Death of Conventional Strategies? [11/18 Patch Notes]

* Have culture cost for policies never go down (trading away cities to reduce culture cost exploit).

Do culture costs stay the same if my cities got conquered in war?

* Unhappiness beyond a certain point breeds rebels within your empire, based on the number of cities a player has.

Someone dig into the XML for numbers.

And I really feel that Autocracy needs a massive boast. Order/Autocracy is already hard enough to get if you have to take social policies immediately. Once you do get it, order >>> autocracy.
 
I'm still suprised they are nerfing the settler reduction though.. I always found that happiness was the bigger issue than settler construction time. Maybe if the Maritime nerfs are heavy enough, or maybe because it unbalances lower difficulty levels?

Actually, I don't believe this has as much to do with nerfing ICS as with making the base tree as crappy as the other three early trees. None of them really grants a very significant bonus, Liberty was arguably the best of them. Now they're all crappy. The first tree that has a good base is Patronage, then two bad ones again. Freedom, Autocracy and Order are all awesome, though.

Do culture costs stay the same if my cities got conquered in war?

Probably. The way it's worded, I assume that instead of the current number of cities the game uses the highest number of cities you ever owned for policy cost calculation. I don't think this is a big deal, though, because most people don't continue playing if they really start losing a number of cities (I know I don't, most of the time)
 
Good thinking, you smell bug potential. Theocracy might have a similar effect. Definitely something to look out for as the patchlog specifically talked about "can't provide more happiness than they have population" rather than "can't provide more happiness than they produce unhappiness from population"

I think other civs can still have 0 unhappiness cities because of SPs like Freedom, though.

I had the same thought- why are they nerfing coloseums, meritocracy, and the forbidden palace, but leaving freedom the same when its the easiest source of extra happiness? All you need is a coloseum and 3 freedom specialists to make a size 4 city 0 unhappiness. Maybe the changes to maritime states will fix that, but still you can make it 1 unhappiness with just 1 freedom specialist.
 
I had the same thought- why are they nerfing coloseums, meritocracy, and the forbidden palace, but leaving freedom the same when its the easiest source of extra happiness? All you need is a coloseum and 3 freedom specialists to make a size 4 city 0 unhappiness. Maybe the changes to maritime states will fix that, but still you can make it 1 unhappiness with just 1 freedom specialist.

It's relatively late. I'm getting the impression that they don't mean to eliminate the strategy, only slow it down.

It appears to me, looking at these changes, like they intended for one of the factors limiting your number of cities to be bumping into your neighbors. War slows down expansion, even if you're steamrolling. By discovering that you don't really lose anything by placing all your cities at the minimum distance, it reduced that constraint, and the others were insufficient to curb early expansion.

So it looks like they've tried to really put the screws to early REX. If that turns out to be the case, it'll probably be best to plan for it and settle on a double-spaced lattice, and fill in later once you get the Ren+ SPs.
 
It's relatively late. I'm getting the impression that they don't mean to eliminate the strategy, only slow it down.

It appears to me, looking at these changes, like they intended for one of the factors limiting your number of cities to be bumping into your neighbors. War slows down expansion, even if you're steamrolling. By discovering that you don't really lose anything by placing all your cities at the minimum distance, it reduced that constraint, and the others were insufficient to curb early expansion.

So it looks like they've tried to really put the screws to early REX. If that turns out to be the case, it'll probably be best to plan for it and settle on a double-spaced lattice, and fill in later once you get the Ren+ SPs.

The fastest Rex is to settle all the available luxuries. Sell the duplicates to raise money to ally with city states that give new luxuries. That way, you don't really need any happiness-even coloseums- until you've reached the renaissance. Maybe the changes to science buildings and the tech tree will slow that down, though.
 
I had the same thought- why are they nerfing coloseums, meritocracy, and the forbidden palace, but leaving freedom the same when its the easiest source of extra happiness? All you need is a coloseum and 3 freedom specialists to make a size 4 city 0 unhappiness. Maybe the changes to maritime states will fix that, but still you can make it 1 unhappiness with just 1 freedom specialist.

Have you missed the "Multiple Tech Tree tweaks to address 'slingshot' tech exploits" part? It could very well mean the end to the acoustic slingshot, which could mean it's going to take much longer to get Freedom. This plus the nerf to Metriocracy and Forbidden Palace could mean that ICS is going to take too long to start working.
 
Have you missed the "Multiple Tech Tree tweaks to address 'slingshot' tech exploits" part? It could very well mean the end to the acoustic slingshot, which could mean it's going to take much longer to get Freedom. This plus the nerf to Metriocracy and Forbidden Palace could mean that ICS is going to take too long to start working.

Good point. If Civ5 was partly designed as an anti-ICS variant, it's a good bet that the changes you mention, along with others, target ICS. In fact, given human nature and the short time span between release and this potentially extraordinary patch, ICS may well be the designers' prime target, while addressing AI performance and diplomacy. Think Ahab and the whale.
 
Oh well, you can already get such info simply by clicking on the Economy slot in DiploCorner that popups the cities list with a happiness tab where numbers are crunched for your pleasure & deductive acrobatics.

Yes, but you'll have to list your cities, check if they have colosseum, circus, oh, well, do they have what horses/elephants nearby and can you see it in that list? And why will suddenly horses and elephants become much more important to a city happiness thaan any other resource? How will you see that? You'll have to list all happiness buildings... They must provide a separate column with the net city happiness, which means they'd better ditch the whole global happiness stuff.
 
Have you missed the "Multiple Tech Tree tweaks to address 'slingshot' tech exploits" part? It could very well mean the end to the acoustic slingshot, which could mean it's going to take much longer to get Freedom. This plus the nerf to Metriocracy and Forbidden Palace could mean that ICS is going to take too long to start working.

It still doesn't change that, when you have 3 happiness available, you're better off spending them on a new city and one pop rather than letting an old city grow (which costs a lot of production and gold while it grows).
 
Have you missed the "Multiple Tech Tree tweaks to address 'slingshot' tech exploits" part? It could very well mean the end to the acoustic slingshot, which could mean it's going to take much longer to get Freedom. This plus the nerf to Metriocracy and Forbidden Palace could mean that ICS is going to take too long to start working.

That'll just slow it down slightly. In all honesty it's already "too slow" to get going as a competitive strategy- other strategies are faster.
 
That'll just slow it down slightly. In all honesty it's already "too slow" to get going as a competitive strategy- other strategies are faster.

I've just played several games on Immortal with the Balance mods - similar to what's coming down the pike. The best approach seems to be resource REX, aimed in the direction of the nearest threat. This is with a space race goal, where endless expansion isn't necessary.
 
I had the same thought- why are they nerfing coloseums, meritocracy, and the forbidden palace, but leaving freedom the same when its the easiest source of extra happiness? All you need is a coloseum and 3 freedom specialists to make a size 4 city 0 unhappiness. Maybe the changes to maritime states will fix that, but still you can make it 1 unhappiness with just 1 freedom specialist.

I realize that my opinion on ICS differs from the majority opinion here. I play Immortal and mostly small maps so there isn't room for a huge ICS anyhow (well unless I have much of the map controlled in which case the game is mine anyhow) so my opinion my differ from those who play large/huge maps.

Anyhow, I see nothing wrong with ICSing in the current state of the game. LOL this is basically what the AI's do anyhow. They expand like weeds on steriods and try to put cities anywhere and everywhere. Why prevent the human from doing this? It makes little sense to me.

How are we supposed to be able to compete vs the AI civs on Immortal or worse yet Deity after the new patch (noting 12/3 notes)? Are we going to have to be at constant war to keep knocking down runaway AI's who will get too much gold, expand huge since they have no happiness issues and just buy a VERY LAME UN victory? Will we even be able to compete on Emperor (I suspect so).

Anyhow, ICS and REX don't need anything close to this much of a nerf.

The developers need to work on game balance at the highest levels..ie Emperor and above and not worry that some near expert who plays on Prince can make 50 closely spaced cities and crush the game as he could anyhow.

Just my opinion and not happy with many of the 12/3 changes and will soon start a new thread about that.

.. neilkaz ..
 
Anyhow, I see nothing wrong with ICSing in the current state of the game. LOL this is basically what the AI's do anyhow. They expand like weeds on steriods and try to put cities anywhere and everywhere. Why prevent the human from doing this? It makes little sense to me.

How are we supposed to be able to compete vs the AI civs on Immortal or worse yet Deity after the new patch (noting 12/3 notes)? Are we going to have to be at constant war to keep knocking down runaway AI's who will get too much gold, expand huge since they have no happiness issues and just buy a VERY LAME UN victory? Will we even be able to compete on Emperor (I suspect so).

The developers need to work on game balance at the highest levels..ie Emperor and above and not worry that some near expert who plays on Prince can make 50 closely spaced cities and crush the game as he could anyhow.

I think the idea is to nerf ICS so it's not a default optimal strategy.

Playing with mods that improved city defenses, I have noticed that there rarely are runaway AIs.

Regarding diplomatic victory, my sense is that the AI won't proactively buy themselves a win - but they'll be more likely to prevent you from doing so.

If anything the developers seem to be focusing on the higher levels more than the lower ones. Top players are crushing the AI on Deity, and Immortal is pretty easy with an aggressive REX.
 
Playing with mods that improved city defenses, I have noticed that there rarely are runaway AIs.

More importantly, this means that it is no longer optimal to spam Warriors and mug your neighbor for a city and luxuries right off the bat. You have to REX luxuries and tech "properly" instead.
 
Then what would limit overall infinite empire sprawl (IES, not to be confused with ICS)? As TMIT pointed out on another thread, the misunderstanding arises from the semantics of "happiness". In Civ4 the global mechanism was called "maintenance", scaled both to # and pop of cities and further scaled per individual city by city distance from capital. It was this last scaling that was annoying (and that dictated ALWAYS getting the GLH if there was enough coast and you wanted overseas expansion, and note that the AI was notoriously slow to build the GLH, and that this wonder was one of the few that couldn't be accelerated with a resource. Plus the predictable GLH gold income windfall with the optics/astronomy discover the overseas AI gambit) and pretty much killed overseas expansion and worse yet island expansion in Civ4 w/o GLH. Vassals were an obvious workaround mechanism for this, Civ4 "puppets".

So in CivV it has been rebranded "happiness", and I'm happy the distance scaling has been dropped. The real issue is correct scaling of the things that give happiness, especially coliseums, so that the player is required to think more strategically about this global empire limiter, beyond the present prescription "Take two coliseums and call me in 10 turns".

They should have ditched global happiness and replaced it with per city happiness. It's going to be a pain to track down now since you won't have the happy/unhappy citizen faces you used to have in civ I-IV. Now where do you have a city that lacks a colosseum? Mmmm... It's a step in the right direction, but the whole happiness system must be replaced to a per-city system with each city showing its current happiness score.
 
More importantly, this means that it is no longer optimal to spam Warriors and mug your neighbor for a city and luxuries right off the bat. You have to REX luxuries and tech "properly" instead.

That approach definitely works with the Balance mod on Immortal, which I just tried for the first time this week. Aggressive REXing tends to lead to war, but the changes allow you time to assemble chariots, horses or swords.
 
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