Maniac
Apolyton Sage
I'd suggest increasing the GPP bonus from the Garden if GPP per specialist is decreased. Even before the building is of questionable value IMO.
What i suggest is to return to the original values for all specialist and give more power to social politcs. Also make the merchant a substitute for the villages with the commerce tree. The engineer should be left with only two hammers or will ruin city placement.
What i suggest is to return to the original values for all specialist and give more power to social politcs. Also make the merchant a substitute for the villages with the commerce tree. The engineer should be left with only two hammers or will ruin city placement.
At first glance it may seem that engineers are OP at 3 hammers, but in the early game you only have 1 or two because the buildings just aren't available and/or you decide to build different buildings. Mid/late game your mines are worth 4 so it's still better to work the mine. The 3 hammer engineers DO give totally hill-less cities a mild chance to produce buildings the hard way though.
consider grassland plots, happiness for 4 citizens
4 grassland river villages with tech boost = 4*4=16 gold
2 grassland river farms with tech boost to support 2 merchants = 2+(2*3)=8 gold
add the cost of four social policies to get +1gold and +1science for villages
each citizen als provides +1gold and +1science from trade routes and inherent science yield
4 grassland river villages with tech boost = 24 gold, 8 science
add the cost of five social policies to get +1gold on specialists and halved food and happiness intake. Can support four specialists with two farms as a consequence
2 river farms, 4 merchants = 22 gold, 6 science
Conclusion: in the early game specialists are only half as useful as villages in non-GP cities. In the late game even with a higher social policy investment, specialists are inferior.
The problem is especially in the early game. Removing the early game yield bonus for non-farm improvements near rivers could solve that. Then 4 grassland river villages would still provide 12 gold, 4 more than the specialist alternative, but GPP are more valuable in the early game.
I find it quite depressing that even with an investment of five social policies, specialists in my example only provide 4 more yield than four villages without any social policy investment.
Specialists are underpowered now!
Perhaps the yield of ALL specialists should be further increased to 4 of their kind?
That would in the late game make the output equal between villages with an investment of 4 SPs, and specialists with an invesment of 5 SPs.
In the early game, assuming the tech bonus from Optics is removed, that would mean 12 gold for villages, and 10 gold and 4 GPP for specialists. This example is in the benefit of specialists, but keep in mind that I am assuming the unlimited presence of rivers, and specialists require an investment in buildings. A higher output should follow from a higher investment and favorable circumstances.
Other yields are always useful, but food and happiness are harder to quantify due to the happy/unhappy threshold. With too little happiness, the value of surplus food is nearly zero. With excess happiness the value of additional happiness drops.
I'd like to inflate food closer to the others but we can't alter it. Population growth has an exponential factor, and without access to the core game we're unable to add a multiplier to the formula, so it'd be very difficult to alter food expenses. The end result is farms are slightly worse than mines/villages, and the farm-boosting techs are slightly better than the mine/village techs. Combining those two I believe works out in the end. It's close enough I'm not concerned about it.
Specialists are somewhat more flexible than tile improvements. If we have 4 river tiles, it takes longer to change the yield of those improvements than it does to change where specialists are slotted.
Free Speech gives +1 to all specialists, and it's easily accessible 2 policies into the Renaissance era. There's no equivalent to this for a tile based economy.
1. Increase the yield of specialists.
2. Return to the vanilla situation where both freshwater and non-freshwater non-farm improvements are boosted by Economics, Chemistry, Scientific Theory(?), and not by Optics etc.
I'm not explaining myself very well. Is your main point river grass tiles are better than specialists?
There's tiles other than rivers and grassland (bottom of the list), and specialists are better than those dry tiles.
To put things differently...
In a specialist economy, specialists are better than some tiles and worse than others. When river/grass tiles are exhausted specialists are the next best choice.
If specialist yields were always the best option in a specialist economy (like with Suleiman), there would be less choice involved. It would be best fill out all specialist slots when we can afford the food, regardless of circumstances.
If the problem is later policies don't boost specialists enough, I can solve that best by buffing the policies.
Something to keep in mind is the specialist policies improve all specialists, while the tile policies improve only villages. I think the specialist policies are somewhat more powerful for this reason.
Changing how improvements benefit from techs would increase options for specialist economies, but reduce our options between types of improvements, so it wouldn't be a net gain for gameplay.
However something I've not yet taken into account, is that while in the two example the happiness consumption is equal, you need 50% more citizens in the specialist example. Which requires an investment in filling food boxes. To compensate for this, the specialist strategy still should receive a boost IMO.
My point was that in every possible scenario you can think of (where GPP doesn't matter), with a similar investment in policies and a similar level of technology, villages are better than specialists, regardless of the plots considered.Thalassicus said:Is your main point river grass tiles are better than specialists?
For me the choice and strategy lies more in researching and building the buildings which provide specialists rather than the actual choice what specialist to pick or what terrain improvement to build on a specific tile.
All improvements being as valid on any terrain seems just as random and devoid of meaningful choice to me as certain terrain improvements always being better on certain terrain, eg farms near river.
1. TBC has two SPs which boost villages. Vanilla only one. Is it still necessary to boost villages this much, considering you've returned to 1=1 rather than 2=3?
Why would I ever want to invest six social policies into specialists
These are some options available for policies... most of the others are already in use.
- CityYieldChanges
- CoastalCityYieldChanges
- CapitalYieldChanges
- CapitalYieldPerPopChanges
- CapitalYieldModifiers
- HurryModifiers
- SpecialistExtraYields
- BuildingClassYieldModifiers
- BuildingClassYieldChanges
- BuildingClassCultureChanges
- BuildingClassProductionModifiers
- BuildingClassHappiness
- ImprovementYieldChanges
- ImprovementCultureChanges
- ValidSpecialists
- YieldModifiers
- FreePromotions
- UnitCombatFreeExperiences
- FreePromotionUnitCombats
- UnitCombatProductionModifiers
- FreeUnitClasses
- FreeItems
@Maniac
Something to keep in mind is Ahriman thinks specialists are overpowered, while you think they're underpowered. Like politics, with such passionate arguments both ways things might actually be balanced.
From the experiences I've had trying each of the three types of economies I feel they're all useful in different circumstances.
Villages can be built anywhere, while mines/lumbermills can only be built on specific tiles. For this reason I set it up so in the early game mines are slightly better than villages, and in the late game (with policies) villages become better than mines. Otherwise, since we can build more villages than mines then villages and village-boosting policies would clearly be the better strategy. This leads to my third point...
In a midgame specialist economy the net benefits are (subtracting the common 1g1s):
Consider the question of what to build on a river forest tile: lumbermill, farm, or village? In two hypothetical cities:
Real cities are somewhere between these extreme examples, but that's the general idea. What to build is much more complex than vanilla's simplistic "farms on rivers, other things elsewhere."
- A city surrounded by ocean. A Lumbermill is a good choice because we have plenty of food and gold for the city.
- A city surrounded by hills. A Farm is appealing since otherwise the city can't grow much.
1) Most policies are designed for specific circumstances and strategies. Why invest in Honor if we intend to play a peaceful game, or why invest in Commerce if we don't intend to focus on gold? The important thing is that with whatever policies we choose to support our strategy, each of those strategies is powerful.
3) In a way you answered your own question. Policies have to give a valuable benefit, or we wouldn't invest in them.
4) Our options for policy effects are very limited. If I removed the effect I'd have to find something else interesting to replace it with. I discuss this in more detail in the policies thread.
In a midgame specialist economy the net benefits are (subtracting the common 1g1s):
1g + 1s + others <=> 1g + 1s + others
I factored out the common 1g 1s. I think you added this back to the village side, but forgot it from the specialist side.
Dry Villages
1 1 4 1 forest, plain
That's 2 base, 1 from Economics, 1 from the Commerce tree and 1 from the Rationalism tree.
You stated tiles are better in every scenario regardless of what the plots are. I gave examples of where this is clearly not the case: tundra, deserts, oceans, mountains, and snow.
...
It does also depend on circumstances of the map. In hostile terrain like tundra or deserts (both of which are common) specialists are very appealing.
However, a specialist economy will have more culture than a tile economy for everyone but Kamehameha. This means a specialist economy a very appealing choice for culture victory games.
Changing the effect of policies in regards to the AI is not a major concern, because the AI ignores the effects of units/buildings/policies/etc when making decisions. It uses random probabilities manually written by humans.
Answering this earlier question I missed... coasts provide a lot of food, which is great for specialist economies. Village policies provide less value to coastal cities, especially those settled to acquire resources in island/arctic/desert areas. An island is a perfect example of where we quickly run out of village tiles. On the continents-plus and pangaea-plus map scripts there's many island chains.I don't see how that makes a difference. A specialist economy still needs as much farms and mines as a village economy.Something to keep in mind is the specialist policies improve all specialists, while the tile policies improve only villages. I think the specialist policies are somewhat more powerful for this reason.