Roland Johansen
Deity
Sullla said:
I've already modded it out of the game (two days ago). It means that there is a bit more money in the game. My break even science rate was about 73% before I modded it out of the game. After modding it out of the game it is about 80%. Wow, that will spiral out of control, really fast.
(note that this is an immortal level game, that's the reason that my break even science rate is not 95% like in a noble level game).
Most people playing at the higher difficulty levels will have finished the game before inflation levels become very high. If you play at the lower difficulty levels, then the other costs are so low that even a 100% inflation level will not make the total costs very high.
The problem is that at some point, there's nothing that will increase the income of your cities, while inflation is still rising.
I don't know who first said during the development cycle that something was needed to increase costs. It was probably based on the notion that science rates were able to climb to about 90% in the late game on the normal difficulty levels. So banks and other commercial buildings were less useful. That's however the wrong reason to make such a change. You have to remember that periods of a low tax rate are needed to upgrade your units and to cash rush when you use the universal suffrage civic and during those periods, your banks and other commercial buildings will be useful.
However, if the developers at some point felt that the economic situation was too good at the end of the game, then they should have looked long and hard at the things that cost money and the things that contribute money. The introduction of the inflation mechanism that increases cost based on the number of turns that you've played seems like a last minute rush decision to fix something wrong in the basics of the game. The economic system is a basic game element and this feels like a very gamey solution to a crucial game element.
Some options that seem better to me:
1) Another easy last minute repair by adding a cost factor based on the progress on the tech tree. In my opinion much better than based on the number of turns played, but still very artificial and gamey. This could still probably be changed in the expansion pack as it doesn't sound that difficult.
2) You shouldn't have removed the costs of buildings. These costs allowed for a realistic increase of costs in the late game. Early buildings maybe shouldn't even have a cost, but late game building costs would have created an excellent balancing mechanism. It would also have led to more emphasis on the city specialisation. Why build a factory that costs 4 gold per turn in a city with low production and high commerce? Why build a bank that costs 3 gold per turn in a pure production based city?
3) You could have made the modern units cost more upkeep while not having such a huge free unit upkeep (a size 20 city can maintain about 5 units for free, that's pretty much). Large modern armies are a serious drain on an economy in real life. In my civ games, they rarely are.
4) You could have made the late game civics clearly more expensive in upkeep but still worth it for offering some other benefits. Now they sometimes offer more benefits and are cheaper in upkeep. Modern societies have the social and economic structure to support a better, more expensive civic system.
I personally would have gone for a combination of no 2, no 3 and no4.
I understand that you can't really talk about this because of an NDA. So this is not a very fair discussion. Hmm, can't really help you with that. Thank you for your reply.
