Legen
Emperor
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2015
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Spoiler Babylon's UA :
Production cost by and additional 15%.Spoiler Babylon's UB, with its unique traits underlined :
+150 HP (from +6 Proposal:
- Walls of Babylon's scientist slot replaced with the following benefits:
- Base
science increased from 1 to 4 - Base +3
Great Scientist Points
- Base
- Walls of Babylon's no longer adds
gold to scientists. Instead, it gains the following benefits:- "Great Scientists provide 10% more Science when used to discover new Technology"
- "No maintenance cost"
- "Great Scientists provide 10% more
Spoiler Walls of Babylon, with the proposed changes in italics :
Rationale:
From pineappledan's suggestion, this proposal tries to alleviate Babylon's massive dependence on
food and free it to work on the UA's improved investments, as well as strengthen the civ's focus on Great Scientists.Babylon has lost some flexibility since around 2018, after a series of general nerfs to specialists made it harder to work them, especially in the earlier eras. The
food consumption was increased by 1, and the 
urbanization unhappiness from working one increased from 0.25 to 1. It didn't help that Crime (mitigated by Defense, which the UB has an extra) was reworked to Distress. After those changes, players reported that Tradition and Authority have stopped working satisfactorily with Babylon, as it became unfeasible to work the UB's extra scientist with them. Progress can still work well with the UB, but even for it is now hard to work both the scientists from the library and the UB when you reach Writing, a normally high point for this civ, an issue that wasn't common before. The AI also seems to be struggling a lot with Babylon at the moment, with a low winrate, the second worst average score by turn 300, and the worst by turn 400.The idea of replacing the scientist slot was suggested back then, and recently once again, to address it without breaking the civ's early Great Scientist generation. The main merit is that the civ can break away from its current massive
food dependency. None of Babylon's uniques support food generation, yet food acts as the bottleneck on how much science the civ can generate in practice; you're often struggling to benefit from the extra scientist slot on your cities, and sometimes to even populate the extra academies. This proposal frees Babylon from this bottleneck, so that its choices don't have to revolve so heavily on food; this frees Babylon to focus more on gold/investments instead, its UA's secondary aspect.The replacement of the "+2
gold on scientists" for a "+10% science on GScientist use" is there to emphasize the most distinctive part of Babylon's game plan, relative to other scientific civs. Babylon's relevance in the late game scientific race revolves mainly on how strong its GS bulbing is at this point, powered by the extra academies over other civs. Pineappledan's concept is that the new ability in the UB can further build up on it and possibly let Babylon challenge the conventional wisdom on the timing for bulbing your great scientist. It is also an extra push towards wide, offsetting the extra academies' incentive to stay tall/thick instead. The removal of the gold on scientists should ensure the shift from seeking food to seeking gold happens as intended, and reduce the overlap with Korea's extra yields on specialists.The maintenance cost removal is meant to preserve some of Babylon's ability to invest during the early game, after the loss of gold on scientists. It is not expected to have a major impact in the midgame, it is only to maintain the viability of the UA's investment bonus early on.
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