New Version - 2.6 (August 16, 2022)

[CppMaster]

The problem as noted previously is that we eventually then fall into the trap of what is gamey, what is unnatural etc. If one only removes all the little things that the player have found out to game the system (so to speak) you are just punishing the player over and over again and eventually that will just be less fun. Not to mention I, and others, would probably not share all the little quirks (or tips-n-tricks) of the game since in that regard we wouldn't want them to be fixed. Or they don't want to get into the whole discussion of if it's abusing the game or whatnot. It is what it is. No matter the system created I'm fairly sure we'll figure out ways to game the mechanics in our favor. It's just part of the game.

Ok, so you want to abuse exploits so much that you would rather not even discussing, so others don't know about them and therefore won't be fixed. This is very surprising. Sure, in single player you can do whatever you want, including cheating, but I would prefer if all bugs and exploits (or as many as possible) to be fixed.

Why is exploiting the game so much fun? I always thought that the fun thing is to develop your empire and make decisions that makes sense both for strategy and immersion. Exploiting the game is (like we all know) very gamey, gives an unfair advantage and ruins the immersion. You don't do a thing, because it makes sense. You do it, because of details of the game system.

 

[SpecifiedUsername]

I think changing quest and WLTKD to be completed by resources you have is absolutely more gamey. It's just free gold and influence without input from the player.

Not connecting a resource delibarately to wait for a quest is at least a decision and risk if you are low on happiness or already unhapppy.

I think the problem is WLTKD and surplus happiness being completely unexicitng and bordering on useless when you do not have specific beliefs and policies which buff it (fealty, industry, synagogues, theocratic rule). You either go full in, or it's bleak whole game.

Maybe we should rebalance some of the least used pantheons/religious buildings to make them give a lot during WLTKD but keep them only to resources you don't have or that you need an admiral or CS allience to obtain. High risk, high reward play.

 

[CppMaster]

I think changing quest and WLTKD to be completed by resources you have is absolutely more gamey. It's just free gold and influence without input from the player.

Not connecting a resource delibarately to wait for a quest is at least a decision and risk if you are low on happiness or already unhapppy.

I think the problem is WLTKD and surplus happiness being completely unexicitng and bordering on useless when you do not have specific beliefs and policies which buff it (fealty, industry, synagogues, theocratic rule). You either go full in, or it's bleak whole game.

Maybe we should rebalance some of the least used pantheons/religious buildings to make them give a lot during WLTKD but keep them only to resources you don't have or that you need an admiral or CS allience to obtain. High risk, high reward play.

It's free rewards IF you already have the resources which incentivise having as many as possible, so how is that gamey? You are rewarded for what you are supposed to be rewarded. And AI would be rewarded the same, so it'd be much more fair.

 

[SpecifiedUsername]

It's free rewards IF you already have the resources which incentivise having as many as possible, so how is that gamey? You are rewarded for what you are supposed to be rewarded.

It's the same as if you were given free experience on a city which you had already taken 50 turns ago. Or any other quests being completed automatically as soon as you get it as you propose. You don't get building or wonder quests if you already even one of them in any of your cities. There is a reason it works like that. It would just feels wrong in a strategy game.

 

[CppMaster]

Doesn't it feel more wrong to be punished, because you have a resource? That's the case right now.

 

[Recursive]

I'm open to it for WLTKD, not for City-State quests as those are more of an interactive mechanic. Enabling it for one of them would justify the AI always being willing to pay something for a luxury.

 

[CppMaster]

I'm open to it for WLTKD, not for City-State quests as those are more of an interactive mechanic. Enabling it for one of them would justify the AI always being willing to pay something for a luxury.

Cool! It's still an improvement.

 

[looorg]

Ok, so you want to abuse exploits so much that you would rather not even discussing, so others don't know about them and therefore won't be fixed. This is very surprising. Sure, in single player you can do whatever you want, including cheating, but I would prefer if all bugs and exploits (or as many as possible) to be fixed.

Why is exploiting the game so much fun? I always thought that the fun thing is to develop your empire and make decisions that makes sense both for strategy and immersion. Exploiting the game is (like we all know) very gamey, gives an unfair advantage and ruins the immersion. You don't do a thing, because it makes sense. You do it, because of details of the game system.

Doesn't it feel more wrong to be punished, because you have a resource? That's the case right now.

I don't see this as an exploit or a bug. It's using the rules of the game. I'm not breaking the rules. You play the game you like. I enjoy finding mechanics that build an engine that produce results. You apparently enjoy other things. Good for you.

Someone asked why you would refuse a gift and I explained a couple of reason why you would do that. I'm not holding anything back. Not keeping any secrets. That said this discussion that some, including you, keep bringing up each and every such time about how this is an exploit and all things should be fixed is starting to get a bit boring. There is never going to be a perfect system. There will always be rules and limitations and as long as there are there are ways to "exploit" or game them. This is not something I would put high up on the list of things to fix. I am not even certain that it's actually broken. Yes it is gamey but it's a game we are playing. Not a simulation of reality.

As I said I don't think this is an exploit. It's me making a choice -- accept gift now or hope that it will be a better outcome for a better reward a bit later if I wait. Each choice have a consequence and a cost involved. How is this an exploit? I'm using the rules as setup by the game. A lot of things in that regard are a bit gamey, every decision I make in the game that the AI can't due to all it's limitations is gamey. If you want it all to be equal I guess all you can do is watch AI play vs AI and just observe it.

If you want to translate it to reality, for some reason, you could say that by selling all my resources I'm creating a short in my local market in hope of future gains. I make more from selling things to others then making them available to myself. Eventually a need or want will rise local and I'll be rewarded for solving that problem then. But it's a gamble. It could fail. There is risk involved, even tho low. As it stands now then we, AI and players, having large stockpiles of resources nobody wants one is left to ask why would you even have large stockpiles of things nobody wants. The monopoly bonus then makes no sense what so ever. Nobody pays for things nobody wants. A monopoly on something nobody wants isn't really much of a monopoly. So why would you gather them up? Why have multiple resources accumulated if nobody wants them. It's a basic part of the game, accumulate resources and sell them to others that want them. If they don't want them, make them want it.

Also isn't that how things work tho? Things you already have don't really count. You have them already. You are gaining the benefit of having it already. You always want to experience things that you don't have? You rarely get rewarded for things that you already have or have done. You get rewarded for doing, trying and getting new things. For doing things. Not for just being. If you don't like the city-state quests you can just ignore them, once in a while some of them will complete just by accident anyway.

So you are not being punished for having something. You are reaping the reward already for or of having it. People get happier etc. So what you want is basically double dipping for nothing then. You want to be rewarded for things you already have, things you have already done. Rewards for nothing. And this is somehow not gamey?

That said I foresee that there will be issues and problems with the city-state quests if we start to hand out quest rewards for things we have already done in game to. It will also probably be a bit spammy and weird to note that quests just complete for things already done. So is this going to be limited to the resource and luxury quests or will it apply to other quests to? Cities already conquered, population already converted to your faith, roads already built, wars already fought, denunciations already made etc. What makes the luxuries and resources in that regard unique or more worthy then the other things?

 

[SullySaltlicker]

If the idea behind this patch is that the AI civs shouldn’t desire a resource if there’s little to no tangible benefit, we ought to make it beneficial to trade. Maybe we could increase the happiness or GAP for the AI from having more resources by a bit, so that the AI will see it as worthwhile.

Or maybe adjust WLTKD so that, for players and AI, its effect on happiness and growth scales up with the number of unique resources you already have when it’s triggered. Peaceful civs can get good benefits from this by trading with other civs as soon as new resources become available, and warmongers can benefit by aiming for cities with luxuries they don’t have yet as they conquer (unhappiness from empire size might need to be boosted to balance out the snowballing potential). Rather than eliminate the “gaming” possibility, it would reward players and AI for keeping a bigger stock of luxuries, and players who still want to “game” would be encouraged to balance the odds of getting an easy WLTKD request against the potential boost from it; players could still “game” the system by denying themselves readily available resources, but the boost from WLTKD wouldn’t be as significant.

I like the idea of WLTKD scaling with resource diversity, because it means that the rarest resources will be more desirable and provide more benefits while still giving a reason for players and AI to trade without worrying too much over the next WLTKD trigger.

Regardless of what change is made, I think the best direction to go is to make resource diversity on its own a more significant factor, while WLTKD shouldn’t necessarily be something that most players/AI would be down bad for but would still provide decent benefits. As it stands, the design choice of AI not trading for luxuries they don’t “want” is an implicit admission that resource diversity isn’t much of a significant factor in gameplay.

One more idea while I’m thinking about resource diversity - the happiness from each resource alone could scale better if there are less copies of it on the map (you could determine this by raw number of copies, or just the number of copies that have been improved and are in “circulation”) and WLTKD could even scale with this. Just brainstorming, common luxuries could provide around 2 or 3 happiness and the rarest ones could give maybe 5 to 7 happiness. This modifier could be either applied directly from the resource itself, or it could be added to the resource diversity modifier.

 

[looorg]

One more idea while I’m thinking about resource diversity - the happiness from each resource alone could scale better if there are less copies of it on the map (you could determine this by raw number of copies, or just the number of copies that have been improved and are in “circulation”) and WLTKD could even scale with this. Just brainstorming, common luxuries could provide around 2 or 3 happiness and the rarest ones could give maybe 5 to 7 happiness. This modifier could be either applied directly from the resource itself, or it could be added to the resource diversity modifier.

Scaling happiness based no the amount of luxuries could be interesting. Question then is which amount should it scale from -- how many are available or how many there are in the game total or how many there are in the game hooked up etc. There are options. Also the total amount of resources isn't preset or static and can change as there are buildings that increase amounts of them -- the most obvious one being the East India Company (it's one of the reasons you sometimes get weird numbers where they say you control more then 100% of the resources etc). Resources that gets created out of nothing (or something) such as the Brazilwood, Inca thing and all the Indonesian spices will have very weird valuations since those go up based on the amount of cities or improvements you build. While not infinite there can be a lot of them and the more there are the less valuable they become, which makes sense but then you might not want that for your economy.

Either way you can find ways to manipulate this -- such as not hooking up the resources if it's availability that controls the value. If 1 of something hooked up gives 5 happiness (numbers being relative and just pulled out of nowhere) then what is your incentive for hooking up more? You are creating an artificial short to drive up the value. At some point you might not want to hook up resources then cause it will crash the market cause there is an abundance. So no matter which or what you pick there will be issues.

In some regard I think, or find, this issue to be a solution in search of a problem. It wasn't really much of an issue before I would say so I'm not really sure what this really fixed. Yes you could "exploit" the AI out of a few pieces of gold here and there but in the grand scheme of things it wasn't really much of an issue. There was stupid things before that you could sell things 1 at a time and get a better deal then selling them in bulk to the same person etc. That was weird and silly but still. I'm not quite certain there is much of a problem here and in some regard I think this current change created more issues then it fixed.

 

[boho]

I too find the current system extremely gamey since I basically lose access to WLTKD by providing my cities with as many luxuries as possible. That part is counter-intuitive.

If I had a magic wand I'd just eliminate WLTKD entirely since it's a problematic, superfluous mechanic that's already covered in Happiness, Golden Ages, and City-State quests. But I'm sure it'd be too much work to uproot wholesale at this point.

Maybe make WLTKD be similar to golden ages in that every city has a counter based on era that grows based on how many unique luxuries you have? Something like 3 different luxuries = 3 points a turn, and a city needs to collect 100 points in Ancient to trigger a WTLKD. Or to reduce spiky micromanagement BS, each unique luxury just gives you flat +% growth - though this gets back to killing WLTKD entirely, which means Halicarnassus would need a rework.

 

[CppMaster]

I don't see this as an exploit or a bug. It's using the rules of the game. I'm not breaking the rules. You play the game you like. I enjoy finding mechanics that build an engine that produce results. You apparently enjoy other things. Good for you.

Literally ALL exploits in the game use the rules of the game and not breaking them. They wouldn't exist otherwise, so it doesn't really mean anything.

That said this discussion that some, including you, keep bringing up each and every such time about how this is an exploit and all things should be fixed is starting to get a bit boring. There is never going to be a perfect system.

Discussions about exploits and bugs are not meant to be entertaining, so it doesn't matter that it get boring, lol. You have play-through section for entertainment. We discuss these things, so the devs are aware of them and could eliminate them. Sure, there won't ever be a perfect system, but we could try to make it as good as possible. Every bug or exploit fixed makes it better.

Also isn't that how things work tho? Things you already have don't really count. You have them already.

Not at all. For example, I generate science every turn because I already have libraries, not because I've just built them. Also, I don't get the point of this statement.

So you are not being punished for having something. You are reaping the reward already for or of having it. People get happier etc. So what you want is basically double dipping for nothing then. You want to be rewarded for things you already have, things you have already done. Rewards for nothing. And this is somehow not gamey?

I'm punished that I cannot trigger WLTKD with a resource that I could buy if I already have the resource. This is literally how the resource for WLTKD is chosen. Same thing for CS quests. The point is to not get punished for having a resource, because that's gamey.

If the idea behind this patch is that the AI civs shouldn’t desire a resource if there’s little to no tangible benefit, we ought to make it beneficial to trade.

I agree.

Yes you could "exploit" the AI out of a few pieces of gold here and there but in the grand scheme of things it wasn't really much of an issue.

You could say about any bug or exploit that is not very significant. And yeah, you'd be right that is not "really much of an issue", because it'd be only a small issue. Yet still, the game is better without bugs/exploits than with them. It's up to devs to decide what's worth fixing, considering the impact of the issue and how much time it'd take to fix it.

 

[rsc2a]

...Maybe make WLTKD be similar to golden ages in that every city has a counter based on era that grows based on how many unique luxuries you have? Something like 3 different luxuries = 3 points a turn, and a city needs to collect 100 points in Ancient to trigger a WTLKD...

I like this idea but I'd also couple it with city population. Something like...

# of luxuries / city population = points per turn

...so that larger cities hit WLTKD less frequently. It would make great merchants more valuable in the larger cities, but would still require a rework of Halicarnassus so it's not completely nerfed. Maybe something as simple as having it provide an reduction on calculated population for calculating WLTKD points.

The internal debate I'm having is if the number of points for consecutive WLTKDs should be static or increase in some fashion?

 

[Amask]

Each additional luxury can provide more happiness than the previous one. Just throwing another idea out there. It's not even a new idea. Civ 3 worked like that as long as your city had a market.

 

[Legen]

I agree it does feel artificial and I can agree it's not very fun after seeing the results of the playtesting. But it is a fair valuation given the current mechanics. The slight benefits of more happiness are outweighed.

The solution is to change the mechanics so that more luxuries are always better.

I'm okay with changing WLTKD to include resources you already have (though not locally). I'm also open to any other ideas on how to make luxuries valuable enough to justify their purchase.

What about WLTKD being triggered when you have a specific number of unique luxuries?

For instance, a city could request a random number, whose maximum range can be based on some combination of game turn, era, map size and/or number of civs (and obviously capped at the maximum number of existing luxuries). If, or when, you have at least the rolled number of different luxuries, that city gets a WLTKD. Note that this proposal doesn't increase the maximum range of the roll based on how many luxuries you already have, so it doesn't punishes you for hoarding as many different luxuries as possible. More luxuries is always better this way.

Current sources outside luxuries, such as Circus, great merchant and Brazil/China UA, can remain as alternative methods of triggering WLTKD. Sometimes, RNG just screws you over, you get sanctioned, or managed to upset the whole world.

If there's any desire to preserve the need for a specific luxury, the city's request could come with one particular luxury counting as 2 or more. Whether that luxury is always one you don't have yet, like it is now, is up to the devs.

 

[pineappledan]

The conversation about WLTKDs and people waiting for connecting luxuries until they have a trigger demonstrates how little people care about the happiness component of luxuries these days. Luxuries used to be the main way you could keep your empire happy and expanding in vanilla, in VP they just don’t really matter.

If something were not to be changed with luxury happiness values, then I think the WLTKD scaling sounds like a nice alternative. You could make WLTKDs 10 turns base, +1 turn per unique luxury. Easy.

 

[looorg]

Not at all. For example, I generate science every turn because I already have libraries, not because I've just built them. Also, I don't get the point of this statement.

I'm punished that I cannot trigger WLTKD with a resource that I could buy if I already have the resource. This is literally how the resource for WLTKD is chosen. Same thing for CS quests. The point is to not get punished for having a resource, because that's gamey.

But you are not getting punished. There is a difference here between the two things that is somehow lost on you. If you build a building, such as the library, you get a passive reward so to speak -- the +2 science income, the specialist slot, unlocks of another building (the university) etc. So you get a reward from here on until the end of the game for having built that building. If you improve a luxury or a strategic resource on the map you get a reward in that resource, you get something you can trade and the plot usually increases by a few points in some yield. Those are rewards. You did something and now you get rewarded.

If you complete a quest you get a reward for having done something, it's a one time payout and then it's done until you finish the next quest. They are not supposed to be retroactive. You have done something here and now and here is your reward for doing that. They want that wonder, luxury, strategic resource NOW and they'll reward you for it. Not that you have ever built it or done it sometime in the past.

This is the thing, in game as in reality -- People want new things! Things that they do not currently have. This shouldn't be an alien concept.

But for some reason that I think is still somewhat unclear you can't explain how completing a quest in an exploit. Not to mention that you are somehow fine, or want, to get rewarded for things you have already done even tho said action you took have already been rewarded by the game. So you want double rewards for something already done? That isn't exploitative and gamey? Is the exploit that you chose to wait hoping for a better reward at a later time? If that is the case then you shouldn't even have an option, the AI should just say "Here have some luxury and you are going to like it and you can't refuse!". On top of that by turning down their gifts or letting the city-state quest stay there for a bit before I try to complete it I'm not getting any reward. I'm getting nothing. I run the risk of the quest going away, there could be a war and for some quest someone else could beat me to the goal. If I turn down the gift I don't get anything, I get a diplomatic penalty on top of that for refusing their gift. Then there is the added risk of when I actually want the luxury (or whatever) it's not available anymore; perhaps the AI gave it to someone else or now they hate me for turning down their offer.

If you can't trigger a WLTKD within a reasonable amount of turns you are doing something wrong.

 

[BornDownUnder]

The main issue for me is that there is no penalty when acquiring the resource to complete the CS quest. Once the resource is connected, we still maintain that resource and the CS gives us a reward, there is no loss of resource such as it would be in trade with another player/AI.

How difficult would it be to turn those CS quests into a gifting resource scenario? We already have the CS quest to gift a unit, would it not be a better outcome to gift the resource instead of just connecting it?

 

[greenfieldpark]

The conversation about WLTKDs and people waiting for connecting luxuries until they have a trigger demonstrates how little people care about the happiness component of luxuries these days. Luxuries used to be the main way you could keep your empire happy and expanding in vanilla, in VP they just don’t really matter.

If something were not to be changed with luxury happiness values, then I think the WLTKD scaling sounds like a nice alternative. You could make WLTKDs 10 turns base, +1 turn per unique luxury. Easy.

I remember when i first started playing this mod that happiness was a major problem. I currently play just below diety, and sometimes dabble in diety, and rarely have happiness issues. So much so that I rarely build public works.

I achieve this through high productivity and a managed city population.

So ya. Luxuries arnt nearly as important as they once were and I basically just use them for those wltkds and city state quests.

Following this convo i havnt heard a great solution to this problem yet. Nor do I have any good ideas of my own.

Its tricky because any change has implications for so many of the game components.

 

[gwennog]

Hello, I rarely give my opinion on new versions of VP, I'm so happy to have one that often brings new things and fixes many bugs. But for once I find that the acceptance or not of luxury resources by AI is really very problematic. You have to open the discussion with each one to realize that it is impossible. It's a very painful micromanagement and in the game I play, I even gave up despite having very average happiness .