Have they fixed the monopoly tourism issue?

[Mallory the Cat]

I keep having to turn off culture victory because I don’t want to win on like turn 200 by accident on deity with no cultural investment whatsoever.

Which kind of makes the whole culture side of things a bit useless in the game.

If they haven’t fixed it, any mods that can disable it? I would be happy enough to have no tourism from monopolies at this point. Doesn’t make sense in a real world context anyway, I mean you don’t see people flocking to France to buy champagne or to Spain to buy oranges or to Colombia to try their cocaine. The products get shipped internationally, the 500% bonus tourism is absurd.

 

[Andrew Johnson [FXS]]

A bug causing excess tourism from monopolies was fixed in the DLC6 patch, according to patch notes.

 

[Mallory the Cat]

DLC6 is the Portugal one I’m guessing?

Anybody tried this out to verify it’s gone?

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Yep.. there was a swift "indirect" fix to that crazy extra Tourism % flaw. Soooooo they claim.. but their solution didn't go very far into trying to inflict greater negative effects on AI stacks.

The whole problem was that active amounts of (any) Monopoly controls *were multiplied* against every calculated averages. One Infixo's mod (( http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2139486665 -- Better World Rankings )) reveals such variations in detail within the Cultural tab.

From what i could detect.. the previously bad impacts have been lowered by about 50% only. When they should have been based on a floating formula that limits AI Tourism input in terms of balance rather than integral stacking of external flow(s) mostly from the Human Civ & also from each other AI civs.

I currently use two special mods (links below) to prevent such a wacky system. I'd highly recommend trying them out to verify your own "conditional" gameplay patterns.

1) https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2389188476 -- Anti-Tourism Policy
2) http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2399439885 -- Monopoly Resource Requirement Setup

Until.. Firaxis staff **does** fix it all for real.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Nothing like a snapshot (with BWR mod in action) to expose the facts...

That little 8% used to stack ( considering how many Monopolies we had under control -- currently i have 2 ) beyond 50+%.. thus, the lifetime (of 3164 at the time) stack would simply grow at exponential rates within a few turns!

 

[fy00sh]

I've started playing with the mode enabled, and in my first game I narrowly avoided the infamous accidental culture victory (while going for a science victory as Portugal) only by getting an accidental diplomatic victory because apparently a volcano erupting next to the Potala Palace makes it give you diplomatic victory points again. edit: nope, it was because I just finished the Global Warming Mitigation civic. That makes a lot more sense!
In that game I played as I usually would without the mode enabled, land-wise owned about two-fifths of a continent plus a smallish island with 4 cities. Got an accidental monopoly really early due to owning the only two copies of Cotton in a city that I didn't realize was on a separate continent, by the end of the game i had a +310% or so modifier from monopolies. Playing another game where I've only settled on one continent, and there's no isolated island for me to settle. I own about one third of the continent (just the continent, not the full landmass, tho it is a large continent) and I've had a +290% modifier since early Medieval.
Going off of other people's reported experiences, it does seem like they've reduced the previous tourism bonus by about 50-60%. But IMHO that's still way too high. I like the mode so I'll still play with it, but I might disable culture next time I play as a civ that won't be going for culture victory, or I might try out using the second mod Zyxpsilon linked and setting the monopoly threshold to 80%.
From what I understand the community consensus on what the problem is, is that the equation the game uses to calculate the modifier multiplies by the number of civs that don't have a certain resource, and then applies that modifier to all civs. The people who did the math determined that you could get much more reasonable numbers by not doing that one multiplication I mentioned, and giving that smaller modifier to either all civs, or maybe even just civs that don't also have a copy of that resource.
IMHO the ideal solution would be for Firaxis to somehow open up the equation to modding so the community can make it whatever they want it to be, and so people who like it as-is can just not install the mod. Second-best solution would be for Firaxis to follow the community's suggestion.

 

[Abaxial]

Maybe the solution is to disperse luxuries more widely so that getting a monopoly is much harder.

 

[Yzman]

I've started playing with the mode enabled, and in my first game I narrowly avoided the infamous accidental culture victory (while going for a science victory as Portugal) only by getting an accidental diplomatic victory because apparently a volcano erupting next to the Potala Palace makes it give you diplomatic victory points again.
In that game I played as I usually would without the mode enabled, land-wise owned about two-fifths of a continent plus a smallish island with 4 cities. Got an accidental monopoly really early due to owning the only two copies of Cotton in a city that I didn't realize was on a separate continent, by the end of the game i had a +310% or so modifier from monopolies. Playing another game where I've only settled on one continent, and there's no isolated island for me to settle. I own about one third of the continent (just the continent, not the full landmass, tho it is a large continent) and I've had a +290% modifier since early Medieval.
Going off of other people's reported experiences, it does seem like they've reduced the previous tourism bonus by about 50-60%. But IMHO that's still way too high. I like the mode so I'll still play with it, but I might disable culture next time I play as a civ that won't be going for culture victory, or I might try out using the second mod Zyxpsilon linked and setting the monopoly threshold to 80%.
From what I understand the community consensus on what the problem is, is that the equation the game uses to calculate the modifier multiplies by the number of civs that don't have a certain resource, and then applies that modifier to all civs. The people who did the math determined that you could get much more reasonable numbers by not doing that one multiplication I mentioned, and giving that smaller modifier to either all civs, or maybe even just civs that don't also have a copy of that resource.
IMHO the ideal solution would be for Firaxis to somehow open up the equation to modding so the community can make it whatever they want it to be, and so people who like it as-is can just not install the mod. Second-best solution would be for Firaxis to follow the community's suggestion.

That sounds like quite the bug if true.

 

[Abaxial]

Well, today I managed to play for, and get, a RV. Admittedly it was just a little ahead of a CV, on turn 263.

 

[kb27787]

It's been reduced, but I'm confused by how the AI is behaving.

The AI is leaving their luxuries unimproved quite often now! (such that they won't make industries nor will they take monopolies that are clearly available in their territory). I've noticed they've focused much less on builder charges (you see every city with farms everywhere from the initial builder they get on deity but not many other improvements)

 

[kaspergm]

That sounds like quite the bug if true.

Never heard of that before. To the op: Are you sure the DV point was not awarded from something else, like a tech or civic, I don’t recall which one but there’s one of them that gives this?

 

[fy00sh]

Never heard of that before. To the op: Are you sure the DV point was not awarded from something else, like a tech or civic, I don’t recall which one but there’s one of them that gives this?

Oh DUH! Yeah ok I was wrong, I just pulled the game back up and it was the Global Warming Mitigation civic that put me over. I had probably just set the game to research all the stuff in the future era automatically and completely forgot about them. My bad!

 

[WillowBrook]

Yep.. there was a swift "indirect" fix to that crazy extra Tourism % flaw. Soooooo they claim.. but their solution didn't go very far into trying to inflict greater negative effects on AI stacks.

The whole problem was that active amounts of (any) Monopoly controls *were multiplied* against every calculated averages. One Infixo's mod (( http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2139486665 -- Better World Rankings )) reveals such variations in detail within the Cultural tab.

From what i could detect.. the previously bad impacts have been lowered by about 50% only. When they should have been based on a floating formula that limits AI Tourism input in terms of balance rather than integral stacking of external flow(s) mostly from the Human Civ & also from each other AI civs.

I currently use two special mods (links below) to prevent such a wacky system. I'd highly recommend trying them out to verify your own "conditional" gameplay patterns.

1) https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2389188476 -- Anti-Tourism Policy
2) http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2399439885 -- Monopoly Resource Requirement Setup

Until.. Firaxis staff **does** fix it all for real.

Thanks for the mod links, will definitely try them out. I'm playing with the Portugal DLC (so presumably the patch as well) and currently getting +351% for luxury resource monopolies with 3 monopolies. Seems rather excessive...

 

[kb27787]

Thanks for the mod links, will definitely try them out. I'm playing with the Portugal DLC (so presumably the patch as well) and currently getting +351% for luxury resource monopolies with 3 monopolies. Seems rather excessive...

Even for a monopoly, there are varying degrees of the bonuses.

For example a 3/5 monopoly will award you nowhere near the bonuses of a 5/5 monopoly. When you happen to get one on a 15-copy resource the bonuses can be huge.
With Maui in the game you can get a monopoly with just 2/3 when you generate a very rare luxury, but you get a teeny, tiny bonus from that one.

 

[Wielki Hegemon]

Even for a monopoly, there are varying degrees of the bonuses.

For example a 3/5 monopoly will award you nowhere near the bonuses of a 5/5 monopoly. When you happen to get one on a 15-copy resource the bonuses can be huge.
With Maui in the game you can get a monopoly with just 2/3 when you generate a very rare luxury, but you get a teeny, tiny bonus from that one.

Maui + monopolies is an edge case that should not be consider as it comes to balance monopolies.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

For anyone still looking for solutions to the extra impact of (multiple) Monopoly control(s).. i just discovered something strange while trying to limit their scope.

This special Map situation has two (Tea + Wine) instances of full 3/3 plantation tiles each with one Corporation already built for Tea ... **BUT** i needed to delete the third Tea plantation to create a National Park to the right of Isin.



To my surprise the Monopoly Status was invalidated for it (thus AI would just stop receiving the usual Tourism Boost) while the Corporate feature to create new Products remained active.

Soooooo -- to activate the Corporation itself we still need to control at least 3/of/X Luxury types.. yet the Monopoly bonus can be de-activated (afterwards) if the minimal count gets below control status.

 

[mrwho]

Well somehow I managed to lose a Deity game to the AI getting a science victory around 1850 or so. I was going for culture and had monopolies enabled. I believe I should have had one monopoly because I owned 3/4 of a resource that I had a product of, but my tourism seemed average. So either I just suck at civ or it's not as broken as it used to be?

 

[Siddharth Venkatesh]

It's still just a tourism multiplier. How much base tourism did you have? Also, I think the multiplier on a 3/4 monopoly is not that big, but I don't know the exact numbers.

 

[Abaxial]

I think the multiplier on a 3/4 monopoly is not that big

That's correct, and getting a monopoly of a luxury of which there are 15 instances is suffiently hard you deserve a big bonus.