Are you sure? Last time I traded some reasources with another Civ for
per turn I didn't get any 
out of it.
Bad feature that needs to go: the slider
- Thread starter Pazyryk
- Start date
Are you sure? Last time I traded some reasources with another Civ for
per turn I didn't get any out of it.
Ahriman
Tyrant
Ahh, you mean diplomacy transfers. Yeah, that's gold.
I thought when you said "trade" that you meant, you know "trade". From trade routes
Obviously no model of the economy as simple as in Civ is a perfect description of the real world, its heavily abstracted, but I think it makes a lot more sense to think about yourself as modeling the economy as a whole than it does to think of yourself as just a government.
I thought when you said "trade" that you meant, you know "trade". From trade routes
Obviously no model of the economy as simple as in Civ is a perfect description of the real world, its heavily abstracted, but I think it makes a lot more sense to think about yourself as modeling the economy as a whole than it does to think of yourself as just a government.
KrikkitTwo
Immortal
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2004
- Messages
- 12,418
A big problem with the slider was unproductive resources.
More Science-> More Techs
More Espionage->More things you can do to the enemy
More Production->more buildings or units
More Food-> more population (or more Settlers/Workers)
More Culture... (Largely useless beyond a certain minimum)
More Gold...(also largely useless beyond a certain minimum)[diplomacy+upgrading+rush buying are the only exceptions, they are Very situation dependent]
because Gold was ony good for maintenance, you would want the 'gold' portion of the slider as low as possible in most situations.
Those last 2 need to be changed.
I'd suggest making Culture the replacement for Gold in term of 'Civics'... the 'social tree' is developed+maintained with Culture.
Gold should be fused with Production so that you can always "Rush build". (I'd say only units... and make maintaining Units a key function of gold.)
More Science-> More Techs
More Espionage->More things you can do to the enemy
More Production->more buildings or units
More Food-> more population (or more Settlers/Workers)
More Culture... (Largely useless beyond a certain minimum)
More Gold...(also largely useless beyond a certain minimum)[diplomacy+upgrading+rush buying are the only exceptions, they are Very situation dependent]
because Gold was ony good for maintenance, you would want the 'gold' portion of the slider as low as possible in most situations.
Those last 2 need to be changed.
I'd suggest making Culture the replacement for Gold in term of 'Civics'... the 'social tree' is developed+maintained with Culture.
Gold should be fused with Production so that you can always "Rush build". (I'd say only units... and make maintaining Units a key function of gold.)
Ahh, you mean diplomacy transfers. Yeah, that's gold.
I thought when you said "trade" that you meant, you know "trade". From trade routes
Obviously no model of the economy as simple as in Civ is a perfect description of the real world, its heavily abstracted, but I think it makes a lot more sense to think about yourself as modeling the economy as a whole than it does to think of yourself as just a government.
What if all sources of
in game were eliminated and replaced by sources of ? So diplomatic trades, goodie huts, religious buildings and whatever else should all provide .This would allow you to spend all of that on research rather than having it sit in your treasury not being useful for very much.
KrikkitTwo
Immortal
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2004
- Messages
- 12,418
What if all sources of
This would allow you to spend all of that on research rather than having it sit in your treasury not being useful for very much.
That would be bad... it would be better to eliminate gold from the game altogether then do that... No slider at all, trade routes, shrines, etc. just give you straight research.
The better option would be to make excess gold useful (like "excess production" or "excess research")
mjs0
The 4th X
<brainstorming>Perhaps excess gold and its uses should somehow factor into the concept of an economic victory.</brainstorming>
Ahriman
Tyrant
Possibly, but then we risk falling into the problem we had with culture, where for most of your (non-border) cities, culture has no value except when a victory condition is achieved.
Gold really has value only when you spend it.
What we really need is to have things that you can do with gold.
Rush-building with gold is one example (maybe this should be more generally available, not only under a few civic/social policies), or upgrading units (I'm really hoping that unit upgrading isn't free), or purchasing new terrain.
I guess I can see gold as being a "flexible" resource.
We could have a system where gold is not as "efficient" in the long-run at achieving any particular goal as is the main mean of achieving that, but it provides the flexibility (and functions as a strategic reserve) to assist you in achieving whatever goal it is you wish.
So:
Culture is better at expanding your territory than gold, but gold can do it too.
Hammers are better than gold at building you new stuff, but gold can do it too.
and so forth.
What are other short-term goals that we could allow gold to let you fulfill?
[Research is not really a short-term goal.]
Maybe buying off barbarians? Hard to implement well. [Though, Sins of a Solar Empire had an interesting system for diverting pirate raids through gold bounties.]
Maybe you could buy temporary happiness, or buy your way out of unrest status (or reduce its duration) in a city (or newly conquered city)? [Bread and circuses] I kinda like the idea of being able to buy off the Mob with gold (temporarily!) or to buy off unrest in a newly conquered city (greeted as liberators!).
And make it increasingly expensive each time you do it.
The problem with this is mostly AI, its hard to get an AI that can sensibly thnik about long-term vs short-term tradeoffs; that can save gold until it needs it, and then correctly recognize when it needs it. But the multi-level Civ5 AI seems more promising in this regard.
They should get rid of the slider and let us do all our allocation via specialists. The web based game Ikariam does this and it works well:
Citizens: +3gold
Workers:+1resource
Scientists: +1science-6gold
This means you can afford 1 scientist for 2 citizens, while 1 science = 9 gold (6 for the scientist + 3 he would produce if he were a citizen) and 1 resource = 3 gold.
In fact each city in Ikariam has sliders to allocate specialists (because each city has between 40 and 300 pop)
Citizens: +3gold
Workers:+1resource
Scientists: +1science-6gold
This means you can afford 1 scientist for 2 citizens, while 1 science = 9 gold (6 for the scientist + 3 he would produce if he were a citizen) and 1 resource = 3 gold.
In fact each city in Ikariam has sliders to allocate specialists (because each city has between 40 and 300 pop)
mjs0
The 4th X
<StillBrainstorming>
Yeah, that is definitely a pitfall to avoid and it arises as you say from a lack of other sufficiently worthwhile uses for culture.
For Gold, what I was thinking was that being able to use it to work towards an economic victory condition should be a choice you would have to balance against the other uses to which it could be put. This would relate I guess to building an overwhelming gold reserve. Once you commit to that victory path any other use for gold becomes a nuisance. This would lead to difficult/interesting decisions when the gold really should be spent on other things. The challenge for the player being to make your economy enough of a powerhouse to overcome these situations. The challenge for the designer being to come up with other compelling uses for gold.
</StillBrainstorming>
Absolutely.
I suspect we will see more uses for gold in the new diplomacy system, with funding for such things as joint research, tile purchases and other yet to be revealed interactions. Given the new importance of strategic resources even a powerhouse economy could suffer if forced to buy those resources on the open market from civs, or even city states, with partial global monopolies. (Hello Saudi Arabia I'm looking at you
)One measure of a good design goal is if it can be easily understood when clearly stated in a few short sentences. I think this would be a very elegant approach...
The only modification I would make is that the use of gold should be less cost-efficient and often less effective, but always more time-efficient, hence one of the primary uses of gold would be to accelerate other natural processes but in some cases the quality of the resulting 'product' would suffer.
As the saying goes 'To speed something up you can just throw money at it'...but that only works up to a point.
Other than the diplomatic possibilities I mentioned above...
Well...how about...
- I like buying off barbarians especially if that would equate to hiring mercenaries.
- Intelligence gathering...bribing foreign officials to get access to the plans of other Civs. I am actually very excited about this possibility (gathering intel) as the AIs will actually be doing some long term planning, so there actually is something to find out.
- Mitigating Anarchy - Reducing the detrimental effects of switching to new social policies (the Civ4 equivalent would be paying to skip/reduce anarchy)
- Advanced unit training - purchasing promotions (probably too controversial but would give a nice way for a peaceful civ to keep their military balanced with a warmonger)
- Rushing upgrades - maybe upgrades should take time to phase-in (as discussed on other threads) using gold one could accelerate the process. This would work even if the actual upgrade were free.
<ASIDE>
This approach of making gold more relevant by introducing many discrete opportunities to spend gold is of course just one way of doing it. Another possibility would be to work with the sliders.
Perhaps introduce sliders for military investment (not necessarily the one I proposed in another thread), diplomatic investment (intel gathering etc.) and infrastructure investment (not sure what it would do yet, but hey we're brainstorming and it sounds good!).
Perhaps total gold should be kept at the empire level but control should be dropped to the city level...increasing city specialization and letting some cities run at deficits at the expense of other cities that would be net contributors to the empire's gold coffers.
@Axi removing sliders and using specialists which have to be paid for with gold is another possibility, but one I would have to think about before deciding if I like it.
So many possibilities!
</ASIDE>
I am so hoping this new approach to the AI works well.
Ahriman
Tyrant
Agreed.
Some intereseting ideas.
I think buying mercenaries gets problematic, since it becomes using gold to create a mililtary unit.
What I have in mind is that you can somehow buy off the mercenary units for a few turns so that you can build sufficient units (or bring in reinforcements from elsewhere in your empire) to then counter them.
I think this kind of "spend money, gain time" mechanic is more interesting than just buying yourself more military units.
I'm a bit skeptical of this. I doubt the AI's plans can be easily translated into a form the human player will understand and be able to use to their advantage. And you should already be able to see many of the AI's plans from looknig at them.
I think the implications of spending gold should be more practical, and should be something that the AI can use. There is no way that the AI can spend gold in order to figure out what *you're* planning on doing, because that is unknowable.
Maybe, but civ-wide anarchy SHOULD I think be a major effect that you can't just buy your way around. I don't mind being able to mitigate the mob on an individual city level, but mitigating anarchy from truly revolutionary changes feels like a bit much, it would reduce the incentives that force you to be really careful when changing governments because of the serious side-effects.
This gets really hard for the AI to evaluate.
I'd beware of too many sliders, they risk turning the game a bit too much into playing a spreadsheet. I think intel gathering has been done before (espionage) and it didn't work out very well, info gathering just isn't that useful to spend resources on, and provides no tangible benefit to the AI player.
I don't quite understand what this means. Each city can already be a gold provider, or not.
Anyway, we'll have to see what actually gets implemented.
mjs0
The 4th X
Precisely
Skepticism is good, it helps weed out ideas that stink, hopefully this isn't one of them.
I'm not suggesting we should get access to the AI's internal thinking...merely a peek at what for the human player are interface accessible settings (sliders, research, civics, troop numbers and placement, foreign deals etc.).
This is one of the reasons I think a military and other sliders may be a good idea because they force the human player to declare their intent in a way that is visible to the AI through intel gathering. Of course subterfuge is still possible and attacks could happen with the slider set to 'peace' but the attack is likely to be less overwhelming and require more skill, plus the AI can be programmed to use similar sleight of hand.
Inclined to agree with you, I'm just throwing out ideas and seeing which ones stick.
I'm also acutely aware that changes I really expected to dislike in previous versions turned out to be OK once played and discussed in terms of the bigger picture.
A nice programming challenge then...
Shucks...I guess you won't be liking my planned Civ5 Excel plug-in then.
Seriously I can see your point and maybe there is a better abstraction.
To my mind espionage in Civ4 couldn't make up its mind what it wanted to be. The intel it gathered was mostly useless because the AI did little planning so there wasn't much useful to be had, (it was at the city view/research/status graphs level) and the spy missions (which were mostly low-level terrorism or hideously expensive) frustrated me more than held my interest. Although some of the ideas about access to power charts etc. could have worked better with a little more work.
In Civ5 my hope would be that the supposedly superior long term planning of the AIs would be evident in the global empire management choices that intel could let us view.
Certainly the removal of access to diplo modifiers (I believe that was confirmed) suggests we will need other clues to determine each AI's likely behaviour.
At the moment each city is in profit or loss based on the global settings. Local sliders would allow for example some 'center of learning' cities to run at a larger deficit and other 'gold-producers' to run at a large surplus, but balancing out over the entire empire. It would allow for heavier city specialization but still preserve the global rule that doesn't allow accumulating a national debt.
I'm not advocating the idea particularly just mentioning it as an alternative to be considered
Must practice patience.
Must practice patience.
Is it out yet?
Must practice pa...
Ahriman
Tyrant
Definitely my design philosophy. Trial by fire!
It doesn't seem unreasonable, I just think its important to make sure that its actually valuable info.
I guess my thoughts go this way: you shouldn't have to expend any effort/resources to gain information that:
a) Would be patently obvious IRL (eg: civics, you don't need to spy on them to know if they're a monarchy or a democracy, or if they support free trade or mercantilism, you can see that by looking out the window). Similarly, what tech the enemy has should be pretty apparent; its not that hard to figure out if they have Railroad yet, or gunpowder.
OR
b) Wouldn't affect your decisions/actions once you know them. I can see myself making different decisions if I observe that they have a huge army, but that's about it. I'm not going to change my own actions at all if I know they're 60 science/40 gold vs knowing they're 70 gold vs 30 science, particularly when they can easily change that from one turn to the next.
I would defininitely say that if there was a military slider such as you suggested, it would have to be something that the AI would respond to, in the same way they the Victoria AI responded to you mobilizing your reserves.
I dislike the idea of the AI using "sleight of hand". It becomes very difficult to distinguish between an AI that is being "tricksy" and an AI that is just bad/confused.
I agree that the espionage system performed poorly, the AI was weak with it, it was MM intensive and most of the missions were blah. We're trying to work on a more interesting design for the Dune Wars total conversion mod, where the missions available are either mroe powerful or cheaper, and the mission accessibility varies across faction (and each faction is limited to a handful of missions).
You may have seen my reaction to that in another thread...
I think its just poor design to make the AI opaque, because it makes it too hard for the human player to actually figure out an intelligent diplomatic strategy.
Ah, I see. I think I mentioned localizing sliders earlier in this thread.
As I mentioned, I think the problem is that it promotes *too* much specialization. You end up setting every city to either 100% science or 100% gold, and only building the appropriate booster builidngs in each. And I don't think that's what we want.
deanej
Deity
Agreed. SimCity 4 placed a large emphasis on the budget, with individual sliders for each building, to the point where it just became SimBudget.
Afforess
The White Wizard
Uh, no it didn't. There were sliders for government buildings. There was an overall government slider in case you didn't want to manually change each building. IMHO, it was not that hard to run your budget in SC4, you just had to be reasonable.
Back on topic, the slider isn't such a bad feature. I can't think of any simpler ways to represent government spending than it. I doubt Civ players wanted to be too bogged down in maintaining an economy. If you want rail against a dumb feature, complain about inflation. It was just a function of turns played, it had nothing to do with your economic choices.
deanej
Deity
True, but one of the first questions that you always ask yourself before deciding to do anything is "can my city afford this". In civ this is rarely the case. My point is simply that we shouldn't get too bogged down in economic management.
Afforess
The White Wizard
IMHO, you are playing on the wrong difficulty. I always have to ask myself that question in Civ.
frekk
Scourge of St. Lawrence
As long as it follows Kipling's poem I'm all for it:
IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:
"We invaded you last night - we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:
"We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"
In other words, payment should not be an absolute guarantee of security (there should be some chance that they break their word and attack anyway) and, of course, if you pay, you are inviting more of the same - the more you pay, the more frequent barbarian events should become for you.
Ahriman
Tyrant
I don't think that would be much fun for the player. It should give you guaranteed security... temporarily, and it should cost more each time you do it.
If it increases your chance of barbarian attacks AND doesn't guarantee your short-term security, then it fails as a mechanic, because its not really worth doing.
Ironic that Kipling would right that too, since Imperial Britain bought off more people than anyone since Imperial Rome - and it worked out pretty well for them. They'd buy off the local Sultan or Maharaja on a personal level, and then use that to take over effective management of the territory for their traders. All through South Asia and Malaya.
frekk
Scourge of St. Lawrence
There's a big difference between buying people in other countries to roll over, and buying off raiders coming to your country. When Britain paid people in India, they were not buying off the Danes ... they were the Danes.
As for the Romans ... it didn't work so well for them, did it? Subsidizing the foederati earned them a stampede of barbarians, one of the largest population movements in the ancient world to ever happen. Which isn't surprising, really! Neither is the fact that Odoacer and Alaric were both on the payroll, at one time.
Depends how you balance it. If the chance of betrayal is small and the cost is low, it would still be worth doing in dire straits.
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