Additional Political Points from "Culture" [IMPLEMENTED]

[raystuttgart]

Hi guys,

let me first explain, why I actually suggest this.

Currently the list of Founding Fathers is really extremely long.
It has simply grown and grown over the years as we have implemented new features.

Even by adjusting the balancing fo Founding Father points it is hard to get even close to getting them all.
(Unless you switch almost all Cities in endgame to producing FF-Points instead of Buildings.)

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Thus when thinking about it I might implement a GameOption to solve this problem.
(It would be activated as "default" but it could always be turned off in Custom Game.)

"Additional Political Points from Culture"

So basically your Culture (from your Cities) would also be converted to Political Points.
(Meaning additionally - not instead - to Political Points being generated from Liberty Bells.)

In XML there would also be a XML setting for the conversion rate.
(Default would be like 50% - but every value could theoretically be balanced.)

Test would show if that is too much or too little.
(But from my calculations I feel that 50% sound reasonable.)

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Benefits:

1) It offers an additional playstyle / strategy and make producing culture more interesting.
2) I feel it is immersive that "culture" is also a "political currency" (i.e. influence).
3) It will kind of balance the extremely long list of FFs - meaning the Player will get them faster.

Comment on AI:

Since "Culture" is a side effect of "empire growth" by population and buildings AI will have no problem with it.
Also AI currently already values Culture kind of like it does crosses, meaning it will use it.

Comment on Liberty Bells:

They will still stay the most valuable Yield.
I do not feel that this concept would "devalue" them too much.

They are still:

1) Primary source for Political Points (converted 1:1)
2) Needed for Revolutionary Rate which gives Production Bonus
3) Needed for Revolutionary Rate needed to declare Independence.

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Feedback?

 

[Schmiddie]

I would love it! I always get angry when the AI gets all the FF - my playstyle is more "building an empire" with lot's of wealthy colonies instead of rushing to the revolution.

 

[Neko Keeshi]

With the 2 new units being used in the Tavern buildings, I love this idea.

 

[ArchdukeLiet]

Yes, I think it would be a good way to deal with the increasing amount of founding fathers given the 'average' time to get to independence.
Of course 'average' would differ from person to person and from game to game. But if there are so many FFs by now that in most cases only (for example) 70% of them when the game ends, it's a bit of a loss for all the high tier FFs that are in the game but never used.

I think that you described most of the other points of consideration. I do not see disadvantages!

 

[raystuttgart]

Ok, this is now implemented.

I however did not create a GameOption, since it can so easily be balanced in XML.
(You can also deactivate it accordingly by balancing and it seems to be a pretty popular idea.)

Conversion of YIELD_BELLS and YIELD_CULTURE can be balanced separately.

Currently:
Bells convert with a factor of 5. < --- this is the old "default" (I did not change it)
Culture converts with a factor of 2. <--- this is what I balanced now (may be changed later)

We can see how this works out for balancing during test.
(But my first few turns seemed to confirm that it is good relation for balancing.)

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In case you want to deactivate it or balance it differently.

Spoiler :

Balancing is in this file:
CIV4FatherPointInfos.xml

Search for:
FATHER_POINT_POLITICAL

Then change / balance the value for YIELD_CULTURE to your liking:
(setting it to 0 will deactivate the feature completely.)
<YieldPoint> <YieldType>YIELD_CULTURE</YieldType> <iPoints>2</iPoints> </YieldPoint>

For Comparison, this is the value for YIELD_BELLS:
(It is still the dominant Yield for Political Points.)
<YieldPoint> <YieldType>YIELD_BELLS</YieldType> <iPoints>5</iPoints> </YieldPoint>

 

[XSamatan]

After thinking about your concept a second time I feel this could be a worthwhile expansion of the FF system.
Balanced right, it will not influence a playstyle aimed to get as much FFs as possible for your colony, yet slower play, turtling or RP will still be able to score some FFs - which is more even than before.

Regards
XSamatan

 

[ConjurerDragon]

Is it even desirable to gain all founding fathers in a normal game?
We play a certain colonial nation (e.g. the Dutch) and we have a lot of founding fathers from various nations, even the spanish who were the Archnemesis of the Dutch in the achtigjaarige Orloog/30years war (+50 years of "internal" conflict when the Netherlands still were the "Spanish Netherlands"). The boni from some are the exact opposite of the "usual" playstyle of some nations (e.g. french cooperation, spanish founding fathers giving bonus to plundering native settlements).

In my games I do not expect to gain all founding fathers and therefore select those that I *really* want - skipping some I desire less so that the AI nations can spend their gathered points on them.

However as long as it´s possible to opt out on that gamefeature I do not see a problem.

 

[raystuttgart]

Is it even desirable to gain all founding fathers in a normal game?

See, we now have something like 20+ new Founding Fathers compared to the release 3.0.1 you play.
Trust me, you will still not get them all, you will not even get half of them on higher difficulties.

We needed to do something so at least a few more are gathered by the Player and AIs because the list just got too long.
Also the dominant Yield is still "Liberty Bells". The change I implemented will only cause that about 25% more FFs will be gathered during gameplay.

However as long as it´s possible to opt out on that gamefeature I do not see a problem.

You could also just give it a try first ingame before downright expecting this change to be bad.
If you then really do not like it ... well I wrote above how easy it is to deactivate.

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If you serisouly do not want to see / acquire the FFs further back in the list, sure go ahead and deactivate it.
I however really like to have a chance to also get some of those without having to skip 50% of all the FF offers I get.

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Anyways, it is implemented now already and seems to work fine.
So far the feedback of our alpha testers was quite positive.

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In other words all that this change really does:

Both, AI and Player will acquire some more FFs during the course of the game.
(And acquiring FFs will also happen a bit more often, since more Political Points are generated.)

It is however still the same competition and rules for Player and AI.
(So AI should steal percentage wise just as many FFs as it did.)

So you may still want to skip an FF to get another one instead.
(Because again, on higher difficulties AIs will not let you get all.)