Yzman
Deity
Its interesting because now Carthage will actually have MORE ways to slot relics than a typical civ no?
Civ Discussion - Carthage
- Thread starter bengalryan9
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Its interesting because now Carthage will actually have MORE ways to slot relics than a typical civ no?
sixty4half
I drink and I know things
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Everyone will have access to Urban Centers as a town specialization
Sagax
Emperor
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Yes, but Carthage also gets slots from Trade Outposts after you research their final civic.
On paper, if we just count all the possible sources of slots - then yes.
Whether it’s practically useful remains to be seen - for example, we don’t know if Urban Districts will also allow building Academies (3 more slots), or it’s limited to Libraries only.
bengalryan9
Emperor
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My guess is no... I don't think Urban Centers will be able to buy academies, and any town that is an urban center loses Carthage's potential extra codex slots from being trading posts. if you make every town an urban center with a library, maybe you could match the average civ for slots (but do you really want *every* town to be an urban center?).
Yzman
Deity
So they make some trading towns, some urban centers and now they have more towns that can build libraries than others have cities than can.
Except the others can make their towns urban centers, as well as having a few cities to build academies.
bengalryan9
Emperor
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The settlement cap is still a thing so it's not like Carthage is going to be at an advantage in empire size, and while Carthage may have more towns every other civ has more cities and thus more libraries and academies. Plus it's not like urban centers are unique to Carthage - every other civ can use them too.
tedhebert
Deity
Unfortunately, this is bugged since last patch ! I just played antiquity with Carthage, and researched that civic, then switched all my towns to Trade outposts, and the slot for codex in those towns never showed up ! Looked it up on reddit, and it's been reported as a bug since last patch
stealth_nsk
Deity
Several thing here. Carthage produces double settlers, which means it could pop settlements faster. Also, Carthage is on the upper end for settlement cap as it gets +2 from civics. Other than that, Carthage usually produces a lot of money, making it easy to buy those things in towns. Finally, Academy is a pretty late building, so it doesn't affect science as much as libraries.
What really hinders Carthage is that you usually wants your antiquity towns to grow and if specialize them early, you'll get your capital bumped enormously, but towns themselves will remain undeveloped. On the other hand, maybe it's not that bad, as you could start actively using specialists right in antiquity and get science from them.
bengalryan9
Emperor
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Well it's not really about the science, it's about the codex slots... the original post this was in response to suggested that Carthage would now have more codex slots than any other civ. A city with a library and an academy has 5 slots. Carthage is going to need three towns, all with an urban center specialization and a library, to beat that. And sure, colonists can help with that, but all I'm saying is that I don't think Carthage has any real advantage in terms of codex slots with the upcoming changes to urban centers.
stealth_nsk
Deity
Placing codices for science victory is not a problem at all. You need to place 10 for maximum reward, which means the city plus 5 towns. In my latest Carthage game I let my towns grow till near end, and then just converted them to trade posts.
In that game I was able to rush through science tree with city-states. Without it, Carthage would need to rely more on urban centers.
That is one thing, with Urban centers (2 slots) Carthage’s ability is a worse form of it
For science victory
urban center:
+Science output
+2 slots
-must buy Library per settlement
Carthage civic
+available at no extra cost per settlement
-requires civic research
-only 1 slot
Basically Urban Centers takes Cathage's civic and gives every civ a (slightly better) version of it.
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bengalryan9
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Again, that's not what I'm saying.
A poster earlier in the thread suggested Carthage would have more codex slots than any other civ in the game. I disagree. That's all. It's not about whether or not they can get enough to finish the science legacy path, which clearly Carthage is already more than capable of doing. My original point was just that no, an urban center buff doesn't really give them any advantage here.
I agree with those who think Carthage isn't among the top civilizations of Antiquity, but it's still fun to play due to its unique features. It has quite a few drawbacks, many of which have already been discussed, but for me, there's also the loss of the option to launch with multiple cities in the Age of Exploration. From my point of view, this is aggravated because it's not easy to start with 3,000 gold to convert towns into cities and produce or buy some ships in the firt turns . Although Carthage generates a decent amount of gold per turn, it would like to spend more than it earns. This is necessary to have unique districts before the end of the Age (and with Augustus, monuments), Numandian cavalry, etc. but it has a negative impact at the beginnig of the next Age. The option of gold academies isn't viable either. Strong points have already been discussed, such as the settlement limit, which can easily be brought to 13 at the start of the Age of Exploration, or the unique districts that persist, but the drawbacks are just as obvious.
MagicCuboid
Chieftain
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All this discussion about Codices is making me feel like the game should be much more stringent with legacy reward selection. If we only got to select rewards from one chosen path, no one would care how many Codices Carthage could slot and we could all move on with our lives lol.
Is anyone else finding that Carthage has been noticably weakened by the production cost changes in 1.2.5? I was expecting to have a pretty good time, now that the all-city meta has gone away, but if anything, the impact felt more pronounced with them than with any other civ. Their big strength before was that you could really get an extremely strong capital. With the changes, the costs scale drastically - far more aggresively than the costs of getting a second or third city on.
I had to sacrifice more of my gold on early unit buying, just because there wasn't any production to spare in the capital. I also didn't get anywhere near producing everything I wanted, because the late building costs were insane - and that's despite only finishing two wonders (and getting beaten to three other). The disappearance of gold & silver discount makes Numidian Cavalry a very expensive affair and - on top of that - the scaling building costs also increase the overall price of completing the unique district in towns.
All in all, this was the worst antiquity era I've had since 1.2.5, and reaffirmed to me the building cost penalties - as they stand now - are punishing tall play and rewarding wide. I think Carthage needs some buffs to offset that; either partial suppression to the scaling cost, or some boost to gold generation to handle the higher prices.
I had to sacrifice more of my gold on early unit buying, just because there wasn't any production to spare in the capital. I also didn't get anywhere near producing everything I wanted, because the late building costs were insane - and that's despite only finishing two wonders (and getting beaten to three other). The disappearance of gold & silver discount makes Numidian Cavalry a very expensive affair and - on top of that - the scaling building costs also increase the overall price of completing the unique district in towns.
All in all, this was the worst antiquity era I've had since 1.2.5, and reaffirmed to me the building cost penalties - as they stand now - are punishing tall play and rewarding wide. I think Carthage needs some buffs to offset that; either partial suppression to the scaling cost, or some boost to gold generation to handle the higher prices.
disjointaccount
Warlord
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Yeah, I've been finding the production cost changes are just a bit more punishing than feels right for tall generally. I think in concept it's a fantastic change to pace the age a bit better, but if there's no difference between how tall vs. wide empires are affected, it just disproportionately hurts tall builds, where it's more important to get buildings online sooner in a given city because that build has more of its eggs in the basket of that city.
Either the scaling needs to vary based on your number of cities, or there needs to be some way for towns to help cities make things faster. There are a lot of kind of abstract ways the latter already happens (towns give gold which can buy buildings, the food from towns gives more pop which can be assigned to work production improvements or as specialists in a production building) but in practice they don't feel super impactful (buildings' gold costs relative to towns' gold production makes purchasing a pretty inefficient option, the production offered from an improvement isn't really enough to offset the cost increases, and assigning pop to a production building requires you to have build the production building in the first place, which is what we're struggling with doing). These are somewhat blanket statements and I think the issue is a little more multifaceted than this but I've played enough tall and wide games since the change to know tall feels bad.
I keep going back to the same thought - building a 5th building in a city shouldn't increase the cost of that building by 20%, building a fifth Library in your empire should increase the cost of that Library. I'm not diversifying my cities any more than I used to, if anything, I do that less. At increased costs, production, science and culture are the only thing I need to build - I can get food, gold and happiness elsewhere. Make it a choice between 3 turn market and a 5 turn library, and it becomes a different conversation.
disjointaccount
Warlord
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Spot on. I think in a perfect world tall and wide should be equally viable (the obvious use-case toll-up that comes to mind is if my adjacencies are good, I want to go tall to pump up my specialists, whereas I'll go wide if my adjacencies aren't so good or if I've acquired a lot of settlements through conquest), so the question really is:
When I've built one library for 4 science, do I want to get my next 4 science from building another library or making my existing library better?
I'm fine with there being tradeoffs either way, but the overall viability should be about the same. As it stands, there's no drawback to building a second (or third, or fourth, or fifteenth) library, but the more I try to make my existing library better, the harder it gets.
There's a risk of punishing wide too much with increasing cost per type of building constructed, but definitely something along those lines.
Or (random half-baked idea that just popped into my head): what if towns' warehouse buildings gave some fraction of their bonuses to their connected cities? Or if there was a specific town focus for doing so? So the more towns you have, the better your tall cities can snowball into their higher tier buildings. And wide cities can still spam their lower-tier buildings to compensate.
The issue I have with buffing warehouse buildings is that warehouse buildings are already must-have. Low cost, don't trigger or get affected by the scaling, get buffed by expansionist attribute, get buffed by all types of city-states. They got two massive bumps in 1.2.5 - by making them relatively cheaper (as everything else got more expensive but they didn't) and by removing all other city-state options that were more powerful than yields on warehouse buildings. There isn't a scenario where getting them is not worth it, so giving them more yields would just be a further yield bloat.
I think they just need to make current production cost the norm at around 5 cities, and make building faster if you have fewer cities.
