Making Culture (and it's slider) Viable Options

[Hickman888]

First, a bit of background...

The way I understand things, in Civilization 4, there are several different ways you can specialize and optimize your economy, in order to maximize your commercial yields. For example:

• surplus will allow you to hire specialists, and these in turn will contribute to earning Great People
  
• can be used to "build" either wealth, culture, or science
  
• is taken and divided, using the slider, into the four commerce types

With the four commerce types, many of these interact with each other in interesting ways:

• researches your technologies, and focusing on this will give you an edge in the tech race, which provides numerous advantages. You can sell technologies to lagging civilizations for some money to continue your research
  
• can be used to buy technologies from willing civilizations, and can be used, with the proper civics, to rush production
  
• is the sneaky type, allowing you to potentially steal technologies and gold from other civilizations, and, just in general, cause mischief
  
• allows you to expand your borders, and can potentially flip rival cities

As you can see, culture is really the odd man out, and is an awkward fit with the relationships of all the other yields. It doesn't provide much utility 90% of the time, and can essentially be ignored once a city reaches Legendary status. Now, this mod has taken some strides in making culture more desired; Namely, by introducing several civilizations with culture as a historical goal, as well as a few buildings which increase in strength as the culture level rises. (Probably my favorite thing to do in this mod so far was to send my settlers out to unsettled land, crank up the culture slider, and watch my borders grow to cover all the virgin land. I loved playing as the Turks and the French for this reason.) Now these are great, but they still don't encourage, for example, the English to build a theater in London, or the Americans to recruit artists in Los Angeles. The player is more likely to build a museum or hotel in a city with high culture, rather than pursue culture in cities for the sake of these buildings. To that end, let me give my ideas:

Benefits of Local Culture:
While gold and science will always be your "bread and butter" yields, and espionage can be seen as a way to underhandedly deal with competing civilizations, I view culture as a yield with a lot of potential, as a way of "reinvesting" in your cities. Let me explain my ideas for new bonuses at each culture level:

1. Poor: Nothing
2. Fledgling: BFC
3. Developing: +10% , +5% more converted when building "commerce", +10% trade yield for every 25 used by city
4. Refined: +20% , +15% more converted when building "commerce", +10% trade yield for every 20 used by city
5. Influential: +50% , +30% more converted when building "commerce", +15% trade yield for every 20 used by city
6. Legendary: +100% , +55% more converted when building "commerce", +15% trade yield for every 15 used by city

Let me explain why I chose these bonuses:

• Cities, by default, will convert only 20% of their production to building either , , . A legendary city will convert 75% of its production. Therefore, a civilization that owns the Sagrada Familia will be able to convert 100% production in any legendary cities it owns.
• Each basic type of yield ( , , ) is encouraged in cities with high culture, and you must make tough decisions as to what your cultured cities will look like.
• Well cultured cities tend to be quite large, thus employing many different specialists. The more cultured a city is, the more it should inspire Great People to move to this city. is rewarded.
• Well cultured cities tend to be fairly developed, and have most of it's required buildings already constructed, increasing the likelihood that the city will devote itself to producing either ,, or . is rewarded.
• Well cultured cities tend to have lots of commercial activity, as well as have a lucrative tourism industry. I didn't want to just flat give a trade route bonus to cultured cities, as I wanted to make sure that emphasizing is rewarded just as much as food or hammers. Towns must compete with farms and mines, after all.
• I also chose to have the rewards scale higher as the culture level does. After all, it takes immense effort to bring a city to influential or legendary status, and the bonuses here should reward that effort.

With the benefits for developing your local culture fleshed out, there's only two more problems that need solving:

1. How to make the culture slider competitive with the espionage, research, and gold sliders.
2. How to reward the culture that a Legendary city is producing.

To that end, I propose a new mechanic in the game, partly inspired by Sunset of Civilization:

National Culture Bar:

This bar, located neatly next to the Great General and Great Spy bars, will slowly fill up as culture is produced in a civilization, thus insuring that both the culture of legendary cities is contributing to something, and the national culture slider can be used to work quickly towards a perceivable goal. Upon filling, this Culture Bar will spawn a Great Hero. This Great Hero can be used to do a couple of things:

• They can settle in a city as a specialist, turning the tile it is located on to a "Historical Territory" tile, or, if it is already a Historical Territory, into a "Core Territory" tile.
• He can be used to instantly raise the stability rating two (one?) level(s), in order to potentially buy a few turns before a collapse.
• Still working on a couple more ideas...

I've always thought it would be neat for a civilization to somehow have a way to spread it's core/historical territory over the course of a long game, and I think this Great Hero will give the player the chance to do that in a way that isn't too powerful. Of course, these guys won't be easy to come by, but I can definitely foresee some situations where a player might want to run the culture slider a decent amount in their attempt to get ahold of one of these Great Heroes.

I think these ideas for culture do a number of things:

• Make culture more competitive with the other commerce types
• Make the culture slider into a tool to be used for peace or war, as it can be used to develop the economies of your cities, or it can be used to increase happiness in war-weary cities and spawn a Great Hero in order to keep the war machine turning.
• Give players a new way to deal with stability in their empire

I'd love to hear your guy's thoughts and worries about these ideas, as well as hear some ideas of your own. Thanks for reading this fat post.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

I'm Imperator Knoedel and I approve of this message.

 

[Hightower]

There was a brief period in the development of the mod when high culture levels increased the output of specialists. I wish that would be brought back.

Reaching Legendary Culture is so rare and difficult (I'm a major builder and very rarely reach Legendary Culture unless it's part of an UHV/URV) that it doesn't seem so important that nothing happens once you get there.

 

[SultanRedSnake]

I applaud this excellent piece of community scholarship (nerd!).

 

[Hickman888]

There was a brief period in the development of the mod when high culture levels increased the output of specialists. I wish that would be brought back.

Reaching Legendary Culture is so rare and difficult (I'm a major builder and very rarely reach Legendary Culture unless it's part of an UHV/URV) that it doesn't seem so important that nothing happens once you get there.

That's interesting. I wasn't around for that period, but that sounds like a neat way to boost specialists and culture. And I understand that reaching Legendary status is fairly rare, but what I'm trying to get at is that if culture was made more of a worthwhile investment, we would see more cities reach Legendary status, and thus get those bonuses I described above.

I applaud this excellent piece of community scholarship (nerd!).

Thanks! After writing that long post, that's a title I'll accept.