(6-49) Make The Yields From Unique Improvement-Enhancing Tenets Scale With Their Rarity

[Hinin]

Current : There are three tenets (meaning policies from ideologies) that boost unique improvements besides some other improvements :
- Civil Society (Freedom) : Specialists consume 2 Food less than normal (minimum 1 Food). Farms, Plantations, Camps and all unique Improvements produce +4 Food;
- Five Year Plan (Order) : +20% Production towards all Buildings. Mines, Quarries, Lumber Mill, Oil Well and all unique Improvements produce +3 Production;
- Military-Industrial Complex (Autocracy) : -33% Gold cost for purchasing / upgrading Units. Defensive Buildings, Forts, Citadels and all unique Improvements produce +3 Science.

There are 13 unique improvements within base VP :
- Brazilwood Camp (Brazil);
- Siheyuan (China);
- Château (France);
- Eki (Huns);
- Terrace Farm (Incas);
- Kuna (Maya);
- Kasbah (Morocco);
- Polder (Netherlands);
- Moai (Polynesia);
- Feitora (Portugal);
- Encampment (Shoshones);
- Hacienda (Spain).

As you know, some are built much more often than others (Eki vs Polder for example).

Proposal :
Make the yields given to unique improvements by these tenets scale with their rarity, from (+1 or +2 for ones that can be built en masse to +4 or +5 for those that are very rare).

Civil Society (Freedom)	Five Year Plan (Order)	Military-Industrial Complex (Autocracy)
- Brazilwood Camp (Brazil) : +4 - Siheyuan (China) : +2 - Château (France) : +4 - Eki (Huns) : +2 - Terrace Farm (Incas) : +4 - Kuna (Maya) : +4 - Kasbah (Morocco) : +3 - Polder (Netherlands) : +4 - Moai (Polynesia) : +3 - Feitora (Portugal) : +4 - Encampment (Shoshones) : +3 - Hacienda (Spain) : +3	- Brazilwood Camp (Brazil) : +3 - Siheyuan (China) : +1 - Château (France) : +3 - Eki (Huns) : +1 - Terrace Farm (Incas) : +3 - Kuna (Maya) : +3 - Kasbah (Morocco) : +2 - Polder (Netherlands) : +3 - Moai (Polynesia) : +2 - Feitora (Portugal) : +3 - Encampment (Shoshones) : +2 - Hacienda (Spain) : +2	- Brazilwood Camp (Brazil) : +3 - Siheyuan (China) : +1 - Château (France) : +3 - Eki (Huns) : +1 - Terrace Farm (Incas) : +3 - Kuna (Maya) : +3 - Kasbah (Morocco) : +2 - Polder (Netherlands) : +3 - Moai (Polynesia) : +2 - Feitora (Portugal) : +3 - Encampment (Shoshones) : +2 - Hacienda (Spain) : +2

The tenet could thus be worded like this :
- Civil Society (Freedom) : Specialists consume 2 Food less than normal (minimum 1 Food). Farms, Plantations and Camps produce +4 Food. Unique improvements produce bonus Food based on their ease of construction.
- Five Year Plan (Order) : +20% Production towards all Buildings. Mines, Quarries, Lumber Mill and Oil Well produce +3 Production. Unique improvements produce bonus Production based on their ease of construction.
- Military-Industrial Complex (Autocracy) : -33% Gold cost for purchasing / upgrading Units. Defensive Buildings, Forts and Citadels produce +3 Science. Unique improvements produce bonus Science based on their ease of construction.

This is only a first draft, and we can debate the fine details.

Rationale :
I know why these UI-enhancing bonuses were created in the first place: to make sure that the bonuses offered to improvements by tenets in order for them to be relevant in the endgame when compared to specialists and buildings don't disadvantage civilizations that must use space for their own unique improvements. This solution however, creates more problems than it solves in my opinion : it not only creates weird artificial power spikes in the endgame for civilizations lucky enough to have a spammable UI, but also warps the design balance of unique improvements around spammability in a way that is detrimental.

I once advocated for the removal of these bonuses entirely, but now I think a more elegant solution would simply to make these bonuses scale with rarity. This would be at the price of a little readibility at first, but it should be easy to change some GameText to simply add clarifications for these who don't already have EUI to access the information.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Stalker0]

MAGI: We need the bonuses from the other two tenents listed out as well.

 

[Rekk]

The Ordo isn't a unique improvement. It is a feature of Mongolia's UU, and is a GPTI. It is not, and should not be affected by these tenets as if it were a UI. It is affected by tenets/policies as a Citadel.

 

[Solic]

Is it possible to have a catchall fallback, so not every modmod with a unique improvement breaks with this?

 

[Rekk]

Is it possible to have a catchall fallback, so not every modmod with a unique improvement breaks with this?

Every modmod with a UI already has to add an entry for these tenets, so they're already defaulted to 3 yields. It will be up to the modmod owner as to what value their UI should have.

 

[Anarcomu]

Is it possible to have a catchall fallback, so not every modmod with a unique improvement breaks with this?

I think it add bonuses to improvements directly, so as a default behavior it wouldn't add anything to UIs from mods.

 

[azum4roll]

Modders can always add e.g.

INSERT INTO Policy_ImprovementYieldChanges
    (PolicyType, ImprovementType, YieldType, Yield)
SELECT
    'POLICY_FIVE_YEAR_PLAN', Type, 'YIELD_PRODUCTION', 3
FROM Improvements
WHERE SpecificCivRequired = 1;

to the end of their mod currently. It'll be more work to figure out specific values.

 

[adan_eslavo]

@Hinin How do you assess the frequency of showing up for particular improvements? Was it compared between human and AI?

 

[andersw]

This would make sense if they were equally good to start with.
edit: but there is also the issue that terrain and maptype will make available spots for these improvements to vary a lot.

 

[pineappledan]

All UIs have tech yields that are set individually for each of them and account for this +3 yield bump at ideologies. This solves nothing, and indeed will require a new round of rebalancing.

 

[Rekk]

To reiterate more clearly:

It is assumed that a civilization with a UI will take one of these tenets, and therefore the yield increase these UIs get in modern/atomic take these tenets into account.

If we change these tenets, we will also have to change the tech increases.

Any assumption that a UI is under/over-benefiting from one of these tenets actually needs to have their tech yield increase checked.

 

[azum4roll]

Taking Eki as an example:
Eki is very spammable, so it has very few tech boosts (+1 at Chivalry, +1 at Fertilizer, +3 at Robotics). Which isn't really much - even with adjacency they aren't very workable tiles after Medieval and before ideology, usually surpassed by Villages and bonus resources. All this is holding back so that the +3 from a tenet (worth more than all tech boosts) doesn't make the UI broken.

There are 2 ways to handle it: one is this proposal, and the other is removing UI from tenet boosts and giving them carefully balanced tech boosts instead.

 

[adan_eslavo]

Taking Eki as an example:
Eki is very spammable, so it has very few tech boosts (+1 at Chivalry, +1 at Fertilizer, +3 at Robotics). Which isn't really much - even with adjacency they aren't very workable tiles after Medieval and before ideology, usually surpassed by Villages and bonus resources. All this is holding back so that the +3 from a tenet (worth more than all tech boosts) doesn't make the UI broken.

There are 2 ways to handle it: one is this proposal, and the other is removing UI from tenet boosts and giving them carefully balanced tech boosts instead.

I think second would be better.

 

[pineappledan]

But then you won’t have different yields on your UI depending on what ideology you take. It will be the same every time. That’s a vote to make the game more samey

 

[adan_eslavo]

But then you won’t have different yields on your UI depending on what ideology you take. It will be the same every time. That’s a vote to make the game more samey

Do we really need this for unique improvements? Only 13 civs of 43 have them. It's a bit unfair that tenets buff them and make UIs even stronger while other civs can only watch with envy.
And do not get me wrong, I don;t want to make all civs have UIs. It would be stupid approach. I only say that tenets shouldn't buff UIs. Other improvements, available for all civs, yeah.

 

[Legen]

It's a bit unfair that tenets buff them and make UIs even stronger while other civs can only watch with envy.

Other civs get enhanced generic improvements with those tenets, and the extra yields are synergistic with the other effect of the respective tenets. You don't need an UI to fully benefit from those tenets; if anything, not having UIs benefitting as well would make those three tenets unfun for the civs that do have UIs, as they allocate less citizens to generic improvements.

That's especially true for Freedom's Civil Society, since that tenet (and the ideology as a whole) pushes you to use more specialists (and indirectly, GPTIs) than usual. There's an argument to be made for Autocracy's, since forts aren't an improvement that you usually work for yields, but chances are that the Autocracy player went for Imperialism anyways, which also boosts forts.

 

[pineappledan]

It’s simply not true that it is unfair.

Furthermore, if you look at the win stats by civs, you will see that civs with UBs consistently outperform UIs as a group. It’s “unfair”, and yet UBs are consistently better.

 

[azum4roll]

You don't have to take one of these tenets. By forcing UI yields on these tenets, you're forced to take one of them or your UI is screwed since they're balanced with these yields in mind. All spammable UIs currently suck in Industrial because of this.

 

[Hinin]

MAGI: We need the bonuses from the other two tenents listed out as well.

Fixed.

The Ordo isn't a unique improvement. It is a feature of Mongolia's UU, and is a GPTI. It is not, and should not be affected by these tenets as if it were a UI. It is affected by tenets/policies as a Citadel.

Fixed, although this concept in itself isn't harmonized between base VP and modmods it seems : 4UC for example grants bonus yields from tenets to the Kraal (a replacement to the Citadel built by expending the unique Zulu GGeneral). So what do we do ?
@pineappledan.

 

[pineappledan]

I treat all UGPTIs as both unique improvements and GP tile improvements. Thus, they get all bonuses from both