The "cities tech cost" and it's implications

[seamus2010]

This. Is. The Best Thing that's happened to Civ5 so far!
I'm gonna set it to around 10% or more.
Ha! In your faces Hiawatha and Catherine with your 20-city empires! I'll just raze all of it with my tanks while all you have are crossbowman, that'd teach you to build cities every 3 tiles!

 

[RealHuhn]

This. Is. The Best Thing that's happened to Civ5 so far!
I'm gonna set it to around 10% or more.
Ha! In your faces Hiawatha and Catherine with your 20-city empires! I'll just raze all of it with my tanks while all you have are crossbowman, that'd teach you to build cities every 3 tiles!

I can't understand comments like this. Are you against diverse strategies? The AI won't be able to settle a city every 4th tile because AI happiness bonuses got severely nerfed anyway.

If you have a lot of space around your starting position with 8 or more good city locations, are you really content with settling 3 boring cities and be done with it? I don't get it.

 

[theadder]

...a full 5% penalty just gives me a headache. Why even bother expanding?

'Why even bother' seems a bit overreaction for what you're assuming is a 5% subtraction.

 

[RealHuhn]

'Why even bother' seems a bit overreaction for what you're assuming is a 5% subtraction.

5% per city can quickly add up to 50% though. In G+K that would completely cripple wide play styles.

Although I think we should wait and see. The devs must have felt that wide empires got too strong in BNW compared to G+K or else they wouldn't have added this modifier.
Maybe 5% is just the max value and it gets scaled down per era or something.

 

[Babri]

I think many people here fail to realise that there are many tools introduced in BNW which would help wide empires more than tall ones. Internal trade routes & archaeology to name a few.

Remember that it took ages for new cities to catch up with the old ones like colonies founded in renaissance & industrial. Not any more, with the help of 1-2 trade routes that city would quickly become very productive & useful. Secondly wide civs would have the advantage of larger gold reserves & military might. If a tall one tries to get ahead, simply pillage the crap out of their trade routes.

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[Babri]

In G+K, four big cities can easily compete with 10-12 smaller cities, even without this weird science penalty.
Every fast science victory in G+K is based on a tall Tradition/NC approach.

An increase in tech costs by 5% per city would be ridiculous. Sure, culture and religion got buffed for wide empires but those mechanics aren't as important as science.
MadDjinn is my only hope here because he said the penalty isn't really noticable.

CiV 4 was fun because you constantly felt the pressure that you had to expand in order to stay competitive. In CiV 5, you have all this awesome land around you but you know that settling a city after turn 120 hurts more than it helps. This science penalty only promotes "lazy gameplay". -_-

cIV also had such penalties which you may call as "lazy". IIRC the city maintenance cost in cIV increased exponentially. Too bad that people have habit of forgetting things all the time.

Edit: Also check my previous post related to buffs that wide empires are receiving in this expansion.

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[seamus2010]

I can't understand comments like this. Are you against diverse strategies? The AI won't be able to settle a city every 4th tile because AI happiness bonuses got severely nerfed anyway.

If you have a lot of space around your starting position with 8 or more good city locations, are you really content with settling 3 boring cities and be done with it? I don't get it.

AI happiness bonus nerfed? How come they're still settling cities like cancer spreading? I made minimum distance to be 6 tiles, and they still build more cities than I would ever care to conquer. (It's a pain sieging and razing ONE city, now imaging repeating that process twenty times).

My 3 boring cities are gonna encompass all these spaces, because these 3 boring cities will be built in carefully considered, strategic spots and will have a lot of expansion, and have around the same land area as your exciting 10 cities with no specialty/individuality. Do you even remember the name of your cities? Or are they just another dot on your big, red, smudge on the minimap? Twenty generic cities with no names, no differences, no lasting impressions, no point, no purpose other than being an absolute pain for someone trying to conquer you.

 

[Browd]

AI happiness bonus nerfed? How come they're still settling cities like cancer spreading? I made minimum distance to be 6 tiles, and they still build more cities than I would ever care to conquer. (It's a pain sieging and razing ONE city, now imaging repeating that process twenty times).

My 3 boring cities are gonna encompass all these spaces, because these 3 boring cities will be built in carefully considered, strategic spots and will have a lot of expansion, and have around the same land area as your exciting 10 cities with no specialty/individuality. Do you even remember the name of your cities? Or are they just another dot on your big, red, smudge on the minimap? Twenty generic cities with no names, no differences, no lasting impressions, no point, no purpose other than being an absolute pain for someone trying to conquer you.

The nerf to AI happiness is coming in BNW, so you haven't seen its effects yet.

As to imagining conquering 20 cities? Um, done that many a game, with little to no "absolute pain."

 

[BrokenSky]

culture was 7% last time I checked, not 10%.

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

Doesn't a policy decrease it from 10% to 7%? I also think it is Speed based

 

[Browd]

Representation (Liberty policy) does reduce per-city culture penalty by 33%, but baseline per-city culture penalties (which vary by map size) are also being reduced in BNW.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

It is also size based (g&k)
Map std-15%
Map huge-7.5%

 

[Ryoga]

Doesn't a policy decrease it from 10% to 7%? I also think it is Speed based

Nope the game speed only affects the tech and policy gain. The policy and tech costs increase for number of cities is however affected by map sizes.


Anyway there's a few things that should be noted I think:

1) If the tech cost mod doesn't includes puppets, it won't have a significant effect on runaway AI civs, because most of the times, at least in my experience, they become strong by conquering everyone around, and the AI prefers to puppet than to annex.
I think the reworked happiness for AI will have a stronger effect to limit that.

2) The new bonuses to techs, specifically those from trade routes, are not based on number of cities, so a one-city civ will benefit from those as much as a wide empire. In fact, from what I could see from MadDjinn video, a well developed city will benefit more from that than a small one, which is probably why he sent all of his trade routes from his capital.

 

[Matthew.]

Yep, it is just like culture. If the culture modifier wasn't in place, you could blaze through policies once you got enough cities. And contrary to popular belief, you can have a large number of cities without crippling your policy acquisition, it just becomes increasingly more difficult to do so since every city needs full culture buildings to keep pace.

I'd imagine the intention of the new science modifier is meant to work the same way: To attempt to keep science pacing roughly equal so tech rate between all empires is more competitive.

If the change helps keep runaways in check, I'm all for it. I always pull up the graphs (or run InfoAddict) after a game and over 90% of the time there will be one AI that greatly out performs the others in science. The game ends up being "defeat the one inevitable runaway and you've won the game; you can ignore the rest".

 

[Bad Wolf]

Along with the AI happiness changes, this should have a huge effect on runaway civs. I'm looking at you, Alex and Hiawatha...

 

[Rajjah]

I've never really liked ICS and REX so I guess I'm biased. My first reaction was similar to others who wanted to rub it into the likes of Alexander. Ill be mostly unaffected but ultimately if it is too much then I'm sure they will fix it in the fall update, I'm just not looking forward to all the complaining until then

 

[Bisqit]

Yeah unless you are going for record finishes, I doubt it is anything to worry about. When I play super-wide domination games, taking new cities is never for the science even though I end up with way more science than if I play smaller.

It has always been that way, you always get more raw science from larger empires. Veneke brings up a good point, as there is a certain stage of the game where you can be pulling in 2500 beakers per turn and you just blaze through the later eras.

Exactly and I think that's precisely the reason they put this change in. I don't remember where I read it exactly but it's essentially a small penalty to make teching up in the late game harder to prevent "run away" science victories. If you expand enough you can be pulling so much science that winning a science victory is just purely simple. This change forces the pace to slow down allowing for a longer time spent in the late game. Usually the late game ended up being a mindless next turn fest until I won when going for science. With the added mechanics and this small penalty the late game will have a lot more spice.

 

[pilot00]

I can't understand comments like this. Are you against diverse strategies? The AI won't be able to settle a city every 4th tile because AI happiness bonuses got severely nerfed anyway.

If you have a lot of space around your starting position with 8 or more good city locations, are you really content with settling 3 boring cities and be done with it? I don't get it.

I am assuming from his crossbowmen to tanks comment that he is talking about lower difficulties. In such a setting ofc it doesnt matter and it helps the human player a lot.

 

[RealHuhn]

If you expand enough you can be pulling so much science that winning a science victory is just purely simple.

We can only talk about our experience in G+K and from the perspective of a human player, this statement is just wrong.
Wide empires eventually get to the point where teching is very fast but this point isn't reached before a Tradition player won the game already.

So, I think we can all agree on the fact that, in G+K, this science penalty would severely nerf wide strategies. Tradition would be a no-brainer and that is bad balancing.

However, this is BNW and it looks like wide empires benefit a lot from the new mechanics. This science penalty might be necessary now. It's too early to tell. But it certainly looks fishy. Every "good/experienced" player will have to admit that.

 

[Matthew.]

Depends on what you consider wide, I suppose. The fastest games seem to typically be around 8 cities, which is pretty far beyond what most would consider "tall".

Sorry, but can't really agree. "severely nerf" would likely be wrong. I will agree that tall Tradition seems to be the favored playstyle in G&K, but I don't think such a change would cripple wider play.

As already mentioned in this thread, it will mostly affect runaway AI's and partially affect humans in late-game if/when they, too, start to runaway. If puppets are not affected, it won't change much at all on the human side of things.