Tech mazes are overpowered

I've finally gotten the knack for maze solving, but the rewards are waaaay out of proportion to the rewards for the culture or caravan minigames. The most I've ever won from a caravan was 800. You can get a good streak going and build up a lot of culture in the puzzle swap, but you'll still be a long way from your next Great Person. But you can solve two or three tech mazes and get a new tech! It's so powerful that I feel guilty if I close out a game before I've examined every tech to see if it's possible for me to solve its maze before I leave. So powerful that it dwarfs my science based city, which gives me 300 beakers a harvest.

I like the minigames, but I wouldn't mind seeing the tech maze nerfed quite a bit and the other two made more rewarding to try and get some balance.

yup i agree. i've gotten about 1,400 or so gold from the caravan gold but no way does that equate to the maze which gives you 12,000 or 15,000 beakers + you can give extra moves to your team mates so they can get the bonus as well :O

The caravan one is the worst. I will only play it if the 'most points from a caravan contest' is up.

No way. Mazes utterly rock, especially in the late game when, come on, HOW LONG is it going to take you to get 500K of science you need for the second-last row of techs without maze bonuses?

Given that Dowries don't scale, they are utterly underpowered in the later game.

I've been science minister and MVP of many techs in a game where I have never built a single scientist house! I LOVE the tech mazes!

The culture minigames can also be very profitable. I just try to solve 1 puzzle if I'm alone, start with placing a few tiles untill I get to a multiplier of 5-6, then switch to x5 and solve the rest. This way you can easily get more than 5000 culture points.

As for the caravan minigames they do get kind of profitable if you have the world bank wonder as this more than doubles the income of this minigame: the prze is doubled but it isnt more costly to place the tracks. However income from caravan games doesnt rise trough time so it seems to me caravan games are more important at the beginning of the game than the end.

yes they are overpowered, but if you want to nerf the output from the mazes, it would be a good idea to lower the costs for the second page of techs, otherwise people will lose interest and just leave.

I agree tech maze is overpowered. So I'm using it. You can BUY thousands of points by putting CivBucks into moves.

mastrude said:

I agree tech maze is overpowered. So I'm using it. You can BUY thousands of points by putting CivBucks into moves.

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seems like a waste because you only get +5 from using a civbuck. that helps in the smaller mazes, but those early techs are pretty easy to finish without doing the mazes.

But everybody can use them, so they're not. They're fun precisely because they are so powerful and there is some strategy involved.

http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread.php?111358-CivWorld-update-for-Monday-July-25

"Science Maze has been rebalanced to provide more moves and a smaller payoff at later techs"

I love that, because it will make teams working together even more able to hump the mazes.

Glinda said:

I love that, because it will make teams working together even more able to hump the mazes.

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Um... How you do that? Each player enters a different front door and explores own area?

That is a level of cooperation I haven't seen anywhere in my current 3 games.

mastrude said:

Um... How you do that? Each player enters a different front door and explores own area?

That is a level of cooperation I haven't seen anywhere in my current 3 games.

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If you complete a maze then any team-mate in the same maze gets some moves (as long as the tech doesn't complete). You give a shout out in the chat window "just finishing maze for currency", for example. Then they switch to get moves from your completion. This might be just enough to let someone else just reach that beaker which gives just enough moves to finish. Then more moves are passed on, etc, etc.

Being in the maze and getting the bonus can get you moves. My team finished half a dozen techs this evening, most of us starting from nothing, just by doing this.

That only works if everyone on your team is actually online at the same time, and in the same time zone. I have rarely seen this to be the case because.... random games are exactly that - random games and civs have people in random time zones.

Xinhuan said:

That only works if everyone on your team is actually online at the same time, and in the same time zone. I have rarely seen this to be the case because.... random games are exactly that - random games and civs have people in random time zones.

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Then take this into account before joining a civ. Look who is online or put a post in global chat to find out. I have played around 20 games now and have been able to find 'maze buddies' in all of them (except the 1st one, as I didn't know how it worked yet).

sadmachines said:

Then take this into account before joining a civ. Look who is online or put a post in global chat to find out. I have played around 20 games now and have been able to find 'maze buddies' in all of them (except the 1st one, as I didn't know how it worked yet).

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Your experiences are skewed by being in the closed beta. In order to get into the closed beta, everyone agreed to be active, hence you mostly found only active players in closed beta. Now we're in open beta, games simply consist of some 160-180 players each, 70% of which don't log on past the first 2 days.

Out of any game, its like only 2 civs are actively playing, maybe 3 at most past the first 2 days. The remaining ones would be about 4 members max, of which only 2 are active. It gets worse. Once it is obvious which 2 civs are going to dominate the game, the remainder players that might be interested simply lose interest and because they cannot leave a civ game in progress, they are resigned to waiting the 7-10 days it takes for the game to end and not login/play it - thus prolonging the game even further. I have a friend still in game approaching 2 weeks long.

The problem with this game is player activity, so many people try the game for 10 minutes and never return. They need to move players in the top 10 of each game into tiered games because the top few are the active players. This problem may fix itself eventually after 3-5 months when only the players still interested in the game actually still remain and play it. But honestly, at the slow rate the bugs are being fixed, people are losing interest even faster.

wow you just described my current game to the T. Started out as a bunch of active people on day 1 after first 2-3 days powers consolidated people left the civs that where full of noobs and in the end by day 3 there was 2 clear front runners. My civ and the other civ just feed off the 1-3 man civs when ever they make a wonder basically but the 2 large civs are equally huge and almost neck in neck in every way.

This has however killed the activity of the rest of the whole game so basically we are playing with 2 civ worth of active players and it is not nearly as good as it could be with a whole game full of active people.

I totally support some sort of tiered game play where if you get into the top 20 you get games that are available to you for other top 20 winners. This gives players in the first tier something to strive for and gives players in the next tier better competition

Xinhuan said:

That only works if everyone on your team is actually online at the same time, and in the same time zone. I have rarely seen this to be the case because.... random games are exactly that - random games and civs have people in random time zones.

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Yeah, my civ "randomly" got a bunch of techs 2 evenings in a row by doing this. It is actually possible to co-ordinate across timezones if you can do math.

There is a huge problem with noobs and people who just try the game and then leave because it is not Farmville or Civ4 or whatever they wanted. For some reason, 2k are very resistant to the idea of lifetime fame, or a league table, or vet games, or whatever you want to call it.