Played one full game and one up until end of exploration now. The first was my usual, pre-1.2.5 strategy of playing at - or just above - the settlement cap, getting at least 3 cities in antiquity and 7 in exploration, carried into modern. The second was trying to go tall and stay way under the limit - 3 cities, 11 towns feeding them - to set up a Qajar game for modern. A few observations:
Positives
* As expected, the UI improvements are big step in the right direction.
* I like the global production cost increase for each new city you create. Even if you know you will want more cities at some point, the answer to "when?" is no longer "as early as you can". That's great.
* The change to skills is fantastic, and how it should have been from the start - some decent upgrades along the way, but diminished past the first few points, with the infinite node now being just a little bit extra, rather that the one you try to reach ASAP. Mixing and matching trees feels much better as a result, and the yields don't swing as wildly depending on your future tech/future civic luck.
* The change to city-states is even better. It's no longer the wrong play to spend your initial influence on anything other than a scientific IP (and that alone is already a massive win). On the whole, the extra power they give is now meaningful, but not overwhelmingly so. You still want multiples, but you no longer need them all, and you no longer need them as early as possible. The individual games feel far more varied as a result.
* On the whole, exploration feels much better to play now. Neither of my two games were spent spamming walls and merchants past turn 60 and waiting for it to end. Start of modern feels a little better, too. I'm still well ahead in both games, but the lead is not quite as unassailable, which makes it feel like there's bit more to do; and with fewer infinite yield multipliers, the benefits of your picked civilization are more pronounced. Big win all around.
Needs further look
* The warehouse building reward from city-states becomes the new default best pick - and it's strong enough to make getting one of science, culture and economy city-state early the new default best strategy. From exploration onward, it's lots of yields for free versus a bit of yields in exchange for production or growth. It needs a nerf; either have it apply to only one building type (i.e. culture on granaries, science on sawmills, gold on brickyards), or have it only apply in either towns or cities. Otherwise, the alternatives are all inferior (except maybe the tile improvement if you care about the yields in the next era more than the current one).
* The baseline antiquity production costs for buildings are too high now. The era felt just right before, since you didn't have your rural populations or skill point multipliers in place yet. You already had to specialise your cities, with early buildings taking a while to build, and only speeding up by the end of the era. Unlike exploration and modern, it didn't need slowing down.
Didn't really change much
* I don't think the new city states created any new strategies, really. Influence is always good, so I will grab the tile improvement for it when I can. Happiness is still a meaningless yield beyond antiquity (unless you played Maurya and can convert it into something useful), so I won't get out of my way to grab any of it. Food is fine. I don't mind those two new types being here, but they feel like the least impactful part of the patch. I'm not excited to see any of them, and I doubt they will bring any lapsed players back. I'd rather the balance focus stayed on tweaking what's here already, rather than adding even more moving parts.
Negatives
* The one obvious misfire is the scaling building cost within the city. It very quickly outpaces the penalty for converting another town into city, which leads to a few very odd, and likely untintended consequences. First and worst; if the extra 10% per city was meant to reward tall play, the scaling cost within the city pushes you towards playing as wide as you can even harder than before. In my 3-city game, I converted couple extra towns late in the era for couple more unique Abbasid districts, and with barely any setup they were outproducing the original three cities. But the weirdness doesn't stop there - partway through exploration, building a late wonder was taking fewer turns than building a temple would. And the building costs at the start of modern were bizarrely high in my first game, since it clearly counts the obsolete buildings. That meant that my most productive city was a newly converted town with basically nothing in it, handily beating my very first capital.
I think this needs a fundamental revisit, but the two quick suggestions I'd make is:
- reward overbuilding in your old cities; if the obsolete buildings count towards maximum, suppress that penalty completely when you overbuild - so creating new urban tiles will still be expensive, but overbuilding an old city will at least feel no worse than starting a new one from scratch
or, better yet
- rather than scaling the penalty for number of buildings within city, apply a more aggressive scaling for duplicates of the same building (completed or in progress to avoid cheesing); make it so the meaningful choice is which city should hold your first guild hall or inn, rather than deciding if it's better off to just skip it alltogether so you can spam academies faster everywhere. If the objective was to specialise your towns more, nothing in the current system rewards it.
On the whole, massive improvement, though, and I hope they continue in this direction. I am looking forward to my modern game with Qajar, which is a nice change from playing through that era on autopilot.
So yes, that seems to be a general problem (independent factors like game speed or continuing old games) and as you said, it is sad that this slipped through QA (especially as it is not the first issue with resources not giving the intended boni due to a bug)
