Academy or bulb?

[Civsassin]

I've been saying that since the initial release.

Giving a GS a finite lifespan won't fix the problem. Trust me, I can end run that. It will help, but it's a Band-Aid. Upping the value of an Academy won't work either. Raise it too much and you break Babylon in half; anything less fails to make the Academy competitive after the first 20 turns.

Reducing the returns of a GS to something derived from the turn counter could help. Using median beaker count will do little; while the GS is relied upon to exit the game for Diplo/Science, altering the mechanic will nerf their potency by about 1/3 at best, and by less in most cases.

What if the academy got a set number of + a small % bonus. That would make it more valuable over time but only slightly better early on. For example. With two cities and the NC up and running, your normally at ~30 give or take a few. What if you had then a 5% bonus? That would give you 1.5 extra, which would go up slowly as your science increased. At 100, you'd be getting 5 extra; at 200, 10; and etc. Settle a couple, and it could really add up over time but not enough to be OP.

 

[qemist]

I've been saying that since the initial release.

Giving a GS a finite lifespan won't fix the problem. Trust me, I can end run that. It will help, but it's a Band-Aid. Upping the value of an Academy won't work either. Raise it too much and you break Babylon in half; anything less fails to make the Academy competitive after the first 20 turns.

Babylon is its own problem that shouldn't be a reason to not fix the GS. The Academy is a wasting asset because of beaker inflation. The bpt are huge early but negligible in the late game. A solution would be for the Academy to provide increasing beakers. Maybe 1 bpt per pop of the city that works it would change the calculation. Or it could randomly give you a free tech every so often.

Reducing the returns of a GS to something derived from the turn counter could help. Using median beaker count will do little; while the GS is relied upon to exit the game for Diplo/Science, altering the mechanic will nerf their potency by about 1/3 at best, and by less in most cases.

I didn't completely follow that. I don't like explicit ties to the turn counter because they are artificial. Tieing it to some multiple of the median beaker count would stop situations where the player can grab a tech that would take them 25+ turns, like bulbing infantry before you've got rifling.

 

[Martin Alvito]

What if the academy got a set number of + a small % bonus. That would make it more valuable over time but only slightly better early on. For example. With two cities and the NC up and running, your normally at ~30 give or take a few. What if you had then a 5% bonus? That would give you 1.5 extra, which would go up slowly as your science increased. At 100, you'd be getting 5 extra; at 200, 10; and etc. Settle a couple, and it could really add up over time but not enough to be OP.

It would take something well north of 10 per turn to make an Academy even remotely competitive right now in the midgame. The problem is that the endgame tech costs are just too large.

Babylon is its own problem that shouldn't be a reason to not fix the GS. The Academy is a wasting asset because of beaker inflation. The bpt are huge early but negligible in the late game. A solution would be for the Academy to provide increasing beakers. Maybe 1 bpt per pop of the city that works it would change the calculation. Or it could randomly give you a free tech every so often.

The beaker per pop point would be feasible if it wouldn't break Babylon in half. Random free techs are a terrible idea for a host of reasons. I have to disagree with you about Babylon; balance solutions exist that take that problem into account.

I didn't completely follow that. I don't like explicit ties to the turn counter because they are artificial. Tieing it to some multiple of the median beaker count would stop situations where the player can grab a tech that would take them 25+ turns, like bulbing infantry before you've got rifling.

That's not how we use Great Scientists these days.

Relying on the RA median rule won't help matters at all. In a Diplomatic game it's a trivial problem - use Oxford and Scientific Revolution to take the last three techs and you're good. The median rule would very slightly nerf Science games; at worst you would need to research an additional tech before setting off the RA/GS bomb.

The turn counter may be an artificial limiter, but it does set a reliable ceiling on the value of a GS which can be relied upon when making other balance decisions. What we need is a consistent system that cannot easily be gamed by players. It's possible to badly abuse the median system, and we should start from the assumption that players will rapidly find any such local optima and abuse it when designing mechanisms.

 

[Karpyan]

Still trying to fully work out how to badly abuse the RA system... Certainly know how to abuse the GS system. On topic, Babylon = academy, otherwise bulb.

Fyi http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=437562&highlight=academy

 

[Sneaks]

The solution to the gs problem is twofold:

1. Change RAs to 3-5% combined science boost every turn instead of a flat one time boost.

2. Give GS discovers the mean value of available techs, and disallow overflow from them. Increase initial academy yields as well as the scientific theory boost.

Finally, an across the board increase in tech costs should result in something mildly more fair

 

[geram]

Hi,
I think settling the Babylon GS is *ok* because the +6/+9 definitely helps grabbing early game technologies. (+9 with National College's 50%). However, I doubt this is the best solution to get the maximum beakers from the GS.

Even if you have a +8 academy (with scientific method) and a research bonus of 100% in your town, that's (8*2)*200 = 3200 beakers after 200 turns (~turn 250), which is the cost of a late game tech you could have rushed with the same GS.

Now, your academy beakers will be much smaller, because you need to build a university to get the +33%, and then research scientific method to get the +2 bonus, so you lose some time here.

Since a Babylon GS->Academy is barely profitable, it's safe to say that later GS should be used to rush, not to build academies. If playing with another civ, I wouldn't bother building the academy, use it to rush a needed tech eventually. Even a non-warmongering player can grab nice techs at mid-game.

I'll conclude with an example of game I played and finished yesterday (Babylon/Emperor). I had a really sweet starting spot: 2x gems, 2x stones, grassland with river, cattle and some wheat a little further... I built the GL around turn 50, used the two GS to build riverside academies I locked civilians on, then build the other wonders, NC, university, then trade-post all the things... Well, even with all this, it would still take me 10 or 12 turns to get the early-late game techs, and my tech advance were mostly done using RA's and GS. My scientific production usually went into completing the research that got overflow beakers.

So in my opinion, settling the Babylon GS to academy is a good choice if you can work the tile, but any other GS should be used to rush techs (including the GL GS if you managed to build it). I'm pretty sure I'm repeating myself.

 

[Pim]

Most of the time when I play babylon i sette the GS from writing. I once tried settling more but bulbing later GS gets me more of an advantage, especially when you save uo some GS.

But maybe a a way to make academy's more used is to give them a bonus when more are settled. So tactics become wether to go for beeline by bulbing or steady science growth by settling academy's. I dont have a good suggestion on the size of the bonus, but I'm think about a % bonus, or for every X academy's a GS slot in the capital. Or mabye a % bonus to RA.

 

[WiseGreen]

Why not go for something like Civ4 approach? A GS can bulb any tech up to a cost maximum (no idea how much, though, and maybe game-speed dependant), with no overflow. So it becomes more of an opportunity thing - early-to-mid game, settling a GS would be more advantageous (disregarding an Astronomy rush, which might still be worth losing science on the long run due to RAs), and mid-to-late game bulbing would still be more advantageous. So short of specific circunstances, you'd lose the incentive to save almost every GS you get to spend them on the last 10 ot 20 turns of the game.

 

[Aoxomoxoa]

Another take on the Civ 4 approach. Treat it like the 'village' of yore. After 30 turns (or whatever adds up) it gains an additional science. Lather, Rinse and Repeat.

 

[Rpger29]

What about having the various science buildings add a certain BPT per academy (in that city)? I don't really know what would be a fair number, but it could increase with each successive building.

Edit: I've done some adding based on extreme and conservative situations. I think it would be fair to have the Library add 1BPT per academy, 1 for NC, 2 for university, 3 for research lab.

I did have a question about this though. Are academy BPT figures already modified by building bonus %'s? That is, does the NC, uni, or RL bonus affect only population science? And then building (and academy) science is added to that? The in-game menu seems to indicate this.

Edit2: For anyone who makes the point that this would make the top of the tech tree over-important. I think most people going for a science VC already prioritize the top of the tree.