City State Tribute Balance

[phantomaxl1207]

Since there is enough thoughts to warrant a discussion this topic.

My thoughts are:

Very good to pursue early on for Authority/ anyone who will be making Spearmen early.
Yields start to fall off around Medieval as CS's become harder to tribute, via you or someone else becoming Allies.It only gets worse from there.
I actually like to take Statecraft as a Warmonger so that I don't bullied in the World Congress and have guaranteed Trade Route recipients.

 

[Bromar1]

I was thinking that Authority should get some light happiness WLTKD bonuses to encourage city state alliances. Would also open up some more synergies foe WLTKD civs that don't usually go authority

 

[Drakle]

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/balancing-city-state-rewards-tribute.656394/

Prior Thread. Has these suggestions, mostly.

One key is that the yields from city-states aren't really balanced. Maritime city-states food are nowhere near worth tributing for food. Culture and faith aren't really worth it much. Production has a niche use sometimes but also drops off. The Culture from tribute policy also isn't worth it, and balances against Heavy Tribute with the percentage system since you get less tribute than just gold. Maybe the base of that should be double culture from heavy tribute, so it would be about the same culture if you take gold, or take heavy tribute.

Another key issue is that quests are an extremely valuable aspect of city-states, and tributing for weak yields, causes you to miss out on them. So like I suggested, Tribute social policy allowing bullied city-states to still give quests would redress the balance somewhat. The influence gain wouldn't do much since you start below zero. But the yields are helpful, and sometimes in the early game, the only mass source of stuff like golden age points.

Another thing that is a issue, is how Tribute only boosts the capital, not other cities. When Authority is usually wide. Maybe a way for Tribute to go to other cities.

Bullying for resources as an option would be good.

I suggested that yields would evolve so, in later era, you can obtain GPP.

But overall, Tribute would really be better shown as Tributary relationship, which would be like an ally status, but one that only lasts as long as the city-state is scared of you. Not sure if that is possible to code, but it would better represent how minor powers interacted with empires. Being able to be a diplomatic power should involve having some power to back you, not just spamming diplomats.

 

[ElliotS]

So while I've played recently I've enjoyed a lot of the changes made, but tributes feel very wrong. The ability to tribute cities states seems much easier than it used to be, but the yields scaling mean that often you can tribute for 0 gold or 0 of another resource early.

Is it possible to make Tributes no longer remove quests? I think that the loss of influence is enough, with the rewards as low as they are now.

I'd do that globally, and then change authority's tribute policy to give +25% yields to the base of the tribute. (So if normally you would take 15% of max yields, you would get 40%.)

If I'm missing some reason we seemed to run tributes into the ground I'd be willing to hear it, and if we're happy with them being so crap, then why does authority still have a policy based on them?

 

[Stalker0]

So while I've played recently I've enjoyed a lot of the changes made, but tributes feel very wrong. The ability to tribute cities states seems much easier than it used to be, but the yields scaling mean that often you can tribute for 0 gold or 0 of another resource early.

Is it possible to make Tributes no longer remove quests? I think that the loss of influence is enough, with the rewards as low as they are now.

I'd do that globally, and then change authority's tribute policy to give +25% yields to the base of the tribute. (So if normally you would take 15% of max yields, you would get 40%.)

If I'm missing some reason we seemed to run tributes into the ground I'd be willing to hear it, and if we're happy with them being so crap, then why does authority still have a policy based on them?

tribute was made easier but with fewer yields. I think the simple feedback is that the yield reduction was too great...so it’s a simple numbers tweak, which I’m hoping we see in the next version

 

[InkAxis]

I feel like there could be an interesting solution in addition to buffing yields. What if something was added to the tribute policy that encouraged you to have a couple of allied CS and a couple of enemies? So if you have two CS on your continent, you could bully one and ally the other. That way you get the bonus of both alliances and tribute. Obviously the policy would also buff general tribute somehow, but it would also add this dynamic of a few CS that encourage the major civ to bully their enemies. I don't know exactly how to implement it, but I have two ideas.

Idea 1: CS can ask for a 3rd quest, that quest being to bully another CS. This way, CS will encourage the player to bully more often, but without overriding the normal quests. So this allows normal quests to stay while adding a bonus. I think this would make gameplay more interesting as you're like a assasin for hire, being hired by the CS to bully their enemies.

Idea 2: some sort of influence bonus for bullying, with CS that you haven't tributed yet. This option is quite obtuse but I think it would work also, essentially creating that ally-enemy divide.

I honestly don't know if these are good ideas, I'm just spitballing. But I think that normal tribute should just be buffed with slightly better yields than currently. But the tribute policy should provide a unique spin on tributing. I think it has a lot of potential, it doesn't have to be my idea but just something less one dimensional than it is currently.

 

[tothePAIN]

I'm going to chime in here and say that authority is severely weakened by the changes to tribute. It's only useful for one, maybe two rounds of tribute now. The yields are puny. I only tribute because I'm trying to get to the third authority policy so that I can go to war and receive culture and science from conquering and founding cities. The gold yields later aren't worth tributing - better to just go for the city state quests.

Tributing used to be a mechanic with worthwhile rewards. Now its meh.