What do people think about cargo ships being able to trade between cities connected by a river (maybe after a certain technology)? It makes a lot of sense to me thematically, since a lot of maritime transport throughout history was via river, not via ocean. But I'm not sure if this would be hard to implement or if people would want this.
Vox Populi Congress Proposal Workshop
- Thread starter Recursive
- Start date
-
- Tags
- vp congress
Sea and land caravans have different profitability ratios.
Such a river caravan is obviously not a sea caravan. But it is also not terrestrial. What yield modifier is needed? What to do with the range and speed of the caravan as technologies are discovered? Should a river be considered a road if faster travel by roads is opened? Or take into account only acceleration in the seas and oceans? This will make river caravans slower than land caravans in the late game.
The rivers are located between the tiles, if I'm not mistaken. Which tile will the caravan belong to, in order to take into account the possibility of automatic plunder by a unit standing on the shore? Or can a caravan be plundered from several tiles? What is the priority of looting if there is an enemy unit on one tile and a barbarian on the other? What if there is a third enemy unit nearby, but belonging to a different empire?
Besides, what about buying a naval trading unit in a non-coastal city? Land caravans can be purchased after building a caravanserai. Marine - after the construction of the harbor.
Is it necessary to introduce a third type of trading units? Create some kind of building for their purchase? Will there be confusion with sea and river caravans? After all, not all river cities have access to the ocean.
Such a river caravan is obviously not a sea caravan. But it is also not terrestrial. What yield modifier is needed? What to do with the range and speed of the caravan as technologies are discovered? Should a river be considered a road if faster travel by roads is opened? Or take into account only acceleration in the seas and oceans? This will make river caravans slower than land caravans in the late game.
The rivers are located between the tiles, if I'm not mistaken. Which tile will the caravan belong to, in order to take into account the possibility of automatic plunder by a unit standing on the shore? Or can a caravan be plundered from several tiles? What is the priority of looting if there is an enemy unit on one tile and a barbarian on the other? What if there is a third enemy unit nearby, but belonging to a different empire?
Besides, what about buying a naval trading unit in a non-coastal city? Land caravans can be purchased after building a caravanserai. Marine - after the construction of the harbor.
Is it necessary to introduce a third type of trading units? Create some kind of building for their purchase? Will there be confusion with sea and river caravans? After all, not all river cities have access to the ocean.
Quick question, what do you think about slightly nerfing: Goddess of the Home?
+25% Growth Rate seems too me a little bit too much.. maybe because i'm not the one usually able to get it
But looking at opponent city sizes around medieval, its pretty much obvious who took it, even without looking at their pantheon/religion.
In my opinion 10-15% would be sufficient.
The problem i'm seeing is that Salt monopoly gives you 10% food increase in all cities, so i don't understand why you can have, basically, basing on luck,
something that have the power of 2.5x monopoly from the start of the game. This bothers me from some time
Generally i kinda don't like the idea, that most pantheons basically don't scale into end game, and those that are, are very sought after, so if you are in the group of lucky few good for you, but rest are screwd..
There are many pantheons, that basically are never taken by AIs and i never took them even if i kinda had opportunity, like Earth Mother with +1 Faith and Culture from Mines on improved resources.
I would very much like to see them as via-able..
I think the pantheons should be a "weapon in battle for religion" and some additional yields, and don't have too amazing endgame scaling. (Or all have or none should imo)
Like every game i play lately basically those pantheons are taken first basically always, they just vary in order..
Ancestor Worship +1 Faith for every 4 Citizens in a city.
God of the Expanse +25% faster border growth
Goddess of the Home +25% Growth Rate
Which only theme they have in common, is that they very good scale into endgame, and have also very good instant boost.
Maybe it would be better to change it to something less impactful like
Ancestor Worship +1-2 Faith Scaling with era
God of the Expanse +1-2 Culture for border growth Scaling with Era
Goddess of the Home +1-2 Food Scaling with Era
Those values would be around 3-6 on medieval era, which should be impactful enough. Of course, static values can be somehow adjusted for balancing.
And few era later, would also give much more, but considering increase in yields for every tile/improvement it would be more negligible.
Those yields would slowly lose their power as civilization and cities grows, which would promote better decision making instead upfront better yield scalers..
+25% Growth Rate seems too me a little bit too much.. maybe because i'm not the one usually able to get it
But looking at opponent city sizes around medieval, its pretty much obvious who took it, even without looking at their pantheon/religion.
In my opinion 10-15% would be sufficient.
The problem i'm seeing is that Salt monopoly gives you 10% food increase in all cities, so i don't understand why you can have, basically, basing on luck,
something that have the power of 2.5x monopoly from the start of the game. This bothers me from some time
Generally i kinda don't like the idea, that most pantheons basically don't scale into end game, and those that are, are very sought after, so if you are in the group of lucky few good for you, but rest are screwd..
There are many pantheons, that basically are never taken by AIs and i never took them even if i kinda had opportunity, like Earth Mother with +1 Faith and Culture from Mines on improved resources.
I would very much like to see them as via-able..
I think the pantheons should be a "weapon in battle for religion" and some additional yields, and don't have too amazing endgame scaling. (Or all have or none should imo)
Like every game i play lately basically those pantheons are taken first basically always, they just vary in order..
Ancestor Worship +1 Faith for every 4 Citizens in a city.
God of the Expanse +25% faster border growth
Goddess of the Home +25% Growth Rate
Which only theme they have in common, is that they very good scale into endgame, and have also very good instant boost.
Maybe it would be better to change it to something less impactful like
Ancestor Worship +1-2 Faith Scaling with era
God of the Expanse +1-2 Culture for border growth Scaling with Era
Goddess of the Home +1-2 Food Scaling with Era
Those values would be around 3-6 on medieval era, which should be impactful enough. Of course, static values can be somehow adjusted for balancing.
And few era later, would also give much more, but considering increase in yields for every tile/improvement it would be more negligible.
Those yields would slowly lose their power as civilization and cities grows, which would promote better decision making instead upfront better yield scalers..
Last edited:
Anarcomu
King
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2022
- Messages
- 814
Idk, my preferred pantheons are God of war, God of Wisdom, Goddess of Protection. Some situational pantheons can be interesting, like God of the open sky, God of Springtime, or God of the Sea.
I hardly take something else, and Goddess of the Home is definitely not a pantheon I'd consider too strong.
I hardly take something else, and Goddess of the Home is definitely not a pantheon I'd consider too strong.
Thought I would throw out my own ideas for Tradition as well. The observation guiding my ideas is that Tradition is not very flexible, is quite brittle, has inconsistent strength in the early game, yet can be very strong in the late game if you can survive relatively intact. My ideas center around giving Tradition stronger earlier bonuses, better defensive options, yet weaker scaling. Essentially, my goal is to improve a Tradition player's odds of survival into the mid game but tone down their snowballing.
| Current | Proposed | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tradition Opener |
|
| Unchanged, as I think the opener is fine. The flat +5% growth in all cities could certainly be changed to a +2 food in all cities, though that overlaps with Fraternity in Progress. |
| Scaler |
|
| Changing the growth scaler to a flat food scaler makes the bonus stronger earlier but weaker later. Fealty's scaler could be changed to remove overlap. |
| Justice |
|
| The garrison requirement for the city RCS boost really only affects gameplay (at least for me) in a really annoying way, so I think it should be removed but the bonus increased quite a bit as well. Having the Guardhouse provide a tiny bit of supply will help a bit with Tall's supply woes without drastically changing anything. |
| Ceremony |
|
| The national wonder bonuses are really janky IMO, as they are pretty inconsequential and don't really change your build order or strategy at all. Instead, an Urbanization reduction in all cities should help Tradition players to make greater use out of specialists |
| Splendor |
|
| There are already so many yield on GP expends in the game, and this one is kind of unbalanced IMO because of the scaler. Instead, replace it with constant yields on specialists. This further incentivizes working specialists in non-capital cities, which I think is a good thing. |
| Majesty |
|
| The +25% GP generation is really quite strong, especially in the late game. However, it is pretty inconsequential in the early game. A one-time boost towards Great People and a free GWW help give you an immediate leg-up in GP generation, but won't scale. Extending the food bonus to all cities synergizes well with the Ceremony and Splendor changes. |
Last edited:
True, and I think that's what would make this an interesting mechanic. There should be some increased profitability of the river cargo ship, or it wouldn't have any advantage over the land caravan that could also be established. I think it makes sense since presumably it's easier to move cargo along a ship on the river than via road.
Good points that I'm interested in hearing what others think. My initial thoughts were that it should behave the same as a sea caravan in terms of yields but I hadn't thought about speed, but probably having it match the speed of sea cargo ships would make the most sense. It could be interesting to have the tradeoff between cargo ship yields and caravan speed, and it makes some sense in the late game since presumably a train is faster than a river freighter.
Yeah, I would say the fact that rivers are located between tiles is the biggest challenge. Presumably to be consistent with the rest of the game's logic the game would have to just pick one side of the river for the cargo ship to travel along, and this would be the side that it would be pillagable on. The logic being that if land units were trying to plunder cargo ships along a river, they would go to the side of the river that the ship was on and bombard it. Perhaps the cargo ships would travel along one side and come back along the other side. The UI would probably look odd unless there is some way to only have the ship appear on the edge of the tile where the river is. Though right now we have ships sitting on top of cities and coastal citadels/forts so maybe this isn't that big of a deal.
Good points. I don't think it's necessary to introduce a whole new trading unit, though open to other people's opinions. As for buying the unit, I can see two options. The first one, which seems a bit worse to me, is to let cities with a river build a harbor, even if they are landlocked. The trouble is that this building would be pretty bad since all of its other benefits would be useless to a landlocked city. The other idea is to add a new building (called something like Riverport or Moorage) that would allow for the purchase of cargo ships and give some small bonus to river tiles, like +1 gold. Maybe this building would be mutually exclusive with the harbor to prevent yield inflation, or maybe not. Open to other's ideas.
I think it is a bit of an odd pantheon. It's honestly kind of bad at the time you get it since (at least when I've taken it) it will very quickly lead to you developing unhappiness issues, which then negate the growth bonus completely. But as you say, it scales better into the end game than probably any other pantheon. +25% growth is a temple of Artemis, tradition opener, and salt monopoly combined, which once you have unhappiness under control, is never not amazing. Meanwhile the other pantheons are probably giving you +20 faith and +20 some other yield in the late game which is basically irrelevant. I think there could be a change to this pantheon to make it stronger initially and weaker later in the game.
I haven't kept up with the latest changes to caravans through Congress, but in earlier versions of VP, land caravans are more profitable than sea caravans, as strange as that may be. It is possible that such an anomaly still exists.
This was once an incentive to use land-based caravans because in vanilla, sea-based caravans had priority (in vanilla, sea-based caravans were more profitable). But given the incredible number of AI units on higher difficulties, it's almost pointless to send ground caravans through hostile territory.
That's just a weaker start. Now you need 5Rough Draft of Tradition Proposal partially inspired by @CAYM's Tradition Tweaks.
Current Proposed Rationale Tradition Opener
- +2
Food,
Citizen, and
Happiness in the Capital.
- +1
Culture in the Capital for every 2 Citizens.
- +5%
+2- +1
Urbanization Unhappiness in the Capital.
- +1
Science in the Capital for every 2 Citizens.
+5%- Earn 50
Great Person, scaling with Era.
Overall, you lose the early 2 Food, 2 free Citizens, and Happiness in the Capital in exchange for a total of 6 Free Citizens and 6 Urbanization Unhappiness (effectively happiness because you'll be working specialists right?) We add this Culture bonus for expending Great People since you can theoretically expend 2-3 Great People before you even get close to Splendor, what a missing out of yields! Scaler
- +1
- +3%
- +1
+1- +4%
We mitigated the Science bonus to the opener, but now every policy choice gives you a specialist that you can work without an unhappiness issue! Justice
- +1 Production in every City.
- Cities with a garrison gain +25%
Ranged Combat Strength.
- Royal Guardhouse (+3
Production, Engineer Slot, +2 Defense, +50 HP).
- +1
Cities with a garrison gain +25%- Royal Guardhouse (+3 Production, Engineer Slot, +3 Defense,
+50 HP, +15%It can be rather difficult to use the garrison bonus given how early it is in the game. Instead, we let the Royal Guardhouse make the Capital hit harder! Taking a Tradition Capital should be harder to do. We'll be moving the garrison bonus lower in the tree. Splendor
- Earn 50
- State Treasury (+4
Gold, Merchant Slot, +2
Earn 50- Cities with a garrison gain +25%
- State Treasury (+4
Inherit a part of Justice's bonus at a stage where it can be more used and that'll stack with Justice so the Capital can definitely be a heavy-hitter now. Majesty
- Specialists in the Capital consume half Food.
- Palace Gardens (+5
- Specialists in the Capital consume half Food.
- Palace Gardens (+5
-2 Urbanization Unhappiness)Since Tradition will be getting an overall -6 Urbanization Unhappiness when finishing it, the Palace Gardens will no longer need to provide this.
before taking Tradition to have +3 . Culture from GP doesn't matter until later.Justice is a pure nerf. +50 HP matters more than +15% city strike strength (technically even -10% since how often does your capital not have a garrison?)
Overall there's more science and population and you can work more specialists at the end, but the tree starts much slower.
I think the problem with Tradition is that it is too weak early on and too strong in the late game. Specifically:
- The growth scaler is unimpactful in small, underdeveloped cities, but very strong in the late game.
- Tradition's early game GP generation is of course quite good, but its late game GP generation is honestly a bit too good.
- Tradition has poor tools for defending itself and no tools for offensive war. I'm fine with the latter, but Justice is a very weak policy IMO and its defensive bonuses should be buffed. Tradition play is just too brittle to the point of making it less fun to play, IMO.
- If we're going to have an ancient-era tree that derives much of its strength from GPs, then we should lean into that identity to improve its early-game performance. As @Enginseer noted, most of Tradition's non-GP early game bonuses are just weaker/different versions of Progress'. That's lackluster design IMO. My proposal doesn't do the best job of addressing the overlap with Progress, but it does try to make the GP bonuses stronger, earlier, which I think is good.
- Tradition is too inflexible. Progress and Authority can go 5 cities or they can go 10. Tradition is practically hard-limited to 3-5. Increasing Tradition's strength range to 3-7 cities would make it a more interesting and dynamic tree. I think the best way to accomplish this is to maintain most of its focus on the Capital, but shift a bit of it away to satellite cities. In keeping with the GP theme of the tree, my proposal tries to shift power by making it easier and stronger to work specialists in non-capital cities while decreasing the rewards from actually generating a GP.
Last edited:
Rekk
Deity
- Joined
- Dec 9, 2017
- Messages
- 2,725
You're getting hung up on a model. Caravans replicate river trade just fine. There's even a bonus if the cities are on rivers.
Tekamthi
Deity
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2016
- Messages
- 2,005
Personally I just don't understand what the implementation would look like. There's no existing mechanism to put the unit art in the river between plots. I will say though thematically it has some value. Also rivers used to work kinda like this in old civ games, ie some boats could travel in them.
Only thing I can think of, would be to recreate the art that's used for a river downstream of Lake Victoria (ever notice these are bigger?), place it in middle of a plot as a feature, and then allow naval passage on these -- I will investigate whether the art can be reused this way, just out of curiosity if nothing else, but I suspect not... this is not quite the suggestion anyway
Tradition's "limit" to 3-5 cities is self-imposed though, I feel like part of the reason people play Tradition that way is because it feels like it should be right every time (and it was somewhat correct in vanilla), but often it isn't.
Isn't part of the reason the scaling can feel overly powerful because you aren't increasing costs from extra cities? So you're risking less territory/yields from the land for cheaper techs and policies. I think azum4roll hit it on the head in the Discord, "tall" (basically opting to stop expanding) has the problem, not Tradition necessarily.
Isn't part of the reason the scaling can feel overly powerful because you aren't increasing costs from extra cities? So you're risking less territory/yields from the land for cheaper techs and policies. I think azum4roll hit it on the head in the Discord, "tall" (basically opting to stop expanding) has the problem, not Tradition necessarily.
pineappledan
Deity
The unit model would have to travel in between tiles instead of on tiles in order to be on the river. There is nothing in the game that moves in the margins of the tiles instead of directly through the middle. Anything else would just look supremely janky, and be a significant downgrade from the existing caravans.
There is already a range and yield bonus for TRs that travel via river tiles. Anything more is completely DOA.
I think the 3-5 limit comes from unhappiness issues. 3 honestly seems too low but after about 5-6 cities on tradition I'm usually starting to dip below 50% happiness. By the time I get that up to the point where I could found another city, there are typically no cities to settle that aren't close enough to a neighbor to incite a war. And typically when going tradition I'm doing whatever I can to avoid a war in the ancient/classical/medieval eras.
I think tradition is more limited on cities because of low production. Authority and progress can pound out every building and get happiness under control while it is much hard for tradition.
On a side note what do people think about changing +2 pop to +x food where x is enough to go from 4 to 6 pop. It is pretty annoying to just miss pop 4 and can be a real pain with ruins on. I don't think many people are taking tradition as a second tree for it to matter otherwise?
On a side note what do people think about changing +2 pop to +x food where x is enough to go from 4 to 6 pop. It is pretty annoying to just miss pop 4 and can be a real pain with ruins on. I don't think many people are taking tradition as a second tree for it to matter otherwise?
It seems like the general consensus is no for river cargo ships because there would be no clean way to implement it, which is OK. I have another idea for a congress proposal that I'm interested in hearing people's opinions of.
Idea: Cultural domination should give +50% religious pressure.
Rationale:
Idea: Cultural domination should give +50% religious pressure.
Rationale:
- Military domination (i.e. vassalage) currently gives +100% religious pressure. In my opinion cultural domination should do the same thing, but to a lesser extent (the people are pressured by your now dominant culture to adopt your religion, rather than via military threat). If a civilization has completely adopted my culture, why do they not care about my religion?
- Religion benefits all civilizations, but there are no culture civ focused bonuses to religious pressure that I'm aware of. In contrast, military civs get the +100% religious pressure to vassals, and typically take Fealty and get the +50% religious pressure to foreign cities with other religions. Seems odd since I would think of warmongering civs as using aggressive proselytization with raw faith while a peaceful cultural civ would rely on word of mouth and the spread of culture to spread their religion. Diplomatic civs get the bonus religious pressure from their many trade routes. Scientific civs don't have a religious pressure bonus that I'm aware of, but it seems kind of thematically fitting that a scientific civ wouldn't prioritize converting others to their religion as much.
- Currently having a shared religion already gives a tourism bonus, and with the next congress it will scale by the number of converted cities. Therefore it would be too strong to give a bonus to religious pressure with lower levels of cultural influence, since this would create a positive feedback loop. But once your culture is dominant with a civilization, the tourism bonus from shared religion is irrelevant.
- I believe this would create a fun and unique mechanic to having a dominant culture. It feels like there should be some kind of special reward for maxing out your tourism with a civilization. But personally I never even notice my culture going from influential to dominant, because the small change in trade route and loss of unrest time bonuses are not really noticeable for a cultural civ. This could create a reason to try to reach dominant with other civilizations to overtake their religion with yours, helping you to spread your religion to other civs and get a small tourism bonus there, etc. I think it could be a fun mechanic with civs like Arabia or a cultural Byzantium.
Similar threads
