My biggest grief thus far (Science VS Production)

[goodolarchie]

Speaking of hammers, why do engineer specialists only provide one measly hammer? Sure they give you great engineer points, but if you're just trying to get more hammers in a city, they're no better than unemployed citizens! I could work an unimproved plains tile instead and get 1 hammer and 1 food.

I found that disconcerting too. Some engineer!

Based on the tech rates of my games, I'd have to say that the beaker costs are tuned appropriately, but I do agree that most buildings take waaaaaaaay too long to create. It would make sense for a growing city to build a hospital, for instance, but building one is like making the SoL.. just not feasible. I think building costs should be lowered (not wonders, they're fine), tech costs should increase slightly. Or, they just need to make Workshops 50%. It seems ridiculous to make one building have that much of a bearing on the rest, but it would solve the problem after early-game.

 

[Ahriman]

I would rather that they just increased tech costs. My problem is not with how long it takes to make stuff, but with the fact that it might be obsolete by the time its finished.

 

[Wulf38]

If you use the "trading posts everywhere" approach, that's not such a problem. Just bank gold until you can afford to buy an up-to-date unit. I think the tech pace is fine, it's just hammers that are weak compared to everything else.

 

[Ahriman]

Well, in part these are related; perhaps the tech is flying past because I tend to focus on rivers and farm every river tile.

 

[Kelume]

The way I've found to solve some of these problems have already been mentioned largely in the thread, but I'll reiterate anyhow.

1) City specialization - most cities simply don't have the hammers to get everything. I think this is by design. My capital has been around a wealth of hills, and had a ton of production, while the remainder of my cities were on desert floodplains and coastal areas for more food or commerce. Each can build only the buildings they need to thrive for their purpose.
2) Gold and Trading posts - these help somewhat, but I do feel like hammers can be made to work.
3) Production buildings - early on, things get produced at an acceptable rate, but hammer costs seem to scale up quickly. This is counteracted by things like windmills, workshops, and factories scale this up VERY quickly.
4) Golden Ages - they're fairly plentiful in this game, with enough happiness, wonders, civics and great people to cause them fairly frequently. Especially powerful once you get into the age of...
5) Hydro plant - this building during a golden age will singlehandedly solve all of your production issues.

Engineer specialists do seem terrible. I'm not really sure what their purpose is, especially considering they come too late to rushbuild anything cool (one single slot in the Medieval era, really?).

 

[keweedsmo]

Has anyone tried climbing Piety and spamming golden ages? That's what I did my first game and was definately not hard up for hammers.

It's funny because as I'm reading this thread I'm thinking to myself, "yea production does seem a bit slower but these guys are over-exaggerating so f'ing much."

But yea. I went heavy on the culture and I completed the Piety and order trees. Order helped with the gold economy, extra production, and happiness. Piety helped with more culture and longer golden ages. I had a good 15+ golden ages that game. I had no shortage of production. And yea....Golden Ages are AMAZING and totally worth their cost/effort. Finally I had many of my cities focus on production.

My problem was actually quite the opposite of yours. I produced way too much and ran myself into a huge deficit.

I think the biggest problem here is everyone is trying to play Civilization V like they played Civilization IV. Obviously that's a bad idea and if you're doing that you need to rethink your strategy a bit.

- Gold is very important
- Golden ages are worth their weight in great people
- You're not supposed to build tons of buildings in each city
- Being aggressive helps your economy a lot

All that being said. I do agree that tech seems to research too quickly.

 

[Dhaeman]

Personally, I like always having useful buildings to choose from in my cities. My issue with civ 4 is that my top tier cities would run out of useful buildings so my decisions were pretty limited. So far in civ 5 I'm really having to decide what to produce in each city.

With that said, it is possible to focus more on production and I think in certain situations it may be ideal. If you have a 5-6 pop city with lots of mines you can cut out growth and still get a good production rate. Less unhappiness and more productivity, just don't build your science buildings there!

 

[IronDraconis]

Seriously folks, this is a new game.
Its different, its going to be different, its a good thing its different (otherwise how many of us would be screaming "they resold civ 4! where is civ 5! wah wah wah!!!!")!!

The biggest thing I have noticed thus far is exactly what the last 2 posts point out so clearly: Cities are now the specialist in the empire, not citizen inside the cities.
Since buildings have now been specified in their production bonuses for units, buildings, and wonders, and the production of those buildings takes time, gone are the days of having every city as a top tier city capable of making any unit/building/wonder efficiently. Now each city has to focus on what it will be (focused on production of units, building, wonders, culture, gold) from the get go. This is a wonderful change to the game which makes it much more of an empire builder (could we even say a civilization builder) than a city-micromanaging game!

 

[Celevin]

I think their big fear of higher production is that it's more of a balancing act in 1upt games. In a SoD system, it's OK to let production values get out of hand. In 1upt, two things can happen with units coming out faster:
1) You can "flood the map", which takes away a lot of strategy.
2) If you can produce fast enough, it doesn't matter if you're getting owned in a war. Units can only die so fast, so you and the other guy can easily force a stalemate situation.

Having said that, in my current game I have a really high production city with lots of production buildings. Yet a building or unit still takes as long as sometimes 2 techs? That's idiotic. I literally can't do anything else to increase production. We're talking about an Iroquois city surrounded by forest and food, with lots of lumber mills and a long house.

5) Hydro plant - this building during a golden age will singlehandedly solve all of your production issues.

Yeah the hydro plant is utterly amazing given the lower tile yields. I thought the levee was good enough, but instead of scaling from 4->5 production, we're going from 3->4, or even 2->3 in a lot of cases. It's the same thing with Golden Ages, they're much more powerful.

But yea. I went heavy on the culture and I completed the Piety and order trees. Order helped with the gold economy, extra production, and happiness. Piety helped with more culture and longer golden ages. I had a good 15+ golden ages that game. I had no shortage of production. And yea....Golden Ages are AMAZING and totally worth their cost/effort. Finally I had many of my cities focus on production.

I definitely agree, golden ages are awesome, and are much stronger than the ones in Civ4. But for turn-to-turn production you shouldn't have to rely on them. Golden ages also don't happen in droves for a lot of empires. They happen when you have a low food to happiness ratio, (or more directly food to population ratio). Try being militaristic and seeing how many golden ages you get.

Seriously folks, this is a new game.
Its different, its going to be different, its a good thing its different (otherwise how many of us would be screaming "they resold civ 4! where is civ 5! wah wah wah!!!!")!!

We know this is a new game, are the entire point of this is to figure out why exactly the majority of the people posting are seeing problems with production. We see a problem, and are trying to find out if it's just a personal mistake, or a problem with the game. You aren't adding anything by saying this.

This isn't about focus. It's about even a single building taking the same amount of time to build as 2-3 techs. Or about not being able to counter a rolling offensive, because it takes 20 turns to make a horseman. It's all about the science to production ratio.

 

[jtwood]

Nobody here is whining. We see a problem, and are trying to find out if it's just a personal mistake, or a problem with the game. You aren't adding anything by saying this.

Precisely.

The problem is that they added (or, rather, retained) the production feature and then nerfed it.

Either dump it completely or make it right. That's not a whiny statement. That's constructive criticism.

 

[Cymsdale]

Try being militaristic and seeing how many golden ages you get.

Actually I've gotten quite a lot, because every great general I received after my first was used to start a golden age.