New Dome? Yea or nay?

[Olodune]

The Might tree actually has +0.25 Health per unit early if you won't be doing alien-hunting, and there's a straight +15% bonus to making military units. 4 units per Health is kind of steep, though, but it's literally better than nothing!

Instead of going down to Civil Support, why not go up to Genetic Design for Gene Gardens? That's a Purity building.

I suggested that +1 Food to the basic tile improvement might make it more worthwhile. OP? Unnecessary? Wrong goal?

All good points. I was a little greedy with Civil Support, but even two Holomatrix satellites are very nice. (35 CPT since one is over a water city. Nice.)

+1 Food would be strong, but not stronger than a Biowell. Especially true since Biowells are obtained from Bionics which also gives Institutes! A more moderate alternative would be to drop the maintenance down to 1 energy, or just to move the +1 Purity dome food to a lower affinity level.

I suspect that a game with dome focus + Quantum Politics is only a little worse than other strategies. A trade route nerf would widen that gap, however.

 

[Ryika]

Ryika:
I assure you, this is not a word game. Being precise is important. A direct requirement is something. An indirect requirement is something else altogether. We're talking beakers on the tile, even, not tech. Those are also different things! ARC can be a monster science machine without any Academies, or Scientists - just lay the spy on thick.

Which means that beakers on the tile isn't a direct benefit. You're conflating a lot of things that have important distinctions between them. It isn't a forgone conclusion that the Virtue you're getting must match the beakers on the tile. The relevant direct requirement is Affinity. Not science.

But this does not change the fact that science is the main contributor to Affinity and that it's the ONLY factor that you can't reach the victory without. You can completely go without virtues, you cannot go without science. And science is direct progress towards victory, Virtues can be, but most of them are not. I'm not saying this science has to be come from science improvements, it can very well come from an food improvement that translates into science later down the line, an all-spy or all-alien farm strategy. But you need science.

I actually don't care about the turn finish whatsoever, but that's neither here nor there.

Well, then it seems you don't really have a neutral measurement to discuss how strong Improvement X needs to be in order to be balanced. Or what would you describe as the "goal" an improvement has to reach? What is the Standard on which we compare Improvements against each other if not the victory times that players can achieve? You NEED to factor in the role of different yields during different part of the game, because they don't have the same value compared to each other, they don't keep the same relative value throughout the game. If you ignore that, then all you can say about balance practically becomes meaningless.

 

[Roxlimn]

Ryika:

But this does not change the fact that science is the main contributor to Affinity and that it's the ONLY factor that you can't reach the victory without. You can completely go without virtues, you cannot go without science. And science is direct progress towards victory, Virtues can be, but most of them are not.

Once again, you're wrong. Science is a resource, tech is indirect progress to Victory, saving some specific techs which are easily acquired and thus do not delay victory. You can't win a game without science, though you can win a game without Virtues - which still doesn't mean that science is a direct requirement for victory excepting the few easily acquired techs. It is mechanically indirect. That's just how the game is, I don't know how to say it another way.

Well, then it seems you don't really have a measurement to discuss how strong Improvement X needs to be in order to be balanced. Or what would you describe as the "goal" an improvement has to reach? What is the Standard on which we compare Improvements against each other if not the victory times that players can achieve? You NEED to factor in the role of different yields during different part of the game, because they don't have the same value compared to each other, they don't keep the same relative value throughout the game. If you ignore that, then all you can say is practically meaningless.

I haven't been ignoring that at all. In fact, I suggested increasing Culture output at higher Purity levels, plus more food output. But then you said that that was end-game; ignoring that I suggested highly frontloading the thing. I dunno. It's like I'm saying something and you're reading something else entirely.

Victory times are highly variable and they depend on beelining things. Basically, I consider that "cheese" and you just suggested that we weigh the value of everything based on the cheesiest finish that's doable right now with all the rest of the mechanics just as they are (broken VCs). Hm. I'm not sure what to say.

Basically, the VC times are totally borked right now, independent of everything else and trying to think about everything based on a warped mechanical interaction that stands to be changed is... well, you're basically adjusting your watch to a broken clock.

Olodune:

Thanks for the input and the play! I'll do a KP game with Domes as well. My suggestion was to keep Domes where they are and as they cost, but add +1 Food to the base output, with more Culture and Food at higher Purity levels, essentially acting as a possible direct replacement for Vertical Farms, if you're inclined to follow the tech.

 

[Ryika]

Once again, you're wrong. Science is a resource, tech is indirect progress to Victory, saving some specific techs which are easily acquired and thus do not delay victory. You can't win a game without science, though you can win a game without Virtues - which still doesn't mean that science is a direct requirement for victory excepting the few easily acquired techs. It is mechanically indirect. That's just how the game is, I don't know how to say it another way.

Okay, you're right. Let's phrase it this way then: Science is the yield (and I'm excluding Affinity as a yield here) that is the closest to being a direct requirement.

Can we agree on that? Great!

I haven't been ignoring that at all. In fact, I suggested increasing Culture output at higher Purity levels, plus more food output. But then you said that that was end-game; ignoring that I suggested highly frontloading the thing. I dunno. It's like I'm saying something and you're reading something else entirely.

Maybe we're just talking past one-another here. What I'm saying is that, if they're designed to stay culture-heavy, domes always have a point where they become out-performed by other improvements and ideally should be replaced (if the time is there to do that), because they partly yield Culture and Culture becomes less and less valuable as the game progresses.

ictory times are highly variable and they depend on beelining things. Basically, I consider that "cheese" and you just suggested that we weigh the value of everything based on the cheesiest finish that's doable right now with all the rest of the mechanics just as they are (broken VCs). Hm. I'm not sure what to say.

Basically, the VC times are totally borked right now, independent of everything else and trying to think about everything based on a warped mechanical interaction that stands to be changed is... well, you're basically adjusting your watch to a broken clock.

You're not really addressing the point that you don't have ANY anchor point to balance things on if you ignore the victory conditions. I mean, the best thing you can do is to balance for some arbitrary point. Let's balance towards turn 200 and see that every improvement-strategy manages to reach about the same empire development at that point. Well, yeah, you may very well have balanced the improvement for that arbitrary turn 200 then, but what does it mean? Nothing. Because "nobody except of you" (hyperbole) cares about that exact point of the game as the end-point where everything flows together, and for people who win on turn 150 or turn 170 there will still be no balance, because the improvements, their yields and the impact their yields have on the game don't scale linearly. So we have to balance towards some objective standard and the only real one we have are the victory times. Take about the average of what people who aren't just playing to role-play can achieve and that's roughly what you balance for.

Yes, that means that at the moment you'd be balancing for a ridiculously low victory time, but until the victory times change that's what you have to do if you want to really "balance" the game.

 

[Olodune]

Olodune:

Thanks for the input and the play! I'll do a KP game with Domes as well. My suggestion was to keep Domes where they are and as they cost, but add +1 Food to the base output, with more Culture and Food at higher Purity levels, essentially acting as a possible direct replacement for Vertical Farms, if you're inclined to follow the tech.

Please do. I think this can be refined to a reasonable strategy. So far this is roughly 10t slower than I'd estimate for a biowell strategy, but still a fun variant. Getting new virtues every 4-5 turns, without QP or culture conversion, opens up a lot of possibilities for alternate development paths

I just hit Purity 12 in my game, and the extra food does make domes into very solid tiles.

In general culture is interesting since it can be converted into so many other resources (science, hammers, affinity, health, etc) through the virtue system. Some planning required

 

[Acken]

I mean, the best thing you can do is to balance for some arbitrary point. Let's balance towards turn 200 and see that every improvement-strategy manages to reach about the same empire development at that point.

To be fair that's not really what the goal should be I think. It certainly would make the domes usable but I think we lose in diversity if the only purpose of an improvement is to be spammed away, pick the relevant tech/virtues associated, and end up with a similar end time.

We agree that domes are inefficient but I'd preffer if the game tried to make domes fit a specific purpose rather than being a complete strategy in themselves.
And you're right that one of the problems domes face is that virtues currently have both an exponential cost and do not contribute enough toward victory. And the inefficiency of non-science systems is a first step to fix. Having a form of culture victory would also help. The other issue is that tech yield bonuses make you deviate from the victory goal without enough incentive to do so.

Possible ideas for domes could include to make improvement more closely linked to terrain. For example domes could give a bigger culture boost when built in a grassland river tile. Another possibility is to give them variable yields depending on other factos, city pop or adjacency for example. Coupled with making culture more interesting to get overall, that would be a step in the right direction.
Roxlimn propose to give it a +1 culture. I'm not sure I'd work that over an academy but over a farm probably. So there is a possibility somewhere through adjustments in the tech web, the virtues, and the yield to make domes an interesting improvement.

All that being said I do not understand Firaxis decision to make special improvement so long to make.

 

[Ryika]

Oh, I'm not saying the base Improvement should be balanced so that it's "spamable". As I said earlier in the thread: I'm perfectly fine with the Dome having a "niche" position by default, in fact, I think in the midgame it's very reasonable to encourage mixedd Improvement strategies (although that may not be possible with all improvement types), but adding something that you can invest in to make them into a "mainstream" improvement - maybe not 100% on the level of other strategies - would allow them to be more useful if you decide that you want to use that improvement.

That way you start using a mix and then specialize to whatever you want during the game.

 

[Gorbles]

I think there is a general expectation that you start off with lesser improvements because Workers working is something you do from game start, but you progress by overriding these with better improvements as the game goes on.

With the multitude of ways to improve Worker speed this allows for rationale to build the heavier improvements towards mid / late game, while dissuading early rushing of said improvements (including Academies, of note, but they all seem to have been hit).

The problem is "Tier 2" improvements don't always give appropriate yields by comparison combined with the eternal issue of optimal game speed. Works very well for casual play and people who aren't trying to optimise Victory speed (i.e. turns taken).

That said, I can understand the design given the caveat that the amount of people who are very skilled at the game at literally less than 1% of the playerbase by Steam Achievements (let's not quibble the mod users, though I'll gladly take up that tangent if someone feels the need to). You cater the design to the people who aren't optimising speedruns, who don't regularly play on Apollo (I'd include Soyuz here but there's a large gap between that and Apollo at the moment). I'm not saying the design can't be improved, but I understand it.

 

[Olodune]

I finished off the dome spam game. t177 Purity.

There was much culture and many domes. Outside of the capital (manufactories) I have 80% dome coverage. I made some basic errors that cost ~5 turns (I thought my affinity quest needed a Biofactory not a Bionics Lab, etc). Given the unluckiness of this map, I don't see any reason why dome spamming couldn't get down to the low 160s on a better map.

I am deep into 3 virtue trees, so the extra culture is useful. The land cities are busy passively acquiring their 5th rings.

Spoiler :

 

[Acken]

A surprisingly decent result.

 

[Galgus]

I use a mod of my own creation that removes the maintenance cost and makes it give +1 Food instead of +1 Energy with Biospheres, which I feel is fair for an improvement requiring a considerable tech investment to research and upgrade.

No maintenance also helps differentiate it from Terrascapes, and to compete with them in Purity.

 

[Olodune]

A surprisingly decent result.

Well, domes are propped up by Trade Route food. Without the extra food surplus this would be more difficult. Part of what this shows is that just a basic opening, cities/workers/caravans/early buildings, is what wins games. Not that I need to tell you that

If we could build improvements more quickly (<5 turns) there might be some room for late game dome building as a way to trade food surplus in non-academy games. Generators build quickly, but they don't do very much. Nodes and arrays also build too slowly.

If in-progress improvements didn't destroy the current tile I would consider adding domes late for an extra virtue push. (Civ games used to work this way).

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Tile acquisition is meaningless in most strategies. You get enough from culture buildings.

I made a mod that decreased culture from buildings. It got two down votes before it got even one download.

 

[Ryika]

I made a mod that decreased culture from buildings. It got two down votes before it got even one download.

Don't worry about workshop-votes, anything that is the least bit controversial will get some downvotes from idiots who can't accept that not every mod is made to meet exactly their wishes. That's especially true for mods that reduce/lower/remove stuff.

Funnily enough my "Classic Version"-Uploads have the highest dislike-ratios of all of my mods. I don't get any bug-reports and the original mods were rated quite highly (90%+ upvotes), so my assumption is that some people downvote them because they're not for Rising Tide. /shrug

 

[Olodune]

Culture is meaningless for tiles? I usually buy a bunch - so I disagree Even in the dome spam game I had to buy several before culture started to spike.

 

[Acken]

If you want upvotes on a mod just make culture buildings give MORE culture

 

[Galgus]

How do you view the votes anyway?

It wouldn't change my perception of my mods, but I'm curious.

 

[Acken]

When you are on the homepage of your mod you have a private access to a Item stats page.

 

[Ryika]

If you want upvotes on a mod just make culture buildings give MORE culture

Yeah, as evidenced by my Awesome Collection. Adding stuff and going over-the-top sells.

Awesome Stations has:

VISITORS
Total Unique - 34,883

SUBSCRIBERS
Current - 19,533
Total Unique - 21,274

FAVORITES
Current - 146
Total Unique - 156

Total ratings - 1,840
Positive ratings - 1,821 (99% of total)
Negative ratings - 19 (1% of total)

...which is mindblowing for a mod that basically did nothing but just increase yields by ridiculous amounts.

Not that I'd complain or anything.
(And obviously I'd not be surprised if that 19 became at least 21 after posting this here. )

How do you view the votes anyway?

It wouldn't change my perception of my mods, but I'm curious.

Click on the "Item Stats" button on the top right of the mod page. That only works with your own mods and only if you're logged into steam if you're using a browser instead of steam itself.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Someone said virtue cost goes up too much for culture to be useful. I found the opposite to be true. It gets slow after the first few, before you get a second culture building, then pretty quick afterwards. However it's still not fast enough. The game is just too short.
Putting aside tile acquisition, culture is an investment in future bonuses. Some of those bonuses are directly or indirectly related to other yields. If the game doesn't last long enough you don't get a return on investment. Why build culture improvements for a future science bonuses when you can build science improvements instead? By the time I get to that tier 3 bonus of +10% everything the game's over.

I've only played one complete Rising Tide game and I did build a good number of domes. I didn't get vertical farming because it wasn't a purity source anymore so the dome food bonus made them a farm with more. Especially for water cities with 50% more culture.
Still it's more an ocd urge to collect virtues because they're collectable and so they are to be collected.
Has anyone tried getting no virtues and see how that affects how long it takes to win?