Are you happy with Tourism?

[Lyoncet]

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?

No, getting policies most certainly had an effect on the game. In that each policy helped you. Accumulating tourism has no impact whatsoever on your game, except on the off-chance that a city flips to you. As boring and menial as culture wins were in vanilla and G&K, they at least gave you a bonus every rung of the way as you unlocked new policies. In that way, BNW's culture victory is actually a step backwards.

Let me parce that out a little bit. Yes, it's true that generating tourism is more dynamic than the old culture wins. You have to be proactive, getting/trading works and artifacts, finding sites for landmarks, setting up your theming bonuses, etc. So kudos to the developers for making that more interactive. The problem is that accumulating tourism is just a binary proposition: either you have enough to win, or you don't. Imagine if Domination were like that. You build units, and once you build your 100th unit, you win. There's no dynamic, no interaction, no incremental advantage or intermittent reward. You just wait until you hit a threshold and then you win. That's what tourism wins are like. Your intermittent reward is the leaders bothering you about blue jeans an pop music. With Science and Diplo wins, at least what you're pursuing (techs and economy/alliances, respectively) advances your position. Not so with spamming out tourism.

Given all that, I'd honestly I'd rather have the old culture victory back. I wouldn't have the semi-interesting process of building up my tourism per turn, but at least the victory condition I was working toward would actually have an effect on the game. That effect-black-hole really kills the enjoyability of that victory condition.

 

[Createk]

High tourism has allready chance for enemy cities to revolt and join you

 

[slowcar]

I would welcome a small effect of tourism before the ideology era, like a bit of gold, science or the like.
Creating great artists/writers/musicians feels a bit meta-gamey to be, you go out of your way to get them for something that will happen a lot later (if at all)

 

[whiplash27]

There should be a thing where any country that has a certain level of influence (maybe popular or higher) initiates a conflict against you, they experience high levels of unhappiness. It should make tourism a bit more important.

 

[Suntechnique]

Tourism is strange for me as well.

G&K culture victory was nice option to win w/o deep diving Science.

In BNW you can't win tourism without hotels, airports and internet (at least on Immortal). And even with all of them in place I was too bored to wait Influental status and did diplo and science just because I eventually got all science/money for that. (And that using culture oriented civs -- Poland and Brasil)

Also having fewer cities doesn't work anymore. You want more cities to get museums to place art and play theming bonuses puzzle.

Culture win is very strange in BNW unless I miss something crucial.

 

[Zednaught]

No, getting policies most certainly had an effect on the game. In that each policy helped you. Accumulating tourism has no impact whatsoever on your game, except on the off-chance that a city flips to you. As boring and menial as culture wins were in vanilla and G&K, they at least gave you a bonus every rung of the way as you unlocked new policies. In that way, BNW's culture victory is actually a step backwards.

Let me parce that out a little bit. Yes, it's true that generating tourism is more dynamic than the old culture wins. You have to be proactive, getting/trading works and artifacts, finding sites for landmarks, setting up your theming bonuses, etc. So kudos to the developers for making that more interactive. The problem is that accumulating tourism is just a binary proposition: either you have enough to win, or you don't. Imagine if Domination were like that. You build units, and once you build your 100th unit, you win. There's no dynamic, no interaction, no incremental advantage or intermittent reward. You just wait until you hit a threshold and then you win. That's what tourism wins are like. Your intermittent reward is the leaders bothering you about blue jeans an pop music. With Science and Diplo wins, at least what you're pursuing (techs and economy/alliances, respectively) advances your position. Not so with spamming out tourism.

Given all that, I'd honestly I'd rather have the old culture victory back. I wouldn't have the semi-interesting process of building up my tourism per turn, but at least the victory condition I was working toward would actually have an effect on the game. That effect-black-hole really kills the enjoyability of that victory condition.

I really like how tourism works. Cultural victories used to be really passive.

When I'm causing 40+ unhappiness in hostile civs, or forging friendships with formerly hostile civs that have switched to my ideology, it's hard to say that tourism does nothing. When a hostile ideology declared war against me, my tourism let my assemble a coalition against them and gain a massive combat advantage due to the happiness difference. Meanwhile, rebels were popping up around his capital. All thanks to tourism.

With a high enough tourism, it's perfectly attainable to cause revolution and flip other cities to your side. It's not an off-chance, it's something that will happen if you work toward it. These are all really significant bonuses, and you get them all before you win.

I'm not sure how you can say that you get no benefits from tourism.

In my cultural game, I started out as Freedom. By the end of the game, I had caused all but one civ in the world to switch to Freedom. My culture had truly changed the world, which is how a cultural victory should be. Much, much better than the old system.

 

[whiplash27]

Also having fewer cities doesn't work anymore. You want more cities to get museums to place art and play theming bonuses puzzle.

Culture win is very strange in BNW unless I miss something crucial.

I felt the same. Policies don't mean much anymore except for their bonuses, so focusing on culture points is fairly useless.

Possibly to offset this, they could grant tourism bonuses based on how many policies you enact and give a penalty if you have a lot of cities (puppet cities don't count against this).

 

[Suicidekills]

Policies give science, happiness, food, production, gold, great people, religion benefits, pretty much anything.

Yea, they did that in G&K as well as in BNW, so not sure why you brought that up.

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.

So tourism pretty much just replaces the cultural victory in G&K which was just to get 5 policy trees completed and then build the utpoia project except that with the ideoligies and good tourism you have a chance to flip cities or at least give the other civ some unwanted unhappiness. Sounds good to me.

No, getting policies most certainly had an effect on the game. In that each policy helped you. Accumulating tourism has no impact whatsoever on your game, except on the off-chance that a city flips to you. As boring and menial as culture wins were in vanilla and G&K, they at least gave you a bonus every rung of the way as you unlocked new policies. In that way, BNW's culture victory is actually a step backwards.

Let me parce that out a little bit. Yes, it's true that generating tourism is more dynamic than the old culture wins. You have to be proactive, getting/trading works and artifacts, finding sites for landmarks, setting up your theming bonuses, etc. So kudos to the developers for making that more interactive. The problem is that accumulating tourism is just a binary proposition: either you have enough to win, or you don't. Imagine if Domination were like that. You build units, and once you build your 100th unit, you win. There's no dynamic, no interaction, no incremental advantage or intermittent reward. You just wait until you hit a threshold and then you win. That's what tourism wins are like. Your intermittent reward is the leaders bothering you about blue jeans an pop music.

Given all that, I'd honestly I'd rather have the old culture victory back. I wouldn't have the semi-interesting process of building up my tourism per turn, but at least the victory condition I was working toward would actually have an effect on the game. That effect-black-hole really kills the enjoyability of that victory condition.

I'm not sure what you mean by culture victory going backwards because you still get policies with culture and even more policies than before not just with the inclusion of ideoligies. Also I was trying to say the old culture was boring because all you did was fill up 5 policy trees and build a building. I never said that policies were pointless. The new cultural victory requires that you influence every other civ in the game through tourism which makes more sense to me than the previous victory condition. You seriously prefer the old cultural victory??

 

[andrewlt]

I have the same concerns. Tourism has no effect outside of the victory condition. It seems rather pointless if you are going for a different victory condition.

Ideology just comes too late in the game and it really is only one perk. Some religious and commercial perks to being influential with another civ would be nice.

 

[wetroofwoof]

one thing is we need to go back to great artists... all these guilds and separate GP's are ridiculous. also archeology is stupid as well. I think the developers need another 2 years - civ 6 to try tourism. not throw it together in 1 expansion. it doesn't work nice.

As for culture victory... we could still have a ratio system without tourism. say the ratio is your culture must be 2:1 for all your opponents. but if you have same ideologies 1.75:1 etc. this is really nice gameplay because you have to target strategies for each different civ. like do I wipe this guy out, adopt his ideology, (or whatever other methods -- religion can play role here) to reduce ratio [increase pressure]. then you just need 1 limit so that you cannot get culture victory on turn 100. i.e you need to unlock a social policy branch for your culture to begin to count against another's total. something like that.

I can wait until someone mods tourism out of the game. and then everyone play that

 

[wetroofwoof]

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 agree with all this. the problem you mention with the culture buildings. they want everyone actually to build guilds to waste your pop for specialists to then get great-works to make your culture building complete. all for social policies / ideologies. thats why guilds are so cheap and stupid imo. it's not national wonder worthy.

 

[MantaRevan]

Spoiler :

one thing is we need to go back to great artists... all these guilds and separate GP's are ridiculous.

I agree. It's dumb to have 3 different guilds floating around that provide and a bunch of specialists that all do the same thing. I don't want to have to balance writers artists and musicians with my engineers and scientists when I could have just done artists like before. These add unnecessary clutter and bulk to the game.

Spoiler :

I can wait until someone mods tourism out of the game. and then everyone play that

Too many of the in-game abilities of the civs, improvements, and buildings are tied in with tourism now to take it out, I'm afraid.

Spoiler :

The new cultural victory requires that you influence every other civ in the game through tourism which makes more sense to me than the previous victory condition. You seriously prefer the old cultural victory??

I do. You could have done it in an active and fun way. Remember that puppet states don't increase culture costs. You can go on a warmongering rampage (this works well with napoleon, for example, because he gets +2 culture from all cities, including puppets) and still win a cultural victory.

The victory felt incremental and satisfying. The main problem it had was that you had to plan early for it because settling too much could ruin it. Just because it took a long time or was inactive isn't a big deal. So is science. You sit and accumulate techs all game until you build a wonder(Apollo program instead of Utopia Project) and then you're done. The culture victory could be more fun than people made it out to be. You can have a blast winning a culture victory going wide as the Aztecs for example.

Cultural policies made sense for everyone and anyone, catering to every playstyle. You still had reason to build amphitheaters even if going for domination, for those nice autocracy policies, or for science to finish rationalism ect. Those culture buildings had a place within the game. Tourism buildings, like hotels, don't. Only one kind of player needs tourism- the kind going for a tourism victory. They're just a waste of space in all of your other games, not justifying their own maintenance costs, unlike opera houses.

Spoiler :

No, getting policies most certainly had an effect on the game. In that each policy helped you. Accumulating tourism has no impact whatsoever on your game, except on the off-chance that a city flips to you. As boring and menial as culture wins were in vanilla and G&K, they at least gave you a bonus every rung of the way as you unlocked new policies. In that way, BNW's culture victory is actually a step backwards.

Let me parce that out a little bit. Yes, it's true that generating tourism is more dynamic than the old culture wins. You have to be proactive, getting/trading works and artifacts, finding sites for landmarks, setting up your theming bonuses, etc. So kudos to the developers for making that more interactive. The problem is that accumulating tourism is just a binary proposition: either you have enough to win, or you don't. Imagine if Domination were like that. You build units, and once you build your 100th unit, you win. There's no dynamic, no interaction, no incremental advantage or intermittent reward. You just wait until you hit a threshold and then you win. That's what tourism wins are like. Your intermittent reward is the leaders bothering you about blue jeans an pop music. With Science and Diplo wins, at least what you're pursuing (techs and economy/alliances, respectively) advances your position. Not so with spamming out tourism.

Given all that, I'd honestly I'd rather have the old culture victory back. I wouldn't have the semi-interesting process of building up my tourism per turn, but at least the victory condition I was working toward would actually have an effect on the game. That effect-black-hole really kills the enjoyability of that victory condition.

I hope firaxis listens to this guy, because he hit the nail on the head here.

 

[pezit]

I dislike the entire pairing up stuff for bonuses, tried it once but it's definitely not for me.

 

[Dux1]

The problem is that accumulating tourism is just a binary proposition: either you have enough to win, or you don't. Imagine if Domination were like that. You build units, and once you build your 100th unit, you win. There's no dynamic, no interaction, no incremental advantage or intermittent reward. You just wait until you hit a threshold and then you win. That's what tourism wins are like. Your intermittent reward is the leaders bothering you about blue jeans an pop music. With Science and Diplo wins, at least what you're pursuing (techs and economy/alliances, respectively) advances your position. Not so with spamming out tourism

Every victory condition ultimately comes down to a binary proposition. Either you hold all of the original capitals, or you don't; either you have 32 delegates, or you don't; either you have all of the necessary spaceship parts, or you don't. The old cultural victory worked this way, too -- either you have five policy branches, or you don't -- but it was far less interesting than the new cultural victory.

As far as interactivity goes, the old cultural victory was easily the least interactive way to end a game. The goal was literally to isolate yourself, limit expansion and spam drab culture buildings until your culture bucket was full. It didn't even matter what the other civs were doing as long as they weren't destroying you. It didn't really feel like cultural domination at all. Now with tourism, you need to achieve a level of cultural presence that is strong relative to the culture of your rivals. This is more interactive. You don't even need to focus solely on the tourism generation side; you can also win by limiting the cultural generation of your rivals; hence, "cultural victory" is seen as a worthwhile path to victory for all ideologies, even autocracy.

As far as rewards for progress goes, I would argue that the great works themselves are the reward. For one thing, they just add a lot to the game aesthetically -- it's neat to see what historical work of art will come out next -- but from a gameplay perspective, gaining tourism almost always leads to gaining culture as well, so cultural civs will still be rewarded by a higher rate of social policy generation. Plus there is the whole ideological pressure system that comes into play later, and it really can be significant, as Zednaught's reply illustrates.

 

[Gucumatz]

Of sure I love the concept of great works. But I think it lacks vision. I agree with other posters here, the New Tourism/Culture victory certainly is more interactive and engaging than the older ancient victory and the art, music, writings are certainly more aesthetically pleasing. I even like the concept of guilds.

But I don't think you can say with a straight face that tourism provides a significant influence outside of a cultural victory. And the few non-victory conditions of tourism can be entirely negated easily:

- If you have negative happy from ideology, just switch ideologies or
- Vote in World Congress for a world ideology and never worry about happiness problems again or city flipping.

And once you have dealt with that... what exactly does tourism then do for the rest of the game? While certainly I like the idea - I think tourism could do with a little more execution and a little more tie in with earlier eras, other mechanics, and boosts for your civ in subtler ways [Potentially religion, gold, trade route bonuses, etc.]

I think you will find most people think the new victory is certainly aesthetically more pleasing... but actually less deep from an interwoven gameplay perspective. But that could be fixed with a few mods/perhaps a patch to make tourism relevant in the earlier game stages [As is its not hard to get 30-60 tourism per turn in the early game on at least immortal with it having 0 effect in the early eras]. You can still ignore tourism without real consequences. You can't say the same about science, diplomacy, or military

 

[Lyoncet]

Every victory condition ultimately comes down to a binary proposition. Either you hold all of the original capitals, or you don't; either you have 32 delegates, or you don't; either you have all of the necessary spaceship parts, or you don't. The old cultural victory worked this way, too -- either you have five policy branches, or you don't -- but it was far less interesting than the new cultural victory.

I think there's an understanding breakdown here on what binary means. Tourism is binary: you wait until you have enough, and then you win. It has (almost) no impact on your game up until that point. Again, for clarification, see my example of what an equivalent system would look for a domination win: you build units until you get a magic number in the demographic screen, and then you win.

None of the other wins are binary. In Domination, you take your first city. That advances your position, because now you have a new city. You approach your victory actively, and your game experience shifts with each step you take. Same with science. While building spaceship parts doesn't actually advance your game state, the critical elements are beakers and hammers. You can bet those things have a visceral effect on your empire. Moving closer to victory also affects the state of your empire. Same with pursuing city-states and diplomacy. And the old culture win system, where every few turns you saw the effect of your impending victory in the form of a new social policy.

Tourism? Blue jeans and pop music.

 

[JFM2796]

What if they made it so that you use tourism to purchase ideology tenets the way culture purchases policies? I think that would fix the relative uselessness of tourism outside the CV and make it so that getting tourism early is actually worthwhile as you can get an ideology early.

 

[Dux1]

@Lyoncet:
Tourism and culture go hand-in-hand. If you focus on tourism, you will wind up with more social policies. It's quite difficult to get a lot of culture in the early game without also getting tourism. I also think you are underestimating the effect of ideological pressure. Yes, it doesn't become a factor until later in the game, but in my limited experience with BNW thus far, it is a significant one.

Now all of that being said, I certainly wouldn't be opposed to more effects for tourism, especially in the early game. But it boggles my mind that anyone would prefer the monotony of the old cultural victory to the current system.

 

[notyetsuperman]

Is it so bad that tourism is only good for winning a cultural victory? The entire game is interwoven but tourism creates polarity. I haven't finished my game yet but I'm anticipating that in order to win a cultural victory I must be 'all in'. In short, achieving a cultural victory should involve some risks and nail biting. High level science play seems to involve this sort of 'risk'.

I have played since Civ 4 and not once ever tried for a cultural victory (not Civ 5 either). Tourism is the first interactive cultural victory and thus I am trying for it. I think that says something.

Tourism is in its infancy and we should anticipate growing pains but in time this has a lot of potential.

 

[ptoss1]

I still don't get how tourism works. How can +2 tourism rise against +10 culture in other civs?