Civ7 stacking bonuses break the game

[SupremacyKing2]

The stacking bonuses are OP. Marbozir decided to spam culture as fast as possible. He was producing over 400 culture by turn 37. He completed the entire civics tree in under 50 turns in the Exploration Age!

And in this game by "One More Turn", he produced +159.7 food per turn in a city that it caused an overflow bug where food needed for next pop went negative causing the city to never grow.

 

[Xyael]

Having 1000 culture turn 50 is actually the norm for Majapahit and Hawai'i (from Aksum)

 

[Acken]

Worth noting that it is on Online speed.
But yeah this is bound to happen if you sprinkle +X% bonuses everywhere.

+X% bonuses are typically bad when too numerous in strategy games and should be scarce for more predictable effects. The reason is simple. Since it acts as a multiplier of the form base*bonus its derivative or incremental value depends on the base and not on the bonus itself (contrary to base + bonus form). Therefore as a designer it is very hard to know how strong the bonus will be and how much it will actually give because it implies you know what will be the base when that bonus is used. Extra bad if those multiple multipliers are compounded rather than added.

 

[Lord Lakely]

Yes, that online speed thing is an important accolade. Still, that is a massive amount of culture by Turn 100 on regular speed.

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

He also started off with 9 Wildcard Attribute Points using an Advanced Start, I'd be curious to see if he could replicate it starting in Antiquity.

 

[Marbozir]

I actually had an overflow bug (or whatever it was) while doing a test run for this, where my culture went from 1000-something per turn down to 22 per turn. It did "fix itself" pretty quickly, but it was still slightly concerning.

Edit: If I started in Antiquity Age, I could almost certainly do better than this, since I could then optimize the entire Antiquity Age with this strategy in mind, get golden age amphitheaters, some ageless tile improvements from suzerain bonuses, etc.
As for the wildcard attribute points, keep in mind Battuta gives 2 extra points per age. So you'll have 4 extra wildcard points basically at the start of exploration age just for playing him. He's going to be very good for many different strategies that utilize attribute bonuses.

 

[Lord Lakely]

I'm wondering if there's any use to stacking that much Culture? Like, you need it for your uniques, and it's good to know you can stack it (not irrelevant in multiplayer), but the age system nerfs Culture and Science by a great deal, and advances your Crisis faster.

Hell, even in Marbozir's vid, he comfortably sits at less than 100 Science and is perfectly fine because he has enough Influence to buy off Denunciations, and enough Happiness to get Celebration after Celebration.

What I'm saying is that it's arguably more interesting to see if Production or Influence can be stacked in a similar way Culture and Food can be, because that could result in some absolutely broken filth.

 

[Marbozir]

I'm wondering if there's any use to stacking that much Culture?

There isn't, no. It was more of a proof of concept kind of thing, to showcase what's possible.
And yes, you can do something similar with Food, Happiness, etc. My most played leader by far at the moment, is Ashoka World Renouncer for exactly this reason - with him, all buildings get +1 happiness adjacency for all improvements.

Edit: I just got confirmation Future Tech and Future Civic is meant to be repeatable, and the fact it wasn't in my game, is a bug.

 

[Nikolai II]

New games are prone to imbalance, a game company, however large, will have a dozen, perhaps even a hundred, of QA, I dunno the number. But whatever they have, compared to a million or more sales, it pales in comparison. As such, I expect balance issues like this, but I trust Firaxis to fix it as it appears.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

Does having that much culture reduce the number of turn significantly?

 

[Unaha-Closp]

So it's not like Civ 6 where you can repeat the future techs/civics is you have daft amounts of science/culture? It being named 'future' in the trees, even in the antiquity age, had me assuming that was the case.

 

[uppi]

Once overflow bugs are patched out (hopefully soon), how much do these strategies really break the game? Amassing a huge amount of culture and flying through the civics trees sure is fun, but it looks like a more balanced approach would have been a more successful strategy.

 

[cabelhigh12]

One thing I hope the per-Age objectives will help with is more diverse win conditions beyond 'get the largest number the fastestest'. Since you can only end the gsme in the Modern age, I guess we'll have to see how big of an effect these early game exploits have on the late gsme victory

 

[JNR13]

Were mementos affecting this? They're kinda meant to break the game.

 

[AriochIV]

Repeatable stacking +% bonuses is pretty ridiculous.

 

[Taefin]

I’m less concerned with culture and science numbers getting so high. It might simulate being a civ that is advanced for its time, but then age transitions represent global breakthroughs that spread across the world (so that one civ isn’t using jet bombers against knights). And ostensibly this comes at the cost of other yields (I haven’t watched a broken yield video yet, not wanting strategy/synergy spoilers).