Policy cost increases per city

One possible difference is I went for Economics before Archaeology. I generally don't get new techs until I can fully utilize what that tech provides... so for example if I can't feasibly afford museums yet, I focus on other techs that will benefit me right away. I vary my tech path and policies based on circumstances of the game. I do always beeline to Acoustics in culture games though... to great-engineer the Sistine Chapel, even if it's not a good time to start building opera houses yet.

I think the number of cities we can get for a culture victory just depends on the map size. The key is how much land we can grab peacefully. I don't think it's possible to expand beyond 6-8 cities on standard/large maps without going to war or leaving ourselves vulnerable to early attack

My intuition says any warfare is a setback for culture victories (though I haven't analyzed that hunch in detail). Even if we don't have any significant military expenditures, just being at war blocks a potential DoF for 5-20% boost. I try to end wars as quickly as possible if there's any hope of signing a DoF later. Some leaders hold a grudge... but I've designed most warmongers to be opportunistic. Just like a smart human conqueror they attack weakness and befriend strength, even allying with enemies if there's a benefit for them (the "enemy of my enemy" situation).


Copying over some information on policy costs here from the Policies thread...

I shifted policy costs in v7.0 when I realized I'd made the total cost for victory higher than intended. This is the cumulative base culture required to reach the cultural victory condition:




Basically, we used to get 1 free policy in each of the 6 eras. Now those 6 free policies are instead spread out over time.

• Modifiers discussed earlier in the thread alter these base costs.
• Total cost same as vanilla (closest I could get was within <100 culture).
• Early policies are 45% less than vanilla, and 25% less than mod-old.
• Overall, victory can be achieved sooner than vanilla because income is higher from the Opera House and Museum.
• I feel favoring early policy generation better matches the distribution of policies over eras. There's lots of trees at the start, and fewer available towards the end.

 

I just started the first new game in a while, and I think culture is too fast at the beginning - I had the entire Tradition tree filled by turn 54 (admittedly with Stonehenge from the free GE). Not in the Medieval era yet, and not particularly interested in Lib, Honor or Piety (giving the new Suliman a shot and going for superspecialists with every specialist booster SP) but I will either certainly be forced into one of those trees in a few turns or be forced to rex to delay my next SP. Obviously not the worst thing in the world, but...

I mentioned it in the Fewer Poor Policies thread, but I'd love it if you consider relaxing the penalties from number of cities and return the policy thresholds to something closer to the "Old Mod" values - they seemed like a good rate to me.

 

Personally, I am a "Tall" empire kind of guy. I'm not big into expansion, I like making every city the pinnacle of perfection.

That said, one thing that came out of the math analysis I did above, one thing that really bothers me, is that extra cities can be "bad" for winning.


In Civ IV, expansion hit you in the pocketbook. But...given enough time and infrastructure, you could always make that city profitable. It might take some time, but eventually every city was a bonus to your overall stats.

In Civ V, the same is true in all aspects, except culture. I don't mind that it takes a lot of infrastructure to make a new city a culture positive. But I don't like that later in the game, regular cities actually decrease your culture rate, no matter how much infrastructure you throw at them.

While I don't want a 20 city civ producing 10 times the culture of a 5 city civ, it should produce more if its gone to the trouble of building up culture infrastructure.


Thal, if you agree with this, then my suggestion is a throwback to Civ IV: The culture "courthouse". Basically, you modify or add a building (like a "forum") that reduces that cities damage to the culture rate...just like courthouses reduced the maintenance cost of cities in Civ IV.

It could have a high maintenance cost, so its not a gimme, but for a player who desires a big civ and policies, it gives them an option beyond "puppet everything".

 

Thinking more on this, perhaps simply buffing Representation may be a decent compromise. Bring it up to 50% (or more) eliminating the Golden Age if necessary.

 

@Seek
I might have not explained very well. I'm guessing you're not going for a culture victory? In other victories, policies are not a zero-sum game. If we get extra policies in the early game, it doesn't mean we're losing out on policies later. You can get both more early and late policies.

Building an early Landmark, Stonehenge, and free Monuments is inherently an investment in early policies. If your strategy is to skip piety/liberty/honor, it might be better to get the Great Library instead of Stonehenge, and wait to get Legalism.

 

I don't think you explained anything badly - I was simply giving an impression of my first game after the changes.

Like I said, I was just having a "fun" game trying to get uber-specialists with Suli - Tradition, Commerce, Rationalism and Freedom - and then maybe decide on a victory type (culture or science most likely). If the situation were different, I probably would have normally gone with 1: Piety for culture, but I wanted the Rationalism buff; 2: Liberty for expansion, but there weren't many good city cites nearby; 3: Honor, but the world was very peaceful at that point; or 4: Patronage, but that version of CSD was buggy with TBC so it seemed like a slog to gain many CS allies. So if I was not going for such a specific (and admittedly inefficient) goal, it would've been less of a problem.

I honestly was just surprised at how quickly the policies came, otherwise I would've gone with something else with the GE.

(I may continue it, but I've been hooked on the Viking scenario. It's quite fun!)

Any thoughts on this?

PS. Before bringing this up I didn't realize how much I dislike this aspect of civ5, and began yearning for the days of civ4 where it was atypical to have less than 8-10 cities. Perhaps I simply need to retrain myself; I've fallen into a rut!

 

I just posted in another Policies thread about a game where the SPs seemed to come awfully fast (and may be OP). Building a landmark right off, then getting Civil Service with the GL gave me an amazing combination of SP and tech growth, at a very early stage.

In the meantime, right across the border from me, Suleiman had Janissaries in 175 BC, and stayed a bit ahead of me in tech right up until the final burst. (He built Apollo a few turns after me - the earliest I've seen it. This would be the Ottomans not waging war - there was only me on the continent - and therefore focusing on expansion and science.

Regarding your PS, Seek - as someone said, it's tough to have more than 6 cities without going to war. By now I've forgotten how it even happened in earlier versions of Civ.

 

Do you feel policies and research come faster than production can keep up?

 

No, because the policies help you with pop and production! Honestly, I'm not sure there's a problem. And there's no doubt it's a lot of fun. I think Seek and I are talking about the same thing: a sense that the game is going too fast. But I should retract my earlier statement that it may be OP, because obviously the AI is benefiting just as much (the Ottomans in my Aztec game).

It reminds me of pro football, where the linebackers seem to get bigger and faster every year!

 

I'd really like to change the default that blocks policy saving... but haven't managed to find any variables available to us that can do so. I'd prefer to allow policy saving and change Christo Redentor / Free Speech. It's on my todo list to investigate further, as I think this might help with concerns about fast early policy rate.

One thing I've been considering is altering the relationship between #turns and year to better match technological progression with the date. I don't pay attention to the year, and the Hall of Fame screen does not list years for reference, so feedback on this would help.

 

I'm one of those players who prefers not being able to save policies, so I'd always like to have the option to not play that way.

I'd like the dates to match turns better, so I don't encounter janissaries in 175 BC, but this is definitely a backburner issue. What would really be great, of course, is for eras to last longer.

 

Not sure if you are looking for this:

Basically it reads, first era has 100 turns and each turn is 15 years(180 months), second era has 300 turns and each turn corresponds to 10 years... and so on. This is from my mod that ends in Renaissance, so later eras have no turns.

Code:

<GameSpeed_Turns>
		<Row>
			<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_MEDIEVAL_MARATHON</GameSpeedType>
			<MonthIncrement>180</MonthIncrement>
			<TurnsPerIncrement>100</TurnsPerIncrement>
		</Row>
		<Row>
			<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_MEDIEVAL_MARATHON</GameSpeedType>
			<MonthIncrement>120</MonthIncrement>
			<TurnsPerIncrement>300</TurnsPerIncrement>
		</Row>
		<Row>
			<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_MEDIEVAL_MARATHON</GameSpeedType>
			<MonthIncrement>12</MonthIncrement>
			<TurnsPerIncrement>1050</TurnsPerIncrement>
		</Row>
		<Row>
			<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_MEDIEVAL_MARATHON</GameSpeedType>
			<MonthIncrement>24</MonthIncrement>
			<TurnsPerIncrement>0</TurnsPerIncrement>
		</Row>
		<Row>
			<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_MEDIEVAL_MARATHON</GameSpeedType>
			<MonthIncrement>12</MonthIncrement>
			<TurnsPerIncrement>0</TurnsPerIncrement>
		</Row>
		<Row>
			<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_MEDIEVAL_MARATHON</GameSpeedType>
			<MonthIncrement>6</MonthIncrement>
			<TurnsPerIncrement>0</TurnsPerIncrement>
		</Row>
		<Row>
			<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_MEDIEVAL_MARATHON</GameSpeedType>
			<MonthIncrement>3</MonthIncrement>
			<TurnsPerIncrement>0</TurnsPerIncrement>
		</Row>
		<Row>
			<GameSpeedType>GAMESPEED_MEDIEVAL_MARATHON</GameSpeedType>
			<MonthIncrement>1</MonthIncrement>
			<TurnsPerIncrement>0</TurnsPerIncrement>
		</Row>

 

This is the cumulative culture cost as a percentage of vanilla.



Examples of how to read the chart:

• -50% culture to get 12 policies.
• +25% culture to achieve a cultural victory.

It's also worth pointing out I raised the capital's culture from 1 to 2. Since both income and expense are doubled, the end result is a reduction of early non-palace sources like ancient ruins culture. Late-game culture buildings (opera house and museum) are also more powerful than their vanilla counterparts, and there's other minor changes to policy costs and income in the policy trees.

 

Compared to pre-patch vanilla, this is how the present vanilla 1.0.1.332 and tbc 8.0 change culture:



Vanilla adopted an identical shift from late to early policy generation as TBC. Both now have an x^2 policy cost modifier, up from the earlier x^1.7. The reason the devs and I both did this is 6 out of 10 policy trees are unlocked by the start of the Medieval era, very early in the game. It makes sense to have more of our policy generation at the time when it can be best used.

Now comparing the red/blue lines from the above graph...

Compared to present vanilla (v332), this is the cumulative cost in present TBC v8.0:



The first few policies are more expensive in TBC 8.0 than vanilla 332. The reason for this is TBC palaces give 2 (up from 1), to reduce the impact of other early culture sources:

• Monument
• Ancient ruins
• Tradition/Liberty/Honor unlocks
• French trait

Later policies are cheaper because the total number of trees required for the Utopia Project is increased to 6, compared to vanilla's 5. I also shifted the time a culture victory can be achieved to approximately the Industrial era (was Modern).

 

You should do another set of these graphs with number of cities.

So:
Graph 1: Cumulative culture required to get 10 policies.
X axis: number of cities (1-15)
Y axis: cumulative culture required
Plot: pre-vanilla patch TBC, 8.x TBC

Graph 2: Cumulative culture required to get 20 policies.
X axis: number of cities (1-15)
Y axis: cumulative culture required
Plot: pre-vanilla patch TBC, 8.x TBC

Graph 3: Cumulative culture required to get 30 policies.
X axis: number of cities (1-15)
Y axis: cumulative culture required
Plot: pre-vanilla patch TBC, 8.x TBC

Go back to the first post here:

This was the case when the policy cost modifier was 0.3 per city. Now it is 0.15 per city. So under the same circumstances, adding more cities unambiguously increases the policy rate, and large empires are now more capable of cultural victory than small empires.

 

What are you basing this conclusion on?

Based on the research below, I'm confident adding cities increases policy costs even under the best of circumstances.

There's an important fact to be aware of. I started this thread and did most of the posting/updates in April and May. In late May I changed cultural citystates to distribute their culture to cities like maritime citystates. They boost border expansion (useful for wide empires) and improve from multipliers (useful for tall empires). The higher per-empire culture income goes, the less powerful adding new cities to the empire becomes.

Let's consider a player going for a cultural victory under the best possible circumstances.

• Stonehenge.
• Beelined Acoustics as first Renaissance tech
• Four cultural citystate allies
• Four landmarks
• Tradition, Liberty, and Piety trees filled
• Monument, Temple, and Opera House in all cities
• All artist slots filled

This is the increase in #turns for each city added under these conditions:



Even under ideal circumstances, each new city slows policy generation.

There's also other factors to consider. This assumes maximum culture buildings in every city for this time period. For a large empire this can be difficult to achieve quickly, especially in new cities. Second, after the initial eight cities or so, we generally cannot continue expanding without going to war. Warfare of any sort is a disadvantage to a fast culture victory since war slows research and gold income, and diverts resources away from items more useful for a culture victory. This limits how large a culture-victory empire can go.

The new-city policy rate hit is even bigger in games that are not ideal, such as before opera houses:



Now don't get me wrong... I'm not saying wide empires are incapable of a cultural victory, either. One purpose of this thread was to show we don't have to limit ourselves to just 4 or 5 cities for a culture victory. Both wide and tall empires are equally viable and balanced for cultural victories in their own ways (as long as it's a peaceful game). What's important is we choose the type of empire we personally enjoy.

 

You yourself argued in the first post in this thread that under a given set of conditions, adding a city had basically no long-run effect on policy rate (beyond the short term). Your statement: "In this situation founding and developing a new city has no effect on policy generation!"

That was when the policy cost modifier per city was 0.3.

Now, the policy cost modifier per city was 0.15. If your previous quoted statement was correct and a new city had no effect on policy generation at 0.3, then clearly dropping the policy modifier per city to 0.15 will lower the cultural costs of adding new cities while not changing the cultural income from new cities, so clearly the policy rate must now increase as cities are added under your representative scenario.

Why?
That isn't the scenario you used before.
Use the same scenario you had.

This doesn't make sense. You argued that both wide and tall empires were equally viable and balanced when the city policy cost modifier was 0.3. Now it is 0.15. This unambiguously moves things in favor of wide rather than tall empires.

 

Hmm, in my last game I built a 4th city and definitely saw my SP turns remaining go DOWN after I built just a monument in it, along with some SP effects like +2 culture for a garrison.

Even disregarding that and assuming those numbers are correct though, can you really call a <1% increase an increase? Surely it will generate enough gold and science to get additional culture sources quicker and outweigh the increase. A culture game will surely be getting policies at much less than 100 turns anyways, so these tiny increases will likely be lost in rounding.

 

To clarify:

These ideal circumstances are just the opposite; your "ideal" circumstances are those with massive amounts of culture from your original cities. If you pack enough culture into your capital from monuments, Stongehenge, etc. then yeah, your culture rate will fall as your number of cities rise.
But take the actual example you had before:
25 non-duplicatable culture.
Monument + Liberty + Representation + Temple in each city. So, 0.1 policy cost modifier, 6 culture per city.

Suppose the next policy costs 500 culture with a single city. Then we have:

Number of cities Policy cost Culture per turn Number of turns per policy
1 500 31 16.12903226
2 550 37 14.86486486
3 600 43 13.95348837
4 650 49 13.26530612
5 700 55 12.72727273
6 750 61 12.29508197
7 800 67 11.94029851
8 850 73 11.64383562
9 900 79 11.39240506
10 950 85 11.17647059
11 1000 91 10.98901099
12 1050 97 10.82474227
13 1100 103 10.67961165
14 1150 109 10.55045872
15 1200 115 10.43478261

As you see, the number of turns per policy is *decreasing*. At 10 cities, the number of turns per policy is only 70% of that of what it is with 1 city.

See the attached Excel sheet to tweak the numbers.

 

And that's before the buffed culture buildings! Of course, there will be a break point as policy costs rise where more cities will lead to more expensive SPs. Seems the steep climb towards the right side of the graph should be made earlier and/or steeper though.