Ex-wide empires and culture

[sav]

Sometimes things don't go your way, and your former wide empire is a shadow of its former self, 'cause of a dick neighbour.

Why is it, that when you lose cities, the culture required for future policies doesn't go back down accordingly?

It means that when you've had a wide empire go a bit wrong, you have no option but to either play out the game until its inevitable end ('cause the programmers forgot to include a 'retire' option) or just quit. There's no way you're gonna come back militarily in most cases, and you can forget about a science victory - it's just too late.

So why can't we go for a cultural victory? If I've only got 3 cities when I used to have five or six, why do I still need culture for six to progress?

 

[Menzies]

Seriously?

The reason is so you can't get a huge empire, power through the culture and then suddenly sell most of your empire and win an easy culture win. That's perfect as well. The culture win should be something that you try hard at all game, not a last lazy resort when you're on course for a deserved loss.

 

[wobuffet]

1. Build (or conquer and annex) 15 cities.
2. Acquire 19,900/20,000 culture required for next policy.
3. Sell (or lose through war) 14 cities.
4. Suddenly find yourself with enough culture to purchase, say, 21 social policies.

A lot of these problems could be avoided by just getting rid of culture overflow. But many players insist on playing with Allow Policy Saving on, so there's really not much else to do.

 

[sav]

Seriously?

The reason is so you can't get a huge empire, power through the culture and then suddenly sell most of your empire and win an easy culture win. That's perfect as well. The culture win should be something that you try hard at all game, not a last lazy resort when you're on course for a deserved loss.

I guess this is where Civ5 differs from Civ4 - in Civ4, it was often the case you could rise and fall, rise again, fall again, then still have an exciting finish, even if it ended in a loss.

In Civ5, if you suffer a setback on your chosen victory path, that's about it - might as well quit, but there's no retire option either.

Don't get me wrong, I like Civ5, but this bugs me, from a fun perspective. If it's that much of an issue, can't they just make it that your accumulated culture drops accordingly, so you're not lapping up policies? Or that sold cities don't count?

 

[Menzies]

I guess this is where Civ5 differs from Civ4 - in Civ4, it was often the case you could rise and fall, rise again, fall again, then still have an exciting finish, even if it ended in a loss.

In Civ5, if you suffer a setback on your chosen victory path, that's about it - might as well quit, but there's no retire option either.

Don't get me wrong, I like Civ5, but this bugs me, from a fun perspective. If it's that much of an issue, can't they just make it that your accumulated culture drops accordingly, so you're not lapping up policies? Or that sold cities don't count?

In Civ IV if you lost one of your culture Cities at any point in the game the idea of a culture victory went out the window, you literally needed at least 3. In fact, Civ IV was worse for this exact thing.

In Civ V it really doesn't matter what's happened, you can still go for a cheeky Diplomatic Victory because the AI are loopy bananas with money. I literally disagree with every single point you've made in this thread.

In Civ V for example, I've started out trying for a culture win, lost a city in an epic war, yet managed to regroup and reconquer that city and many others on my way to a science victory. On Civ IV Monty would "be your friend" then march a stack of doom on you and suddenly #### gets real. I think they've hit the nail on the head with the culture win, its the Diplomatic Victory that needs work.

Also, I pose a question to you. How much would you hate it if you destroyed most of an enemies empire and got back to what you were doing, only for them to have accumulated massive amounts of culture and just win a cultural victory right under your nose despite you wiping the floor with them?

 

[Glassmage]

if you lost many cities then you deserve to lose?

 

[sav]

I suppose this is the old play to win vs play for fun debate in another form. Prince is too easy, but King is just wave upon wave of hostile units, war the whole time...

 

[Menzies]

I suppose this is the old play to win vs play for fun debate in another form. Prince is too easy, but King is just wave upon wave of hostile units, war the whole time...

Or the ol' 'making sure a game is actually balanced such that its no equivalent to having a giant win button built into the GUI'... Either term works here.

 

[elprofesor]

Actually, this problem would get fixed easilly if the cultural penalty for having too many cities weren't increased SP cost, but reduced culture per turn.

For example, if settling/annexing 3 cities gets you a 60% increase for SP adquisition (IIRC), get instead a -37.5% decrease to culture per turn for SP adquisition. The result is the same, but is perfectly balanced for city losses and cultural progression: should you lose a city, you only have to adjust the penalty to cpt, and the exploit described would be impossible to execute. Plus, the situation early game where you wait a couple of turns for a settler to settle because the culture gauge is about to fill and you don't want to wait 10 extra turns for the SP would be less of a problem.

I don't understand why they didn't go with this solution from the beginning. There may be other ways around I haven't thought of, though.

 

[Olleus]

That way would be better elprofesor, but less intuitive and would almost certainly confuse new players. Not a good reason to do it that way, but probably why the devs chose this.

 

[elprofesor]

Well, I hope there is a reason, because it didn't take me very long to think of this

I don't really think this is counter-intuitive, I think it's about the same: right now, the cost of the SP increases because you have to get your culture to the new city too. With the other version, getting your culture across the empire is a slower task because it's larger. The numbers would be uglier, that's for sure, but I don't think the casual player knows the current numbers either.