Are you happy with Tourism?

Lyoncet said:
I think there's an understanding breakdown here on what binary means. Tourism is binary: you wait until you have enough, and then you win. It has (almost) no impact on your game up until that point. Again, for clarification, see my example of what an equivalent system would look for a domination win: you build units until you get a magic number in the demographic screen, and then you win.

None of the other wins are binary. In Domination, you take your first city. That advances your position, because now you have a new city. You approach your victory actively, and your game experience shifts with each step you take. Same with science. While building spaceship parts doesn't actually advance your game state, the critical elements are beakers and hammers. You can bet those things have a visceral effect on your empire. Moving closer to victory also affects the state of your empire. Same with pursuing city-states and diplomacy. And the old culture win system, where every few turns you saw the effect of your impending victory in the form of a new social policy.

Tourism? Blue jeans and pop music. :rolleyes:
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well. it seems you have confused yourself :lol:
tourism is more like spaceship parts, building a part does nothing to your empire as well as getting influential over one of rival civs does nothing besides that. ahh! could do nothing, if there was no war of ideologies and related pressure and unhappiness.

so, you confuse actual effects with values of prerequisites: for tourism these are great works which give culture, for space these are techs which unlock useful things; for domination - cities.. or more prescicely capitals (you can capture only capitals, one after another, leaving there some units to guard, so those cities wont give much profit, if any. and this is how fast domination is won, quite boring). if you think better you'll conclude that new culture victory is even more dynamic than 'good old' domination or space. not to mention the old culture victory which was boring as hell.

theres no fun in capturing a captial city as it does not differ from capturing any other city, and theres no fun in building space ship part, as it has no effect onto the game. taking policies is taking policies, no matter are you pursuing a culture victory or not, so virtually theres nothing interesting in the old culture victory at all, its just about how much you can cripple yourself and survive maximizing the speed of accquiring new policies. whereas becoming influential to another civ may lead to very sound consequences, which has infinitely more impact on the game. and you guys say tourism victory is bad... i just cant believe you arent trolling. :eek:

sorry for my english
 
ptoss1 said:
I still don't get how tourism works. How can +2 tourism rise against +10 culture in other civs?
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Well, if that's the case, the tourism player will never win a CV against the other player.

But that is, often, not the case.

If a Civ constructs all cultural buildings in each of their Civs (as I understand, a rare thing), each City generates +5 Culture per turn before Great Works. (+2 for Monument, +1 for each of the others.) Let us assume that we have an equal number of cities, and you have one Great Work in each of your cities.

Before any modifiers or other sources, that means you are generating 7 Culture per turn per city that I need to overcome with Tourism.

So how do I do this? Well, I'm going to need at LEAST 8, because you certainly started building Culture before I met you. Best way (early) is through GW, so let us assume I have double the GW that you do in your cities. That's 4 Tourism per turn. Maybe I have another 1 from Theming Bonuses, averaged across my cities. So say 5 Tourism / city is my raw output.

At this point, and in the late game, if we have different ideologies, this is going to hurt you quite badly. But I don't want to hurt you; I want to win.

So here comes the Civ-specific bonuses: I get a 25% bonus to my Tourism against Civ X if I have a Trade Route with them, Open Borders with them, and with something else that isn't springing to mind. (There are other ideology-specific bonuses, and the Order ones are brutal.)

The analysis changes sharply here. Those Civ-specific bonuses really can hurt other Civs... but note that both can be prevented with a DoW.

Basically, the farther you get in the tree, the faster tourism can catch up to culture. While it's not impossible to win a CV early (unlike, say, Domination), but it becomes increasingly likely the farther you get.
 
ptoss1 said:
I still don't get how tourism works. How can +2 tourism rise against +10 culture in other civs?
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Multipliers. Your base tourism yield will be just a fraction of what you're actually outputting to your rivals by the end of the game. Shared religion, open borders and having a trade route each give +25% tourism output. Later on, hotels and airports will vastly enhance your base yield (over 100% with both if you have any wonders or culture- producing tiles in a city), and the Internet tech will increase tourism globally by another 100%.
 
The intrinsic benefits of Tourism, or lack thereof, have begun to bother me as well, and it's good to see some people who share these concerns.


On the one hand, Tourism can have a huge destabilizing effect on other empires. And in contrast to military methods of destabilizing other players, cultural means have diplomatic benefits rather than (newly enlarged) diplomatic penalties. Clearly, the game was designed for this to be the main "intrinsic" benefit of culture.

There are just a few problems with it. First, it comes on very late. Tourism has no effect until ideologies are adopted, which event is linked to technology and production. Second, the magnitude of the effect on other empires is pretty small, unless you have a level of culture that's going to win the game. For instance, if an AI is running away with a Science win, you can build military to capture a city or two of its and prevent the win. But it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to put the AI's empire into enough unhappiness via Culture to stop it from getting a space win. Either he will simply flip ideologies and only be slightly disrupted, or one or two smaller cities will defect and he'll build the ship in Capital. All the while, he can still just build Happiness to counteract what you're doing. So, the only way to interfere with his win is to actually win yourself.

One sensible fix to this is to disable the three VC's unless the player has adopted the corresponding ideology. But it's questionable that would be sufficient, or desired, and besides, it's not the community's responsibility to fix problems. We can really only spot them.


Another thing to consider is that most of the time, but not all the time, whatever is giving you Tourism is giving you an equal amount of Culture. So viewed in that way, Tourism has the benefit of giving you SP's on your route to victory, just as the old Culture VC did.

But there are a few problems with that too. First, there are enough ways to get Culture without Tourism that a civ can build no Tourism and still get a lot of policies. Same thing as before with Culture, but the investments are different and much steeper for Tourism. As one example, a lot of games in G&K might have you taking Cathedrals for the culture without going directly for a culture win, but in BNW you are definitely not taking them unless you plan on investing for great works. Same thing with Ampitheatres. In G&K, every civ built them. Now, mostly only the Culture VC gets them. So using Tourism for culture is extremely inefficient and unnecessary.

Second, not every source of Tourism gives you Culture for SP's. Take the Reformation Belief of Sacred Sites - 2 Tourism for each faith building (no culture). Either you are all-in on the Culture VC, or this belief does zero. Same with certain buildings like Hotels. Tourism isn't even useful as defense against the Tourism of others. If you're defending, pushing SP's, or doing anything other than the Culture VC specifically, you want raw Culture instead, and the Culture tied to Tourism is too difficult to get by comparison.


All in all however, I think they were successful in making the culture win more interactive, at least. There are a lot of times as a Cultural player, for example, where I'll need to make a city conquest. Maybe I want to steal some great works, or maybe the Culture output of a city is so high that I'll never be able to overtake that civ in Tourism unless I take it out. This alone makes the Culture much more fun, and for that reason, I think the new Cutlure is more dynamic, despite this problem with Tourism.


So far I've completed 2 culture games on Immortal. One was with Assyria, which had me going around the Ancient world conquering enemies here and there for Great Works. That was a really rewarding game, and balancing diplomatic allies in the mix of being both a Warmonger and a Builder was really unique. If anything, it's a bit too hard to keep friends. The other game I was Byzantium, opening Piety, Goddess of Festivals, Monasteries, triple Faith building, Sacred Sites. I gamed the start quite a bit, and blew the game away fairly easily. I had quite the head-start by the point in the game where Ideologies were adopted.

The frustrating thing in both games was the lack of Ancient benefits to Tourism. I had a lot of empty Tourism from Sacred Sites in both games, and in the Assyira game, the effort of filling both the Royal Libraries and Cathedrals with Works was setting my empire back a lot on tech. IN G&K, I would've filled Universities with Scientists, regardless of VC. It would've been more difficult without invading others for their works, and I'm not sure that was worth the Tourism hit on those civs I was unable to get Open Borders with afterwards. So all in all, I see the bud of the problem that the Culture VC used to have on Diety/Immortal. The Culture input doesn't translate nearly as well into survival as Science and Military. I'm not going to say that the Culture VC is similarly impossible on Diety, but if it's gotten any better, it's because of two unrelated things - the AI is less aggresssive and tech is slower for the runaways.

So all in all, I like the culture game more, but it is definitely a lot more awkward than I expected after all this development atention.
 
I won a culture victory (easily) in my first game on emperor. I do think it's more engaging than winning a cultural victory in G&K. When you go for a cultural victory you obviously still get more social policies throughout the game, and tourism is just there to make how you achieve a victory through culture more interesting than building 1 wonder at the end.

That tourism matters only at the end of the game is mitigated by the fact that we already have religion in the middle of the game. Also it's more realistic that tourism matters most at the end...

On a different note, when I got to archeology I dug up more stuff than I could fill in my museums, but it was nice to see that my puppets eventually build them. That did however made me think that ideally I should get 5~10 puppets when going for a cultural victory.
 
I think it's important to remember archaeology and the ability to trade great works for theming bonuses. Both involve more player activity (something the old VC was lacking), and the whole tourism system in general doesn't require a burdensome amount of effort to pursue. Even if I'm not going for a cultural VC, I can easily develop strong tourism. It's also worth considering developing tourism in case an enemy AI is going for that type of victory.

The best part of the system, besides being so much less passive, is that a cultural victory actually sees you changing the world's culture.
 
I'd like to see a bit more interaction of Tourism with the other victory conditions (although I haven't been in a close late game yet, so maybe it's there already):

1) You win victory if for each civ, you either hold their original capital or you have influential status over them. That means that you can actually ally with civs with the same ideology to beat the heretics out of the game, and don't need to conquer them afterwards.
2) If you are influential/dominant over a civ with the same ideology they have to vote for some/all of your proposals in the World Congress. For example, for civs that share your ideology, a civ you have influence over must vote for your proposals, a civ you are dominant over must also vote for you as World Leader and Host.
 
Also you don't necessarily have to get Great Works. I find getting a large sum of culture to be beneficial as well. Tourism is used specifically for a cultural victory. Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to get it.
 
Zednaught said:
I think it's important to remember archaeology and the ability to trade great works for theming bonuses. Both involve more player activity (something the old VC was lacking), and the whole tourism system in general doesn't require a burdensome amount of effort to pursue. Even if I'm not going for a cultural VC, I can easily develop strong tourism. It's also worth considering developing tourism in case an enemy AI is going for that type of victory.

The best part of the system, besides being so much less passive, is that a cultural victory actually sees you changing the world's culture.
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Well, effort in terms of deciding that specialists go in a certain slot, no. But effort in terms of slotting Artists instead of Scientists, and then dropping behind in tech as a result, yeah, there's a lot of effort. Just as much as there used to be, really, which is what kept cultural VC's down on Immo/Diety.

Also, it actually does not make sense to develop Tourism in reaction to an AI trying to win cultural. Opposing Tourism always goes against your Culture, not Tourism. So it is best to just build Cultural buildings and not actively slot them. If you do find an artifact, fine, but otherwise you'll not be investing anything in it.

On that point, I find the way that the AI trades of Great Works to be a little gameable. They will trade for anything that gives them theming bonuses, regardless of what theming bonus it gives you, and regardless of whether they're going for Cultural. The dominant strategy would be to just not trade with the players who have high Tourism. But I suppose that there are a lot of other cases in this game where the historically flavorful thing is at odds with what's strategically best.

On religion v. culture, there's really no comparison there, other than just giving players something to do. Developing Religion gives you the benefits of owning a Religion and the ability to choose the beliefs you need. Devloping Tourism gives you little other than points toward the VC. What you have available to do in each era isn't really a strategy consideration.

On whether it's realistic that Tourism only matters at the end, I think it's historically debatable. People were making Pilgrimages throughout all history, with drastic effects for how big certain cities got. Certain military conquests like the European conquests of the Americas were inevitable because of Culture, while others like the Moorish invasion of Spain or the Barbarian invasions into Rome just fizzled out because of how people migrated. As of now in Civ, any unilateral military of any kind makes you a villain of the worst sort, and your cities just grow based on available food, regardless of Culture and Tourism. Hardly historic.
 
Justice1337 said:
The intrinsic benefits of Tourism, or lack thereof, have begun to bother me as well, and it's good to see some people who share these concerns.


On the one hand, Tourism can have a huge destabilizing effect on other empires. And in contrast to military methods of destabilizing other players, cultural means have diplomatic benefits rather than (newly enlarged) diplomatic penalties. Clearly, the game was designed for this to be the main "intrinsic" benefit of culture.

There are just a few problems with it. First, it comes on very late. Tourism has no effect until ideologies are adopted, which event is linked to technology and production. Second, the magnitude of the effect on other empires is pretty small, unless you have a level of culture that's going to win the game. For instance, if an AI is running away with a Science win, you can build military to capture a city or two of its and prevent the win. But it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to put the AI's empire into enough unhappiness via Culture to stop it from getting a space win. Either he will simply flip ideologies and only be slightly disrupted, or one or two smaller cities will defect and he'll build the ship in Capital. All the while, he can still just build Happiness to counteract what you're doing. So, the only way to interfere with his win is to actually win yourself.

One sensible fix to this is to disable the three VC's unless the player has adopted the corresponding ideology. But it's questionable that would be sufficient, or desired, and besides, it's not the community's responsibility to fix problems. We can really only spot them.


Another thing to consider is that most of the time, but not all the time, whatever is giving you Tourism is giving you an equal amount of Culture. So viewed in that way, Tourism has the benefit of giving you SP's on your route to victory, just as the old Culture VC did.

But there are a few problems with that too. First, there are enough ways to get Culture without Tourism that a civ can build no Tourism and still get a lot of policies. Same thing as before with Culture, but the investments are different and much steeper for Tourism. As one example, a lot of games in G&K might have you taking Cathedrals for the culture without going directly for a culture win, but in BNW you are definitely not taking them unless you plan on investing for great works. Same thing with Ampitheatres. In G&K, every civ built them. Now, mostly only the Culture VC gets them. So using Tourism for culture is extremely inefficient and unnecessary.

Second, not every source of Tourism gives you Culture for SP's. Take the Reformation Belief of Sacred Sites - 2 Tourism for each faith building (no culture). Either you are all-in on the Culture VC, or this belief does zero. Same with certain buildings like Hotels. Tourism isn't even useful as defense against the Tourism of others. If you're defending, pushing SP's, or doing anything other than the Culture VC specifically, you want raw Culture instead, and the Culture tied to Tourism is too difficult to get by comparison.


All in all however, I think they were successful in making the culture win more interactive, at least. There are a lot of times as a Cultural player, for example, where I'll need to make a city conquest. Maybe I want to steal some great works, or maybe the Culture output of a city is so high that I'll never be able to overtake that civ in Tourism unless I take it out. This alone makes the Culture much more fun, and for that reason, I think the new Cutlure is more dynamic, despite this problem with Tourism.


So far I've completed 2 culture games on Immortal. One was with Assyria, which had me going around the Ancient world conquering enemies here and there for Great Works. That was a really rewarding game, and balancing diplomatic allies in the mix of being both a Warmonger and a Builder was really unique. If anything, it's a bit too hard to keep friends. The other game I was Byzantium, opening Piety, Goddess of Festivals, Monasteries, triple Faith building, Sacred Sites. I gamed the start quite a bit, and blew the game away fairly easily. I had quite the head-start by the point in the game where Ideologies were adopted.

The frustrating thing in both games was the lack of Ancient benefits to Tourism. I had a lot of empty Tourism from Sacred Sites in both games, and in the Assyira game, the effort of filling both the Royal Libraries and Cathedrals with Works was setting my empire back a lot on tech. IN G&K, I would've filled Universities with Scientists, regardless of VC. It would've been more difficult without invading others for their works, and I'm not sure that was worth the Tourism hit on those civs I was unable to get Open Borders with afterwards. So all in all, I see the bud of the problem that the Culture VC used to have on Diety/Immortal. The Culture input doesn't translate nearly as well into survival as Science and Military. I'm not going to say that the Culture VC is similarly impossible on Diety, but if it's gotten any better, it's because of two unrelated things - the AI is less aggresssive and tech is slower for the runaways.

So all in all, I like the culture game more, but it is definitely a lot more awkward than I expected after all this development atention.
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I think this succinctly sums up most of my thoughts on the issue - Tourism is much more interactive in a good way than the previous system but its application still feels awkward and unfinished. Its sort of hard to get a tourism win imo on Deity. Both times I have tried on Deity I discovered an Egypt/India wonder spamming and running away on tech [Both of which have been very aggressive civs, I saw India in my last game conquer 3 civs [Sweden, Zulu (The Big surprise), and Spain]
 
I do like tourism, but I think all your suggestions should be implemented. They are really good. Please post this thread on the 2k forum as well, better chance of some Dev see them.
 
MantaRevan said:
Much like most of BNW,(excluding the new civs, which are all very well done) I'm not happy with tourism. It feels gimmicky and weird to accumulate tourism as a yield, which is made even worse by the simple fact that tourism doesn't do anything practical for you or give you anything 75 percent of the time. Maybe if Firaxis were to give tourism an actual utility for players not going for culture then I might like it more. As it stands, tourism is just the nasty byproduct of the extra culture that was taken out of the game. Because most of the in-game culture was migrated over to great works, all of the culture buildings only provide a single :c5culture:, making most of them not worth their own hammer and maintenance costs any more for players not going cultural. Now many of the civilopedia entries are cluttered with slots for great works or points for great people that produce them. Don't get me wrong- I love great works. The idea of having your civilization actually create works of art that you can see in-game compared to some abstract value representing your civ's culture is very appealing. But in reality all great works do is further some dumb tourism mechanic that somehow links to ideology. All of the new GPs were basically unnecessary. They could have just stuck with artists and had them creating great works whenever you popped a GA or a landmark. That would have been more satisfying and added less clutter to the game. The three distinct specialists for the writers, artists, and musicians all provide the same yield- 3 :c5culture: and 3 :c5greatperson:. It just seems like it adds a lot of empty depth that really didn't need to be there. The OP brings up tons of good suggestions for how to improve the currently shoddy tourism mechanic, and I hope the devs consider them.
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Fully agree. It's very gimicky and weird and I'm not terribly militant about immersion.

At least as far as gameplay goes it's alright.
 
I really like how it works in brave new world. I just had a game where I went for the cultural victory. I had to use every system the game has to offer. I used the religion system to spread my culture and help with diplomacy. I had to use the spy system to rig the world congress to deal with my rivals. I love the archaeologists, and because of themes, the sites weren't just all the same. I specifically went after sites I thought would give me the right era or civ based on what wars I knew happened. Then I had to use diplomacy again to apologize profusely for taking their stuff. I even had to use warfare on my main cultural rival. I was the second person to declare an ideology, order, and everyone who chose after me wisely followed suit. The poor fascist Americans went first. They were subject to all sorts of wars and extra unhappiness until they finally flipped and there was a global commie utopia. Overall I enjoyed it a lot; it was much more engaging than my cultural attempts in previous versions.

I do think it would be cool if the effects of tourism were a little bit more evident earlier. So here is my idea for a tiny change. I say each Civ should start with a unique ideology, e.g. Polish Nationalism. This ideology would have no peculiar polices or benefits, but it means you would be susceptible to having unrest from a neighbors tourism. When any of your cities becomes religious. You should have the option of changing your ideology to that religion. The only benefit of having a religion as an ideology would a slight increase in that religion's spread in your borders. However, if your high tourism neighbor switches to that religious ideology, you could follow after him. Of course, as soon as a real ideology with policy benefits is available- most players will switch to that. (Unless there is a technologically backwards, high tourism civ holding them back in the dark ages.) Anyway, just an untested idea.
 
I also wonder why people are so happy about great work swap "puzzle".

It's awkward and stupid activity, it requires no planning (except a bit if Indiana dug 2 things at once), only repetitive swapping of items which has most important information hidden in the tooltip and most important ones (art and artifacts) even look the same despite you can't mix them. That's worst UI for a puzzle I ever seen in 21st century.
 
Adjuvant said:
I'm not understanding what you're arguing. The tourism mechanic really doesn't come into play until later with hotels and airports. Sure, you get some points early but you're not going to have people buying your blue jeans before 1600 ad unless they're a crippled-up, destitute, has-been of a civilization.

Tourism, before it's "tourism game mechanic", is culture. You want culture for all those neat little bonuses in the social policy tree. As a matter of fact, if you don't get some culture, you'll be missing bonuses everyone else is getting.

You know how you used to get 3 culture from an amphitheatre? It's 1 culture now. You're paying 1gpt for 1 culture. To fix that, put a great work of literature in it. Now you get 3. Same with the other buildings.

Ok, so you don't want excess tourism because you're not trying for a cultural win? That's fine, but you'll have between 20 and 50 before the modern age anyway, just by virtue of trying to get your social policies, unless you're just running over people with keshiks, and then who cares.
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But hell, if you're running over people with keshiks, you're bound to steal some great works along the way anyway. :p
 
Suntechnique said:
I also wonder why people are so happy about great work swap "puzzle".

It's awkward and stupid activity, it requires no planning (except a bit if Indiana dug 2 things at once), only repetitive swapping of items which has most important information hidden in the tooltip and most important ones (art and artifacts) even look the same despite you can't mix them. That's worst UI for a puzzle I ever seen in 21st century.
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Well, I guess not everybody is going to be happy with this expansion then, because I loved the great work swap puzzle. The UI could use some improvement, but no way is it the worst I've ever seen.
 
Love tourism and its mechanics, but it needs tuning.
The penalties are too heavy when you're the victim, and the game gets too easy against civs that are the victims.
You basically associate with the runaway's ideology and that's about it.

They should halve those penalties so it's less unbalanced, in both ways.
 
Do people really think Ideologies are unbalanced? In my experience I have had little problem with them and any problem with them can be solved with adopting a world ideology/swapping ideologies [Yes not pretty but it easily removes the -20-30 unhappy you may deal with]
 
Justice1337 said:
Well, effort in terms of deciding that specialists go in a certain slot, no. But effort in terms of slotting Artists instead of Scientists, and then dropping behind in tech as a result, yeah, there's a lot of effort. Just as much as there used to be, really, which is what kept cultural VC's down on Immo/Diety.

Also, it actually does not make sense to develop Tourism in reaction to an AI trying to win cultural. Opposing Tourism always goes against your Culture, not Tourism. So it is best to just build Cultural buildings and not actively slot them. If you do find an artifact, fine, but otherwise you'll not be investing anything in it.
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I'm not sure that the effort of slotting artists is really that burdensome- we're talking about 6 specialists for the three guilds, spread out however you like, and I think it's usually in your interest to work them, to make more culture, or to use writers and artists golden ages or faster policies.

Culture buildings without anything in them don't generate much culture at all, so you need to make up the difference somehow. Slotting artists and great works helps you gain social policies and build up a culture defense. Culture gain would be much slower if, as you suggest, we mostly ignore it if we aren't going for a culture win. If anything, building a culture building with no strong intention of stocking it seems wasteful.

Almost all of the things that generate culture also generate tourism, so developing tourism is very similar to developing your culture.

Strong tourism also has the advantage of imposing crippling happiness penalties on other civs, flipping cities, or making other civs switch to your ideologies. In an Immortal game I played, all of that happened. Russia, the most powerful nation, lost several of her cities until she switched to Freedom with me. Nations that I could never get a DoF with suddenly became allies as they switched to Freedom. Germany, the lone Order civ, with the strongest military, was isolated and attacked by a coalition of allies when he declared war against me.

All of that was thanks to tourism, an experience that I wouldn't have seen in G&K.
 
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