New Changes: Gold and Culture Uses

[Nicolas10]

Hey, to get back to the actual game, I wonder if anyone has thoughts on what we learned from the Civ V Podcast posted over the weekend on the game site?

Most of it was developer process/fluff, but there were a few 20-second tidbits that got me excited.

1) The focus on developing more uses for Gold in the early game. This is really exciting, I think, in gameplay potential. I mean, in Civ IV, the only thing Gold enables you to do is research and expand... i.e. turn the research shifter higher and support more cities.

But if you can do a whole range of things, like buy sphere of influence, pay off barbarians, start research pacts with other Civs, build a large Road Network (which will now cost money), or other things... doesn't that really make both the early and mid games really fun?

Now, you could still choose to focus on Tech (which, because of no Tech Trading, will actually be valuable to invest in), but it seems that depending on what the map throws at you, what city states you're around, and what other Civs you're next to, you might really have gameplay choices to strategize over, rather than just go about business as usual: Tech and Cities.

2) Culture Unlocks powers. I'm assuming that the Unique Civ ability, i.e. Ancien Regime/Fathers and Sons, etc. is linked here, but one of the developers commented that now, as you rise in Culture, you can unlock certain things. Again, this seems great from a gameplay perspective.

Unless you were going for Culture win, all Culture was good for was boarder expansion and Boarder defense against a Cultural Civ next to you. But if building buildings, Working Culture specialists, can give you some noticeable abilities, then, again, it seems there is something for the player to strategize over when debating what to build/expand.

Obviously, we have to wait until further demos to learn more, but I like the focus on breaking up the formulaic aspect of Civ. Civ IV was extremely formulaic, in my opinion, once you understood the fundamental elements: City Expansion, Workers, Barbarian Spawn-breaking, etc.

 

[Ahriman]

But if you can do a whole range of things, like buy sphere of influence, pay off barbarians, start research pacts with other Civs, build a large Road Network (which will now cost money), or other things... doesn't that really make both the early and mid games really fun?

I'm really hoping that there are more things to do with gold, but I'm not convinced yet.

The slider is gone, so more gold will *not* let you increase research.
I'm not sure that paying maintenance costs for roads counts as something you can "do" with gold, but I guess it does kinda.
Do we know that research pacts have an upfront *gold* cost? Seems feasible, but would be good to see.
I haven't seen

You used to be able to rush-build with gold, we don't know if that's still there. I wouldn't mind seeing mercenary purchase rather than rush-build units, but its hard to know how mercenaries would work well. I've never really seen them implemented well in a game (and it would be hard to get the AI to know when to use them or not).

I'm a little worried that the only active thing you can do will be to buy tile influence (ie substitue for culture).

I like the idea of gold being something that allows flexibility. Gold does (almost) nothing well, except cover maintenance costs. But it allows you to convert gold to many things when you need them suddenly.
So, beakers would be better at providing research, culture would be better at expanding territory, military would be better at fending off barbarians, hammers are better at building military units but having a gold stockpile would allow you to do any of those things, slightly inefficiently.

but one of the developers commented that now, as you rise in Culture, you can unlock certain things

I haven't heard this, but it could be interesting. I wonder if this is linked to social policies?
Maybe social/governmental advancements in the social policy trees require culture thresholds? And some of the governmental special abilities could be to allow you to ignore those thresholds (eg: Anciens Regime lets you adopt Absolute Monarchy at no cultural cost).

It would be great to see culture do more than just provide territory.

 

[Nicolas10]

This is from the Podcast Transcript, re: Culture. I belive it's Dennis Shirk speaking.

http://www.civilization5.com/#/community/podcast_transcript_1

"Because we wanted to make culture really interesting and have a really big impact in the game and what he managed to accomplish with culture and the policy tree was really intriguing because now with culture you're actually unlocking all of these abilities all throughout time for your civilization as a whole. And the results of it means that you can have something completely different in terms of a civilization. Not just in terms of the units and the buildings that you have but of the way your whole kingdom works, all based on culture which is strikingly different from how it was before and an immense amount of fun."

The Gold comment is admittedly more brief, but comes from Jon Shafer:

"We tried to make gold more important in the game, you can do a lot more things with it. So that gives players the opportunity to do things that they haven't been able to do in previous games. It gives them freedom."

 

[Ahriman]

Cool, makes "Maybe social/governmental advancements in the social policy trees require culture thresholds?" sound pretty likely.

Hopefully there are ways that make liberal democracy not the only path that is culture intensive.

eg: communism and fascism, as a modern political philosophy, should also require major cultural investment

Religious tolerance should probably require a high cultural threshold.

It would be interesting as well if you could "spend" culture to advance in various categories, rather than just having passive thresholds. So you could go a long way in one tree (representative governments) while remaining "backward" in another (religious treatment).

 

[Nicolas10]

I like the idea of gold being something that allows flexibility. Gold does (almost) nothing well, except cover maintenance costs. But it allows you to convert gold to many things when you need them suddenly.

So, beakers would be better at providing research, culture would be better at expanding territory, military would be better at fending off barbarians, hammers are better at building military units but having a gold stockpile would allow you to do any of those things, slightly inefficiently..

Yeah, not to use the dreaded "realism" word, but I think you summarize what gold has hisorically been able to do, and how it could be used in CiV. I mean, it'd be really cool if you could use a Gold Mine, Gems, or work a lot of Sea tiles (early two commerce) and then do fun things with it.

If you could "recruit" a great scientist, artist, etc., That'd be awesome (although, I doubt possible; just like Mercenaries, I think any recruiting function would be hard for the AI).

Still, I think early gold will do some things. The most obvious is City States. I think, from the many interviews Dennis Shirk has given, that there is a clear expectation that a city state will be able to give you things if you're on good terms with them, and specifically, Gold gifts will aid that. So, gold could buy units from a City State, or at least buy something, whether that's More Food, Luxury Items, or something.

Oh, and I'm pretty certain that Research Pacts will require upfront gold. Again, gleamed from some interview, maybe at Pax.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

This is from the Podcast Transcript, re: Culture. I belive it's Dennis Shirk speaking.

http://www.civilization5.com/#/community/podcast_transcript_1

"We tried to make gold more important in the game, you can do a lot more things with it. So that gives players the opportunity to do things that they haven't been able to do in previous games. It gives them freedom."

One interpretation of that supports Ahriman's idea for gold

It(gold) gives them freedom.
of course more likely it is
It(opportunity) gives them freedom

of course "opportunity to do things they haven't been able to do in previous games" suggests gold may have a unique role that Doesn't overlap.

I think City-states+diplomacy would be key areas. Buying Terrain.. maybe building Improvements

Also 'making gold more important' would support making a number of things more Costly (unit maintenance and repair) that were cheap/easy in previous civs.

 

[Earthling]

I too would really welcome an expanded role for the use of gold, especially in the early game, it's one of the things that could be very neat in the new game. In civ IV terms, the game mostly did have it right regarding flexibility etc... (I definitely agree gold serves as an overall form of commerce/flexible way to shift between other focuses.) The main problems were in faults of the military system (and I do think civ V could have a promising maintenance/recruitment/economic side of military management, since they are limiting the number of units that should be even easier, and pillaging/conquering etc... could be diversified to work a little better) and perhaps just not having a few odd uses, say with new changes to barbarians/minor civs.

For example, especially for those who have experienced it - BtS did not quite get where it should regarding the "random event" system because the events were just broken or worthless. Many mods, though, have incorporated and done amazing things, where gold was mostly the default thing necessary, that you always wanted to have a reserve of, for dealing with events and other happenings - Fall From Heaven and its modmods being a good example of this.

Implementing various new things into civ 5 in short should be feasible and I really agree it would be more fun.