Is the Tribute part of Tribute Policy supposed to scale with era?

[Gidoza]

The question is simple, but the reason might be less so.

In the Tribute Policy, it describes the acquiring of new tiles as scaling with Era.

However, when actually demanding tribute from a city-state, there is no such description there saying that it does scale with era. However - demanding tribute on a city-state most definitely DOES scale with era.



What's happened in the current game: I noticed that my tribute demands were providing higher yields than I anticipated, even for Mongolia. What I did with at least 1 city-state was annihilate all its troops, burn down all its stuff, and choke the city so it doesn't even have a military unit in it. With enough troops surrounding the city, I'm able to demand tribute every single turn for 100%. This is increasing my Culture yields something like eight-fold (and it's a Faith city-state...). I'm not sure if this behaviour is intentional or not, but boy is it great!

 

[Gidoza]

UPDATE: I want to add just how hysterical some of the bonuses from this method actually are.

It is turn 218. I have two ideological tenets and I'm on Immortal difficulty - the most advanced cultural AI has 2 policies in a 3rd-tier Cultural policy set.

What I'm doing: I have three City-States near my territory which I have burned to the ground, save the city itself. If a new unit is trained by the City-State (which it always does), I immediately declare war on it and kill the unit - because this prevents my demanding of tribute every single turn.

For reference - demanding tribute on a Cultural City-State as Mongolia is getting me roughly 750 Culture in the Industrial Era (for the City-State itself) - BUT the bonus from the Tribute Policy, scaling by Era with the Mongolia bonus, is yielding upwards of 1500 Culture. That's just for one City-State. With all three going, I'm easily making over 5000 Culture per turn, and it takes four turns to get a new Social Policy, because - I repeat - I demand tribute on 3 City-States *every single turn*.

I'll let that all sink in...

 

[azum4roll]

Sounds like what I used to do in low difficulty with the old system, except I didn't even have to kill the units back then.

Things that should be changed:
1. Fix the bug (?) that doesn't count units in major civ territory into the threat score (I think it's related to the change that made CS units unable to enter major civ territory). We can raise the CS resistance value a bit after that.
2. Add a hard cooldown (maybe 5 turns) after a player demands tribute during which the "recently tributed" score is 9999%. The score can scale normally after.
3. Declaring war on CS should lock you into the war for some amount of turns. Alternatively, make players unable to declare on the CS if they have recently made peace.

 

[Gidoza]

Sounds like what I used to do in low difficulty with the old system, except I didn't even have to kill the units back then.

Things that should be changed:
1. Fix the bug (?) that doesn't count units in major civ territory into the threat score (I think it's related to the change that made CS units unable to enter major civ territory). We can raise the CS resistance value a bit after that.
2. Add a hard cooldown (maybe 5 turns) after a player demands tribute during which the "recently tributed" score is 9999%. The score can scale normally after.
3. Declaring war on CS should lock you into the war for some amount of turns. Alternatively, make players unable to declare on the CS if they have recently made peace.

These are all potential solutions. The one I had in mind was relating to the "someone recently demanded tribute..." notifier, which initially is -300: however, each demand always *resets* it to -300 - alternatively, each demand could simply *add* another -300 instead. So plausibly I might be able to demand tribute a few turns in a row, but eventually I would get to a point where the duration between demands is the same as it was originally intended.

All this hinges on the question: what is the goal of the -300 modifier? To make a 30 turn gap between demands, or to just require a huge army to make more demands more often - and if so, how often?