International Space Station: Totally Useless?

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Keirador

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Aug 14, 2004
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I really like how World's Fair and International Games add a nice cooperate/competitive dynamic to the Culture Victory, but has anybody ever gotten any benefit out of the International Space Station project in pursuing a Science Victory? It's made available by Satellites, and by that aren't you yoinking your SV before the next meeting of the UN anyway?

Assuming you're hoarding your Great Scientists and have a Great Engineer in reserve to pop the Hubble Telescope, I'm betting you've got all the techs you need to build the Spaceship within a few turns of hitting Satellites, so why would anyone waste production trying to build the ISS when they could be spending those hammers on spaceship parts?

Am I way off-base in thinking the ISS needs a buff or the SV needs a slight re-work in order to make the ISS relevant as a part of the game at all?
 
ISS doesn't need a buff, by your logic, it simply comes too late to be useful, I think it's actually a very wonderful and useful wonder.

International Space Station
+1 Science per Engineer specialist
+1 Production per Scientist specialist
+33% more beakers when using GS's ability
+1 Free Great Scientist
+Boost to current tech.

It's quite a powerful Wonder if you ask me. It doesn't need a buff, like I said, by your logic, it comes too late, so moving it back would fix the issue.
 
Keirador said:
I really like how World's Fair and International Games add a nice cooperate/competitive dynamic to the Culture Victory, but has anybody ever gotten any benefit out of the International Space Station project in pursuing a Science Victory? It's made available by Satellites, and by that aren't you yoinking your SV before the next meeting of the UN anyway?

Assuming you're hoarding your Great Scientists and have a Great Engineer in reserve to pop the Hubble Telescope, I'm betting you've got all the techs you need to build the Spaceship within a few turns of hitting Satellites, so why would anyone waste production trying to build the ISS when they could be spending those hammers on spaceship parts?

Am I way off-base in thinking the ISS needs a buff or the SV needs a slight re-work in order to make the ISS relevant as a part of the game at all?
Click to expand...

The balance between CV/DV (which comes too early and is too simplistic)/SV needs some work, but I also find the ISS is fairly useless as it is now (it comes too late).

Personally I'd introduce one or two late game projects that wouldn't go through the WC but rather through ideological "teams". Appolo Program and Manhattan projects could be initiated by each ideological blocks instead of by ind. civs, and the first block to finish its project might get an earlier but less powerful ISS (and perhaps one free nuclear bomb, for the MP).
 
Love the ideological teams idea.

And KingofBiz, yeah, it comes too late, but how would you make it come earlier? Make the ISS available at a tech before "Satellites?" Seems odd.
 
I used the ISS project once to speed up my science victory. It might have sped up my progress by a turn. Maybe not, but I figured building that was more fun than setting my cities on research at the very least.

It seems like a pretty powerful wonder to me, but unless you hit the world congress timings really well, it comes way too late to be of any use. So, it doesn't need a buff, but it needs to be earlier. Maybe you could propose it on rocketry, but you're only allowed to start building it when someone reaches satellites? Idk, something in that front needs to change a little.
 
Keirador said:
Love the ideological teams idea.

And KingofBiz, yeah, it comes too late, but how would you make it come earlier? Make the ISS available at a tech before "Satellites?" Seems odd.
Click to expand...

Right now it needs to wait for the Satellites to be proposed at the next WC. If the WC leaders don't pick it, it can be delayed for a long time.

If it came as a reward for the team that built its AP first, that part of the reward could be enabled when the civs gain Satellites.

Of course if Specialists had to be used within the era they appear in and people didn't have a bunch of GS to bulb at the end, the ISS wouldn't come too late to really matter.. if the DV was rebalanced not to happen so early anyway (I'd find a way to link it to ideologies as well, buying out votes from CS is very boring unless you find yourself in a race against Alexander, and even then).
 
I don't think Great People should scale up the longer you keep them. Plant 'em or bulb 'em, da Vinci was a genius of the Renaissance and keeping him around until the Information Era ain't gonna teach him how to program the Internet.
 
Keirador said:
I don't think Great People should scale up the longer you keep them. Plant 'em or bulb 'em, da Vinci was a genius of the Renaissance and keeping him around until the Information Era ain't gonna teach him how to program the Internet.
Click to expand...

Pretty much my thought too. Unused ones should "die" when you switch era, ie the game should force you to use them that turn if you didn't before.
 
EK834 said:
Pretty much my thought too. Unused ones should "die" when you switch era, ie the game should force you to use them that turn if you didn't before.
Click to expand...

Agreed, they really need to fix the "bulb 10 GS at the same time" strategy. It works but it makes no sense. The bulb amount should be tied to time of creation
 
Rather than just having them die, I would simply lock the number of beakers they produce when they get bulbed as soon as they're created, so they don't become more potent as time goes by. A flat 1240 science or whatnot is going to be a lot more useful in the Renaissance than in the Information Era.
 
Yeah the GS breakers should be locked when it pops. That would stop the saving, encourage planting and maybe make the ISS a little more useful.
 
Yup. Agreed with everybody who thinks GS strength should be fixed when they appear (like musicians).
 
Daniel Dennett disagrees with you. Earlier thinkers were probably just as smart as the most intelligent people living today, but had access to less thinking tools and information. Put Da Vince or Newton in the Information Era and they'd be near the top of their respective fields most likely (though Da Vinci would probably need to specialize a bit more).

The strength of Musicians is what does not make sense to me, the cultural influence of Bach and Mozart is arguably stronger now that their music is more widely available than when it was first conceived.
 
Vohbo said:
Daniel Dennett disagrees with you. Earlier thinkers were probably just as smart as the most intelligent people living today, but had access to less thinking tools and information. Put Da Vince or Newton in the Information Era and they'd be near the top of their respective fields most likely (though Da Vinci would probably need to specialize a bit more).
Click to expand...

Lulz, he was a professor of mine in undergrad.

Thing is, you're talking about da Vinci being born in the Information Era and being just as notable, whereas the way CiV works now in incentivizing storing up GPs, da Vinci is born in the Renaissance and then lives for 400 years and then discovers a new technology in the Information Era. There's not a perfect analogy to human nature going on here in the first place, and the mechanic is way too biased in favor of stockpiling GSes to the extent that it takes two turns to discover every single spaceship tech.
 
EK834 said:
Pretty much my thought too. Unused ones should "die" when you switch era, ie the game should force you to use them that turn if you didn't before.
Click to expand...

It would be easier to have them work like Great Musiscians... their Strength is fixed at the time they are spawned.

(So Babylon's Great Scientist from Ancient Era can be saved.. to give you a total of 200 bulbs towards nanotech.)
 
Agree with the OP. Even the International Games can be useless(unable to start or finish) if you get pretty fast dates.
 
yeah, this is a point I've noticed, the only time the ISS was proposed was about 10 turns from me winning SV with or without it. The problem is, to make it more viable, the end game needs to be longer, but without becoming too boring, and anything that would rectify this would either be another DLC or, dare I say, Civ VI.

Speaking of that, maybe a DLC or the inevitable Civ VI should have a longer end game, with more future techs, like a drone army and cyber attacks (all very real suggestions) and maybe the SV wouldn't be who can into space first, but rather you have to build a large enough outer planet colony? (this would work like the normal civ, but on a fresh planet, with different landscapes and maybe everything has to be under bio-domes?) This would give diffident strategies, such as many smaller, faster ships, or a few larger ones that hold more colonization resources. This could maybe include space warfare? :rolleyes:

(yes I know it sounds too stupid, but then again, air combat seemed stupid and sci-fi-ish when planes where first invented, and now look what we have :p)
 
It looks good, but by the time you can propose, yet alone vote for it, you're usually already building the parts.
 
joshua43214 said:
/sigh

GS's have already been massively nerfed, seems it was not enough?
Click to expand...


They're fine as it is, its just that piling them up to bulb them to get to space techs at light speed is the equivalent of bribing all the city-states on the turn before the WL vote as Venice.. it works, but it's boring and it renders some of the late game features like the ISS pointless.

It's a clever enough trick for the higher, almost purely strategic levels, but on the mid and lower levels it makes that victory too easy and formulaic (the bigger challenge is to avoid a CV or DipV before you can have your SV, but those arriving too early to play the information era as conceived is another issue...)

Mind you, it's easy enough to just avoid doing it yourself, since the AI doesn't know that trick.
 
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