Civ 4 has far, far more buildings to generate/multiply culture than any other type, they are key to one type of 'builder' victory. To render them obsolete is shocking.
This isn't really a fair claim; most buildings that produce
also produce something else (even the religious ones produce
and
). I also do not believe we have evidence that they are obsolete; I expect you'd still basic
structures and religious buildings used as necessary...and some usage is necessary. To further my position, optimized culture victories ignored a large majority of the buildings producing
even when using the slider. Anything too
intensive or too deep in the tech tree got skipped deliberately, and that was a substantial portion of the buildings that generate culture...over half of them certainly.
If a player just starting the refinement can smash the previous methods by 1000 years and does it without having to build culture
But you do have to build culture, and what we don't know is how much is optimal yet. You absolutely have to use *some* traditional
sources though or the
missions are too slow.
The vast majority of culture in culture games typically came from a combination of GPP and
. That hasn't changed with using
, but rather a more efficient conversion method of
-->
was found.
Does espionage fit into that? Well a little bit. It's plausible that you can spread a little culture via spies spreading propaganda etc., but the idea that you could spread so much culture that way that people admire you to an extent worthy of a cultural victory is ludicrous.
The concept of a civilization "winning" in reality is ludicrous in the first place. Certainly, if your ideals are successfully spread across the world such that any opposition is effectively locked down, that could be perceived as a victory.
Now I realize that Civ's approximation to the real world is crude and you always pick holes and find absurdities in it, but nevertheless that approximation is important to my (and I'm sure most people's) enjoyment of Civ
This is a common position as a player and there's nothing wrong with having it, but it's not the only position and using that position as a means to control other players' actions, even a minority (if it is a minority) in a competition doesn't work.
Your point about removing all of the naming of mechanics and just making the game a puzzle is noted. I doubt very many people would be interested in that, aside from balancing it and using it as the framework for a themed game
. That said, it will be rare to see two people with precisely identical positions on that scale (reality vs gameplay) where they draw the line. For example, a lot of people draw the line with RNG combat and would hate deterministic combat, even though they adore the core gameplay where
,
,
, GPP,
, and movement speeds are all 100% deterministic (none of which meshes with actual history). That a farm is ALWAYS worth the same, along with livestock and mines, is just hand-waved, but it's important to note that such is a major and overwhelming break from reality, as are the victory conditions themselves.
CtE is therefore on a different point on a sliding scale rather than something you can point to as "breaks from reality implausibly". The entire game does that, and some of its choices are necessarily arbitrary. From a competitive standpoint, what criteria do you use when deciding on which completely unrealistic factors are okay and which should be banned?
In this light the extra VC seems a stronger solution...and more so to me than it did earlier.
Further, you need to commit a lot of Hammers early on to building Cultural Buildings, sacrificing the chance to get Military Units.
As Kossin pointed out, CtE still requires military concessions bigtime. You need the
buildings, want to run spy specs...and most importantly you have to build a TON of spies. There's not a lot of room for other units there. I'm not sure we have seen whether initial military conquest would improve finish times consistently or not.
In other words, it is pretty unlikely that you could start pursuing domination or space, switch to CtE mid-game, and expect to beat a strong player gunning for CtE from the beginning.
In fact, a similar balance issue is that your Legendary Cities are limited by the number of Cultural Buildings that they can build.
And
, and corporations + resources. And wonders that boost them. These are statements of fact but do not inherently condemn either approach. I don't see the point of dicussing it really since we know pretty definitively that CtE is much, much stronger than traditional culture. The lack of balance between the two is obvious; just as OCC space is slower than conquering 25 cities and winning space.
In terms of risk, certainly you won't have the heart-thrilling excitement of waiting to see whether a nearby AI will declare war on you with Rifles against your Swordsmen (and doing whatever you can to please said neighbouring AIs), where your Cultural Building build items and your tech choices kept you from getting stronger City defenders.
Earlier Tachy made an anti-RNG argument point out that traditional
relies upon it less, however you're implying the opposite, that traditional
is risky/reliant on luck (otherwise you'd not have heart-filling excitement, but rather knowledge that nobody can declare on you). That would be an argument in favor of CtE.
"We know that a change was in order, but we didn't figure out a good value to change it to in order to achieve the balance that we wanted, and since we're soon putting this product on Maintenance Mode, let's just change it back to what it was, since people are upset that we still haven't gotten it right, but we don't have the time or people-power to figure out what values would be good to use."
This is a reach and outside the scope of the discussion at hand. We could argue until the game is completely dead if we start considering things the devs might have wanted to change again. Also, if we seek to make mechanics somehow balanced we'd literally be rewriting the game...maybe not from scratch but so severely that it wouldn't resemble civ IV very much anymore.
. It's not a jury, we don't need a unanimous decision. As far as I can tell, not one person other than SunTzuWu is buying a word he is saying. I'd be concerned if I thought his opinions were swaying others, so if someone does find some logical or valid point in his posts that actually has merit, I ask that you quote that bit of info so it can be debated. I don't have the time to debate all of the misinformation presented, but I will if there is something convincing in there that might be used by the staff to make a ruling.
