New Growth Curve (v1.2)

[Taefin]

The way things stand, according to your strategy every town ends up locked into the same speciality forever—and that shouldn’t be the case. There ought to be room for genuine strategic pivots. My old “rules of thumb” were simple but at least had a strategic choice: hit the soft‑cap, pause growth, shift the city to a new focus, then resume growth in the next era once the cap rises.

Now, that logic no longer applies. The optimal play now is just “keep expanding”—ignore specialisation entirely until the modern era (the lone exception might be influence, which looks inadvertetly buffed under the new connection rules). If you choose not to grow today, you’ll only make it harder tomorrow, so there’s really no incentive to do anything else and this makes the game obviously way more "flat" (and also historically NOT accurate, it's pretty obvious that the world population has drasticaly increased in the modern Age, so I really have no idea why they should do this).





Honestly, given this team’s track record—every “fix” seems to break something else—I’d bet money this is just a typo in the code, not a deliberate change. They never said they were flipping the antiquity/modern formula, they just said the cubic formula would have become quadratic. Inverting the formula between Antiquity and Modern is huge and would have been reported. It makes zero sense, either for gameplay or historical accuracy. I’m almost certain it’s a simple coding slip; I can’t see any other explanation and this seriously makes me lose all my hopes that this game will be fixed one day

Seriously, they have no idea how to code a game or they don't understand the math behind their own game at this point

I feel like FXS balances from the hip. I’ll reserve final judgement until I play a game of 1.2, and I’m not hearing people say “growth feels so slow now”.

Maybe you will finally need to build a granary to get ahead of the early growth curve.

Modern civs with food UI still seem like they are going to be just as worthless.

 

[Tanel]

I feel like FXS balances from the hip. I’ll reserve final judgement until I play a game of 1.2, and I’m not hearing people say “growth feels so slow now”.

Maybe you will finally need to build a granary to get ahead of the early growth curve.

Modern civs with food UI still seem like they are going to be just as worthless.

Well to be fair a lot of Modern stuff is worthless and that won't be fixed without some major changes to the victory are made anyway.

 

[bumpyglint]

Not necessarily.
Issue
spend the last X turns in current age Growing v. Spend them getting benefit and Grow more next Age

even if
Next Age does mean more cost for growth...

1. Next Age will have higher output, so less turns will be needed
2. Next Age may rearrange resources to reach
3. Next Age food sent to city will also yield less Growth. (so send to cities now)

The idea of “Spend them getting benefit and Grow more next Age” only makes sense when today’s gain comes at the expense of tomorrow’s growth. Right now, though, leaving a town on Growth gives you the best of both worlds:
- Immediate benefit: faster population increases mean more yields right away (maybe not in literally 3-4 turns, but in few more yes)
- Long‑term benefit: every citizen you add now carries forward to future Ages and if you wait to get them it will be more expensive later.

On your three points:
1. "Next Age will have higher output, so less turns will be needed" --> True—but that higher output costs gold for ageless buildings. The whole balance patch happened because dumping everything (gold/ production ecc) into food almost never paid off; with this change we’re drifting back to the same problem during modern/ exploration Age compared to previous ones. Now it's like the completly opposite at the start of the game, you must rush food basically and then let it go again in Modern (and in Modern you have to pay gold in every city to simply "have similar growth than previous Ages")
2. "Next Age may rearrange resources to reach" --> Also true, yet the underlying maths barely change. Rearranging yields doesn’t fix the core issue.
3. "Next Age food sent to city will also yield less Growth. (so send to cities now)" --> Again, true—but the new formula hasn’t altered that relationship, it's not related to the problem. The real question is: is +10 Growth in two towns better than +20 in one city (where it's harder to grow)? Normally the split +10/+10 wins. However, if a town hits a soft cap you can’t break until the next Age, specializing for the +20 might make sense. Under the new rules, those soft caps effectively vanish, so delaying Growth only hurts you.

I seriously can't find a single reason to support this (it's simply wrong both on historical point and gameplay perspective), and the fact that they flipped the game’s logic without saying a word makes me almost sure it's typo n.1 million in their code.

In order to make my points easier to understand, instead of trying to show situations where specialization can be usefull (I know there will be some), can someone please think how this situation is better than the one with the same exact formulas of 1.2.0 but with Antiquity and Modern swapped???

 

[bumpyglint]

I feel like FXS balances from the hip. I’ll reserve final judgement until I play a game of 1.2, and I’m not hearing people say “growth feels so slow now”.

Maybe you will finally need to build a granary to get ahead of the early growth curve.

Modern civs with food UI still seem like they are going to be just as worthless.

(Apologies for the double post—your reply hadn’t loaded when I wrote the first one.)

Just to be more clear, I’m fully aware Growth is finally faster across the board—even in the Modern Age. My gripe is that Modern was where food most needed a boost because:

• In earlier Ages, food is a long‑term investment.
• In Modern, the game is almost over, so a “future‑oriented” spend has to pay back huge—otherwise dumping production or gold into Growth is pointless.

Instead, Modern got nerfed relative to other Ages. That does two things:

• Makes late‑game food even less attractive. Why invest when you’ll see only a handful of turns of benefit that will never pay the cost? At this point is better to invest in science/ culture/ production etc...
• Undercuts town specialization, which is supposed to be a core mechanic—yet you’re now pushed to ignore it until the closing turns of the game.

In short, the patch solved the early‑Age food problem but reopened the late‑Age one, and it discourages a feature the game claims to value (town specialization). Again, I feel like this is a typo in their code, I see no other explanation.

 

[evonannoredars]

The idea of “Spend them getting benefit and Grow more next Age” only makes sense when today’s gain comes at the expense of tomorrow’s growth. Right now, though, leaving a town on Growth gives you the best of both worlds:
- Immediate benefit: faster population increases mean more yields right away (maybe not in literally 3-4 turns, but in few more yes)
- Long‑term benefit: every citizen you add now carries forward to future Ages and if you wait to get them it will be more expensive later.

I don't get your point? If you leave a town on growth, you won't be sending any food to a city. The immediate and long term benefits of a town focus is that you can get more food to your cities to boost their production and specialists.

 

[bumpyglint]

I don't get your point? If you leave a town on growth, you won't be sending any food to a city. The immediate and long term benefits of a town focus is that you can get more food to your cities to boost their production and specialists.

A town on growth get +50% food and having 10 towns with +50% food gives you more population than sendin all the food of those towns to a single city (because obviously the more a single city grows, the more it requires to grow). With this new bug/ feature it's incentized to keep growing as much as possible in first Ages and then using specialization at the end, when you've reached the soft cap (because every Age the growth is always worse now).

Again, I know sometimes specialization will be good anyway, but can someone tell me how this model can be better than the one with antiquity and modern swapped?

 

[Tanel]

A town on growth get +50% food and having 10 towns with +50% food gives you more population than sendin all the food of those towns to a single city (because obviously the more a single city grows, the more it requires to grow). With this new bug/ feature it's incentized to keep growing as much as possible in first Ages and then using specialization at the end, when you've reached the soft cap (because every Age the growth is always worse now).

Again, I know sometimes specialization will be good anyway, but can someone tell me how this model can be better than the one with antiquity and modern swapped?

But those extra pops you are growing in towns can only work tiles so once you run out of good tiles to grab they will not be very useful. At some point yo would rather have more specialists in your cities.

Is the growth really worse considering you can have more bonuses to food in the next age? I would imagine settlements will still overall grow faster due to increased yields.

 

[evonannoredars]

A town on growth get +50% food and having 10 towns with +50% food gives you more population than sendin all the food of those towns to a single city (because obviously the more a single city grows, the more it requires to grow). With this new bug/ feature it's incentized to keep growing as much as possible in first Ages and then using specialization at the end, when you've reached the soft cap (because every Age the growth is always worse now).

Again, I know sometimes specialization will be good anyway, but can someone tell me how this model can be better than the one with antiquity and modern swapped?

Large populations in towns are predominantly only useful for grabbing resources, gold or more food. The later you specialise, the less time those towns will be put to actual use in growing your cities, where more populations can get more important yields like production, science and culture.

Either way, I don't think antiquity and modern are swapped: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/v1-2-settlement-actual-growth-rate-estimates.697777/

 

[bumpyglint]

Either way, I don't think antiquity and modern are swapped: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/v1-2-settlement-actual-growth-rate-estimates.697777/

This is the only good news I was hoping to have I'm on holiday so don't check the math,but just reading it, are you sure the tech boost and similar in every age should be immediatly applied? They should arrive later if I'm not mistaken, but hope this doesn't change a lot

 

[evonannoredars]

This is the only good news I was hoping to have I'm on holiday so don't check the math,but just reading it, are you sure the tech boost and similar in every age should be immediatly applied? They should arrive later if I'm not mistaken, but hope this doesn't change a lot

Realistically, no they shouldn't be applied immediately, but I am for the sake of a simplistic estimate - iirc the exploration and modern ones are p early in the tree anyway.