I wish they'd changed the Great Person system!

My least favorite game mechanic in Civ IV was that all of my cities were competing with each other to spawn Great People. Typically I had one Specialist city churning out Great People, and each time one appeared, the cost would go up for all cities, which meant that none of my other cities would ever catch up, which means that there was zero reason to ever care about Great Person Points in any city but that one.

Civ V, unfortunately, took things even further in that direction. Not only are all of my cities "competing" with each other for this same limited resource, but each type of Great Person is competing against the other! (I will acknowledge that one improvement of this system was that it removed the randomness of Civ IV's system, where you might have a 75% chance of spawning a Great Engineer and a 25% of spawning a Great Scientist.)

And then, to make things worse, somewhere around Gods & Kings, they changed the mechanics that give "free" Great People to increment the cost of producing Great People in cities. So I end up in these situations where I'm 80/100 towards producing a Great Engineer. But if I complete the Liberty tree this turn, I'll be only 80/200 towards that Great Engineer. So what have I gained with my "free" Great Person? And if you're playing as the Maya, you basically ignore GPP altogether.

Basically, I think it's bad game design where I feel the need to deliberately sabotage my progress in one area because it will actually set me back in another area simply due to an arbitrary game mechanic. I can accept such things where they add strategic depth and make flavor sense. For example, if you want to make lots of Missionaries, you might want to hold off on discovering a Renaissance-era tech, which increases the cost of Missionaries by 50%, representing my people starting to rely less on faith and more on Enlightenment principles. And it's actually an interesting tradeoff.

But cursing my puppet city for generating Great Merchants faster than my capital can generate Great Engineers... that's just a weird annoying gameplay mechanic. Why should those two things even be connected?

It seems like they realized this was a bad system in Brave New World, and fixed it... partially! Specifically, it seems like the Culture specialists (Artist/Musician/Writer) are each in a separate silo than the other three types. When I generated a Great Writer, it increased the cost of my next Great Writer, but not my next Great Engineer/Scientist/Merchant.

I wish they had gone the rest of the way and split Engineers, Scientists, and Merchants. Not only would it remove the feeling that my specialists are working against each other, it would encourage diversity. For example, even if you were pursuing science, you'd want to get a cheap Great Merchant or two rather than just keep making Great Scientists.

Now I'm just dreaming, but I wish that all your cities contributed to a civilization-wide bucket for each great person type. If I have four cities contributing Great Merchant points, let them work together, and just have the Great Merchant spawn at the city that created the most, or choose randomly (weighted based on how much the city contributed).

There are a lot of ways that they could have gone with this mechanic. I'm disappointed that they didn't come up with anything as of Brave New World's release.

What do other people think about this mechanic?

Totally agree, although I was under the impression that "free" GPs from Maya long count, Liberty finisher, Pisa etc don't increase the GP cost and neither do faith purchases.

They should just take GM, GS and GE costs apart and balance them in some other way. GM is currently abysmal because of the opportunity cost: getting one of these makes you get less GS and GE, and very rarely would I actually want that 500-1000 gold and 30 influence more than a huge beaker flood or a free wonder.

Couldn't agree more, this is is badly thought out at the moment. It would be nice mechanic that all cities work together - on empire level - on producing great people. We'd have one bar for each great person, so we could plan to get few of each, and it would avoid illogical situations you described. And free great persons should be really free not what we get now. Some tweaks should be made balance wise - tall empires shouldn't suffer - but it can be said that current system punishes wide empires.
This all looks like a bigger revamp to game mechanics, I don't think devs will be willing to make such changes so late in the game development.

I also don't expect the devs to make these kinds of changes at this point. I do agree with the OP that there is a lot of room and opportunity for improvement in this area.

I think it would be a good idea to remove the Engineer/Scientist/Merchant competition (since it now applies only to those three, so not even the majority of GP types) but I would be against pooling your points from many cities, as it would remove a substantial strategic element of city specialization.

Martinus said:

I think it would be a good idea to remove the Engineer/Scientist/Merchant competition (since it now applies only to those three, so not even the majority of GP types) but I would be against pooling your points from many cities, as it would remove a substantial strategic element of city specialization.

Click to expand...

This, and what's even better, I'm very sure this would be easy to implement. But perhaps trickier to balance...

Martinus said:

I think it would be a good idea to remove the Engineer/Scientist/Merchant competition (since it now applies only to those three, so not even the majority of GP types) but I would be against pooling your points from many cities, as it would remove a substantial strategic element of city specialization.

Click to expand...

Yea, I actually agree with you that the city specialization aspect is cool. Except for food and production, all other mechanics are just cities contributing to empire-wide buckets (science, money, culture, faith, tourism, even happiness). It's cool to have one mechanic that's local within cities.

First of all, it makes sense. If Barcelona has a vibrant artistic movement going on, well, that's where the Picassos, Miros, and Gaudis are going to make their debut on the world stage.

Second of all, it leads to interesting gameplay. Do I build Big Ben in my city with Marble so it's built more cheaply, or do I build it in New York which I've specialized with Merchants?

It just rubs me the wrong way when I see that I have, like, 18/500 GPP towards a Great Engineer in some city that once needed an Engineer specialist for six turns, and I just think, "ha, yea right." That's equal to zero for all intents and purposes.

There are more complicated things you could do, but at some point the complexity isn't worth it. For example, cities could share their GPP in some way. They could put "great person pressure" on each other like religion. Or maybe something like this: When deciding if New York has enough points to spawn a Great Merchant, it also gets to count half of the points contributed by other cities. So if New York has 90/100, and Washington and Boston each have 10/100, that's 90 + 10/2 + 10/2 = 100, and it all turns into one Great Merchant in New York. But that might do the wrong thing if you want to generate Great Merchants in two cities at the same time. (Note that you CAN'T do this with the new Great Artist/Musician/Writers, since the Guilds that produce them are National Wonders. Again, I think that this was because they agree with me about the flaws of the GPP mechanic, but it was easier to balance the new guys than rebalance the old guys.)

Have any modders tried their hand at a different GPP system?