Lux thoughts

[Victoria]

I have 5 sage and can sell 5 to everyone. Wouldn’t it be better to put a free one up for auction/offers?
If you stopped lux stability stacking would that make things too unstable?

the fact these things multi sell and stack and you make money buying them just seems insane.

 

[looorg]

Yes its a bit odd that you can sell everything to everyone but I gather this is mostly a matter of abstraction. You are not selling all your stuff just some of what is produced at X. While Lux specific here I gather it would have to be similar for Strats which would break the entire game, nobody (most of the time) would have that kind of actual access since a lot of units and other things (moon/space stuff, nuke stuff) require multiples of a resource to construct/upgrade to. So they would never be built. I have already run into issues with trying to find a third source of X (oil, in this case) which nobody had and it just stalled out inovation/production in that regard.

While the selling access for gold can be a bit weird the main issue here is perhaps more how it scales with buildings. You are more or less incentivized to buy it all since it all stacks.

The only reasons to not buy it all at the moment is a lack of gold at the moment. But once you start to buy you might just buy it all. There is no incentive or reason not to. Just stack it up.

 

[Gedemon]

maybe each new version of a resource you already have should give a bit less yields than the previous.

 

[Siptah]

I think the idea of luxuries stacking is fine per se. It allows for a very simple concept. The „yields“ need to be retuned, however. And I don‘t mean FIMS of the resources - except maybe that early papyrus is too strong - but that stability each copy gives should be less and the buildings that enhance gold from trade routes need to be toned down a bit.

 

[looorg]

Some form of diminishing return perhaps per unit of luxury X that you have? But even then there is no reason not just buy it all. After all a lump sump of gold for something that gives yields every turn, it would have to be a very bad thing not to want to stack it. I'm not quite sure how you would get rid of it now.

 

[Victoria]

I'm not quite sure how you would get rid of it now.

You want to stack it for its values it gives your cities about say +2 food per farmers.
But stacking the stability, maybe it makes atbility too easy?
And the gold stacking from it is powerful.
It also has diplomatic value so all around luxes are qute string ATM was all I was saying but there are other things that are much stringer and need to be toned down.
So yh, in these early days its= is not such a big one i guess.

 

[AntSou]

Why not something akin to the city cap, like limit to trade routes in civ? Perhaps in addition to diminishing returns for trading duplicates like suggested above.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I don't think I'm speaking out of turn to share that the dev team was aware that experienced 4x gamers would find it easy to minimize stability in the release build, including through luxury stacking. They didn't want stability to be too punishing for new players, though, especially those new to Amplitude's style of 4x games, and they wanted more data before tuning stability and luxury impacts. So I'm confident that feedback here will be read with interest.

It's also known that the inter-related webs of trading can make the late game more peaceful, which makes a lot of sense in the very late game, but may happen a little too early right now. So while I think the core trading system is solid, I expect the dev team is open to balancing some of the impacts of trade.

One of the best things about the Amplitude team is that they relish and listen to feedback, and they pay close attention to what experienced gamer communities like Civfanatics are saying. They have a pretty clear vision of what they want their game to be, but they're very open to ideas on how best to realize that vision, so you should feel confident that your ideas are being listened to, even if they don't always have time to drop by and say so.

 

[Elhoim]

Yes, plus I believe that any tweaks to the stability system should be an integral approach, so that the impact is felt at the right time. Just lowering luxuries stability without changing something else would make the early game very limited, so there needs to be some kind of compensation in stability balance since it's quite good early on.

My take would be:

- Lower the system dependency on luxuries, having max stability from luxuries being around 100 (so that if you are playing too close to the limit you get an impact when losing a trade route, but not going from 100 to -50).
- City centers can act as commons, adding stability per surrounding quarters, to help build basic cities (plus sacrifice a bit of yields when doing so).
- Make commons and forts one per territory, and in increase their effects via infrastructures, to avoid the annoying "build a garrison, build a district, repeat" gameplay.
- Make some more infrastructures give minor stability bonuses, like walls and watchtower infrastructure lines.
- Connecting train stations should add stability.
- Natural reserves should add a bit of stability.
- Make the "per population one" tech benefit only unlock once or twice, not 3 times.

The idea is to link it to things that are unlocked as the game goes on, so the game goes a bit more into a flow of "pulses" of city expansion, instead of endless quarters.

 

[Victoria]

inter-related webs of trading can make the late game more peaceful

And the early game, you can play peaceful all game straight off the bat, maybe with a few tussles but as long as you push influence early and get those trades going. Been playing the peace game, grab land while being nice, and keep the peace while I sail off to have a continent all to myself.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

And the early game, you can play peaceful all game straight off the bat, maybe with a few tussles but as long as you push influence early and get those trades going. Been playing the peace game, grab land while being nice, and keep the peace while I sail off to have a continent all to myself.

Out of curiousity, have you found this to be true in the higher difficulty levels, too? The AI seems to be tuned right now to be rather passive in the starting difficulty levels and to take it's cue from the player as to whether this is to be a war-heavy or peaceful game. But at the higher difficulty levels, the AI gets much more feisty. Or at least, it did. I haven't been able to play very much of the builds over the past couple of months and there's been a ton of balancing done during that time, so maybe what I'm saying isn't true of the release build. I'm looking forward to getting home early next week and being able to try out the release version.

Also, the AI's traits make a difference. Depending on who you're dealing with, some AI will be very happy to cement a peaceful border through trade, while others are always itching for a fight. You can cow pretty much all of them by investing in having the biggest army, but the "I'm willing to be friendly" approach will only work with a few at higher difficulties, from what I've seen.

It also helps if your neighbours don't become the Huns or the Mongols. If they do, best to hope they dislike somebody else more than you.

 

[Victoria]

Out of curiousity,

At Empire they start to get a bit more stroppy still but I have dropped down to work out more on the best way to get early influence… and this is some of it.
When I play aesthete everyone is aligned with you, and if you are trading with the huns and they are aligned it seems to be enough. When not aesthete you need to have better influence and at higher levels, but that is not the case, I think this is the difference as to why they get more agressive.
The traits do come in to it as well and as I have mentioned, you get some stroppiness, the point is to react well diplomatically. At some stage I’ll pop up to civ and HK levels but at the moment I am more interested in the influence.