Question & Critic about the increasing cost of the improvements

[Ogi123]

This is going to be nerfed. In future version, Dural courthouse gives -20% and +2 science from people studying the laws.

I will also propose cutting down colleges bonuses in half if you enable multiple religions for Dural.

I am thinking to change Order temple from -20% maintenance to +10xp for disciple units. Basilica will retain -20%.

In that case temple will be on somewhat weaker side. Perhaps -10% maintenance and crime rate for temple and -20% both for basilica?

Unlimited number of specialist slots is not good enough for +50% maintenance? Should I decrease the penalty to +30%? I don't want Liberty to be OP, though, just in same level with Arete and Guardian of the Nature. Social Order is deliberately rather weak, Order has so many strength already. Sacrifice of the Weak has its own problem: the hell terrains.

There are a lot of buildings giving specialist slots, and other civics also grant unlimited specialist albeit of one type. So no you can easily remove that penalty from liberty completely, and it will not imbalance game.

 

[Vital Brasil]

Liberty is an extremely powerful powerful civic for civilizations that can get huge cities, like Kuriotates.

I finished a game with the Elohim and Empyrean religion and it worked great. The amount of merchants i could assign in my cities made my income skyrocket and greatly surpassed the maintenance cost increase. Also was pretty nice to see great merchants popping all the time in a civilization that values freedom

I don't think it needs to be buffed again.

 

[Vital Brasil]

There are a lot of buildings giving specialist slots, and other civics also grant unlimited specialist albeit of one type. So no you can easily remove that penalty from liberty completely, and it will not imbalance game.

There are not many buildings that gives merchants slots, that's where the liberty civic shines.

 

[Ogi123]

Merchant houses has no drawback and give you unlimited merchants.

 

[Vital Brasil]

Merchant houses has no drawback and give you unlimited merchants.

But with the liberty you have the freedom to get the specialists you want, at the moment you want (except for the priest). I gave the example of the merchants because i skipped the merchant's guild, and due to liberty i could have the amount of merchants i wanted in a city.

But you can, for example, assign many specialists as engineers in a newly founded city to make it build faster, or if the city is in a terrain that does not gives you many hammers. You can assign many bards to a newly founded city to help its cultural development, you can assign many citizens as sages if you feel your civ needs a boom to you research and spellresearch.

Edit: Based on what i could see, MOM Xtended is designed to have your great people spawn reflect the specialization of your empire. So, if you don't have the merchant's guild, you will have a hard time getting great merchants; if you don't have the artisan's guild you will have a hard time getting great engineers and so on. Liberty allows your civ to easily spawn any great people (except for great prophets).

Edit 2: This civic has great sinergy with philosophical trait also.

So, to conclude, liberty civic gives you this freedom and an amazing versatility, which i think it's great.

 

[esvath]

So, to conclude, liberty civic gives you this freedom and an amazing versatility, which i think it's great.

Yes, this is the main benefits of Liberty: flexibility. Fits with its theme too!

 

[Linvega]

I will also propose cutting down colleges bonuses in half if you enable multiple religions for Dural.

In that case temple will be on somewhat weaker side. Perhaps -10% maintenance and crime rate for temple and -20% both for basilica?

There are a lot of buildings giving specialist slots, and other civics also grant unlimited specialist albeit of one type. So no you can easily remove that penalty from liberty completely, and it will not imbalance game.

I'd give the temple -10% maintenance and the basilica -10%, too. It should not be forgotten that negatively cumulative bonuses and positively cumulative bonuses work completely different. Positively cumulative bonuses get weaker with each bonus (if you already are at 200%, then a 20% bonus only improves your output by 20/200 = 10% relatively speaking) while negatively cumulative bonuses get stronger with each bonus ( at 50%, a -10% bonus reduces your costs by 10/50=20% relatively speaking), so buildings with seemingly small bonuses can in practice be still strong enough to be almost mandatory buildings. I also think that for this reason, negatively cumulative bonuses should simply not be used at all since they actively increase snowballing compared to positively cumulative who reduce it, but it's not like esvath can change much about this...

I'd also agree to the point about liberty. Aside from that I disagree fundamentally with the idea that more personal freedom for some reason is more expensive (actually, giving people more personal freedom actually cuts down on costs due to lower bureaucracy; See the Ottomans and Rome compared to the Caliphates or similar Empires; Both cut down on costs by not caring much about you personally unless you were criminal or actively conspired against the empire and thus both were comparatively stable & long lived), I also had the experience that you get enough slots anyway.
It's kind of weird when the Malakim, who are supposed to be *THE* empyrean civ, have no legitimate reason to use its civic because all you want is merchants anyway, which you already get from merchant houses without huge penalties.
Also, my first point has something to do with this, too; While a 50% increase seems to be manageable, in the lategame, you'll be at -20% or -40%, which means it is actually a relative increase of 50/80 = 62.5% and 50/60 = 83.3Period%. It gets even worse if you compare it to the order.

But with the liberty you have the freedom to get the specialists you want, at the moment you want (except for the priest). I gave the example of the merchants because i skipped the merchant's guild, and due to liberty i could have the amount of merchants i wanted in a city.

But you can, for example, assign many specialists as engineers in a newly founded city to make it build faster, or if the city is in a terrain that does not gives you many hammers. You can assign many bards to a newly founded city to help its cultural development, you can assign many citizens as sages if you feel your civ needs a boom to you research and spellresearch.

The problem is that buildings give enough slots already to do that to some degree, and being able to do that more isn't worth being forced into a much smaller empire. Even in completely new cities, building construction yard immediately allows you to hire 2 engineers with the added bonus of getting 25% more hammers. And longterm, specialization of your cities is much, much stronger than constantly changing specialists around anyway.

Yes, this is the main benefits of Liberty: flexibility. Fits with its theme too!

Don't misunderstand me, I really like the idea of Liberty and liked to use similar civics in other mods, but most of them actually didn't have very big penalties without being OP. So even if you think it definitely needs a penalty, then it should be thought about whether it might be lowered or if it could even take another form than maintenance increase.

 

[esvath]

So even if you think it definitely needs a penalty, then it should be thought about whether it might be lowered or if it could even take another form than maintenance increase.

I am not married into the idea that Liberty has to have some drawback. The maintenance increase is there to prevent it from being too OP. If, for example, people think that 20% maintenance is enough, I am fine with that.

About the availability of specialist slots, I want to reduce some more. Early buildings should give no specialist slot or at most one. Or, give only specialist slot and no flat yield but I am afraid that the AI won't understand that.

 

[Linvega]

About the availability of specialist slots, I want to reduce some more. Early buildings should give no specialist slot or at most one. Or, give only specialist slot and no flat yield but I am afraid that the AI won't understand that.

I wouldn't overdo this since pillaging aside, early game buildings are pretty expensive as is. If you only get something like 5-20 stone per turn, then buildings that cost 300 stone really need to matter. I don't even bother with the grand majority of 500 stone buildings. It wouldn't be quite so bad though if building science/gold/whatever wouldn't be so goddamn atrocious because not building anything wouldn't be such a big waste, then. Maybe give normal civs 50% return and liberty 100% on building science/gold etc.? After all, it would fit the theme of added flexibility.
Though on the other hand, not building anything is somewhat boring, so for gameplay reasons it should be avoided. Maybe simply the yield/ressource cost of some improvements/buildings should be slightly adjusted.

 

[gbursson]

newly founded city to make it build faster

newly founded city to help its cultural development

Inherent flaw in the thinking here. Newly found city (aka 1-pop) will not have population to fill the slots.

 

[Vital Brasil]

The problem is that buildings give enough slots already to do that to some degree, and being able to do that more isn't worth being forced into a much smaller empire. Even in completely new cities, building construction yard immediately allows you to hire 2 engineers with the added bonus of getting 25% more hammers. And longterm, specialization of your cities is much, much stronger than constantly changing specialists around anyway.



Don't misunderstand me, I really like the idea of Liberty and liked to use similar civics in other mods, but most of them actually didn't have very big penalties without being OP. So even if you think it definitely needs a penalty, then it should be thought about whether it might be lowered or if it could even take another form than maintenance increase.

Constuction yard takes a decent amount of turns to build (at least in marathon speed, which i always play), and you can easily speed up this time by getting some engineers. If your city is small, this works great.
You can easily expand it's borders by putting there some bards. Of course that in a longterm, specialization of the cities os much stronger. But the Liberty allows you to do some nice things on demand.

Imagine you have a huge noble district city, and you don't feel you need more culture or faith, but you want to improve your gold income and your research. Just change those priests and bards to sages and merchants and voi lá.
Sure, that's requires some micromanagement. But thats what makes this civic really shines.

 

[Vital Brasil]

Maybe give normal civs 50% return and liberty 100% on building science/gold etc.? After all, it would fit the theme of added flexibility.
Though on the other hand, not building anything is somewhat boring, so for gameplay reasons it should be avoided. Maybe simply the yield/ressource cost of some improvements/buildings should be slightly adjusted.

No, this would just double your science gold output, at the risk of creating really overpowered cities. There's no flexibility there. That would be a pretty boring change that would remove all the strategic elements of that civic.

Inherent flaw in the thinking here. Newly found city (aka 1-pop) will not have population to fill the slots.

A newly founded city can have 5 population, for example. When i say newly i don't mean founded in the last turn, but i mean a city recently founded.

 

[Calavente]

re liberty:

I am on the side of Linvega on this:
the benefits of Liberty are not really worth the maintenance increase... especially due to the non-symmetrical way that positive and negative maintenance rate give effect (the difference in maintenance between someone paying +10% maintenance (+50 from liberty -40 from local buildings) is almost doubled (and not 50% more) than someone having only the -40 from building : 110 instead of 60 !

the benefits of having illimited GP is interesting and gives versatility... but that's all: you rarely get enough free citizen to populate more than 2-3 GP unless your city is really big....
however the +50% maintenance is also applied in all your smaller cities that don"t really benefit from that civic.

and there are enough rush mechanics so that late game you can rush a science building or monument or craftsman building to get that 1 GP slot in small cities (which anyway never have enough pop to allocate more than 1-2 pop to GP).


Other civics which give illimited GP slots are narrowed to 1 GP type, and need a specialized tech / guild tech... but they don't have negatives... and even have a further positive than the GP slots.
..but liberty also has a tech limitation : the tech cost to get it is not small !

further currently liberty has a negative but you have to consider that taking liberty also carries the negative oppportunity cost of losing the additional positive of those specilized civics ... so it's currently a double nerf on the liberty only positive aspect which is illimited GP.

 

[Linvega]

No, this would just double your science gold output, at the risk of creating really overpowered cities. There's no flexibility there. That would be a pretty boring change that would remove all the strategic elements of that civic.

You do know that I was talking about the transformation of hammers into science/gold ("building" science/gold), not normal science generation with gold? At 25% or 50%, it's not really worth it, so it generally is only used if you have absolutely nothing else to build.
However, at 100% it IS somewhat worth it (hammers are generally worth more than gold, so it's still a slight loss, but not such a big one) so a liberty civ could use it flexibly depending on what it needs.
And there isn't much risk to create overpowered cities with this, since the normal science/gold multipliers don't work on that AFAIK. Having a bunch of +science buildings with lots of sages will still be vastly superior to simply having lots of hammers and building science.

A newly founded city can have 5 population, for example. When i say newly i don't mean founded in the last turn, but i mean a city recently founded.

That's a bit of shifting the goalposts here. If we're now talking about cities that already grew a bit, then it's not reasonable why we shouldn't already have a construction yard there. That building isn't THAT expensive hammer-wise.

 

[Vital Brasil]

That's a bit of shifting the goalposts here. If we're now talking about cities that already grew a bit, then it's not reasonable why we shouldn't already have a construction yard there. That building isn't THAT expensive hammer-wise.

Not really, you can get a city to 5 population really fast if you kill the animals around the region you built it. If you do this, your city will reach a considerable size in a few turns with nothing built on it. I personally do this all the time i found a city. Already reported i think this mechanic OP, but, unfortunately it requires dll modding.

About the construction yard, you will need to invest a few turns there to get its benefits (it will take at least 15 turns in marathon, and since i only play on this speed, all my feedbacks are based on it). Grow the city fast by killing animals around and put 2 engineers there and you will receive a + 8 production bonus. Nothing bad for something that costs 150 hammers on this speed. This civic is great for those "on demand" things.

But, if the community feels that liberty is underpowered, why don't add something nice and unique to the civic, instead of exchanging it's uniqueness for something boring, like 100% gold, research, etc... ?
The civic does a great job simulating the meaning of freedom (you can be whatever you want), but, if its weak, why don't make the civic simulates religion freedom as well ? Like, allowing the player who adopts the civic to receive the benefits of other temples, despite of having their religion as official ?

So, if you want to get more health, you can choose to get fellowship of leaves when discover a second religion, or if you want more xp, you can choose the order (if it goes live the way its on the future changelog), and so on. Maybe halve the beneficits of non official religion temples if its too powerful ? Keep in mind that you can easily discover 2 religions if you have the priests' guild.

This would add something unique to the civic, since it would be the only thing in the game making the player pursue a truly multicultural civilization.

Also, if the unlimited specialist is perceived by the community as a weak feature, due to all specialists slot you can get (again, you will have few merchants slots if you don't have mechants guild, so this is not true at all), i think it's better to reduce the specialists slots in some buildings, than removing the uniqueness of the civic. So, the construction yard would give only 1 engineer slot, instead of 2, for example.

I agree that, from a realistic point of view, makes no sense the increased maintenance, but, i can easily overcome this by thinking this is to simulate the choices people do. Like opting for not working, or to become an artist instead of a merchant, or an artisan.

I also want to point out that my feedback is based on my last playtrough, with the Elohim/ Empyrean combo.

And finally, i am not a modder, so i don't know if my suggestion above is viable. All i know to do is brainstorming

 

[Icezera]

Very nice ideas Vital, and much more interesting than boring numbers buffs.

Of course, we can't use the benefits from other religions IMO because it is the unique trait of the dural who are rather featureless as it is. Perhaps creating an option for liberty civs to freely switch alignment? Maybe allowing liberty civs to have ways to switch their alignment to represent the civilization taking a new direction as its people are freed of being tied to religion for their alignment.

IMO liberty requiring higher maintenance IS historically realistic. Liberty requires a stable economic base of educated bourgeois that can survive off the working class so that they have the financial, educational, and political opportunity to go off in many directions. And I don't know where this idea of the Ottomans and Romans having less bureaucracy than the caliphates comes from. They were actually very similar. The Ottomans, for example, had a far more developed bureaucracy with separation of powers, separate governmental and civilian administrations, a huge social service in the divan, governors, local representatives, millets, vassal states, and more. The Abbasids also had different civil, judicial, and military administrators. Local representatives maintained the religious and civil duties of the caliphate who then reported to their higher ups in the form of governors who cooperated with the many different departments of the Abbasid caliphate such as the post office, such as the bureau of taxes, chancery, inspections, etc.

The Romans? Ha. The Roman Empire had a council of 5000 administrators alone at the highest council which then filtered out to the lowest. Regional proconsuls were everywhere and the Diocletian reforms are the root of where we get the term a Byzantine bureaucracy. The Republic was represented by a variety of legislative senates, the most famous being the Senate and the Comitias. Then they had executive power in a whole other branch with the famous consuls being the top position of them.

So no, liberty does not equal lower bureaucracy. It actually involves more.

 

[Jojo_Fr]

- I agree with the guys who said that having infinite specialist is not that great. You have a limited slot number, you will not abandon the expansive improvements you built in your cities.

- I propose to add to Liberty a big bonus : +50 % culture production. It would feat very well to the Liberty concept, and help the Goods to generate really more culture than the Evils. The Evils have already the advantage to easily rush buildings with slavery (even if Slavery guild is broken in my opinion, as it has no sens to take the advanced levels because of the horribles happiness malus).

- Speaking to buffing civs, I would find good to give to Order a Support buff, as it's a military oriented civics, and the bonus is not that great. Giving it a +25 % units support.

 

[Ombatur]

- I agree with the guys who said that having infinite specialist is not that great. You have a limited slot number, you will not abandon the expansive improvements you built in your cities.

- I propose to add to Liberty a big bonus : +50 % culture production. It would feat very well to the Liberty concept, and help the Goods to generate really more culture than the Evils.

The thing with Liberty is, that it's very situational. It's also good when you produce a lot of food and have big cities like Kuriotates.
I personally think it's fine when a civic is situational, since they're in my opinion there, to support specific situations.
If Liberty needs to be improved, one could maybe try to increase the importance of Liberty in supporting a specialist economy. Something like giving a bonus to each great person settled in a city.

 

[Vital Brasil]

The thing with Liberty is, that it's very situational. If you for example play as Elohim or some other civ and go for the altar victory, you want to be able to amass priest specialists. Liberty allows you to do that. It's also good when you produce a lot of food and have big cities like Kuriotates.
I personally think it's fine when a civic is situational, since they're in my opinion there, to support specific situations.
One could maybe try to increase the importance of Liberty in supporting a specialist economy. Something like +20% Greatperson rate or give a bonus to each specialist or superspecialist in a city.

Yep, thats true. Once you start to have a few cities with more than 35 pop, this civic really shows all its potential. Having such big cities is not something hard to get if you are playing with Elohim, or Kuriotates; civilizations that fits pretty well with the Empyrean theme, and gameplay wise, have a nice sinergy with this religion.

My Elohim capital is at 52 pop and growing, most of the people are specialists and the city became a great people birth powerhouse.

Regarding the maintenance cost of liberty, if you have the empyrean religion, you will want to get life mana anyway (for their hero affinity and hall of light building), which offers many options to help your cities growth and reduces their maintenance cost (and also, prosperous realm GE). So the increased maintenance of the civic, when adopted at the right time will be pretty irrelevant.

I like the idea that i don't need to switch immediately to the liberty civic as soon its avaliable, but instead, i need to wait the right time to do it. This game is still about strategy. isn't it ?

Edit: Ombatur, Liberty does not give infinite priests slots.
Edit 2: I'd like to point out that agnosticism has a low upkeep, and Liberty has no upkeep. So, regarding civic upkeep, your civilization should have a small costs reduction when switching from Agnosticism to Liberty.

 

[Ombatur]

Edit: Ombatur, Liberty does not give infinite priests slots.

Yeah
I noticed that, too, after I made my post and edited it.