The game is too fast and too easy

As long as random events are not as random/lethal as Russian roulette, I'm fine with randomness.

The best randomness should pose a minor new challenge but it should be resolvable.

 

I must admit it feels weird that the Secret Societies relies on Governors system. I would rather want a dedicated tab for them where you need to do a mini mission (like Eureka and Inspiration) to unlock the new tenets. After all, we already need to do a mini mission for unlocking them in the first place.

For example (just throwing ideas):

Spoiler :

For the Owls of Minerva:

1. Initiation: Sending an envoy to city-state.
2. Ritual: Build 1 Bank and reach the medieval era.
3. Indoctrination: Build 2 Spies and reach the industrial era.
4. Master Plan: Gather 5000 Gold and reach the atomic era.

Or for the Voidsingers:

1. Initiation: Discover a tribal village.
2. Ritual: Gather 1000 Faith and reach the medieval era.
3. Indoctrination: Buy 2 Apostles and reach the industrial era.
4. Master Plan: Fully expand 3 Cultists and reach the atomic era.

Or for the Hermetic Order:

1. Initiation: Discover a natural wonder
2. Ritual: Build 1 University and reach the medieval era.
3. Indoctrination: Earn 2 Great Persons and reach the industrial era.
4. Master Plan: Have 3 Ley Lines in your empire and reach the atomic era.

Or for the Sanguine Pact:

1. Initiation: Destroy a Barbarian Camp
2. Ritual: Kill a unit with a Vampire and reach the medieval era.
3. Indoctrination: Pillage 2 tiles with a Vampire and reach the industrial era.
4. Master Plan: Build 3 Vampire Castles and reach the atomic era.

Those are fake missions, because it is unlikely to not achieve them. But at least there is some task/reward system, and not completely free stuff.

The main problem is unlocking 3 extra Promotions for the other Governors early on, where it has the most value, and make the early game way quicker than before.

 

Yep. A quest system makes a lot more sense. I'd go with more risk-reward than most of your tasks though. For instance, I'd rather see the Owls advance by using spies to Siphon Funds rather than simply amass gold, or see the Hermetic Order go out get those ley lines. And I'd like to see the later quests be competitive. In other words, Firaxis should be borrowing cues from Amplitude games.

Question for anyone who has used the Hermetic Order. Can you build districts on top of ley lines without destroying them?

 

You can't build on those tiles or improve them, they're blocked for any construction, once revealed.

 

Yowch. Dubious proposition.

I looked the ley line up in Civopedia, and it's all fluff text. The first promotion says that a ley line grants a standard adjacency bonus. That's nice and all, but I don't need stuff like this blocking the placement of a settler or district, or even a farming triangle. Do later promotions use them for anything?

 

On level 3, the Ley Lines get yields from great people you've recruited (so each great scientist adds +1 science, each great artist +1 culture, etc.). I picked this society in my current game, and I can honestly say it sucks pretty badly. All the Ley Lines in my territory spawned either underneath already build districts or wonders, or in completely obscure places. Furthermore, since almost all the great people were soaked up by the AI civs, the yields I got from the one line I could actually work was very low. Anyway, I'm losing this game no matter which society I had picked, but I definitely feel this society is heavily pulled down by the fact that you don't know where the lines are before picking it.

 

That SS probably relies heavily on a civ with high gold/faith income to mass buy great people. That monument that the void get would probably work really well with that SS.

Ill will probably try my first SS game in the next few days. Did one regular one to see how ethopia and the religion changes from last June played out.

 

- I like random events.
- Voidsingers are too good, Hermetic order too weak/random, later Vampires are too weak, Owls seems balanced.
- If the AI goes Voidsingers, they make for much stronger opponents.
- By too easy and too fast, I mean the difficulty and pacing needs to be smoothed over the whole game, as currently you have 200+ turns you do not even use, and units which become obsolete too fast.

I think that sums up what I believe.

 

Started an Ethiopia game as Hermes. Seems clear you gotta take that first promotion ASAP.

Got a ley line right next to the capital. Not sure if that's a standard issue thing. It's right where I was going to sandwich an IZ between a dam and aqueduct. Oh well. Also seemed to have mulitples show up in desert areas. They referenced this in the preview video, but I can't imagine having a bunch of unusable tiles in the desert somehow makes it appealing.

They definitely need to let you build on top of ley lines. Doesn't even make thematic sense that some secret society would have this massive undeveloped area in the middle of their cities.

 

I don't know if you always get one next to your capital, but I got one as well. I know this was probably a bad starting position no matter what, but this Ley Line is literally useless - I mean, in normal games I would not be able to remove the Citrus (I have a mod that lets me do that, but since it was the only Citrus in my territory, I was not inclined to do it), and I can't build on the Geothermal Fissure.

Spoiler :

The other Ley Line in the desert in the right side of the picture would have been ok if I had not already started building the Pyramids in that exact spot.

The only other Ley Line in my territory was in a Tundra spot with three adjacent water hexes - not a whole lot of benefit from that either:

Spoiler :

I don't know a lot about Ley Line lore, but if this should have made any sense in game, this should have worked like either an improvement or a district we could place ourselves, perhaps only one per city, but I guess that conflicts with the idea of these lines having some sort of natural/supernatural origin.

 

Being able to build cities on ley lines would make them so much more useful.

 

I mean, some mythologized masonic order would build on the place of power, not around it. Don't even need a lot of real-world knowledge, just watching a movie like Ghostbusters or what have you.

But if ley lines have a tendency to appear in crappy terrain, then they need to address the basic problems of crappy terrain, which is starvation.

 

Ley Lines are unimpressive. They are quite random even rare, even if some cluster can appear in the most inhospitable places. They lock a tile from improvement / districts / wonders and need the Pingoracle strategy to yield some good yield. It would be interesting that:

• Ley Lines be consistent. For example, they could follow a pattern that align themselves in the map. For example, 1 Ley Line every 4 tiles in all direction, being able to be on water, moutain... no matter what. Therefore, it needs no luck to have some in your empire.
• Ley Lines should not block improvement, wonder / district placement.
• Settling a city on a Ley Line could give some bonuses, like a +1 to all Great People or some +20% to yield.
• Maybe let them work à la Nubian Pyramids and give them additionnal yield from adjacent districts.

Off topic: I always wondered what the game would be if all terrain (without feature) give 2 yields, and made the crappy terrain more hospitable.

Spoiler :

This is just an example, and not my main point in this post. If I understood how to make a mod, I will probably test this and watch if this idea is ok or not.

• Snow: 2 Faith
  • Snow Hill: 1 Production and 1 Faith
• Tundra: 1 Food and 1 Faith. Can have Farms on fresh water tiles and on all flat tiles with Indutrialization.
  • Tundra Hill: 1 Food and 1 Production
• Grassland: 2 Food
  • Grassland Hill: 1 Food and 1 Production
• Plain: 1 Food and 1 Production
  • Plain Hill: 2 Production
• Desert: 1 Production and 2 Gold. Can have Farms on fresh water tiles and on all flat tiles with Indutrialization.
  • Desert Hill: 2 Production.

Tundra and Desert should have as many ressource that their Grassland / Plain counterpart.

Basicly:

• Hills do not give more yield. Since they are a not removable features, there is not really a choice between keeping it or chopping it. In 95% of case, Hills is strictly superior to flat land.
• Faith is introduced as equalizer yield. It could be Gold or other yield. I am just throwing ideas, it might be not balanced. The Tundra / Desert are still less hospitable, but less crappy overal.
• CIvilizations that have avantages on "crappy" tiles should have their abilities changed a bit: you can't let Russia having 1 Food, 1 Production, 2 Faith farmable Tundra tiles. Same thing with wonder (Petra, St Basil's) that would give too many yield.

 

It's related to a thread I've been meaning to start for a while. Cities need food and housing to be cities.

Deserts become habitable by virtue of flood plains and wheat tiles. In Civ V, deer could feed tundra cities, but in VI camps boost gold instead and don't upgrade to bonus food until Mercantilism. Damned peculiar. Hunting is about food first and foremost, not fur-trading. Most tundra cities are left relying on coastal settles with fish. Problematic design. Deserts are patchy, but most maps generates large swaths of tundra that mainly have to rely on trade routes to function. When the New Frontier pass promised a new resource, I hoped they'd address the tundra problem, but we got maize instead.

 

Indeed, around 40% of the "total tech yield" required is bypassed when you complete eureka "quests".
Since a lot of these quests are tied to production, it is much easier to not only complete them, but complete them in a shorter time window, when you own a larger number of cities as you have:
higher total production in your empire (of which you can diversify against multiple eureka quest goals)
higher total of district slots available (allocating 3 slots to IZs out of say 20 is a more impactful decision than 3 out of say 80)
& more features available to harvest/chop (each single chop decision becomes of less significance).
So not only does the tech rate area (ie campus spam) benefit a wide empire more, but the eureka/inspiration system does too.

This is a straightforward and simple way to reduce and delay total science output, but recently I am trying to move away from such a solution as I think it is "bad game design". It simply makes build order more rigid (ie you simply need to build CH/Harbors before you build your Campi/Theater Squares). But what if I want to play a Jesuit Education game? Faith generation also costs some gold to produce, so now I need a Holy Site, CH and Harbor before I build a Campus or Theater Square? Running international trade routes instead of internal ones also becomes more of a necessity to generate the necessary gold output. Limiting the number of viable strategies or approaches is not a good idea in my opinion...
And most importantly in this example, the science/gold ratio needed stays the same independently of the number of cities you have in your empire. Whether you have 6 or 20 cities, you need 3 CH/Harbors for every 2 Campus/TS.

Currently, a player focusing on tech rate area is greatly rewarded (and adding another campus is never a bad decision, except maybe very late game).
Currently, there are not many ways a player can work toward increasing the tech rate density of individual cities.

Now, I think an interesting idea would be the following: decreasing marginal benefits (decreasing marginal science output) for every increase in tech rate area (total number of campi).
Thus, there would be a point where a adding another campus (versus another district) would become a mistake.

 

People tend to hate this psychologically.
Personally I agree with the concept, but it might be preferable to do a little sleight of hand where rather than penalize tech yield, or tech cost (like civ5) we convert things to % of the tech per turn. Then you can apply all sorts of math to that (IE shove it through a logarithm so more science = faster but not 1:1) and people won’t really think about it the same way.


Because all things come from the tech trees, pretty much any strategy focusing on pumping up tech rate will beat ones that don’t. But as you observed, making it a question of degree is a great way to impart some variety without much change to the basic mechanics.

A present day example is that the US was desperate to maintain a tech edge during the Cold War; after that a lot of funding and research stopped because being more than a generation ahead isn’t worth the massive Additional rise in cost.

 

Civ V had a penalty on tech cost for each city you settled but I don't remember how it works. Working with DanQuayle and your ideas I'm thinking maybe a 2% penalty on science for each campus you build (apply like compound interest - not that it matters: 1.02 ** 10 = 1.218, not too far from 1.2), so a tech like Radio, whose base cost is 1370, will be now 1670 if you have 10 campus. That may just delay the player 10 turns per post-industrial era. (And as cost grows exponentially the speed is slowing down logarithmically.)

But since districts are not removable, it may make some people want to sell their cities if it got a poor campus.

I'm thinking if this can also be applied to Civics, but a problem is culture is not just coming from Theater Square. Making it work like this will greatly boost the importance of cultural improvement like Moai or Batey.

 

Yes! Applying a simple logarithmic function to empire wide science output seem like a simple quick fix. (No need to modify tech costs, etc.)
More science still provides an edge, but there comes a point the marginal increase in science is not worth the additional investment and these resources are better spent elsewhere.

Well that sure does sound like they "swapped out a science policy card", doesn't it?
Except that "the science policy card that they swapped out" had a steep cost attached to it which is not the case in the game at the moment..

 

The maintenance cost idea would work much better if it was exponential.

 

If you apply a logarithmic function over the "total raw science output" (irrespective of its source, be it campus adjacency, buildings, terrain, UI, etc) that does not become a problem anymore. You also do not need to change the costs of techs. So in your example, the Radio base cost stays at 1370, but your total science output may drop from 300 to maybe 250?

Now, the big question is: what exactly should that formulae be?
Thinking about it, something more complex than one simple logarithm might be needed..
But the more complex and "opaque" it becomes, the less intuitive or "natural" it may feel..

In Civ V, adding a city added something like +5% to tech costs. If your newly added city increased your science less than 5%, your research rate decreased (the number of turns to get a new tech increased). Undiscovered techs had a research premium added to them (20%?) and each time a civilization discovered it, the tech cost decreased. The last civilization to discover it had it at a major discount. So there was a very real rubber band mechanic around tech progression, but it involved varying research costs. Now, I may be mixing up these mechanics with Vox Populi, but I think it was in the base game.