* Have culture cost for policies never go down (trading away cities to reduce culture cost exploit).
* Unhappiness beyond a certain point breeds rebels within your empire, based on the number of cities a player has.
I'm still suprised they are nerfing the settler reduction though.. I always found that happiness was the bigger issue than settler construction time. Maybe if the Maritime nerfs are heavy enough, or maybe because it unbalances lower difficulty levels?
Do culture costs stay the same if my cities got conquered in war?
Good thinking, you smell bug potential. Theocracy might have a similar effect. Definitely something to look out for as the patchlog specifically talked about "can't provide more happiness than they have population" rather than "can't provide more happiness than they produce unhappiness from population"
I think other civs can still have 0 unhappiness cities because of SPs like Freedom, though.
I had the same thought- why are they nerfing coloseums, meritocracy, and the forbidden palace, but leaving freedom the same when its the easiest source of extra happiness? All you need is a coloseum and 3 freedom specialists to make a size 4 city 0 unhappiness. Maybe the changes to maritime states will fix that, but still you can make it 1 unhappiness with just 1 freedom specialist.
It's relatively late. I'm getting the impression that they don't mean to eliminate the strategy, only slow it down.
It appears to me, looking at these changes, like they intended for one of the factors limiting your number of cities to be bumping into your neighbors. War slows down expansion, even if you're steamrolling. By discovering that you don't really lose anything by placing all your cities at the minimum distance, it reduced that constraint, and the others were insufficient to curb early expansion.
So it looks like they've tried to really put the screws to early REX. If that turns out to be the case, it'll probably be best to plan for it and settle on a double-spaced lattice, and fill in later once you get the Ren+ SPs.
I had the same thought- why are they nerfing coloseums, meritocracy, and the forbidden palace, but leaving freedom the same when its the easiest source of extra happiness? All you need is a coloseum and 3 freedom specialists to make a size 4 city 0 unhappiness. Maybe the changes to maritime states will fix that, but still you can make it 1 unhappiness with just 1 freedom specialist.
Have you missed the "Multiple Tech Tree tweaks to address 'slingshot' tech exploits" part? It could very well mean the end to the acoustic slingshot, which could mean it's going to take much longer to get Freedom. This plus the nerf to Metriocracy and Forbidden Palace could mean that ICS is going to take too long to start working.
Oh well, you can already get such info simply by clicking on the Economy slot in DiploCorner that popups the cities list with a happiness tab where numbers are crunched for your pleasure & deductive acrobatics.
Have you missed the "Multiple Tech Tree tweaks to address 'slingshot' tech exploits" part? It could very well mean the end to the acoustic slingshot, which could mean it's going to take much longer to get Freedom. This plus the nerf to Metriocracy and Forbidden Palace could mean that ICS is going to take too long to start working.
Have you missed the "Multiple Tech Tree tweaks to address 'slingshot' tech exploits" part? It could very well mean the end to the acoustic slingshot, which could mean it's going to take much longer to get Freedom. This plus the nerf to Metriocracy and Forbidden Palace could mean that ICS is going to take too long to start working.
That'll just slow it down slightly. In all honesty it's already "too slow" to get going as a competitive strategy- other strategies are faster.
I had the same thought- why are they nerfing coloseums, meritocracy, and the forbidden palace, but leaving freedom the same when its the easiest source of extra happiness? All you need is a coloseum and 3 freedom specialists to make a size 4 city 0 unhappiness. Maybe the changes to maritime states will fix that, but still you can make it 1 unhappiness with just 1 freedom specialist.
Anyhow, I see nothing wrong with ICSing in the current state of the game. LOL this is basically what the AI's do anyhow. They expand like weeds on steriods and try to put cities anywhere and everywhere. Why prevent the human from doing this? It makes little sense to me.
How are we supposed to be able to compete vs the AI civs on Immortal or worse yet Deity after the new patch (noting 12/3 notes)? Are we going to have to be at constant war to keep knocking down runaway AI's who will get too much gold, expand huge since they have no happiness issues and just buy a VERY LAME UN victory? Will we even be able to compete on Emperor (I suspect so).
The developers need to work on game balance at the highest levels..ie Emperor and above and not worry that some near expert who plays on Prince can make 50 closely spaced cities and crush the game as he could anyhow.
Playing with mods that improved city defenses, I have noticed that there rarely are runaway AIs.
They should have ditched global happiness and replaced it with per city happiness. It's going to be a pain to track down now since you won't have the happy/unhappy citizen faces you used to have in civ I-IV. Now where do you have a city that lacks a colosseum? Mmmm... It's a step in the right direction, but the whole happiness system must be replaced to a per-city system with each city showing its current happiness score.
More importantly, this means that it is no longer optimal to spam Warriors and mug your neighbor for a city and luxuries right off the bat. You have to REX luxuries and tech "properly" instead.