[GS] Pillage Yield in GS

[steveg700]

... 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.

Yeap, this has "disaster" written all over it. Which I guess is appropriate for this expansion.

Fix chop overflow, but replace it with a new major exploit de pièce.

Did it occur to the dev's that maybe pillaging would do well *not* to scale throughout the game? Thing is, later in the game, civ's will have more tiles improved, and they'll have better capability to get a builder out, so even without it scaling, it's more subject to repetition and therefore exploitation.

You want to milk pillaging a bit more in the later game? Get some policy cards.

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?

I want to stop hearing about the unthinkable notion that Norway or any civ isn't at the top of a diety tier list as much as the next guy. My shoulders ache from so much indifferent shrugging. But the question begged here then is: just how rewarding should pillaging relative to building your own infrastructure? How much of a ROI should it yield you to spend three turns running 6k worth of cav around for a quick raid?

 

[Furycrab]

Just how rewarding should pillaging relative to building your own infrastructure? How much of a ROI should it yield you to spend three turns running 6k worth of cav around for a quick raid?

I think it should be more than it is now that's for sure because it encourages going to War for other things than just taking cities. I think it's fun gameplay because it allows you to convert the opportunity cost of units into Yields if played correctly. Considering how you basically get no warmonger penalty for being at War and not taking cities, it could lead to very fun, very dynamic games with the AI where you might evaluate the advantage of pillaging a neighbor vs the potential cost of having a harder time running peaceful trade routes. Right now it feels off. Early game pillaging feels pretty good, but there's also little warmonger penalty to taking the city. Late game it feels pointless but every AI will turn on you if you start taking cities.

The loophole where you use free cities should definitely be fixed, but it's also one of those loopholes where you can just make a conscious player decision not to exploit the AI around it.

 

[steveg700]

I think it should be more than it is now that's for sure because it encourages going to War for other things than just taking cities. I think it's fun gameplay because it allows you to convert the opportunity cost of units into Yields if played correctly. Considering how you basically get no warmonger penalty for being at War and not taking cities, it could lead to very fun, very dynamic games with the AI where you might evaluate the advantage of pillaging a neighbor vs the potential cost of having a harder time running peaceful trade routes. Right now it feels off. Early game pillaging feels pretty good, but there's also little warmonger penalty to taking the city. Late game it feels pointless but every AI will turn on you if you start taking cities.

Well, to me, a boost to pillaging should be derived by options like policy cards and unit promotions. A promotion reflects a long-term investment, and a policy card represents an opportunity cost on par with slotting a policy card to improve a district's yield.

Pillaging is something that can easily get out of hand, because it inherently requires minimal investment to run into another civ, hit tiles that are protected poorly if at all, and get an immediate lump-sum reward. If you get a quick payout with little to no risk or investment, then a low-yield return could well be a perfectly fair and balanced ROI. Since more tiles will be developed in the later game, and they'll get repaired more quickly, then perhaps go for volume.

When you say it could be fun gameplay because there's no associated warmonger penalty, it triggers a warning flag, because maybe the "fun" is in getting away with a new exploit that isn't fair or balanced. Milking the ol' chop overflow was fun for fans of shortcuts.

I hope I don't see Norway leaping on a tier list on the back of this one change.

 

[UWHabs]

I think it should be more than it is now that's for sure because it encourages going to War for other things than just taking cities. I think it's fun gameplay because it allows you to convert the opportunity cost of units into Yields if played correctly. Considering how you basically get no warmonger penalty for being at War and not taking cities, it could lead to very fun, very dynamic games with the AI where you might evaluate the advantage of pillaging a neighbor vs the potential cost of having a harder time running peaceful trade routes. Right now it feels off. Early game pillaging feels pretty good, but there's also little warmonger penalty to taking the city. Late game it feels pointless but every AI will turn on you if you start taking cities.

The loophole where you use free cities should definitely be fixed, but it's also one of those loopholes where you can just make a conscious player decision not to exploit the AI around it.

The simple solution is that free cities should basically never give you anything. So you shouldn't get anything from pillaging their tiles, nor get a free unit when you capture them, or probably even get any experience from battles with them.

But I can definitely imagine some late game wars where it will make sense to avoid actually capturing anything, and just send troops all around the countryside destroying everything. Most of the time I don't care about warmongering penalties, but maybe this would make me care a little bit more. Of course, there's probably other things they can do - trade route yields should also potentially scale down. I mean, if I'm virtually on the doorstep of war with an AI, it probably doesn't make sense for me to be getting 30 gold per turn per trade route to them.

 

[pgm123]

Idea that would make sense, but they won't do:

Have districts accumulate science, culture, faith, gold. When you pillage it, you get everything there. That would limit repeated pillaging. Don't have improvements scale or have them scale at a low rate.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

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?

You're ignoring the significantly larger number of things available to pillage as the game goes on. More improvements, more districts per city, more buildings per district. It does scale.

And no, it's not OP. Which was my point. It works fine now in my opinion, gives a nice boost if you want to do it, but doesn't replace the need for Campuses and Theatre Squares.

Under the proposed rule change you'll get double scaling: the number of things to pillage increase and the yield per pillage increases.

 

[pgm123]

Under the proposed rule change you'll get double scaling: the number of things to pillage increase and the yield per pillage increases.

What if the scale isn't exactly in line with everything else?

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

What if the scale isn't exactly in line with everything else?

The comment on the last livestream was that they wanted one pillage to generate about 1/4th of a new tech or civic, regardless of what era you pillage in. So it sounds like they intend to make the per pillage yield scale in line with chopping, tech costs, etc. Which combined with the number of things to pillage per city also increasing, would make pillaging more and more profitable as time goes on.

Will have to wait and see whether this changes by the release date or in subsequent patches.

 

[steveg700]

The comment on the last livestream was that they wanted one pillage to generate about 1/4th of a new tech or civic, regardless of what era you pillage in. .

If true, and without augmentation by policies or promotions, that is a preposterous ROI for just sending a few cav units into enemy territory for a quick pillage. .

 

[pgm123]

The comment on the last livestream was that they wanted one pillage to generate about 1/4th of a new tech or civic, regardless of what era you pillage in. So it sounds like they intend to make the per pillage yield scale in line with chopping, tech costs, etc. Which combined with the number of things to pillage per city also increasing, would make pillaging more and more profitable as time goes on.

Will have to wait and see whether this changes by the release date or in subsequent patches.

Right. I'm saying that the simple balance solution would be to adjust those amounts, but still have it scale.

 

[Lily_Lancer]

The comment on the last livestream was that they wanted one pillage to generate about 1/4th of a new tech or civic, regardless of what era you pillage in. So it sounds like they intend to make the per pillage yield scale in line with chopping, tech costs, etc. Which combined with the number of things to pillage per city also increasing, would make pillaging more and more profitable as time goes on.

Will have to wait and see whether this changes by the release date or in subsequent patches.

It will be a disaster if pillaging a bunch of ancient mines will result in your discovery of GDR. Nothing is like that in any settings of world.

The comment on the last livestream was that they wanted one pillage to generate about 1/4th of a new tech or civic, regardless of what era you pillage in. So it sounds like they intend to make the per pillage yield scale in line with chopping, tech costs, etc. Which combined with the number of things to pillage per city also increasing, would make pillaging more and more profitable as time goes on.

Will have to wait and see whether this changes by the release date or in subsequent patches.

It shall add some restriction like "pillaging science from a Civ whose science behind you yields nothing", "pillaging culture from a Civ whose culture behind you yields nothing", "pillaging gold from a Civ will reduce the gold of the Civ pillaged. If it has no gold the pillage yields nothing", and "pillaging faith from a Civ will reduce the faith of the Civ pillaged. If it has no faith the pillage yields nothing"

And, most importantly , pillaging independent cities/ city states yield nothing.

 

[Victoria]

They have really not thought this through.
The argument that the tech treecosts increase 25x during the game as opposed to pillaging 10x sounds sensible but Ed has just not thought through the snowball effect. We finish the science tree so fast anyway.
Being able to finish multiple smaller techs in one turn with higher pillaging values will really speed things up amd rapidLy increase pillage values.
Currently a science game is a Dom game, you pretty much own a map. This pillage change made OP cavalry class super OP, using foot will put you way behind.
The game is becoming heavily polarised toward cavalry, I thought it could not get worse, hell I’ll move 5 turns at the start to get to those horses.

 

[Browd]

The game is becoming heavily polarised toward cavalry, I thought it could not get worse, hell I’ll move 5 turns at the start to get to those horses.

... but, sadly, you won't see (or even comprehend the existence of) horses until you settle and tech Animal Husbandry, so ....

 

[Victoria]

... but, sadly, you won't see (or even comprehend the existence of) horses until you settle and tech Animal Husbandry, so ....

lol, true... I was really just trying to stress how crazy this concept seems to be with an example but yeah.
We may be wrong but we are doing the numbers and playing games imagining and its just meh... I normally do not watch liveplays but I watched the posted @civtrader6 deity dom win in 106 turns 3rd part and he was pillaging every tile possible with the raid card in place, no surprise... and that is at T80 with only 25 science or 50 gold.... pillaging a horse tile for 320 gold at T80 is great... at T100 when you have ramped up your chopping properly it will e at 500 gold for a single pillage.... jeez.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

No question the new pillaging rules materially improve warmongering, which was already the fastest / easiest route to victory.

What's more interesting to me is whether the new pillaging rules could improve the competitiveness of the AI when you're playing peacefully? Currently, the AI gets nothing out of many of it's wars. Assuming the AI has been taught to pillage more (and I hope the dev team looked at this when bumping up the value of pillaging), then at least the AI will get stronger and stronger the more it fights. Potentially this could help it win quicker and be more of a threat, militarily.

I'd still prefer a system where pillaging yields were tied to the production of the thing you're pillaging. I'm glad the dev team got rid of the free gold from emergencies, which never made sense as where was that gold coming from? It would be nice if we didn't also have free science coming mysteriously from mines (it's the Industrial era: you're not going to learn anything interesting from blowing up someone's mine; you're sure not going to learn three times as much by blowing up three of them). However, if it helps the AI move along the tech and civics trees faster, that's a plus. Not the best way to boost the AI to my mind, but every little bit helps.

 

[steveg700]

It all drives home the nonsensical nature of pillaging. You pillage a mine, you gain science. What? Vikings and pirates bringing home bags of rocks for the eggheads to study?

Vanilla improved tiles should just stick to gold and health. Leave culture and science yields to pillaging resources and districts (not sure faith is ever a good fit for a pillage yield). Maybe as a compromise tie in policy cards.

 

[Victoria]

It seems like everyone is in agreement apart from Firaxis.
Pillage a mine or a marble quarry and you will get a bit of gold out of it in reality.
Pillage a farm and get food (works really good)
Pillage a campus and get science... well yes, makes perfect sense.

Warriors are not scientists.
What does work well is capture a city with farms and get the inspiration, makes perfect sense.
Pillage 3 mines and work out how to sail in deep water is a bit shallow for me.

Ramp up gold by pillaging standards if you must but please, not science, it is not a positive for the game.

 

[Harlequeen]

I think pillaging a campus is a bit like kidnapping scientists. Werner von Braun.

 

[Sagax]

I think pillaging a campus is a bit like kidnapping scientists. Werner von Braun.

Science from pillaging campuses is more or less understandable.

Science from pillaging mines, though... what have they been mining there, Australium???

 

[Harlequeen]

Maybe it's the Sons of Ivaldi being kidnapped then. But yes, I agree.