(Rising Tide) Fixing Academy spam

[Red Menace]

I think the perfect way is to nerf the yield; increase maintenance, and make it so they cant be built adjacent to another Academy, seems right to me makes It impossible to really spam them the same way they do now.

2 4 in maintenance and cant be built adjacent.

if you think this is to extreme or you have a better way of making academies balanced (I predict someone will say just remove them) please say so, I hope the devs use something in this thread if they haven't already balanced them, which I doubt they have but really hope they did.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

I tried playing without them and array spam worked pretty much the same. Although I wasn't playing to win, I was seeing how fast I could get every tech so going to the tech that adds more science to arrays wasn't a detour.
And I do think they should probably just be removed, and I made a mod for non adjacency. In civ 5 it was hard to get academies in large numbers because of great scientists being required. I think making them more expensive might just increase the ratio of academies to generators.

 

[Red Menace]

I think your right they should probably just be removed, no real point in spending so much maintenance on something that's not very helpful, but still academies cant remain the same it throws the game all out of balance.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Here is the thing: I have played mods that didn't have Academies or Arrays - it still doesn't really fix the problem. Granted, it slows down the game, but except for that it will only shift the dominant strategy to the next best science engine, which would be Arrays, then specialists, then food spam.

To be honest, even if Academies were nerfed like you suggested, they'd still be a decent alternative to scientists as long as you have energy to support them. You'd just get 4-6 per city instead of 8-10.

 

[Natura]

How about if terrain improvements like this were limited to certain terrain?

Academies, designed to explore the strange new plant life and mineral deposits on this new world, can only be built on basic resources. Not only does this limit them, but technologies along the lines of "improves plantations" wouldn't help such a tile if you built an Academy instead.

Arrays, designed for space observation and connectivity to a growing number of artificial satellites, can only be built on hills.

This would make city placement more important whilst also limiting the number of these that can be built. Co-incidentally it buffs Weather Controllers and Orbital Fabricators since those new basic resources can be Academies if you want.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

In that case you will just shift the weight from food heavy locations to ressource heavy locations. You'll still have 2-5 academies per city and use specialists for the rest. Arrays become useless, because hills are horrible tiles for them.

 

[Halbbruder]

My recommendation to limit spamming of certain tile yields (and maybe satellites) is to set a limit on them per number of cities and population.

For academies and other special tile improvements, while constructing them within 3 tiles of your city, you cannot build more than 1 per city and the limit is around by 1 for every 4 citizens in a city. So a city of 16 can have 4 academies while a city of 5 can only have 1. The knowledge tree should contain a virtue that increases the base limit by 2 per city. This will encourage tall empires while knowledge encourages a bit more width to academy spamming.

For solar collectors:
- decrease duration, increase resource cost (3 titanium, 3 oil, 1 silica*) and production cost is tripled.
OR
- there's a max limit for satellites in general (base is 3 per city) and buildings like launch complex increase the limit and maybe SF sponsor has increased limit on satellites.


*Yes, I am also suggesting that silica should be a strategic resource.

 

[Gorbles]

You can't fix something like this with a small change to yields. You're always going to make it completely useless, or still-mandatory.

Science is King. Always has been, always will be. It makes it impossible to perfectly-balance Science in games such as this. As someone else has already said, you could nerf Science production into the ground; people would just focus growth instead.

 

[Ryika]

As someone else has already said, you could nerf Science production into the ground; people would just focus growth instead.

...which is fine in my opinion, because growth means that actual Empire management is needed. Of course there will always be a dominant strategy, but it doesn't need to be as dominant as academies are and if the dominant strategy is one that doesn't require a well-rounded empire, then that makes "efficient" gameplay really silly - and also much easier than it should be.

In a sense Beyond Earth Singleplayer is a lot like Civ 5 Singleplayer - you stay small but instead of reacquiring you to go tall, you just get academies and win.

 

[Gorbles]

I haven't really needed empire management in Civilisation since the first one; it doesn't really have that kinda scale by comparison. Taxation, combined with the interface, made builds far more scarce in the first Civ. Even building your first Granary could tip you over the edge into a negative economic situation.

If we nerf all forms of Science production into the ground, you invalidate that as a strategic choice. As they already exist in the game, people would complain that this is the dreaded "removal of choice" (and thus, "depth").

The better and more elegant solution would be to incentivise the other existing strategies, including growth. Don't nerf downwards, people have already complaining about this with regards to Beyond Earth. Buff upwards.

 

[Ryika]

I haven't really needed empire management in Civilisation since the first one; it doesn't really have that kinda scale by comparison. Taxation, combined with the interface, made builds far more scarce in the first Civ. Even building your first Granary could tip you over the edge into a negative economic situation.

That's a nice story, but not an argument for anything. There is a balance to be found, and I think Academies push it too far. Civ V was too simplistic for me personally, but people in general seemed to like the state of the game.

If we nerf all forms of Science production into the ground, you invalidate that as a strategic choice. As they already exist in the game, people would complain that this is the dreaded "removal of choice" (and thus, "depth").

That's only half the story. If you nerf science production "into the ground", you do at the same time create new strategical choices - if you nerf something that's towering everything else, then ideally you'll have even more choices than before, because now everything else that's on the "next tier" has suddenly become viable.

Or if you think that people could have used them even with strong academies, well, then people can still use the weak academies.

However, either way I'm not advocating a direct yield nerf. I'm fine with anything that removes the "spam as many science improvements as you can"-system. Limiting them by other means would be just fine with me.

The better and more elegant solution would be to incentivise the other existing strategies, including growth. Don't nerf downwards, people have already complaining about this with regards to Beyond Earth. Buff upwards.

Not in a game that already has a midgame that for the most part doesn't exist. For balance between strategies it literally doesn't matter if you nerf one thing or get everything else on the same level, it doesn't take away "fun" or "choices". In terms of balance between mechanics it DOES matter. Strategies that skip the second ring of techs completely and start getting Affinity Techs instead are just silly. The goal should be to bring all strategies on a level where they have to somewhat naturally progress through the tech web. Which means nerfing academies in some way. Or you get everything else on the level of academies and then increase tech scaling, but that would have the same result, just with higher numbers.

 

[omniclast]

The devs aren't going to do anything about academy spam because they don't care about how serious players are playing the game. Their focus is on people who are sand-boxing at standard difficulty or lower; that's pretty clear from their belief that the virtues "work pretty well". From their perspective optimal strategies like academy spam and tech beelining might as well not exist because they don't use those strategies when they play and their target player doesn't either. (And they don't actually play test.)

For those of us who care about that sort of thing, it's pretty much up to us to balance stuff like academies with mods.

 

[Gorbles]

And higher numbers are better, Ryika. For player satisfaction if nothing else.

My "story" was relevant to you stating how empire management would then be "needed", like needing it is apparently a good thing. Given how unnecessary empire management has been through the series, I don't see the urgent need to incentivise it now.

S'alright, I know how you handling differing opinions. I'll bow out here

 

[GenEngineer]

@ Ryika - at the very least, the rebalancing of where the affinity is located means that it's different from how that occurs in vanilla BE (not predicting if better or worse, just different), and that was going to be back patched to vanilla. Gorb does have a point about science being king, because it's always king - looking at the (disputed) 'Best' civs in 5 shows Babylon (science bonus), Korea (science bonus), the Mayans (early science bonus on unique building), and Poland (Social Policies, but still). IF there is a way to research faster, then that is the best option, 9 times out of 10.

Maybe there just needs to be a limit to how many academies can be worked by a city? Say, 1 per every 5 population?

 

[Minor Annoyance]

It think fixing academies is an opportunity to fix knowledge virtues. Have academies be the direct, brute force way of generating science. Then have knowledge give you more ways to generate it.
It would have to be changed extensively, with an eye towards enhancing everything but academies, and I don't think that's going to happen. I usually don't like posts that talk about the designers because it gets personal, and I don't like seeing someone insulted because the don't take orders from anonymous internet commenters. But I don't think they design with an end goal in mind. Like, if you fill out this virtue tree, this is what your empire will look like. Here's what it can do that others can't.
Some of that may be pushback they get. Like when there is talk of affinities favoring wide or tall someone often says but if I role play X I dont want to have to play Y. I'd say it's like playing D&D as an orc wizard. You can role play an orc wizard but they have two systems that make the game interesting, races and classes and an orc wizard just won't be optimized.
That was a tangent, but my point being they seem to not want to go too strong on one direction with any option lest it become mandatory, although that has happened in some places anyway.
Having Knowledge move away from academies does seem counterintuitive, why would a civilization value knowledge and not have numerous learning institutions? It would be like industry not having factories. I still say make knowledge have the least need for academies because I'm sick of them because I always need them and not sick of knowledge because I never need it.

 

[LORD ORION]

Clear the tiles when you build Academies and Biowells on them. (the 2 large imba offenders)

Build an Academy on a flood plain?
Congratz, it is now a blank desert tile with no base yield.

In this example:
For 2 Energy maintenance you get
+2 Science
+1 Energy (River)
With the possibility of
+1 Science for Learning Centers
+1 Culture for Protogenetics
+1 Food (Vivarium) *it is a desert tile*

The whole point is to make you pay an opportunity cost for spamming science and health tiles, rather than making it a total no brainer if you are doing a "play to win" game.

 

[GenEngineer]

@ LORD ORION - That's an interesting idea, actually. They already have that to some extent with Terrascapes editing the yield regardless of the base tile. Not sure how it would work in practice (I avoid building Academies if I can, more interesting seeing how the other late game improvements work), but it's definitely worth considering as a simple fix.

 

[Gorbles]

That is a neat way of approaching it, I like that.

 

[Red Menace]

Clear the tiles when you build Academies and Biowells on them. (the 2 large imba offenders)

Build an Academy on a flood plain?
Congratz, it is now a blank desert tile with no base yield.

In this example:
For 2 Energy maintenance you get
+2 Science
+1 Energy (River)
With the possibility of
+1 Science for Learning Centers
+1 Culture for Protogenetics
+1 Food (Vivarium) *it is a desert tile*

The whole point is to make you pay an opportunity cost for spamming science and health tiles, rather than making it a total no brainer if you are doing a "play to win" game.

I like the idea, removing the base yield suddenly means grassland tiles are no different for spamming academies, the only terrain that would be different would be: tundra (mass digester) and desert (vivarium) in those cases it might make a small difference.

Biowells are imbalanced? I thought the major complaint about virtues was it didn't have enough health in trees like Might and Knowledge? I don't have health problems in the other two and farms can easily match the food yield with added energy instead of maintenance. oh yes tundra cities are the only places where I build more than 3 biowells.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Eh, if you nerf academies like that people will just spam specialists instead. I'd rather make Academies a Knowledge-only improvement (unlocked via virtue where the current +1 science one is). Then you *might* actually have a choise between Industry or Knowledge as your primary tree.

As for Biowells, I never build them to get the health - I build them because they offer 2F without any extra techs and they can be build on forests (which saves *a lot* of worker turns). I like that a forested hill Biowell is actually a decent tile.