Culture Calibration Mod

[QES]

The primary purpose of revamping culture is to make it less focused on empire size. I don't think we're really planning on de-linking it from policies too much.

Oh, my mistake. I sorta love the policies, and i think they have greater potential than did civics, but as it stands, i miss civics. I never "switched" civics - so for me they're sorta similar at the moment, but civics seemed to have more power to them. I'd like policies to have that kind of bite - which should mean that non-culture-focused civs should have some access too. I really like the idea of giving freebies at era progression. It's not "too much" and it's not something that can be "sought." Progression happens naturally, and only tech changes it, which is pursued anyway.

However, if social policies are no longer the pervue of culture-whores exclusively (everybody get's a flavor), then culture should have other additional utiliy. Sure the culture-monger is going to have MORE social policies, but it takes away the exclusivity (which i like) from culture mongers. To pay culture-mongers for this, giving them some other utility to culture seems appropriate, hence my "boarders and attrition" idea.

Frankly, even my idea bores me a bit. While nice, it'd still be combat centric, when ideally culture would be another function entirely.


Perhaps part of the problem is the fact that the core of CIV is resource management, and the only way to apply those resources "against" opponents is to use military force. Economic and cultural starvation do not really work - since every civilization is self-sufficient. Creating economic, productive and cultural dependencies would change the dynamics of power.

Ideally, things should change around the late renaissance and into the industrial ages, when nation dependency becomes more crucially obvious.

Perhaps it's possible to have culture influence city-states and civilizations in some way? Give it a diplomatic facet? Another option is to revamp the renaissance and late-game policy tree's entirely, making them all about inter-dependence between states, and giving muscle to manipulate societies based on possession or lack there of of those policies.


If we want culture to have utility outside of pure resource manipulation (which in turn only becomes about military manipulation and technological dominance (which is itself, in turn, about military influence). We'd have to create forces that exist within empires that cannot be solved by the sword.

One answer is happiness. Happiness cannot (save one middling honor policy) be solved by soldiers. If happiness had differing and varied consequences, then the adverse and external manipulation of happiness would be a very viable tactic.

I said that I missed "Schism" in another thread somewhere. But I do genuinely miss the internal turmoil of older civ games. I think revolution and schism could be brought back, and culture could be a buffer against that possibility, or indeed, a weapon to encourage it in less refined lands.

The Culture-wars of Civ IV were amazing and dynamic, however culture itself was not a very precise tool. Since the core mechanics of CIV V err on the side of not reproducing those effects (the way tiles are gained prevents any kind of "culture-flipping") I wonder what other pursuits might be taken which would be as fun instead.

One subtle possibility, which I have no idea of the merits or possibility, is to give individual populations an "identity." This is, each citizen would identify themselves with either a nation, or city-state. This identity could change dependant on geographical proximity, trade and culture (mostly culture). High culture civs would have citizen of mostly their own people, and other civs might have many of their own citizens identifying themselves as outsiders.

Outsiders/Outlanders could produce more unhappiness - and possibly represent the need for courthouses or not. Courthouses could remove the penalty for having outlanders in a city. "Puppeting" could also remove the same penalty. (Thus maintaining that mechanic). Cities could be manually turned into puppets, if possible, so that outside cultural influence could be mitigated and unhappiness controlled.


This would be complex to implement, I think - but if possible, would make the game much more dynamic, and give cultural powerhouses a much more insidious means to influence the world.


EDIT/ADD: Oh and yes, take whatever ideas you want and disregard the others. Credit is unnecessary unless you desire to give it. You are doing much of the work, and I am just hopeful to get to play some of the ideas (and only then if they are fun.) So please do as you like.

 

[jwallstone]

One subtle possibility, which I have no idea of the merits or possibility, is to give individual populations an "identity." This is, each citizen would identify themselves with either a nation, or city-state.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this in an earlier Civ? Great posts by the way. Excellent and deep analysis.


Here are two additional ideas.

1) Change the mechanic of gaining policies so that the player actually gains a "Policy Point" or something when the culture bar fills up, which they can then save and spend at will.

This eliminates the incentive to hoard culture until something like Cristo Redentor can be built. The incentive then would be to spend it earlier for earlier benefits, but allows saving until a certain Era is reached to unlock more branches. This also removes serious exploits like attaining lots of culture as a big civ with many cities, then selling a bunch of cities and buying through the social policy trees with ridiculously low costs. This also eliminates any issue of attaining a policy, then gaining a city and suddenly not having enough culture (I'm not sure if this happens or if the game remembers the attainment).

2) Rather than increasing the total culture threshold of attaining the next policy, have the penalty from cities manifest as a % penalty to culture gain. I.e. , instead of adding 30%, it would reduce your total culture output by some %.

This also removes the issue of the "moving target" of attaining policies, which quite frankly makes no sense. Gaining one city suddenly devalues all the culture you've acquired until that point? Or losing a city and suddenly all the culture you've gained is far more valuable? It's a silly way to implement the mechanic. Reducing culture output achieves the same intended effect, but the player's completed progress is actually stable and can be counted on. They make slightly slower or faster progress from there on out, but their progress so far doesn't suddenly undergo historical revision. This is particularly frustrating in a growth phase of the game, where the target can keep moving so much that the player never attains a policy. Growth should have a penalty - future culture is reduced. But it shouldn't screw up your past culture. Also, people shouldn't start timing their expansions - that's just silly micro. I should also mention that razing a city adds it to your empire for a while, which can move the target when the policy normally would've been attained.

 

[QES]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this in an earlier Civ? Great posts by the way. Excellent and deep analysis.

Thank you. It was in an earlier iteration, but like so many things, I'm uncertain of what is transferable and what is not.

Here are two additional ideas.

1) Change the mechanic of gaining policies so that the player actually gains a "Policy Point" or something when the culture bar fills up, which they can then save and spend at will.


This eliminates the incentive to hoard culture until something like Cristo Redentor can be built. The incentive then would be to spend it earlier for earlier benefits, but allows saving until a certain Era is reached to unlock more branches. This also removes serious exploits like attaining lots of culture as a big civ with many cities, then selling a bunch of cities and buying through the social policy trees with ridiculously low costs. This also eliminates any issue of attaining a policy, then gaining a city and suddenly not having enough culture (I'm not sure if this happens or if the game remembers the attainment).

Not sure this is a genuine exploit. Only using Criso Redentor really has this impact, and that's a long, LONG wait for that pay off - which in a way is kind of a decent strategy. As for the "big cultured civ selling off cities" - i'm not sure any AI would ever do this, and players would not likely do this either, even if it is an exploit, Players are generally loathe to lose their precious and hard-fought-for cities.

2) Rather than increasing the total culture threshold of attaining the next policy, have the penalty from cities manifest as a % penalty to culture gain. I.e. , instead of adding 30%, it would reduce your total culture output by some %.

This also removes the issue of the "moving target" of attaining policies, which quite frankly makes no sense. Gaining one city suddenly devalues all the culture you've acquired until that point? Or losing a city and suddenly all the culture you've gained is far more valuable? It's a silly way to implement the mechanic. Reducing culture output achieves the same intended effect, but the player's completed progress is actually stable and can be counted on. They make slightly slower or faster progress from there on out, but their progress so far doesn't suddenly undergo historical revision. This is particularly frustrating in a growth phase of the game, where the target can keep moving so much that the player never attains a policy. Growth should have a penalty - future culture is reduced. But it shouldn't screw up your past culture. Also, people shouldn't start timing their expansions - that's just silly micro. I should also mention that razing a city adds it to your empire for a while, which can move the target when the policy normally would've been attained.

Except that the "moving target" is useful if policies are revamped because "lower" policies (those at the bottom of their tree) can be made much more powerful. If not progressively more expensive, it removes a bit of the "increasing potency" of high-requisite policies.

I think that policy power/influence should be wholly contingent on two things: A) when it is available, and B) how expensive it will be (on average) to get.

Removing the obstacle to flush out trees (or many trees) makes that potency somewhat diluted. (Or at least the justification for the potency.)

 

[jwallstone]

Not sure this is a genuine exploit.

It is. There are threads about this strategy. Especially as France, but it works in general. Acquire lots of cities and build cheap culture (monuments), then sell them off and win big on policies or boost toward cultural win. The AI also places extremely high value on cities, so you can pretty much bankrupt them for everything they've got with city sales.

Also, I should note that the second point effectively fixes this as well, since your RATE of progress is changed rather than totals. You don't need "policy points" in that case.

Except that the "moving target" is useful if policies are revamped because "lower" policies (those at the bottom of their tree) can be made much more powerful. If not progressively more expensive, it removes a bit of the "increasing potency" of high-requisite policies.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but if you are saying what I think, cultural policies still DO get more expensive, because each successive target is higher. So later policies ARE harder to get. Growing an empire also DOES slow rate of policy acquisition, it just so in a reasonable manner rather than devaluing or inflating all your progress thus far.

Imagine if constructing buildings worked the same way. You build an expensive building (say, a Wonder) halfway. Let's say then you rushbuy a Factory (or obtain the Policy that helps with it) or something that speeds it up. Instead of changing your RATE of progress, it cuts the total cost of the building. This means all your accumulated hammers throughout "history" suddenly all got the boost as well, not just your hammers going forward. As an extreme case, if I'm halfway done with a building, but through some combination of factors get +100% hammer boost (not that hard actually, connect a railroad and buy a factory), which through this mechanic would manifest itself as cutting the total cost of the building in half, then I've suddenly already completed the building. This makes no sense, and yet is how policy acquisition is designed.

 

[QES]

@jwallstone

I guess i just cant imagine playing that cheesy tactic, it seems antithetical to the fun of the game.

As for the "cheaper cost" - i think it makes perfect sense that things get more efficient. And I dont think it breaks immersion, sometimes breakthroughs or new policies can change things dynamically and drastically and quickly in the real world - this doesnt seem problematic to me.

 

[jwallstone]

As for the "cheaper cost" - i think it makes perfect sense that things get more efficient. And I dont think it breaks immersion, sometimes breakthroughs or new policies can change things dynamically and drastically and quickly in the real world - this doesnt seem problematic to me.

This mechanic literally allows one to make progress out of thin air. A halfway built building does not build itself instantaneously just because my workers got faster. This is equivalent to a suddenly infinite production rate.

At what point does it seem ridiculous enough then? I'm 1/10 finished building something - if I hire more workers and speed up my progress rate by 10, then the building finishes instantly and I don't even need to put in the remaining work?

This is simply a distorted mechanic.

EDIT: Also, given that the proposed mechanic of changing the rate of culture progress toward policies rather than the total still achieves the exact same goal of penalizing large empires, but without these strange behaviors, then I don't see any downside. I'll try my hand at it so it's not more work for you guys and you can decide whether to include it or not. It should be doable - the effect of changing civ-wide culture rate already exists.

 

[QES]

This mechanic literally allows one to make progress out of thin air. A halfway built building does not build itself instantaneously just because my workers got faster. This is equivalent to a suddenly infinite production rate.

At what point does it seem ridiculous enough then? I'm 1/10 finished building something - if I hire more workers and speed up my progress rate by 10, then the building finishes instantly and I don't even need to put in the remaining work?

This is simply a distorted mechanic.

EDIT: Also, given that the proposed mechanic of changing the rate of culture progress toward policies rather than the total still achieves the exact same goal of penalizing large empires, but without these strange behaviors, then I don't see any downside. I'll try my hand at it so it's not more work for you guys and you can decide whether to include it or not. It should be doable - the effect of changing civ-wide culture rate already exists.

Unless you think of it like developing new designs which are less labor intensive, which retroactively makes all previous labor more useful. Things like this happen - we can agree to disagree.

I like efficiency.

 

[MasterDinadan]

@jwallstone

I guess i just cant imagine playing that cheesy tactic, it seems antithetical to the fun of the game.

That's exactly why we are looking to change it.
There are those of us who are bothered when "fun" strategies and "optimal" strategies are not one and the same. As it is, the optimal strategy for getting a culture win is not fun. You basically just follow a script with very little variation.

On the note of culture-mongers needing something extra... They are getting something extra, more policies. I played a game with my mod without really focusing on culture, and the pace felt good. I didn't have to save up all of my culture to make decent progress in later branches, and I had enough policies to really feel like I had created a unique "government" style.

This change means everyone is getting more policies. The people who are affected least are those who already buy 25+ policies, and these people are probably going for a culture victory anyway. I would say that being able to build a game-winning project is incentive enough to go for that much culture. It doesn't need more.

Culture victories are a little easier to compensate for the fact that your "uncultured" neighbors have more policies. The city cost penalty is reduced (unless you play on huge), and you don't have to commit to going for culture right off the bat because there are no Cristo Redentor effects any more that make pooling culture so highly efficient. You can buy a bunch policies as you have enough culture early in the game, then if you stumble upon several great sites for culture cities in the early mid-game, you can still decide to make culture a priority and go for the win. Spending your culture early on didn't really hurt you. That's kind of the goal.

As for a policy overhaul, it may come eventually. I was thinking that policies could more closely represent the civics of Civ 4 in that there would be more branches exclusive to one another. For instance, the policy system may allow you to pick one branch in the top row and one branch in the bottom row. If you get more than 12 policies, you just start developing a new tree, and then you have two different "civics" to switch between as you need, but of course the one you've put more culture into is more highly developed.

With this exclusive effects model, the trees could have much more dramatic effects like we are used to. For example, a tree which prevents the player from declaring war but offers other benefits. If you need to declare war, you can just switch to a different active tree. It would be like Democracy in CivRev (and civ2 I think).

But those kinds of things will have to wait. It would be simple enough to make more exclusive groupings of branches in the XML, but doing something like disabling war declaration, we need more tools.

 

[killmeplease]

This is simply a distorted mechanic.

EDIT: Also, given that the proposed mechanic of changing the rate of culture progress toward policies rather than the total still achieves the exact same goal of penalizing large empires, but without these strange behaviors, then I don't see any downside. I'll try my hand at it so it's not more work for you guys and you can decide whether to include it or not. It should be doable - the effect of changing civ-wide culture rate already exists.

i completely agree with you. it should be as you write here, lower culture progress instead of higher policy cost.

i'd like to see it fixed
such a simple solution, pretty obvious but noone except you could discover it

 

[MasterDinadan]

Simple to think of, but it can't be done through XML modding.
The only "civ-wide" culture rates are things like Sistine Chapel that modify culture from cities (city states are still uneffected) and there is no way to tie that to number of cities or anything. The only way we can apply a global city culture modifier in-game, as far as I know, is through buildings and policies.

 

[SamBC]

One thing that immediately occurs to me, and may or may not be possible with just XML, is making the culture-producing Wonders produce culture per city, not just the raw (and rather stingy) amounts.

On the subject of Lua, what you can do with that in this area depends simply on what event hooks they've provided. As a language, you can do anything with Lua you can with Python (I'm pretty sure they're both Turing-complete), but what you can do practically within the game also depends on the API they make available.

PS: I agree with the stated aims here; policies should play a bigger part, and culture victory should be more plausible for a larger empire.

 

[QES]

PS: I agree with the stated aims here; policies should play a bigger part, and culture victory should be more plausible for a larger empire.

I completely agree too. Larger empires should be getting more policies, and the cultural victory possible for a large empire. I totally agree.

But what then do we give the small empires in exchange? My main concern is the "any thing you can do, i can do better!" problem of allowing big civs to do "everything." Of course they should be able to pursue any avenue - but then what benefit is there to remaining small? As of now, the only benefit is to keep culture tight to go for ONE type of victory.

I'd like to see it more likely that small civs could win the diplomatic, space and domination victories.

Giving culture other means to influence the world (outside of policies) is one option.

Another would be to have buildings remain expensive (or get even more so) but provide mammoth bonii. In this way, compact, efficent industrialized nations might be able to compete "economy/production wise" with larger empires. The most obvious example of this is simple maintenence. If buildings were huge bonuses, and there were "higher grades" of specialists (something I miss from SMAC) Then a small nation could compete, even militarily.

The only real concern (as I am probably overly repeating myself) is that when we make culture and the fun of policies more available (and i agree it should be), then we deprive small nations of their one true benefit. So long as this is replaced with something of equal value (or greater), then I think we will have done civilization justice.


EDIT/ADD: Is it possible to have "new" types of specialists? It would be nice to have specialists that produced increased amounts of their resource. I think maybe not "too many extra" specialists, but perhaps 3 levels per specialist wouldnt be over doing it? (SMAC got a little crazy with it, i'd like something similar but still simple)

 

[Feyd Rautha]

I had this thought when it came to planning my own abandoned culture modcomp (I'm just going to go with these guys on this one).

Double the culture from monuments and temples, triple monasteries and opera houses, quadruple musems, etc.

This would make it faster for all, but you'd have to be very dedicated since these are all chains.

 

[QES]

I had this thought when it came to planning my own abandoned culture modcomp (I'm just going to go with these guys on this one).

Double the culture from monuments and temples, triple monasteries and opera houses, quadruple musems, etc.

This would make it faster for all, but you'd have to be very dedicated since these are all chains.

You might wind up with cultural victories in the 1800's then.

I'm not sure i'm for or against that.

 

[MasterDinadan]

I don't want to just hand out a ton of extra culture, because it would affect the balance of the culture victory. Rebalancing the policy costs is the best way, I feel.

As for small numbers of cities vs large, I don't think there should be a mechanic that encourages players to stick to a small number of cities. Players should be encouraged to expand. My goal, though, is not to give large empires the advantage with culture victories, but to make them equally viable as small empires. In other words, culture victory would be the only one that is more or less indifferent to the size of your civ.

Note that I didn't get rid of the policy cost increase, I just reduced it. Going around and recklessly settling cities that can't efficiently produce culture will hurt your ability to get a culture victory... I'm just making it so a large empire doesn't necessarily have to dedicate every single city to culture to make it worth settling.

In a OCC, I've gotten about 400 CPT (most of it from city states) and I've seen people mention that they've got 800 CPT with 8 cities. If I make it 15% policy increase per city, both of these situations would reach Utopia in about the same amount of time. 15% is the number already used on Huge, and the very small amount of CPT data I had seems to suggest it's a good number, so it's a good place to start. It can be tweaked if it needs to.

 

[Jabarto]

Do you guys know anything yet about how culture costs are calcluated? I want to try enacting some of the changes you're describing, but I can't make heads or tails of the polcy cost info in GlobalDefines.xml.

 

[MasterDinadan]

The fields you need to work with are in GlobalDefines.xml:
POLICY_COST_INCREASE_TO_BE_EXPONENTED="6"
POLICY_COST_EXPONENT="1.7"
BASE_POLICY_COST="25"
POLICY_COST_VISIBLE_DIVISOR="5"

and there are also fields in Worlds.xml (because the city cost increase is based on map size):
NumCitiesPolicyCostMod="30" (on Standard map size)

The formula on a standard map is this. you should be able to figure out which variable goes where in the formula:
[20+(10n)^1.1]*[1+.30*x]
n is the number of policies already purchases (free policies don't count).
x is the number of cities beyond the first (puppets don't count).
After calculting the value to this formula, the cost is rounded down to the nearest multiple of 5. You can avoid this my changing the policy cost divisor (I use 1 in my mod, so you end up with costs like 72 and 98. Not as "nice" numbers, but I don't think civ fans will care if their numbers aren't in 5's.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Could a link to the most recent version be placed on the initial (or 2nd since MasterD is doing it) post so those of us who have a busted in-game Mod browser can access the most updated version of this mod?

 

[MasterDinadan]

It actually isn't on the modbrowser at all, as I'm one of those people who can't use it.
I may still be able to upload through modbuddy, but considering all of the issues with accounts breaking after a number of uploads, I'm waiting for the bugs to get worked out.

It won't allow me to attach the version 2 file to my other post (because I have already attached it elsewhere and can't seem to remove the attachment there). I will start attaching it to my first post starting with version 3, but for now, you can find it here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9735809&postcount=33

 

[QES]

As for small numbers of cities vs large, I don't think there should be a mechanic that encourages players to stick to a small number of cities. Players should be encouraged to expand.

I completely disagree.

What this means is that players would be required to expand to win. I had thought that your original intent was to give more options to more types of play. That big civs should be given the option for more policies and a better chance at a culture victory - something added. I agreed, variety is the spice of life.

But to say that nothing to should be given to small empires, and then suggest that "no empire should be small" completely loses my allegiance to this mod. After all, it means that a specific playstyle no longer becomes viable. If I played this mod, I could not play with small empires, because there would be no mechanical benefit to doing so, and it would be foolish. This saddens me.