What do we want to do about culture and tourism?

This thread is dedicated to a look at culture and tourism, and what changes (if any) we want to make to them. Of course, CEP already had a lot of ideas towards this, so likely we will incorporate many of those as well.

Culture is produced for most of the game (until archeology) in a series of small very powerful sources.

Note: This may not be a balance issue, but I wanted to point it out for discussion.

Unlike other yields, culture is dominantly provided by just a few sources:

1) Writers/Artist Guild: A combination of 6 culture each from the specialists, plus the resulting Great People they create (especially the writer).

2) Cultural City States - 6 culture per CS ally.

3) A few world wonders (like the Parthenon).

The cultural buildings themselves do not impact culture that strongly (especially the Opera House and Amphitheater).


Because of this concentration a few things happen. First of all, culture scales in a weird way. You get a big jump when the guilds come online and you get your CS allies in order. Then culture barely moves for a long time...and then jumps again when you get archeology and radio.

Second is culture heavily favors Tall playstyles. Almost all culture is derived from 1 or 2 cities...all other cities just carry the 10% extra culture weight around.


Tourism is imo... just a terrible system.

I personally really hate tourism as it is right now, because it is a tack on to the core system. It is my least favorite thing about BNW.

With culture, I am gaining social policies and expanding my borders regardless of any intention towards a cultural victory. So culture is still useful at least in part.

Tourism is nearly worthless unless I am pursuing it as a victory condition, I commonly will go the vast majority of the game without even glancing at it.

Further, tourism is one of the worst scaling modifiers in the game. You get a piddly amount of it for 80% of the game...and then suddenly it shoots off when radio comes into play.

Further...it makes the great musician a terrible GP for most playstyles. Great Writers produce culture for social policies. Great Artists give you Golden Ages...useful for everyone. The Great Musician provides no benefit unless you are focusing on tourism.

So how to change tourism?

If I had my way, honestly I would scrub the entire victory condition and go back to using culture for the victory. But...that represents a radical departure from the current game, and would remove several mechanics. So as much as I would prefer that personally, I don't believe its the way to go.


Instead, I think there needs to be two things:

1) Tourism needs to provide a more general benefit. It needs to do something other than sitting like a lump until the last 15% of the game.

2) There should be early and midgame sources of tourism. Whether its buildings, great people, whatever.. I think tourism's progression should be smoothed out instead of something that barely comes up until radio.

I don't find that the early-mid-game sources for tourism is an issue on its own. Great Works are available as soon as you get guilds and a few wonders. The amounts are low, but because everyone else's are also, they can start to work on the influence for later and provide significant amounts of culture over time. Once you get museums or certain wonders they can be paired up for theme bonuses and start to stack well. If there's a weakness in that system, it is that there are few objects interacting with great works.

Some thoughts
1) Tourism should be boosted by Golden Ages (and other yields as well)
2) Some culture can be provided to make the amphitheater and opera house feel less useless. I would propose culture from a few luxury resources on one and bump the other to 3 culture, both the museum and broadcast tower are fine. We could also remove the building tier such that all you need is a monument and cities could build culture however they find appropriate.
3) Beliefs may be the best place to look for some earlier tourism yields. Some mid-game policies (something like holy city gets x tourism, or national or world wonders provide tourism).
4) Aesthetics could add +1 tourism to great works, and receive both culture and tourism from happiness.
5) park some policy tie-ins on the tourism buildings (hotel, airport, possibly great works as well), so they are somewhat useful in non-tourism victory games. (providing gold in the freedom ideology? extra culture or provide gold from great works).

The next question would be how to make tourism more interesting. We already have things like more science from trade routes and decreased resistance on conquests.

I find that these could be useful objects
1) Easier religious spread for higher influence
2) Could add to border spread along with culture? Passive, but it would be something.
3) A way to "use" tourism against nearby CS?
4) Extra gold and religious spread for influence trade routes?
5) way to convert tourism into gold? (commerce tree?)
6) Interact with the new happiness system? (eg, tourism counts toward the culture or gold quantity required?)

mystikx21 said:

3) A way to "use" tourism against nearby CS?

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Perhaps tourism could provide you a diplomatic unit from CSD every once in a while, to represent increased influence due to tourism.

To me tourism victory needs to be relevant to other civs besides Brazil. Right now, that is the only civ with which this victory is actually viable.

As a preliminary statement, I'd say the theming has to be looked at - it's an interesting system but not only completely useless in the long run as it barely changes your tourism output, but it really feels like you're just rearranging stuff around. It's not that fun. We need to make it more interesting.

Also there needs to be other sources of tourism. Of course, we need to be careful not to make it an easy win, but this still needs to be looked at.

Other sources?

1) I would not make tourism an on tile yield unless it's part of a policy/ideology or belief effect. Maybe with natural wonders (or luxuries?). It should not come by default.

2) I could conceive of making it a direct yield on certain buildings to improve those buildings (garden?, opera house/museum, guilds?). But it wouldn't be very big. The larger sources should still be belief or policy based, or late game buildings converting culture sources, and great works. Maybe just default to putting +1 tourism/+1 culture on world wonders (with some granting more culture, and a few late game ones granting more tourism).

If there are more sources, they can be balanced against adding slightly more culture to culture buildings and that should not make the victory type too easy. We would be talking about adding +1 to a few things at most per game (great works, wonders, maybe a building or two, maybe natural wonders) and not adding 2 or 3 times as much tourism.

Really the 20k question is how to make tourism more interesting. Culture does things. Gold does things. Faith does things. Tourism is just kind of there for most of the game.

mystikx21 said:

Really the 20k question is how to make tourism more interesting. Culture does things. Gold does things. Faith does things. Tourism is just kind of there for most of the game.

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Tourism already does other things, it generates influence which affects ideology choices and other aspects. It could be argued that influence could do more, though, and that tourism itself could also be useful in other ways.

The problem to me is that, to a civ not seeking tourism victory, it's too hard not to be influenced and too easy not to influence. Like for example, rarely if ever does a conquering city make use of the influence's ability to decrease resistance and population loss when conquering cities by an influenced civilization.

It does other things, but those things are not very interesting. The influence weighs a lot on ideology, but that's late game. The problem with it is the process getting to that late game it does essentially nothing. Maybe a little extra science from trade or a couple of cities are conquered easier.

Once there it becomes more active (though not really "engaging" so much as a passive battle of numbers that impacts more things). In that respect it is very similar to the late-game diplomatic victory (do some votes, buy up a lot of CS right before votes/diplomatic win), except harder to achieve.

If we look at real world tourism, I am considering two areas:

1) True tourism, aka people come to your countries to see stuff.
2) Cultural influence, aka your country is influenced by the goings on of my country.

So if we consider it from that angle, we can look at real world benefits:

The first one is money. There are many countries who the bulk of their GDP is based on tourism, at least in modern times. I think the easiest mechanic might be to simply let tourism add in directly to your GPT. From a balance standpoint, it would have the strongest impact early in the game (to make tourism more desirable) and late game it wouldn't have much balance issue since gold is already flooding through your ears at that point. This seems easy to adjust, it makes real world sense, and I don't think it would cause any immediate balance problems out right...so I think its a strong candidate for inclusion.


The second one is influence, which you could represent by CS influence effects. For example, perhaps all CS gain resting influence equal to half my tourism...or something to that effect. I already mentioned perhaps provided free diplomatic units for the CSD mod based on tourism, etc. This one would be a bit harder to implement and balance.

A third could be some kind of happiness effect. Having a civ everyone comes to see and admire sounds like a good thing.


Regardless, I would say that I would want to add in an implicit benefit to tourism...not one just through a policy. I have no issues if policies make tourism better...but I want any standard yield to be at least somewhat useful on its own two feet...it should not require a policy before it gains any use.

mystikx21 said:

Really the 20k question is how to make tourism more interesting. Culture does things. Gold does things. Faith does things. Tourism is just kind of there for most of the game.

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The problem with it is the process getting to that late game it does essentially nothing.

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Technically, yes, the tourism yield by itself is practically useless. But saying that there needs to be mechanical changes to the effects of tourism is a long leap from that.

This is because, even though there aren't hard coded game mechanical benefits to the tourism yield, the game is still designed so that *generating* tourism gives you benefits, as all the main Tourism generators also gives culture. In that way, Tourism and Culture are intricately linked, and ignoring that and saying that "Tourism has no benefits" is incredibly misleading.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sensing some perverse belief that "if there aren't hard coded mechanical benefits to the yield it's pointless" ignoring this design doctrine that "if it generates tourism then it also generates culture". This belief is absurd: consider the following alternative design:

Instead of each Great Work giving 2 Tourism and 2 Culture, they instead give 2 Tourism only, but in addition a city gains bonus Culture for each Tourism point generated. This would give Tourism a useful and thematically appropriate effect, and overcome the mental hurdle of Tourism being "useless". *But* it would be functionally identical to the current design! (At least in the early game, before modifiers really kick in - coincidentally when Tourism is percieved as "most useless")

If your main complaint about tourism is that it has no clear effect, then it's not a mechanical design change with engine rewrites you're after - you can accomplish the above with some UI redesign.


So, yes, the Tourism yield itself is boring - this would be a problem if it was possible to focus on the Tourism yield alone. But via design, it isn't - focusing on Tourism means you focus on Culture, and focusing on Culture means you focus on Tourism. I seriously think this is just a perception issue - false expectations from Tourism being next to the other yields on the top bar. If people accepted Tourism as the secondary "offensive part of Culture" yield it was, we wouldn't be having this discussion, so just hide it away on the culture screen then!



Whatever you decide on, please, at least stay true to the vanilla intent - don't just add another equation to the giant yield churn (and if you do, make it optional via policies, which has the bonus of keeping culture and tourism thematically intertwined!). Culture is gathered internally, and actively spent. Tourism however is gathered "externally" (towards each opponent) and gives passive rewards towards your opponents when you've "overcome" them. If you think the rewards are too small, increase them - if you think they come to seldom/late, change the thresholds (they could be logarithmic!) - if you think they're too boring, make them big distinct changes that come in chunks, rather than incremental changes! They could even be tied to policies! Each time I read this forum and see "Let's add more stuff!", my heart dies a little - often changing is enough.

(Or, as has been suggested, remove Tourism altogether and rebalance the game around that - make Culture victory being having 2x the culture as your opponents or something instead. Removing things can also be good design, and Civ 5 is bucketastic enough as it is.)

I'm going to get flamed here but nonetheless...

There is nothing wrong with the tourism mechanic.

Tourism only comes to its own in the late game because that's the way it is supposed to work. Tourism IS a modern day phenomenon, with perhaps one or two exceptions that will no doubt be shown in later posts.

Look on it like another strategic resource that is only revealed after a certain tech is researched. You don't get any benefit for having that tile in your empire other than the basic ones, but once that resource is available, bam!! you must improve it and you really are glad to have it. The resource was, technically, always there just unusable. Same with tourism. It is always there but your empire has no use for it until the right time and research comes around. The only difference is we see this 'useless' yield being accrued and think why can't that be used. Maybe what we need to do is make the tourism totals invisible to the UI until we can actually use them and then we might view them differently.

Ignite your flamethrowers now.

JohnS said:

Instead of each Great Work giving 2 Tourism and 2 Culture, they instead give 2 Tourism only, but in addition a city gains bonus Culture for each Tourism point generated. This would give Tourism a useful and thematically appropriate effect, and overcome the mental hurdle of Tourism being "useless". *But* it would be functionally identical to the current design! (At least in the early game, before modifiers really kick in - coincidentally when Tourism is percieved as "most useless")

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John,

You have made a persuasive argument, though you are wrong in one area...the Great Musician. This is the one early game area where tourism can be generated without culture (though you do gain culture through the guild).

Otherwise though, you are right. When it comes to great works, they can be thought of as culture generators...with this other "useless" yield that you may or may not want late game.

That said though, sometimes culture and tourism actually compete with each other. With the great writer, do I get a great work (for the tourism) or go for the big culture boost? For an archeolgist, do I get the great work, or should I build a landmark (again gain more culture).

So perhaps the better question is are the great works balanced early on?

Second question still remains...should tourism be as lop sided as it is? Meaning you get almost none of it early game, and then it shoots off like a rocket at late game.

ExpiredReign said:

There is nothing wrong with the tourism mechanic...

Tourism only comes to its own in the late game because that's the way it is supposed to work...

It is always there but your empire has no use for it until the right time and research comes around.

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Expired you don't need those flame retardant pants just yet

You are right that tourism is working "as intended", it is reflecting a modern day phenomena. What I question is its use as a game mechanic.


Your last statement to me is the crux of the problem. In any game, it is good to have some things that work immediately, and some things that take planning and preparation to bring to fruition.

But in this case, we have a yield that does ALMOST NOTHING until I get the victory screen. It is the absolute most extreme version of patient planning...and I think it is so much so that it is not fun.

Science Victory: Science gives me all sorts of things.
Military: I get to crush my enemies, and take their land. Fun!
Diplomatic: I get to vote on resolutions starting in Industrial. And obtaining the CS for those votes gives me stuff.
Cultural: I accrue a resource that sits there for 95% of the game. In the last 5% it gives me some very weak bonuses as I "influence" other cities. And then...I win....yeah.

Even when I can finally get some of that sweet tourism with hotels and the like....it still does nothing. I am building a worthless building for almost all of its lifecycle!

That is ultimately why I think tourism is such a bad system.


So thinking about it some more, perhaps what would be the right way to go is this:

1) Make it easier to get that initial "influenced" condition with tourism. Rebalance the later stages to compensate. This would allow tourism to kick in earlier in the game. Not necessarily early game, but at least by mid or late midgame.
2) Provide some real "meat" when you influence another civ. Something strong and tangible, especially as you get to the later tourism stages.

Ahh... now I'm with you. Its no so much the case that tourism is useless early, mid game as even when tourism does kick in you get nothing from it until the victory!

So the most logical use for it would be as an influence on other civs.

Things like:
A modifier to the friendship rate of like-minded civs
An antidote to warmonger penalties from past indiscretions.
Possibly some form cultural tile flipping? Maybe not.
Maybe easily influenced CS would join your empire or at least want to become permanent allies.

That sort of thing.

(For the record, I've always thought of the name Science Victory as misleading: it may be the only victory condition with a hard science limit, since certain techs are necessery to build the parts, but in practice science is just as useful/needed for the other conditions)

The Great Musician and the Eiffel Tower and probably some other sources are pretty useless if you don't care about Tourism, yea. But I don't really see those as problems, Great Generals also easily become redundant for many playstyles, for example. Not everything has to be useful all the time, and Great Musicians are easy to not generate in favour of something useful instead. (note that my argument was also about the "main" sources. Obviously Tourism *is* a separate yield, but the design intent was clearly to have most tourism sources give culture)

The tricky thing with the archaeologist dilemma is of course also that the landmark culture can later on be converted to Tourism via hotels

I can see that the Tourism lopsidedness feels strange, but by itself it is once again a perception issue - balance wise Tourism victory obviously shouldn't be possible too early, making it "shoot off" makes it easier to "switch" to Tourism Victory later on (which is possibly a good thing?), and if it's boring that the influential effects come too late then it's probably easier to adjust the tresholds (I probably meant exponential rather than logarithmic before, it's late alright ). Making the UI emphasise that Tourism is only a secondary yield will hopefully make it easier to accept lopsidedness (it could be merged with the culture tooltip in the top bar/city view instead of being an entirely separate box, for proper Tourism info you really want to go to the influence screen instead due to the opponent-specific multipliers anyway)

1) Make it easier to get that initial "influenced" condition with tourism. Rebalance the later stages to compensate. This would allow tourism to kick in earlier in the game. Not necessarily early game, but at least by mid or late midgame.
2) Provide some real "meat" when you influence another civ. Something strong and tangible, especially as you get to the later tourism stages.

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These things sound reasonable to me. The first part can easily(?) be done by changing tresholds (avoiding modifying more visible numbers that the player has to actively judge will make it easier to transition to this mod from vanilla). For 2), I'd like to reiterate that policies would be a cool way to go - keeps tourism/culture linked, and it's always great when players gets to modify their own tools (it feels much cooler to make good use of religious bonuses when I myself have picked them, for example). My main objection to many ideas being thrown around is that they add more pipes to the Giant Yield Churn, which has always been my least favorite part of this game. I'd much rather see existing pipes modified, for simplicity.


One thing I can agree with is that the main culture buildings are quite boring - that they're just slots waiting for the GWs with little effect on their own (though thematically I like that culture come from "people" rather than "buildings"). The best idea I can come up with to mechanically deal with the problem is to merge all/some GW slots into a single/fewer buildings (it could work out balancewise since the slots are still useless until filled) and then let the other culture buildings have cooler effects (modifiers/secondary effect on the GWs/"enable" theming bonuses?), though that'd be difficult to motivate thematically without completely reinventing the whole building line.

Tossing an idea out there:

Tourism now comes in play much earlier (I'd say renassaince era), but now you have to unlock tourism victory in some way later in the game - either by just discovering a tech, or by doing that plus building a "project" (the utopia project?)

JohnS, what we/I was concerned with was more what Stalker outlined. Tourism as a yield is independent of culture and independently it is boring. It provides no substantial effects until very late (and then you win, basically). I do not think of it as intrinsically linked to culture, it does not have to be. Tourism could go up when culture does not, or vice versa. The only reason it is that way is that the sources are similar currently.

The idea would not be to add much culture or tourism to the game, but to make the culture part do what it does now (provide resistance to tourism, provide border expansion, and provide policies) and give the tourism something to do as you gain it. It does a few minor things (add some science, help with conquest, assuming you were going to go to war), and does one important thing later on (ideology influence), but it doesn't do much until then to encourage its use except come with culture in most cases.

The yield is essentially unimpressive unless you are intent on winning a cultural victory. Every other yield is more flexible or provides some immediate and tangible gain. Those two suggestions, perhaps with some policy or belief tie-ins to provide other gains, would be fine to give it some usefulness, and that's what I would propose we focus on is how to provide some meat for getting influence levels so there's a reward that is useful throughout the game besides just "you will win". It should be a top priority if you intend to win that way, and then somewhat useful the rest of the time to provide some secondary effect. Right now it is not fulfilling that second option for most of its existence.

The idea of tourism only being useful later in the timeline is pretty realistic though - tourism would not have been a major thing in say, the medieval era, at least compared to the modern times. I do like the idea of tourism promoting spread of your religion though, it makes sense that lots religious tourists could influence people.

I think it's very important that we don't attach ourselves to the literal meaning of "tourism" (which by the way, I think was a huge misnomer on Firaxis' part; it should have been called popularity or something) - tourism means basically your culture becoming popular and trendy in other countries, which as far as I know goes back a long way. Nations absorbed things from other cultures all the time. In fact the more I think about it, the more I think realistically it could very well start as early as the ancient era (not gonna argue for that as a game design point of view though).

Wodhann said:

Nations absorbed things from other cultures all the time. In fact the more I think about it, the more I think realistically it could very well start as early as the ancient era (not gonna argue for that as a game design point of view though).

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In that context, the Roman Empire was a big example of this. While Rome did a lot of conquering, part of why it was so successful is its ability to assimilate cultures into its own.