pineappledan
Deity
It sure would.Would this not be a massive buff to wide play?
The current state of things means that GPPs generated in non-core cities, and maybe in some cases outside the capital at all, don't do anything.
@Stalker0 is planning a playthrough to get hard numbers for exactly how many GPPs are generated in what cities, and how much contribution cities are actually making to GP generation right now, versus what contribution they might have made if they could contribute a portion of their yields to a global pool.
Is 1/3 of GPPs the correct amount? Not sure, but it is an intuitive starting point, since it's the smallest discrete amount that specialists' 3 GPPs can be split into.
What do I expect would be the outcome of these changes? How GWAMs from guild cities work would be minimally affected by this, first off. Re: GEMSD, I would not be surprised to find that, in aggregate, more than half of all the GPPs generated in a single game arise solely from the capital. If that is true then the remaining half, contributing at 33%, would mean less than 16% more GEMSDs in a game, and sooner. That would have knock on effect for GP-centric strategies and GP reward mechanics in general, and some of them would probably need to be weakened.
What do I think of Wide vs Tall right now? My perception is that the recent changes we have been making, such as lengthening the late eras, adjusting Tradition and Artistry policies, changes to tourism generation, are all squarely aimed at weakening tall play while strengthening wide play. You could see this proposal as part of that larger theme. BNW was indisputably a tall game, where there was almost no way to beat a focused SV or CV player who stuck to a 4 city core. It is plausible that this proposal swings things in favour of wide over tall more than is reasonable, but I think that requires real playtesting and data to know for sure, and I think we may find that the actual number of additional GEMSD -- and it is only GEMSD we are talking about, because GWAM is basically unaffected by any of this -- is rather modest. That leads us to:
Should there be changes to GP threshold scaling, or the addition of a city size modifier? I would prefer to stay away from adding a city modifier to GPs, but I think the existing cost scaling for subsequent GPs could be slightly increased to compensate. With tech, policy, and tourism modifier costs associated with the number of cities, I think we already have the levers we need to balance tall vs wide without adding new ones.
============================================================================================================================
I am aware that this proposal has some drawbacks and costs associated with the balance between wide and tall, but I see the benefits outweighing the costs.
On the realism front, It is strange that larger empires with more people seem to have an inverse relationship with GPP generation. Great people are people, after all, and shouldn't have an inverse relationship with being less likely to be born in places with more populations.
On the mechanics front, specialist slots are limited, require investment in buildings to create, and consume more food than comparable yields from tiles. At the end of the day, if you can manage to grab the same yields from tiles, you should.
- This makes scientists only situationally useful if you have no from UIs, pantheons, or otherwise
- It makes Merchants marginal, since from tiles is relatively easy to find, but another large source of gold -- trade routes -- is largely agnostic to this dichotomy,
- it makes engineers almost useless; directly inferior to mines which are easier and faster to construct, far less limited in number, and give more for less
But yields aren't all that specialists give, they also make GPPs, and that's incomparable to whatever you could get out of tiles. The problem now is that GPPs in cities that can't get enough of them to make a Great Person have no value. To give those some worth in non-core cities we could either convert GPPs into something else, or we could send GPPs somewhere where they could do some good.