[NFP] Cultural Victory by Monopoly: Modify or Nerf? (poll & discussion)

[CromulentRomulan]

I’m starting this poll to see if there is appetite for retaining the new way of winning cultural victory introduced by Monopolies and Corporations (albeit with some changes) or if people would prefer that Monopolies provided a multiplier bonus in the realms of 25 - 50% (bringing it inline with the Computers and Environmentalism civics, Social Media policy card and trade route bonuses). I think this is worth gauging because the expectation around this mode appears to be that the current modifier is a mistake and will be reverted. I want this poll to explore the potential in what we have been delivered. I invite you to reply with an explanation of why you favour one option or the other.

For me I think the existing state of play should be retained but gated. This is because this is the game mode most likely to offer a different route to victory of all the introduced game modes, so I am in favour of retaining the possibility of winning through monopoly but adding additional criteria for the very large tourism modifiers to trigger. I wish that the team had opted to create a category of economic tourism analagous to religious tourism but it seems unlikely this will happen.

For those who haven't followed the other thread it appears the formulae for monopoly tourism is:

5% times the number of improved nodes times the number of civilizations who do not control an instance of that resource.

In this post 2 uncontested monopolies of 11 nodes added up to a plus 500% tourism modifier.

I would favour retaining the potential to get really big tourism numbers but instead move the tourism output into the Products. This would mean that securing a monopoly doesn’t magnify the tourism secured from Great Works, Wonders etc (this would enable to play the mode with cultural victory enabled). It would also make the victory require more effort than just holding land. I think this could be accomplished by tethering the production cost of creating a product such that it scales in relation to the number of luxury nodes improved. Higher production cost products would have more base tourism associated with it. This would give the player a decision to make as only 5 products can be produced per corporation - do they create many low tourism products to boost the economy or improve many resources to secure one or two 500 tourism generating products. Moving the massive tourism into a great work would also (in theory) open this route to victory to espionage counterplay were the developers open to making changes to where a spy can execute Great Work Heist. At minimum Sabotage production could also be used.

The trickiest part of what I think would be best is that I think the Products tourism output should still remain linked to number of nodes controlled even on completion. This would be to open up the option of using military force to break the effect of a monopoly

 

[InsidiousMage]

Nerf. Accidental wins are just really bad game design and I shouldn't have to turn win conditions off to play with an optional game mode.

 

[Datgingah]

It has to be merged at least a little bit - it makes the rest of the tourism modifiers functionally useless. But I think changing the way it’s given could help some - I like the idea of products helping produce the modifiers.

I also definitely think monopoly bonuses should only be available to corporations, industry’s getting it is counter-intuitive

 

[kryat]

I think it’s fine as is (though I agree that the AI does seem to be in need of tweaking to ensure they’re improving resources). It’s not an accidental win if you’re actively settling and improving large numbers of resources, which is what’s required to obtain the large tourism multipliers. In a lot of cases, the tourism is low, but the multiplier is high. That’s fine. “Buying your blue jeans and listening to your music” has always been in the spirit of a cultural victory. If you can get large tourism and large multipliers, that’s also fine, good on you. In none of these cases did you win on accident, you won because you did something.

In my experience CV wins typically take 200-400 turns, and I haven’t heard much about people winning far outside those bounds. If you’re lucky enough to be in a game absent serious competitors and you’re in a well suited civ, you can clear it around industrial even pre-corporations. In other games, it turns into a slog if you’re unwilling to “diminish the competition”.

The formula also seems fine. The bonus being proportional to copies you have ensures more difficult monopolies are more valuable and being proportional to number of civs in the game makes sense for similar reasons. The “5” base also seems fine, since multipliers of ~100%-200% are pretty typical, so usual monopoles aren’t THAT far outside of bounds. The x1400% seems to be more edge case than anything, but even so, there’s other things in the game that can reach that level of absurdity. I’ve been able to game the system to get 14x as many GPPs as other civs, if that’s my goal, just as an example.

 

[InsidiousMage]

It’s not an accidental win if you’re actively settling and improving large numbers of resources, which is what’s required to obtain the large tourism multipliers.

It's an accidental win if you are going for a science victory and get a culture victory without trying the turn before you unlock Offworld Mission. I shouldn't have to not properly play the game, settling wide and improving resources, in order to avoid a win I don't want. That's the problem, not that you win to fast but that you can get a win you were not even attempting to get. It's bad game design.

 

[Hellenism Salesman]

As someone who hasn't played enough with it to gage for myself, the question I would ask is this: What is the effort required to win Cultural Victory through primarily monopolies? Now that you have that answered in your head, ask yourself if the amount of effort required to win Culture through monopolies is greater than or less than the effort required to do so the normal way. If the answer is less than, then it needs a nerf. If it's greater than, then it needs a buff.

This is my systematic way of gaging if an alternative playstyle is truly just an alternative, or better or worse than the other methods, and I'm sure it could be applied to other balance questions, if need be.

 

[InsidiousMage]

What is the effort required to win Cultural Victory through primarily monopolies?

Depends on the continents honestly. The more continents you have easy access to the easier you can win without trying. On multiple playthroughs from before M&C came out I was the only person to have to cities on a continent and that's a massive bonus just through RNG. Nothing wrong with that per se but the tourism modifiers are so strong that that alone is basically enough to guarantee an effortless win.

 

[Yig]

I think the biggest issue is you can just do both. Making improvements and building cultural districts and buildings/theming great works are not mutually exclusive. Do both and the cultural victory becomes monstrous.

For me personally, id just rather the mode have multipliers more akin to other similar effects in the game. Feels like you really dont need a trade route to other civs if managing them is annoying (because the game doesnt prompt you when a deal ends) if you can get 500% instead of 25% or whatever it is.

 

[UWHabs]

The simple changes I would make:
-Gold and tourism bonuses from monopolies do not appear until you have a corporation on a resource. Or, arguably, you could do something where gold bonuses from monopolies unlock at Mercantilism (the same time as the resource screen updates), but perhaps tourism should still not appear until you have a corporation on a resource.
-Tourism bonus should scale such that having 6/6 gives a bonus perhaps slightly larger than what computers gives, but able to grow larger. So probably something like each civ without a copy of the resource takes the 5% * # resources tourism modifier against them. So in that case, each civ would take a 30% increase to tourism against them. But perhaps that bonus should grow larger if you 1. have a 100% monopoly (so that it becomes, say, 10% per resource) 2. have produced Products. So if you have produced all 5 products for a resource, then sure, multiply out that bonus more. So in this case, in theory, a 6/6 monopoly with all 5 products would produce a 10% (monopoly) * 6 (# resrouces) * 6 (1+#products) = 360% tourism bonus against that civ, which is probably close to what the current modifiers can yield. But at least in this case, it requires both a corporation and 5 products produced, so has a physical cost to achieve, and isn't simply something that comes for free from a bunch of settlers and builders without even needing to found a corporation.

As to which poll option this counts as, I don't know.

 

[Shadowstrike]

I lean towards nerf (by removing the double multiplying of tourism output by number of civs), but I could also see the current situation being kept, but you need to have a corporation to get a monopoly (which makes it expensive in a different way).

 

[kryat]

I think the biggest issue is you can just do both. Making improvements and building cultural districts and buildings/theming great works are not mutually exclusive. Do both and the cultural victory becomes monstrous.

For me personally, id just rather the mode have multipliers more akin to other similar effects in the game. Feels like you really dont need a trade route to other civs if managing them is annoying (because the game doesnt prompt you when a deal ends) if you can get 500% instead of 25% or whatever it is.

To me though, this doesn’t seem that different from production, gold, and science being linked. If you haven’t built massive industrial complexes or recruited the right great engineers, the space race projects can take many, many turns to finish. Having a strong production core can shave 50-100 turns off a science victory.

Comparatively, CVs without C&Ms have had just the faith route to win faster, and even then rock bands were relatively slow. But what if you didn’t want to build holy sites? This gives a nice alternative where settling and maintaining is a new branch.

The thing I think everyone is underestimating: how much would it change if not only you had the 300% multiplier, but so did the AI if they developed their resources?

 

[Yig]

That is true. They may have mainly tested it from a pvp standpoint with people using it's systems against each other and the person with the biggest set of monopolies would have a slight edge rather than the only edge. But it does make it a sort of mandatory thing for atleast one other person to counter you as the normal cultural setup required anyway. It just creates two mandatory counters rather than one. Hell, on PS4 when you reach mercantilism the UI bugs out, hides your % monopoly and number of resources behind your civ icon and you can't see anything other than if you do or dont have a "opoly". Reported it to 2k support and they kept asking me repeat the same details I put in the original submission. That support is absolutely useless. So hopefully when they release a patch for this someone else cared enough to repeat the issue to support 7 times for them to actually put it through their systems cus I dont have the time for that crap. Sorry for the side rant. lol

Moderator Action: Appreciate your frustration but please mind your language --NZ
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

I think ultimately its fine though that its a mandatory thing you need to do just like any other of the game modes. If you are the only guy not using heroes or a society then you are going to be hurting compared to everyone else as well. Which feels fine. My next game with my friends I'll try C&M with them and see how it feels when everyone is engaged with the system.

 

[walkerjks]

As someone who hasn't played enough with it to gage for myself, the question I would ask is this: What is the effort required to win Cultural Victory through primarily monopolies? Now that you have that answered in your head, ask yourself if the amount of effort required to win Culture through monopolies is greater than or less than the effort required to do so the normal way. If the answer is less than, then it needs a nerf. If it's greater than, then it needs a buff.

This is my systematic way of gaging if an alternative playstyle is truly just an alternative, or better or worse than the other methods, and I'm sure it could be applied to other balance questions, if need be.

Essentially none*. I mean, sure, you can actually spend a lot of effort settling specific areas in order to get more monopolies, but in my most recent game as Amanitore (not a strong cultural civ), I played normally and settled normally and ended up with 10 cities, but controlled 5 monopolies (4x 3/4, 1x 2/3) for a +350% tourism bonus and a turn 141 win (on deity, nonetheless) with 192 tourism/turn coming from 2 music, 6 art, 19 books, 4 heroic epics, and 3 regular relics (Kandy was next door and old world obelisks just happen to have room). The only artifact I had pulled at that point was one of my own heroic relics.

Turn 141 is pretty messed up for Amanitore on deity. I'm guessing I would have won around turn 210 on the same map without corporations mode on.

*Once I saw I had 2/4 on marble and saw a marble in the 3rd tier of one of my late cities, I bought two tiles to reach it and grab the last monopoly. That was all the effort I specifically put into getting monopolies. Of course without that effort, I still had +315% tourism modifier.

Nerf it. Even though I like my culture games to be shorter, but the big issue with the formula is the opposing civs without the resource multiplier. Just reducing the 5% in the formula to 1% and leaving the other two modifiers alone would make it a useful bonus without being ridiculous. My 5 monopolies at +70% is still huge, but unlikely to lead to accidental cultural wins.

Oh, and I should note that I didn't build a single commercial district or harbor in the game (I typically build these post-archeologists). I was a long ways off from having a corporation or product. Or really any economy at all with my single trade route. So I can understand the argument to redistribute it to something like product (though that might just cause me to abuse it with Mali rather than everyone).

 

[Archon_Wing]

They could cut it to 1/4 and it'd be rather strong.

Problem with monoplies is that they're pretty passive. All you need to is improve the luxuries and there they are.

 

[Abaxial]

If you use this game mode, this is your economic victory - live with it.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

Playing with monopolies is bad enough.
Don't gripe about fast wins if you are combining game modes with Heroes, SS and Monopoly.
lol

 

[tedhebert]

I personally think the mode is fine; It's really only the monopoly bonus that makes no sense. The rest is great ! So, severely nerf the monopoly bonus, and if possible make the AI use corporations, leave the rest as is

 

[CromulentRomulan]

As to which poll option this counts as, I don't know.

I'd consider the solution you outlined as Retain and redistribute, which is the option I voted for. I agree that the very high modifiers would be more welcome if you had to expend resources additional to simply settlers and builder charges.

I think the accidental Cultural Victory complaints are less valid than the fact that combining monopolies with a standard cultural victory path makes the latter extremely cheap. This is the main reason I wish they'd gone the whole hog and created economic tourism analagous to religious tourism. If you're going dom, diplo or science there's rarely any reason to improve multiple copies of a resource outside of the early game where it can net you some extra gold. That said I do think it is indicative of not fully thought through game design.

So far it seems like the consensus is overwhelmingly in favour of nerfing it. I think having the option to drive home a cultural victory through corporations and products is a preferable victory path to using rock bands (and opens up potential for more interesting counterplay than that route to CV), so that's another reason I hope it isn't nerfed. Also another poster is correct, this is the closest thing to an economic victory that we are going to get.

People have also brought up the possibility that the game mode might change substantially were the AI to improve their resources more, hopefully this is the lowest hanging fruit that any patch to this mode addresses before throwing the baby out with the bathwater

 

[Kotofei]

1) Firaxis makes new entertainingly OP feature
2) Many people enjoy it
3) The peanut gallery howls for the nerf bat
4) Some folks make it part of their regular game, others don't, but everyone moves on with their lives one way or another.
5) Repeat

 

[Shadowstrike]

The issue is mainly that the formula for the bonus ("5% times the number of improved nodes times the number of civilizations who do not control an instance of that resource") is then applied individually to the tourism to each other civ you've met, which increases its effect by a factor of how many other civs there are in the game. It seems like the intended implementation is for the multiplier to be the first part only (""5% times the number of improved nodes"), and have the second part identify the civs it applies to, just like how the other existing tourism modifiers work (shared governments, open borders, active trade route, etc.) That just seems like a bug to fix, not a design nerf.