I'm posting this in the Orbis subthread since it's all I play now, but obviously this isn't specific to Orbis. It seems to me that (for perfectly understandable reasons) there has been a lot of focus on adding cool new things or features and not a lot on actually balancing how the game plays out. For example, new buildings, civics, and wonders are not individually overpowered, but you stack a whole bunch one after the other and all of a sudden you're pumping out thousands and thousands of science a turn. Ditto with culture.
The turn limit on standard is, what, around 700 turns? Play on one of the harder difficulties and the tech tree will be finished in less than half that. Sometimes as little as, what, 250 turns? The tech progression gets darn near exponential towards the end.
Same with culture; it seems to me that you should have to really work at winning in whichever fashion you choose. You won't win a conquest game without devoting yourself to it. Ditto for domination and religion. Certainly winning a Tower of Mastery victory is going to require a lot of hard work. But you can almost stumble into a cultural victory. If you're TRYING to win culturally you can do it in, again, less than half the turns in the game. With some civs I have no doubt even faster. I'll probably have to turn it off from now on which would seem to disadvantage somebody like the Kuriotates or Elohim.
As with the tech progression, it's because once you start stacking all the new buildings and affects it becomes almost exponential.
Has anyone given serious thought to massively increasing tech costs as you progress up the trees? To finish the entire tech tree should require serious effort. Yes, the techs get more expensive but 20k (for example) is really not very much for an end-game tech and they just fly by so fast near the end. One second you and the AI are running tiremes and such and before you can blink everybody has the tree finished...
The turn limit on standard is, what, around 700 turns? Play on one of the harder difficulties and the tech tree will be finished in less than half that. Sometimes as little as, what, 250 turns? The tech progression gets darn near exponential towards the end.
Same with culture; it seems to me that you should have to really work at winning in whichever fashion you choose. You won't win a conquest game without devoting yourself to it. Ditto for domination and religion. Certainly winning a Tower of Mastery victory is going to require a lot of hard work. But you can almost stumble into a cultural victory. If you're TRYING to win culturally you can do it in, again, less than half the turns in the game. With some civs I have no doubt even faster. I'll probably have to turn it off from now on which would seem to disadvantage somebody like the Kuriotates or Elohim.
As with the tech progression, it's because once you start stacking all the new buildings and affects it becomes almost exponential.
Has anyone given serious thought to massively increasing tech costs as you progress up the trees? To finish the entire tech tree should require serious effort. Yes, the techs get more expensive but 20k (for example) is really not very much for an end-game tech and they just fly by so fast near the end. One second you and the AI are running tiremes and such and before you can blink everybody has the tree finished...
