[GS] Pillage Yield in GS

[bbbt]

Or maybe they can make district pillaging scale but improvement pillaging stay fixed. That to me seems more balanced - pillaging a campus seems like it should reward a lot more than pillaging a mine anyways.

 

[Sostratus]

If they scale from 25 then OMG, pretty much wrecked the game, CS are OTT but you can temper a game by removing the right ones, pillaging with the raid card would just be stupid and you know it. I hope to hell it does not work like this.

I'm quite sure the senior dev team (Beach + Shirk) said in the Sweden livestream that they looked at pillaging and thought it needed a boost, and that they wanting pillaging to be as strong throughout the game as it is at the start, where the science / culture yield equals about 1/4th of the a new tech / civic. Further, I believe they indicated that it will use the same scaling system as chopping to increase the pillage yield continually throughout the game.

My suspicion as well. This lands at 250 end of trees.
They should really be careful with this one because you can pillage the same tile many many times, exploits as have been listed in this thread, etc. Further, the pillaging only creates a feedback loop- if it's based on your tech progress, which proxies military strength, then you can quickly become unbeatable. If it proxies with their tech progress, it's not getting any weaker as you rapidly surpass them and your new military strength means you can invade and pillage more.

Or maybe they can make district pillaging scale but improvement pillaging stay fixed. That to me seems more balanced - pillaging a campus seems like it should reward a lot more than pillaging a mine anyways.

I really hope so. I just don't see daring raids to haul off stones and bananas as the key to imperial power in the industrial era. Improvements would mean mounted just gets even better.

 

[Boyan_Sun]

a 1000 science pillage is certainly better than 4*250 because they reset each other, maybe they will change Daw & Gal

We checked the recent videos and found that the clearing overflow bug may already fixed in GS, and that means pillage will be far more useful when you have overflow science. Daw & Gal will be more valuable too.
We have reported to the official twitter about Mali's twice debuff calculation bug, and they really took it seriously. So this time we will also try to make some suggestions to reduce the loot benefit.
And we know that in the beginning of R&F, there was a trick for Macedon - make a free city, conquer it and sell it to AI repeatedly, to get all Eurekas. Firaxis fixed it very soon, so we can trust them.

 

[Hammurabbit]

I think it's a bit weird if pillaging would be a super effective way of getting science/faith/gold/culture from neighbors who are equally developed. Why can't you pillage your own tiles then, we use the same technology?

It would be cool with a system where the yields dependent on the differences between you and your victim. Pillaging your culturally superior neighbor for culture would be lucrative, while pillaging someone who is hopefully left behind because of a war they lost to you 500 years ago would yield very little.

 

[Metecury]

Pretending something doesn't exist is not a solution. How will you tell your opponent to not use it? By your logic, if building a scout crashes the game, that's perfectly acceptable if you don't build a scout. And you can't stop the AI or other players from doing that.

Prevention is much better than the cure and the game hasn't been released yet. Not to mention that many players already pretend some mechanics don't exist to enjoy it. Let's not add more. The game already assumes the player is a fool for not going to war; this will just make it worse and closing your ears and going "lalallalala i can't hear you" is simply out of touch with reality.

This is not the case with pillaging and your comparison makes no sense. Pillaging scaling is a good thing since it was practically useless before and the policy related to it were too. Only min maxing players looking for easy ways to get ahead of the ai would spam scouts or light cavalry to pillage and easily pull ahead of the AI and if it is your friends on multiplayer that play like this perhaps you should change friends. Besides, fighting wars for the sole purpose of pillaging makes perfect thematic sense and can be done without exaggerating same as chopping resources without exploiting overflow but than again people can not control themselves.

 

[Hakan-i Cihan]

I think it's a bit weird if pillaging would be a super effective way of getting science/faith/gold/culture from neighbors who are equally developed. Why can't you pillage your own tiles then, we use the same technology?

It would be cool with a system where the yields dependent on the differences between you and your victim. Pillaging your culturally superior neighbor for culture would be lucrative, while pillaging someone who is hopefully left behind because of a war they lost to you 500 years ago would yield very little.

Pillaging should work as a catch up mechanism and should not turn into a snowball effect. Therefore I agree with your thought. Turning this thought into numbers I suggest a change for science and culture yields from pillaging in the lines of:

• 50% pillage yield if 4 or more civics/techs ahead of the pillaged civ
• 100% pillage yield if less than 4 civics/techs ahead or behind of the pillaged civ
• 150% pillage yield if 4 or more civics/techs behind of the pillaged civ

Something similar for gold and faith yields but then based on civs yields income per turn. This idea can also be worked out more gradually instead of as above.

The cheese mechanizm with pillaging free cities, capturing it and let it flip back should also be prevented in my opinion. I would suggest that pillaged improvements in a city change should be removed if the city is captured. This wil give you the choice of whether u want that city with all improvements intact or you only want to pillage and capturing the city is for clearing the way to the next city for capturing/pillaging.

 

[Archon_Wing]

This is not the case with pillaging and your comparison makes no sense

Well, I mean, it doesn't matter if it's not broken or not, because we can just ignore it right?

Pillaging scaling is a good thing since it was practically useless before and the policy related to it were too.

Pillaging is very powerful, and so is that policy for quite a while. But nobody said pillage scaling by itself was bad though, if you actually understood the discussion. Considering you think the raid card is useless, you probably don't.

Only min maxing players looking for easy ways to get ahead of the ai would spam scouts or light cavalry to pillage and easily pull ahead of the AI and if it is your friends on multiplayer that play like this perhaps you should change friends.

Oh no, God forbid people play to win the game. I mean, I could make baseless statements about people too, like maybe only people that don't care about mechanics balance just like to hit random buttons and have no standards as long as there are pretty colors would ignore something as blatant as this. Why are these people even playing a strategy game?

Also, I'd love to change the AI, but.... you think you can ask them not to pillage you or each other?

 

[Metecury]

Well, I mean, it doesn't matter if it's not broken or not, because we can just ignore it right?



Pillaging is very powerful, and so is that policy for quite a while. But nobody said pillage scaling by itself was bad though, if you actually understood the discussion. Considering you think the raid card is useless, you probably don't.



Oh no, God forbid people play to win the game. I mean, I could make baseless statements about people too, like maybe only people that don't care about mechanics balance just like to hit random buttons and have no standards as long as there are pretty colors would ignore something as blatant as this. Why are these people even playing a strategy game?

Also, I'd love to change the AI, but.... you think you can ask them not to pillage you or each other?

If you got to use exploits to win the game lower the difficulty.

It is not about balance, there is nothing wrong with the mechanic of pillaging if people do not abuse it. It is not broken.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

It could be a thing that they're still balancing out. In a general sense though, it's nice to see more/better options for wars that aren't all-out conquest wars.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

It is not about balance, there is nothing wrong with the mechanic of pillaging if people do not abuse it.

If it can be abused, then it also has room to be improved.

It could be a thing that they're still balancing out. In a general sense though, it's nice to see more/better options for wars that aren't all-out conquest wars.

Pillaging was already pretty useful and scaled well. As the game goes on, there's more and more stuff to pillage, so you got more and more out of pillaging, if that's the route you wanted to go. A lot of players either just stopped fighting the AI altogether, or else just took all of their cities. So there wasn't a lot of commentary about pillaging after a few months. I do remember in the early months after Civ 6 was announced though, commenting about how any general of mine that took a city before every improvement in the city was pillaged was immediately fired. Basically, pillaging worked fine, wasn't OP or UP, and so people talked about other things. I even ran the policy cards during wars back before I stopped fighting against the AI. The main issue about the cards was they only boosted sacking either improvements or districts, not both, so you had to guess which you were going to do more of.

I do agree that providing benefits and consequences from wars that don't involve cities changing hands is a good thing. It should even help the AI, which is much less likely than a player to otherwise get any value from starting a war.

It's just a matter of balance, and also the matter of stuff appearing for "free". Once you've gained the science from sacking one Egyptian mine, how much more new knowledge are you going to get from sacking another dozen Egyptian mines? And why wouldn't you learn just as much from occupying the mine? To move pillaging even closer to chopping, I wonder if the pillaging yields shouldn't be a function of the output of the item you're pillaging? So if you pillage a library, you get, say 10 or 20 turns worth of the science that library would have produced had you not sacked it. A district gives you multiples of it's adjacency bonuses. Things that produce city-specific yields (production, food, amenities) get converted to gold. Sacking a mine then gives you gold equal to 4x 10 to 20 turns of the current production value of that mine (which itself escalates over time, so there's your scaling). Bump the number of turns of production up or down to get to the level of benefit from pillaging that feels right.

 

[ehecatzin]

I would like to see the new pillaging yield increase tied to grievances rather than just era. It would make war against certain targets have a different flow, in that you would keep your relationship horsehockey so you could come back every time just to extra pillage, very useful if you are Norway.

 

[Archon_Wing]

If you got to use exploits to win the game lower the difficulty.

It is not about balance, there is nothing wrong with the mechanic of pillaging if people do not abuse it. It is not broken.

lol so basically, developers shouldn't fix their game as long as we pretend problems don't exist.

 

[Furycrab]

Personally I rather like the change because pillaging gets really pointless except to heal in the late game, but I can understand a more peaceful player not liking the idea of speeding up a Science Victory by war. Hopefully we get more info on what the new science victory is going to be.

 

[Ziad]

lol so basically, developers shouldn't fix their game as long as we pretend problems don't exist.

His point is that just because an option exists doesn't mean it should be exploited if one is concerned with gameplay health.

The best example is save reloading. You can reload as much as you want to ensure the best outcomes. Doesn't mean you should.

speeding up a Science Victory by war.

Ironically historical.

 

[Archon_Wing]

His point is that just because an option exists doesn't mean it should be exploited if one is concerned with gameplay health.

And my point is that it's a nonsensical deflection. Why not have pillaging give 100000000000 science? Or have it instantly win the game? As long as we don't pillage, it doesn't matter. Wouldn't it be better if the exploit never existed in the first place, especially since we're not @ release?

Also, pillaging is a common act and sorta tied into the district system. It's not like say the Giant Death Robot that may never be encountered in many playthroughs. Asking players to refrain from an action that is like available for like 90% of the game is not reasonable.

Finally, nobody is arguing that pillaging shouldn't scale. The question is how much. Player behavior, is simply put, an irrelevant tangent.

 

[Victoria]

... So I just started a Dom game as Gorgo, Shaka had 3 cities in a line underneath me, So I crush his army, take the central city after pillaging a luxury, a farm and a quarry. I have enough time with my 3 charge builder to build another quarry, repair the quarry and lux there and build a mine. When it flips my troops will get more XP and I will get 50 culture 25 science and 25 faith before I capture it... and let it flip.... meanwhile I am building another builder to come and help with the farm.
And the Irony is Shaka does not mind any of this.

Note I do not use this tactic when playing properly but tested it ages ago when R&F came out, it works just fine. If they make these things scaleable it will work all game, not just in the first 70 turns.

The raid card makes it last longer but as said can be removed.
The main problems are the free city will start spawning swords then muskets... and also Shaka’s units will start wandering in.

 

[AriochIV]

The only time I pillage is to heal units, so this change is largely irrelevant to me. It doesn't make a lot of sense to destroy the city you're trying to capture intact.

 

[Archon_Wing]

When it flips my troops will get more XP and I will get 50 culture 25 science and 25 faith before I capture it... and let it flip.... meanwhile I am building another builder to come and help with the farm.
And the Irony is Shaka does not mind any of this.

Yep, this has been brought up before Rise and Fall release.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/pillage-and-fix-for-rise-and-fall.625724/

But of course as it turns out stuff that was thought to be broken actually ended up broken.... who would have known.

 

[Furycrab]

Pillaging was already pretty useful and scaled well.

No it doesn't. Pillage an entire district over 3 full turns for like what 100 gold (200 if for whatever reason you had the double yields promotion) while the Army you used to do this could cost like 6k? 100 science when you are generating over 5 times that in the late game? The only part of it that scales well is the healing. If you pillaged in the late game right now it's probably just for fun or to slow down an AI in a city you don't plan on taking. Where's Norway on Deity tier lists lately?

 

[Draco84]

These are blatant

Yep, this has been brought up before Rise and Fall release.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/pillage-and-fix-for-rise-and-fall.625724/

But of course as it turns out stuff that was thought to be broken actually ended up broken.... who would have known.

The solution to pillaging is similar to the solution Firaxis put through on milking free cities for XP. Make pillaging a free city give negligible yields.