Great person spam: intended or unbalanced?

[Rainbow Sand]

On epic speed i took old witch as leader, stacked all that was for gp %boost in capital and now i receive great engineer every 15 turns. 10++ of them and score of others in one place hmm... i crank wonders like units. Was in intended or it should be categorized under "insane uber OP"? I understand, rise of awareness, transcendency and stuff but, erm, game consistency?

 

[ChrisAdams3997]

This is the result of having multiple ways of boosting gp points at the same time in the same place. Any time you have multiple items that can provide bonuses to the same thing and can potentially all be acquired at the same time, this kind of thing can happen. The game is usually balanced with the idea that one or two might be stacked, so having more than that can cause 'problems'.

The problem is that nerfing the individual components makes having just one of them virtually useless. Eliminating some of them means you have less options for how to acquire such a bonus. Neither is a very good approach I think in our case.

The other less taken approach is to use a 'diminishing marginal returns' approach. If you've taken an economics course at any point in your life you've heard this term, wether you remember it or not. To put it simplistically, it's the basic idea that the more you invest in any one aspect, the less incremental return you get for each unit of investment.

In game terms, that would mean a city with a base 25% bonus might receive that full bonus. However, if you push it up to a base 50%, the actual might only be 40%, @ base = 100%, actual = 65%, @ base 150%, actual = 75%, etc. (purely made up numbers here for an example, it can follow whatever mathematical model best fits the situation)

This works well for internal numbers the player never sees (I've used just recently for espionage defense's effects on capturing nearby spies). However for numbers that will be publicly displayed in the interface, it can create confusion for players of where the numbers are coming from.

When 1 + 1 no longer equals 2, people get uncomfortable .

So every approach has it's own drawbacks to consider. At present the main (and probably best) limiter is the opportunity cost of building the buildings and wonders that boost it, or taking the civic (as opposed to some other useful civic). At higher difficulty levels, it's generally harder to amass all of them, and a bunch of wonders, and/or specialists all in one city to do this. But it can be fun when you do manage it .

 

[Ahriman]

The one thing I wonder about is if the Faufreluches civic should be changed so that it doesn't offer unlimited engineers. This has been a problem, in part because of how the AI favors hammers over other yields and so tends to stick everyone onto GE duty.

But I worry that doing this would weaken the specialist economy too much.

Still, by the time you can crank out GE's every 15 turns, I suspect most of the Wonders have been built already. And I don't think that pumping out any of the other Great people is really that strong.

 

[ChrisAdams3997]

The one thing I wonder about is if the Faufreluches civic should be changed so that it doesn't offer unlimited engineers

It already has as of the last patch . Civics giving additional slots now only give two extra slots in each city for each type they cover instead of unlimited of each. Produces much less silliness . Considering it still means 6 specialist slots opened up in each city (of three different types), it definitely does not weaken the specialist economy, just make it more believable and balanced.

 

[Ahriman]

Civics giving additional slots now only give two extra slots in each city for each type they cover

This sounds good to me.

 

[Lord Katana]

This sounds good to me.

We should make sure there will be enough slots total so big cities (under Arrakis Paradise for example) have enough. For fully developed cities/tech trees, there should be enough variation for a player to make a choice.. not be frustrated that you have a dozen citizens providing only one hammer each...
This means that perhaps some more buildings need to have an GPslot.

 

[Ahriman]

This means that perhaps some more buildings need to have an GPslot.

Possibly.... but I'm not sure there is really a problem.

If you want to run a specialist economy, you should need the appropriate civics, and then some buildings on top of that.

One of the problems with vanilla civ4 and many mods is that specialist slots were too easy to come by, and so had basically no value.

If we increase specialist slots on buildings, then we reduce the value of those slots, and we reduce the value of the civics that give extra slots.

I've never encountered a situation where I had a dozen pop in a city with no specialist slots for them. At worst case: 20 tiles, 6 slots from Faufreluches, at least 6 slots from other buildings, you'd have to be size 44 to have a dozen spare, and I think by that time you will have more than 6 slots from buildings!

Still, lets count up the specialist slots offered by existing buildings.

But I tend to lean towards fewer slots (maybe even reducing the current availability) rather than more. This is one of the nice things about Civ5, it makes specialist slots much more meaningful.

 

[ChrisAdams3997]

In my test games I haven't noticed anything 'off' in terms of specialist slots (other than the above mentioned fix). There's certainly as Ahriman mentioned not too few of them for the late game, and I've never looked to see if there are maybe a few too many (which like Ahriman said would devalue the faufreleches civic)