If great people scaled...gamebreaking?

Mr. Civtastic

Prince
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Jan 2, 2006
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Reading all the SE talk about how it slows down around liberalism because great scientists cant fully lightbulb techs and they come at a slower rate had me thinking...what if great people scaled?

The main problem would be deciding when they should scale up...maybe at a certain point in time set by difficulty and length of game, or if a certain number of civs (maybe 2 or 3) have, say...education, then your gs can fully lightbulb education.

We could have great scientists continue to fully lightbulb techs. Great engineers fully build wonders. Great artist's culture bombs could increase. Same with Great merchant's trade missions.

Would this be close to historically accurate? I think yes and no. Surely today we have better construction tools, more outlets to spread works of culture, more methods of selling and trading, more sharing of knowledge. But at the same time, as things become more complex work often becomes a group effort. Things like computers, nuclear power, space flight...they are the product of many men. But then again, you'd be hard-pressed to convice me that the design and construction of pyramids was a single man. You could go both ways with this.

I especially like the idea of being able to fully lightbulb if a certain number of techs have it. A "great scientist" would surely study other people's work and be able to duplicate it a little quicker. Things like the soviet union and nuclear weapons, the u.s. space program come to mind.

The main question, would this be too powerful? Imagine if someone could build the space elevator in one turn. Thats ALOT of hammers...but is it more then the pyramids at their period of time? Same thing with tech...is biology more beakers that that point in time then philosophy at its point?

This still could be somewhat held in check by great people point requirements increasing with each great person produced.

Thoughts?
 
Great people already scale with your population.

i knew that engineers did. after being someone frustrated by trying out using one for versailles in a large city, realizing it'd be 20 hammers from done, so i scooted him out to a far city that was much smaller (where it would do more good), and was disappointed that he'd contribute far fewer hammers.

so i can see how you mean it for GEs, but do the others scale in ways i don't know about?
 
The lightbulb scales to empire-wide pop size, i'm pretty sure. Someone can post the exact numbers if they want, but yeah, it does scale to some extent.
 
Hmm...I was under the impression it didnt scale because eventually you cant complete a tech or a wonder with a single gs/ge.
 
it does scale, formula is something like
Normal speed, 1000 (1500 for GS) + K*Total population
I do not remember K
 
Well, it doesn't scale enough, IMO.
 
Great people's effect increase somewhat with population but it's pretty small. I don't think that it's "scaling" in the sense of the OP - one meaning is that it increases roughly proportionally with population, and it's nothing like that.

They'll still become of low importance just because it gets hard to make them after a while.
 
Technically that's scaling, but in practice it's flat. Your very first GS will give you ~1530 beakers. When you'vee grown to 10 cities of size 10, you get 1800 beakers -- less than 20% more. And I thought I read somewhere else that it was 1500 + 2*pop? (And 1000 + pop for nonGS). Dunno.

I didn't know that GEs build hammers depended on city size. Anyone know a formula?

peace,
lilnev
 
I did some testing in world builder, not code finding. The beakers for specialists scales according to game speed, but not anything else that I thought might matter.

Normal speed GS is 1500 + 3 * pop
Epic speed GS = 2250 + 4.5 * pop
Normal speed OS* is 1000 + 2 * pop
Epic speed OS = 1500 + 3 * pop

I tried both map size and difficulty, both of which scale the beakers that you need, but neither one of them changed the output.

* Other Specialist
 
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