Order's Cultural Revolution Tenet

[InkAxis]

So we were talking about this in a different thread about how this tenet could be reworked.
Currently it is:
+34% Tourism to other Order Civs, and +5 Tourism from all Great Works. Spies steal Tech at double the normal rate.

My issue is mainly that +5 tourism on GW isn't that helpful for wide civs, it's rare you have a lot of GW anyway. Also the spies stealing tech seems a little strange, doesn't really fit with the rest of the bonuses to tourism.

I have a couple of ideas, these wouldn't be the full tenet but parts of it.

1. Most of the time if I'm going for a wide CV, then the strategy is to use high culture tiles and then hotels and other buildings that convert tile culture into tourism. Polynesia especially uses this strategy but a lot of civs can do it, I heard someone talk about doing it with Byzantium recently. So, the tenet could somehow help with that. It could be "10% of the culture from tiles in each city is turned into tourism", so basically a mini-hotel in every city. Or even simpler, a cost reduction to hotels and a reduction to their maintenance, which is pretty high. This tenet will be more specific to a strategy but remember this won't be the tenet alone, it will probably have additional things in it, and if someone isn't going that strategy they could just not take the tenet regardless.

2. Another way to do it is a reduction to the tourism malus you get from cities. Currently you get something like -7% tourism per city (I don't remember exactly), this could reduce that to 5-6%. This would be a more general bonus that works to any CV strategy, unlike the last suggestion. The main problem with Wide Tourism is exactly that you have an explicit negative modifier for tourism, which makes sense. But reducing it could help a lot as that is the main problem wide tourism faces.

Those are my suggestions. Again, they won't be a full tenet on their own probably, but it would be mixed with other suggestions/what currently exists. I'd like to hear what your suggestions are. I heard pineappledan suggest a tourism process, to convert the production Order has into Tourism, which sounds good to me.

 

[Stalker0]

2. Another way to do it is a reduction to the tourism malus you get from cities.

This to me seems the most clearcut change that would benefit wide.

Ultimately the +34% tourism to other order civs could in theory be really decent, but realistically I never see culture leaders go Order, and your never going to get your culture rival to convert to Order if you select it, so this tenant never actually gives you tourism with the people you need it.

The +5 tourism from GWs is still a potent benefit, its just not enough on its own to make Order a CV tree. You can drop the spy rate, at that point in the game spy rates are so bad, even doubling them does nothing. If my spy rate is 100 turns for a tech (which is quite common at this point), lowering it to 50 doesn't do a damn thing.

So I could see:

+5 tourism from all GW. Reduce Tourism Malus per city by 30% (have to check map sizes to see if that scales alright, you can't just do -1% or something that won't scale right with map size).

 

[pineappledan]

Reducing the city malus makes sense.

I don’t like the idea of order increasing tourism from tiles or augmenting hotels, because both options are just a poor man’s Air Superiority. The free airport in every city from autocracy gives a better building with more flexibility and utility.

I still like my idea for a unique process. Completely different tourism generation mechanic from freedom and autocracy, leverages Order’s theme and their production/infrastructure focus, especially with iron curtain

 

[crdvis16]

I'd also say #2. #1 just doesn't feel right- Order giving buffs to hotel production would make strategic sense but seems off historically.

 

[Thibix Magnus]

both the bonus to other order civs and the GW bonus can be useful for tall culture play. Tall Order (hehe) culture victory can be interesting, when securing your diplomatic relations with wide neighbors that went (or will go) Order too is a worthy alternative to the obvious benefits from Freedom. By all means if people find wide culture victory too hard, give it more tools, but careful with replacing tools that seem unefficient for the standard strategy, they might have their use in sub-optimal but more adaptive and creative game plays.

 

[pineappledan]

What about this?

Department of Publicity
The number of cities affects Policy Culture Cost and Tourism output 10% less than normal. (retroactive)
Unlocks the Propaganda Process (converts 15% of Production into Tourism each turn)

This would make Order the wide Culture victory option vs Freedom's tall. A T3 tourism finisher that leverages many cities with high production synergizes with Party Leadership, 5-year plan, and Iron Curtain, and makes ITRs a viable option for TRs and CVs. This addresses a problem that Order has had where it doesn't make proper use of tourism modifiers from ETRs and from franchises with Nationalization, and reinforces Order's disengaged, insular playstyle.

Another possibility is maybe Order could add % tourism modifiers for other civs experiencing poverty and distress, in addition to boredom?

 

[Drakle]

Another idea. Actually based upon Cultural Revolution. Or perhaps could be renamed World Revolution. Gain lump sum of Tourism upon adoption of Tenat based upon number of cities. Cities enter anarchy for a turn. Gain additional Tourism when any civilisation adopts Order, modified by influence over them (so full amount for being influential over a civ, but very little if another civ just adopted Order and you don't have much influence over them).

 

[InkAxis]

Personally I like pdan's suggestion or Stalker's suggestion of replacing the spying buff with the Tourism per city thing.

But, what do the devs think? Do you guys want to implement this?
@Gazebo

 

[azum4roll]

Dropping the malus per city won't really matter for the truly wide, unless you reduce the cap too (currently at -75%).

 

[InkAxis]

Dropping the malus per city won't really matter for the truly wide, unless you reduce the cap too (currently at -75%).

I didn't realize there was a cap. How much does each city increase the negative tourism?

 

[Stalker0]

Another simple option would be to remove the 15% malice for being a different ideology. This would effectively mean you were getting a 15% tourism bump against the civ you actually care about The vast majority of the time

 

[crdvis16]

I didn't realize there was a cap. How much does each city increase the negative tourism?

It's 7% penalty to tourism per non-puppet on standard size I believe. So after 11 cities you're maxed out (assuming it's an additive penalty). So for wide tourism you're sort of incentivized to either go mini wide at like 6 or 7 cities or mega wide at like 20+ cities.

I really like some of PDan's suggestions, they sound more Orderish. I'd probably vote for the tourism process and the distress or poverty modifier modeled after boredom. They fit the flavor of Order well and capture the propaganda/'workers of the world unite" ideas somewhat.

 

[pineappledan]

It's 7% penalty to tourism per non-puppet on standard size I believe. So after 11 cities you're maxed out (assuming it's an additive penalty). So for wide tourism you're sort of incentivized to either go mini wide at like 6 or 7 cities or mega wide at like 20+ cities.

I really like some of PDan's suggestions, they sound more Orderish. I'd probably vote for the tourism process and the distress or poverty modifier modeled after boredom. They fit the flavor of Order well and capture the propaganda/'workers of the world unite" ideas somewhat.

Maybe 15% reduction on city penalty makes better sense then, since that would reduce the penalty from 7% to 5.95%. 10% wouldn’t move the needle.

My hang up with a distress/poverty modifier is that, while they are a perfect thematic fit, unhappiness levels for them swing wildly, and are omnipresent. I think finding a sweet spot for that modifier would require a ton of tweaking and retweaking whenever something else changes re: late game or happiness balance.

boredom, on the other hand, is unhappiness from a relatively rare yield type, and is buffered behind all the other unhappiness sources. Boredom isn’t so sensitive to balance updates and macro game situations as food/prod/gold

 

[InkAxis]

Maybe 15% reduction on city penalty makes better sense then, since that would reduce the penalty from 7% to 5.95%. 10% wouldn’t move the needle.

Maybe I'm being stupid, but can you clarify what you mean by "on city penalty". Do you mean reducing the cap/maximum penalty?


Also there's a lot of options we're discussing here, should I make this a poll?

 

[crdvis16]

Maybe 15% reduction on city penalty makes better sense then, since that would reduce the penalty from 7% to 5.95%. 10% wouldn’t move the needle.

My hang up with a distress/poverty modifier is that, while they are a perfect thematic fit, unhappiness levels for them swing wildly, and are omnipresent. I think finding a sweet spot for that modifier would require a ton of tweaking and retweaking whenever something else changes re: late game or happiness balance.

boredom, on the other hand, is unhappiness from a relatively rare yield type, and is buffered behind all the other unhappiness sources. Boredom isn’t so sensitive to balance updates and macro game situations as food/prod/gold

The issue @azum4roll pointed out makes changing the %malus from, say, 7% to 6% less appealing. If the policy changes it to 6% then you still max out the malus with 13 cities instead of 11. In other words, lowering the per city penalty just means you get a few more cities before maxing out at 75%. Even if you made the policy halve the malus to 3.5%/city you still hit the 75% cap with 22 cities, and the closer you get to 22 cities the less impactful that policy is. 22 cities is a lot to me when going wide but I think people do hit that number.

Maybe just lowering the cap is better? Have the policy drop it from 75% to 50%? Then any city past #7 is no longer adding to the malus and you can take advantage of it by going as wide as you want. It's probably pretty common to get 10+ cities as wide->order so the policy would be pretty universally useful for culture victory.

Good points on poverty/distress. Being at the front of the unhappiness queue does probably make it harder to balance. It would have been cool thematically but so it goes.

So yeah- I'd vote for "reduces the total per city tourism malus from 75% to 50%. Allows for the propaganda process to convert 15% production into tourism".

 

[pineappledan]

The issue @azum4roll pointed out makes changing the %malus from, say, 7% to 6% less appealing. If the policy changes it to 6% then you still max out the malus with 13 cities instead of 11. In other words, lowering the per city penalty just means you get a few more cities before maxing out at 75%. Even if you made the policy halve the malus to 3.5%/city you still hit the 75% cap with 22 cities, and the closer you get to 22 cities the less impactful that policy is. 22 cities is a lot to me when going wide but I think people do hit that number

if you reduced the per city tourism penalty, you could also reduce the cap in the fine print. A 15% reduction in the cap would mean -75% is reduced to -64%.

I’m not a fan of only reducing the cap by 25%, because that functionally means any empire with 11+ cities has +25%tourism, but this bonus does nothing for empires with less than 8 cities. Meanwhile, Freedom’s t3 media culture is:
— “+25% Tourism and +1 Happiness generated by cities with a Broadcast Tower. +20% Culture from stadiums.”
So both ideologies’ t3s would act as flat +25% modifiers, but order’s would be stronger for CV because it has a 2nd pure tourism bonus with the propaganda process, and have no non-tourism benefit.

The other reason I want to preserve the per city bonus is to keep the reduction to culture policy cost that I proposed with it. I think the T3 can’t be purely tourism, and has to have at least some sort of general benefit, even if that benefit is just faster policies. Spending culture for more efficient culture isn’t enough though, so how about this?

Department of Publicity

• PolicyCulture cost, technology science cost, and tourism penalties per city are reduced by 15% (effects are retroactive, and affect both incremental and capped totals)
• Unlocks the Propaganda Process (converts 15% of Production into Tourism each turn)

 

[CrazyG]

You could lower the city penalty and lower the max penalty, to give something to both tall and wide. Tall order really is pretty good.
I like the idea of the propaganda process.

I’m not a fan of only reducing the cap by 25%, because that functionally means any empire with 11+ cities has +25%tourism, but this bonus does nothing for empires with less than 8 cities. Meanwhile, Freedom’s t3 media culture is:
— “+25% Tourism and +1 Happiness generated by cities with a Broadcast Tower. +20% Culture from stadiums.”
So both ideologies’ t3s would act as flat +25% modifiers, but order’s would be stronger for CV because it has a 2nd pure tourism bonus with the propaganda process.

They wouldn't both be flat 25% modifiers. I think order's bonus would end up much being quite a bit stronger that freedom's here, because they stack differently. Order's would affect bonus yields directly, which freedom's doesn't. Freedom's bonus stacks additively with other % bonuses, order's would be multiplicative. Decreasing the % penalty to the entire empire tends to be extremely good even if you don't have that many cities.

 

[pineappledan]

True. Cost reductions and positive modifiers behave differently, though the distinction is usually in how they interact with other existing bonuses.

Maybe propaganda should only convert 10% ->? Seems super low considering the opportunity cost, but it depends on how strong the other portion’s anti-wide penalty abilities is in practice.