Specialists... What are We Doing Here, Guys?

[ma_kuh]

My reservation with putting the value of specialists too far into the %mod direction is that they become less good at smoothing out a start-up city, and I'd have concerns that they lose too much value in the early game. For instance, I'd look for a way that the first Engineer offers the same amount of yields as it currently does, but the second and onward would be picked mainly for the %mod. Quick brainstorm for this: "[+Yields (maybe era scaling?)] while working at least 1 [Specialist]", maybe on the first building of a specialist-type.

On a more general note, I would prefer to consider Specialists versus Resource tiles, not generic tiles. No-resource mines shouldn't be competing with Engineers in my opinion; you already bought into the specialist slot, why should you need to make a decision over whether that's better than some un-supported improvement? If this means that improvements without resources get weaker to accommodate improved resources getting stronger, I think that's a good direction. I can see an argument that Features (Hills/Forests/Jungles) are sort of like their own mini-resources, but I think that's already supported by Mines/Lumber Mills > Farms.

This also gets to one part of the puzzle: should citizens be slot-efficient early (improve your resources and fill your specialists first), and "over"-growth just squeezes a little more out of the surrounding terrain, OR should citizens be a more consistent value per slot, then scales multiplicatively once you can feed specialists? I'm in favor of the former, but building consensus around either of these approaches will at least get us on the same page.

 

[Stalker0]

So it might be worth taking a look at Vanilla to remember how specialists used to operate.

One note is that specialists came later in the game in vanilla. The very first specialist is the merchant on a market, but the market is in currency in vanilla. The first engineer is on the forge which is on metal casting. The library doesn't have a scientist, you don't get those until university (but you do get 2). I believe (not 100% sure) there were overall fewer specialist slots in total.

I also don't believe the GPTIs actually enhanced future bulbs, so that is also new.

The old GM GPTI was just gold, and its bulb was a lot of gold AND influence with a CS (effectively it was part GD), so that was part of its appeal. Also gold was more "special" at that point because it was the only way to boost influence with CS. So effectively merchants and GMs was the path to CS play.

 

[ma_kuh]

I wonder, maybe swinging back towards vanilla a little with Merchants has potential:

1. Great Merchant gets some influence added back to its bulb, and produces a little less gold. You effectively "buy" a CS's yields for awhile.
2. Great Diplomat bulb reduces its influence a little and adds some yields to the mix ( and are present on the civil servant specialist) to make it a little more enticing (compared to embassies, which take up a lot of oxygen regarding GDs).

Regarding the OP, what if these solutions weren't applied as a blanket solution to specialists, but were tied into the opening policy trees? I know there's a risk that policies are getting overloaded, but there's a certain natural path to letting Tradition give specialists %scaling (which is better for tall play), and Progress give specialists shared GPP (which is better for wide play). And Authority is compensated by getting GPP and yields on kills, border expansion, and city capture and settling; it's like your army acts as your specialist "scaling".

 

[DeAnno]

Thinking about the percentage boost idea, it's a little weird because especially early in the game most of your science and culture comes from specialists themselves, and ability to boost either in a particular city by other means tends to be limited. Sure, your capital will have tons of bonus science, but all your cities will have monuments. Sure, one city you might push a library faster in for more science, but some other cities will still have barracks. And as time goes on the cheap more primitive buildings of all types tend to get built everywhere, dampening the ability to specialize in a practical way further. Even later in the game outside of a (Tradition) capital most cities tend to have a kind of flat amount of culture/science (though I guess you can condense great works but meh that's a bit brainless of an activity.)

Every city needs a decent amount of hammers, but I suppose a really hammerful city might profit more from Engineers doing a percentage boost and maybe it cranks out military while other cities catch up on basic buildings. Similarly, since gold is tile based as well it's possible to have very gold loving cities and also sort of gold poor cities. So I think the percentage boosting idea actually works a lot better for Engineers and Merchants, which conveniently are the specialists without any real identity besides extreme-tile-in-specialist-form right now.

So I would support leaving Scientists/WAMs/Diplomats as they are for now but changing Engineers and Merchants over to a percentage boosty model and experimenting solely with them.

 

[azum4roll]

If engineers work off percentages island cities will be completely unplayable. They're the ones currently benefitting the most from working engineers.