How should maritimes be nerfed?

[andrewlt]

Like another poster, I was thinking about changing their bonus to happiness as well. It needs to be a global, not city-based, bonus.

 

[Rudster816]

There already exists almost no incentive to actually kill city states. They don't need to be STRONGER.

+1 The only time I attack a city state is when two other city states want me to destroy them. Two allied CS's > One less CS to ally.

 

[bryanw1995]

Here's how maritimes should be nerfed:

The AI should be patched to more actively work towards gaining city state allies, especially maritime ones. They should compete for allies that you already have. We all know that the AI commonly sits on thousands of gold. Those AIs unable to win the friendship of maritimes should be actively attempting to conquer them, on the principle of "if I can't have it, no one can!"

Would we still consider maritime city states to be overpowered, if we needed to keep them at 300/60 friendship, and needed to keep 4+ good military units by them at all times, in order to gain the bonus?

I played an immortal large pangea as the mongols right after the patch. ramkhatemangydog or whatever his name is had 31 food in his capital for quite a long time. I finally had to kill him when he built the apollo program...

 

[Surgeon]

There's been so much discussion on this, and I think the best 2 options that came out of that were

1: Making them give a +% bonus to your surplus food production (like a We love the king day effect)
2: making them give a flat quantity of food, divided evenly through your empire, rounded to the nearest .01

Both would need some serious testing to balance the exact numbers, and there might be unforseen effects. But farms are currently underpowered (in large part due to maritimes), so I don't think multiplying their output by a % would suddenly make them overpowered. Splitting a flat food amount would be great for small empires, which are currently much less powerful than large empires. Either way, you are strengthening a weak part of the game, which should theoretically work out well.

Flat food sounds good. I'd simply dish it out on a 'X cities closest to this maritime' basis (so some maritimes would be better to get than others).

Making city states more interesting to trade with would be nice too. Why do they need to only have one mission? Why not a priority list? Why is lump sums of gold the only option? Why not a payment plan? Why not an option to pay food?(crazy idea but jsut putting it out there).

 

[Uniform Sierra]

I'm really new to the game. Can somebody please tell me why maritime cities are OP?

 

[_hero_]

I disagree that Maritimes need to be nerfed. I think Culturals need a buff and militaristic need a big boost.

 

[jdubbins]

For difficulty up to king, keep Maritime CS same.

At Emperor level, keep capital and then 12 closest city bonuses.
And fewer cities get bonuses, when difficulty is increased. So for deity, Maritime CS only gives to capital and 4 cities.

 

[zimmah]

instead of nerfing MCS (or in adition to it) it might be an idea to just buff the other two.

 

[SuperJay]

I'm really new to the game. Can somebody please tell me why maritime cities are OP?

The bonuses are cumulative, they increase as ages progress, and you can often ally with several in the same game. In later ages, you can get a ridiculous amount of free food - manna from heaven, basically - if you Ally with just three Maritimes, like +15 free food in your capital and +9 in every other city in the world. (I think that's the rate, but my numbers could be wrong.) That enables you to basically found cities anywhere you want; even a city in the middle of the desert will grow quickly given +12 free food.

In broader terms, this ends up almost negating terrain yields completely, and city development becomes pretty warped because your newly-founded cities can skyrocket up to major metropolises without any "growth improvements." Improvements like farms, buildings like granaries, and food-based resources like Fish all become meaningless. Might as well drop that Settler down in the middle of polar tundra, because that city is going to grow like it was surrounded by grassland / river tiles.

 

[He-Who-Hunts]

Get rid of the Scholasticism (33% of CS sci) Social policy and change them to scientific City states where they gift a set number of beakers similar to the culture CS's. That would make them as important to small empires as cultural CS's are to large ones!

 

[carlisimo]

Nerf trading posts, nothing else.

 

[Uniform Sierra]

The bonuses are cumulative, they increase as ages progress, and you can often ally with several in the same game. In later ages, you can get a ridiculous amount of free food - manna from heaven, basically - if you Ally with just three Maritimes, like +15 free food in your capital and +9 in every other city in the world. (I think that's the rate, but my numbers could be wrong.) That enables you to basically found cities anywhere you want; even a city in the middle of the desert will grow quickly given +12 free food.

In broader terms, this ends up almost negating terrain yields completely, and city development becomes pretty warped because your newly-founded cities can skyrocket up to major metropolises without any "growth improvements." Improvements like farms, buildings like granaries, and food-based resources like Fish all become meaningless. Might as well drop that Settler down in the middle of polar tundra, because that city is going to grow like it was surrounded by grassland / river tiles.

Sounds pretty realistic to me.

The settlement at Jamestown in the 1600s entirely relied on food supplies from England until John Smith came along.

 

[smellymummy]

the AI should really get a boost in its aggression for city state influence. it's already almost there; with non default game setups (many civs low CS) you can see competition going on. so either wait for a firaxis patch or add some quick lua to force the AI to buy favors

id like to say the concept and bonus is good, just that its too easy to game it for the player vs AI. if the gamey tactic is gone then problem solved right?

how do things roll out in multiplayer games? i'd imagine that maritime influence is important. examples from those games is where good insight on how to improve maritime CS is going to be found

 

[Peng Qi]

Beaker bonus?

 

[JP1]

Sounds pretty realistic to me.

The settlement at Jamestown in the 1600s entirely relied on food supplies from England until John Smith came along.

But it's not realistic for one maritime city-state to provide huge food surpluses to 25 or 30 tiny cities spread all over the continent. (Which is exactly the kind of city spam the maritime bonus promotes and supports.) Forget any kind of historic realism, it's just game-breaking.

Let's throw out the option of making the computer pursue the Maritime city-states more aggressively as a fix. (Which is kind of the Marvel vs. Capcom method of balance... If everyone has access to broken stuff, the game becomes balanced again, right?) The ways of fixing the Maritime states seem to be some combination of:

1. Leaving the bonuses functionally the same, but lowering the amount of food given.
2. Limiting the number of cities which can receive the bonus food.

Making the bonus somehow only apply to one city seems to be the most logical to me, as it is the only city-state bonus which scales with empire size. (In fact, the Militaristic and Cultural city-state bonuses become relatively LESS valuable as your empire gets bigger.) Perhaps the bonus should only apply to the city nearest the city-state, only apply to some random city each turn, or only apply to your capital... But one way or another, I'd think the fix for Maritime states would have to involve removing the scalability.

 

[Grimberht]

Change Foods bonus for pure $$$

they provide extra "trade routes" after all.

 

[Aldor]

How about leaving them as they are?? As long as tile yield and city growth past size 10 is not adjusted, I would change NOTHING about the current maritime city states.

Also don't forget that not everyone plays on huge maps where you have dozens of maritime CS! I often play smaller maps, where you usually don't get more than one or two maritimes.

However IF something is done about tile yield and city growth, then I like the suggestion of changing maritimes to provide a science bonus similar to the culture bonus of cultured CS.

 

[aimlessgun]

I'm not sure why many people are suggesting something to do with distance from the city state. That just sort of feels awkward and unnecessarily complicated.

How about leaving them as they are?? As long as tile yield and city growth past size 10 is not adjusted, I would change NOTHING about the current maritime city states.

Also don't forget that not everyone plays on huge maps where you have dozens of maritime CS! I often play smaller maps, where you usually don't get more than one or two maritimes.

However IF something is done about tile yield and city growth, then I like the suggestion of changing maritimes to provide a science bonus similar to the culture bonus of cultured CS.

Change nothing? Care to explain why in more detail?

As for number of them, on a standard map you will have 16 CS, for an average of 5.33 Maritimes. Hardly limited.

 

[LDiCesare]

Maritimes are overpowered because their bonuses increase with the number of cities you have (thus making ICS easier than it should be), unlike the fixed bonuses granted by cultural and militaristic city-states.

The simple solution would to let maritimes grant X amount of food (or X*1.5 for ally status), to be distributed among all your cities. X should start low and increase significantly every era to prevent maritimes being too overpowered in the early ages.

Yes. Or even better allow any city to trade food and get rid of city states.

 

[Aldor]

Change nothing? Care to explain why in more detail?

As for number of them, on a standard map you will have 16 CS, for an average of 5.33 Maritimes. Hardly limited.

Not everyone plays the same, not everyone uses "optimal" strategies (ICS). I hate ICS, instead I love to build small empires with large cities. And it takes FAR too long to grow them without the current maritime CS (and yes, I build granaries and watermills wherever possible). I'm not using the trading post spam, I farm a lot of tiles, but even so and with a few maritime states I rarely manage to get large cities in a timely manner.

There are several problems here really, city growth past size 10, tile yield, AI still ignoring CS, also how late hospitals/medical labs become available. All of these should be changed before working on the maritime CS. Or at least, along with them.

Also, I wonder, if people think something is overpowered, why do they still use it? If you think maritimes are OP, don't use them (or don't use multiple of them). If you think horsemen are OP, don't use them. Why ask for a nerf if other people might enjoy those aspects? You even have the ability to mod these things to your taste. But don't ask for the main game to be changed. This is my opinion at least.