Natural wonders

[qqqbbb]

How about first finder bonus for every NW not just El Dorado? You get faith if you are first to find Mt Sinai, production for discovering king Solomon's mines and so on.
Value of NW diminishes in late eras. This can be fixed by giving them tourism yield in late eras.

 

[tu_79]

There is a WC resolution that improves NW, you can work on it.

 

[Funak]

I actually have a NW idea that I've been hammering on for a while, it's nowhere near done, but if people are interested I guess I could post the base idea and you could provide input.

Yes, the current NW situation is something of a mess, and most of the 6yield NWs aren't worth working.

 

[Gidoza]

I actually have a NW idea that I've been hammering on for a while, it's nowhere near done, but if people are interested I guess I could post the base idea and you could provide input.

Yes, the current NW situation is something of a mess, and most of the 6yield NWs aren't worth working.

Surely you mean that they're not worth working mid to late game, because high yields like this are definitely valuable early on...

 

[Funak]

Surely you mean that they're not worth working mid to late game, because high yields like this are definitely valuable early on...

Yeah, I meant from the mid-game and forward. You're probably going to end up working them anyways, but it's fairly sad if you end up wishing your natural wonder was a flat grassland so you could farm it.

Speaking of which my followup post to that post seems to have been completely lost, awkward, I'll rewrite and post it again.

 

[Funak]

Okay, here is the deal guys and non-guys, I'm not really a big fan of the current natural wonder system.
The wonders are currently split into three groups. The first group just provide you with a tile with 9 yields, which is definitely fine (assuming the wonder in question is not Cerro de Potosi or El Dorado). The second group are the ones that provide you with +1 happiness for being inside your territory and then provide you with a 6 yield tile, there is a gigantic difference between a 6 yield tile and a 9 yield tile, and getting +1 happiness means pretty much nothing with how the happiness-system currently operates.
The third group, the one I find the most interesting are the odd ones out, they are a group simply because they don't act like the other wonders at all. It consists of two wonders, the first one being the Barrier Reef, it starts out as two 8 yield tiles that grow when you add lighthouse, harbor, seaport to the city controlling them. Despite being ocean-based and therefore more often than not spawning just outside of reach for any city, the wonder to me remain interesting because it occupies two tiles.
The second wonder in the group is the Mt. Kilimanjaro, a 9 yield (and actually 9 good yields) wonder that uniquely provides visiting units a unique promotion that gives them the ability to move faster in hilly terrain. The wonder is interesting because it is comprised of two different parts, the active part where you work the wonder and gain 9 yields and the passive part where your military units have a slight advantage over hostile military units.

My main idea here is to apply the Mt. Kilimanjaro concept to all the natural wonders in the game, letting them have one active part and one passive part. In my opinion a natural wonder should be something worth fighting for, something worth forward-settling for, something worth using a great general for or attacking a city-state for, and I just don't see the current natural wonders as holding that value, even for Polynesia, at best you're receiving a slightly buffed up great tile improvement and at worst you're getting +1 happiness and a tile that you wish you could farm for adjacency-bonuses.


The Active Part:
I think 8 yields sound like a good plan, an even number also makes the Polynesian UA happy.

The Passive Part:
This is the hard part. First of all I don't know if this is at all possible, but I would love to see these passive abilities being global, something along the lines of "As long as this wonder is within your territory, all units produced starts with the Altitude training" instead of all units moving next to the tile receive the promotion. Mostly because of the annoyance of actually having to send all your units over to the wonder, I also don't really see the AI handling the wonder very well, so something like this would probably help them.
As for the passive part itself, it doesn't necessarily have to be promotions at all, it could range from something like a global +5% gold(or any other yield) or a bonus when recruiting units. The effects could range between the power of a bottom-tier wonder or maybe half the power of a monopoly-bonus. Some wonders could provide promotions like Mt. Kilimanjaro, maybe bring back a lesser version of the old fountain of youth promotion (like +5 healing per turn instead of double healing).
The effect doesn't necessarily need to be amazing, the main thing is that they make natural wonders feel cool and interesting, and makes them worth getting into a conflict with your neighbor over.



So, thoughts?

 

[Moi Magnus]

So, thoughts?

I agree with you.

 

[tu_79]

Mmm. So two effects, one for having NW inside your territory and other for being working it. Passive=inside borders; Active=city worker.
All Active effects will consist in 8 yields. Fine.
Passive effects will consist in, we are yet to say. Hmm.

Suggestions, local effects:
+1 or 2 yield to all adjacent tiles (depending on what's the biggest yield of the NW).
+20% to attack for friendly units up to 3 tiles.
+2 yield to towns up to 2 tiles.

Suggestions, global effects:
+X% naval production
-halves global unhappiness (if you were meant to have -20, then you have -10)
-Free maintenance for X melee units.

 

[Funak]

Suggestions, local effects:
+1 or 2 yield to all adjacent tiles (depending on what's the biggest yield of the NW).
+20% to attack for friendly units up to 3 tiles.
+2 yield to towns up to 2 tiles.

Way bigger fan of just having them be an 8yield tile, dropping yields for effects like these makes them more unique, sure, but it also messes with consistency and makes them a lot harder to use (also kinda screws Polynesia over)

Suggestions, global effects:
+X% naval production
-halves global unhappiness (if you were meant to have -20, then you have -10)
-Free maintenance for X melee units.

Naval production I'm totally down for. Halving global unhappiness sounds way too powerful (or way too weak depending on what you mean), I was thinking more of effects in the line of 'Gold need modifier in all cities -X%' when it comes to happiness effects. Free maintenance for X melee units sounds kinda limited, especially since the number of soldiers available changes a lot with gamespeed/mapsize/era, I think 'reduced unit/(seperate one for buildings?) maintenance by X%'

 

[phantomaxl1207]

If you feel Natural Wonders are too weak in the Mid Game, we could buff the WC Resolution.

I don't like the +1 Happy for owning a NW. There's already a Happiness gain for knowing about it.

Somehow I was expecting something more drastic. This is better that having the NW giving a Promotion to Units.

 

[Funak]

If you feel Natural Wonders are too weak in the Mid Game, we could buff the WC Resolution.

First of all, I don't think I've ever seen that resolution pass, the AI just shuts it down no matter if they have NWs themselves or not.
Second of all, that is absolutely not what this is about, if it was I'd just suggest upping the yields of the wonders that are clearly underperforming. This is about the underlying issue that NWs just aren't worth bothering with. Just think about it, if you're playing for the lategame, even moving one tile away from a river or the coast to grab a NW is not worth it, which is a really sorry situation.

Somehow I was expecting something more drastic. This is better that having the NW giving a Promotion to Units.

Suggestions are welcome, and as I tried explaining, unit-promotions was just one idea, I was speaking of global effects in general. Stuff like longer golden ages, cheaper units, cheaper maintenance, these things are definitely worth settling off spot for, definitely worth going out of your way to control. And assuming we could figure out unique and interesting enough effects, all NWs would definitely feel unique.

 

[tu_79]

I was just brainstorming, but I'll explain better.

+1 to adjacent yield. I mean, if we've got a food Wonder, like Lake Victoria, all adjacent tiles gain +1 food, while if it's a faith wonder, like Mt Sinai, all adjacent tiles gain +1 faith. That's to be added to whatever yield the tiles might already have. So no conflicts. Just a matter of balancing things.

halves global unhappiness. That was meant to act only when global happiness is negative. It's useful for fast expanding civs. But if you feel it too weak, we can change it to +20% to global happiness sources (that's the positive happiness before the unhappiness is taken into account).

+x% to naval production. Ok, that's very situational, but if we place it on great reefs (so you already have a coastal city and we can think that there would be more coastal cities), then chances are that you'll need a navy.

Happiness is important the first 100 turns when you're starting to settle, so a +1 to happiness for discovering a NW is not so bad. Another +1 by middle-late game is useless, but as you said, that's for another topic.

The local effect on a range for wonders may push players to fully integrate the NW into the territory, as some of its benefits can be missed if outside borders. Just imagine that a NW is exactly between your city and one of other civ. I usually buy the tile containing the NW to take it before the other civ, and sometimes the border is very weird, my tile with the NW is surrounded by 5 tiles of the other civ. With local effect spreading, I'll be missing this extra yields on adjacent tiles, so I rather conquer the other city and benefit fully for the NW.

 

[Gidoza]

Okay, here is the deal guys and non-guys, I'm not really a big fan of the current natural wonder system.
The wonders are currently split into three groups. The first group just provide you with a tile with 9 yields, which is definitely fine (assuming the wonder in question is not Cerro de Potosi or El Dorado). The second group are the ones that provide you with +1 happiness for being inside your territory and then provide you with a 6 yield tile, there is a gigantic difference between a 6 yield tile and a 9 yield tile, and getting +1 happiness means pretty much nothing with how the happiness-system currently operates.
The third group, the one I find the most interesting are the odd ones out, they are a group simply because they don't act like the other wonders at all. It consists of two wonders, the first one being the Barrier Reef, it starts out as two 8 yield tiles that grow when you add lighthouse, harbor, seaport to the city controlling them. Despite being ocean-based and therefore more often than not spawning just outside of reach for any city, the wonder to me remain interesting because it occupies two tiles.
The second wonder in the group is the Mt. Kilimanjaro, a 9 yield (and actually 9 good yields) wonder that uniquely provides visiting units a unique promotion that gives them the ability to move faster in hilly terrain. The wonder is interesting because it is comprised of two different parts, the active part where you work the wonder and gain 9 yields and the passive part where your military units have a slight advantage over hostile military units.

My main idea here is to apply the Mt. Kilimanjaro concept to all the natural wonders in the game, letting them have one active part and one passive part. In my opinion a natural wonder should be something worth fighting for, something worth forward-settling for, something worth using a great general for or attacking a city-state for, and I just don't see the current natural wonders as holding that value, even for Polynesia, at best you're receiving a slightly buffed up great tile improvement and at worst you're getting +1 happiness and a tile that you wish you could farm for adjacency-bonuses.


The Active Part:
I think 8 yields sound like a good plan, an even number also makes the Polynesian UA happy.

The Passive Part:
This is the hard part. First of all I don't know if this is at all possible, but I would love to see these passive abilities being global, something along the lines of "As long as this wonder is within your territory, all units produced starts with the Altitude training" instead of all units moving next to the tile receive the promotion. Mostly because of the annoyance of actually having to send all your units over to the wonder, I also don't really see the AI handling the wonder very well, so something like this would probably help them.
As for the passive part itself, it doesn't necessarily have to be promotions at all, it could range from something like a global +5% gold(or any other yield) or a bonus when recruiting units. The effects could range between the power of a bottom-tier wonder or maybe half the power of a monopoly-bonus. Some wonders could provide promotions like Mt. Kilimanjaro, maybe bring back a lesser version of the old fountain of youth promotion (like +5 healing per turn instead of double healing).
The effect doesn't necessarily need to be amazing, the main thing is that they make natural wonders feel cool and interesting, and makes them worth getting into a conflict with your neighbor over.



So, thoughts?

I like the idea of the city that works the wonder offering promotions to produced units. The "visit Mt. Kilimanjaro with every unit on the map" thing is unimaginably irritating and accounts for more pilgrimage than anything related to religion!

With the rest of your suggestion - I like where you're going with this. Is it possible to make Natural Wonders improvable (e.g. if it is a hill, enable Mining) and reduce their starting yields? That way it would give a small but obvious bonus, some side troop or global bonus, and be useful throughout the whole game in a meaningful way. On the other hand, if this isn't possible - meaningful global bonuses would certainly work.

Perhaps you could expand on your idea a little more? If you can give me a stronger schematic, I could churn out a template for potential changes, sort of like I did for Pantheons a while ago, and then have that assessed. Could use a list of all the Natural Wonders and their present effects, though.

While we're talking about this, however - is the number of Natural Wonders on a map hard-coded, or can it scale by map size? I ask because Natural Wonders are kind of meh on super huge maps, and insanely useful on small ones...

 

[Funak]

I like the idea of the city that works the wonder offering promotions to produced units. The "visit Mt. Kilimanjaro with every unit on the map" thing is unimaginably irritating and accounts for more pilgrimage than anything related to religion!

Perhaps you could expand on your idea a little more? If you can give me a stronger schematic, I could churn out a template for potential changes, sort of like I did for Pantheons a while ago, and then have that assessed. Could use a list of all the Natural Wonders and their present effects, though.

Doing private messages with Gazebo to try and figure out what is actually possible from a code-perspective. So far it seems like anything to do with promotions is completely fine, things to do with cities seems more complicated.

Hopefully one can avoid making 17 different promotions, because personally I don't see that as very interesting either.

With the rest of your suggestion - I like where you're going with this. Is it possible to make Natural Wonders improvable (e.g. if it is a hill, enable Mining) and reduce their starting yields? That way it would give a small but obvious bonus, some side troop or global bonus, and be useful throughout the whole game in a meaningful way. On the other hand, if this isn't possible - meaningful global bonuses would certainly work.

I don't really see mining Mt. Fuji or the barrier reef sending the right message. The yields themselves can kinda be left out of the discussion, if the wonders need to improve with time, just letting them get a yield-bonus from for example hotels or some other building is the easier solution. I suggestion 8, because I think that's a good starting-point and it is enough room to work out 17 different yield-combinations.

While we're talking about this, however - is the number of Natural Wonders on a map hard-coded, or can it scale by map size? I ask because Natural Wonders are kind of meh on super huge maps, and insanely useful on small ones...

Number of NWs already scale with mapsize.

 

[kenneth1221]

Would it be too overpowered (or redundant) to let natural wonders serve to reduce global unhappiness thresholds? For example, faith NW could decrease religious divisions, while science NW could decrease illiteracy. Would such a bonus fit in well with the rest of the game's balance? If it's too good of a bonus, it would reward settler spam; if it were subpar, it wouldn't be worth settling just for the wonder.

 

[Funak]

Would it be too overpowered (or redundant) to let natural wonders serve to reduce global unhappiness thresholds? For example, faith NW could decrease religious divisions, while science NW could decrease illiteracy. Would such a bonus fit in well with the rest of the game's balance? If it's too good of a bonus, it would reward settler spam; if it were subpar, it wouldn't be worth settling just for the wonder.

That was on the list of possible bonuses. But there are 17 natural wonders and 5 different types of unhappiness to reduce.

 

[kenneth1221]

That was on the list of possible bonuses. But there are 17 natural wonders and 5 different types of unhappiness to reduce.

If you excluded Kilimanjaro and FoY, because those already have unique bonuses in the form of promotions (though not FoY in Vox), there would be 15 natural wonders.

You could then divide them in roughly five groups:

Gold (Poverty):
Cerro de Potosi
Rock of Gibraltar
Grand Mesa

Science (Illiteracy):
Barringer
GBR
Krakatoa
Old Faithful

Culture (Boredom):
Fuji
El Dorado
(Old Faithful could go here?)

Faith (Divisions):
Kailash
Sinai
Sri Pada
Uluru

Other (yeah, this is a sub-par sorting scheme):
Lake Victoria
Solomon's Mines (Crime?)

(This is going off of the Civ wiki, by the way. I don't remember Vox yields off the top of my head.)

Obviously these categories are bad, demonstrating your point, but I think it's workable. Two in each could reduce their related threshold, while the rest could be assigned something more unique. Could they be tied into events? If you had Krakatoa, eruption events could be pseudo-positive. Uluru could give "dreamtime" events or Sinai could give "revelation" events.

 

[Funak]

If you excluded Kilimanjaro and FoY, because those already have unique bonuses in the form of promotions (though not FoY in Vox), there would be 15 natural wonders.

You could then divide them in roughly five groups:

Gold (Poverty):
Cerro de Potosi
Rock of Gibraltar
Grand Mesa

Science (Illiteracy):
Barringer
GBR
Krakatoa
Old Faithful

Culture (Boredom):
Fuji
El Dorado
(Old Faithful could go here?)

Faith (Divisions):
Kailash
Sinai
Sri Pada
Uluru

Other (yeah, this is a sub-par sorting scheme):
Lake Victoria
Solomon's Mines (Crime?)

(This is going off of the Civ wiki, by the way. I don't remember Vox yields off the top of my head.)

Obviously these categories are bad, demonstrating your point, but I think it's workable. Two in each could reduce their related threshold, while the rest could be assigned something more unique. Could they be tied into events? If you had Krakatoa, eruption events could be pseudo-positive. Uluru could give "dreamtime" events or Sinai could give "revelation" events.

I don't think any of them should have the same effect as another, feels like lazy design. I mean if we are remaking the system, we could just as well go the extra mile to make sure every wonder feels unique.

From what I understand we are able to use any ability that's present on a building or a wonder, which is a lot of room to work with, so here are some examples.


Reduces Poverty
Reduces Boredom
Reduces Illiteracy
Reduces Crime
Reduces Division
(Like the early wonders, maybe -10% in all cities?)

Increased Gold
Increased Science
Increased Culture
Increased Food
Increased Production
Increased Faith
(% increase income, maybe 5%?)
Increased Golden age Duration

All units have the X promotion
(Could probably whip up a few promotions)

Increased production when building Buildings
Increased production when building Wonders
Increased production when building Units
Increased production when building Land Units
Increased production when building Naval Units

Reduced cost for upgrading units
Reduced cost for purchasing with gold

Aqueduct effect in all cities (maybe 10% or something like that? I think this is slightly more fun than just adding growth)

 

[kenneth1221]

I don't think any of them should have the same effect as another, feels like lazy design. I mean if we are remaking the system, we could just as well go the extra mile to make sure every wonder feels unique.

From what I understand we are able to use any ability that's present on a building or a wonder, which is a lot of room to work with, so here are some examples.

Effects snipped

With that in mind, I'd like to throw out a few ideas for them all. Not sure if they're possible, but I'm trying to make them thematic and historically interesting.

Cerro de Potosi: 5% increased gold yield in all cities
Gibraltar: Some sort of bonus to trade routes empire-wide? Is this possible, maybe as a variant of the market's effect?
Mesa: 5% production
Krakatoa: 5% science (might be OP)
Old Faithful: Reduces Boredom
El Dorado: Reduces Poverty (City of gold and all)
Lake Victoria: Probably best candidate for the aqueduct effect
King Solomon's Mines: 10% longer golden ages
Kilimanjaro and FoY: Their usual bonuses

For the faith mountains, I'm almost inclined to give mini-religious wonder/founder belief effects. No idea whether that would be too powerful or even possible.

Kailash: Faith yields upon researching a tech - Path of Transcendence-esque
Sinai: Faith yields upon adopting a social policy - Holy Law-esque
Sri Pada: 1 faith for every x tourism? Pilgrimage-esque
Uluru: City connections produce faith? (This one I'm really shaky about)
Fuji: Faith upon owned unit death

Some of these are dependent on being able to use the effects in UAs and Beliefs. If that's not possible, then those particular ideas will need to be disregarded. And of course I'm really just throwing out the best ideas I can here.

And for Barringer and GBR I can't really think of anything. They don't have much consistency in the base game, and I'm struggling to think of their value overall in our world.

 

[Glidergun]

Great Barrier Reef could be a small city connection boost, if that's possible. Barringer Crater could reduce illiteracy or give a small bonus when a tech is discovered (culture, probably, or golden age points).