elprofesor
Pluri-editing poster
I've posted this idea before in unrelated topics, and since people seemed to like it, I'll post it here to for discussion. It's about SP costs linked to number of cities owned, and exploits linked to it.
When the game was released, a possible exploit was to play using a massive empire, and when it accumulated a lot of culture, and right before getting the new SP, you'd sell/raze all your cities but your capital, and you would end up with way cheaper SPs, and a lot of culture to spend, thus making cultural victory exceedingly easy.
The devs chose to lind SP costs to the maximum number of cities EVER owned, to avoid this exploit. It does have a negative impact for the player, should he lose a certain number of cities for a valid reason.
Another, maybe better, solution (which isn't the one I want to expose), would be to reduce to 0 the amount of culture accumulated after adquiring a SP. This would avoid the exploit, the player would still usually benefit from reduced SP costs should he lose a city for valid reason (less so if losing a lot of cities), plus would make the "policy saving ban" a useless thing from the past, allowing a margin of error when timing techs for unlocking new SP branches.
My proposal:
The number of cities you currently own should affect the cpt for SPs adquisition, instead of the SP costs. For example, if you have 4 cities, instead of increasing SP costs to 8/5 of the normal cost, lower the cpt produced by your empire to 5/8 of the usual (no need to slow down hex adquisitions, though). This way, it takes just as much culture to get a SP if you don't settle/annex a city in between two adquisitions.
The advantages provided by this other formula are mainly 2:
-it can't be exploited for easy cultural victories (I think). If you try to do the previously mentioned exploit, you will end up with just about as many turns to get your next SP, since you will have reduced your cpt penalty, but you will also have reduced your total cpt produced (since you've just lost most of your empire); and you'll meet with the nasty secondary effect of having lost all your gpt and beakers too.
-it wouldn't be much of an issue to settle your first cities just before you get a SP. Right now, if you do it, the SP cost will rise just as much as if you had settled the city just after your last SP adquisition, but you won't have produced as much culture, since you didn't settle the city back then. With the other formula, the SP cost will stay the same, only your cpt will be reduced, thus the extra waiting time would be less important.
tl;dr actual_cpt = cpt / penalty(n)
instead of: actual_SP_cost = SP_cost*penalty(n_max),
where n is the number of cities owned, and n_max is the maximum number of cities ever owned;
this formula seems better (?) and not exploitable (?).
So that's what I thought. I'd like to hear if there is a way to exploit it, or if you can think of another reason why Firaxis didn't model the cultural per city penalty this way. Or just say whatever you think about this.
When the game was released, a possible exploit was to play using a massive empire, and when it accumulated a lot of culture, and right before getting the new SP, you'd sell/raze all your cities but your capital, and you would end up with way cheaper SPs, and a lot of culture to spend, thus making cultural victory exceedingly easy.
The devs chose to lind SP costs to the maximum number of cities EVER owned, to avoid this exploit. It does have a negative impact for the player, should he lose a certain number of cities for a valid reason.
Another, maybe better, solution (which isn't the one I want to expose), would be to reduce to 0 the amount of culture accumulated after adquiring a SP. This would avoid the exploit, the player would still usually benefit from reduced SP costs should he lose a city for valid reason (less so if losing a lot of cities), plus would make the "policy saving ban" a useless thing from the past, allowing a margin of error when timing techs for unlocking new SP branches.
My proposal:
The number of cities you currently own should affect the cpt for SPs adquisition, instead of the SP costs. For example, if you have 4 cities, instead of increasing SP costs to 8/5 of the normal cost, lower the cpt produced by your empire to 5/8 of the usual (no need to slow down hex adquisitions, though). This way, it takes just as much culture to get a SP if you don't settle/annex a city in between two adquisitions.
The advantages provided by this other formula are mainly 2:
-it can't be exploited for easy cultural victories (I think). If you try to do the previously mentioned exploit, you will end up with just about as many turns to get your next SP, since you will have reduced your cpt penalty, but you will also have reduced your total cpt produced (since you've just lost most of your empire); and you'll meet with the nasty secondary effect of having lost all your gpt and beakers too.
-it wouldn't be much of an issue to settle your first cities just before you get a SP. Right now, if you do it, the SP cost will rise just as much as if you had settled the city just after your last SP adquisition, but you won't have produced as much culture, since you didn't settle the city back then. With the other formula, the SP cost will stay the same, only your cpt will be reduced, thus the extra waiting time would be less important.
tl;dr actual_cpt = cpt / penalty(n)
instead of: actual_SP_cost = SP_cost*penalty(n_max),
where n is the number of cities owned, and n_max is the maximum number of cities ever owned;
this formula seems better (?) and not exploitable (?).
So that's what I thought. I'd like to hear if there is a way to exploit it, or if you can think of another reason why Firaxis didn't model the cultural per city penalty this way. Or just say whatever you think about this.
