenge instead of artillery. Maybe one day I can make the decision to invest into my economy long term using hospitals to grow my population and then watch in awe as weeks later my production is greater than that of my foes.

      So what does it improve? It improves (by enlarging) the pool of sensible actions to take. And currently the pool of sensible actions to grow your home economy, outside of conquest, are fairly limited.

    • OK - I personally haven't felt like I've suffered from having too few options.

      At least no more than I suffer because I only have one Queen when I'm playing chess.

      Where I've felt like things get out of whack is that I can't grow my economy through conquest while simultaneously defending previously captured territories.

      The reason (for me) is that the defending troops' maintenance costs grow almost as fast as the increased income from freshly captured territories.

      Perhaps this is the game designers trying to slow down my conquests (by encouraging me to let the captured territories morale improve before I try to capture more).

      In the case of the Hospital's ties to economic growth, the designers might have the same intent.

      In that case they might be willing to give you and either/or option that would give you an economic benefit from any one of several buildings, but not "stack" those benefits.

      That would be a change that would give you more choices, but wouldn't cause economies to grow too quickly (if the designers think that economies are growing at the correct pace already).

      Would you be pleased if they offered an either/or sort of effect (you can build several buildings, but you only get an econ boost from the highest level building in the group)?

      That would enlarge the pool of sensible actions you could take.

    • That wouldn't. I could only chose which building I want to invest into at to what level. Since its pointless to build multiple buildings in your version, unless swapping buildings priority makes sense for some reason.

      For economic growth there are currently 2 classes of buildings: direct output boost (arms industry, naval base, airport) and morale boost (underground bunker). I would welcome a third class, population boost.

    • OK - I see.

      To be more precise, faster Pop boost - Hospitals already have a positive effect on Pop growth (which affects resource production growth), but it's fairly small.

      And you want all those effects to "stack" in the sense that if everything was equal in two games, in the game with your suggested Hospital, resource output would increase faster than it does now.

      That brings me back to thinking that you first need to make a case for "increasing resource output faster" before making a case for using Hospitals to accomplish that.

    • KFGauss wrote:

      OK - I see.

      To be more precise, faster Pop boost - Hospitals already have a positive effect on Pop growth (which affects resource production growth), but it's fairly small.

      And you want all those effects to "stack" in the sense that if everything was equal in two games, in the game with your suggested Hospital, resource output would increase faster than it does now.

      That brings me back to thinking that you first need to make a case for "increasing resource output faster" before making a case for using Hospitals to accomplish that.
      Simple fact is that the boost to pop-growth is fairly useless right now, I mean have you seen Playbabes chart on it?

      On top of that the boost to resource income gained from population is not even comparable to the time it takes for it to grow.

      They are essentially poorly implemented mechanics.
      I am The Baseline for opinions

    • Teburu wrote:

      KFGauss wrote:

      OK - I see.

      To be more precise, faster Pop boost - Hospitals already have a positive effect on Pop growth (which affects resource production growth), but it's fairly small.

      And you want all those effects to "stack" in the sense that if everything was equal in two games, in the game with your suggested Hospital, resource output would increase faster than it does now.

      That brings me back to thinking that you first need to make a case for "increasing resource output faster" before making a case for using Hospitals to accomplish that.
      Simple fact is that the boost to pop-growth is fairly useless right now, I mean have you seen Playbabes chart on it?
      On top of that the boost to resource income gained from population is not even comparable to the time it takes for it to grow.

      They are essentially poorly implemented mechanics.
      They are poorly implemented unless you (a designer) want those effects to be small.

      And - Yes - I understand that you can make argument for not putting in (very) small effects because they create user-confusion while supplying little game-play benefit.

      This part of the discussion overlaps some with the suggestion, but it overlaps in the sense of saying this:
      • Hospitals' effects on growth should change (perhaps), and if that effect is changed we'll want to spend some time thinking about whether the change will screw up the existing resource-production-growth rates by boosting them too much, in addition to boosting VP growth, and the cities' pseudo-HP supplied by population.
      If you want to say that Hospitals' effect on pop growth needs to increase and your reason is (almost) entirely because hospitals don't effect resource-production growth enough, then we're back to asking whether resource production growth needs to be accelerated.

      The post was edited 2 times, last by KFGauss ().

    • "then we're back to asking whether resource production growth needs to be accelerated."

      No. We don't. Because we are not doing that.

      More than 99,99% of the players still won't use hospitals to boost their economy because the return of investment is simply too long. Think how few are using underground bunkers. I am currently playing the battle royale, which has a 29 day peace period, hence why I suggested hospitals as long time investment. That battle royale is supposedly filled with the best alliances, and yet so few of them use underground bunkers to increase their resource output. That means even less people will build hospitals, and even then only in rare scenarios. The average game, even alliance challenges won't see any significant rise in production because the increased production comes with much higher population levels which take very long to reach. 200+ days for population level 10? However you should be allowed to reach high levels of population faster with hospitals, and if you do, you should be rewarded. That's the entire point. To have the choice to do that and be rewarded.

      If someone suggested officer units before they were added to the game you would also complain about "is there currently not enough damage in the game?" even though thats not the point of officers at all (to increase overall damage in the game).

      If we were to answer "does resource production growth need to be accelerated" with "Yes", we wouldn't be talking about hospitals. You make it sound like I'm suggesting to add more levels of arms industry.

    • Mc_Johnsen wrote:

      Hospitals are primary used for healing units, but they also have an economic stat, increasing population growth.
      . . .
      The city currently produces 2646 electronics but you want more, maybe a good opportunity to increase the population?
      . . .
      produce 2772 electronics. If however you did construct a hospital Lv5,
      . . .
      that results in a production of 2822. A difference of mere 50 electronics per day. Any lower level hospital would have even less of a difference.
      . . .
      Still tiny compared to the 2500 electronic investment into the hospital Lv5 (and lets not talk about the other resource investments).
      . . .
      This could allow the hospital to become a real long term investment that can pay off really hard and be more than just a healing building.

      Mc_Johnsen wrote:

      . . .
      grow your economy.
      . . .
      invest into my economy
      . . .
      my production is greater than that of my foes.
      . . .
      grow your home economy, outside of conquest,
      . . .

      Mc_Johnsen wrote:

      "then we're back to asking whether resource production growth needs to be accelerated."

      No. We don't. Because we are not doing that.

      . . .

      If we were to answer "does resource production growth need to be accelerated" with "Yes", we wouldn't be talking about hospitals. You make it sound like I'm suggesting to add more levels of arms industry.
      I'm sorry if I misunderstood why you want hospitals to increase cities' populations faster.

      Based on the material I've quoted here (the first & second quotes) (I added the one color highlight) it appeared that you were 99% focused on the effect faster population growth would have on resource production (aka a player's economy).

      What exactly is the motivation?

      The post was edited 3 times, last by KFGauss ().

    • Mc_Johnsen wrote:

      Hospitals have a nice stat, its useless
      They are very useful, just not for the purpose you are trying them to be for.

      Population growth is diminishingly slow near the limit, which is a design feature. It is not a problem for the hospital feature, per se. If you think about your suggestion, you'd see that it is not a solution. If stats are changed somehow, then either the building would become senselessly overpowered, or the growth boost would remain negligible to justify the investment.
      Commander Zozo001 :thumbsup:
      humble player

    • Bunkers are not a terrible investment for resource improvement. They are only a tad bit less efficient than arms industry but don't cost any rares nor electronics.

      "If stats are changed somehow, then either the building would become senselessly overpowered, or the growth boost would remain negligible to justify the investment."

      Pretty sure there is middle ground between both extremes.

      "They are very useful, just not for the purpose you are trying them to be for."

      And how is the population growth modifier very useful from hospitals?

      "What exactly is the motivation?"

      Its to have more choices. Different methods of economic growth. And if you combine all methods of economic growth, including a buffed hospital, then yes, you end up with more resources than before. But thats also because you invested more resources into them.

    • Mc_Johnsen wrote:

      Bunkers are []... are only a tad bit less efficient than arms industry
      Please expand on how do you suggest this comparison would work out - what efficiency would you get from bunkers?

      Mc_Johnsen wrote:

      "If stats are changed somehow, then either the building [i.e. that of a hospital] would become senselessly overpowered, or the growth boost would remain negligible to justify the investment."
      Pretty sure there is middle ground between both extremes.
      You're welcome to try and present some. Just saying "I want more resource boost from hospitals" ain't cut it. Ah, and you may want to think about how population dynamics works in CON, before you go into any detail.
      Commander Zozo001 :thumbsup:
      humble player

    • I usually build two higher level hospitals to heal wounded troops,
      to me the location is more important than the bonus.

      I'm always tempted to annex the city where I put them,
      they're rarely in a homeland city (due to negligible effects).
      This is usually mid to late game.

      I've seen players build a level 1 hospital in each homeland city,
      I don't know what their motivation was but they didn't win.

      Display Spoiler
      It would be really nice if there was a way to conceal them,
      as they always seem to be noob-magnets.
      for example if a certain level of construction wouldn't appear on the map,
      I'm sure nobody would take advantage of that.