Are you happy with Tourism?

[Gucumatz]

I was particularly excited with it when it came out... but I can't say I am as excited now.

I am not particularly a fan of tourism because of its limited use. There seems to be little real use from tourism unlike every mechanic in BNW/GK. Of all the mechanisms that came with BNW, it has/had the most potential but I feel its limited use makes it so most people can skip it if they aren't going for a cultural victory.

While tourism can act as a late game defense, this can be nearly entirely circumvented by simply picking an ideology that tourism heavy civs have already picked. There is simply next to no use for tourism and that imo is the major flaw of this expansion. Trade Routes, the World Congress, Ideologies are all brilliant - but does anyone else think that this is easily the weakest component of the expansion?

How would you all improve tourism?
-----

A few things I would suggest

- High Tourism increases the power/rate/distance of religious spread from a city
- Using a form of the brilliant emigration mod by CFC, have tourism be used to potentially steal population from other civs to join your civ.
- Bring back tile flipping. City flipping is interesting, but limited and needs extreme influence to accomplish. Tile flipping would be a little thing to ultimately improve the gameplay experience while adding further relevance
- Have Tourism act as a potential against spies. High tourism in this suggestion would mean spies could defect to your civ, giving you potentially more spies than otherwise possible

Your suggestions on making it more relevant?

 

[_megafone_]

I ABSOLUTELY love the religion-tourism link. Just now, we're having a huge Catholic gathering in Rio and the tourism sector of the city is kinda like on a "We love the King!" period LOL. Realistic, cool, and fixes a gameplay issue (Tourism being rather useless on non-cultural games)? Sign me up!

Where do we send suggestions to the Firaxis team?

 

[MantaRevan]

Much like most of BNW,(excluding the new civs, which are all very well done) I'm not happy with tourism. It feels gimmicky and weird to accumulate tourism as a yield, which is made even worse by the simple fact that tourism doesn't do anything practical for you or give you anything 75 percent of the time. Maybe if Firaxis were to give tourism an actual utility for players not going for culture then I might like it more. As it stands, tourism is just the nasty byproduct of the extra culture that was taken out of the game. Because most of the in-game culture was migrated over to great works, all of the culture buildings only provide a single , making most of them not worth their own hammer and maintenance costs any more for players not going cultural. Now many of the civilopedia entries are cluttered with slots for great works or points for great people that produce them. Don't get me wrong- I love great works. The idea of having your civilization actually create works of art that you can see in-game compared to some abstract value representing your civ's culture is very appealing. But in reality all great works do is further some dumb tourism mechanic that somehow links to ideology. All of the new GPs were basically unnecessary. They could have just stuck with artists and had them creating great works whenever you popped a GA or a landmark. That would have been more satisfying and added less clutter to the game. The three distinct specialists for the writers, artists, and musicians all provide the same yield- 3 and 3 . It just seems like it adds a lot of empty depth that really didn't need to be there. The OP brings up tons of good suggestions for how to improve the currently shoddy tourism mechanic, and I hope the devs consider them.

 

[I_qua_I]

I also think there is a lot of room for improvement with tourism. I'd like to see it become relevant in the early game. It doesn't necessarily have to do with the culture victory but I find it pretty disappointing that I can start generating some tourism from the classical era onward and it not really doing anything until the final stages of the game (where it gets amplified by hotels and other modifiers).

I really like some of your (the OP's) suggestions. The religious spread one in particular seems really good.

I'd like to see culture flipping much earlier than it currently happens. It might be worthwhile to be able to invest your tourism output in the conversion of a single (nearby?) city (you choose the city). There can be limits placed on the range of cities you can target that increases with each era. The defending player can build cultural building in that city to stave off the flipping so it's not completely one-sided. Individual cities that have accumulated a lot of foreign influence by being targeted by another civ's tourism could also be more susceptible to the targeting civ's spies' tech stealing or maybe the targeting civ receives a combat bonus against that city (if s/he didn't want to wait for a completely peaceful flip).

Cultural combat so to speak. Just as a civ can be distracted by military advances so should we have to worry about more peaceful take-overs. Tourism seems like it could fill this role quite nicely.

 

[Gucumatz]

It does seem like it could fill this role better if its potential were fully met.

I am reserving my judgment still on city flipping but on my immortal games so far I haven't seen a single city flipped, largely I bet because of AI bonuses. I agree, tourism should have an effect [even if its just a small one] in older eras

 

[jjkrause84]

I don't really understand it well. I build great works...but I cannot see how it benefits me in any way. I'm tempted to start using Great Writers, etc. for their bonuses (culture, golden age, etc) and just leave it at that.

 

[Dtekkar]

I think part of what is unsatisfying is they don't do a good job of showing the player what impact on the other civs he is having, and even battles with rebels all occurs under the fog of war. A simple fix would be give the player map vision in the fog of war of the rebels he has generated in other civs. But there still aren't many visualizations or notifications in game for an unhappy empire elsewhere, and having to check a statistic to see is a little boring. I think unhappiness is a bland side effect. Maybe instead you can see the uncontrollable workers in a rebellion animation adjacent to the city, and maybe the player/AI cannot control them for a few turns. Maybe as it gets worse they periodically get an exclamation point over their heads and start building improvements that the AI/player didn't tell them to. As it gets worse, it goes from occuring rarely to more frequently and now, rarely, a special negative tile improvement is made that pollutes the tile and forces a nearby city to work it. (maybe a friendly military unit must pillage it then any non-rebellious worker can replace the improvement). And by revolutionary wave things get wild: barbarian workers try to cross into my border with the Mona Lisa they stole from the Louvre (If I capture the unit a great work goes from their civ to my civ, the unit would use barbarian worker escape AI modified so that the target tile are the other civ instead of an encampment, and would become captureable outside of their borders), a great scientist escapes to join my cause (great person unit control switch, capturable like workers, have the rebels try to escort them to the borders to reach asylum in your civ, where they can then be used as a great person for your civilization), units in wars not following orders and moving to a different tile than the intended one (infrequently, with a notification and exclamation point of course), sympathizers frequently leaking information on their troops movement (frequently, the map vision an enemy unit generates is permanently granted to your civ as well), another unit defecting altogether (rare, unit control switch), draft dodging (rarely, a unit just built in a city disbands upon completion), a barbarian great prophet running around in their borders nuking cities with your religion (or someone with your ideologies), leaked technologies (rare, same as stealing a tech), pandemonium. That's the sort of stuff I was expecting. Instead we get a chart, which is a missed opportunity imho.

Maybe with a spy diplomat you can control a small faction of the rebellion units in the uprising and these effects occur more often. Maybe part of an autocracy tenet is that you can control a larger fraction of the rebel units, and the rebels come better equipped (or perhaps you can even choose the majority of what units spawn and where, whether your control them or not) and maybe a freedom tenet is the peaceful stuff like great people/works defections and tech leaks occur more often. I dunno, just brainstorming. But escorting a defecting Albert Einstein to my borders, who then bulbs Atomic Theory for my civ would be so freakin' amazing.

 

[Adjuvant]

I'm not understanding what you're arguing. The tourism mechanic really doesn't come into play until later with hotels and airports. Sure, you get some points early but you're not going to have people buying your blue jeans before 1600 ad unless they're a crippled-up, destitute, has-been of a civilization.

Tourism, before it's "tourism game mechanic", is culture. You want culture for all those neat little bonuses in the social policy tree. As a matter of fact, if you don't get some culture, you'll be missing bonuses everyone else is getting.

You know how you used to get 3 culture from an amphitheatre? It's 1 culture now. You're paying 1gpt for 1 culture. To fix that, put a great work of literature in it. Now you get 3. Same with the other buildings.

Ok, so you don't want excess tourism because you're not trying for a cultural win? That's fine, but you'll have between 20 and 50 before the modern age anyway, just by virtue of trying to get your social policies, unless you're just running over people with keshiks, and then who cares.

 

[Gucumatz]

People can get a ton of tourism long before Hotels. On lower levels I am sure you could even win a Cultural game long before you get Hotels, just by using the theming bonuses/great works/religion/stealing great works

Tourism really isn't just a late game thing - And that people tend to be able to win long before Airports are up at least in significant cities, or hotels in cases.

IE in my current immortal Poland Game I have 64 tourism per turn in the year 1200 A.D. [Standard Pace] and long before Hotels and Airports. Tourism has pretty much 0 effect in the Pre-Ideology eras and any non-cultural victory effect can be negated by choosing ideologies that other powerful tourism civs are taking.

 

[Gazebo]

One missing element, in my opinion, is the lack of impact on city-states. It would be nice if relations with neighboring city-states automatically improved as your tourism increased. Also, it would make sense for buildings like markets, caravanseray or even World Wonders earned gold based on a % of your tourism.

Edit: also, the aesthetics policy tree has almost nothing to do with tourism, when it should.

 

[Biologist]

I wouldn't say I'm unhappy with tourism, in theory, but I'm still a bit confused by it. My first game of BnW I set out to win a cultural victory, yet I had trouble getting above "exotic" with any civ, and finally gave up and went for a diplo win. This was despite the fact that I had tons of great works and theming bonuses, trade routes, and ideological bonuses.

I think the problem was that I was still thinking in terms of GnK cultural victory, i.e. fewer cities = more culture = faster win. Is building a wide empire the trick to getting enough tourism, or am I missing something else?

 

[Gucumatz]

In my opinion it is Biologist. You build the culture wonders, have 3 cities dedicated to spawning great artists, musicians, and writers. Capture or build the GL/Parthenon and try and get Cathedrals [For an early art slot + if you get 2 religious buildings and Sacred sites that's another 4 tourism per city]. If you go on a conquering spree you can steal more great works and then subsequently rush buy religious buildings for another 4 tourism per city

 

[ajok]

i'm happy for tourism, more challenging CV, but you should turn-off the time victory.....(cause it takes more than 2050 )

 

[Peac0ck69]

Can someone quickly explain to me what tourism does outside of a cultural victory? Or does it really do sweet FA?

 

[VainoValkea]

Can someone quickly explain to me what tourism does outside of a cultural victory? Or does it really do sweet FA?

Increases cultural pressure and unhappiness against other ideologies, protects you against similar pressure of other ideologies.

 

[mrwho]

I agree that tourism definitely should have more impact outside the cultural victory. Tourism should spread religion, generate revenue, increase city state influence, improve AI relations ('our people love your culture') and maybe even give combat bonuses against a civ you've got more culture that (people are less willing to fight due to their liking of your culture).

 

[killmeplease]

sorry, didnt read the whole thread
agree, tourism should give something before the ideology war gets started (if started at all)

my idea is to give gold for tourism:
1 gold per city of a civ for which your are exotic, 2 gold - familiar, 3 - popular (influential and dominant have their own effects so no need to increase gold further).

 

[Suicidekills]

I think tourism is just fine. I don't know why people are upset about tourism not doing anything unless you're going for culture (which isn't quite true because you can flip cities later with the ideoligies in play, and if you don't have the same ideology as your neighbor you're in for a rough time with unhappiness). In G&K culture was obtained to get policies which lead to a cultural victory. It's not like it did anything else, so why would this new culture system do anything other than lead to a culture victory?

 

[Vasire]

I think tourism is just fine. I don't know why people are upset about tourism not doing anything unless you're going for culture (which isn't quite true because you can flip cities later with the ideoligies in play, and if you don't have the same ideology as your neighbor you're in for a rough time with unhappiness). In G&K culture was obtained to get policies which lead to a cultural victory. It's not like it did anything else, so why would this new culture system do anything other than lead to a culture victory?

Policies are THE reason I am in love with civ5. They make your civilization into a fallout character with perks. Tourism on the other hand is a wasted mechanic if you are not going for cultural victory. It's just a side effect of your quest for more policies.

 

[Hpuk]

In G&K culture was obtained to get policies which lead to a cultural victory. It's not like it did anything else, so why would this new culture system do anything other than lead to a culture victory?

Policies give science, happiness, food, production, gold, great people, religion benefits, pretty much anything. Food, production, science, gold, culture and faith are all resources that are interconnected very deeply, and can each boost aspects of each other.
Tourism is the odd man out, it's connection to the other resources exists, but it's very light compared to how the rest of them work together.

I've played too little to give much of an opinion yet, it may work very well, but so far I've not been that impressed by it. I managed to win a science victory on immortal with 0 tourism and the only effect I noticed was some unhappiness.