Tourism is Broken; How to Fix it?

[JohnS]

I personally think the current situation is fine - every yield doesn't have to have an immediate effect, surely? I'm fine with tourism only having an effect later, it adds variety to the eras and makes sense thematically (as much as tourism victory makes sense at all... but we've discussed that and possible renaming in other threads). Just think of tourism sources as culture sources, up until your ideology choice.

I also dislike the idea of adding extra effects to tourism. I like to think of early tourism as a risky strategy - if you can survive with the less resources invested in other areas, you're gonna have a head start later, both in hos much you've built up and how high your income is (plus theeming will be easier). I think making tourism optional increases the number of possible strategies - if we add extra bonuses, then tourism will slowly become less optional (since we need to balance around those bonuses) and then possibly less interesting.

Like any choice, this tourism comes at a sacrifice--in this case, he's producing obscene amounts of happiness, culture, faith, and tourism at the cost of science. The game allows him to do this, but does not reward him for what should be a clear-cut success.

I'm not sure I see the issue here - why should this be a clear-cut success? This to me sounds like someone sat down and played the game without reading the rules for tourism - and became SHOCKED when seeing that their precious tourism wasn't doing anything, even though nothing in the game signaled that it would have an effect. The strategy simply wasn't as good as your friend suspected, and I don't see why we should reward high numbers if they're clearly marked as "not useful yet - increase at your own peril".

That is certainly one way to go, just like spies don't show up until renaissance tourism could be delayed until industrial era.

So the yield wouldn't gather up until someone got their first ideology or something? I'm not sure what the effects would be of that - what would be some of the pros and cons?

 

[mitsho]

Agree with JohnS completely, but in regard to the question just above:

Great Works would still give tourism. Their 2 tourism isn't the world as there are few(ish) of those and every civ can get around the same of those. You will not reach big numbers just from tourism of those areas. What makes those beliefs "unbalanced" is that they allow you to gather quite a lot of the yield in a way that is unintended (it's cyclic like in the op described). That tells me we should change those (or make these tourism beliefs part of the reformation ones and available only later on), not to make big changes to tourism...

Going to ideas mode, one section of the game that loses value are religious city states, if we want to boost tourism, we could do this by linking them somehow?

 

[Gothic_Empire]

I'm not sure I see the issue here - why should this be a clear-cut success? This to me sounds like someone sat down and played the game without reading the rules for tourism - and became SHOCKED when seeing that their precious tourism wasn't doing anything, even though nothing in the game signaled that it would have an effect. The strategy simply wasn't as good as your friend suspected, and I don't see why we should reward high numbers if they're clearly marked as "not useful yet - increase at your own peril".

It's a clear cut success because he set out to produce a lot of tourism and then did. Your sarcasm, incidentally, was unwarranted.

There's a *lot* of early tourism in the game, especially considering it has no real use, and potentially has no real use in the late game--I've been in games where literally everyone picked Order as their ideology, or else were defeated before ideology. With no chance of city flipping, tourism literally produces nothing. Even with a chance to flip a city, there's no way for either side to gauge when this will happen.

Tourism is not marked clearly as a late game mechanic, incidentally. There are both classic era wonders and ancient era wonders that produce tourism; there are also buildings in the ancient era that can produce tourism.

Like I keep saying, the problem isn't that my friend picked a dubious strategy (we got a few more turns in and he's catching up in science while still producing new cities; I suspect he found a city with high potential for his spy.) The problem is that his strategy has high-lighted a flaw in the tourism currency; producing tons of tourism is never useful; it exists only as a win mechanic.

At the risk of repeating myself, any other currency in the game produces some other result than winning, and then is combined with the other currencies to actually win. Tourism interacts with nothing, but is rather the product of effort. That effort serves only to fill a very, very large barrel, and the only reward for filling the barrel is that you might win, maybe, if you fill it fast enough. While this is true for all of the currencies, they reward you with fun gameplay mechanics all the while you're accumulating the currencies; gold and faith buys units and buildings; production creates wonders, projects, units, and buildings; food produces everything; beakers unlock new things to produce new currencies with.

All of the other currencies can be used to produce tourism (including military experience points, since you can steal great works during conquest) but tourism cannot be used to produce anything, and having a high tourism per turn does not provide any advantage except in a very specific set of circumstances. You either have enough tourism to win, or do not. There is nothing to produce with it, nothing to unlock, nothing to earn.

If tourism even added a positive modifier to trade routes from cities with high tourism output, it would feel useful. In fact, I like that idea; it fits thematically with tourism as a word, rewards theming bonuses, and retains the passive feel of tourism.

 

[Gothic_Empire]

Going to ideas mode, one section of the game that loses value are religious city states, if we want to boost tourism, we could do this by linking them somehow?

I'm open minded to changing how we produce tourism.

But I'm confused as to why, as a gamer, I should choose tourism over the other peaceful victory methods. What makes tourism fun?

 

[JohnS]

Your sarcasm, incidentally, was unwarranted.

Fair enough, sorry.

What makes tourism fun?

Let's keep the tourism yield separate from the tourism system. Yes, the tourism *yield* itself is just a number that eventually lets you win (mainly). The tourism *system* consists of Great Works, Great People, wonders, religion and much more, and (key point) almost all tourism generators have other benefits (mainly culture).

That's the key - I can accept that the tourism yield itself is pointless for many players much of the time, but by generating tourism you're also generating other things that help you win. I have a hard time grasping the notion that tourism is pointless, when everything that generates tourism also generates culture by the bucketload. If it helps, don't think of Great Works as tourism generators with culture on the side, think of them as culture generators with some tourism on the side.

I would see your point if the tourism system was just a set of Great Works etc that did nothing but generate a yield that eventually let you win. But now the Great Works etc do other stuff too.

Let's do a thought experiment - let's say that Great Works etc only produced tourism, no culture. But also that each point of tourism a city generated gave one point of culture. That would be mechanically identical to what's happening now (if we made sure that modifiers worked in the right order etc), but would give the impression that it's the tourism *yield* at work, giving us the culture. Then tourism would have an effect - would this be okay for you? Tourism would be visibly strong, but nothing would change gameplay wise. Personally I think the current situation, though mechanically identical, makes more sense and is more intuitive.

I think most of us accept that the tourism yield is mainly spaceship parts that we can start constructing very early, and that this is not a problem. Tourism is not fun because of the number at the top of my screen, but from the wheeling and dealing with Great People, spreading my religion and negotiating open borders, and all the other small parts that interlock with the tourism system.

Is tourism fun? The number isn't, but everything around it is.

 

[EricB]

Another advantage of great works is that they can be moved from city to city. You can move that great work to a border city where you are trying to expand your borders more rapidly, or you can concentrate them in one city for culture multipliers.

 

[Gothic_Empire]

Fair enough, sorry.

谢谢 ~ Thanks

Let's keep the tourism yield separate from the tourism system. Yes, the tourism *yield* itself is just a number that eventually lets you win (mainly). The tourism *system* consists of Great Works, Great People, wonders, religion and much more, and (key point) almost all tourism generators have other benefits (mainly culture).

That's the key - I can accept that the tourism yield itself is pointless for many players much of the time, but by generating tourism you're also generating other things that help you win. I have a hard time grasping the notion that tourism is pointless, when everything that generates tourism also generates culture by the bucketload. If it helps, don't think of Great Works as tourism generators with culture on the side, think of them as culture generators with some tourism on the side.

I would see your point if the tourism system was just a set of Great Works etc that did nothing but generate a yield that eventually let you win. But now the Great Works etc do other stuff too.

Let's do a thought experiment - let's say that Great Works etc only produced tourism, no culture. But also that each point of tourism a city generated gave one point of culture. That would be mechanically identical to what's happening now (if we made sure that modifiers worked in the right order etc), but would give the impression that it's the tourism *yield* at work, giving us the culture. Then tourism would have an effect - would this be okay for you? Tourism would be visibly strong, but nothing would change gameplay wise. Personally I think the current situation, though mechanically identical, makes more sense and is more intuitive.

I think most of us accept that the tourism yield is mainly spaceship parts that we can start constructing very early, and that this is not a problem. Tourism is not fun because of the number at the top of my screen, but from the wheeling and dealing with Great People, spreading my religion and negotiating open borders, and all the other small parts that interlock with the tourism system.

Is tourism fun? The number isn't, but everything around it is.

That makes me see your perspective on this a lot easier for me to see; thanks. Tourism is just a measurement of how much of your culture influences the other civs. I buy that.

Where I stumble, then, is what benefit is there to having culturally influenced / dominated another civ, but not having won the game? Inversely, what if there was a benefit to being culturally dominated?

My criticism would apply to space-ship parts, except that's a bit more like rushing to build a wonder, which is already appropriately tense.

I'm still keen on adding a small modifier to trade routes coming out of tourism hubs. It makes sense, and helps mitigate the idea that tourism = spaceship parts you start working on in the ancient era.

 

[Gothic_Empire]

Another advantage of great works is that they can be moved from city to city. You can move that great work to a border city where you are trying to expand your borders more rapidly, or you can concentrate them in one city for culture multipliers.

Derail: Russian Kreposts + Religious Borders + Tradition. Absolutely insane. It's like watching a water-balloon fill up.

 

[Stalker0]

I personally think the current situation is fine - every yield doesn't have to have an immediate effect, surely?

I think this sums up the crux of the debate. Until now in civ 5, every yield provides a benefit in relative short order. We have not had a yield that you were expected to bank for scores of turns before any benefit manifested.

So...are we okay with that, or does it warrant a change?

 

[Gothic_Empire]

I think this sums up the crux of the debate. Until now in civ 5, every yield provides a benefit in relative short order. We have not had a yield that you were expected to bank for scores of turns before any benefit manifested.

So...are we okay with that, or does it warrant a change?

This, exactly. And I think the spirit of tourism being a long-term investment is something we want to preserve if we change it. I really want to campaign for tourism as a trade-route buff, especially since moving GW around cities is such an active manipulation of culture. Having high tourism spots get trade route buffs would be a decent way to capitalize actively on where your enemies have sent their latest trade routes, too, since (at least in MP--not sure if the AI does this) it's fairly easy to figure out where the East India Company / Colossus / Petra is and simply deprive them of the extra gold.

Tourism becomes a bit more active this way, and it ties together commerce and tourism in a natural way.

 

[ExpiredReign]

I think Stalker0 hit the nail on the head. 'Tourism', at least as the game defines it, is simply a value assigned to reflect the inherent "pull" this Great Work etc. will have on people.

Think of it this way. Do we imagine any of the great artisans of old actually made their masterpieces because they would become tourist attractions? No.

The tourism attraction only becomes evident after tourism becomes commonplace.

So if we just let the whole 'tourism value' accumulate in the background, what harm is done?

To any who might counter this by saying "But we know which way to produce the most tourism and thus gain an advantage in the later game.". I will simply say: this is a game.

 

[kruszelnicki]

Tourism is IMO the worst feature of BNW.
I don’t see the reasoning behind separating culture and tourism. I wish they had just adjusted the mechanic so that culture could act offensively (flipping tiles, cities) like in Civ4, and if needed, investigated additional avenues for culture generation.

 

[Naeven]

I have mixed feelings about Tourism. Best point so far is that Tourism is only perceived much differently than culture, since most sources give both. But that raises the question, why are they different yields at all? If we only want Tourism to be a rarer version of culture "filling the barrel", surely culture mechanics could do this equally.
I like that they are separated, but I do think that currently their functions are not separated enough to justify 2 yields. Sure, tourism other than filling the barrel affects a diplomatic minigame that culture don't. But this kinda falls short on the first point, that Tourism is only perceived differently. In mechanics culture indirectly affect the same diplomatic minigame equally. If tourism should only be perceived differently, what the point of having it?

This is why I think tourism needs something more to reward during it's accumulation. The alternative would be to either split the culture & tourism generation from each other or combine them totally. I think both of these are lesser alternatives that changes CEP to much from vanilla.

I'm not sure what to give tourism, but tile flipping &/or extra trade route gold could work. We don't need to give it much, just something that sets it apart from culture.

 

[mitsho]

Tourism is much more affected by modifiers, so the difference lies mostly in the generation. You get culture from the start, while tourism is supposed to catch-up later on, so it has higher per turns.

You can't merge that or you lose the "race" of catching up. Maybe Tourism should be more like the slider in civ4 so it's an active decision by the player how much he wants to generate to "catch up onto the other players".

@Gothic Empire What makes Tourism fun is the experience of creating new works, the flavour of seeing or hearing them all for the first time. Gameplay wise, it's that Tourism is a puzzle that you can solve in so many ways as opposed to science (build spaceship) or diplo (buy city states). I'd rather fix diplo by the way, seems more broken than tourism victory...

You can solve the puzzle as your friend did above, his way just started quite early and thus actively chose not to get contemporary benefits. But you can also go high religion, you cand go beeline archaeology, you can conquer your way to it, you can...

Tourism in the end is just a displayed number, it's not a "yield" per se, we don't need another one of those to spend on, the game is sufficiently complex without it.

What might solve the "display issue" may be a system like civ3's palace or civ2's throne room. A totally flavour thing that lets you chose stuff when you reach those tourism levels to give the player the illusion of a reward?

 

[Qwynn]

I don't know if tourism is broken, per say, but I would have to disagree that early game tourism is worthless.

Mind you, I don't play online, and the AI can be a little (a lot) silly at times, but deciding to produce tourism (and thus culture) early means I'll often win culture victories before I even reach the industrial era, assuming I survive. This is especially true for an old world start map, but even on the continents style, my tourism production is so high that even after meeting another civ in the mid-game, I'll dominate them quickly, especially if I choose to bomb them with musicians (which at that point I often have sitting around since I don't have enough great work of music slots available).

Build tall with egypt, get the cultural/economic/tourism wonders (and the first religion unless Celts/Ethiopia are on the map), and cherry pick my religion just makes everything boom, especially when I start spreading said religion.

Personally, I like it, but it plays well with my playstyle, so that could be why.

The point is, I don't think tourism really needs anything else attached to it. That said, I wouldn't be opposed to allowing excessive amounts of tourism to flip cities before ideologies come up. Perhaps only after you've become influential, and being dominate increases the chance?

I also think the AI needs to be smarter, but that's for another thread.

 

[Gothic_Empire]

@Gothic Empire What makes Tourism fun is the experience of creating new works, the flavour of seeing or hearing them all for the first time. Gameplay wise, it's that Tourism is a puzzle that you can solve in so many ways as opposed to science (build spaceship) or diplo (buy city states). I'd rather fix diplo by the way, seems more broken than tourism victory...

The flavor of Civ V has always been great; it's a replayability issue, though, if the mechanic depends on 17th century paintings to make it fun. At the very least, tourism should bring an economic boon, as it often does in real life.

I'm not sure what you mean about Tourism being a puzzle, though. It seems largely unmysterious to me.

If tourism and diplomacy interacted more, that'd be nice, too, incidentally.

 

[griffer13524]

I have no problem with tourism being a late game mechanic myself--after all, tourism itself is a result of civilizations having the capacity for long range travel, but in agreement with @Qwynn above (and @Gothic Empire too) I think tourism can be accumulated too fast, and too early. I mean, if I set my sights on a cultural victory, and cherry pick religion/wonders as necessary, it is really damn easy to have a culture victory in the bag by the modern era.

It could just be weak AI, but I'd rather see tourism rates start lower, and then have them ramp up later in the game, with buildings like the broadcast towers, airports and hotels giving multipliers. It would also be nice if it would have some diplomatic effect--improving relations with other civs as you become more influential on them.

It would also be nice for late game tourism to do more than city flip on occasion. Maybe stealing great people (in the sense of brain drain) or even population (immigration between civs is something which has never been reflected well, but is definitely a real world concern).

If tourism is broken, it's not broken in the sense Gothic Empire intended. It's broken because early tourism is too easy to accumulate, in my opinion, making this probably the easiest victory condition. I would argue that, at the moment, it isn't late game enough.

 

[Gothic_Empire]

@Griffer13numbers,

In multiplayer, a cultural victory is obscenely hard compared to single player. =) I think that might be where my perspective comes from, at least a bit.

If anyone cares about the game between me and my friend, he was producing 150 culture per turn at around year 1700 (standard speed--wasn't keeping track of turn numbers), but was defending his territory with pikemen and crossbow men when I rolled into his lands with cavalry, cannons and riflemen.

His decentralized network of cities, 28 in number, were surprisingly sturdy, and burning them down didn't matter to him until I had destroyed so many cathedrals and pagodas that his tourism fell so far that he actually dropped from influential to popular with one of the AIs (by his account.)

That said, I was the only person who he hadn't won over. In single player, he would have won a cultural victory easily fifty turns prior to my invasion. It's only because I saw what he was doing and keeping track of his tourism output that I was able to start focusing on culture in self defense. I don't think the AI is smart enough to notice what reformation he picked, and then start relentlessly burning down his cities. He definitely had that game in the bag if I hadn't been playing, too.

That said, by his account, it was very frustrating to have a bunch of AIs who were somehow defeated by him, but to still have to deal with them DOWing him (I paid off Zulu and Attila bots to sic' him, and Inca bot asked me very, very nicely to declare conjoined war...). Basically, he felt as though his win mechanism was making him powerless, which is more or less what he said at the mid-game point.

That said, his ICS would have worked (on looking at the save file post-game) if he'd have leveraged his trade ships differently. He had the happiness to keep expanding, but he was dropping pop one cities one after the other and it killed his tech rate. If he'd been using trade ships to food them up to pop six or so before dropping a new city, and making sure the cities had libraries, I think his empire would have been terrifying, and only a few cities smaller.

TL;DR - My friend may have found a valid ICS strategy if he makes a few tweaks. Don't try to win culturally in multiplayer.

 

[Ahriman]

In multiplayer, a cultural victory is obscenely hard compared to single player. =) I think that might be where my perspective comes from, at least a bit.

We can't really balance for multiplayer, because in multiplayer there is nothing to stop human player A from invading human player B. Whereas in the core game, civs that are good friends and share an ideology are not going to invade you to stop you from winning a tourism victory, and AIs do not realize you are getting a tourism victory and make a concerted effort to increase their culture.

So multiplayer and singleplayer balance are inherently different, and my understanding is that this mod is trying to focus on the singleplayer experience, which is the focus of most civ players.

In single player, he would have won a cultural victory easily fifty turns prior to my invasion.

So it's probably best that we don't start adding additional economic benefits that make tourism even more powerful.

 

[Gothic_Empire]

We can't really balance for multiplayer, because in multiplayer there is nothing to stop human player A from invading human player B.

That's a massive non-sequitur. Also untrue. I've had someone march Legions to my border, get a peek at my defenses, and then march right past to the next player.

Also, many MP games mix humans and AI together.

So it's probably best that we don't start adding additional economic benefits that make tourism even more powerful.

I don't think I'm making my idea very clear.

I'm suggesting that high tourism in a specific city infer trade route benefits on that city--something like every ten or fifteen tourism is treated like a new resource in that city. This benefits the city owner, but also all of his potential enemies. It's also really easy to identify the high tourism output cities and avoid trading with them, if you're worried about the enemy's economy.

This would also allow players to take advantage of already established trade routes in a way that isn't currently possible. This would enhance the sense of economic warfare a bit, too, since there would be a more passive-aggressive option to taking advantage of trade routes than pillaging them / DOWing so that the ships and caravans get nommed.

While he tried a wide tourism win, It's far more common to have a City of Lights situation where one city is generating most of the tourism. It would easy to *not* trade to this city if it meant giving the enemy too much money, but much harder to avoid trading with a city that has a museum and a few GW thrown in to capitalize on a few already-established trade routes.

Tourism providing a trade route multiplier to incoming trade routes (perhaps treating every ten tourism as another resource in that city) would provide the critical short term benefit that is present in literally every other accumulated currency without being overpowered.

In the last game I played, though, this wouldn't actually have helped my friend win. He went wide, not tall, so there wouldn't have been much of a modifier he could have built up. But the important thing is that it would have thrown him a bone--some benefit to his focus on tourism other than "Well, you almost won."

Which consistently feels like, "Well, you almost won, but focusing on anything other than tourism is innately better, so you didn't win."

I've seen tourism referred to as a spaceship parts several times now. But spaceship parts are at the end of a tech chain that gives you at least a handful of military units that let you protect yourself. The guy who decides to play tourism against the guy who decides to play any other way loses by default, in my estimation.

Put it in these terms:

If I turn off tourism as a victory condition, what do I get for my tourism output? Why wouldn't I be better off popping all of my writers and artists for an immediate benefit, and how would the tourism I get for dropping them in a city be any different from the culture they're generating, too? There is no religious victory, but faith is inherently valuable--likewise food, production, culture and gold.

Musicians become akin to spaceship parts on a game where a Science victory is disabled. They're basically just monuments I can move between cities on a dime. Which is admittedly cool, but not nearly a big enough benefit to seek other than passively.

###

Tourism and City Flipping is where I see the real fun of the new currency, and makes tourism feel valuable *until* you're in a situation where you can't city flip anyone. What if spies in a non-capital city of a civ you're popular / influential / dominant with could attempt to put the city into revolt, and give a better way to target someone with city flipping (or an outright military coup).

This would two-fold make tourism much more dangerous and active across all eras, and give spies back a bit of their Civ IV flavor.

Naturally, we'd have to teach the AI how to do this.