Headsup: Negative Health much worse than expected

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Strategist83

King
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Dec 30, 2005
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If you've followed discussion on this forum leading up to release or watched some of MadDjinn's videos you're probably left with the impression letting Health run negative isn't a problem. There is one important caveat to this:

Culture produced does not get rounded down, it is always an integer. This is different from all the other city resources produced, including Science, which all get rounded.

What this means is that if you go into negative Health in the early game, your culture output (and thus your Virtue and tile acquisition rates) get halved for most cities. Old Earth Relic drops to just 1 culture/turn!

So yes, the penalty for over-expanding is in fact severe. If you didn't pick [overpowered] Artists for colonists, Unhealth is probably even worse than Unhappiness was in V.
 
Strategist83 said:
Unhealth is probably even worse than Unhappiness was in V.
Click to expand...

For building peacefully unhealth might be worse than unhappiness, but unhappiness gave combat strength reductions and spawned rebels. I am willing to bet you can win a game completely ignoring health and building nothing but military units/annexing everything.
 
Yeah. It's still not worse than a 75% penalty to growth (and penalties to combat strength, and production).

Thing that's getting me, is that the contributions to healthiness are all wrong. They need more global contribution, and less local contribution.
 
You aren't starting out at negative health though. Even when the first settlement pops, you will likely still be positive health. So for the first 30 turns or so, you are still getting full culture.

Then, you start to add the +1 from quest, culture gained from ruins, artists if you took them, and additional culture gained from random sources like certain trades, and it still isn't going to affect you much. Certainly not enough to offset what you are gaining, through multiple trade routes, extra science, more map control, etc.

So like on a pro/con list, you can add a tiny check to rounded reduced culture gains, but the pro list still has quite a few heavy checks.
 
In fairness, it must be said my observation was based on a played game where I deliberately picked the free maintenance on Relics, just to test it. In a such scenario, Unhealth amounts to close to -50% Culture. That completely gimps Virtue acquisition and therefore colony development (no source of Global Health without Virtues). Hopefully, they will rebalance the quest decision on the Relic to be less one-sided. Even when you do pick the extra Culture on the Relic quest, though, it's still a ~33% penalty. Ouch.

Interesting side note, if you get the tier 1 kicker from Knowledge its bonus (+10% Culture) cancels out the Unhealth penalty, letting you run full culture even when Unhealthy. Thus, the kicker is quite a lot better than it appears.
 
meh, unhealth is really not an issue. Especially as growing fast in pop is not a big concern and tile improvement are [snip] long to build.

I just try not dropping below 10. And in the end, ended with 130+ health. (which combined to the 30% health to culture is insane)

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People win games with negative 3 figure negative health on high difficulties. That would be utterly impossible in BNW, you'd have cities defecting left and right, barbarians would pillage all your improvements and so on.
 
Well, going into negative health is necessary.

I dropped into -33 health to help clear my entire continent of other factions and bugs in advance for my Earthling Settlers from exodus gate.

Plus those cities you are razing and puppeting will give you a ton of negative health cuz the game is mad at you for winning.
 
Has not been a critical issue for me so far.
 
On the flip side, it must be noted that health potentially has a massive effect on science output: if you're in the Knowledge Virtue tree, unhealthiness means losing +10% Science and gaining -10%, a massive swing. Outside of knowledge, 10% less science can be rather unpleasant.
 
Absolutely worst case you lose half culture (if you have +2) and 20% base science (i.e. not science gained from trade or some bonuses).

In return you can blanket the map and completely skip health buildings and tech.

It's not even a decision.
 
Going below -20 is a pretty harsh penalty though. Half growth is pretty big, though still not as bad as unhappiness in BNW...lol. Usually I'm pretty deep in unhappiness for most of the game, then once I've gotten to Eudiamonia, Mind Over Matter, Joy in Variety, the second Prosperity finisher and Biowell spam, I get to reap the science, culture and production benefits of high health.
 
Well the difference between 20 health and -20 health is 20% production, 20% science and 20% culture. Isnt that significant?
 
Question said:
Well the difference between 20 health and -20 health is 20% production, 20% science and 20% culture. Isnt that significant?
Click to expand...

Not as a penalty for growth. Health doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's something you buy either with virtues in "late" game (or beelines in BE's virtue tree) or, in early game, primarily by not growing.

Stagnation with a +20% modifier is never better than continuously growing your base (base pop is base production, science, and with later tile improvements, culture), so, why buy the former by giving up the latter.
 
Of course the best is to grow your base and stay Utopian after a short dip into the negatives for initial expansion. Biowells are the way to have your cake (+Food, +Culture) and eat it too (Utopian bonuses).

With Biowells on a tech that's one away from Autoplants and gives Institute (quest for free Tech) there's no Tech Web trade off either regardless of where you're headed.
 
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