Useless, Worthless, Stupid Water ;)

Firaxis, please end the ocean tile and seaside city discrimination. My suggestions:

Allow workers to build work boats in a city rather than having the city build them. That should help coastal cities get started without having to divert so much production or gold into work boats.

Food and gold yields of ocean tiles needs to increase in some manner as the game progresses. A riverside city will get access to several 4 food 1 gold farms as soon as Civil Service is researched, whereas a seaside city will be stuck with 2 food 1 gold ocean tiles. One way to remedy this could as follows: with the Compass tech coastal tiles give 1 extra food and with Navigation tech coastal tiles give 1 extra gold. The Colossus should probably limited to giving 1 extra gold on coastal tiles only (if it isn't reworked entirely to boost trade route income).

To further increase the incentive of seaside cities, add more ocean luxuy resources and possibly increase the number of bonus resources in deep ocean tiles. Another seaside city oriented pantheon belief would also be nice.

Generally a seaside city is more open to attacks compared to an inland city, as well as having lower production. In return seaside cities should at least have similar food income and better gold income.

I don't mind having to build workboats, but geez it costs way too many hammers.

It is true that coastal misses out on civil service/fertilizer, but fishing boat tiles can give a significant number of food (and gold/production). So the problem doesn't necessarily seem to be that ocean tiles are stuck at 2/1 food/gold, but that a coastal city without any fish is much weaker than one with plenty of fish.

It would be a big change, but what if fish were completely removed from the map (luxuries stay) and you "create" fish tiles by building workboats and working ocean tiles? Obviously the numbers would have to be modified both on how much workboats cost and how much they yield, but the point is that in such a system any coastal start will have the potential for decent ocean tiles. And as it should be. Kind of silly that you can only fish in specific areas.

I think the coastal layout is fine the way it is currently. You only build coastal cities for 2 reasons. One, that there are abundant sea resources. And two, that you really need a port. I feel this correctly parallels real life city placement. It is not until the modern days of family vacations that cities began to crop up in places on the coast that aren't fishing centers or essential ports.

How about instead of actually having workers do the work of work boats, we could have work boats work like workers instead. So they sit a couple of turns on the tile and bam you got an improvement there. We could then have sea tiles work like regular tiles, some will have resources some wont, but every tile can be improved.

The yield that a plane coastal tile yields is up for question though. I would like to see riverside farms be stronger in food yield, so what about the basic 'sea farm' improvement could give +1 food or gold now that coastal tiles are penniless, with a lighthouse they should be stronger than a farm before civil service, so maybe 3 food and 1 gold. Making coastal starts viable, not that much as you don't have to waste tons of hammers on work boats and viable growth, with production later on with harbors and seaports.

I actually don't mind coastal starts as I tend to play a wider, sprawling game. A city population of 9 isn't going to be working ocean tiles either way.

However I was looking at the situation from a gameplay perspective (tall vs. wide). I think it is an interesting choice and in most places on the map that choice is available. Deserts can go tall with 4 food floodplains and hammers from working sand dunes (lol?). Even tundra does fairly well in G&K. The +1 food on camps religious trait along with deer and fox can make for some impressive tundra cities.

The only part on the map that often gets left out is coastal unless there are several sea resources. I just think it would be interesting gameplay for a player to be able to build a tall coastal city if the investment is there (fishing boats) regardless if you get lucky on 6 fish tiles or not.

I'm not overly concerned with realism. Any portion of the game breaks if you analyze it too closely. As long as there is good gameplay with general ideas that represent ideas in the real world, that is good enough.

ahawk said:

I've been wondering the same thing about early gold. I have several thoughts:

1) The palace could now provide more gold then it used to.
2) Trade-posts could be moved to a much earlier position on the tech-tree.
3) New buildings may be introduced to the early game that give raw gold (as opposed to the percentage-bonuses from Market, Bank, etc.)

Any of those seem like possible solutions, though, if caravans are unlocked as early as Animal Husbandry, then I'm not sure how bad the problem will actually be, since that's quite early indeed.

Click to expand...

I hadn't thought about trading posts...given the role of trade routes, I've got to think that trading posts functioning the way they used to is completely illogical. If rivers don't represent small-scale trade the way they used to, then tile improvements shouldn't be able to generate this effect either.

I noticed that every civ is guaranteed a land and sea trade route. I wonder how this affects non-coastal civs.

I don't mind coastal tiles as they are, i.e. essentially useless. There are a lot of useless or marginal tiles (non-resource, non-fresh water grassland and plains) in Civ5, and you usually don't have the population to work them anyway.

I think they should increase the occurrence of Fish though, not by a massive amount, maybe 20-30%, but I've seen to many cases where you have a continent and hardly any location where you can have even two sea resources within a city's three tile radius.

Helmling said:

I hadn't thought about trading posts...given the role of trade routes, I've got to think that trading posts functioning the way they used to is completely illogical. If rivers don't represent small-scale trade the way they used to, then tile improvements shouldn't be able to generate this effect either.

Click to expand...

Without TP's, there's little to no reliable source of income.

Removing gold from rivers takes away the heavy dependence on luck with rivers. Removing TP's actually remvoes the player's to make a trade-off to generate some gold instead of something else that could have gone there.

steveg700 said:

Without TP's, there's little to no reliable source of income.

Removing gold from rivers takes away the heavy dependence on luck with rivers. Removing TP's actually remvoes the player's to make a trade-off to generate some gold instead of something else that could have gone there.

Click to expand...

Indeed, and I'm thinking that's the direction they want to go. It's a movement away from the "magic" trade gold that has existed throughout the series. It started with roads no longer automatically generating gold. That was to prevent road spam. Then the whole cottage concept was scrapped for 5, again to prevent tile spamming.

Now, with BNW, they're attacking the other sources of easy gold, coasts and especially rivers. Think about it, if they take away river gold and road gold but leave trading post gold, what do you think everyone will be forced to do? Spam trading posts everywhere. That's why I suspect posts will work differently in this expansion. Maybe they'll extend the range or value of routes, but I doubt they'll still be a ready source of gold.

I'm really thinking that we're all going to have to dramatically rethink our strategies, especially in the early game. But who knows, maybe I'm reading this wrong. It's so early.

I'm sure the tradeship that you will get will be a good incentive for having a coastal city (besides building ships). I remember a game, I think it was called Call to Arms, Call to Power or something like that (a civ game not by this company, I think), in that game there was trade routes that could be broken. You could do economic warfare. In this expansion you will get an automated unit that will represent the trade route. I think the money you get from getting a trade route over seas will be worth guarding it from a privateer or later on submarine

My concern towards the new Trade route mechanics and removal of gold from riverside and coast tiles is how the AI will handle the situation. If the new system require too much micro would the AI earn enough gold? And it shouldn't be a new method for he player to benefit from the AI.

Calouste said:

I don't mind coastal tiles as they are, i.e. essentially useless. There are a lot of useless or marginal tiles (non-resource, non-fresh water grassland and plains) in Civ5, and you usually don't have the population to work them anyway.

I think they should increase the occurrence of Fish though, not by a massive amount, maybe 20-30%, but I've seen to many cases where you have a continent and hardly any location where you can have even two sea resources within a city's three tile radius.

Click to expand...

Non-freshwater grassland is ok. 3 pre-fertilizer and 4 post fertilizer isn't bad. I see your point re-plains, although they're perfectly good post fertilizer. Water without gold, on the other hand, tops out at a trashlicious 2. That's worse than tundra. Let that sink in; a frozen, barren wasteland produces more food in this game then water tiles. In what sort of world is Deadhorse, Alaska a better source of food than Tyre, Manhattan, Carthage, Istanbul/Constantinople, Alexandria, etc.

Water tiles should be useful. If they get rid of the coin, then I'd put water tiles at:
-1 food base
-Lighthouse gives all water tiles +1 food
-Harbor gives all water tiles +1 food (and +1 coin on fishing boats)
-Seaport gives all water tiles +1 production (and +1 production and +1 coin on fishing boats)

So then water tiles would be 3 food with a harbor, 3 food 1 hammer with a seaport. Maybe add a late industrial or early modern building to add trade (or possibly tourism) to water tiles, and then they're at least not a bad tile.

Ocean should be a MAJOR food resource tile (Just like in the real world). Its ridiculous that Ocean gives as much food as perma-frozen Tundra tiles.

Now Ocean will be even more useless? Are 2K trolling us?

Securion said:

Ocean should be a MAJOR food resource tile (Just like in the real world).

Click to expand...

Depends on what part of the ocean you're talking about. Most viable food resources are located near continental shelves. The open ocean (which is what I assume "ocean" tiles are referring to) is essentially a desert in terms of available nutrients. Ocean tiles should be similar to desert tiles in base usability. Coast tiles should have greater appearances of fish and other resources than they do currently.

DemonMaster said:

Or make the worker turn into a workboat if moved into water.

Click to expand...

I like this.

Helmling said:

Indeed, and I'm thinking that's the direction they want to go. It's a movement away from the "magic" trade gold that has existed throughout the series. It started with roads no longer automatically generating gold. That was to prevent road spam. Then the whole cottage concept was scrapped for 5, again to prevent tile spamming.

Click to expand...

I don't think so. Like Steveg700 said, there was no magic about the Gold from Trading Posts, because you got this gold on behalf of something else - you could have build a farm to earn Food instead, or a Mine to earn Production, depending on what terrain you are working. This is one of the crucial tactical decisions in the game, so I very much doubt they'll change this (or they are imo. very stupid).

Gold from Rivers, on the other hand, was not really good for gameplay, because starting with River had no bad aspects to it - in fact, starting on River would both give you Gold and faster growth and more production and a bonus to Great People rate and could even make it easier to defend your lands - whereas starting without a River gave you absolutely nothing to compensate! Which obviously was not good for game balance.

Just saw the new demo and coastal cities will generate more gold than land ones. The trading ship to a city state generated +6 gold per turn compared to a land trade route to the same city state that only generated +2 gold per turn. I like the idea that trade routes generate gold per turn rather than just a lump sum.