Rebalancing Proposal

[Txurce]

My suggestions in the OP for taking Tradition's happiness down a notch (-33% in capital and wonder happiness limited by pop) were quite moderate compared to where we are now - going Tradition early feels like a waste next to Liberty now.

I'm all in favor of balancing Tradition vs Liberty, as long as it's not in a manner that sets the overall rebalancing effort back. Boosting happiness in Tradition should perhaps go hand in hand with a slight decrease elsewhere. In doing this, I would put the major happiness in Tradition at a place in the tree where it's less likely to be cherry-picked, and more likely to benefit people going all in for the tree.

 

[Seek]

I'm all in favor of balancing Tradition vs Liberty, as long as it's not in a manner that sets the overall rebalancing effort back. Boosting happiness in Tradition should perhaps go hand in hand with a slight decrease elsewhere. In doing this, I would put the major happiness in Tradition at a place in the tree where it's less likely to be cherry-picked, and more likely to benefit people going all in for the tree.

Agree completely.

 

[Zaldron]

@Zaldron - don't forget that it affected National Wonders too, which is a good five or more happiness in the early/mid game.

I tried posting earlier and the forums seem to have thrown it away. I only counted three in early game (NC, NE, HE), and only one more (NT) in midgame. Am I missing some national wonders? Even with that said I'm really excited to try out the latest beta once I finish my current v131 game.

 

[Thalassicus]

1. Heroic Epic
2. National Epic
3. Circus Maximus
4. National Treasury
5. National College
6. Ironworks
7. Oxford University
8. Hermitage

4 classical
3 medieval
1 early renaissance

 

[Seek]

Yeah, the forums have been down a lot these last couple weeks..

I consider the Renaissance as midgame, so I'm counting everything but HE (almost never build it) and OU (I generally save it for a key Modern era tech).

 

[Txurce]

Thal, I can see with v131.12 that you are cranking. Can I confirm that the AI gold-spending adjustment is still to come?

 

[Thalassicus]

I've been experimenting with it, but don't have it refined enough yet for anything definitive. I want it feel 'immersive' so we don't even notice it much. I think the biggest problem with the AI is when it does bizarrely non-human immersion breaking stuff. It will ideally just be in the background, doing its thing, and the problems with AI gold reserves will simply not be there anymore.

 

[Zaldron]

I didn't think I would, but I like the new culture rate and tile costs a lot. It made me cry when the AI was able to pop down its nth-tastic city before my capital (with oracle AND GL) was able to reach fourth ring, but it really makes you think about which tiles to buy and which tiles to attempt to get normally. I found myself buying resources in the second ring all the time because the expansion just wasn't happening. In fact at one point my workers completely ran out of work and it was far too expensive to buy tiles so I ended up idling them for about 20 turns until some new tiles popped.

In other news in a three city tall empire, happiness was really tight (I was constantly going small negatives although I sold all copies of one of my luxes) even with the bug where the piety policy was granting double happy. Then I hit the patronage happy policy and all my happiness problems were solved (with a small amount of help from the tradition finisher).

In short, I'm still not quite sure about the early game initial happiness but I never hit the -10 threshold of doom so I'm willing to work with it so far.

Finally, what's the intention for tall empires regarding happiness? Should they always be at a small amount of positive happy, or should they have 20-50 excess to help push GAs around? If they aren't supposed to have lots of spare happy, the GA length policy in freedom might need rethinking as well.

 

[Thalassicus]

Glad you like the higher gold/culture costs for borders!

Golden ages are mostly passive so they aren't a focus of tall empires (not intentionally at least). The goal for each playstyle is to have about the same amount of happiness. Tall empires are focused on science, specialists, and wonders, which have more direct interaction than GAs.

Changes to Freedom are being discussed in the universal policies thread, and the GA booster will be gone.

 

[Txurce]

I didn't think I would, but I like the new culture rate and tile costs a lot. It made me cry when the AI was able to pop down its nth-tastic city before my capital (with oracle AND GL) was able to reach fourth ring, but it really makes you think about which tiles to buy and which tiles to attempt to get normally. I found myself buying resources in the second ring all the time because the expansion just wasn't happening. In fact at one point my workers completely ran out of work and it was far too expensive to buy tiles so I ended up idling them for about 20 turns until some new tiles popped.

This doesn't sound like fun to me - more like overkill on a relatively minor issue (excessive cultural expansion). Is this with v131.12, or an earlier one?

 

[Thalassicus]

Feedback said fast expansion wasn't fun either, so if testing now shows it's too slow, we can adjust to somewhere in-between.

 

[Zaldron]

This doesn't sound like fun to me - more like overkill on a relatively minor issue (excessive cultural expansion). Is this with v131.12, or an earlier one?

This was 131.12 without the tradition policy. Once I got the tradition "faster bolder expansion" policy I didn't run out of work until all workable tiles were improved.

 

[Txurce]

Feedback said fast expansion wasn't fun either, so if testing now shows it's too slow, we can adjust to somewhere in-between.

Sight unseen, that's where I would imagine it would end up. Fast expansion feels unearned, but expansion as slow as what Zaldron described would feel frustrating.

 

[Zaldron]

Sight unseen, that's where I would imagine it would end up. Fast expansion feels unearned, but expansion as slow as what Zaldron described would feel frustrating.

Believe it or not it actually felt less frustrating than it may have came across as in my post, but I still would be in favor of a small increase in expansion speeds (and "maybe" a corresponding change to the tradition policy to reduce its benefit slightly?). The tension of whether to buy a tile or wait for expansion was something I haven't experienced in a long time, it was probably just a bit too slow.

 

[Thalassicus]

Here's two things I've been considering:

• People say culture is too important per-point compared to other yields like science.
• People say gold needs more importance.

It seems these issues would improve if border expansion relies on a combination of gold and culture, perhaps 30/60 instead of 5% from gold / 95% from culture? We'd need more gold, and culture has less of an impact.

 

[Seek]

Were you playing on standard speed, Zaldron?

 

[Txurce]

Keep in mind that border expansion is largely an early-game issue, since gold is more available for the occasional tile in a mid-game city. Making it gold-related (which based on Zaldron's post is effectively what you have now) would make gold more important, but at a time when you have relatively little ability to generate more. And of course generating more is what we seem to be trying to avoid.

That aside, border expansion being cultural makes a certain historical sense, and is consistent with Civ since the days of Civ 2.

Couldn't the cultural expansion rate be adjusted independently of the raising or lowering of culture-point acquisition?

 

[Zaldron]

Were you playing on standard speed, Zaldron?

Oh yeah my settings were standard size and speed, emperor, default AIs and CSes.

 

[Thalassicus]

Keep in mind that border expansion is largely an early-game issue [...]. Making it gold-related [...] would make gold more important, but at a time when you have relatively little ability to generate more.

This is why I made early tile purchases cost less.

That aside, border expansion being cultural makes a certain historical sense, and is consistent with Civ since the days of Civ 2.

Ahh, but consider! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase

It depends on what we consider "culture" to be... there's certainly a history of people buying and selling land around the world. I'm not too concerned about precedent since Firaxis was the one to introduce land purchasing into the game. I'm just modifying the ratio of importance between gold vs culture.

Couldn't the cultural expansion rate be adjusted independently of the raising or lowering of culture-point acquisition?

We have full and independent control over each of these:

• Culture income
• Policy costs
• Cultural border expansion
• Gold tile purchase

 

[Txurce]

If the adjustment you made to the culture/gold ratio for tile acquisition is effectively making them cheap enough to buy even early in the game, then I get it, and like the proactive choice involved. (Even if it requires more future balancing.)

Two questions come up:

1. How does the AI not suffer from this?

2. How much room is left for America to have a meaningful gold advantage here?