Cultural Exchanges

[Jorlem]

Would it be possible to implement some sort of cultural exchange mechanic? I'm imagining something along the lines of research agreements, but for culture points.

Does anyone else think something like this would be useful or interesting?

 

[Ahriman]

I think culture should be something you generate on your own, not something you get from other countries. If anything, importing culture from other countries arguably suppresses generation of your own.

 

[Nitro2985]

I think culture should be something you generate on your own, not something you get from other countries. If anything, importing culture from other countries arguably suppresses generation of your own.

I disagree. The US's culture was entirely a mashup of the immigrants that came here. However it was in combining these different cultures together that we get a bunch of new and interesting stuff that we call the "American" culture we see today.

While cultures can be supplanted, more often then not, the introduction of a new culture leads to a blending of the old and new (much like language) leading to an acceleration of new cultural innovations.

 

[Atlas627]

I disagree. The US's culture was entirely a mashup of the immigrants that came here. However it was in combining these different cultures together that we get a bunch of new and interesting stuff that we call the "American" culture we see today.

While cultures can be supplanted, more often then not, the introduction of a new culture leads to a blending of the old and new (much like language) leading to an acceleration of new cultural innovations.

While it creates a new culture (and therefore does not 'subtract' from culture) it also creates a new national identity. As such, if you want to have Romans get French culture, the new set would be neither Roman nor French. So what would we do with this in-game?

We want the different mechanics of the game to actually be unique and change the way you play the game. Culture is not meant to be like science.

 

[EsoEs]

I haven't thought out the deeper implications of the mechanic but on the surface it seems fun

 

[Jorlem]

Hmm...
The only other ideas that are jumping to mind involve getting limited access to each others unique stuff. The UA would probably be better, as it doesn't go obsolete.

Maybe once you start a cultural exchange, both Civs gain the effects of the other Civ's unique ability in addition to their own. It would probably be best for it to only last around 15-20 turns or so, and I'd limit it to those Civs that are very friendly, and only let a Civ initiate a cultural exchange with a specific Civ once per age. Maybe give the Great Artist the ability to start a half-length cultural exchange with any Civ that its owner isn't at war with. I don't know how much it should cost, but I think it should be at least twice that of a research agreement, off the top of my head. There should also be some boost to culture points while this is going on, or maybe unlocking policy trees that one Civ has that the other does not. Maybe make it easier to get a CE started with a Civ that has many of the same policies as you, but there would be more benefit in starting a CE with a Civ that is different from you.

How does that sound?

 

[tlaurila]

I fail to see a design goal here. Culture victories don't need to be made easier, do they? Neither does peaceniking. Culture Civs are already the most pacifist, since conquests don't really help you along to culture victory, so giving them more incentive to spread the global love doesn't seem necessary either.

As for spreading out UAs with Great Artists, it just sounds very complex a dynamic to put on top of the game, for no apparent purpose but more complexity? Great Artists sure could use some love, but I'm thinking it has to be something simpler than that.

 

[Jorlem]

I've always been rather dissatisfied with cultural victories in Civ 5. In Civ 4, the main four VCs (not counting score) could be broken down on a grid, with Offensive vs Unoffensive, and Insular vs Actively Involved, which might not be the best description. A tech victory would be Unoffensive and Insular, as it can be accomplished without impinging on another Civ's territory or ever being deeply involved with them. Domination would be offensive and actively involved, as it is obviously invading other territory, and requires interaction (via combat) with other Civs. Diplomacy is Unoffensive and Active, and Culture would be Offensive and Insular, as your territory overruns the other Civs' without requiring any in depth interaction.

In Civ 5, all that is left of culture's old method of offense is the culture bomb, which is rather boring. Culture's new VC is Unoffensive and Insular, like tech's VC still is. (The actual VC action is pretty much the same too. At least you need to do something after you build the UN. With tech and culture, you just need to unlock and build something, and building tech's spaceship is more fun than building culture's Utopia Project.) That's why my first thought was to follow tech's lead, but I agree with what GamerKG said, which is why I started trying to brainstorm ways in which to make it less like tech. Now that I've actually thought this all the way through, I can see that my second set of suggestions would shift it towards Diplomacy's space, when I should be trying to move it back towards offensive somehow. Anyone else have any ideas?

 

[Thalassicus]

One idea I saw in another thread is for each completed policy tree to unlock an independent "mini-project" of Utopia, and achieving Utopia requires building N mini-projects. I'd also like Diplomatic victory to be more involving than just accumulating a lot of gold.

Any significant change to victory conditions is a long-term thing, since it'd require game core access, but I do like brainstorming early.

 

[tlaurila]

I'd also like Diplomatic victory to be more involving than just accumulating a lot of gold.

Well, if the AIs would properly counter your ally-making with their own (usually very large) treasuries, it'd be quite involved already. To start with, they could go all out on diplo gold to nab CSs off of someone who has enough for Diplo win.

 

[Jorlem]

Well, for diplomacy, could the criteria for who the CS vote for be changed away from whoever they are currently allied with, to who they were most often allied with throughout the game? Give each CS an number of score counters, one for each Civ in a game, and add one point for each turn they spend as a friend to a Civ, and two or three points for each turn they are allied. Then, when the time comes to vote, they vote for whichever Civ has the highest point total with them.

As for the mini-utopia projects, I don't really like it. I think it sounds too similar to building the spaceship, and culture victories are already to much like science victories. As it stands, all but one of the current VC are fairly passive with regard to other Civs, and I think it would be nice to have some way of actually playing out your culture overwhelming other Civs, or have diplomatic possibilities beyond other Civs liking you more or less. Stuff like being able to break off trade deals if you are denounced, and that sort of thing. Even being able to buy individual hexes off another Civ would be a great step forward, as it would mean you aren't limited to war or culture bombs to get another Civ's territory.

 

[tlaurila]

Well, for diplomacy, could the criteria for who the CS vote for be changed away from whoever they are currently allied with, to who they were most often allied with throughout the game?

A CS alliance system where you'd be doing things to gradually increase your relation with CSs, as opposed to the current buying decreasing influence, sure would sound good to me. You'd still end up competing with other Civs as the major thing, but keeping and cultivating good relations for a long time would matter, not simply dumping huge wads of gold at the end.

It'd also be a huge undertaking to implement, however. Particularly to make the AI understand it.

 

[Jorlem]

A CS alliance system where you'd be doing things to gradually increase your relation with CSs, as opposed to the current buying decreasing influence, sure would sound good to me. You'd still end up competing with other Civs as the major thing, but keeping and cultivating good relations for a long time would matter, not simply dumping huge wads of gold at the end.

It'd also be a huge undertaking to implement, however. Particularly to make the AI understand it.

Well, does the AI currently understand the system to dump huge sums of money at the end, or does it go after CSs throughout the game? I'm fairly sure it tries to get CSs through the entire game, not just the end, so it would just be a matter of changing things on the CSs end. If those point tables I thought of earlier were added, then all you'd have to do is set it so all the things that add points to the friend/ally meter now also add the same amount of points to the voting score, except for gold donations. This would probably be easier to do than teach the AI to use a new CS system, as it wouldn't even need to know about the new system, as the same actions it should already be doing would add to the vote score.


Here's an idea that might make culture a bit more fun to play, even if it doesn't address the VC's problem of being too similar to science. You would have two culture scores, that would grow at the same rate, one for growth, the other for policies. Let's call them C(g) and C(p). C(p) would act the way culture does now, by controlling your policy tree growth. C(g), on the other hand, would be used to purchase hexes instead of gold. If you purchase an unowned hex, you would get it as normal and the C(g) would just vanish. However, if you used it to buy a hex from another Civ, that Civ would add the amount you paid to their C(p) total, but not their C(g) total. This way, you'd have to choose between expanding your territory and the AI getting policies sooner. This would also make the culture bomb a bit more interesting, as it won't seem as out of place. I'd also buff the culture bomb a bit, so you could 'buy' some number of hexes along your border for free, so long as they touch at least two of your current hexes, with the total number of hexes scaling with what age you are in.

 

[Atlas627]

Making culture VC different from tech sounds great to me! Since the science victory does have research agreements though, doesn't that make tech better when involved with other empires?

@Jorlem: I like the idea of actually making diplo VC about, well, diplomacy with the CSs instead of bribing. So recording overall friendliness seems good to me. And each turn you are at war is -1 to record. I don't think we should buy tiles with culture though, that is what gold is for.

What we could do to culture VC is change it back more toward CIV, so that you would want a few cities to be amazing, but I would rather not. The policies are cool, and tall empires should be a thing for all VC, and wide should be doable for culture as well.

I have an idea. How about we tie the culture VC to the Utopia Project, but that is buildable by everyone at a certain tech. Then every 20 turns from then on, the game identifies the 7 most cultured cities. If somebody has 4 or more of these cities, they win through culture.

 

[Nitro2985]

Making culture VC different from tech sounds great to me! Since the science victory does have research agreements though, doesn't that make tech better when involved with other empires?

@Jorlem: I like the idea of actually making diplo VC about, well, diplomacy with the CSs instead of bribing. So recording overall friendliness seems good to me. And each turn you are at war is -1 to record. I don't think we should buy tiles with culture though, that is what gold is for.

What we could do to culture VC is change it back more toward CIV, so that you would want a few cities to be amazing, but I would rather not. The policies are cool, and tall empires should be a thing for all VC, and wide should be doable for culture as well.

I have an idea. How about we tie the culture VC to the Utopia Project, but that is buildable by everyone at a certain tech. Then every 20 turns from then on, the game identifies the 7 most cultured cities. If somebody has 4 or more of these cities, they win through culture.

If you do that then you should remove or reduce the 7% increase in policy costs for each city. If policy acquisition is no longer tied to winning a cultural victory then there's really no reason to make keeping a small empire the only feasible to build out your policies (and honestly, the fact that a like 1/3 of the policies deal specifically with large empires, and are unattainable beyond the first couple of policies in each if you're going for a wide empire doesn't make much sense.)

If this change is made then the increase in policy costs from building additional cities should only serve to keep large empires from just getting every policy in the book by virtue of their greater cultural generation. It should be just as easy for a small empire to get policies as a large empire, or nearly so, to make the policy trees dealing with large empires more useful and attainable.

 

[Atlas627]

If you do that then you should remove or reduce the 7% increase in policy costs for each city. If policy acquisition is no longer tied to winning a cultural victory then there's really no reason to make keeping a small empire the only feasible to build out your policies (and honestly, the fact that a like 1/3 of the policies deal specifically with large empires, and are unattainable beyond the first couple of policies in each if you're going for a wide empire doesn't make much sense.)

If this change is made then the increase in policy costs from building additional cities should only serve to keep large empires from just getting every policy in the book by virtue of their greater cultural generation. It should be just as easy for a small empire to get policies as a large empire, or nearly so, to make the policy trees dealing with large empires more useful and attainable.

It currently is just as easy. The increase in cost is, on average, equal to the culture per city. At first it is less because your new city is less developed, but once it is fully developed it is actually easier wide.

 

[EsoEs]

It currently is just as easy. The increase in cost is, on average, equal to the culture per city. At first it is less because your new city is less developed, but once it is fully developed it is actually easier wide.

Yes, going wide will set you back culturally early, depending how wide you go it may or may not be enough to prevent you from pursuing a cultural victory. However, once your cities develop (specifically opera houses) you can pick up policies very quickly, maybe not enough to win a CV but you can pretty easily complete 4 trees with a few extra picks by the end of any given game.

 

[Nitro2985]

Isn't the 7% an ever accelerating thing? So it does (((base)x1.07)x.1.07)x1.07)
and so on and so on in with each new city?

So doesn't it rapidly outpace any sort of additional culture you might produce from a given city if you've reached, say, 15, 20, or 30 cities.

 

[Seek]

Isn't the 7% an ever accelerating thing? So it does (((base)x1.07)x.1.07)x1.07)
and so on and so on in with each new city?

So doesn't it rapidly outpace any sort of additional culture you might produce from a given city if you've reached, say, 15, 20, or 30 cities.

In general, yes, but it depends on many other factors such as how much culture is being produced by puppets, how focused your cities are on getting new culture buildings out, whether you have Organized Religion and/or Republic, etc. I've found that, like EsoEs, it's often possible to keep up a good rate of SP acquisition even with somewhat wide empires (around 10 non-puppet cities or so).

 

[Zaldron]

Isn't the 7% an ever accelerating thing? So it does (((base)x1.07)x.1.07)x1.07)
and so on and so on in with each new city?

So doesn't it rapidly outpace any sort of additional culture you might produce from a given city if you've reached, say, 15, 20, or 30 cities.

No, like (almost) every modifier in Civ, it's additive. 7%, 14%, 21% etc.