Range and sources of education property

Every animal will eventually give some education. The story of animal buildings give +1 education.

I thought I would bump this now that we are doing things with this.

With the latest changes I think we may have gone a bit too far the other way. I am no longer having any trouble at all keeping most of my bigger cities at 1000+ in education. Although at the Education tech most of the buildings I am using loose that education component so it may be harder after that point.

Ok. Are you using many units to assist in the process?

I'm thinking of a few ways to work this... I mentioned them elsewhere recently - in the ideas thread I think.

I probably would after Education tech but I am not before as I have no need so far.

Is the difficulty/nightmare mode included in the calculation of education? I think TB mentioned it somewhere. But no one says the difficulty in his 'I can reach education xxx' statements

I use Deity/nightmare and in my opinion there is too big difference between smaller cities (below 3) and size 6 or 7 in prehistoric. For the former I reach almost 500 easily. Now I am in early ancient (mining, wheel) and my capital just grew to size 7 and it has education 30 (-5 per turn). I guess this value will drop a lot below zero soon without me being able to do anything about it (until writing), as I built all stuff and plenty of myths already.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

I probably would after Education tech but I am not before as I have no need so far.

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hmm... given some of the values on buildings unlocked with Education it should be harder before education even with numerous myths etc...

So you're right I think... it's standardly set a bit to easily at the moment - which I'd pretty much already suspected.

Rodnok said:

Is the difficulty/nightmare mode included in the calculation of education? I think TB mentioned it somewhere. But no one says the difficulty in his 'I can reach education xxx' statements

I use Deity/nightmare and in my opinion there is too big difference between smaller cities (below 3) and size 6 or 7 in prehistoric. For the former I reach almost 500 easily. Now I am in early ancient (mining, wheel) and my capital just grew to size 7 and it has education 30 (-5 per turn). I guess this value will drop a lot below zero soon without me being able to do anything about it (until writing), as I built all stuff and plenty of myths already.

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Yes difficulty is the biggest factor and what you are set on is established as the 'nearly impossible' level so it's pretty horrendous. If I recall it's like -6 edu per population on that setting (maybe more.) It's -4 on standard deity lvl. So each pop is going to be quite a hurdle and if you can manage to stay in the positive edu lvls on that setting without lots of units to help with it then the game is surely set too easily.

imo, it should be harder in the beginning and for the smallest cities and then cost little less per population... see the differences. As I said, early ancient, there are no units to help with yet, unlesss I missed something. The values in brackets are per turn, as the city shows it:

capital just grew to size 7, education 30 (-5), can't built more, will drop below zero

city size 1 has education 271 (+8) and has not built everything yet, there are +6 more education points in the list of available buildings. And the high value will even cause the slower grow, so all the free specialists will remain there for a long time.

newly conquered city size 1, education 77 (+8), from education buildings it has storyteller hut only and a crafts hut, everything else is available.

city size 3 education 352 (+0), there is 1 more building available giving +1.

city size 2 education 355 (+2), there are 4 more buildings available giving +4.

Snail speed, no caste system yet, so the cities grow slowly. I started that game December 9th after you modified some settings, did not use SVN improvements since Monday. In games a more than a month old (before the recent education modifications) I remember I had education around 200 max.

It is very much supposed to be a pain inflicted upon cities of higher and higher population. Brings back some cause to slave hurry some population. But it can be mitigated with storytelling units so that's not the only way to address the issue. And going into negative education can have some benefits - it becomes a good time to enter anarchy if your education levels are low. And war unhappiness isn't as strong. Cities may not produce as much food but also don't take as much to grow (so it can make it harder to keep the education levels up when they falter making it important to stay on top of them - but stay too on top of them and it can really hurt anarchy times and war weariness.)

It's meant to be challenging - and obviously is succeeding to be so particularly on nightmare deity where it should be nearly impossible to stay in the positive.

well I agree for the city size 7 and more, but 350+ at the same time for the city size 3 is too much. Its the opposite for the small cities, not very challenging and the education there grows quickly itself.
IMO, its little counterintuitive if the smallest cities are source of great people.

All depends on how fast your city has built up education buildings right? If you prioritize it then it can grow quickly. Many small cities have more important things to focus on with many strategic approaches... you, apparently, tend to make it an early priority to build the buildings that would provide education (likely for the sake of research levels I'm sure.) Many players would instead build production and food buildings first and would probably thus suffer for education levels at first and find it gets easier once the city is more firmly established.

Also too... property levels are just how it's going to adjust that particular turn - you may find some of those higher + adjustment values are shifting to negatives the next round as there's a bit of a sloshing in a tank effect on those. Entertainer units in the city could be having a tremendous effect on it as well if you happen to have any there.

Actually I build production first, almost all hammer producing buildings. Then research usually... But that 77 (+8) city did not build anything except production yet and it will hit 100+ mark easily. So I see no suffering for the lack of education (It's impossible to go negative now except at the start or for the large cities).

So what's the source of your positive education in that city? Something is certainly strange about that. I wonder if you're using autobuilt buildings in the My_Mods module? There's no automatic anything but drain on a new city otherwise.

Thunderbrd said:

So what's the source of your positive education in that city? Something is certainly strange about that. I wonder if you're using autobuilt buildings in the My_Mods module? There's no automatic anything but drain on a new city otherwise.

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I use no automatic buildings.

I haven't played for a week or so and now I see a new SVN with some reworks, so I updated and tried an older save with it.

I recalculated the modifiers and settled a new city. It had 6 songs buildings each giving +1 education. I am also using Oral Tradition of course, so the net education after the first turn was 5 (+5). And I build production buildings. I suppose I could get to Education 100 and two specialists just with that, maybe even more considering Childcare hut required for Omega Child Crew also gives +2 education.

The songs are really overpowering things there - and we have education coming in from civics? I wasn't aware of that - I'll have to take a look at that - not that it's bad. On a game in the beginning I just started here the research amount built up quick once I started getting in animals but I didn't see anything for education (which was probably a good thing.) But then I hadn't seen the songs either.

So that said, it does appear to be very (perhaps far too) easy to get education levels quite high in underpopulated cities.

Every animal has a Myth building as a pseudo national wonder it provides +1 in the city and a Song in every City which provides +1 education. The goes at Writing and the education at Literature.

At Writing every animal has a story building that provides +1 education until Education. There is a pseudo national wonder that makes a free version of this in every city.

I forgot to make the Song building be replaced by the Story building and its upgrade. I am trying to figure if I can make the Myths also upgrade.

Strikes me as a bit overpowered to have the Song be given in every city. Having storytellers learn a song from one city and teach it to the next would be more interesting I think (and we can work out that side of things very soon.) For now though it seems really OP to have them go to all cities. I also noticed that some Myths were buildable in the city queue - was this intended?

Thunderbrd said:

Strikes me as a bit overpowered to have the Song be given in every city. Having storytellers learn a song from one city and teach it to the next would be more interesting I think (and we can work out that side of things very soon.) For now though it seems really OP to have them go to all cities. I also noticed that some Myths were buildable in the city queue - was this intended?

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The Song is what makes the Myth a pseudo national wonder so they have to go to all cities.

Some Myths are. Rodents, Amphibians and Fish for starters. They are still pseudo national wonders so you can build only one. It is only the group ones that are buildable not the individual animal ones, they still need a subdued animal.

hmm... is it possible to make the song require Prehistoric Music and still have it pop up if the myth has already been founded before prehistoric music is earned?

I wish we could set decimal points on these... if each could offer 1/10th - 1/4 an education rounded up then this could work out much better.

Another way to balance this out may be to enhance the edu cost per population and the palace to match. Just makes it very tough to balance to have THAT much education flooding the early part of the game (but not until the myths can be built so it's a very sudden huge amount possible hitting very quickly from a beginning where there's next to nothing.) And would make things even harder to balance for later game cities as they get very large.

So... just how many myths can the average civilization earn considering how far they can roam?

For balance purposes, I'd actually think that having all myths produce the same song (song of nature) would be appropriate, 1 education blending in with all the rest of the education sources at that point would still be quite a bit. Then the city the songs are placed into can still be a major powerhouse of research from all the collected myths while we keep the songs from overwhelming all efforts to balance the education structure. I know that's not as charming an approach but I'll keep thinking on how it can be balanced somehow so that civilizations CAN, if neglected, fall into negative education while not crushing the early game or larger cities so badly that it chokes off all progression.


EDIT: Ok, another way to go about this would be to vary population prereqs on the song buildings. That way they don't all of a sudden overwhelm new cities and they can all have their bonus education and have a purpose. If each population point can only have one song assigned to it (which means there becomes a heirarchy to the songs) then songs can only ever give +1 per population which would be fairly easily balanced by adding 1 to the education cost per population and +1 to the education bonus for a palace. Also makes 'collecting them all' even more important. Now, another thing to consider in this would be that if we were to follow the 1 per population level prereq count among a given biome then the more biomes(by the sixth of the earth) you can get out and explore in and capture in, the more you can double up on these at particular population levels.

Cities can get up to size 20 or more before these songs would be obsoleted so we'd have quite a few levels of hierarchy to establish for each song validation point.

Does this concept make sense?



Let me try to put this into the actual numeric terms so you can see how difficult this much education so early makes things:
*Each population costs 1 education on Noble and less and up to 4 education on normal deity level and up to 6 education on nightmare deity.

*To keep education from plummeting as soon as the first city is built, the palace gives +1 education so on normal and less difficulty games the education levels balance out and won't fall until a population is earned. Even on these games it should be possible if you aren't prioritorizing education to have this happen once you hit your second population.

*To give the option to care or not care about education, the Community Discussions building opens up at Language tech. It gives +1 education (which is a hell of a lot at this stage.) It is necessary to build to mitigate research losses to keep from losing all ability to research if you're on Deity level.

*Then, the way this is, when you hit Cooperation, one tech further, you suddenly open up the ability to get 4-15 more education in all cities, which makes early new planted cities extremely over-educated as soon as they are built and throws what has been a challenge to your research rate into sudden overdrive. Within a few rounds of dumping my collected animals into myths I went from about 16 turns (on deity with undereducated folk as a result of the difficulty level) to get the next tech to an average of 2 rounds per tech. Part of this was due to the flat out research bonus which I think is a bit overpowered as well (perhaps +2% research for each myth would be more balanced for this early in the game.)

*Then other buildings giving a little education to help make them more attractive since they were previously primarily just cultural bonuses along with the buildings that give research AND education begin to spill in and before you know it this whole thing is completely out of whack and it's almost impossible NOT to have so much research it's only going to take another 20 rounds or so on the longest gamespeed setting to complete the whole prehistoric tech tree. (I'm not even sure that's an exaggeration tbh... would take some actual testing to validate this but I think you may get the point.)

So I'm just trying to figure out how to make it work is all.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

The Song is what makes the Myth a pseudo national wonder so they have to go to all cities.

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Why don't you make a myth collector house or something as prereq for all myths? Is it because you want to be able to spread them around your empire as you wish?

People complained when you could only build Myth buildings where the palace was. So yes you should be able to build them anywhere.

The Song buildings are what make the myths pseudo national wonders so you need one per myth otherwise you will only be allowed one myth.

If you make the song buildings appear later then you will be able to build many of the myth buildings before the Song building comes into play making them not pseudo national wonders.

The education (and culture) was added to the song buildings recently at the request of other modders. I did not have them producing anything. So it can go back to culture. It was just that people wanted something when the Myth building stopped providing .