Poll: How is the strength of each Great Person (INSTANT Ability)?

How do you feel about the strength of each GP?


  • Total voters
    30
  • Poll closed .

Stalker0

Baller Magnus
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Just doing a generic checkup on how people see the various great people. Is the GP fine or does it needs some number adjustment? For this poll, we are looking at the instant ability of the GP,

Scientist - Instant Science
Merchant - Instant Money + WLTKD
Engineer - Instant Wonder Build
Diplomat - Gain influence with CS, lower it for others
Writer - Instant Culture
Aritst - Instant GAP
Musician - Tourism bomb
General - Combat Aura
Admiral - Combat Aura
Prophet - Found Religion / Enhance Religion / Spread Religion

Adjustment means a simple number change, if you think conceptually the GP needs adjustment that will go in teh comments.
 
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In my opinion the Great General is easily the most overpowered, whilst the Great Merchant is the weakest & underpowered.

As mentioned in other thread, the GG is overpowered due to its use of using citadels, not as a General in battle supporting his troops.
 
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My short list.

Engineer - This one is probably the strongest "reverse scale" of all the GPs. Early on, an instant bulb is amazing, but it quickly scales out of usefulness. I find my first few engineers bulb, and then I just go manufactories. While I often see GMs get more press about weakness, I actually think GMs are more useful than GEs late in the game.

Musician - G's already trying out an alternate mechanic for them. Its the common tourism problem, if your going CV, its the best thing you got. If your not, its +1 happy in your capital (the place you need it least), it really doesn't move the needle at all. I wish the happiness would go in the city with the lowest happy number or something to at least make it more useful.
 
Okay I've been sitting on this for a while but for Great Merchants I think they should have some ability which relates to Corporations.
My suggestion is the ability to construct a super-franchise in another city. Which basically counts as 2 franchises in that city and increases your franchise max by 2.

I feel like towns scale very badly and the WLTKD bonus is rather weak as well but I guess you could keep it for civs who don't get a corporation.
 
Okay I've been sitting on this for a while but for Great Merchants I think they should have some ability which relates to Corporations.
My suggestion is the ability to construct a super-franchise in another city. Which basically counts as 2 franchises in that city and increases your franchise max by 2.

I feel like towns scale very badly and the WLTKD bonus is rather weak as well but I guess you could keep it for civs who don't get a corporation.

If you want to just keep it simple, you could say every town is a free franchise. I think that's a nice solid boost.
 
Engineer - This one is probably the strongest "reverse scale" of all the GPs. Early on, an instant bulb is amazing, but it quickly scales out of usefulness. I find my first few engineers bulb, and then I just go manufactories. While I often see GMs get more press about weakness, I actually think GMs are more useful than GEs late in the game.
I think the design is to encourage you to use early GEs on manufactories if you want them to be relevant in the late game.

I don't think they are worse than merchants, saving up two for a wonder is still a really big deal.
 
Okay I've been sitting on this for a while but for Great Merchants I think they should have some ability which relates to Corporations.
My suggestion is the ability to construct a super-franchise in another city. Which basically counts as 2 franchises in that city and increases your franchise max by 2.

I feel like towns scale very badly and the WLTKD bonus is rather weak as well but I guess you could keep it for civs who don't get a corporation.

WI using the GM ability gives something like a Corporate Franchise in the CS?


The scaling on Great Artists GAP gets a little ridiculous. I've had times where it gives about 50,000 GAP when my next GA costs only 20,000.
 
WI using the GM ability gives something like a Corporate Franchise in the CS?


The scaling on Great Artists GAP gets a little ridiculous. I've had times where it gives about 50,000 GAP when my next GA costs only 20,000.

It can become even more crazy on large map later in the game. I had GA give around 400k GAP in my last game (Huge, Epic, Frontier map).
 
For the adjustment ones:

Merchant - Mass WTLKD isn't difficult to maintain, and this mass reset doesn't guarantee helping you, plus it is covered by circuses pretty well. Gold received is already irrelevant early on and it only gets worse.

Engineer - Scaling is too flat. It's very strong early on, especially when wonders are a huge cost compared to overall production output, later on they barely make up a few turns of production.

Artist - Scaling is too steep. It gives 10% of a GA early on and then 200% of a (10x more expensive) GA cost later.

Musician - As we saw in Stalker0's data, they are the win condition if you're going CV, because they are the only way to dump a massive amount of tourism on culture runaway civs. At the same time, their effect is useless outside of CV.
 
Okay I've been sitting on this for a while but for Great Merchants I think they should have some ability which relates to Corporations.
My suggestion is the ability to construct a super-franchise in another city. Which basically counts as 2 franchises in that city and increases your franchise max by 2.

I feel like towns scale very badly and the WLTKD bonus is rather weak as well but I guess you could keep it for civs who don't get a corporation.

Perhaps you should actually pop a great merchant to be able to found a corporation, sort of like how you spend a prophet to found a religion. So an extra "button" when you have the appropriate tech and monopoly. But it might not be technically possible to do it, or if one can tie it into as you found the town or if you can do the action in your own cities that is now the company HQ city.

Still the towns might be somewhat weak but they are ok and can create a usable workable tile out of nothing. The biggest benefit tho is the WLTKD that can reset the bonus resource you might not be able to get and there are just a handful of buildings that can reset it (circus etc) or triggering golden ages. So they do have their usage.

If one is more general about it tho a lot of them start out great but then turn out weaker as the game progresses but others are weak to start and grow better with age. Some are very specific to various games -- if you just do war then diplos are kinda bad, if you don't do culture then who cares about musicians etc.

Every one that builds a tile is in someway good (better in some places, playstyle, for certain civs then others).

Scientists are quite good, but in then eventually become pointless since the science comes from other sources.

Merchants have already been mentioned.

Engineers are great at the start but if you keep using them for instant wonder builds they eventually become bad cause they won't do a wonder anymore since they need to scale with their tile improvement to build the later wonders. So it's a path you have to pick and chose from.

Diplo/Prophet/Merchant all sort of fall in the same category. Great for some things, pointless for others. Such as if there are no more embassies available and you don't care about the statecraft game then they are almost pointless and certainly so vs the AI where one of them can't even instant flip a city-state since the AI have somehow built up enormous amounts of points due to them spamming out envoys etc.

You need a couple of prophets if you do religion stuff, if you don't then you need none. Merchant mentioned above.

Writers are great at the start when a small culture improvement makes a lot of difference but eventually their usefulness diminish as getting another single digit token for a city does nothing. So eventually you just try and use them to cut some turns for the next policy. Artists and Musicians are somewhat similar in that regard but with special actions.

General, probably the best or most important of the GP. Since it can change the world -- or the border of the land. I can't think of any game or victory condition where it is not important or great to have. The Aura, the citadel and naturally boosted even more if you get lebensraum that double the range in all directions of the bomb.

Admirals are similar aura vise if you use a fleet. Otherwise they are just "here have two copies of some random luxury and 2 points of unit cap". The cap should be increased, 2 might be a lot early but late game 2 is a pitiful amount.

Prophets have already been mentioned.

So in my mind they all have their usages, but the General is the supreme GP-unit way more important then the rest of them.
 
Could prophets be given some way to gain extra spread religion actions? Four spread religion actions is usually just a bit too little for me to want to use a prophet to spread religion instead of planting a holy site.

Idea for a change: "After you have enhanced your religion, every two holy sites you control grant your Great Prophets +1 spread religion action."

For what it's worth, I do think that prophets are reasonably well balanced, but a minor tweak here could keep the religious competition game relevant longer.
 
The spreading action on prophets is quite strong when you use Apostolic, you can get a gigantic four bombs of culture and food if you hit big AI cities with one. Kinda like a Great Writer but usually even better.

Also there are other corner cases you want to use them, like if you really need something you don't own converted (for example to reform) but it's swimming in pressure and would take infinity missionaries to do. Prophets are especially useful to send into an enemy civ after a peace treaty since they don't decay inside (and the treaty stops them being killed)
 
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Please don't increase prophet spreads. The AI prophets are already annoying enough, burning 4 inquisitors each (they do know to follow up with missionaries).
 
Prophets don't get decay, only missionaries.

There might be only 4 spreads, but the important part is that they remove all of the accumulated enemy religious pressure and guarantee conversion, which is much, much more powerful than what missionaries are capable of. I don't think they need to scale, because their ability scales by itself - in late game, there is a lot of accumulated pressure, so dropping a prophet is harder to recover from, even with inquisitors you end up with a functionally reset city.
 
If people think Great Prophets are weak at spreading (I mostly agree), I think just bumping it to 5 charges would do the trick.

The spreading action on prophets is quite strong when you use Apostolic, you can get a gigantic four bombs of culture and food if you hit big AI cities with one. Kinda like a Great Writer but usually even better.
How much more does a great prophet earn compared to a missionary (asking because I've never tried it).
 
To clarify my point, I think 4 base charges is fine in Classical/Medieval. But then in the Renaissance, many religions have reformed/enhanced, the total number of cities is up, and religious pressure is high. At this point, missionaries are largely useless and Prophets have become quite expensive. Now, if I still have faith buildings to buy or need inquisitors to ward off enemy pressure, all is good. But if I've already enhanced and spread my religion to my closest neighbors, I'm forced to either waste faith on ineffective missionaries or build a very expensive holy site which - because it was built later - has fewer turns to recuperate its heavy faith investment. If I've managed to found, spread, enhance, and plant a few holy sites, shouldn't I be rewarded with more effective prophets whose abilities match their large faith cost?

I don't think my suggestion, "+1 charge per 2 holy sites after enhancing" would unbalance the game, because I'm really only talking about the 5th prophet and later: 1 to found, 1 to enhance, 2 to build holy sites. But points taken about Borobudur/Apostolic Tradition/implicit scaling. I may be in the minority here, and if so, well, the populi hav vox'd.
 
How much more does a great prophet earn compared to a missionary (asking because I've never tried it).

I didn't write it down exactly but I'm pretty sure I've gotten something like 400/400 for a spread before, compared to the 25/25 (zero conversions) and 50/50 (one conversion) spreads you get from missionaries in pressured-out lands. I know that the usual low bar is about 175/175 which is the same as the very biggest possible missionary spread, which happens if you hit a city that's not quite big enough, like size 10. I should take better data on it next time.
 
So I don’t see the GPs role to really “spread” the religion, it’s just there to drop the draw bridge. He crashes all of the enemies religious pressure, and now the city is viable for missionaries to truely spread.
 
I don't think my suggestion, "+1 charge per 2 holy sites after enhancing" would unbalance the game, because I'm really only talking about the 5th prophet and later: 1 to found, 1 to enhance, 2 to build holy sites. But points taken about Borobudur/Apostolic Tradition/implicit scaling. I may be in the minority here, and if so, well, the populi hav vox'd.
I think a better improvement would be to choose a Renaissance era tech and have that give prophets +1 spread action. 1 extra spread after planting exactly two holy sites is a very specific condition.

I didn't write it down exactly but I'm pretty sure I've gotten something like 400/400 for a spread before, compared to the 25/25 (zero conversions) and 50/50 (one conversion) spreads you get from missionaries in pressured-out lands. I know that the usual low bar is about 175/175 which is the same as the very biggest possible missionary spread, which happens if you hit a city that's not quite big enough, like size 10. I should take better data on it next time.
I think it follows the same rules as missionaries, but it appears to count any citizen who changes religion, including from a foreign religion to none.

So you are right, it can be come much more efficient than missionaries once a lot of pressure builds up. However, Great Writers still get potentially much much higher.
 
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