Artifacts can use some work

Love the ideas for reforming archaeological digs. One thing left out is hidden sites. I have yet to play a game where I complete the exploration tree and find hidden sites. I'm not sure whether hidden sites offer more culture and tourism, but if not, make hidden sites offer a much higher chance of success (you mentioned failed archaeological digs) and greater culture/tourist yield (something like +6 tourism and culture per hidden site).

Also, another awesome reform to archaeology would be gpt generation. Wouldn't it make sense if museums (with exploration or aestethics finisher) generated variable gpt per valuable archaeological stuff stored in a museum? The gold generation would initially be quite high but it wears off over time. Recycling great works between cities stabilizes gpt gained from museums, whilst trading great works of archaeology boosts the gpt rate gained from them. Some digs might also contain rare coins which would give you the option of cashing them in and making lots of gold.
 
Love the ideas for reforming archaeological digs. One thing left out is hidden sites. I have yet to play a game where I complete the exploration tree and find hidden sites. I'm not sure whether hidden sites offer more culture and tourism, but if not, make hidden sites offer a much higher chance of success (you mentioned failed archaeological digs) and greater culture/tourist yield (something like +6 tourism and culture per hidden site).

Also, another awesome reform to archaeology would be gpt generation. Wouldn't it make sense if museums (with exploration or aestethics finisher) generated variable gpt per valuable archaeological stuff stored in a museum? The gold generation would initially be quite high but it wears off over time. Recycling great works between cities stabilizes gpt gained from museums, whilst trading great works of archaeology boosts the gpt rate gained from them. Some digs might also contain rare coins which would give you the option of cashing them in and making lots of gold.

As it stands, hidden sites are nothing more than harder-to-acquire antiquity sites. I'd like for them to produce more culture and tourism as well, though I think it would more efficient to determine how much gold is produced based off overall tourism output than gold production between artifacts. Perhaps 25-50% of total tourism could be converted to gold, though I do agree that some great works should be able to be sold, like I said in my other post.
 
I would add the following "improvements" to this idea thread:

1. When clicking on an artifact from the city screen, there should be some image/picture of the particular artifact (Beads, Coin, Amulet, Artillery Shell, whatever). One of the nice things about Artwork is viewing the picture. Even Writing and Music get a cool little display. With artifacts, they are boring.

2. I also like changing the icon (to that headdress icon that is already in game). Also, you can color code it, based on either Civilization or Era.

3. I also wish they would be more creative with the Theming - both the requirements and the name. Most of the wonders seem to have a "fixed" title if you achieve the Theming bonus. For example, the Great Library is always a "Library of Ancient Knowledge," even if the two pieces of writing are from the Atomic and Information Age.

4. I dislike how all artifacts end up being in the "warfare" department. It would be nice if the theming title would actually have more variation. In addition, even if you match up the era + civilization + even artifact type, the museum is simply "Museum of ERA World Warfare." How about a Museum of Ancient German Beads? Etc. It would also be neat if there were bonuses for actually matching up the artifact type, and other such characteristics.
 
Love the ideas for reforming archaeological digs. One thing left out is hidden sites. I have yet to play a game where I complete the exploration tree and find hidden sites. I'm not sure whether hidden sites offer more culture and tourism, but if not, make hidden sites offer a much higher chance of success (you mentioned failed archaeological digs) and greater culture/tourist yield (something like +6 tourism and culture per hidden site).

Also, another awesome reform to archaeology would be gpt generation. Wouldn't it make sense if museums (with exploration or aestethics finisher) generated variable gpt per valuable archaeological stuff stored in a museum? The gold generation would initially be quite high but it wears off over time. Recycling great works between cities stabilizes gpt gained from museums, whilst trading great works of archaeology boosts the gpt rate gained from them. Some digs might also contain rare coins which would give you the option of cashing them in and making lots of gold.

I ignored hidden sites mostly because it's rare for people to actually take the whole exploration tree - it's a sad SP tree, and usually only used if you're already going to win the game anyway. Hidden sites as it is currently is certainly not enough incentive to get the tree.

I did some rough math. For example, let's say on a standard map there are about 40 sites (I think it's usually 38?). Let's say you get archaeology and manage to get half of those first, which is 15 artifacts + 4 landmarks, say. You probably also made half a dozen great artists by then, so 25. Let's also say you got Louvre, Uffizi, Sistine, and you have the slot from palace. So that's 10 slots. So you need about 6-7 cities with museums to even have enough space for all the artifacts.

That's quite a few museums, and honestly, in a regular culture game on standard map, if I'm not playing also a military game that happens to generate a lot of culture, it's not too likely that you will need the hidden sites - you'll probably run out of space before that, or at best have room to dig up a few hidden sites. I don't find it compelling.

Maybe if hidden site artifacts give more stuff, it'll make it more worthwhile, but then you pretty much have to have a wide empire to hold all the items. What the current mechanic doesn't allow is for a tall but productive empire to amass a lot of artifacts.
 
They're supposed to, but they don't. If you dig up a lot of artifacts you'll start to find things that you know for a fact did not happen (IE an artifact from a razed AI city being dug up within three tiles of your capital).

From my experience it's both, some will correspond to real events that happened and others won't. All the digs in my neighborhood around my capital and core cities will almost always be where a barbarian camp was or where a unit was killed. However it seems like once you get into more sparsely populated areas the game starts randomly generating fake events for digs. My guess would be the game tries to evenly distribute digs around the map, in the areas where events did happen it will put in digs based on real events but otherwise it randomly generates them.
 
ah, well okay, the OP answered a question i had about the value of different digs. so they all generate the same tourism/culture, before any applicable bonuses. :/

yeah it would be great to at least assign variable Tourism/culture rates that depend on either distance, or diverse civ artifacts, or artifact you were able to dig up from a civ you're at war with.

a couple games ago, Bismark eventually wiped out the Shoshone around Medieval era. i went into his land and the nearby neutral ground, dug about 6 times and finally got a prized Shoshone razed city artifact and was kind of crushed that is was the same value as a crappy bead from a dig site that was in my own territory.

oh, also i don't Archaeologists to be that expensive... at least not relative to all other late cultural endeavors, b/c all of them are expensive it seems. if you're bothering to build more than a handful of Archaeologists and building Museums in all your cities, then that means you're whole strategy must be CV anyway. unless ofc you've already kind of beat the game even though there's a lot of time left in it, and you're kind of just dabbling somewhere in the middle of a SV or CV, or DV really (depending of if you're playing with a lot of CS's)
 
From my experience it's both, some will correspond to real events that happened and others won't. All the digs in my neighborhood around my capital and core cities will almost always be where a barbarian camp was or where a unit was killed. However it seems like once you get into more sparsely populated areas the game starts randomly generating fake events for digs. My guess would be the game tries to evenly distribute digs around the map, in the areas where events did happen it will put in digs based on real events but otherwise it randomly generates them.

Yes, that is more conclusion as well.

I'm currently in a long marathon game. After about 40-50 dig (half of the total available), almost all of them actually do correspond to actual events (most of it mine!). So far, I've only had a single occurrence which seems odd - Valletta (off in a corner) in a melee combat with Aztecs during the Classical era. I am skeptical that the Aztecs discovered them at this time. However, Valletta is in a sparse area of land, far from other civs, so I figure either:

A. They are trying to distribute digs evenly around the map, and in some areas (far from civs), they are forced to randomly generate because not enough interesting things happened there. I think this is the most likely explanation.

B. There could also be an attempt to spread the dig sites around the civilizations (maybe they wanted Valletta and the Aztecs represented), but I think this is a less likely reason.
 
I agree with the points made by the OP. I also wish there was a wonder other than the Louvre that made use of the artifacts. There should be a major Natural History Museum in the vein of the one in NYC, even just as a national wonder.
 
So much win in this topic.

At first I thought that artefacts are for tourism and that is their place. it's like asking garrisoned troops to provide happiness in a city...oh well i guess it'd be cool if there were a reason for them to be in more games.

It seems to me that artefacts don't need to have a nation/era the same way art does, and that they should just be artefacts for the sake of putting in art slots. However instead they would have a type as suggested above such as War, Innovation, Fossil, and Relic.

Making a site would give a strong bonus to whomever controlls the territory (diplo for making it for others) and an initial little boost to make it worthwhile. Or keeping the artefact would give a small bonus per turn, with an increasing bonus for each of the same type. and these bundles should be able to be traded as an exhibition for 30 turns, or sold outright. actually all works should be able to be sold.

In short i'm totally agreeing with everyone and backup whoever posted something very similar top what i just said.
 
4) Maybe have digs that will come up empty - yup, that's right. Not all digs will work out, surprise surprise. In those cases, have the archaeologist stay in the game instead of disappear, and he can go dig somewhere else. Archaeology is a lot of guesswork and takes some luck. It will, again, make this part of the game a bit more meaningful and interesting.
you mean this???
Spoiler :
 
1) Make the artifact's stats variable. Not everyone will want to go pay money to see a pottery shard from the middle of nowhere, but everyone wants to see King Tut's headdress. The point is, artifacts are not all the same, and some are worth a lot more than others. It's not only more realistic for digs to come up with variable values, it's also more fun. Balance of course is an issue, but that shouldn't be too hard to work out.
I like the idea of there being super artifacts lying around; however, rather than have them be randomly distributed I'd prefer these to be relegated towards the Exploration finisher. I honestly thought this is what they were going for pre-release when I first heard of the finisher's details and was disappointed to see that they were so boring.

2) Attach some other attributes to some dig results. Instead of always giving some tourism, some digs maybe can give faith, others culture, maybe others science. It doesn't have to be a big boost. Maybe to balance out the variable tourism, some artifacts can give you +3 faith and +1 tourism, or something. The point is, we all recognize that different artifacts have different values/attributes in real life, so it's really silly for them all be exactly the same.
Alternatively, allow you to put artifacts in other buildings that will give other bonuses. For example, an artifact placed in a University could give science, an artifact placed in a Temple could give faith. I'd really like to keep the random element down to a minimum and just let you have more OPTIONS in regards to what to do with your artifacts.

3) Make foreign/faraway artifacts worth more. This goes along with the problem a lot of people have with trading art/artifacts - it's a straight up trade and it's a bit silly. I guess right now there's a bit of this "worth more" worked into the tourism bonuses, but generally speaking the artifacts should reflect some sort of foreign/exotic premium. If you want me to send my archaeologist all the way around the world to dig, then it better be worth my time (instead of just digging right outside my borders for what is basically exactly the same thing).
No critique here, I absolutely agree. Maybe even give an additional bonus for artifacts from civs that you conquered as a way of saying "yes, this is a great empire that fell at our bidding, look how awesome we are".

4) Maybe have digs that will come up empty - yup, that's right. Not all digs will work out, surprise surprise. In those cases, have the archaeologist stay in the game instead of disappear, and he can go dig somewhere else. Archaeology is a lot of guesswork and takes some luck. It will, again, make this part of the game a bit more meaningful and interesting.
Nononononononono

Gameplay over realism any day. There's nothing meaningful about finding out all of those digs around your capital are empty and will produce no landmarks; we already have to deal with this crap via digs not showing up at all and at least then we'll know not to waste precious turns on these empty tiles.

5) When digging up foreign artifact belonging to another civ, have the option to give it to them for diplo bonuses. Kinda like how you return a worker. It's only fair.
I like this idea. I'd also like to be able to pay for dig rights; it would require a DOF and would be on a per-dig basis.

6) This might be too much coding change, but maybe have the ability to organize exhibitions beyond the current tourism bonus system. I mean, if I have 8 artifacts that are all warfare related, right now if the era/civ don't work out I might not get many bonsues at all, when in real life such a collection may be worth a lot as a group for an exhibition. I don't know if this is possible, but it's an idea.[/qupte]
It's a nice idea but I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to implement it. The best way would be through new wonders with oddball theming bonuses.
 
I do think they could be spiced up somehow, but I kind of disagree with the notion that the yield (+2 tourism) is a problem.

It's a balance thing between tall & wide empires. Tall empires have the advantage in building wonders and getting those nice theming bonuses. There needs to be a mechanism that allows wide empires to compete in tourism. And that is archaeology. If you have more cities (and hence more museums), you can make up that difference and compete. If you change the yield it messes with the balance. You don't want wide empires to have that big of an advantage.
 
I do think they could be spiced up somehow, but I kind of disagree with the notion that the yield (+2 tourism) is a problem.

It's a balance thing between tall & wide empires. Tall empires have the advantage in building wonders and getting those nice theming bonuses. There needs to be a mechanism that allows wide empires to compete in tourism. And that is archaeology. If you have more cities (and hence more museums), you can make up that difference and compete. If you change the yield it messes with the balance. You don't want wide empires to have that big of an advantage.

Actually the real advantage with wide in tourism is you have way more landmarks to work. Once you get a hotel or better those things are equal to at least a couple artifacts, especially if historical landmark is enacted. A couple theming bonuses won't help.

I also suggested that theming bonus can be expanded a bit. GW theme bonuses can use a buff, for example. No reason why Sistine has the same +2 as any generic museum
 
Really like the thoughts here, especially those in the OP. Nicely thought out.

I particularly like the idea of randomization of artifact effects. +:c5science: and +:c5faith: both seem like reasonable additions to the current +:c5culture: and +tourism. A few other possibilities:
  • +:c5gold: (per turn)
  • +:c5happy: (either a static bonus, like discovering a NW, or a tradeable luxury resource, like Civ IV's "hit singles", "hit movies", etc.)
  • +:c5greatperson: (for a specific kind of GP, perhaps a Great Archaeologist (see below))

This accomplishes more, in my opinion, than mere variety for the sake of variety. It makes the artifact/archaeologist feature relevant to different VCs and priorities, as artifacts would no longer be tied to the culture game. Also, and perhaps most important to the fun factor, it would introduce a second "wave" of world exploration, similar to goodie huts (exactly as headcase pointed out). Artifacts already do this all by themselves, but the novelty has worn off and we now know exactly what to expect from each and every site (era-specific landmark benefits notwithstanding). Introducing non-trivial randomization would spice things up.

One new suggestion I have is to introduce a new GP, the Great Archaeologist. ("GAr"?) This would be an interesting addition in its own right, and it synergizes very well with the randomization idea. There are many possibilities with this idea, both in how the GAr is used and how it is produced. Some ideas (not all of which should be implemented, of course, for balance purposes):
  • the GAr could have multiple uses, akin to how a Great Prophet is a super-Missionary/Inquisitor. Say, 4 sites per GAr.
  • the GAr could reduce the dig time. Say, 33% faster digging.
  • the GAr could be like the Pathfinder, and allow the player to choose the benefit received when an artifact is produced. (Assuming randomization is implemented.)
  • the GAr could magnify an artifact's bonus, regardless of whether or not randomization is implemented.
  • rather than having the completed Exploration SP tree unlock hidden sites, have it unlock production of GArs, and transform hidden sites into "Great Sites" (as per dexter's suggestion). These sites would be visible to all upon Archaeology's discovery, allowing for planning and strategizing, but would only be diggable by a GAr.
  • introduce Great Artifacts that can only be discovered by GArs. These could perhaps result from regular digs (% chance?) or be tied solely to Great Sites. As with other GWs, these would have their own pop-up picture, and would grant enhanced bonuses, regardless of whether or not randomization is implemented. This would just be plain cool, as it would introduce things like King Tut's mask, the Sutton Hoo helmet, Peking Man, etc. (Perhaps the Terracotta Army could be replaced by another Wonder, and its name shifted to a Great Artifact.)

I don't believe that implementation of these ideas would require significant coding or resources, except perhaps for new unique pictures for Great Artifacts. Balancing would certainly need to be carefully done, but again I don't believe that any of these suggestions are crazy or severely imbalanced. The artifact game is a great addition; for a minimum of extra effort, it could be made ever greater and really serve to spice up the mid-game play.

Great thread and ideas, MarshalN!
 
I agree with the OP and others. In my last game I went all out building archaeologists until I had exceeded my ability to curate the artifacts I had "discovered." In my current game, I got to the end of Archaeology, and suddenly felt weary at the thought of "oh no, not this again." I agree archaeologists are expensive and several are required but once they are built, they really don't add much to the game.

I don't think much can be done to save archaeology, in a tech tree, that I believe is already getting to be too long, in a game where players are raising complaint about processing times. I think the best thing the developers could do would be to create visualizations of the artifacts (like those for World Wonders), so that gathering artifacts would become like collecting Baseball cards. But the idea of having a collection and building up sets has little direct appeal for me. Archaeologists and artifacts may survive another expansion or into the initial Civ VI but I don't think it's an idea facing a short shelf life.

The first issue I think is that the ancient sites simply "appear." If one were to build a game based on archaeology it would need to have that ancient mystery feel ... a much more complete "back story," eg. "we know that the lost army left here, and there were accounts given of it here and there. We know it was searching for....." And then following up on clues. There's no room for that in Civilization.

There's not much point in endowing the ancient sites with "60 gold", "new technology" and the goodies of the past. That formula exists in Ancient Ruins and in the tribal or barbarian villages of past editions, so there's no point in a second tier of ancient relics in the game.

Ancient Ruins and the Barbarian Villages of past games, were stumble upon, early game discoveries, that presented at least a small "eureka." Archaeological Sites, simply spring up whole and if they're hidden on an unexplored portion of the map they're probably in another civ's territory.

I cannot see any way Archaeology can be built up to give it a real game play feel, that presents the player with any real challenge apart from the decision to allocate resources. Archaeology looks to me like a serious example of putting more things in more slots.

BNW is a great game but it's not pure gold and not every aspect of the game glitters like gold. I am getting the nagging feeling the developers of Civilization may be trying to be all things to all people and some of these blue sky, overly ambitious and not very engaging experiments that take the away from its core could limit its future.
 
Actually the real advantage with wide in tourism is you have way more landmarks to work. Once you get a hotel or better those things are equal to at least a couple artifacts, especially if historical landmark is enacted. A couple theming bonuses won't help.

I also suggested that theming bonus can be expanded a bit. GW theme bonuses can use a buff, for example. No reason why Sistine has the same +2 as any generic museum
that's also true, but landmarks can be unpredictable, sometimes you get bad luck with them not being in 3 tiles of a city. And that is not the highest priority WC resolution. artifacts are pretty much guaranteed, since you can steal 1 from each AI, plus usually get most of them in neutral/CS territory. if you go wide and fill all museums with artifacts, you are at least guaranteed a decent baseline tourism.
 
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