Culture Calibration Mod

[Opellulo]

The OP point is to make more cultural victories possible even for large empire.

Why don't simply rework the policies as they are? You could set two mutually excluding branches like "Empire" and "City State" that help mending your weakness. Empire branch could boost happiness and culture while city state could boost production and gold for example.

I like the policies branch but i find them a little too obscure: they're like more a "one time bonus" rather than political choices that shape your game. To me they could borrow something from the political slides and National Ideas in Europa Universalis 3.

 

[Cire]

Hey guys. Kudos Thal and MasterD, you guys are doing a great job bringing balance to this game. I've played through a few games w/ some older versions of the mods (dld a little over a week ago), loved it.

I got an idea for your culture debate here. I'm thinking, instead of automatically getting the culture win as soon as you fill your (5 or 6) trees, maybe instead it opens up a wonder that needs to be built to get the victory. A la, Age of Empire (wonder victory).

If you go this route, the happiness plays a bit of a factor also, witch imo, should be a pretty important factor in a culture win. A civ that is unhappy will build this at a much slower rate. Granted, you can still get the win with an unhappy civ, its just going to take more time.

Just an idea I had.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

That's actually how it works in Vanilla, Cire.

You have to build the Utopia project.

 

[Cire]

Ahhh. I did not realize that. I was going for a culture win in 1 game and ended up getting in a huge war like half way through my 4th tree, so I got super distracted and lost. I never realized that they had to build something to get the win. I was watching the victory board and it seemed as soon as they got thier last tree filled they got the victory. Guess I was wrong. Now I want/have to go get a culture win, so's I know what the hell I'm talking about before I post. lol

 

[MasterDinadan]

The OP point is to make more cultural victories possible even for large empire.

Why don't simply rework the policies as they are? You could set two mutually excluding branches like "Empire" and "City State" that help mending your weakness. Empire branch could boost happiness and culture while city state could boost production and gold for example.

I like the policies branch but i find them a little too obscure: they're like more a "one time bonus" rather than political choices that shape your game. To me they could borrow something from the political slides and National Ideas in Europa Universalis 3.

Interesting thought.
Perhaps we could offer some benefits to small empires by creating powerful policies that lower happiness significantly. Basically, a a large empire (which frequently operates at near-0 happiness) would see a noticeable hit for taking these policies, but a small empire with a huge surplus of happiness could easily afford them.
It's similar to the concept "Build more cities or get more policies" except now its "Build more cities or get better policies"

 

[MasterDinadan]

Played with the culture mod active last night. Was able to OCC with Ghandi in the mid 1900's. You weren't correct in what you said above, though. The policy costs are not as much with the formula you used unless you build three cities. Compared to the standard formula the cost is still much lower.

I lowered the costs significantly to balance the fact that the new Free Speech and Cristo are much weaker than they used to be. I did some estimating as to their relative value, and lowered the total cost accordingly.
What this means is that anyone who gets these two will have about the same difficulty winning with culture as they did before. Anyone who fails to get one or both of these will actually find it easier than it would have been otherwise. Cristo is not as "essential" as it used to be for a culture win.

 

[Tomice]

@MasterDinadan:

I'm still playing with v2 of your mod, but there hasn't been any discussion on it in the last 3 weeks or so. What happened? (Most likely the topic was lost because it was in the huge general forum)

Are you still using the mod yourself? Any tweaks?

Greets Tom

 

[MasterDinadan]

I haven't had time to Play Civ 5, much less do any development. I've been busy moving and starting a new job and I've also got much bigger projects going on in my personal time.
I may come back to this at some point, but as I've mentioned, there isn't much I can add to this mod with what I know right now. v2 is still the newest version, and I do still feel that this version does a decent job of accomplishing what I originally set out to do, which is to give more policies across the board without making the culture win too much easier, and reducing the penalty for number of cities.
I still certainly welcome feedback from anyone who's given it a shot. It's no trouble at all for me to tweak the numbers as they are and release a new version if v2's numbers are a bit problematic, but adding new features is a different story.
That being said, nobody has given me any opinion about how they feel about the policy rate in v2. Personally, I think it feels really good, but I'm interested to hear what others think. Keep in mind if you test this that the rate you acquire policies early on does not reflect the speed you will get later. Don't try claiming that this makes a culture win too easy until you actually go for a culture win. Policies after the 20th or so get VERY expensive, much more so than before.

 

[Tomice]

I never spcifically tried a cultural win, but the rate at which policies appear in the early game feels good. Could even be faster, IMO. I like your mod, because I agree that every player should be able to unlock 10-12 policies up to the endgame, if he plays decently. They are way to interesting to keep them too hard to get.

 

[Txurce]

I will be testing your mod along with some of Thal's new ones this week.

Conceptually I'm in favor of what you're trying to do, which seems to be balancing the victory conditions so they are achievable in more ways than one.

One suggestion made early on that seemed to fall by the wayside was to counter the saving of policies. This strikes me as an exploit like multi-bulbing, as well as unrealistic. Could there be a bonus for the timely use of SPs, or a "decay" effect on saved points?

Someone also pointed out the cheesy effect of culture bombs. Wouldn't it be more elegant and consistent if it worked like the Harder Free Tech mod, and a culture bomb gave the civ a certain number of culture points instead?

 

[Feyd Rautha]

"Holding" policies is kind of like earmarking bills in Congress. Everyone knows it's wrong, but try not doing it or trying to take it away completely. You better be ready for a fight!

 

[Thalassicus]

Culture bomb giving culture like in earlier versions of Civ is an ideal solution, but not something we can pursue yet.

 

[gruven]

Someone also pointed out the cheesy effect of culture bombs. Wouldn't it be more elegant and consistent if it worked like the Harder Free Tech mod, and a culture bomb gave the civ a certain number of culture points instead?

Yes.
It would be really nice if tiles could culture flip like in CIV. The static borders really ruin the effect of seeing the rise and fall of nations.

 

[Tomice]

Hmm, I really like somewhat static borders in the lategame for realism.

There have been some discussions pre-release about the weirdness of civ4 style culture. My favourite example was when civ A conquered a city from civ B and suddenly civ C was the one with the most culture in the region, getting most tiles without ever fighting.

Cities should be able to flip as a whole, though. One should be able to expand without war, as it happened very often in history.

 

[Celevin]

While this is a completely different idea than the OP, I think it's worth thinking about. The current reasons that a large civ doesn't keep up on culture with a smaller civ are opportunity costs, and constant culture inflow. I don't think it's wise to stop opportunity costs (examples of this are building every culture building in a brand new city), but the constant culture amount can be stopped. This constant culture exists because of 2 things:

1) Cultural city states
2) Puppet cities

My suggestion is to change Cultural city states to be +x culture in the capitol and +x*(world size modifier) in every other city. The world size modifier is the same as the additional cost per city for new policies, for example it's .3 on standard world size. So on a standard world size map, a Cultural city state would add x culture in the capitol, and .3x culture for every other city. Doing this will make cultural city states have the same impact no matter your empire size.

As for Puppets, I suggest either taking them out entirely or making them add to policy cost. I'm leaning towards the former.

If you make these two changes, you'll greatly shrink the policy gap between large and small empires.


I'm also of the mind that the Freedom -25% social policy cost and the Cristo Rendentor are bad for the game. Why not delete these entirely, then lower policy costs? You'll get civs that aren't specifically going for a culture win having a greater number of policies, and civs that are going for a culture win not feeling quite as constrained in the tech and policy path.

 

[Seek]

I'm also of the mind that the Freedom -25% social policy cost and the Cristo Rendentor are bad for the game. Why not delete these entirely, then lower policy costs? You'll get civs that aren't specifically going for a culture win having a greater number of policies, and civs that are going for a culture win not feeling quite as constrained in the tech and policy path.

I think these are placed specifically in the game's timeline to represent the massive changes and speed of transformation in political thought in the last two centuries. Are the mechanics used ideal? I don't think so, but removing them entirely would be a mistake, imo. One fix could be to just give everyone a 25% discount on future policies when entering the industrial age.

 

[Celevin]

I think these are placed specifically in the game's timeline to represent the massive changes and speed of transformation in political thought in the last two centuries. Are the mechanics used ideal? I don't think so, but removing them entirely would be a mistake, imo. One fix could be to just give everyone a 25% discount on future policies when entering the industrial age.

I would much rather see a +33% culture gain than -25% policy cost. The Freedom policy and the Cristo Rendentor are what cause people to save up policies. In my fastest culture win I saved up practically every policy until I unlocked the Rendentor!

 

[Txurce]

I would much rather see a +33% culture gain than -25% policy cost. The Freedom policy and the Cristo Rendentor are what cause people to save up policies. In my fastest culture win I saved up practically every policy until I unlocked the Rendentor!

This is the ideal way to do it, since it nerfs the exploit, and achieves essentially the same bonanza.

 

[MasterDinadan]

I love the ideas, but most of them are impossible given what is available in the XML, and I lack the skill to do anything more sophisticated.

I like the idea of a culture "decay" or an increase in policy cost over time, but I totally lack the means to do this. Sorry!

That being said, the calibration mod changes the effects of Free Speech and Cristo Redentor, so saving up policies isn't that important anymore. The only reason to do it is if you want to get deep into a later tree as soon as you get into the requisite era, and I don't really see this as a problem since you are giving up policies now to get slightly more useful ones later. Buying policies as you get them is definitely viable as you can be very successful even with few policies from later trees.

I also am not able to change the way that cultured city states work. They simply give a specific amount of empire-wide culture every turn. I can't make it give more depending on the number of cities. Frankly, I'm okay with this. This is one of the major things that makes small civs viable for culture wins. Taking it away would shift the balance too much towards large civs (I feel that with 15% policy increases, the comparison is pretty fair if I leave the cultured city states alone)


What I am looking at doing is improving the "Free Speech" policy to give two culture instead of one. I only worry that it basically becomes mandatory for culture win pursuers and mediocre for everyone else, but I guess that's better than mediocre for culture wins and garbage for everyone else.

I am also thinking of switching the effects of Free Speech and Constitution. Constitution is generally more useful than the new Free Speech so it should be deeper in the tree.

Any thoughts? I'll probably throw out a new version this week with some of those changes.

 

[Thalassicus]

I agree about city-states.

By the way, check through the lua files of the mongol DLC. They added a few functions to the game that aren't documented elsewhere... probably nothing useful but it's worth looking.

I think +2/Wonder for Free Speech should be fine, wonders are VERY challenging to get on hard difficulty settings so it'll mostly just be an AI thing anyway. It also makes sense to swap it with Constitution due to the modded effects.