March Patch Notes (formerly february)

[QuantumProjects]

as stated, Nazi Germany was fairly a happy place til it got bombed out.

unhappy = they get mad. You can't take a bunch of people who are unhappy and form an economic system that keeps them unhappy. It doesn't work.

Yeah, Chinese people work 14h a day and get minimum wages at the end of the month, with no protection to their health, their country is ruled by a despotic party and they have no freedom of speech and thought. I'm quite sure they are not happy, in general. But they're still the second most powerful economy in the world. I call this "survival", not "happy working citizens".

 

[Zyxpsilon]

How this turned into Politics is a puzzle even i can't resolve.
In the meantime, the favorable principles of happiness can only lead to growth when managed efficiently. Foreign troops deployment under Democracy was a bit of an overshoot but who cares anymore, Communism is on its Death Bed no thanks to Global Economy & Capitalist'ium chemistry and anorexia fattening McBurgers.
Want correctness, you asked.

 

[lschnarch]

What made people space cities apart and not spam them in Civ 4 was simply that worked tiles were so darn valuable. You wanted cities to be working a ton of them. You wanted to grow your cities larger so that they could work more tiles.

Which actually is a realistic and plausible way to do.

I know, many now will roll their eyes and say: "Ah, go away with realism if it's going to spoil my fun!".
Nevertheless, realism and plausibility are key elements of a civilization game.
First, because a Civ game is about re-creating history. Second, because it helps to understand certain elements of the game. We know that a swordsman is a military units being stronger than a warrior, since we know this from history and we identify his task at one glance due to the term "swordsman".
The game would play exactly the same if the unit's name would be "bludsnedgu" and it would be represented by a pink blob. We just were unable to identify it.

That being said, this patch is a step in the right direction because working tiles and the kinds of tiles within the city radius will matter more.

/defender mode on
Ah, you are just wanting to have Civ4.5
/defender mode off

Maintenance hampered you in Civ 4 because it would drag your tech rate down. Building.

Exactly. Immediate costs of opportunity. The effect becoming viable immediately.
In V, the effect (on happiness) becomes effective much later, if at all.

Furthermore, one of the glaring problems of V is the magical "beaming".
You plop a city somewhere on the planet, improve the luxury tile next to it and - bammm - you are more happy and are getting more gold. Except for the founding of the city you don't have costs of opportunity.
Especially you don't have to care for infrastructure, one of the main factores for the success of "empires" throughout history.
Add the magical beaming of maritime food and it becomes completely ridiculous.

In other words, a key element of empire development (the connections between cities and productive areas) was given up because "it didn't look nice! Booohoooh!"

Just think of the soviet union after ww2: allies in war, conquer a few cities (eastern europe), result decades of cold war and nearly ww3.

Wrong analogy.

The conflict between the western world and soviet Russia was much less due to the fact that they conquered territory. It was due to the fact that the respective "social policies" weren't compatible.
Another thing which was completely left out in V. Whatever you do within your country in terms of social structure ("Social Policies") doesn't have any influence on your international relationships.

as stated, Nazi Germany was fairly a happy place til it got bombed out.

You can't say that the WWII Soviets were 'very unhappy' given that they managed to fight for their country, rather than against it.

Despotism != automatically unhappy. that's a big problem in your argument. Some people are just fine with that.

unhappy = they get mad. You can't take a bunch of people who are unhappy and form an economic system that keeps them unhappy. It doesn't work.

First: Nazi Germany was quite far away from being "happy". Most probably the Soviet Union was even less "happy". At best, you may say that both were forced to be tolerant, meaning the level of unhappiness was balanced against the level of oppression.

This just is another weakness of a "happiness system": Happiness is something which cannot be quantified in real life. Especially you cannot "engineer" the happiness level to the desired level.

Yes, you can tweak such a gamey system back and forth, until you reach a desired effect under certain conditions. But it remains a gamey feature without any relationship to real-life experiences. It is as artificial as ever possible.

The point is that in V the developers were unable (and it doesn't really matter if it was due to unwillingness or incapability) to create plausible features to balance your "empire".
Where Civ4 (the game which must not be named) was an "empire-building" game allowing for immersion, V is just .... a game. In these regards it is on the same level as Monopoly. At best.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Ah, but the "other landmass" rule is in Civ5 too.

Nitpicking again.
That's why I said I'm pretty sure it (settling cities within workable radius) will be still the case in civ5. (because I don't know for certain whether the patch will change that)

The point still stands; As far as cities on the same landmass are concerned, you couldn't settle into the workable radius of a city in Civ4, why should that be different in Civ5? It's a change that should have been in before the game shipped.

I probably agree. I haven't bothered to try the changed rule in the game. Honestly I can't see it concerning me one way or the other. If it supposedly helps tone down ICS a bit, I'm all for it.

I'm certainly not one to treat the rules of the game at release as some standard on which the game should forever be judged.

 

[Nares]

In your line of work, how much can be done by a small team of developers in one month? Because that's how often patches are showing up. I'm asking because in my line of work 8 to 16 is usually meetings and phone calls with maybe 3-4 hours of effective "sitting in front of the PC". Considering how many changes and upgrades they did to this game already, I'd say they are doing just fine (and under a lot of pressure, obviously).

Once again, most of the changes were ripped directly from already established mods, and most of those changes are merely tweaks to XML files that can be made in Notepad; hardly indicative of any real work, though I understand your point of bureaucratic red-tape making any one step take much longer than it needs to.

One developer with vision, given the clearance to make changes at their discretion, could have researched the various popular mods, assembled a list of worthwhile and relatively conservative changes, and implemented them within a very conservative one week time frame.

These changes are so easy to make I suspect that it takes more effort to incorporate them into some sort of patcher than it does to directly make the edits to the XML files themselves. It's not like we're talking about stability or performance improvements, which probably do take a good deal of time to investigate, address, implement and test. If it took a month for them to put these changes together, it's because it took two to three weeks to coordinate discussions with their Frankenstein team.

(which I applaud, actually -- it never made sense to me that building a bunch of roads in Civ 3 meant I was a sterling researcher).

That's actually really funny of you to say, because the flow of information is perhaps one of the greatest components in scientific advancement.

Einstein could never have proven relativity without observations made from observatories outside of Europe, and probably wouldn't have tried as hard to prove it without knowing of competing research being done in America.

That's just one example. There are countless others.

 

[noncognosco]

Ok so I have a question. City centers now only get one free production. Is this regardless of terrain type? In other words, do cities on hills get two free production? If so, this seems like it creates a genuine question of whether it is better to build on flatland and get the buffed windmill or build on a hill to get the extra free production. Discuss.

 

[danieladler]

And since it is said this patch will release in february, i guess we can expect it in the end of march?

 

[Andoo]

Yeah, Chinese people work 14h a day and get minimum wages at the end of the month, with no protection to their health, their country is ruled by a despotic party and they have no freedom of speech and thought. I'm quite sure they are not happy, in general. But they're still the second most powerful economy in the world. I call this "survival", not "happy working citizens".

I'm curious to see how real Chinese people would respond to this assertion. Although I'm not a Chinese myself, at least all of my Chinese friends keep confirming me that a life in China isn't as bad as people make it to be since they started openning their markets.

 

[King of Spades]

And since it is said this patch will release in february, i guess we can expect it in the end of march?

I'm unsure what you mean by this. Do you mean that the ETA we've gotten earlier were wrong? Do you prefer it if we didn't get patch notes before release at all? Or do you prefer it if we didn't get an ETA?

 

[CTH]

Ok so I have a question. City centers now only get one free production. Is this regardless of terrain type? In other words, do cities on hills get two free production? If so, this seems like it creates a genuine question of whether it is better to build on flatland and get the buffed windmill or build on a hill to get the extra free production. Discuss.

Hmmm I would really like it if was terrain dependent. It would create some extra strategy for city placement.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Hmmm I would really like it if was terrain dependent. It would create some extra strategy for city placement.

Comin' up... baby!!!

 

[QuantumProjects]

I'm curious to see how real Chinese people would respond to this assertion. Although I'm not a Chinese myself, at least all of my Chinese friends keep confirming me that a life in China isn't as bad as people make it to be since they started openning their markets.

"Isn't as bad", that's really vague. Is it bad or not? I don't say that my life in my free democratic country "isn't as bad as people say". It isn't bad at all, most of the time. However, I do understand that, maybe, Chinese people may generally be tolerant about their condition, and they call that happiness.

Truly, only a Chinese can tell for sure, but a Chinese person who moved from China to a free democratic country could tell the difference better, IMHO.

Anyway, back to the topic: while I don't have CiV myself, it does seem they're going in the right direction. I hope they get this game better and better. I've stated in another post that they should focus on fixing those well-known game breaking bugs first, people generally prefer a mild playable game than an astonishing unplayable game.

 

[bryanw1995]

Don't get too excited -- it's not your mods that are being ripped off.
These chances borrow heavily from Thalassicus' unofficial patch.

yeah, now I'll get the best of both worlds. Thalassicus imho had by the far the best early mods, so now we will be able to play the game in a more builder-friendly fashion instead of just warwarwar constantly for optimal gameplay. TP changes will be interesting, putting a premium on bonus gold tiles, banks, etc etc.

 

[bryanw1995]

Yeah, I guess we'll see how it plays out. -25% from factory and -25% from railroads though...

The lowered starting production for a city is also interesting. It will make founding cities harder, but I hope it doesn't do this by making them more annoying.

increased cost of settler, lowered initial city production, lowered trade income from smaller cities, much better "special" tile potential, all of these make city location much more important. Which just happens to be something that many of us have been clamoring for since launch.

 

[bryanw1995]

The beelined Babylon Academy will still be viable. Artists are still a waste, and it's hard to envision circumstances where you'd take a Manufactory over a midgame Wonder. If you pop a GE out early enough from Meritocracy, you might build a Manufactory on a tile that several cities can share to jump start infrastructure.

I don't see how this patch is going to make "tall" empires viable. Even with the hit to base city squares, lots of cities are still going to be optimal until they nerfbat Great Scientists and rework Maritimes. Speaking of which, upping late game tech costs and the new Landed Elite just compound those errors.

The only question left in my mind is whether France, Babylon, India or Siam best abuses the new rule set.



You're going to want parts of both trees, unless you are playing an OCC. With all of the Culture buffs, you won't have to restrict yourself to one or the other. You're going to end up with a boatload of early policies.

siam got an indirect nerf b/c universities are now 2 GS's instead of one.

 

[bryanw1995]

Well the buildings actually providing base is good, but I'm not sure if that +7 base is going to outweigh an extra +50%. Let's see...

A city with base 10 with +115% will get 21.5 , and with the new yields will have a base of 17 and get 28.05 . A city with 30 currently gets 64.5 , but will instead get 61.05. The point where production starts to be better under the current system would seem to be at 25 base production.

Hmm...not as bad as I thought, actually. That's reasonably high. But it would seem to run counter to the emphasis being placed on larger cities; the larger your cities get, the more they are disadvantaged under this new system.

don't forget the boost to mines, plus the added production on "special" tiles with the right improvements/building. overally I'd say that it will be a production boost, though it will be somewhat based upon how well you placed the city in the first place.

 

[snapple232]

"Isn't as bad", that's really vague. Is it bad or not? I don't say that my life in my free democratic country "isn't as bad as people say". It isn't bad at all, most of the time. However, I do understand that, maybe, Chinese people may generally be tolerant about their condition, and they call that happiness.

Truly, only a Chinese can tell for sure, but a Chinese person who moved from China to a free democratic country could tell the difference better, IMHO.

Anyway, back to the topic: while I don't have CiV myself, it does seem they're going in the right direction. I hope they get this game better and better. I've stated in another post that they should focus on fixing those well-known game breaking bugs first, people generally prefer a mild playable game than an astonishing unplayable game.

I'm a Chinese-American who grew up in the US, but has visited China many times and has family there. How life is in China really depends on where and who you are. There are still many millions of poor rural people in the countryside who continue to represent what many Westerners imagine when they think of life in China. It's a different story if you live in a metropolis like Shanghai. You have people with condos, HDTVs, luxury cars, etc. Your living standards could be very high - as long as you keep your mouth shut.

As someone who knows both the east and the west first-hand, I've noticed that Westerners tend to believe that political freedom is a prerequisite to economic prosperity. Unfortunately (or not, depending on your point of view), that isn't true. Both China and post-Soviet Russia have opened up their markets and rapidly grown their economies while resisting any real movement towards democratic ideals. So talking about whether people in various countries are 'happy' or not really depends on the definition of happiness. As of now, most people in China measure happiness by the things they own. After living in extreme poverty for decades, all the shiny new toys they can buy with their newfound wealth are irresistible.

I identify more closely with Western political ideas, so I recognize the restrictions on civil liberties and human rights. The reality is though, that the average Chinese citizen just doesn't care about those relatively abstract ideals as long as their tangible living standards are rising. That will probably change, though, once the initial gold rush is over.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I think what civ needs for city limiting is a combination of the corruption concept of Civ 3 and the maintenance of Civ 4 AND the global happiness of civ 5.

In Civ 4+5 they moved from a local model of civlilization limiting (corruption) to a global one (maintenance, Happiness)

What is needed is a mix.
Have Local Happiness... with Local results... but dependent on both Local AND Global Factors.
So Happiness in City A =/=Happiness in City B... but Happiness in City A is affected by Factors in all other cities.

More advanced techs let you move from Unhappiness->maintenance costs

Also, Un happiness should have almost NO growth/population effect... instead it should be a Rebel activity effect.

So Early on...
Expand too fast=Rebels in outlying areas ("Military Maintenance" needed... with destruction of things involved)
Later on..
Expand too fast=extra maintenance costs



However, the big fdifference in Civ 4 v. Civ 5... In civ 4 extra paintenance is a Continuous cost... each extra gpt spent would hurt your science rate. In Civ 5, happiness=population cap(just like civ 4, but now it is an imperial population cap) so it only hurts if you hit the limit. It lowers your maximum science (based on population)... but it has no penalty otherwise.

If they seriously improved Golden Ages, then excess Happiness(pop cap) would probably be worth aiming for, instead excess pop cap is near useless.. so you want to fill it up as fast as possible.

 

[Mustakrakish]

This is one of my bigger headaches in single-player...walling off or managing border agreements to prevent annoying civ from planting a city in nearby tundra and then denouncing me for encroachment.

Border agreements?

I doubt its enough though, but hey rome wasnt built in 1 turn

I'm fairly sure it was. I just did it yesterday.

 

[Drawmeus]

increased cost of settler, lowered initial city production, lowered trade income from smaller cities, much better "special" tile potential, all of these make city location much more important. Which just happens to be something that many of us have been clamoring for since launch.

It's a good set of changes. It won't fix everything, but this game is incrementally moving in the right direction.