Bad feature that needs to go: the slider

[Silverdawn]

If I play Monarch level and play as a builder, not warmonger, yes, I might run 100% research the whole game. When I play Emperor with better AI mod, I cannot do this. My guess is that most players play at Monarch or below, with base AI, and leave the slider at or close to 100% the whole game. (Am I wrong?)

The slider is typically below 100% when are expanding and don't have buildings like courthouses or techs like currency.

eg. Look at the screens in this ALC game:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=5790320&page=26#515

 

[Ahriman]

More importantly, unless you're running a ton of merchant specialists (which still require marketplaces and the like) a religious shrine is the only significant non-slider based source of gold.

Trade routes provide commerce; if you're at 100% science they're not giving you any gold.

What if you don't found a religion? Or if you play Civ5, *without* religious shrines?

 

[AlphaShard]

Probably just wishful thinking on my part, but I'd sure like to see this go away. In the current implementation, all commerce is pretty much the same. What's the difference between and when you can just move the slider a little to compensate? Same for which is always set to 0 unless it is set 100 (when finishing a cultural victory). Same argument for . Right now, if I need , then I build a library and shift the slider from 90 to 80 (or whatever I need at the time). I think it would add a lot more flavor if you had to manage , , , and (if it's in) somewhat separately. Then you would have to decide which of these was really critical at a given time and build/research accordingly.

just because you set the culture slider at zero constantly doesn't mean the rest of us do. There have been times where I had it at ten percent or even twenty when doing very well.

 

[PieceOfMind]

To those surprised about the 100% science comment...
Actually you can run your slider that high at high levels, even for a huge portion of the game. I've done it at Emperor on BtS but haven't tried it above that.

It usually requires there to be a decent number of civs in the game as you will see below...
It's because once you can start trading techs, and getting lump sums of gold in individual trades, it's not that hard to keep yourself at 100% science with foreign lump sum gold as a big chunk of your gold income.

What is perhaps ironic is that (as far as I can tell) it's actually easier to do at higher difficulty levels because the AIs will keep up with you techwise (making trading important) and have more gold for trade.

Even if not strictly 100% though, many high level players manage to stay very near 100% for most of the time so the problem is very real.

 

[toft]

I hope they make economy fun, and remove the sliders. The current slider system is not logical, nor is it fun. Currency overall isnt used much in civ4... or not as much as I would have liked it to.

 

[chongli]

Capacity constraints, seems perfectly reasonable.

While I agree with you in principle that you can't expect your research capacity to be unlimited I don't think basing it on your revenue is at all reasonable.

Wouldn't it make more sense to allow you to spend as much or as little on research as you want but with diminishing returns on the -> exchange?

 

[Ahriman]

Wouldn't it make more sense to allow you to spend as much or as little on research as you want but with diminishing returns on the -> exchange?

You aren't basing in your "revenue", you're basing it on the level of economic activity of your entire society.

And as others have pointed out, going beyond that is really an exploit.

Besides, there has to be some limit, it makes no sense to think that you could do this forever. What is that limit? Call it 100%. 100% science is, *by definition*, the most you can produce. If you could produce more, it wouldn't be 100%.

And "diminishing returns" starts getting really confusing to the human player; moving a slider from 70% to 80% gives you less extra beakers than 80% to 90%?

Its not like you're a government agency and there is some infinite size private sector which you can buy from. Your commerce represents the entire economic activity of your society. You can't go beyond that, there aren't any more educated people who can act as researchers.

 

[chongli]

You aren't basing in your "revenue", you're basing it on the level of economic activity of your entire society.

And as others have pointed out, going beyond that is really an exploit.

Besides, there has to be some limit, it makes no sense to think that you could do this forever. What is that limit? Call it 100%. 100% science is, *by definition*, the most you can produce. If you could produce more, it wouldn't be 100%.

And "diminishing returns" starts getting really confusing to the human player; moving a slider from 70% to 80% gives you less extra beakers than 80% to 90%?

Its not like you're a government agency and there is some infinite size private sector which you can buy from. Your commerce represents the entire economic activity of your society. You can't go beyond that, there aren't any more educated people who can act as researchers.

No, you're basing it on your tax revenue. 100% means 100% of your tax revenue, that has nothing to do with your capacity for science. How is spending surplus money on research an exploit?

 

[PieceOfMind]

No, you're basing it on your tax revenue. 100% means 100% of your tax revenue, that has nothing to do with your capacity for science. How is spending surplus money on research an exploit?

I think technically you're correct about it being tax revenue - that would be in line with how earlier versions of civ described it.

But I think there still needs to be some limit on how much you can simply turn gold into science.
Given that I can't imagine any civilised society where at any time the government has funneled 100% of tax revenue into research, I think it's reasonable to make that number (100%) the limit.

It's really a fairly pointless argument because there's no strong gameplay reason to let you research more than the slider allows. Remember that you can already build research and hire scientist specialists - both things which represent putting more into research than simply 100% of tax revenue.

 

[Ahriman]

No, you're basing it on your tax revenue. 100% means 100% of your tax revenue, that has nothing to do with your capacity for science. How is spending surplus money on research an exploit?

I completely disagree. You're representing the entire economy of your society, and whether it gets poured into research, paying costs, being stored for trade, or culture.

"Revenue" has been used as a way to describe it because its a convenient analogy for thinking about costs and benefits.

But that's not what it really represents. If it did, then there would be a way for you to expropriate more of the private sector wealth, like through changing tax rates or nationalizing industries. In a fight for a very civilizations survival against a rampaging horde of conquerors, its not like the government is going to say "oh, we'd love to do more, and actually use our entire economy, but we can't, we can only use this small part that is the government budget".

The 100% science is basically representing diverting your entire system of educated elites into practical research. Think of it this way; you're choosing whether your "best and brightest" citizens go into business, science, or the arts. You can make them more productive in their field by improving the quality of the institutions (building +X% buildings).
But there are only so many people available to send into these areas.

 

[kivanc]

i couldn't read all the thread but i can say culture slider is fine, roughly. and i liked ahriman's approach.

every country has potentials, so the tax slider not only represent gold to be spent but also the intellectual citizens. you tell them what to deal with more. would u like them to be merchants mroe frequently or university professors or would you like them to be celebrities

in some way, they have to implement these and it is not bad in civ4. and they did good to make civ4 have so many economy types. and civ4 is fien with its micromanagement and city-specialisation issues.

 

[Shurdus]

The slider was some mechanism that has always felt natural and intuitive to me. Even if it makes no sense in a realism pov, it is still making the economy in the game very accesible. This in itself is a goal that I value very much. Keeping the game intuitive and accesible is something that I would hate to see go. Therefore I would very much like to see the slider as it is rather than making it go in favor of realism or any other concerns.

It works fine from a gaming perspective, that is all that matters in my book. Civ and realism have nothing to do with each other.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Well there has been an indication that you can't spend gold on science.

What I'd like to see
Science<->Culture (make sure culture is useful)

And

Production <-> Gold
where gold is the resource you use for military (creating/maintaining/repairing/upgrading)
and production is what you use for buildings/wonders

 

[Pazyryk]

OK. A lot of folks say they like the intuitive simplicity of the slider, and I can appreciate that. I also could care less about realism. My main complaint is that your decision of what to build (marketplace vs. library) is not based on what you need (revenue or research). It is based on current slider setting. It takes away from the flavor of these buildings, reduces long-term consequences in how you develop your cities, and make it feel like you are gaming the system (ie, the slider).

Edit: You've also convinced me that many players don't have the slider near 100% research most of the game (although some responses indicate that some do). You really can do this in a slower expansion, builder style, lower difficulty, etc. But that's not my point. My point is that your decision on what to build (library or marketplace) depends on current or expected slider setting. I'm sure you all do this. It's gamey.

 

[Ahriman]

My main complaint is that your decision of what to build (marketplace vs. library) is not based on what you need (revenue or research).

As noted, I agree that this dosen't work well in Civ4.

Here's another way that Civ5 might help improve this though.

We can still get a good differentiation between research vs gold buildings IF they can give us incentives to move things in the right direction.
The real problem occurs because currently, if you build a gold building, that lets you shift your slider *away* from gold towards research.
Whereas what we want is for buildnig a research buidling to increase your tendency to shift the sliders towards beakers, but building a gold booster to increase your tendency to shift the slider towards gold.

What we need is more things you can do with gold.
The real problem comes fromt the fact that about the only thing you can do with gold *is* to convert it into research.

If gold were something valuable in its own right, then by building banks everywhere, you'd want to switch your slider more towards gold, since for each point of commerce you put towards gold you now got 50% more yield than you used to, whereas your yield from each commerce put towards science was unchanged.

We know you can buy terrain with gold. So that's something. But maybe there need to be more things you can buy. Bad news if unit upgrading happens automatically/free now, since that's about the main use for gold we have.

* * *
Another way to fix the problem is to move sliders to the city level rather than the empire level. There is mild evidence for this from the screenshots where we can't see any sliders on the empire main screen.

The problem with this would be that it encourages *too* much city specialization. Basically every city will be set on either 100% beakers or 100% gold, and will only bother building one type of booster (gold or research).

 

[Pazyryk]

Some ideas for a different system:
1. Excess (untaxed) commerce should go back to city production.
2. 3 sliders allow you to divert commerce to state-sponsored research, culture or surplus revenue.
3. Diminishing returns when total diverted commerce >30%.
4. Marketplaces and banks should modify commerce rather than gold (have taxhouses or whatnot modify revenue).

 

[Ahriman]

1. Excess (untaxed) commerce should go back to city production.

If by city production you mean hammers, then by doing this you would eliminate the distinction between commerce producing tiles and industrial tiles. You could just build cottages everywhere and still have major production. More harm than its worth IMO.

3. Diminishing returns when total diverted commerce >30%.

Non-linear returns start getting very confusing to players very quickly.

4. Marketplaces and banks should modify commerce rather than gold (have taxhouses or whatnot modify revenue).

Then you've just made marketplaces superior to libraries (if they're the same % booster) or you've made them difficult to compare (if markets give smaller boosts than libraries).

This also gets confusing I think.

And you've failed to solve the underlying problem, because once again marketplaces boost your research output.

I don't think this is solveable without making Gold valuable in its own right.

 

[Pazyryk]

So my system just creates some of the same problems I'm complaining about, as you say. Actually, I don't mind if research, revenue, or even production or food have some interchangeability. I just don't like it when they are completely interchangeable, as is true now for research and revenue. Theoretically speaking, I only see 3 ways to differentiate research/revenue buildings more:

1. Hard limits on the slider (so you can "compensate" a little for your weak area but not too much). This makes some players angry (the same players that don't like peaks and desert tiles, I suspect).
2. Soft limits on the slider -- i.e., diminishing returns. This can be less than transparent, leading to confusion.
3. Have buildings give more "strait-up" bonuses (e.g., +4 beakers, etc.) rather than modifiers. This has the same effect as #1 (i.e., it put some amount of research/gold out of the "reach" of the slider). But players that hate #1 probably won't realize this because they can still set the slider to 100% (hell, give them 110% even!) so maybe they won't get mad about it (some sarcasm intended here).

Edit: #3 is already the case for culture buildings, which is why it does feel a little different than research and revenue.

 

[chongli]

I completely disagree. You're representing the entire economy of your society, and whether it gets poured into research, paying costs, being stored for trade, or culture.

"Revenue" has been used as a way to describe it because its a convenient analogy for thinking about costs and benefits.

But that's not what it really represents. If it did, then there would be a way for you to expropriate more of the private sector wealth, like through changing tax rates or nationalizing industries. In a fight for a very civilizations survival against a rampaging horde of conquerors, its not like the government is going to say "oh, we'd love to do more, and actually use our entire economy, but we can't, we can only use this small part that is the government budget".

The 100% science is basically representing diverting your entire system of educated elites into practical research. Think of it this way; you're choosing whether your "best and brightest" citizens go into business, science, or the arts. You can make them more productive in their field by improving the quality of the institutions (building +X% buildings).
But there are only so many people available to send into these areas.

Then where do specialists fit into this whole scheme? What about trade revenue? What if you have an absolutely massive trade surplus? Why should you not be allowed to spend it on research?

 

[Ahriman]

Then where do specialists fit into this whole scheme?

Under normal circumstances, a small portion of your overall population population are able to enter professions, while the rest work the fields.
With specialists, you're specifically taking out extras and supporting them separately.
Specialists have a resource cost, they require to to change the normal structure of your society by producing an otherwise non-productive class that just does research or whatever.

What if you have an absolutely massive trade surplus?

? Trade just adds commerce, which gets turned into gold or beakers.