Player's Guide to Complex Traits

[pi4t]

Then consider what a huge nation in a developed game can do to get more culture by ACTUALLY using the slider for something other than research!!! *gasp* Is it worth it? When you're talking about the power you get from a Tier II or III trait, it may well be. Playing FOR trait selections is intended to be a strategy that can compete with research, and it may take knowing when to let off the pressure and when to best put on the pressure and having the strategic cleverness to withhold some effort in that direction until later in the game might enable you to play to go HIGH with traits as opposed to WIDE with traits.

First, I fully approve of wanting to make it worth using the sliders for things other than research. And indeed, I might have considered doing that - the traits do a good job of encouraging that, at least a bit. (In my own game, I haven't used the culture slider. Not that I've actually unlocked it yet, but even if I had I wouldn't have used it. But I did build Captured Fire specifically for the culture bonus, and have prioritised culture a bit.) However, the higher tiers being tied to tech level gives an incentive to avoid culture output, which undoes that effect rather badly.

You say nothing in the game is like this but city spreading strategies already contain this same duality of interesting choices (tall vs wide) as well. No, nothing QUITE works like this, which is part of what gives it its own character. You may be the first to note some of the intricacies of strategic consideration that I intended players to have to find for themselves.

"Tall vs Wide" isn't the mechanic I was talking about. I'm saying that nothing else in the game actively penalises you for generating resources. Making new cities is expensive (both in terms of building the settler, and in terms of the hit to your economy while the city is in its early stages). But once you've paid that cost and the city is being productive, you won't suffer any further harm from having the city. At absolute worst, you might end up deciding to abandon the city to e.g. settle one elsewhere once your technology has advanced and you've revealed new resources or something. You've wasted the resources you invested in the city, but nothing further has happened. On the other hand, investing in early culture permanently blocks you off from getting as many higher tier traits.

It's hard at the moment to guess exactly where we'll be in the late game with trait accumulation until someone gets there and experiences it. It seems like it gets prohibitive but with so many wonders doubling the base culture output after so many years in play, more techs opening up more powerful cultural buildings, and all of us being so used to culture being something to downplay as not highly valuable after our cities get to the final rungs - this introducing a very different way to think of it - you might shock yourself at how much culture you can plug out if you're still caring about it later into the game. I don't intend for all of your traits to go past Tier I, just a few at most throughout the whole game. The rest would be a matter of finding great synergies between lower end traits to build your platform of mods upon.

Well, this is something where looking at things mathematically will probably make things clearer. (And I'm a mathematician IRL, so that's kind of my default approach anyway.) I'm going to try to analyse what will happen during the game depending on when you do and don't focus on culture, and to simplify the mechanics down. We'll end up with a more abstract mechanic which, on the surface, looks totally different, but is actually just the same mechanic simplified and expressed in a way which is easier to understand.

Now, even if every wonder had its culture output doubled immediately, once the map is filled out the culture you gain per round is going to increase pretty linearly - or possibly quadratically, if there are enough +% buildings. On the other hand, the culture required for traits increases exponentially - and very exponentially at that. While obviously I haven't actually been able to test this in practice, mathematically there should be a natural plateau - after you've got some number of traits, the cost will be so astronomical compared to your culture production that you can't expect to get any more at all. And that number of traits will be pretty much the same whether you've been focussing on culture or not. At best you might be able to squeeze out an extra trait or so, but to get any more than that you'd have to be multiplying your total culture gain by at least 100 over what a non-culture strategy would have, which I seriously doubt is possible.

On the other hand, if you suddenly start focussing on culture at some point midway through the game, then (again because of the scaling nature of the costs) you'll find that you rapidly make up most of the lost ground from not focussing culture early. In return for making the investment of building lots of culture, you'll quickly end up about a trait ahead of everyone who isn't focussing on culture, and only negligibly behind people who've focussed on culture from the start of the game. (The culture producing buildings you didn't make before are now either obsolete, or very cheap to build. You'll be missing out on the wonders which are designed for culture, but there aren't that many wonders designed to boost culture which don't go obsolete, are there?) And if you later stop investing in new cultural buildings, the people who didn't invest in culture in the first place will quickly catch up with you and you'll be equal with them.

This means that at any stage of the game, you'll have about n traits if you've been focussing on culture recently, or n-1 if you haven't. And at some stage - at an educated guess, quite a while before the end of the game - you'll effectively stop getting any more traits.

So the simplified, abstract way we can look at the mechanics is this: You get a steady sequence of traits over the course of the game, up to a certain point at which point the trickle dries up. At any time, you can get early access to the next trait in the sequence by focussing your civilisation on culture, which you then lose access to if you stop focussing on culture. Of course, this is a simplification: it treats "focus on culture" as a binary choice, assumes it's always worth exactly one extra trait to do so, and ignores the delay between changing how much you're focussing on culture and getting/"losing" the trait. But it shows the key principles, and is a good deal easier to work with and see if there are going to be problems with different ways of unlocking new trait options. The rate of gaining traits will also go down as the game progresses, but that's irrelevant to this model as it turns out.

If the traits are all available from the start of the game, the mechanic is fine. We just need to make sure that the cost of gearing your empire towards culture for a turn is roughly equal to the benefit gained from a turn of having an extra trait, and all will be well. If the later traits in the sequence become more powerful - or offer better options for some people's strategies - then again, this is fine. Indeed, it could even be a way to account for the fact that culture is far more important for other reasons when you're just starting and don't actually have much of it.

But if the traits available improve over time based on some outside mechanic - technology, the number of turns played, or whatever - then we have a problem. At certain points in the game, in order to get access to the next trait, you have to lock it in as one of the weaker ones when it could otherwise have been one of the new ones. Which means that for most of the game, the cost of getting access to an "extra" trait is that you have to focus on culture. But at certain points, the cost is that you have to focus on culture and you end up with a suboptimal trait line up in the future. Since these two costs are very different, it's going to be impossible to balance the traits against them both - either they'll be too strong to give them in exchange for just focussing on culture, or they'll be too weak to be worth getting in exchange for the two costs put together. (In my opinion, at present we're in the latter situation, which is probably the better one if we have to pick one or the other because it's generally better to be too stingy than too generous with new options. But it's still by no means ideal.)

Things are made worse by the fact that the mechanics aren't presented to the player as obviously as I did it there. Because of the inertia I mentioned above, and because it's not obvious exactly when the traits will come if you don't focus on culture or if you do, it's hard to tell whether focussing on culture will pull the next trait forward so it's ahead of the tech unlocking new options. You might say this is an added layer of strategy, but it isn't really. There's a simple correct answer, and you can calculate it by checking the time it'll take you to reach Ren./In. Lifestyle, checking how much culture you're making per turn and how much more you need, and then figuring out how much your research and culture will be increasing over the next turns. That's not a strategic choice, that's a tedious calculation. And one which you have to make quite a way in advance, since if you get it wrong you won't be able to stop the trait being given to you early.

I think players get used to the quick few they get right up front and are hoping it won't get too tough to get the more advanced ones later but they are meant to be very difficult to get. It's designed to be somewhat like military ranks. You might get to e5 (5th rank) within 4 years of dedicated service, but you can very easily only get to be as far as e7 (of 10) by the time you retire at 20 yrs.

Well, I can't say I know much about the US military's ranks, but that also reminds me of the XP mechanics in my D&D campaign, where the cost to gain a level doubles every level like in the oldest versions of the game, and which was designed to do something similar. Then my players ended up spending the first arc of the campaign dealing with a spider demon that massively outclassed them rather than looking for treasure and thus got stuck at level 2 for ages, but I digress. But neither in my D&D game, nor (I assume) in the US army does the amount you gain from a promotion depend on how long you've been playing/in the army.

 

[Thunderbrd]

However, the higher tiers being tied to tech level gives an incentive to avoid culture output, which undoes that effect rather badly.

At the beginning of the game, yes. In the second half of the game, not so much, quite the opposite. Depends on whether you have a wide or tall strategy to trait accumulation.

I'm saying that nothing else in the game actively penalises you for generating resources.

Very untrue - if you overgrow your cities, they will likely rot in uncontrolled properties. If you overgrow your empire (# cities) you will clog off your economy with upkeep. If you tech too fast, you'll outpace your production and end up with lots of unapplied technology and in a lot of cases, the techs have delivered penalties that need to be overcome by applying those technologies. I'm a big fan of numerous options that add to this thinking. The game is setup in many areas to demand you pace your progress to an optimal degree.

On the other hand, investing in early culture permanently blocks you off from getting as many higher tier traits.

However you've achieved those smaller bonuses more immediately and have been able to establish the early momentum to steamroll which may not pay off with the accumulation of higher tier traits but would certainly pay off in game results in ways that may outweigh the achievement of the higher tiered traits.

I'll comment more once I have a little more time to read more.

 

[pi4t]

Both. More the 2nd than the first.

Part of the problem (and this was the last point I was forgetting to make earlier) with this is that I currently have no idea how many traits most civilizations will be getting by Ren era, and even less of a concept of how many the average would be getting around Information age. It would take a lot more testing to try and target the balance in this manner, which perhaps someday I'll attempt, but things can change fast so it was better to anchor the unlocking of tiers directly to when they are intended to be unlocked, regardless of the average earnings that can vary based on future modding in other areas - at least for now.

Hmm. I see what you mean, but I still think you can get a fairly decent idea of how long the wait is going to be. You only need to get the order of magnitude right, after all! Even if people were earning as much as ten times the amount of culture you were expecting, that will still only give them one extra trait, and will only give them access to the higher tier traits a little earlier than you'd anticipated.

Culture is obviously useful in the beginning of the game - it's only later in the game when you've capped out your land grab that it otherwise loses all value. So culture has more value on its own merit earlier on, making earlier holding back on culture painful in other ways.

True, but culture loses its value primarily based on how much culture you have, not how much research you have. It's once you've got enough culture to fill out all your land that its value is lost. So surely it would make sense to have the better traits unlock based on how much culture you have, ie how many traits you've gained before?

Sorta true - also means you'll get a lot more of them and thus a lot more interaction options between them and in the late game if you've played to enhance culture then you've got hope of getting both later tier traits AND more lower tier ones. It would be interesting to see what could actually be done and will take a number of games to see what the best cultural output strategies really amount to.

I addressed this above. Summary: I don't think it'll work the way you think it does. The number of traits above the usual progression you get for focussing on culture is likely to be fairly flat no matter how long you've been focussing on it for. Thus if you focus on culture from the start of the game to the end, you'll end up with no extra mid and high tier traits and an extra low tier trait or two. If you start focussing on it in the end game, you'll end up with an extra high tier trait or so - better than the player who focussed on it for the whole game (though of course, he got the benefit of that low tier trait for the whole game, while you only got your trait near the end). If you start focussing on culture and then abandon it later on, you'll get an extra low tier trait, but will miss out on a mid/high tier one.

Less developed cities would benefit more from stronger +/-yields and commerces than larger cities that consider those higher base bonus amounts to be more blending in with what a normal building source usually gives. That's just one example. With fewer cities, some things have greater impact. As for Preeminent, despite my arguments, I saw that it makes sense to consider the capital bonus %s to have a varying value depending on the stage of the game and HAVE reacted to that feedback to adjust it so that it won't be such a clear choice at the beginning and stay more relevant for more advanced selections.

A casual glance suggests that most of the benefits of those traits are "per population" - adding yields to tiles is better when you have more tiles being worked, improvements to specialists are better when you have more specialists to improve, etc. But I'll take your word for it.

So that its not an obvious, brainless strategy that players would naturally gravitate towards without there being a barb in the concept that makes it balance out with other strategies.

I don't think it is an obvious strategy. Or at least not if you know what you're doing. In fact, it seems highly suboptimal. Unless you're trying to stop new players from gravitating towards it, in which case...having the costs of doing so be hidden in another mechanic which you might not even realise until you've played the game a few times is probably not the way to do that.

Yes, and thus it challenges the player to consider another layer of strategy deeper than just pump as hard as you can to collect as much as possible, just like what happens if you overgrow your empire too fast you can collapse your economy (if things are balanced properly this works this way at least.)

On such a strategy, minimizing your cultural output until you've tech unlocked higher tiers would then be a wise move. It's not the best approach for all ways of approaching it of course, and it's not to say it's an invalid approach. It takes more discipline to NOT reach out quickly to get your traits than it does to grab them as quickly as you can. You also have to wait longer to get the platform traits of your strategy this way. Another thing you can do with more trait selections if you really want to only focus on a few positive ones, is to eliminate the negative ones with your positive picks when those come up that would otherwise have you selecting strategies outside the scope of your plan. If you play to only maintain positive traits, you won't have a lot but you won't be burdened by much either and if you moderate your culture output rather than racing for it, you would find yourself capable of reaching the higher tiers more easily thanks to your discipline. That's usually how life is right? We want a LOT but if we think more about the big goals than the small immediate ones and plan properly to get those big goals met, we achieve them faster and more powerfully than by spreading ourselves to grab at every piece of candy we can find.

It works I guess, if "do a fiddly calculation to work out whether your next trait will be arriving before Renaissance Lifestyle and if so, get rid of your culture producing buildings" is your idea of a fun strategic element. But it doesn't make much sense in terms of flavour, or fit in with the other mechanics of the game in terms of style. With the other mechanics of the game, there's a cost, and if you can afford the cost you get the benefit. Even with cities, the economy hit is designed to be a short term disadvantage, essentially a slightly more spread out cost of founding the city. And you can always destroy the city (or give it away, in the base game) if you turn out to have misjudged it. Here your "reward" for investing in culture is to get a short term advantage at the cost of a long term disadvantage, which is...weird, and discourages use of culture to go after traits or indeed to do anything else.

It's not so much that it's flat out OP, it's that the mods are really meant to harmonize with that level of the game yet. Focused in one region, some things CAN tip a balance, not just about power, but about power concentrated in the same place. Consider what getting Industrial II in Classical or even Ancient might do, for example, in comparison to the impact it would have at Renaissance, when its modifiers are blending into the overall soup more like the buildings that come about at that stage anyhow.

The military ones too, like say, Aggressive... try holding off an Aggressive II promoted force when you haven't had as much time to develop your defenders against it.

I'm going to assume you meant "...aren't really meant to harmonize..."?

As I said, I think you're overestimating how much variation you can get in terms of how many traits you have. There's not much more I can say there, except that you and your enemy both being in the Classical age but you but having Aggressive II is probably not as big a problem as them being in the Medieval age because they focussed on research rather than culture.

 

[pi4t]

Very untrue - if you overgrow your cities, they will likely rot in uncontrolled properties. If you overgrow your empire (# cities) you will clog off your economy with upkeep. If you tech too fast, you'll outpace your production and end up with lots of unapplied technology and in a lot of cases, the techs have delivered penalties that need to be overcome by applying those technologies. I'm a big fan of numerous options that add to this thinking. The game is setup in many areas to demand you pace your progress to an optimal degree.

I thought you'd bring up the cities thing. But the harm to your economy is part of the cost of founding a city. Once you've "paid" it (ie kept your economy afloat for long enough for the city to become beneficial) you get nothing but benefits. And if at some point you decide it's too expensive, you can abandon the city and lose nothing except the hammers and commerce you invested in trying to make it work. It's possible (if usually inadvisable, and somewhat fiddly) to stop researching if you have to. But once you've started making culture, you're stuck making it and getting the trait, unless you start demolishing buildings that are doing other things for you too.

As a potential compromise, things would be at least somewhat improved if you had the option to delay taking a trait rather than having to choose it as soon as you gather enough culture. (That would also allow you to check the civilopedia descriptions of the traits - some of the tooltips are being cut off at the bottom on my screen meaning it's hard to figure out exactly what the trait does in the moment the popup appears).

 

[Thunderbrd]

Well, this is something where looking at things mathematically will probably make things clearer. (And I'm a mathematician IRL, so that's kind of my default approach anyway.) I'm going to try to analyse what will happen during the game depending on when you do and don't focus on culture, and to simplify the mechanics down. We'll end up with a more abstract mechanic which, on the surface, looks totally different, but is actually just the same mechanic simplified and expressed in a way which is easier to understand.

A mechanic that would have to be adjusted for hundreds of iterations of settings, difficulties, gamespeeds and so on. This would be as difficult to maintain properly as the calendar, perhaps worse.

Hmm. I see what you mean, but I still think you can get a fairly decent idea of how long the wait is going to be. You only need to get the order of magnitude right, after all! Even if people were earning as much as ten times the amount of culture you were expecting, that will still only give them one extra trait, and will only give them access to the higher tier traits a little earlier than you'd anticipated.

It's possible that this could be fairly self-regulating since it's so exponential - as you say about the magnitude. And as I said, for now, I don't have enough game experience up to later eras (and the balances swing wildly lately) to have a good idea of a guess to take here. Maybe if a good sample of games could send in their feedback on experiences to say what level they were when they were finally able to get a Tier II and Tier III trait... so it'll take some time with some feedback being collected. I think trying to take guesses, even for a mathematician, is looking at too great a field of chaos in potential modifying factors. Some of those could be boiled into a scaling formula perhaps, but it would take a LOT of analysis, and still even more feedback. I like to keep this sort of thing more simple, AND as mentioned elsewhere, there is some desirable strategic trickiness to the way it's established. Our disagreement lies in whether its a feature or a bug mostly. Which is fair since gamers of all games have these schisms. Perhaps we can figure out some good Leader levels to unlock the tiers but then keep in mind that at that point you are affixing when leaders will stop going wide and start going tall with their selections so it's less open to enjoyable variations between those two approaches. Sure, players would always have the choice to widen their selections rather than deepen them even past that prerequisite level, but the AI will almost always select to deepen a trait rather than widen their selection.

At best you might be able to squeeze out an extra trait or so, but to get any more than that you'd have to be multiplying your total culture gain by at least 100 over what a non-culture strategy would have, which I seriously doubt is possible.

To an extent, you're right, though I think it's possible to get significantly more selections if you try, AND it is a matter of WHEN you get your traits and how long you have them before your opponents get their picks that also make a huge difference in the balance between wide and tall trait selections. By the same logic you are using, about how stable the amount of traits you can select should be such that we can regulate tier selections by level prerequisite instead of by tech prerequisite, most players will ALSO be stated to get roughly the same amount of trait selections wide as they are enabled to tall and a little bit of disciplined strategy can trade off between getting more traits earlier and getting slightly more powerful traits later. There is also a much more exponential output increase than I think you're giving things credit. Between expanding outward in cities through settling and conquest, and upwards in population growth in each city, and improving buildings with technologies, you have a lot of factors to make the curve get stronger and stronger the farther you are into the game. It's nowhere near linear progression, though the rate will plateau since even with space maps there are limits to expansion.

I'm also trying to make, as noted, culture more valid for allocation of resources in the later game where it normally runs out of value entirely. We're used to giving it no mind in our most powerful cities since there's no other purpose to worrying about it in deeply interior regions (normally) and I think we'll find with this, that changes. And if you've been clever enough to minimize your culture output early, you'll pay for that strategically in that you aren't getting access to plots as quickly and may find your borders weaker and may even lose cities over it.

On the other hand, if you suddenly start focussing on culture at some point midway through the game, then (again because of the scaling nature of the costs) you'll find that you rapidly make up most of the lost ground from not focussing culture early.

Sure but you won't regain all the lost production, food, commerce, resources you could have had so much earlier. You also wouldn't have had those traits influencing your nation all that time. Even if they are slightly weaker than the deeper tiers, you had them longer.

If the traits are all available from the start of the game, the mechanic is fine.

Only if you want all the AI to super specialize as far as they can as fast as possible and develop out to the max each selection. That doesn't sound very interesting, nor is it optimal for the AI in the way the traits are designed to give the best benefits during the eras they were unlocked for in many cases - the techs and buildings and more that they apply bonuses to are guided by these tech brackets usually, which means that it is actually more beneficial to the beginning of the game to be selecting a Tier I trait in many cases. And +3 base production in every city would be a LOT more lopsidedly valuable in the Prehistoric, not to speak of a total of +10 total base production in each city. It's the non-scaling tags that are empowered to be safer to hand out stronger at the later tier stages that makes it justified to make them only available later in the game.

Since these two costs are very different, it's going to be impossible to balance the traits against them both

That's the point. There's no perfect way to approach it as a player. There's tradeoffs between restraint and rapid collection, and no clear best practice can be defined. That's the whole purpose of it.

Things are made worse by the fact that the mechanics aren't presented to the player as obviously as I did it there

Again, the joy of the game is in figuring out what isn't obvious - it's in strategic discovery. If you let people know about all the thinking traps you've placed in their path to consider, they'll never make those discoveries for themselves and enjoy the experience of that discovery.

That's not a strategic choice, that's a tedious calculation.

A calculation displayed for you when you hover over the flag on a DL game. Can't account for gains but you can get enough info to make a good estimation. You seem to want to be able to fire your weapon at a target without letting your subconscious come up with an assessment as to where to fire and only rely on an absolute number crunched calculation to determine where to place your shot. It's a game... use your gut some rather than trying to be numerically sure in a field of vast chaos.

Well, I can't say I know much about the US military's ranks, but that also reminds me of the XP mechanics in my D&D campaign, where the cost to gain a level doubles every level like in the oldest versions of the game, and which was designed to do something similar. Then my players ended up spending the first arc of the campaign dealing with a spider demon that massively outclassed them rather than looking for treasure and thus got stuck at level 2 for ages, but I digress. But neither in my D&D game, nor (I assume) in the US army does the amount you gain from a promotion depend on how long you've been playing/in the army.

Time is certainly a factor in both as it takes time to earn accomplishment. HOW MUCH time is the variable that's based on what it takes to achieve the XP. And yes, it's almost entirely based on RPG style arrangements of XP. I'm an avid D&D player myself if that doesn't shine through obviously.

In this system, as in D&D, the more you earn, the more you are empowered to earn more.

True, but culture loses its value primarily based on how much culture you have, not how much research you have. It's once you've got enough culture to fill out all your land that its value is lost. So surely it would make sense to have the better traits unlock based on how much culture you have, ie how many traits you've gained before?

Similar arguments could be made to abandon tech prereqs on building chains and unit upgrades. The interplay between differing regions of achievement is what makes Civ an intricate game experience which is what makes it interesting to begin with.

If you start focussing on culture and then abandon it later on, you'll get an extra low tier trait, but will miss out on a mid/high tier one.

That's exactly the tradeoff that makes the varying strategies to address the quandry interesting enough that it will divide players into different camps of preference. When you can do that, you have struck the design on the head by denying the simplicity of a 'best practice'. C2C has a very classic element like that now that was introduced by the eventual ability to work the 3rd tile range but also giving a lot of good producing buildings - do you pack in the cities to make the most of how much land you own or do you spread them out to play a long game of giving the fewer cities you have maximum centralized output? I tend to side more with the latter while many prefer the first. The secret is that neither is 'right' - it's just got pros and cons to each choice.

A casual glance suggests that most of the benefits of those traits are "per population" - adding yields to tiles is better when you have more tiles being worked, improvements to specialists are better when you have more specialists to improve, etc. But I'll take your word for it.

There's a balance between scaling and non-scaling benefits - as stated above it's the non-scaling benefits that can be really imbalancing in the earlier phases, particularly as they compile on top of the previous ones.

Unless you're trying to stop new players from gravitating towards it, in which case...having the costs of doing so be hidden in another mechanic which you might not even realise until you've played the game a few times is probably not the way to do that.

Why not? The joy of expanding your mastery over something is what gives it replay value.

It works I guess, if "do a fiddly calculation to work out whether your next trait will be arriving before Renaissance Lifestyle and if so, get rid of your culture producing buildings" is your idea of a fun strategic element.

No... being able to make a good judgement call due to experience at how things tend to play out is not all about having to do the math. In fact, the math should be too complex to even want to attempt. But the back of the mind is powerful - training yourself to make good accurate educated guesses and finding you do get better at it with experience IS my idea of a fun strategic element. Something difficult to master and impossible to calculate. I haven't imagined someone would go through destroying their cultural buildings - more that you might want to delay in building them if you're trying to go deeper into the traits selections as soon as you can, taking the slow cultural growth as a hit. If you think it would be valuable enough to actually downshift so severely that you actually sell off buildings to do it, that could be interesting to see if it actually has merit as an approach - however, you'd seek to do so by calculating it rather than just by playing it out? I suppose you ARE a mathematician... I would not expect someone to try to crunch numbers that hard ever. Part of the design point is to make things nearly impossible to calculate to a 'best course' conclusion so as to force you to let go of calculation and start relying on judgement and estimation.

I suspect the property system really drives you crazy...

I'm going to assume you meant "...aren't really meant to harmonize..."?

Correct. I missed the n't there.

As I said, I think you're overestimating how much variation you can get in terms of how many traits you have

If that's the case then your arguments for a change are all as flat as mine to keep this as designed.

There's not much more I can say there, except that you and your enemy both being in the Classical age but you but having Aggressive II is probably not as big a problem as them being in the Medieval age because they focussed on research rather than culture.

That's an interesting argument and one considered against the need to keep the AI simple enough that they are forced to diversify rather than specialize only by the fact they cannot select the deeper tier traits until later. You really can't express the value of the synergy factors between various benefits that match up in a way the AI can calculate into their decisions.

you can abandon the city and lose nothing except the hammers and commerce you invested in trying to make it work.

You minimize this effect far more than I assess it to mean. My approach to the game is that how effectively and efficiently you spend your production is one of the most important strategic keys to victory. I tend to grow a little slower than some...

You would be a lot of fun to have in a PBEM MP game! We could compare some strategic approaches. I think we'd play different but very competitive games against each other.

As a potential compromise, things would be at least somewhat improved if you had the option to delay taking a trait rather than having to choose it as soon as you gather enough culture. (That would also allow you to check the civilopedia descriptions of the traits - some of the tooltips are being cut off at the bottom on my screen meaning it's hard to figure out exactly what the trait does in the moment the popup appears).

I may well like to have that included. It would probably have to be like a 10 turn delay as you suspend the selection - you'd get the option to do it again. I could do that fairly easily (I think) but I'm not sure how I'd handle a bind up where you start having to select more than one trait - the popup mechanism might give me some severe problems with that. I might try some things along these lines though since I think it would be a good compromise indeed. Might have to make it so that you only have one slot per player to recall the next 'delayed popup retry turn' and check if it's that turn every turn and do the popup again if it's that turn, which would mean if you delayed too long, you'd simply lose a selection. You could easily avoid that fate by keeping an eye on how many rounds you have at the current earnings rate til your next leader level gain (again - take a look at the flag tooltip!) When it starts getting anywhere near the next selection time and you get the popup, you better use it.

Negative traits would not be suspendable, which would really hurt then to delay your pick when it's on a negative trait cycle.

I kinda like this idea a lot.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Ah!!! T-brd has a wall of text partner now! Yeah! Enjoy you 2.

 

[pi4t]

In the interests of not letting our posts just get longer and longer, I'm going to be selective in which of your points I respond to.

It's possible that this could be fairly self-regulating since it's so exponential - as you say about the magnitude. And as I said, for now, I don't have enough game experience up to later eras (and the balances swing wildly lately) to have a good idea of a guess to take here. Maybe if a good sample of games could send in their feedback on experiences to say what level they were when they were finally able to get a Tier II and Tier III trait... so it'll take some time with some feedback being collected. I think trying to take guesses, even for a mathematician, is looking at too great a field of chaos in potential modifying factors.

It's true that I don't have much (well, any) experience with the C2C lategame. My analysis was also about what general pattern the progression would take - I don't have anywhere near enough knowledge or experience to predict more detailed questions, like how many traits you can expect to have by the renaissance. If you don't think you can do that either, then of course I'll take your word for it. And, if it would help, I can let you know at what tech stage I get each trait during my current game?

I do still think that the stage of the game at which you get a given trait will stay fairly static even with things like balance tweaks, though. Unless someone does something insane like quintuple all the cultural outputs of buildings.

Our disagreement lies in whether its a feature or a bug mostly. Which is fair since gamers of all games have these schisms.

Indeed. I tend to dislike exploiting quirks in the rules like this which don't have an "in character" explanation and aren't obvious balance choices. As I see it, if we've accepted the premise that a higher culture improves your traits, then we should stick to that premise - there shouldn't be a point at which your traits will end up better if you didn't build culture and just wasted your production instead. Not unless it's unavoidable for balance reasons, at least, and even then it should be very clearly signposted. But you're right; this issue seems to be more of a difference in gameplay style.

Perhaps we can figure out some good Leader levels to unlock the tiers but then keep in mind that at that point you are affixing when leaders will stop going wide and start going tall with their selections so it's less open to enjoyable variations between those two approaches. Sure, players would always have the choice to widen their selections rather than deepen them even past that prerequisite level, but the AI will almost always select to deepen a trait rather than widen their selection.

On the other hand, as things stand, you're still fixing when leaders will start going tall - you're just tying it to a point on the tech tree rather than the number of traits. That will make the amount of width slightly more variable and give you a little bit more freedom in how wide you go if you exploit the game's mechanics, but it's still dictating a point at which you're probably going to start going tall and the only way you can get any control over that point is by knowing the game mechanics and exploiting them in a way I don't like to do (see above).

To an extent, you're right, though I think it's possible to get significantly more selections if you try, AND it is a matter of WHEN you get your traits and how long you have them before your opponents get their picks that also make a huge difference in the balance between wide and tall trait selections. By the same logic you are using, about how stable the amount of traits you can select should be such that we can regulate tier selections by level prerequisite instead of by tech prerequisite, most players will ALSO be stated to get roughly the same amount of trait selections wide as they are enabled to tall and a little bit of disciplined strategy can trade off between getting more traits earlier and getting slightly more powerful traits later. There is also a much more exponential output increase than I think you're giving things credit. Between expanding outward in cities through settling and conquest, and upwards in population growth in each city, and improving buildings with technologies, you have a lot of factors to make the curve get stronger and stronger the farther you are into the game. It's nowhere near linear progression, though the rate will plateau since even with space maps there are limits to expansion.

Well, maybe I'm just more of a builder, but I find that once the settling phase of the game is over, I don't tend to expand my empire too much. Unless I've got bored and gone into "conquer the world" mode, but by the time my empire has doubled or tripled in size I'm typically steamrolling everyone anyway and balance isn't really relevant any more. That might change a bit with space though, I suppose...

But again, it looks like this is a case of one man's disciplined strategy is another man's metagamy exploit to get something which should have been available automatically.

I'm also trying to make, as noted, culture more valid for allocation of resources in the later game where it normally runs out of value entirely. We're used to giving it no mind in our most powerful cities since there's no other purpose to worrying about it in deeply interior regions (normally) and I think we'll find with this, that changes. And if you've been clever enough to minimize your culture output early, you'll pay for that strategically in that you aren't getting access to plots as quickly and may find your borders weaker and may even lose cities over it.

I don't think that changing over to unlocking the higher tier traits after X culture will decrease the value of culture in the endgame. Indeed, it may increase it - if you're only ever going to get your first tier 3 trait at (say) 160 million culture, you're going to be eagerly pushing to break that milestone and the one after it so you can get the high tier traits. On the other hand, if you were clever and held back on getting traits until you researched information lifestyle, you'll then be able to get tier 3 traits from the 1.6 million and 16 million milestone, and will have far less incentive to reach for the higher ones as you'll have already cherry picked the tier 3 traits.

Various comments about my analysis

I think you've misunderstood what I was saying there. Probably my fault - I should know better than to write that sort of post late at night. I wasn't looking at the traits themselves as they currently exist. I was looking at the mechanism for giving them, and asking "if we were to carefully design the actual traits with this in mind, could we theoretically make them balanced for this system?" And by "balanced" in this sense I mean that at no stage of the game should one option be consistently better than another. In this case, there should be no stage of the game where it's almost always better to emphasise culture; and nor should there be any stage where it's almost always better to not emphasise culture.

In particular, I was looking at three variations of the mechanic - one where all traits are made available from the start, one where the higher tier traits become available based on how many traits you already earned (the one I'm suggesting), and one where they become available based on some outside factor like having a technology (as it is now).

Of course, just because a variant of the mechanic can be "balanced" in the sense I gave above doesn't mean it should actually be used. As you correctly observed, the "all traits available from the start" variant would only be balanced by making the higher tier traits equal to the lower tier ones, essentially reverting back to standard developing traits mode. But if one of the variations fails this test, then it's never going to be working ideally no matter how much you tweak the traits themselves. And my argument is that the mechanic as it stands now fails that test, because the cost of rushing a trait is inconsistent. Essentially, if you make the traits strong enough that it might be worth getting one when you're getting near to Renaissance Lifestyle, even though that'll both cost a load of culture and reduce one of your traits' tiers for the rest of the game, then you'll find that focussing on trait acquisition is a no-brainer for all the rest of the game. And vice versa, if you balance the traits so that it's a difficult choice whether to build culture or not even when you're not near Renaissance Lifestyle, then it's going to almost always be a bad idea to go for traits when you're approaching RL.

Of course, there are significant simplifications in my argument - there are always going to be times when you don't want to focus on traits even if they're really good, like when you're at war - but I think the fundamental problem is still there and won't go away unless you change the mechanics. The best you can hope for is to disguise things enough that most players never really figure out what the optimal strategy is.

Time is certainly a factor in both as it takes time to earn accomplishment. HOW MUCH time is the variable that's based on what it takes to achieve the XP. And yes, it's almost entirely based on RPG style arrangements of XP. I'm an avid D&D player myself if that doesn't shine through obviously.

But if I'm level 6, it doesn't matter whether I levelled up yesterday or whether I've been level six for most of the campaign. I'm still equally powerful (extra magic items, injuries, etc aside). Conversely, in this system, if I've earned six traits and got them all before Renaissance Lifestyle, I'm (potentially) weaker than I would have been if I'd earned the last one post RL. You see the difference? Of course, I'd have had the benefit of the extra trait for longer, but then I'd also have paid more for it in opportunity cost - it gets easier to build up lots of culture as the game goes on, so to get the trait earlier I'd have had to commit a far larger proportion of my resources to culture.

(And I'm assuming the size categories were a D&D influence as well, by the way?)

No... being able to make a good judgement call due to experience at how things tend to play out is not all about having to do the math. In fact, the math should be too complex to even want to attempt. But the back of the mind is powerful - training yourself to make good accurate educated guesses and finding you do get better at it with experience IS my idea of a fun strategic element. Something difficult to master and impossible to calculate. I haven't imagined someone would go through destroying their cultural buildings - more that you might want to delay in building them if you're trying to go deeper into the traits selections as soon as you can, taking the slow cultural growth as a hit. If you think it would be valuable enough to actually downshift so severely that you actually sell off buildings to do it, that could be interesting to see if it actually has merit as an approach - however, you'd seek to do so by calculating it rather than just by playing it out? I suppose you ARE a mathematician... I would not expect someone to try to crunch numbers that hard ever. Part of the design point is to make things nearly impossible to calculate to a 'best course' conclusion so as to force you to let go of calculation and start relying on judgement and estimation.

In practice, I wouldn't calculate it unless it was getting very close, since that would be seriously annoying even for a mathematician! But personally, I don't really like it when games use "there are too many possibilities for you to analyse everything even though you have all the information" as their challenge. I end up trying to analyse all the possibilities, giving up when that's impractical, and making a choice that's not particularly good just to get it over with. It frustrates me that the information is there and the only reason I'm playing suboptimally is because I don't have time to come up with the correct solution. (Potentially that time would be "longer than the universe has existed" but eh, anything finite looks pretty much the same from my field of maths). The usual consequence is that I avoid games which heavily involve that kind of thing - unlike some mathematicians, I'm not really a fan of chess for example.

I suspect the property system really drives you crazy...

Oddly enough, no it doesn't. I think that's partly because I only have a partial understanding of how it actually works - and not having all the information seems to be an effective antidote to my analysis paralysis. But it's also because a small error will only lead to a small cost. If I build one too few watchmen and crime climbs a bit too high so a new building gets made, then maybe I'll have to make two watchmen to bring it back down again. If I'm very unlucky I might have to search for a criminal who spawned. A waste of a few hammers and gold, but nothing more serious than that as long as I keep an eye on the crime levels and don't let them spiral out of control like I did in my first C2C game. On the other hand, if I mess up my culture gain I might be permanently left missing a higher tier trait

If that's the case then your arguments for a change are all as flat as mine to keep this as designed.

Not really, because the slight variations which do exist can have a bigger impact on some things than others. In particular, a single trait of difference between different civilisations will probably mean everyone will be getting their (say) 6th trait at about the same time, plus or minus an era depending on how much they focus on culture. Thus if you started unlocking higher tier traits at (say) the 6th you could be confident everyone would start getting them at around the same time, and could also be reasonably confident about where in the game the players were when they unlocked them, in terms of tech. Theoretically, that is - you've said you don't think you can judge it accurately enough at this point, which does admittedly rather undermine my position.

On the other hand, if higher tier traits are tied to tech, then even a single trait of difference could be a serious problem, since that means that civilisations which didn't invest in culture are getting access to the potentially better high tier traits sooner than those who did.

That's an interesting argument and one considered against the need to keep the AI simple enough that they are forced to diversify rather than specialize only by the fact they cannot select the deeper tier traits until later. You really can't express the value of the synergy factors between various benefits that match up in a way the AI can calculate into their decisions.

If the AI doesn't understand the synergies, how is it going to be able choose traits which synergise? And if it can't do that effectively, wouldn't it be better to encourage it to focus on the tall builds it does understand?

You would be a lot of fun to have in a PBEM MP game! We could compare some strategic approaches. I think we'd play different but very competitive games against each other.

Thanks! I do tend to roleplay my games rather than just playing super optimally, though.

I may well like to have that included. It would probably have to be like a 10 turn delay as you suspend the selection - you'd get the option to do it again. I could do that fairly easily (I think) but I'm not sure how I'd handle a bind up where you start having to select more than one trait - the popup mechanism might give me some severe problems with that. I might try some things along these lines though since I think it would be a good compromise indeed. Might have to make it so that you only have one slot per player to recall the next 'delayed popup retry turn' and check if it's that turn every turn and do the popup again if it's that turn, which would mean if you delayed too long, you'd simply lose a selection. You could easily avoid that fate by keeping an eye on how many rounds you have at the current earnings rate til your next leader level gain (again - take a look at the flag tooltip!) When it starts getting anywhere near the next selection time and you get the popup, you better use it.

Negative traits would not be suspendable, which would really hurt then to delay your pick when it's on a negative trait cycle.

I kinda like this idea a lot.

Yeah, it would be a reasonable compromise. Perhaps it would be possible to change the popup to activate via a button on, say, the victory screen, if you haven't already earned as many traits as your culture can support? Or would that be impossible due to how civ is coded?

 

[Thunderbrd]

if it would help, I can let you know at what tech stage I get each trait during my current game?

Sure - could be good to get feedback on this.

give you a little bit more freedom in how wide you go if you exploit the game's mechanics

I see this more as a bit more random variation in how the game proceeds for players, AI included. It's not about IF you exploit the game mechanics, though you may attempt to. Hidden strategic secrets are good things to infuse into design. But mostly it's just about the variations that naturally take place due to other differences in play styles, approaches, and simply varying degrees of success in different arenas, like expansion and warfare, as well as differences in how you prioritize game element development. I have been known to crank down all research development so my production could catch up, so even research is not always a 'get as much as you can as fast as you can' element.

But again, it looks like this is a case of one man's disciplined strategy is another man's metagamy exploit to get something which should have been available automatically.

Let's say we accept the basic premise that the body likes sugar. Sugar is fuel... energy! So why should it be damaging to us if we get too much of it? Because too much of a good thing is always damaging and unhealthy in some way. Get too much sugar, you get overweight because the body wants to store all that energy and never let it go because it thinks that's going to help it survive (which in some extreme cases it can and has helped a person survive) but doesn't realize that it's also going to cause strain on the system and probably lead to an early heart attack. Also makes the person less attractive and thus leads to the decreased likelihood of passing along the immortality of that gene pool to the next generation, or at least keeping the next iteration more likely to be paired with another that strongly follows the same strategy of storing too much energy.

Nature works with gamey exploits too. It's fun to have in play as long as one strategy is comparable against another and creates a playstyle difference where either choices are valid. We're not talking min/maxing, we're talking about adjusting priorities so you can access deeper specialization of traits VS a more proliferated selection of slightly weaker traits. You've observed the less obvious fact that you might not want to hoard as much 'food' (culture) for your leader's trait body as quickly as you can and you might benefit from being stronger and leaner.

I don't think that changing over to unlocking the higher tier traits after X culture will decrease the value of culture in the endgame

I don't either. But by giving tech prereqs to Tiers II and III, you are INCREASING the value of culture in the later phases of the game, far more than you have in the beginning, at a time when culture value naturally falls off and loses almost all relevancy.

On the other hand, if you were clever and held back on getting traits until you researched information lifestyle, you'll then be able to get tier 3 traits from the 1.6 million and 16 million milestone, and will have far less incentive to reach for the higher ones as you'll have already cherry picked the tier 3 traits.

No less incentive... now you're able to get even more deeper II and III tier traits. Up to Ren Lifestyle and even beyond, you're expanding and the culture has tremendous value in its original purpose in the game so holding back does have its own consequences, not the least of which the inability to benefit from constantly improving synergistic combinations of proliferated lesser trait levels.

I wasn't looking at the traits themselves as they currently exist. I was looking at the mechanism for giving them, and asking "if we were to carefully design the actual traits with this in mind, could we theoretically make them balanced for this system?" And by "balanced" in this sense I mean that at no stage of the game should one option be consistently better than another. In this case, there should be no stage of the game where it's almost always better to emphasise culture; and nor should there be any stage where it's almost always better to not emphasise culture.

The ability to limit higher tier selections to techs enabled the traits to be designed in a way that would consider the differences in value on certain tag uses that they would have at different stages of the game. It allowed for design to not have to be muted by having to allow them to all be valid at all stages and freed up certain tags for heavier use at later tiers than they should ever get if you were making them generically.

You say that there should not be a stage where it's better to not emphasize culture but the nature of the design of culture in CivIV is such that this is somewhat taking place by default in the later end of the game when cities really don't benefit any further from more culture growth than they already have. This part of the design helps to be a correction for that.

Of course, there are significant simplifications in my argument - there are always going to be times when you don't want to focus on traits even if they're really good, like when you're at war - but I think the fundamental problem is still there and won't go away unless you change the mechanics. The best you can hope for is to disguise things enough that most players never really figure out what the optimal strategy is.

Which I feel I've done because I couldn't tell you which is the better approach and I honestly think it boils down to preference. But interestingly enough, it is at least helpful to have played to the point of recognizing the design works as it does and has the implications you point out. Not being obvious is I think one of the better sides of the design, yet you're saying it's (to paraphrase) an unfair slap in the face to players who haven't figured it out, which I'm countering by suggesting it's not unfair at all... it's like any strategy game, there are always hidden benefits to certain choices you may not have realized. There are a lot of pros and cons to balance that we've discussed in how to approach this quandry, but at least there IS a quandry, and that makes it have some design character. I realize the argument is that it goes against what you'd expect from a 'rpg' kind of approach to gameplay - if you want to win, do the things you need to do to win and do it better than others. However, when that is also balanced against, do the things you need to do to win in the most effective measure, balanced against the other things you have to do to win, also in the most effective measure, then it gets even more interesting as a strategy game.

Take the property system, for example. You can say, low crime is GOOD! So you race to get as low crime as you can. But what you might not realize is that past a point of investment into crime fighting, you're just paying a lot of upkeep into Law Enforcement units that are doing nothing but pushing your crime levels into farther from bad territory, which even has a decay associated with it which means that you're actually wasting a lot of that crime fighting investment entirely.

From the perspective you've shared, I have to think that the compromise proposed... to enable suspension of a trait selection, with some degree of limitation, keeps some of the design tenants and even some of the strategic considerations it implies alive, while blunting the frustrating cut that can take place when you qualify for a trait just a bit before you tech qualify to take a higher tier.

Of course, one could argue that if you recognize you're likely to get that trait before you can qualify by tech for the next level could sure cause a massive strategy adjustment in specialist assignments and slider and even production allocation to get the tech on time, while minimizing your culture. Not unlike what you sometimes do when you realize an opponent is about to get a tech with a first-to-tech bonus and you suddenly have to race them for it, or what you need to do when your realize your city is going to grow before you can get your granary built... some shifting about and reallocation and you might get the granary in first. That kind of thing has always been a very enjoyable aspect of Civ and makes you feel pretty darn smart when you pull it off. It doesn't mean you have to get stuck in (I like your wording) analysis paralysis the whole game, but when you see convergence points coming up sub-optimally, adjusting what you can to put your ducks in a row is a classic enjoyable element of the game, and yes it can sometimes seem a little metagamey to do it but that's how strategy games are when they are running at their best.

If the AI doesn't understand the synergies, how is it going to be able choose traits which synergise? And if it can't do that effectively, wouldn't it be better to encourage it to focus on the tall builds it does understand?

I have infused them with a proxy method of understanding those synergies but it could use some improvement and is an indirect way to express something of a far too complex nature to address directly. The AI can mathematically tally values on things but it cannot see values that derive from combinations of various values acting in tangent to create a more powerful effect. So what the AI is programmed to do in this case is evaluate the numeric flavors of value on the traits and select them according to their personal assigned values that correspond which gives them 'personality'. They select traits according to their personality - but higher tier traits are given more value IN those personality flavors, so they'll likely always pick higher tier traits they qualify for because it's extremely likely that it's just more of what they already proved they like. Traits do vary some in their flavors across tiers due to differences in tag values, so it's not an ALWAYS thing and some variation is possible, and there's a little random co-efficient in there as well, but I don't think it's enough to see them not almost always choose the next tier of traits they have if they can.

Obviously, synergies are often tied into those personality flavors, though not quite as directly as I'd like - I need to eventually expand on the number of flavors there are but that's a LOT of work to put in to the leaders we have because we have a LOT of leaders - and the flavor systems also influence building construction choices so that's another angle to consider as well in expanding that system.

Thanks! I do tend to roleplay my games rather than just playing super optimally, though.

I'm sure to an extent it's impossible not to do both, even - and perhaps especially - in an MP game.

Yeah, it would be a reasonable compromise. Perhaps it would be possible to change the popup to activate via a button on, say, the victory screen, if you haven't already earned as many traits as your culture can support? Or would that be impossible due to how civ is coded?

Not impossible perhaps, but outside the frame of my know-how since I don't really 'do' python. Bear in mind some design choices end up finalizing in the way they manifest because not everything imaginable is easily achieved. Even this suspension selection is promising to be challenging.

 

[pi4t]

Sure - could be good to get feedback on this.

Well, so far I've gained my first trait early on, about 40 turns after getting controlled fire IIRC. The second came towards the end of a druidism-beeline - I think I was about to start researching poison crafting.

Let's say we accept the basic premise that the body likes sugar. Sugar is fuel... energy! So why should it be damaging to us if we get too much of it? Because too much of a good thing is always damaging and unhealthy in some way. Get too much sugar, you get overweight because the body wants to store all that energy and never let it go because it thinks that's going to help it survive (which in some extreme cases it can and has helped a person survive) but doesn't realize that it's also going to cause strain on the system and probably lead to an early heart attack. Also makes the person less attractive and thus leads to the decreased likelihood of passing along the immortality of that gene pool to the next generation, or at least keeping the next iteration more likely to be paired with another that strongly follows the same strategy of storing too much energy.

Nature works with gamey exploits too. It's fun to have in play as long as one strategy is comparable against another and creates a playstyle difference where either choices are valid. We're not talking min/maxing, we're talking about adjusting priorities so you can access deeper specialization of traits VS a more proliferated selection of slightly weaker traits. You've observed the less obvious fact that you might not want to hoard as much 'food' (culture) for your leader's trait body as quickly as you can and you might benefit from being stronger and leaner.

So what would be the analogue to bad health in the culture analogy? Developing the culture too quickly somehow causes it to be set in its ways and unable to adjust to new ideas when they're thought of? That...actually sounds surprisingly plausible now I say it, and there seem to be good examples of it in history. (Eg the horrible idea of social darwinism was first proposed in Britain, but largely took off in America, and - of course - Nazi Germany, according to the Internet.) Huh.

I don't either. But by giving tech prereqs to Tiers II and III, you are INCREASING the value of culture in the later phases of the game, far more than you have in the beginning, at a time when culture value naturally falls off and loses almost all relevancy.

The thing is that keeping tiers connected to how many traits you've got would also restrict the higher tier ones to the later phases of the game. Not quite as directly if you define the stage of the game solely by the tech level (which, as you've noted yourself, isn't really quite accurate - whether you have the infrastructure, etc, to make use of that higher technology, and indeed things like how many traits you have, also influence how far through the game you are). But it does restrict them to the later stages of the game. Indeed, it will be more effective at keeping the high tier traits locked until the later phases of the cultural game - the point at which culture value naturally falls off is going to be somewhere around a certain point on the tech tree, but will always be when you reach a particular amount of culture per city, by definition.

No less incentive... now you're able to get even more deeper II and III tier traits. Up to Ren Lifestyle and even beyond, you're expanding and the culture has tremendous value in its original purpose in the game so holding back does have its own consequences, not the least of which the inability to benefit from constantly improving synergistic combinations of proliferated lesser trait levels.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that it's going to be your first couple of tier II/III traits that you really care about. I mean others are very nice to have and provide synergistic benefits, but you're only going to really need one or two at most in order to make your strategy work. In which case, if you get those one or two quickly after researching RL/IL (by holding back on your cultural development until that point so you can use a bunch of traits from lower cultural thresholds, which by this point are fairly easy to get) you then have little incentive to invest further in culture - even if you've got more tier IIs you could advance, the cost of pushing hard for another trait is probably not going to be worth it when you're only getting your second/third choice of trait anyway, since that trait isn't as central to your strategy.

Conversely, if you link trait tiers to culture, you can't do that - you're always going to consider pushing for the post-culture-becoming-otherwise-unimportant traits, since you simply can't get the tier III's without doing so.

You say that there should not be a stage where it's better to not emphasize culture but the nature of the design of culture in CivIV is such that this is somewhat taking place by default in the later end of the game when cities really don't benefit any further from more culture growth than they already have. This part of the design helps to be a correction for that.

Yes, the system is definitely better than vanilla. But by tying higher tier techs to RL and IL it also introduces the problem again in the medieval and atomic eras. In fact, it makes it even worse than normal - in vanilla civ, at least all that happens is that you start ignoring culture. But here, in those particular periods, the optimal strategy for some builds will be to actively avoid making culture even at the cost of a (limited) amount of productivity elsewhere.

Take the property system, for example. You can say, low crime is GOOD! So you race to get as low crime as you can. But what you might not realize is that past a point of investment into crime fighting, you're just paying a lot of upkeep into Law Enforcement units that are doing nothing but pushing your crime levels into farther from bad territory, which even has a decay associated with it which means that you're actually wasting a lot of that crime fighting investment entirely.

That's just a case of diminishing returns, which is both something that makes sense "in character" (there's a reason the police don't try and catch everyone who ever breaks the speed limit or pirates a film) and is something we already see in the rate at which you get traits - it may be worth putting in the culture to get one trait, but not to get the one after it which costs ten (well, nine) times as much.

Not impossible perhaps, but outside the frame of my know-how since I don't really 'do' python. Bear in mind some design choices end up finalizing in the way they manifest because not everything imaginable is easily achieved. Even this suspension selection is promising to be challenging.

Fair. I haven't done a great deal of programming, but I've done enough to have a couple of similar experiences myself.

 

[Thunderbrd]

until the later phases of the cultural game - the point at which culture value naturally falls off is going to be somewhere around a certain point on the tech tree, but will always be when you reach a particular amount of culture per city, by definition.

I think it matters more with when interior cities individually reach various culture levels, and there's a lot of variations in games between when this happens. However, it does make sense that if you're further along on the 'trait development tree' that you'd unlock the later tiers based on that. Still, there's too much variation in how much national culture one earns from one game selection set to the next. Much of that COULD be scaled, but scaling is already somewhat inaccurate in effect.

For many of your arguments, I do prefer to get the third city rung without having to wait for a building for it and thus have that linked to tech. THAT is certainly a reason to plug your culture as strong as you can as early as you can. Earning that third rung is very powerful.

IF we could determine a good range for when the 2nd and 3rd tiers should start, I can see some fun to changing it. But it will play out very differently from one game to another. How much culture would you expect to accumulate on a small map vs a gigantic one? Getting the scaling factors necessary to make that work right is... painful.

But here, in those particular periods, the optimal strategy for some builds will be to actively avoid making culture even at the cost of a (limited) amount of productivity elsewhere.

You might not be giving the alternative of wider selections the balanced benefit they are due. It's not an 'optimal' strategy to get as many high tier traits as you can necessarily. They ARE slightly stronger, but they are also more of what you already have, both in penalties and bonuses, which means you are more one dimensional. As you say, it depends on the strategy you are using as to which you would prefer.

Still, I think with the suspension selection solution in place, this becomes a moot point.

 

[IdioticUlt1mara]

Ahhhh so much to read . Will read laters. Read about 2 posts. lol.

One thing I will say, not sure if it was mentioned or not? Is there a way to "save" culture trait pop ups? Like GPs, Promotions etc etc? Wouldnt that help with the whole "having lots of tier 1 traits?" I also mentioned the problem during my stream T-bird that I though it was near impossible to get to tier 3 of any trait in the current system

 

[Thunderbrd]

Ahhhh so much to read . Will read laters. Read about 2 posts. lol.

One thing I will say, not sure if it was mentioned or not? Is there a way to "save" culture trait pop ups? Like GPs, Promotions etc etc? Wouldnt that help with the whole "having lots of tier 1 traits?" I also mentioned the problem during my stream T-bird that I though it was near impossible to get to tier 3 of any trait in the current system

I think you underestimate how much culture you can produce later in the game.
It seems like the main conclusion would be to give the ability to suspend a trait selection for a bit. Not easily done but should be possible.

 

[pi4t]

IF we could determine a good range for when the 2nd and 3rd tiers should start, I can see some fun to changing it. But it will play out very differently from one game to another. How much culture would you expect to accumulate on a small map vs a gigantic one? Getting the scaling factors necessary to make that work right is... painful.

Actually, I'm not sure it would be as difficult as you think, assuming you want it to scale with technology rather than time. After all, both total culture and total research are going to be (roughly) directly proportional to how big your empire can get. Particularly if tech trading is disabled. Thus, on a smaller map (or a large one with a lot of tiny civilisations) you'll find that both research and trait acquisition take longer, but that they stay in sync with each other.

Still, I think with the suspension selection solution in place, this becomes a moot point.

Agreed.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Actually, I'm not sure it would be as difficult as you think, assuming you want it to scale with technology rather than time. After all, both total culture and total research are going to be (roughly) directly proportional to how big your empire can get. Particularly if tech trading is disabled. Thus, on a smaller map (or a large one with a lot of tiny civilisations) you'll find that both research and trait acquisition take longer, but that they stay in sync with each other.

Except that the tech stuff IS scaled and currently the trait achievement rate is not. So while you make a good point about the ratio of the two being fairly consistent since the generators of those sources would be roughly equivalent, I'd still need to carefully adopt every scaling feature tech has over to the trait gain thresholds. I will admit that's a little intimidating.

 

[IdioticUlt1mara]

Actually I am 100% ready for a challenge given to me. I will post a picture somewhere every time I get to a new culture pop? Or I could stream it - it wont be recorded for youtube.

So who wants to give me a challenge then?

Actually nevermind just seen the first challenge that T-Bird posted. Time to try it on Deity

 

[IdioticUlt1mara]

Scientific, spiritual and seafaring dont have a I for the first tier trait. Just noticed it now. Actually there are a lot of traits missing the I for tier 1

Nvm it fixed itself in a match when I looked at the civopedia I could not see a lot of things while in the main menu however once I got into a match it fixed

 

[pi4t]

Scientific, spiritual and seafaring dont have a I for the first tier trait. Just noticed it now. Actually there are a lot of traits missing the I for tier 1

Nvm it fixed itself in a match when I looked at the civopedia I could not see a lot of things while in the main menu however once I got into a match it fixed

In fact, to see the pedia reflect the first tiers of these traits successfully, you must have the option activated and be looking at the pedia IN the game.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Nvm it fixed itself in a match when I looked at the civopedia I could not see a lot of things while in the main menu however once I got into a match it fixed

Yeah pedia outside the game is hard to get working right with this.

Actually I am 100% ready for a challenge given to me. I will post a picture somewhere every time I get to a new culture pop? Or I could stream it - it wont be recorded for youtube.

So who wants to give me a challenge then?

Actually nevermind just seen the first challenge that T-Bird posted. Time to try it on Deity

Hah! Cool! This will be quite interesting to see.

 

[pi4t]

Just to update you, Thunderbrd: I just got my third trait while researching Tribalism.

 

[IdioticUlt1mara]

I have a challenge. Honest, Aerial, Deciever and Defensive. If you get more positive traits you can take whatever but those 4 have to be the main focus