Nadin Bytefelt said:
hi
The engineer specialist produce a Great person a Engineer (normal worker in your Mod) not a Great Engineer.
this is not a strong balance issue in the current version of the mod 0.23.
since Genetic Screening is available as a Special non-time expiring civic from the start of the game, most players will use this civic the entire game.
the game play pattern I developed for myself was to create ALL eng specialists for my workers unless there is a tile which is a flood plain or resource tile. (for a non Moon-map version of the game, my workers also worked hill tiles.)
a city will max out around pop nine or ten unless having one of the above tiles.
as a city starts to max out around pop nine or ten I slowly switch the eng specialists to artist, scientist or merchant specialists as enough hammers now come from powered manufacturing plants.
so for my "developing" cities any great persons produced are always engineers. from the perspective of game balance, the relative lack of power for the engineer GP unit reflects the fact the city is still developing.
however I will admit a mere engineer unit is too lowly a unit to provide any real help to the gamer, so there is a balance issue here that needs to be addressed.
my proposed fix to this Great Engineer GP balance issue is to for the created unit to be a slightly more powerful version of the military engineer who does not found a new tech like other GP's, but functions like the standard engineer worker - maybe with a power level of five?
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in my more advanced cities where the population has maxed out and no more significant improvements are left, I use artists, scientists, or merchants as the specialists.
there is a different balance issue here that needs to addressed.
artist and scientist specialists max out at four, but merchant specialists max out at only two. this limitation is felt most when the tech tree is ended as merchant specs are needed to generate income coin.
my proposed fix to this balance issue using the current improvements available is for the digital stock exchange to add the possibility of two more merchant specialists.
an alternative is to add another merchant type of improvement such as a grocer or supermarket (or both) that provide the opportunity to add merchant specialists.
four artist specialists are only available in a non Moon-map based version of the game where a Wonder creates a free theatre that can be duplicated. a fix to this is to disallow such duplicate buildings and create a new tech or two that adds the ability to create up to four artists. perhaps this could also be implemented as a civic, but preferably not a "special" civic since Genetic Screening is a must.