Culture Calibration Mod

Based on several suggestions and an overall feeling in some threads seen on the forums, we're starting to put thought into a reworking of culture mechanics. MasterDinadan will be heading this project, he provided some very good ideas in this regard to use as a starting point. I'll let him post the details.

In short, the current mechanism for cultural feels very constrained. There's two forces pulling culture apart:

MasterDinadan said:

As it is, it's absurdly difficult to balance culture mechanics so that small civs do not easily coast to a culture victory AND large civs still pick up enough traits to get some interesting use of the mechanic. A lot of the trees like Autocracy are useless because the only kind of civ that could use it effectively would never get enough culture to really make it work (and will just opt for Honor instead).

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In previous versions of Civ government or social structures were a major part of the game for all victory types. In addition, other victory types can be pursued at any stage of the game, whereas culture victories must be decided upon in the first few turns and pursued exclusively. You can start with a small empire cultural strategy and shift to domination with a large empire, but not vice versa.

The basic idea is to shift the focus away from empire size and towards a more exponentially-increasing culture cost instead. The total amount of culture required for such a victory will remain the same. A cultural victory will be one that can be pursued later in the game, though planning and executing it early will obviously still have benefits (similar to an early domination push).

Thoughts on this subject are welcome!

Thal did an excellent job of explaining my problems with the system. My hopes are for a mod which will make culture viable with both small and large empires. As it is, all other victory types encourage you to build a large empire. I'm okay with the premise that culture victories do not require a large empire, but I don't want them to deter it either.

Some thoughts I posted from the other thread:

Culture victory will now require 6 trees to be completed. This means that you will have more choices to make along the way towards a culture victory, but costs will be adjusted so that reaching 6 trees is as easy as reaching 5 is currently.

Policy costs will be significantly reworked to increase in price more slowly than normal at first, and then increase much more quickly towards the end. Combined with the above concept, culture victories will require approximately the same amount of culture as before. They will just get more policies early and fewer policies later. Empires who aren't pursuing culture will get more policies over all, so they have more control for customizing their civ's advantages!

The policy cost increase for extra cities will be turned down. If possible, this may be linked to a building, so popping out a new city will increase the price, but building the proper building will set it to a much more reasonable rate. This allows large empires to still viably go for a culture win, but gives them an extra step to take for each city to help keep their culture production from skyrocketing. The rate will also be standardized to map size, instead of being lower on large maps.

The Cristo Redentor and Free Speech will be reworked. Applying a discount to policy costs encourages players to pool up a massive amount of culture prior to acquiring these, and then spend it all at once. I feel that players should be encouraged to buy policies as they have the culture to do so. Not sure what exactly we will have them do instead...

We're thinking about some mechanic to give players a one-time refund of the culture they've spent on policies, allowing them to "respec" the focus of their empire. This is potentially a new effect for the Cristo. Not sure how feasible this is to mod though.

If possible, civs will receive a significant boost to culture rate when they enter a new era, to help "jump start" their progress into policy branches that have just recently become unlocked. Players can still pool their culture to "slingshot" a deep policy as soon as it is available, but we wanted those policies to be reachable in a reasonable team even if that is not done. Costs will be balanced with these era boosts in mind.

Overall, these changes should provide typical empires with more policies throughout the game, and less pressure to pool their culture excessively. At the same time, culture victories will be viable for any empire size and will give the player more choices to make along the way.

Current version is 2. I can't attach it here, but will begin using this post for attachments in version 3.
For now, you can find version 2 here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9735809&postcount=33

Those changes sound incredibly well thought-out, I'm stunned by the work you're doing for the community, Thalassicus! Applause also to MasterDinadan for your ideas!


Are you planning to change something about the second function of culture, tile acquisition? As of now, I have a strong feeling that the gaps between cities and empires stay too long into the game, IMO they should close somewhere in the late medieval age. In the real world, precise borders were already common in the renaissance, AFAIK. Lots of hardly populated areas were a thing of the medieval age and before, I think.

I couldn't say this is a pure gameplay question, it is more about style. Similar to trading post spam, which is mostly annoying because it's ugly and unrealistic.

Sounds very interesting. My best wishes.

Great idea, I'd love to see this implemented. On this point:

MasterDinadan said:

If possible, this may be linked to a building, so popping out a new city will increase the price, but building the proper building will set it to a much more reasonable rate. This allows large empires to still viably go for a culture win, but gives them an extra step to take for each city to help keep their culture production from skyrocketing.

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What if a handful of non-culture-producing buildings, but ones that are still culture-relevant (say Library, Theatre, Garden) all reduced the 'culture drag' of a city by a little bit each? It'd give an incentive to build things like libraries even in non-science cities, as you'd still get a small science boost in addition to helping your culture victory.

Please explain to me how you 'coast' to a cultural victory ? I've done this on several occasions and it has consistantly required the most number of turns out of any victory type. Maybe you could post (or at least list) a few saves with the number of turns it took you to achieve this.

Large empires btw are not without cultural traits.. you're probably just shooting for another victory type and aren't building the corresponding culture buildings. Primarily because.. you can't! You have to decide upon what victory you plan to take at the outset. Making yet another building to reduce cultural costs is highly unlikely to provide any greater ammount of culture than you could already achieve since you wouldn't have the time to build it. Oddly large empires via puppets are probably a better way to achieve this type of victory than running a small empire.

Also keep in mind that the progression of culture increases is linear, not exponential. It increases by 30% of the base ammount not the current ammount. Try starting a future tech game and calculate how much it increases for each city.

Yes, you can get culture victories with puppets - I won a pretty decisive one with Egypt, just three of my own cities and about a dozen puppets I captured to the south. Thing is, puppet cities just aren't much fun There should be a way to win culturally with lots of your own. It doesn't make sense that a country with just three cities is somehow more "cultural" than a vast, continent-spanning empire.

Evalis said:

Please explain to me how you 'coast' to a cultural victory ?

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It's from a balance perspective: if culture aquisition is too fast, it'll make culture victories too easy. If culture is too weak, it makes the social policy system less useful for other victory strategies. This is currently dependent primarily on empire size: any more than 5 cities and it's difficult (or even becomes mathematically impossible) to create enough buildings in new cities to offset spiraling culture cost increases. The reason is world/national wonders are factored in as a basic part of the equation, and culture potential from them is fixed since only 1 can be built.

@jasoldier
An interesting irony is your empire can have -100 anger for millennia and win with the Utopia Project, if you go for an ignore-happiness strategy yet puppet everything -- lifetimes of brutal conquest and totalitarian oppression of a furious population leading to utopia! For the leaders at least. I think we'll primarily be focusing on the culture system and not touch the happiness one at all, but it's still amusing.

I haven't pushed for a cultural victory yet, so my observation may be of limited value. However, over about 6 games that I've played into the industrial era, I would say that my big empires are always trumping my small empires on progression through the policies. Of course, that is to some extent because my smaller empires were struggling for survival (but then, that is usually the case for a small empire isn't it?). Really, I'm finding that building a small, focused empire (that competes with the big boys) is harder in civ5 than civ4, although this could just be that I haven't learned how to do it yet.

I don't mean to criticize your effort. I'm just tossing in my observations for your consideration.

Thalassicus said:

It's from a balance perspective: if culture aquisition is too fast, it'll make culture victories too easy. If culture is too weak, it makes the social policy system less useful for other victory strategies. This is currently dependent primarily on empire size: any more than 5 cities and it's difficult (or even becomes mathematically impossible) to create enough buildings in new cities to offset spiraling culture cost increases. The reason is world/national wonders are factored in as a basic part of the equation, and culture potential from them is fixed since only 1 can be built.

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C&P'ed from the other thread, since it fits here as well:

I want to report on a playthrough I did with the Modset (refers to Balance mods).
I played France, Pangea, Emperor difficulty, Standard Speed.

I pulled a cultural Victory (without "cheating" with Culture pooling) by 1958 (turn 378) with 8 full cities (and later in game 4 puppeted ones). I got more than 800:culture/Turn
The Victory was not unconstested - Ghandi had just finished the Appollo Project and Japan held most of the continent with only my Capital remaining to his Victory.

I think this was only made possible by some of the changes here, namely:

* The Liberty Policy giving city lvl 2 instead of 1,5 really helps early game.
* The 100% instead of 50% happiness added to culture helps.
* Most Importantly: The increase in and in several places helps cities different than the capital to flourish. In previous games they were always lacking behind a lot, with crappy size and hence production. Not this time. I managed to build one and only one Wonder in most of them (for the Freedom Policy). All in all I did not have many wonders. Ghandi and Persia got most of them, but I got some.

I would hence consider the cultural victory fine for medium size Empires. (e.g. this 8 cities one). Frances bonus sure helped, but not end-game.

This was my 3rd Cultural Victory by now, Ghandi (3 Cities) and Arabia (2 Cities) were the other ones.

Not that is would solve all the problems, but a smaller simple aid, might be to create a building/series of buildings, that produce more culture (% increase, say +50% or so), and give that building a # of city minimum.?

A few things. Thalassicus you and I see eye to eye on much i think. And I agree with your synopsis.

A few thoughts, there should be a feel of difference in play style between huge empires and small nations. I feel that while the huge empire has raw capasity, the small empire should run off efficiency - and if both are run well, they should be about equal in overall power.

The argument is this - while the huge empire focused on expansion (through aggression or colonization), the smaller empire should focus on buildings and infrastructure.

I think the "solution" to the feel between the two lies in 3 things. Culture (which is more or less an intangible force of the "quality of life" the civ has), Infrastructure, and Efficiency.

The way to make this more obvious is two fold.
A large empire should have minimal improvements, buildings and culture, but a lot of raw resources available. The cities would be moderate in size but specialists would be rare.
Small industrious nations, on the contrary, should be heavily improved, heavily saturated with buildings and culture. Their cities should have large populations (compared with the cities of the large empire), they should be efficient, lean and mean.

The way to accomplish this differentiation is through policies and what culture effects. I only now refer to "late game" policies. Those of the bottom row: Order, Autocracy, Freedom, Rationalism and Commerce.

These policies should start to create either efficiencies, or raw growth. The easiest way to differentiate between the two is policy holders with "per city" bonii and those with "per population"

I agree wholeheartedly that culture should be increased across the board, perhaps with more required to make a Utopia project. In this, late-game policies of some kind or another should more or less be ALWAYS grabbed.


Buildings should be made more efficient and dependent on the population of the city. Either providing more specialist slots (for an impetus on larger cities), or provide bonuses directly based on population size. These buildings are expensive and would represent an investment in the local structure rather than expansion.

Improvements should either be harder to build/maintain, OR conversely - worker units should be harder to come by or more expensive to maintain. This way Large empires would not have "every tile filled with improvements" making expansion a double edged sword. Smaller nations of course WOULD have every tile maximized.

One idea is incurring a penalty for numbers of workers. Making smaller teams of workers more efficient than larger teams. Another option would be the cheapening of workers, but their consumption upon making improvements (not roads/railroads). This would mean time would have to be spent by cities making their tiles improved, instead of merely the effort of workers.

The feel of a large empire should indeed have culture, but not as potent as a smaller nation.

QES said:

One idea is incurring a penalty for numbers of workers. Making smaller teams of workers more efficient than larger teams.

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Unit maintenance?

MasterDinadan said:

Unit maintenance?

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Right, as of right now they either dont cost enough or it's insubstantial - perhaps make workers cost more than they are? (perhaps harder to maintain than an army?)

Interesting ideas... but it's not really relevant to culture which is the focus of this mod.

For adjusting the costs, the relevant lines are in GlobalDefines.xml


**Edit - The formula I'm using is wrong or else the game does some weird intermediate rounding I can't wrap my head around. I'm working on figuring it out. Everything below is incorrect.**

**Edit 2 - I figured it out. The formula I've got is correct. The problem is that the formula will only accept integers for POLICY_COST_INCREASE_TO_BE_EXPONENTED and will round any non-integers DOWN. I was getting wrong numbers because it was using 2 instead of 2.9. I will have to come up with a new formula.**

The formula seems to be 25+(6*n)^1.7
Rounded down(?) to the nearest 5.
Where n is the number of policies already bought (free policies don't count)

The base cost of 27 policies (the amount needed for a culture victory assuming you took Free Religion and built The Oracle) is about 54890. This may be a little bit off depending on how often the number rounds up or down.

We want to make it 36 policies, and we want the rate to be a bit "steadier" early on.
Right now, the first policies cost:
25,45,90,160,245...
The fourth policy costs as much as the first three combined, and it just keeps getting worse.

Rather than balance the equation for buying 33 (and getting 3 free) policies, I think it may be better to hand out more free policies, this time from the tech tree. This helps even civs with terrible culture to maintain a steady (yet very slow) rate of policy acquisition just by teching, and also helps civs get a jump start on new policies when they enter a new era, with the policy they get from the appropriate tech in that era.
Free policies could be given from the following techs:
Agriculture
Mathematics
Theology
Printing Press
Steam Power
Mass Media
All of these techs are at the start of an era, but not necessarily along the same path, so someone can't just beeline through the policy techs that easily. The agriculture one just means that civs start with a free policy.

This means that the player still only has to buy 27 policies for a culture victory (though they may have to tech a bit deeper than they would otherwise). Now we tweak the formula to have the policies come at a steadier rate early on and be more expensive later but without having a major effect on the total cost.
One such formula is:
50+(2.9*n)^2

This brings the total cost of buying the policies to 53500. A bit cheaper than normal, but you also have to tech deeper, so it may be okay.
This also means that the first couple of policies cost:
50, 60, 80, 125, 185
The first two are more expensive (but you get a free one from Agriculture) and the rest come at a much more steady pace, so this is better early on.

The costs increase a lot more later though. After 22 policies, the policies become more expensive than previous. The old costs for policies 20-24:
3165,3450,3745,4050,4370
and in the new system they cost:
3085,3415,3760,4120,4500

Any civ which previously would have gotten fewer than 22 policies (which is almost everyone who didn't go for a culture win) will now buy slightly more policies throughout the game, but also get significantly more through the tech-granted policies. More policies gives more choices

@MasterDinadan

Oh sorry, my point was how I agree that culture should be more than purely an "end game strategy" and that it should be encompassed in a more wholistic "small vs large" approach than it is. As it is, you must go for culture from the start. If it had more utility than just the end-game victory, like affecting other issues, then it would be purposeful to those who do not wish to utilize that end game, and as such people who use it for it's other utilities might opt to switch TO a culture-based win later.

I for one would like to see boarders change from culture again. A stronger culture should be able to push out other culture, like in civ4. This should be purely culture however, and not "purchasable".

QES said:

@MasterDinadan

Oh sorry, my point was how I agree that culture should be more than purely an "end game strategy" and that it should be encompassed in a more wholistic "small vs large" approach than it is. As it is, you must go for culture from the start. If it had more utility than just the end-game victory, like affecting other issues, then it would be purposeful to those who do not wish to utilize that end game, and as such people who use it for it's other utilities might opt to switch TO a culture-based win later.

I for one would like to see boarders change from culture again. A stronger culture should be able to push out other culture, like in civ4. This should be purely culture however, and not "purchasable".

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Well, that's what great artists are for.
Maybe some great artists from certain policies?
Changing how culture works with regards to tile acquisition would probably take source code modding.

At any rate, I've run into some challenges. Granting social policies for techs is not something that is doable through XML.

I'm also having an issue with modifying the policy cost increase per number of cities. In spite of the fact that the change is showing up in the database file, I start a new game on standard and it still has it set to 30% in game.

What I'm adjusting is NumCitiesPolicyCostMod in the Worlds table. Is there something else I'm missing?

I believe social policies through techs should be easy with Lua, as it's flexible and likely has all the same potential as python did in IV. I haven't yet sat down to really learn it in depth, but my brother is very experienced with Lua from creating zombie survival game modes in Gary's Mod for HL2 for years now, so I can ask him for a quick rundown. Often quicker to do that sort of thing in an interactive face-face environment than written tutorials.

I'm sure it's doable. It's just not something I'm ready for at my level of modding.
I've come up with a good formula and made a mod of it which works. All the numbers are as I was expecting. The formula I've got now is:
25+(4n)^1.86
and I decided to get rid of the rounding down to 5 thing. I just don't see a reason for it.
Earlier policies tend to be cheaper, but later policies are more expensive. This means that culture victories have not really affected been affected difficulty-wise, but civs that aren't going for a culture win will get more policies and earn them more frequently.

None of the other changes I described are incorporated in this version, but I'll upload it in case anyone wants to test it. I tested enough to make sure it works and the pace feels good, but I didn't play through a game to see how the culture win felt.

MasterDinadan said:

Well, that's what great artists are for.
Maybe some great artists from certain policies?
Changing how culture works with regards to tile acquisition would probably take source code modding.

At any rate, I've run into some challenges. Granting social policies for techs is not something that is doable through XML.

I'm also having an issue with modifying the policy cost increase per number of cities. In spite of the fact that the change is showing up in the database file, I start a new game on standard and it still has it set to 30% in game.

What I'm adjusting is NumCitiesPolicyCostMod in the Worlds table. Is there something else I'm missing?

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I find great artists inelegant. "Culture Bomb" was fun when it more or less increased the culture of a city, because then it's the "culture itself" that takes over. (Civ 4). However the modern incarnation seems much less like culture and more like diplomatic shenanigans. Stealing away land-rights in a skeezy diplomatic deal and calling it "culture" puts a sour taste in my mouth. It's too (ironically) aimed and specific. Culture should be a slow creeping inexorable doom. I really liked how civ 4 did it.

The other nice thing about it is that it makes the "peaceful" nation still capable of harming it's opponents. The small industrialized nation is ignorable now. It's either on the attack physically, or not. And if it succeeds, it will become a large empire (like everything else in the game.)

If culture could somehow have a real-world impact that was a force to be reckoned with, it would go a long way to making culture-strategies more viable than the end-game win.


There are two fun ways to achieve this:
1) Have policies which punish other civs for lacking culture. "Each civ that has less culture than you (total policies spent?) receives 1 for each fewer policies spent." This would make culture moderately aggressive, for example.

2)Make the owning of land something to value. I think that cities fall far too quickly. Adding a function where culture directly affects defensive abilities might help. I think that enemy units should lose 1 HP whilst in the territory of an enemy each turn. (Cities would then lose the ability to shoot, which is an annoying micro management anyway). Forts would also do 1 hp of damage to anything adjacent to them (but no damage in them and they'd heal 1HP to any unit in them, making their capture key.)

This would make it a perfectly viable strategy to invest heavily in culture and land, expanding boarders far, FAR beyond the cities ability to work tiles. This would mean that A) land is taken up and interferes with expansion by the enemy, and B) any invading army would take lots of damage before reaching a city.

The "counter" to this should be pillaging. Pillaging should not only give gold - but heal units (2 or 3HP). This way, when an army is invading, it must take the time to stop and pillage along the way or be too weak to take a city. Pillaging also only gets to happen once, so the army would have to move on.


This is about culture because it is about boarders. Tile acquisition should be a flat rate, and not scale with distance from the city. This would make culture-heavy citys expand their boarders VERY rapidly (and to distance) while culture starved locations would be FORCED to spend on acquisition of new tiles, or be content with small boarders.

The combination of rapid boarder expansion, and territory benefits (outside of combat) would make a culture heavy strategy viable for any nation.