Health Proposal: Alternate ways to manage Health early on.

[Galgus]

Dipping into negative tech to expand is a good part of the system (and it was designed so that that would work (sloping penalties, etc.).
The effortlessness of health later is a problem, but some of that may be poor choices on the part of players (ie going for health when that problem has been solved).

One of the reasons dipping into low health to expand is done so often is the guarantee that health will be a non-issue later.

If the latter issue was solved, perhaps significant food or growth bonuses for high health could be instated to make Tall a bit stronger?

 

[nimling]

The point of health is that it is supposed to be less of a hard cap than happiness in Civ5 (and even then there are cases, moreso in Vanilla, where it was worthwhile to tolerate unhappiness to claim city sites). If -15 health produces a more useful empire than -5 or +5 then so be it. The devs as far as I can tell don't really know the optimal strategy for their own game, hence why there are gamebreakers like vivarium-desert terrascapes that shouldn't exist.

I don't like to fall below -5 health due to the culture hit, and definitely don't want to fall below -10 when science takes a hit. Growth penalties are also annoying to deal with. Again, getting to 10 pop cities asap is when trade routes balloon to huge advantages, and growth penalties get in the way of reaching that - especially before good food tiles are available.

 

[Ryika]

The point of health is that it is supposed to be less of a hard cap than happiness in Civ5 (and even then there are cases, moreso in Vanilla, where it was worthwhile to tolerate unhappiness to claim city sites). If -15 health produces a more useful empire than -5 or +5 then so be it. The devs as far as I can tell don't really know the optimal strategy for their own game, hence why there are gamebreakers like vivarium-desert terrascapes that shouldn't exist.

I don't think it's good design to have that as the standard. It's okay if the penalties are low enough so you can play alternative strategies that make you drop into unhealth for a while (very liberating for domination-oriented playstyles), but if the best strategy is to drop down to almost -20 health, then they should just rename -20 to 0.

I don't like to fall below -5 health due to the culture hit, and definitely don't want to fall below -10 when science takes a hit. Growth penalties are also annoying to deal with. Again, getting to 10 pop cities asap is when trade routes balloon to huge advantages, and growth penalties get in the way of reaching that - especially before good food tiles are available.

Getting a 10-pop city is worthless if you can just have 2-3 additional cities that all send an additional trade route to the capital.

And "vivarium-desert terrascapes" are gamebreaking? o.O Terrascapes as a whole aren't used (in SP at least), because they're way too slow and completely outperformed by Academies.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

One of the reasons dipping into low health to expand is done so often is the guarantee that health will be a non-issue later.

If the latter issue was solved, perhaps significant food or growth bonuses for high health could be instated to make Tall a bit stronger?

Actually, just significant food/growth bonuses period... if 1 size-50 city (almost impossible) was anywhere near as achievable as 5 size-10 cities (very easy), then tall could work.

If they changed the ramp up in food costs, then it could be actually useful to have specialists. (or perhaps change all +%Growth bonuses into +%Food bonuses)

 

[Galgus]

That would be interesting, but I think tying it to health could be a good way of making not going into negative health early more viable.

 

[Endar]

that are good for +7 (fixed)

And a single city consume 4 health by itself. 7 is way too small.
Besides, Prosperity tree is way too weak compared to Science or Industry trees.

The effortlessness of health later is a problem, but some of that may be poor choices on the part of players (ie going for health when that problem has been solved)

No, towards the endgame you get a lot of without much effort, e.g. your cities produce less and less unhealth as they grow, Magnasati gets stronger and stronger as you build more and more buildings.

If they changed the ramp up in food costs, then it could be actually useful to have specialists. (or perhaps change all +%Growth bonuses into +%Food bonuses)

Not really. I once tried to play by scientists specialist with no Academies. It actually worked (on Soyuz) but the biggest problem I faced was the lack of scientists slots. You simply can not have as much scientists as you can afford because too few buildings have scientists slots (affinity buildings included, I had all of them).
Academies spam is much more effective tactic.

Btw., current growth food costs are just insane, I had built ALL food producing buildings, had purity farms and weather controller above them and tonnes of production converted into food and still didn't had any city with 20 population.

 

[Galgus]

Specialist slots seem very limited when using a mod to make them useful, though food cost changes would help.

I think one of the most agreed upon balance statements is that Academies need to be nerfed or removed.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Specialist slots seem very limited when using a mod to make them useful, though food cost changes would help.

I think one of the most agreed upon balance statements is that Academies need to be nerfed or removed.

Nerfing would definitely be preferable, that 'option to specialize' is useful.

I could see either
1. change them to 2 science yield
2. change them to 4-8 maintenance (and in that case increase the Academy boosting virtue back to +2)

 

[Galgus]

The Knowledge tree has some serious problems, but I'm not sure the Academy buff would be positive for the game - players would simply rush it and go back to spamming.

One of the problems with energy costs is how easy it is to get large amounts of it through trade routes and spies - generally toning down would help.

There should be some sense of sacrifice in improvements or buildings to maintain a large number of energy-hungry tiles.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

The Knowledge tree has some serious problems, but I'm not sure the Academy buff would be positive for the game - players would simply rush it and go back to spamming.

One of the problems with energy costs is how easy it is to get large amounts of it through trade routes and spies - generally toning down would help.

There should be some sense of sacrifice in improvements or buildings to maintain a large number of energy-hungry tiles.

Well you could also make Academies -2 energy +2 unhealth, that Might be a good way to deal with it.

But I agree the simpler would just be to bust them down to 2 science.