[GS] The Mali might be a bit stronger than we Realised...

[Legacy of Smiles]

According to this Reddit post.

Combining the Suguba with Democracy, a military academy in the city and suzerainship of Ngazargamu allows you to buy units for the low price of 0 gold.

 

[Warwolf22]

This seems perfectly balanced yes. I’m sure it was intended for Units to be free.

 

[craney1987]

Carpet of doom anyone?

 

[Siptah]

According to this Reddit post.

Combining the Suguba with Democracy, a military academy in the city and suzerainship of Ngazargamu allows you to buy units for the low price of 0 gold.

To be fair, this strategy is available pretty late in the game, and it doesn‘t make Mali *that* much OP. We all knew that if Mali is allowed to survive the early game, it would be a beast. Still, it‘s a surprise that the beast is that large. Would be funny if the AI could make use of this (on Intention or unintended)

 

[anandus]

Regardless of that trick (exploit), if Mali survives the first bit of the game it's a monster.
I've played 2 games with them and they are amazing. Go as wide as possible (you can really spam cities, buying a settler every 2 or 3 turns or so), pack your cities as close as possible, get suguba's and holy sites everywhere and get insanely rich.
INSANELY rich.

But the offset is that the beginning is really hard, the first 50 turns you really are struggling. It's the hardest civ of all in the early game.

 

[Victoria]

Democracy? I am with @Siptah in that it’s very late but I also think they should remove it purely because the anti 1 UPT brigade will whine like a plane load of Englishmen if such a thing is left in place.

@anandus Inca amd Maori are similar as to a degree is Hungary. TBH for me it gets a bit tiresome. England could get lots of gold in a game, Mali looks like an awful lot more and it is like magic when you can buy a stock exchange but I feel it then is all about the early struggle with Mali, the rest is just candy floss.

 

[Uberfrog]

Firaxis have really got to learn the difference between multiplicative and additive modifiers.

I mean this is a niche strat but this can't be intended behaviour.

 

[Onii-chan]

Yeeeeeah that's a bit silly. I mean if Mali can get to that stage they're kinda supposed to be crazy strong financially but there's a line to be crossed. Just changing the formula of how the percentage discounts stack with each other would be an easy fix (as in make it multiplicative instead of additive) and it'd make more sense already

 

[Sostratus]

In Civ5 you could stack gold discounts like Big Ben, the commerce/mercantilism/ gold focus tree, and some ideology tenets. They were multiplicative.

While additive is easy for players to know what the end discount will be if they stack them, multiplicative has two nice properties- it will never be zero, and it preserves the value of the discounts as coded. Stacking 2 additive 20% discounts means the first is a 20% discount but the second is effectively a 25% discount.

Whereas for multiplicative discounts, no matter what you have already, getting a 20% perk means you will always pay 20% less than what you are paying right now. That, to me, is more informative to on the fly decision making and avoids the cascading value of stacking in an additive system.

 

[BarbarianHunter]

Their early game is also insanely weak, so the madness of the late game free unit horde certainly contrasts well against the early game. I’m presently playing an “ice breaker” GS game as Rome so as to acquaint myself with the mechanics and what-not. I ran across Mansa Musa and decided to declare on him. It was like playing on marathon speed. I rolled 4 cities before ever encountering a single unit. All his cities were wallless. Finally in the 5th city I found a pikeman who left the city to engage a courser (RIP). Then a crossbow popped up (he must have bought it). Then another pikeman in a CS I liberated.

In all I took 7 cities, 1 liberated CS, and encountered 2 pikers and 1 crossbowman. The war lasted from T92 to T118.

Note: If you’ve ever played a game on marathon speed and caught the AI without any units it’s really easy to just roll the whole place, as the 200% slower speed means if they don’t have the units already it’s going to be awhile before they make any.

Note2: The commercial hubs I was able to acquire and trade routes I was able to plunder have been of great help. In fact in the early war I had a scout who wandered from one mine to the next pillaging for 100+ science before the main army finally caught up with him. In the one game I’ve played Mali was REALLY easy to roll. With the production malus, I’d wager it’s repeatable.

 

[ExemplarVoss]

To be fair, Mali as AI and Mali as Player are two entirely unrelated beasts. The underperforming AI isn't going to manage the gold and faith farms correctly. That's honestly a given with the AI we have.

 

[BarbarianHunter]

To be fair, Mali as AI and Mali as Player are two entirely unrelated beasts. The underperforming AI isn't going to manage the gold and faith farms correctly. That's honestly a given with the AI we have.

So the early game AI Mali is ultraweak and the human late game Mali is uberOP. Why does this make sense to me?

 

[pgm123]

To be fair, this strategy is available pretty late in the game, and it doesn‘t make Mali *that* much OP. We all knew that if Mali is allowed to survive the early game, it would be a beast. Still, it‘s a surprise that the beast is that large. Would be funny if the AI could make use of this (on Intention or unintended)

You also need a specific city state to be in your game (and unconquered). A cost of zero is definitely an error, though.

 

[UWHabs]

They could probably get very similar with Theocracy and faith-buying, which would come a little bit earlier, although you still need the T3 military academy to actually do this, so it's not like you can spam them from every city. And the fact is, everyone else with that city state can get almost to that point, with unit prices down to the 25% mark from default, which is not insanely different.

 

[Archon_Wing]

That CS bonus has always been there. It was under Carthage and I guess they didn't take in account Mali. You could always get units for almost nothing, but Malian bonus makes it possible to get it for literally nothing which obviously should change.

Of course, the CS itself is really strong, but you can't rely on it appearing every game.