Poll: Is health worth the effort

[proftc]

long term negative is fine... its the Infinite negative that is not.

There needs to be some penalty for -900 that is greater than the penalty at -21

I could see that... I can only assume that in their testing, they never really managed to get too far past -20. City spamming seems like something that's gonna go quite a bit slower in Beyond Earth, even if you play as KP.

 

[Haggbart]

What I'm worried about is the lack of "right" and "wrong" in the game. In Civ 4 you had happiness and health to limit tall cities, and maintanance cost for each new city to limit going too wide. By trying to combine them into one entity you got balancing issues with wide/tall, but softing the penalty takes away the urgency in caring about it at all. Also the civics in Civ 4 promoted hard tactical choices and different play style - do I sacrifice this bonus for this bonus? The social policies and virtues are about accumulating, it's not "good" or "bad", it's "good" or "better". The happiness penality was about the only really "good" or "bad" left in Civ5. Now it's something you can chose not to care about. And that is not a good thing.

 

[thedrizzle02]

I think that it could be a great system but the penalties need to be tweaked a bit more. It seems like they wanted to give you the option to either go wide or tall which is a welcome change.

For me the -1 to -9 penalties seem pretty good, maybe make them slightly higher 15% penalty but nothing completely crippling and something that you could spend most of the game in if you wanted(especially if you go wide/warmongering)

the -10 to -19 seems specifically too easy to deal with, I would like it if the science and culture penalties also jumped up to say 25% and a small growth penalty was added along with production 10%/10% along with the intrigue change(which looks like it will be great for multiplayer but less useful against the computers because they do not seem to take advantage, at least in the limited examples we have)

as for the -21 and lower, the penalty should be something pretty severe and something that scales with lower and lower health. I would say -40% for science, culture, production, -50% growth maybe higher, slower outpost growth and then maybe a scaling maintenance increase..... so as you went lower in health the cost of buildings, tiles, units increased dramatically so if you kept dropping you would have a massive energy deficit.

Obviously all of the numbers/specifics would have to be tweaked/balanced but it would allow you to dip into negative health and stay there if going wide as long as you did not spend too much time really negative.... Furthermore, anything over -9 would cut down on science/culture/production/growth making the extra cities less productive hopefully preventing runaway ICS problems since all those extra cities would create very little overall gain for your empire.

Just my 2 cents

 

[TLHeart]

I like the fact that there seems to be no right or wrong way to play, one can choose to go tall, maintain health, and maybe win.

one can choose to go wide, disregard health, war, any maybe win.

Madjinn has stated he is NOT playing optimally, and he is not playing to win on the press build. He is showing the early features of the game, and some of the options.

I hate the wall of civ V BNW when you go negative on happiness...

 

[MasterDinadan]

I always thought the best thing to do would be to have really negative happiness have impacts on the total food yield, instead of just the growth, meaning that your population actually starts shrinking because of the food penalty instead of just slowing to a halt.

I think with the rebranding of "health", this would make even more sense. Unhealthy people die, leading to smaller towns. Outposts should stop growing as well.

I like the trade off they go with of saying "you can found a city to grow more infrastructure, but the negative health will cost you in these other ways" but I don't think it's unreasonable to say, at some point, "sorry, you just can't grow any more until you build more health improvements".

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I always thought the best thing to do would be to have really negative happiness have impacts on the total food yield, instead of just the growth, meaning that your population actually starts shrinking because of the food penalty instead of just slowing to a halt.

I think with the rebranding of "health", this would make even more sense. Unhealthy people die, leading to smaller towns. Outposts should stop growing as well.

I like the trade off they go with of saying "you can found a city to grow more infrastructure, but the negative health will cost you in these other ways" but I don't think it's unreasonable to say, at some point, "sorry, you just can't grow any more until you build more health improvements".

I don't so much like the wall.
But there should be an effect that increases per unhealthy point without limit.

 

[Inhalaattori]

Well Maddjin should have tried harder to keep himself healthy, because he got that first Knowledge virtue that gives +10% science when healthy. So he was losing lot of science and culture because of unhealthiness. In general it seems that keeping yourself healthy in mid-game is really hard.

 

[Haggbart]

I like the fact that there seems to be no right or wrong way to play, one can choose to go tall, maintain health, and maybe win.

one can choose to go wide, disregard health, war, any maybe win.

Madjinn has stated he is NOT playing optimally, and he is not playing to win on the press build. He is showing the early features of the game, and some of the options.

I hate the wall of civ V BNW when you go negative on happiness...

Well, what happens when there is no right or wrong and the game never punish you, is the game gets too easy. CiV is allready too easy, and not punishing you for making bad decisions is not going to fix that.

 

[Lancor]

There should be a stacking bonus for having more than 10 health and a stacking malus for having less than -10. Maybe incorporate virtues.

Well, what happens when there is no right or wrong and the game never punish you, is the game gets too easy. CiV is allready too easy, and not punishing you for making bad decisions is not going to fix that.

Yes, since Civ5 there are really not enough penalties involved. It's always only choosing a bonus, no negative consequences... And it seems we are at the point were even making bad decisions and failing the game doesn't give you penalties, it only gives you a smaller bonus. -.-

 

[Aeson]

The question is what are "bad" and "good" decisions though ...

I find it much better if the answer to that is situational rather than engrained in mechanics that force you to play the same way every time. Good expansion in Civ I - III was almost always REX and ICS. Good expansion in V was to not do much expansion at all. BE looks somewhere inbetween, where "good" expansion might at times be different than "good" health, and vice versa.

Though no further penalties past -20 does look like a problem. Better granularity of benefits/detriments of Health would be better as well.

 

[TLHeart]

Well, what happens when there is no right or wrong and the game never punish you, is the game gets too easy. CiV is allready too easy, and not punishing you for making bad decisions is not going to fix that.

oh but the game does punish you... but it should NOT be like civ 5 where tradition, rat, win, with 4 cities....

There Needs to be actual choices, do I want to play tall or play wide, depending on neighbors, and land. Not just 4 cities and call it good.

Watch the FI play through, where bad decisions leads to very low science, and slow growth...

 

[aguliondew]

Well the negative health can be an issue specially if you plan on going down the knowledge tree. A lot of the early health builds tend to give science. Say you have 150science per turn and -5 health. If you add 5 health builds to your cities you gain 20% more science(~32 science plus the science from the health builds) from having positive health and the first knowledge virtue. The -10% production looks like that can be offset by one internal trade route per every 3 cities. Looks like tall civ will have positive health during early game. Late game the virtues will enable wide civs to stay positive.

 

[Lancor]

The question is what are "bad" and "good" decisions though ...

I think we should agree that for immersion reasons it would be bad to almost always have to have negative health to be efficient. It makes little sense that only the dirty, people absusing societies have the edge. Of course that can be a valid strategy, but usually not in the long run.
Immersion-wise spawning rebels would make sense, but they could be portrayed through gradually stacking penalties, maybe capped somewhere for balance reasons. The AI needs to handle it too, though.

 

[Aeson]

I think we should agree that for immersion reasons it would be bad to almost always have to have negative health to be efficient. It makes little sense that only the dirty, people absusing societies have the edge. Of course that can be a valid strategy, but usually not in the long run.

I was saying it would be bad for the game for either to always be most efficient. The game should be about assessing situations and having to make non-obvious choices about how best to proceed.

As for immersion, I'll take a fun game over a realistic one anyday. In any case, Health is an abstracted concept that isn't going to make much sense if you think about it too much. It actually attempts to counter reality to try to hamper it from wrecking gameplay.

The negative health for each city for instance is just a game mechanic to try to slow down snowballs. You could have 10 citizens packed into one city without a Clinic and have higher health than having 10 citizens one in each colony with it's own Clinic. It makes no sense, but it's good for gameplay.

Best to not think too hard about the realism of the game.

 

[m15a]

I think we should agree that for immersion reasons it would be bad to almost always have to have negative health to be efficient. It makes little sense that only the dirty, people absusing societies have the edge. Of course that can be a valid strategy, but usually not in the long run.
Immersion-wise spawning rebels would make sense, but they could be portrayed through gradually stacking penalties, maybe capped somewhere for balance reasons. The AI needs to handle it too, though.

I agree with what Aeson is saying here, but even considering realism, I don't think we can agree that unhealthiness is inefficient in every way. Plenty of societies abuse* groups to the extent that their health is at risk to increase productivity of some sort. I don't think such conditions can be shown to always spawn something equivalent to rebels either. As to how long such a system can be maintained, I think that's a complicated question that would need a lot of historical study and probably couldn't be proven anyway. The game has some tradeoffs in efficiency between healthiness and unhealthiness, which I think is reasonable. (Whether it's balanced is a difference question.)

* Even calling it abuse is subjective I guess . . only pointing that out because I'm thinking of certain sci-fi books with alien races that have a much lower regard for individual health.

 

[JokerJace]

I agree with what Aeson is saying here, but even considering realism, I don't think we can agree that unhealthiness is inefficient in every way. Plenty of societies abuse* groups to the extent that their health is at risk to increase productivity of some sort. I don't think such conditions can be shown to always spawn something equivalent to rebels either. As to how long such a system can be maintained, I think that's a complicated question that would need a lot of historical study and probably couldn't be proven anyway. The game has some tradeoffs in efficiency between healthiness and unhealthiness, which I think is reasonable. (Whether it's balanced is a difference question.)

* Even calling it abuse is subjective I guess . . only pointing that out because I'm thinking of certain sci-fi books with alien races that have a much lower regard for individual health.

That made a lot of sense. I was fixated on the idea that perma low health shouldn't be a valid approach, because it was not intended and Firaxis only failed to balance it correctly. But maybe it was actually intended to make it a valid approach. In that case we will still need more treshholds, though. Right now the low health approach seems significantly stronger.

 

[Gamewizard]

I really think a small combat penalty for unhealthiness would balance it quite nicely.

 

[Miravlix]

Maddjinn seemed to do fine with health under the -20 level for much/most of his game.

The Press Build is broken and in the hands of MD it got butchered badly, because he is a bit too good at playing.

It's apparently so broken that Firaxis decided to recall access to it.

 

[joncnunn]

The Press Build is broken and in the hands of MD it got butchered badly, because he is a bit too good at playing.

It's apparently so broken that Firaxis decided to recall access to it.

Better now that after release.

But seriously, Firaxis should seriously consider hiring MD as a Beta Tester for Civ VI whenever that is.

 

[Acken]

Firaxis already uses some playtesters (on top of QA), Maddjinn did play the game before this preview. However I have a feeling there aren't many of them.