There is something very screwy about how culture bombing works in BTS. It has been seriously nerfed from prior versions. I noticed something was wrong in a recent game and set up a test game using world builder to see what is happening.
When you use a great artist for a great work, you earn 4,000 city culture points. That is straightforward. What is odd is how the great work affects culture in the surrounding tiles. Since vanilla, you don't get 4,000 points, you get 20 "bomblets" applied to the tiles. Each bomblet is equal to a turn's worth of culture. This was potentially overpowering if done in a city with say 1,000 culture/turn (this could be set up temporarily using the culture slider and a bunch of artists). You would gain 20,000 culture points over a huge area and could flip a massive number of tiles with one great artist. Obviously, it needed fixing.
Whatever is worth doing is worth overdoing apparently. In BTS, what appears to happen is that you still get the 20 bomblets as before (why are they wedded to this silly mechanic?). The difference is that now your culture per turn is ignored. In other words, you get 20 turns worth of zero culture. Good luck flipping tiles with that. It isn't a complete waste as each turn you earn 20 points of tile culture per ring inside the outermost ring. So you now get 400 culture (20 x 20) applied by a great work in the next to outermost ring. That is still garbage, but it is something.
What all this means is that culture bombing is now worthless for tile flipping. It seems to be useful only for gaining uncontested territory, but who uses a great artist for that? The artist was already the weakest of the great people; why did Firaxis see a need to nerf it so badly?
When you use a great artist for a great work, you earn 4,000 city culture points. That is straightforward. What is odd is how the great work affects culture in the surrounding tiles. Since vanilla, you don't get 4,000 points, you get 20 "bomblets" applied to the tiles. Each bomblet is equal to a turn's worth of culture. This was potentially overpowering if done in a city with say 1,000 culture/turn (this could be set up temporarily using the culture slider and a bunch of artists). You would gain 20,000 culture points over a huge area and could flip a massive number of tiles with one great artist. Obviously, it needed fixing.
Whatever is worth doing is worth overdoing apparently. In BTS, what appears to happen is that you still get the 20 bomblets as before (why are they wedded to this silly mechanic?). The difference is that now your culture per turn is ignored. In other words, you get 20 turns worth of zero culture. Good luck flipping tiles with that. It isn't a complete waste as each turn you earn 20 points of tile culture per ring inside the outermost ring. So you now get 400 culture (20 x 20) applied by a great work in the next to outermost ring. That is still garbage, but it is something.
What all this means is that culture bombing is now worthless for tile flipping. It seems to be useful only for gaining uncontested territory, but who uses a great artist for that? The artist was already the weakest of the great people; why did Firaxis see a need to nerf it so badly?
