National Wonders

1. Help balance small 'builder' and large 'conqueror' empires (harder to get for big ones)
2. Allow strategic specialization of cities
3. Other roles?

• More build order flexibility and allows cities to specialize, with less need to build unwanted or low-priority buildings.
• No more annoying cancellation of construction just for building or annexing 1 more city.

Thalassicus said:

• I'd like to buff all the national wonders while also making them more difficult for large empires to get. I haven't touched national wonders in over a month, and recently adjusted the small vs large empire balance in other ways, so I'm back to here again.
• I'm fine with national wonders of a higher tech level and higher cost being stronger than earlier & cheaper world wonders. After all, Harbors or Lighthouses have alternated between giving +1 on water tiles, nearly the same bonus as the Colossus. The point of the early world wonders is the fact they are so early, just the fact they can be built so soon is what makes them strong. 8 is huge when it's in the first 50 turns with only one or two cities... 10-15 later in the game is less powerful. In addition, getting a world wonder denies it to someone else in the game, so it has an added benefit beyond the stated effects.

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Ahriman said:

I'd argue the opposite. Trying to build a world wonder is risky, because with significant probability you'll be beaten to it and lose your progress. Hence, the reward for the world wonder needs to be larger to make it worth chasing.
For national wonders, there is no risk of being beaten to it, so no need to reward that excess risk.

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Ahriman said:

My problem is that with the early game national wonders, there is no reason why they necessarily need to imply a small empire.
Its perfectly possible to:
a) Build those national wonders early, and then found new cities.
b) Have a very large empire with ~4-5 core cities and then lots of puppets
c) Build cheap/high value structures like libraries in every city even with a fairly large number of cities.

A national wonder that requires a tier2 or tier3 structure everywhere is very different to one that requires a tier1 structure.
What is the logical reason for some national wonders to have costs scale with number of cities, but not others?

I agree that % modifiers are a good way to go, so that you can concentrate yield boosters and actually specialize culture.

A +% culture boost on the national epic would be a better solution than + culture per pop.
That way, you're encouraged to build it in an actual culture city - one with monastary and buildings that benefit it, or with Landmark improvements.

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Thalassicus said:

That's part of why I moved the earliest national wonders later in the tech tree with more challenging prerequisites, and nerfed puppets. Getting the College and Epic with only 1-2 cities early on now significantly delays expansion, and keeping an empire as puppets has stiffer penalties.

All national wonders actually scale in cost with the number of cities. This has been in vanilla since patch .135 in December, which is what Firaxis meant by "the cost goes up as number of cities increases" on tooltips. You can see this more clearly with the new dynamic tooltip system where the exact numbers are shown for each national wonder.

Currently:

• 30% - Baths, College, Epic, Treasury, Oxford
• 20% - Agra, Ironworks
• 10% - Heroic, Hermitage

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Sneaks said:

Having done a bit of testing each way, I think that National Wonders in general need to be handled differently. I hate the fact that they simply cannot be built in large empires without endless building spam.

I would be much happier if the first tier of NWs required perhaps 3 of their parent buildings rather than 100%, and second tier perhaps 5 (the only second tiers in existence right now are Oxford and Hermitage)

This accomplishes several things:
-Single city NC tech rushes would be prevented
-Players are no longer penalized for successfully expanding
-National Wonders become the city specializers I assume they are designed to be within an empire.

At the cost of:
-OCC no longer able to build.

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Thalassicus said:

That wouldn't be hard to do, I prepared for that possibility by setting up the tooltips so it recognizes -1 as "all cities" and other numbers as the amount specified.

The question is is, if we don't use national wonders as a way to balance expansion, what else is there? Earlier versions in the Civilization series had corruption or city maintenance, but that was removed. I suspect it's one reason why alpaca added it back for his mod. Changes like that at such a fundamental gameplay level are something I tend to hesitate from for mods theoretically designed to keep vanilla mostly the same.

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Sneaks said:

I totally understand that, but frankly not having the National Wonders does little to inhibit vast growth, and you can game the system by going vertical first with a NC rush, something the AI cannot do.

The only non-maintenance way you can ever probably properly balance expansion with is scaling technology costs (albeit to a lesser degree than culture). This would also solve the glaring issue of culture being miles and miles behind all other victory types.

I totally understand the worry over making any fundamental changes, and thus your reticence to tackle issues like AI idiocy directly in a balance mod. I believe alpaca's city maintenance approach actually works rather well, and can probably be made to be configurable by the user (either in a config.lua like Jooyo did with CCMAT, or a pop-up after the DoM screen).

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Thalassicus said:

@Ahriman
I already adjusted happiness, and I like to spread changes out instead of concentrating them in one place.

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Thalassicus said:

To be honest I do prefer the concept of city maintenance over national wonders as a restriction on growth, never really liked that decision for Civ V. I've been trying to figure out ways to adapt the developer's system to work, though.

It could be something to explore in the next beta cycle. It'd probably require a week or so of experimentation to balance (particularly with the AI), and it's been over a month since I last put out a public release. Right now I'm focusing on squashing bugs and adjusting existing values to get a public version put out in the next few days.

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Ahriman said:

Happiness. Use the intended mechanic.
If necessary, add non-linear happiness-per-city.

But think about what precisely goal it is that you're trying to achieve here.
Is your problem one of width vs height?
Is it that expanding doesn't require enough infrastructure?
I'm not sure that expanding forever should be a problem if you have the infrastructure to support it. Even with constant unhappiness per city, there is already the design feature that your base happiness/happiness from luxuries/happiness from wonders/happiness from most social policies shrinks in per-city-terms as you increase the number of cities.

* * *
I like the existing national wonder mechanic, my balance thoughts were just on specifics, particularly of how the new national epic overshadows other culture producers for value.

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Thalassicus said:

Instead of a 'hard cap' requiring the necessary building in 100% of cities, what if national wonders have a soft cap:

• Requires X copies of the necessary building
• Increase cost-per-city modifier of the national wonder

In other words... transfer the cost from the required buildings to the national wonder itself. For example, right now the national college costs:

Option A (vanilla)

• 80
• +24 cost per city modifier
• +80 per Library
• Total = 80 + 104*cities

Option B (idea)

• 80
• +50 cost per city modifier
• Total = 80 + 50*cities

These numbers are simply estimates off the top of my head, we could try anywhere from 40 to 100 per city, but you get the idea. I reduced the per-city from 104 because with libraries we get the effects of the actual libraries, while the added NW cost isn't giving any other bonuses. With this method, founding a new city simply adds to national wonder costs instead of the annoyance of canceled construction. This would still require a high overall expenditure for large empires, but wouldn't require spamming unwanted buildings (only to sell them after).

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Sneaks said:

I like that direction with the national wonders, and I honestly wish there was more to do with this mechanic.

Ideas:

Science NWs

Tier 1: Royal Library - 3 Libraries - Does what NC does now

Tier 2: National College - 3-5 Univ - Rename of Oxford University

Tier 3: Academy of Sciences - 3-5 Public Schools + RL and NC - Specialist Yield +1 Science

Culture NWs

Tier 1: National Epic - 3 Temples

Tier 2: Hermitage - 3-5 Opera Houses

Tier 3: National Archives - 3-5 Museums + Hermitage +NE - Specialist Yield +1 Culture

Commerce NWs

Tier 1: National Treasury - 3 Markets

Tier 2: National Mint - 3-5 Banks - 15% gold from trade routes

Tier 3: Federal Reserve - 3-5 SEs + NM + NT - Specialist Yield +1 Gold

Happiness NWs

Tier 1: Circus Maximus - 3 Colosseums (would like to see rename to amphitheater

Tier 2: Baths of Trajan - 3 Aqueducts

Tier 3: World's Fair - 3-5 Stadiums + CM - Either +10 unmodded happiness or +1 happiness per city

Production NWs

Tier 1: Ironworks - 3 Workshops

Tier 2: Assembly Plant - 3-5 Factories + Ironworks - 75% production

Military NWs

Tier 1: Military Epic - 3 Barracks

Tier 1: Agra Fort - 3 Walls

Tier 2: West Point - 3 Military Academies - 50% GG spawn rate

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Ahriman said:

I prefer the vanilla mechanism [requiring building X in every non-puppet in order to build its associated national wonder]. It works well, it isn't broken. I don't see any need to change things just for change's sake.

I don't think that is a good strategy here. The very deliberate core design for Civ5 was that happiness be the limit on growth. They very deliberately moved away from having multiple mechanisms that achieved this, and I think it was a good design decision.
The right way to get expansion limits to work is to concentrate on making happiness really work *right*. If you try to achieve a goal using several mechanics, its much harder to get balance right, and its much harder to make sure that mechanics like happiness really work as binding constraints. If you have one constraint that is tight, that is much more efficacious than having ~3 separate restraint mechanics, none of which are actually binding.

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Mentos said:

Although I’m no big fan of breaking existing game features, like National Wonders, I know it’s quite annoying if you currently build one for many turns and have to delay conquering a city just because of that. Sometimes you just forget you currently build one and blam: production for nothing.

That list above from Sneaks doesn’t look that bad. Such minimum building requirement will also force the player a bit too expand before you can benefit from all these wonder-buildings.
A general requirement of 3 sounds good, otherwise the poor Gandhi would suffer too much with too many cities as requirement. Also by forcing more cities, you are going to eliminate such feature-buildings on duel-size maps and no National Wonders at all with "One-City Challenge" game option then.

Here is my breaking game feature idea for National Wonders:
Instead of numbers of prerequisite buildings: city or total population requirement. Gandhi would very well like that!
No population 1 city needs Circus Maximus or offers enough workers/employees to occupy National Archives, Colleges, etc. Commuter traffic is more a modern era thing.
You just have to wait until the citizens are ready to support it. Airports aren’t built next to farm villages either (maybe).
I see the point though that it's maybe hard to know when you can finally build National Wonder A or B. More notification popups would be maybe too annoying.

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Txurce said:

I really like the names you came up with [Sneaks]. Is the idea to nerf single-city NW builds, then create a middle ground for expanding empires to still get NW's? Obviously it hurts OCC... but that aside, the theory seems to be that if you're not puppeting everything, everyone is going to build at least three cities - and there should be some semblance of "progress" before a NW is earned. It makes sense, and is interesting to boot.

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Thalassicus said:

Civ IV solved the OCC problem by allowing national wonders to only require 1 copy of the prereq building when that game mode is selected, which makes sense.

[If happiness is designed to be the only limit to expansion,] what then are the purpose of national wonders?

Sadly, I'm in the "they dumbed the game down" camp on this particular topic. I feel Civ IV's maintenance was the one iteration of Civilization that truly eliminated ICS at a fundamental level. I think it was removed because it was complex, but I personally like complex games, which is why I play Civilization. I've been spending months finding ways to mitigate ICS when that one mechanic took care of it completely.

I don't know of a way to replicate it with happiness in a way that wouldn't change Civ V at a basic level, which is why I've implemented dozens of small tweaks to mitigate ICS:

• Happiness per city, per population, per empire
• The buildings that boost resources
• Better buildings, especially at higher tiers, and weaker less-developed cities
• Buffed national wonders
• Shifted around and balanced policies
• Aspects of conquest like puppeting
• ...and so on

Another problem is even if I did have a way to take more drastic measures with happiness to curb expansion, there's no parallel method to prevent the AI from ICS'ing. I've been trying for a month, ever since the patch where they made the AI do ICS, which is why I started this thread a week ago: AI city distance?

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Seek said:

A few days ago when I was arguing for a nerf or move for the NC (Thal did the latter) in the Research thread I decided to test it for myself: play two games from the same start, one with rex and one with the one city NC rush with a rex afterwords if possible.

Random leader (Greece), Tectonics map, standard size, standard speed, emperor. Compared at turn 120.


National College version
(NC finished around turn 40)

• Renaissance era
• 3 cities (only, because I got completely walled off really early by Arabia)
• 71 /turn with specialists enabled and two academies worked.
• 23 techs
• 7 policies (most of Tradition, a couple in Rationalism)
• 20 /turn
• 1 wonder (Great Library but Porcelain Tower nearly finished)
• 0 city states (playing with CSD, no spare hammers for diplomats)
• 1 RA

Rapid Expansion version
(Note, I didn't remember where the goody huts were and actually got 1-2 fewer)

• Medieval era
• 6 cities
• 46.5 /turn (no specialists available)
• 17 techs
• 6 policies (Liberty mostly, and Piety because of happiness issues)
• 20 /turn
• 0 wonders
• 3 city state allies (one of each type)
• 0 RAs

All in all, fairly equally powerful empires. Though the NC is dominant in science by far (I hit 100BPT not long after), the other felt much more balanced and able to accomplish much more in the long run.

I posted this because I'm not crazy about the small number of cities requirement idea for National Wonders; it should be a reasonable and balanced choice to expand or not - which I think is Thal's point - and I found that to be true.

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Thalassicus said:

Thank you for that comparison Seek. Even if it's only one game, I agree with you that in practice, the national college isn't as powerful as it might seem. Since it now requires an additional tech, a rush to the NC is delayed 10-30 turns compared to vanilla (depending on game speed) which is a long time to halt expansion.

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Sneaks said:

You touch upon one of my biggest issues with the NW system as it stands. Expansion should indeed hurt in some form or another. However, the requirements of a building in every city ignores this very basic idea: Cities can and should be specialized. I have had instances where I might have the top 4-5 science producing cities in the entire game, but I am disallowed from building a national university because my size 2 city on the border of my empire does not have the same level of technological advancement as the capital which has existed for eras longer.

The reason city maintenance is a much more appealing negation to expansion to me is that it flows much smoother as a game progresses, and can reasonably be overcome after infrastructure investment. As it stands, a player that wants to play with 15 cities is more or less disallowed from building any non-tier 1 national wonders.

Every time the game removes things from the player as a means of balance, I consider it poor design.

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Thalassicus said:

Sort of like removing...

• Promotion saving
• Policy saving
• Early game scientists

...to try and solve:

• Insta-heal
• -25% policy cost effects
• Lightbulbing techs

The point of balancing is to enhance choice, and removing options reduces choice. It's a quick and absolute way to solve imbalances because the balance equation itself is removed, but doesn't really deal with underlying issues.

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Txurce said:

That "cities should be specialized" seems like a very subjective opinion. I see the point that a good-sized empire with specialized cities may be deprived of a NW, but my response is, so what? Your empire has the advantage of having more cities - cities that you chose to keep small because it suits some other part of your approach. I have the advantage of getting more NW's, because I passed up the advantage of REXing or ICSing.

I still like the thought behind your earlier proposal, but think it has to be considered very carefully, or it will penalize small empires over mid-sized ones.

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Thalassicus said:

I think what Sneaks is talking about is how we were rewarded for specializing in Civ IV. We'd have our military city, gold city, science city, GP city, etc.

In V, the nature of things means city focus is mostly gone, just about every city can be the same. National wonders sort of force us into non-specialization, and science is no longer tied to improvements, so science-focused cities don't really exist anymore either. Specialists themselves are also very limited in vanilla, making it difficult to have a "specialist city," one reason I added specialist slots to a bunch of stuff.

The capital tends to be a wonder and/or science city, but not really out of any choice of our own... there's lots of stuff that only boosts that one city and we can't decide where those boosts go.

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Seek said:

I like the proposal as well. A dynamic percentage-based system rather than the flat number system may be a good compromise: if you have the prereq building in, say, 75% *or more* of your cities, the NW would be unlocked. I don't know if it's possible, but it would avoid the downfalls of both sides of the argument.


Following this, perhaps more NWs should be % boosters.

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Thalassicus said:

I agree about NW's as boosters, one reason I added a bunch of % and pop-based bonuses lately... basically I'd like to find some way to reward thoughtful, strategic specialization.

Percent-city requirements to build NWs are not an option with the tools, unfortunately.

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bobbyboy29 said:

Hey thal, my idea for the national wonder requirements is to have different requirements for large and small empires. i.e: If you have only 4 cities, all of them need a library to complete NC, if you have more than that then you need libraries in 75% of cities rounded up (those numbers are subject to change, I'd probably put the percentage lower for NW's related to buildings which have maintenance costs like barracks).

If this is possible to mod in this fashion, I think it will mean that it will still be harder yet possible to build NW's for large empires (without having to stall settling or annexing cities to build them) yet the change doesn't make it any easier for small empires to build the NC.

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alpaca said:

My interpretation of what national wonders should be is basically along the lines of Sneaks'. They should be super-buildings that promote city specialization. If city specialization is powerful enough that a small empire with well-specialized cities has decent chances of fighting a larger empire without, that's a good thing. The large empire can have the specialized cities, too, but they will be smaller because of happiness reasons and more resources flowing into expansion than infrastructure.

In fact, I would argue that especially for small empires, it's not at all feasible to build most of the NWs because it's not feasible to get a university in all of 3 cities if one of them has to build military and the second is money-focused and has few hammers. Large empires usually have hammers to spare and can rotate their building plan so they can keep churning out units even though they get markets, libraries and universities up everywhere. They also have more money to rush-buy them in cities with little production. The NW city requirements don't promote small empires, it just promotes periods of stagnation.

My own plan is to add some more NWs and remove the building requirement except for the city you build the wonder in, and instead increase cost per city to make the investment steeper for large empires. Flavor-wise I'm also deliberating styling some NWs as super-versions of their respective buildings, as kind of upgrade.

I don't know if you should use city maintenance in balance. It once again depends on what you think "balancing" means, but city maintenance feels quite a bit different from happiness capped expansion. The most effective way to curb ICS is to make settlers expensive, by the way. You do think twice about when you want to shell out the 200 hammers for the settler if he's only going to grab vanilla terrain in PWM, so maybe that's a more appropriate way to go for BC

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Txurce said:

I've never understood [why to specialize cities for small empires], unless my three cities just happened to be geographically really different. I've occasionally had one of three cities low on hammers, but for me a university in every city of a small empire is a given, because all three cities being super-cities if at all possible is my foremost goal. What's the rationale for the more specialized approach?

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Seek said:

That sounds like a good way to go about it; I'm not sure that the larger empire would necessarily have smaller cities in the core than the small empire however. I often play in a builder style similar to Txurce and make 3-6 super-cities with decent hammers (if possible), science, gold and culture. There might be slight specialization, but usually they're all pretty well rounded. I'll build pretty much all the NWs in my super-capital which carries most of the heavy lifting.


Out of curiosity, can one adjust unit costs by number of cities like the NWs? (I took a cursory glance through the xml, but didn't see anything.) It might be an interesting way to go with settlers.

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zambies said:

Completely agree. I'm very much a builder so I generally don't have any use for more than the bare minimum military (just to keep people off my back) until I'm ready to sweep the world away or I decide to go for a rare domination victory.

I don't even bother specializing until I have more than, say, 5 - 7 cities. Even then I see a use for at least gold or science enhancing buildings in all but the most completely deficient cities.

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Sneaks said:

I think the basic point is that National Wonders should not only be appealing to all playstyles (not just builders), but also available to them. I also considered the non-requirement for multiple copies like alpaca, but ended up sticking with the 3 concept much like Civ IV did.

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Seek said:

I think it just comes down to what we decide NWs should be for: To me (and the devs and Thal I think) their purpose is to allow the small empire to keep up with large ones. Alpaca's view is to create/encourage city specialization. This is equally valid, but I think Thal has taken steps toward this using other methods (like building tweaks and additional resource bonuses), using the NWs as a temptation to stay small.

It's a shame that it cannot be based on a percentage of cities; I think this would be ideal once the dll is released. Until then I think we should leave them as is: essentially forcing the builder types to have 3+ cities is not really a desirable option I think, and for the expansionist the three city reqs seems insignificant.

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Ahriman said:

I think 17 national wonders is just too many.
Most wonders should be World Wonders. World Wonders should be the big powerful things with huge effects.
National wonders should be weaker, and should be about encouraging city specialization and giving some boost to small empires.


I'm not sure that encouraging planning is necessarily a bad thing?

What then are the purpose of national wonders?

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National wonders are a small extra reward for being small. They aren't there to actually limit growth or expansion. They're just a nice extra, you don't have to have them.
If national wonders are ever so powerful that you have to have them, then they're too good.

Another problem is even if I did have a way to take more drastic measures with happiness to curb expansion, there's no parallel method to prevent the AI from ICS'ing

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This means that the problem can't fully be fixed without dll access.
But you should start by fixing things from the human perspective using happiness, and then fix the AI's excessive happiness bonuses later.

I've made two main changes to the economy:
Trading post income
Unit maintenance

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Plus: larger cities (less growth required) which means more gold from trade income.
Plus: larger yields on buildings and mine/lumbermill yields mean more stuff gets built faster, including gold boosters.
The cumulative effect of all the boosts have dramatically shifted the economy.

I think the basic point is that National Wonders should not only be appealing to all playstyles (not just builders), but also available to them.

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Why? I disagree that national wonders should be available and appealing regardless of your playstyle. That's anti-strategy. Strategy is about choices having consequences, and about some playstyles closing off other options.

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alpaca said:

Well, I give you the university, which I will also build everywhere. It's more relevant for things like barracks or workshops. If I focus my unit needs (assuming I don't just go for the "manipulate the AI" approach) in one city, it's perfectly fine to only have a barracks there and ignore it in the other cities. Similarly, having a workshop in a city with only maybe 10 hammers is not really worth building this pretty expensive building, so the ironworks will be closed to me.

The advantage to specialisation is that I can focus my science city on farms and scientists, build the national college there, and get +50% for my highest pop city (usually the capital). In my money city, I will have all the money buildings while banks are too costly for what they will gain me in the other cities and I'd rather focus on other things. In my production city, I will usually churn out wonders so won't have a lot of time to build all those pesky buildings I need for the not-so-great national wonders.

Put simply, specialised city building simply makes better use of your resources because you need fewer buildings to achieve the same efficiency level.

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Txurce said:

I'm always intrigued by seeing something totally differently from someone who knows what he's talking about. I build my capital similarly - pop for science and NW's. I can see why a production city for Wonders makes sense... I often don't focus on Wonders, and build them piecemeal in any of my major cities. But I don't understand a gold city except when there are no hammers. To me a bank is a no-brainer once I have nothing else to build, and I would probably make a similar point about almost everything but wonders. That's why I wind up with 2-3 all-around cities apart from the capital.

Hypothetically, what do you do in a city (specialized or not) when you can build a bank, and have built everything else you need except for stuff like watermills? Maybe the answer is units... and here is where like most builders, I keep a small army that doesn't require that sort of focus.

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alpaca said:

Depends on the situation. Banks aren't no-brainers, they have a large opportunity cost as Ahriman says. If it's a production city, a granary or waterwheel could be more valuable than a bank. If it's a science city, waterwheels and granaries are often interesting anyways, and if I don't want them I'll pull off citizens from the mines and put them to working farms or gold until I get something more useful to build. If it's a money city, I will take the bank. Since we're talking about small-empire games I don't tend to build a lot of units, either (in fact, you can get by with barely any with the cutesy-kitten AI after the 1.1 patch).

City specialization does still pay off quite a lot, it's weaker than in Civ4 but I actually felt that it was too powerful in 4. Building maintenance is a very important point why this is the case. I typically end up with at least a library, university, market and colosseum in each city. If I don't play ICS, also a monument and temple, but they actively hurt in an ICS game due to their maintenance.

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rhammer640 said:

I agree that lack of city specialization is a huge 'fun' killer and choice killer for me. National wonders are one of my biggest problems with the game because it seems like they add a fun level of city specialization seeing as you can only build one of them. The problem is i never get to build them as i always like to have a medium sized empire. As is if i have only a few cities so i can get a few of them then each of those cities needs to be able to do everything and thus it isn't as fun to have a national wonder in them because they dont end up being specialized. Also like Alpaca, I dont want to build a library in a city that is small as it is a waste and doesn't seem like strategy at all but like a 'game' requirement, which removes the immersion feel.

I dont think the game should limit a cool element to pretty much one play style and make it not fun for other play styles to achieve. I know that this has been stated by others as well but i figured i would show my support for making some change in how national wonders are acquired.

On the flip side, i think a small empire should be able to achieve a science victory as well and that empire size shouldn't limit victory conditions. Some of the smallest countries have achieved the greatest scientific achievements.

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Thalassicus said:

I could give gold buildings a maintenance cost, so cities with X or higher gold income would be a priority for gold buildings. It's even simpler than with workshops, where I've found it penalizes an economy to build a workshop in a city of under ~10 due to the maintenance.

With markets etc it'd be intuitively obvious that if it has -2/turn maintenance at a 25% modifier, 8/turn base income is a break-even point.

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Ahriman said:

If you ever have nothing else to build, then hammers and production boosts are too available.

You should always have stuff to build, and a bank should have a low relative value if it only brings in ~2-3 gold per turn.

I don't see any need for adding explicit gold maintenance on gold-boosters though. Its fine for the cost to be opportunity cost.

But the point is; a bank is a priority in a city with lots of trading posts and good gold income. Its not a priority elsewhere.

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Dunkah said:

Hey is it possible to build specialists buildings that use say hammers per turn as an upkeep? Then you are trading gold for hammers.

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Thalassicus said:

It'd be rather easy to do that Dunkah. I think it might overly complicate things to have two types of maintenance though, especially for a mod designed just to balance things.

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Txurce said:

alpaca said:

If it's a production city, a granary or waterwheel could be more valuable than a bank. If it's a science city, waterwheels and granaries are often interesting anyways, and if I don't want them I'll pull off citizens from the mines and put them to working farms or gold until I get something more useful to build...

City specialization does still pay off quite a lot, it's weaker than in Civ4 but I actually felt that it was too powerful in 4. Building maintenance is a very important point why this is the case. I typically end up with at least a library, university, market and colosseum in each city. If I don't play ICS, also a monument and temple, but they actively hurt in an ICS game due to their maintenance.

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The first paragraph mostly mirrors how I play, but I wind up with more than a monument, library, market, coliseum and university in every city. To be clear, I can see how there could be an efficiency to limiting what you build. Let me ask about one of your examples: what do you build in the science city when you pull citizens out of the mines? Do you set the city on research or gold? Or, differently, what do you build (units aside) in all the turns following the researching of Banking?

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I prefer the vanilla mechanism [of happiness to limit expansion]. It works well, it isn't broken. I don't see any need to change things just for change's sake.

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doktorstick said:

@Thalassicus
Does a city in revolt (whether annexed, razed, or puppetted) count as a city requirement for the NW? If so, can you exclude cities cities in revolt or those being razed? (I haven't seen a city in revolt outside of conquest.)

I personally find the canceling of a NW a minor inconvenience. To me, it isn't much different than delaying a new city until SP pops. You don't lose the hammers contributed to the NW, so I come back to it when I've re-met the requirements.

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alpaca said:

The first thing you should do when capturing a city is to puppet it, no matter what. Then you can decide whether you want to keep it a puppet or raze it.

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