[GS] Ok so what do Rock Bands actually do?

[tiamats4esgares]

I thought it would be similar to using a Great Musician in enemy territory in Civ V (creating a lot of tourism towards that one civ). I know Civ VI has different tourism mechanics, so I figured......it would lower their domestic tourists, but, it didn't...

Before I used the Rock Band on Rome, I had 62/115 tourism (they were the 114), and it didn't give a timer for me winning. After using it, it tells me now I have 65/116 (them being the 115) but that I have 52 turns to win. So I guess the timer is triggered when you're over halfway. And now I'm closer to winning which is great. But it said it generated 2000 tourism and yet their domestic tourists still somehow went UP? How is that possible? Am I missing something?

Also, that unit was deleted. Ouch. All that faith down the drain. Can I go back and play at the same place again with a DIFFERENT band? I know it says not at the same place twice, but is that per band?

 

[Victoria]

EDIT - Rock band guide created from this thread at https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civ-vi-rock-bands.27716/
This thread is now superseded.

Per band for same place.. we can all play the pyramids once.
How much culture was the Civ making?... maybe bands just create pure foreign tourism.
Next band with be +80 faith
I'll have to look into it... do you have an unmodded save?

 

[kaltorak]

I have no idea about this, but I think I read a post of somebody explaining that it reduces defensive culture, so it needs to be used on the civ that has more culture.

 

[Victoria]

I have no idea about this, but I think I read a post of somebody explaining that it reduces defensive culture, so it needs to be used on the civ that has more culture.

that was probably me... however I need to check it works like other tourism, I had just made the assumption, early days.

 

[kaltorak]

I see

 

[tiamats4esgares]

Per band for same place.. we can all play the pyramids once.
How much culture was the Civ making?... maybe bands just create pure foreign tourism.
Next band with be +80 faith
I'll have to look into it... do you have an unmodded save?

I don't know how to check their culture, but I'm sure I'm producing way more culture than any other civ (my domestic tourists are almost tripled his), and I'm only producing 415 per turn.

Yes I have a save. I'm on Stonehenge where I originally played for 2000 tourism. Not sure if it'll be 2000 again (not sure if I have random seed with each load or whatever enabled) but you should get the gist of it. Just look at the culture page, play there, then next turn look again.

 

[Victoria]

Yes I have a save.

Fantastic, I'll have a look ... thanks... i did not save my culture rock band game to test so you saved me messing around to get in a state I can test and feed back the results... I am working from home so just have to wait for the spouse to go to the saddlery so I can slip down and give it a surreptitious test.... shhh
I'll post a shot of where you can find their culture also, its in the victory overall screen hovering over their civ in the culture victory portion. (shows their tourism also)

 

[Darklighter]

I'm looking forward to seeing the test results. I don't quite understand the Rock Bands functionality either. Victoria, thanks for taking the time to look into this.

 

[Victoria]

OK so we are Canada and have a rock band on Stonehenge at Rome. The rock band plays as 2 levels higher on enttertainment districts so a wonder is not the best.

I can see Rome is second and producing 1.125 domestic tourists per turn.

At the moment we are sending 306 tourism to the Romans this turn and have accumualted 16132 tourism with them wich when divided by 1600 (200 x 8 civs) is 10 tourist points which shows as what you have collected from Rome.
On your main screen it shows you have 240 tourism which then has the trade route open border, government and religious modifiers applied to get you to 306 per turn. Trajan currently has 114 domestic tourists so your victory is to reach 115.
Now Trajan will increase this by 112.5 culture next turn which is likely to be just 1 domestic tourism but could be 2. We certainly would expect the 114 to change to 115 next turn.
However we are applying 306 tourism + whatever the band does to this one civ. if it is 1000 than means 1306 which is pretty close to 1 tourist... so I would expect next turn their foreign tourists to show 11 (we too roughly 1 off them) and their domestic to show 114 (they went up 1 but we took 1 away) ... I have not played next turn yet, just typing as I go for realism in a test.

OK so we lost the band but they went out getting us 2000 tourism....this should show in the detail as 2000 + 306 + 16132 = 18438 lifetime tourism with them if the modifiers do not count. It is also 1.5 tourism ... so should definately have kept Rome at 114 so lets see

Before I went to the next turn I checked and the 2000 has been added without modifiers so that clears that up
Also note their domestic tourists have dropped!!! I think we already have the answer, the calculation for bands is done before end of turn so pretty much answers what we need. Lets just double check out 18438 lifetime next turn and that they go back to 114 tourism

So next turn trajan shoots up to 115 Domestic tourists which is odd but at least our lifetime is correct.
I check his culture output and it is 111.7 this turn so he has done nothing to get to 115 unless he got an inspiration or looted something. As he is not at war it will not be looting... I'll check the logs for an inspiration at T244/245

But here we see the answer and this is often where people get confused.... Trajan is player 3 and gained an inspiration which boosted domestic tourists

Now you may think that that is too larger boost so playing on a turn shows trajan jumping to 119 domestic tourists, remember, you get a lot of inspirations and so too does the AI.
However you have highlighted a possible bug. I cannot see the inspirations correctly for the turn before from the log (just the way the log lags) so IF trajan did not make a smaller inspiration the turn before then rock bands are reducing the domestic tourists as we saw temporarily but that is ignored when we press next turn.
I will have to do more tests but thats how it all works... feel free to ask a zillion questions, quite happy to help.

 

[Infixo]

Why exactly would you expect or suspect that rock bands affect domestic tourism? Does it say anywhere about such an effect?
As I understand, a concert produces X tourism against specific Civ, which translates into Tourists using standard formula (200*numcivs as divisor). And this is all that rock bands do, imo.

 

[Victoria]

Why exactly would you expect that rock bands affect domestic tourism? Does it say anywhere about such an effect?

The clue is in the parameter that is used to calculate tourism off tourism points which is TOURISM_TOURISM_TO_MOVE_CITIZEN
The clue being in the word move.
This value is set to 200 in the globalparams xml. change it from 200 to 2 and watch everyone's domestic tourists disappear (and your foreign rise accordingly) next turn.I have tried it.
Also I just found it in the above posts

You may be asking from a sense point of view rather than a mechanical... and perhaps you are right, perhaps rock bands only give you tourism but do not reduce theirs.... welll we could see from above that Trajans domestic tourists dropped from 114 to 113 in response to the band playing but also we can say that they thought... "this band is great, lets visit their country and get more of this"

100% respect for the question, good to be challenged, we should all, always be doing this.

Do you see now a CV has some nice twists in it, sure you can ignore them and still win but if you want a faster victory understanding them is key. A Chinese god level player, one of their best at CV's and much better than me did not know why Teddy's culture suddenly rose until I suggested looking at their inspirations... they had 2 in one turn, this lady is smart enough to know she could have stopped one of them. @Copper_47 is a really fast player.

 

[Moxx]

Thanks for all of your hard work Victoria to explain this but why go through all of this effort when we have such a detailed and helpful Civilopedia to explain these intuitive mechanics?

 

[gberetfr]

Oh Victoria you amaze me by how deep you go in trying to figure out the underlying mechanisms !
From my side I thought about it like, I make 500 tourism/turn, my band generated 2000, so I "won" 4 turns toward CV...
But it seems to be "a little bit" more complicated than that

(Arrh and you have to change your Avatar, each time I see it I want to kiss you, and I know you're a man...)

 

[tiamats4esgares]

I didn't realize the wonder was a bad place to do the concert lol.

Would it be wise to do concerts in civs where they have lower culture hoping to get more tourists? Or is going after Rome the correct approach?

 

[Moxx]

It's not that wonders are bad it's that with the promotion to do +2 levels in an entertainment district you vastly reduce you chance to lose the rock band in entertainment district and thus be able to level up further and do further better concerts. I usually always pick as the first promo anything that lets you perform at +2 levels since IIRC instead of a 50% chance to lose the unit on the first concert it drops to 26%. Further levels you can get this down to a ~4% chance to lose the unit. However somehow I've lost every one of my high level rockbands much faster then the odds suggest so I need more testing on that. I am either unlucky or there are other factors at play.

 

[Victoria]

why go through all of this effort when we have such a detailed and helpful Civilopedia to explain these intuitive mechanics?

Yes... indeed! The problem is working out what chances a rock band has and how much they generate in what range is much more difficult... I am hoping @Wandering_Dandelion has some answers on this

each time I see it I want to kiss you, and I know you're a man.

That picture is of Jenna Coleman playing Victoria so is very appropriate and changing avatars confuses people. Also weirdly... gay men are heavily attracted to me which I find quite annoying and also I am a very heavy feminist, I like strong women and sometimes in my marriage feel I am the less equal one.

Would it be wise to do concerts in civs where they have lower culture hoping to get more tourists? Or is going after Rome the correct approach?

No... Rome is normally best because you want to reduce their domestic tourists as this will speed up your victory. However... your rock band is likely to do better and survive if playing in an entertainment district so if most civs had similar domestic tourists I would go for the civ that had more entertainment districts... or at least 1.

somehow I've lost every one of my rockbands much faster then the odds suggest so I need more testing on that. I am either unlucky or there are other factors at play.

Apparently they work like spies... and people complain the same with spies.... I explained this in another thread after doing spy tests... it is complicated ... I can try if you want.. or try and find the spy post

 

[Victoria]

I didn't realize the wonder was a bad place to do the concert lol.

Another thing... it looks like a wonder give +1000 tourism....
if this is the case
At least playing at a wonder without +2 is better than playing at a theatre without +2
Having a band that plays at a wonder as +2 seems pretty good but some other promo's are also good like every civ within 10 tiles gets affected.
I will write up a little rock bands piece and put a link to it here ... and probably at the bottom of my signature.
I do not have everything but at least it is a start.

 

[Infixo]

The clue is in the parameter that is used to calculate tourism off tourism points which is TOURISM_TOURISM_TO_MOVE_CITIZEN
The clue being in the word move.
This value is set to 200 in the globalparams xml. change it from 200 to 2 and watch everyone's domestic tourists disappear (and your foreign rise accordingly) next turn.I have tried it

Yes, but this mechanics was from the start, wasn’t it? Increase in tourism causes an increase in tourists and since they subtracted from domestic tourists, then it is an indirect effect. Every source of tourism has it.
My point is that rock bands don’t seem to have any special or additional effect for domestic tourists except standard game mechanics.
Edit. It is only more because the tourism increases in bigger numbers compared to usual per-turn-tourism.

 

[Victoria]

My point is that rock bands don’t seem to have any special or additional effect for domestic tourists except standard game mechanics

indeed, underneath they are yet another number put through the same grinder but in larger chunks.
However they are different in that

• They have variable effects with variable promotions
• Require faith
• Only affect one civ (for what that's worth)
• Have to travel and target locations.
• They transcend governmental differences.

So there is some flavor there. Certainly they feel better than the violinist in Civ 5 which felt more like a missile that exploded at a civs border.

 

[HappyBuilder]

I'm not quite sure how they do what they do, but I sent a bunch of them into foreign lands and I suddenly had a cultural victory. The religious rock band was particularly devastating to my opponents as it successfully knocked out their holy cities. That religious band practically won the game single-handedly. They struck me as very powerful.