Summarized Suggestions for Post v.6-12

[Revolutionist_8]

and 7 votes for number 7. Id say not really definitive enough yet, so we need more people to weigh in.

You mean number 2, right? You're right tho, so I vote for number 2, I think it's a clearer bonus.

After ITRs, what's the next step in your opinion? I feel that we still need to find a different approach to growth, and we should flip that it's encouraged instead of being 'feared'. I suggested an option, that I think would align well with technological development and would encourage growth and food in general. Bite also has some really good ideas. I think this is 'more urgent' than ITRs.

 

[phantomaxl1207]

My vote is for Number 2 on ITR's.

 

[pineappledan]

There are 3 things that I think are non controversial:

Spoiler “Some sort of boost to ITR should be on buildings.” :

However it works, there should be some way for buildings to put yields on ITRs so that strong infrastructure boosts them. How that works and what the yield should be can be up for debate. I think current system works fine. Maybe markets don’t need that food on the ITRs. Maybe instant yields aren’t the best way to add those boosts, but it works well enough and it’s the code we already have.

Spoiler “Grocers are crap” :

Grocers need some kind of boost. Right now they are not worth building unless you are Austria or have one of the relevant monopolies.

CrazyG suggested we put +1 happiness, but I completely disagree. Zoos come out at the same time. Circuses, zoos, and policies are fine; they don’t need the help. I suggested instead that’s the workshop’s free specialist be moved to grocer instead. Workshops are already a strong building and moving the free specialist to grocer makes more sense. Engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs don’t necessarily need access to a workshop, but they all need somewhere to get food.

If you move the urbanization reduction to grocer, you won’t have to flood your empires with happiness just to make grocers useful.

Spoiler “Agribusinesses are too specialized” :

Currently, agribusinesses give +3 food to farms and pastures. What if I have a coastal empire? What if I have a UI? What if I went Way of Transcendence? What if my empire gets food from literally any other source than those two improvement types? The old agribusiness gave +5% food. Not terribly interesting but good and flexible enough to merit two horses. Some people have suggested the agribusiness could convert food to gold or food to science. The hospitals already convert food to science so that doesn’t make sense to me unless we’re planning to change hospitals too. Food to gold makes much more sense to me, but that’s new code.

Someone else suggested adding +1 food to all grassland/plains terrain (so basically the wind plant). I mean, sure, that would be powerful, but we already have a building that does that.

I suggested long ago that agribusinesses could give +2 food for every farm, plantation, or pasture within 3 tiles of a city even if you don’t work the tile. ie. it would work the same way as observatories/mountains, but with an improvement. That would also be new code and very computation-heavy, so probably not.

However it is changed, I don’t think such a costly building should be so specific in its use, or should force you to work such specific, marginal tiles as farms and pastures.

 

[Stalker0]

There are 3 things that I think are non controversial:
Some sort of boost to ITR should be on buildings

Grocers are crap

Agribusinesses are too specialized

Agreed on ITRs. I think they are good early but lose too much later on.

Grocers, yep could use some love.

Agribusiness. I think we can debate the usefulness of food throughout the game, but late game, food is just not useful. Its a yield that is designed to obsolete. So any building that gives me more food in the late game is inherently flawed to me. That's why I like the concept of converting food into other resources, and like the food as gold idea. With the hospital, +1 food could now give me .05 science and .1 gold. Its not super great, but its something.


One thing I think needs to be debated, if we go with Grubby's idea that specialists always create -1 unhappy but no longer are affected by happiness level....than do we need urbanization redactors? I think its a layer of unneeded complexity. If a player wants to afford more specialists...than they get happiness bonuses or reduce their unhappiness through the core buildings. I don't see a need to have a whole other class of unhappiness reducer for this.

 

[pineappledan]

*shrugs*
Agribusiness is certainly not helped by having hospitals before it. Hospitals are another food building but they don’t require horses or specific tiles and are just better.
Shifting agribusiness to be more of a gold buildings makes sense (business). There is a niche there and we can make agribusiness work; it just needs to suck less and there are many ways to make this happen.

Re: your comment about urbanization. Free specialists on some buildings is a fine mechanic. I see no reason to remove it entirely. Though, perhaps you were forgetting about guilds? Going for a CV without urbanization reduction on any buildings anywhere would be a massive unhappiness burden. That’s 18 unhappiness that you would have no way of mitigating. You would force people even harder onto Artistry than they already are. I see no reason to remove urbanization reductions but they don’t need to be everywhere. Guilds and 1-2 buildings is enough.

 

[Stalker0]

Though, perhaps you were forgetting about guilds? Going for a CV without urbanization reduction on any buildings anywhere would be a massive unhappiness burden. That’s 18 unhappiness that you would have no way of mitigating.I see now reason to remove urbanization reductions but they don’t need to be everywhere. Guilds and 1-2 buildings is enough.

This is where my philosophy differs from some others. Personally, I think specialists with just food cost and slot limits are enough, I didn't think they needed unhappiness in the first place. But if we are going that route, we are doing it because we are saying that specialists are strong enough that they need that for balancing. We shouldn't then go "well guilds are an exception"....why? Either those specialists are strong enough to warrant the penalty, or they aren't. If they are....then you deal with the penalty the same way you deal with unhappiness in general. Otherwise, lets just toss out the unhappiness for specialists in general, and further simplify the system that is probably the most complex in the mod currently.

 

[pineappledan]

That conflates having some of the specialists with ALL of the specialists.

2 on non-guild buildings and 1 on Artistry combined with 3 on the guilds covers the bare minimum for a viable culture victory. If you aren’t focusing on a CV then use the ‘common core’ of unhappiness-free specialists to pursue your preferred specialists, but the urbanization penalty is there so that you can’t have a specialist-centric strategy with only a little extra food consumption as a downside.

To put another way, no unhappiness from specialists will give a non-CV, specialist-focused civ like Korea (and Sumer) too much leeway. Having no urbanization mitigation will give a specialist/CV-focused civ like Arabia too much of a nerf

EDIT: how is needs reduction from urbanization any more complex than needs reduction from any of the other sources of unhappiness? Isn’t making urbanization this exceptional source of unhappiness — with no buildings/policies/tool to mitigate it except to remove specialists — its own bit of complexity? It’s the “stop growth” button debate all over again.

EDIT EDIT: if urbanization reduction is a no-go on grocer, yet you agree that grocer needs love, what do you recommend? Surely not more food?

 

[Rekk]

There are very few cases where not working guilds is the right thing to do. Everybody is going to be paying whatever cost to be working these 18 (21 if tradition) specialists.

 

[BiteInTheMark]

This is where my philosophy differs from some others. Personally, I think specialists with just food cost and slot limits are enough, I didn't think they needed unhappiness in the first place. But if we are going that route, we are doing it because we are saying that specialists are strong enough that they need that for balancing. We shouldn't then go "well guilds are an exception"....why? Either those specialists are strong enough to warrant the penalty, or they aren't. If they are....then you deal with the penalty the same way you deal with unhappiness in general. Otherwise, lets just toss out the unhappiness for specialists in general, and further simplify the system that is probably the most complex in the mod currently.

That conflates having some of the specialists with ALL of the specialists.

2 on non-guild buildings and 1 on Artistry combined with 3 on the guilds covers the bare minimum for a viable culture victory. If you aren’t focusing on a CV then use the ‘common core’ of unhappiness-free specialists to pursue your preferred specialists, but the urbanization penalty is there so that you can’t have a specialist-centric strategy with no downsides.

To put another way, no unhappiness from specialists will give a non-CV, specialist-focused civ like Korea (and Sumer) too much leeway. Having no urbanization mitigation will give a specialist/CV-focused civ like Arabia too much of a nerf

In the best circumstance, the happiness system is mainly adressing expansion, warmongering and empire management and only gives you a bad response, if you expand too agressiv and manage (empire or war) too bad.
In this case, working specialists should have downsides out of the happiness system. Besides urbanization unhappiness, we have only the consumption of a lot of food as downside. Cause food is more and more accessable in the later stage of the game, this downside gets more and more neglegible and Gazebo is using happiness as a regulation system.

As others have already said or atleast claimed, late game is all around specialist usage and GP spam. If this is true, and specialists are able to contribute much more to the empire than all the normal citizen and even future citizen working the tiles of cities, then we have to ask, why is this the case, and there are 3 possible answers:

• A) The direct yields from specialists are much greater than the normal citizen contribution
• B) Great People born by the usage of specialists are able to influence the game noticable
• C) A lot of yields contribution by working AND the benefits from born Great people

To A) Even with very strong buffs for my specialists (+1+2+2) in my current game, their direct yield infusion isnt that big. Engineers and Merchants can be beaten by citizens working mines and lumbermills or villages on roads with trade routes.
To B) I have a tremendous amount of instant yields gain, especially science, but also from culture. This comes probably from using scientists and writers and all the instant yield popups

I think, C is the right answer. Scientists and Writers generate already good and worthy yields, but tremendous amount of yields by using the instant ability of their GP. Winning the science race didnt come mainly by the yields from specialits, but from their GP.
I think as long as those GP still stay that strong, theres no real reason to deliver the food for the scientists or writer instead into the growth.

If we want to make growth more relevant, we need to make citizen more relevant and/or specialits and their GP less relevant.

 

[Stalker0]

That conflates having some of the specialists with ALL of the specialists.

2 on non-guild buildings and 1 on Artistry combined with 3 on the guilds covers the bare minimum for a viable culture victory. If you aren’t focusing on a CV then use the ‘common core’ of unhappiness-free specialists to pursue your preferred specialists, but the urbanization penalty is there so that you can’t have a specialist-centric strategy with only a little extra food consumption as a downside.

To put another way, no unhappiness from specialists will give a non-CV, specialist-focused civ like Korea (and Sumer) too much leeway. Having no urbanization mitigation will give a specialist/CV-focused civ like Arabia too much of a nerf

EDIT: how is needs reduction from urbanization any more complex than needs reduction from any of the other sources of unhappiness? Isn’t making urbanization this exceptional source of unhappiness — with no buildings/policies/tool to mitigate it except to remove specialists — its own bit of complexity? It’s the “stop growth” button debate all over again.

EDIT EDIT: if urbanization reduction is a no-go on grocer, yet you agree that grocer needs love, what do you recommend? Surely not more food?

Just noting, that we have only had specialists giving unhappiness for a small window of time. The majority of the mod we haven’t had it, and all of the civ balancing was done without it. So I don’t think removing it suddenly gives the civs you mentioned “too much leeway”.

Needs reduction from urbanization is another bucket that a player has to understand, one that works differently than the core ones. More things to understand = more complexity.

 

[pineappledan]

Just noting, that we have only had specialists giving unhappiness for a small window of time. The majority of the mod we haven’t had it, and all of the civ balancing was done without it. So I don’t think removing it suddenly gives the civs you mentioned “too much leeway”.

Unhappiness from specialists has existed since I have been playing this mod (summer 2017). It was 0.33, then 0.5, then it got it's own name instead of just "unhappiness from specialists". Lots of changes to civs have happened since then. Huns, England, Morocco, Mongolia, and Arabia have all had some degree of reworking since I got here, and unhappiness from specialists is at least as old as all that.

Needs reduction from urbanization is another bucket that a player has to understand, one that works differently than the core ones. More things to understand = more complexity.

A bucket that currently works the same as all the other buckets: They all have flat reduction from buildings.

I am not the slightest bit convinced that a new player will have difficulty with how urbanization works. We have newbies come here all the time saying they don't understand Distress, but I have yet to see someone take to the forums for an explanation of Urbanization.

 

[CrazyG]

I think there is a consensus that having specialists blocked by unhappiness is a bad feature, it seems everyone is expecting it to be removed, it keeps getting bug reported and new players clearly don't understand it. I don't think urbanization prevention is the best mechanic to be honest. Its necessary on this patch to let players get around the specialist thing, but we shouldn't add something just to get around a bad mechanic, especially one we expect to be removed.

I'm modified my local files, giving the difficulty handicap +2 happiness, and changing the values on unhappiness from 0.25 to 0.5, and it plays pretty well (I'm still always taking artistry though), but what I really dislike is the +5% growth if a city has happiness. You can intentionally stack a really high value in your capital, which is far more impactful for tradition than it is for other strategies. I've got to say that great people and golden age strategies are the top dog this patch, which is just another plus to tradition.

What I'd like to talk about is adjusting hte cost of growing a new citizen. We could look at changing the costs, especially for populations 10-20. Does anyone have the equation or number list for the cost of growing?

Just noting, that we have only had specialists giving unhappiness for a small window of time. The majority of the mod we haven’t had it, and all of the civ balancing was done without it. So I don’t think removing it suddenly gives the civs you mentioned “too much leeway”.

Its always been present, it just used to be a lot smaller.