Vox Populi Congress Proposal Workshop

[Tekamthi]

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.

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.

missed the point.. the substance of my "alternative" would be to make a new, navigable river. Look at a river connected to lake victoria, the art is often different than normal river -- wider, etc. Somewhere in the game engine & database that alternative, wider river art exists; so we just recycle it into a proper feature, with the art in the middle of a plot instead of along its edge. Any standard feature can be made passable or impassable to specific units -- ie some small boats and cargo ship could use it.

Big IF on all of this though -- I know the features tables alright at this point and I've never seen any kind of art definition for anything to do with rivers at all... would have to find that first

 

[alchx]

1. 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.

Cultural influence bonuses are already there. Open the tourism tab and hover over the indicators, there will be a hint. There are very significant food bonuses if you send trade caravans. This means you need fewer internal caravans, and external caravans provide even more science and culture due to your influence. I don’t remember if there is additional religious pressure from the caravans.

+xx% population growth rate from caravan
-xx% spy installation time
-xx% spy mission time
-xx% population loss when capturing a city
-xx% city uprising time when captured

In addition, that empire may come to a point where imperial happiness will fall for some reason and cities will start uprisings, moving into your empire. But VP I don't remember seeing this, although in one game the Ottomans regularly dropped to 35% happiness for a very long time. Not a single Ottoman city rebelled. In vanilla, both my cities and the AI's cities were transferred to another empire several times due to rebellion or turned barbarian. It's possible that the ease of stabilizing happiness in VP prevents cities from rebelling, since vanilla requires a few turns of low happiness and then gives it time to stabilize. And only after this the cities rebel. In VP you can send a caravan from the city and get +science and +culture, which can easily remove 2-3 unhappiness. Or move a specialist from one slot to another.

 

[msw1]

I know that there are bonuses from cultural influence. I was just saying the jump from influential to dominant isn't very interesting despite dominant requiring another 100% influence and being the "max" influence. I don't think the extra +2 culture and science or so and extra 5-10% food per trade route from going from influential to dominant is going to be game changing. The point was moreso that in certain situations this feature could give a reason to a player going for a culture victory to try to achieve a dominant culture with certain civs. Right now I imagine most players just go for influential and then move on to bringing up the other civs to influential, since that is what you need to win.

 

[azum4roll]

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?

The only problem is the population is instant, while food takes 2 turns to grow the city.

 

[Alpharius]

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

+25% growth is a temple of Artemis, tradition opener, and salt monopoly combined, which once you have unhappiness under control, is never not amazing.

That doesn't sound right? Temple of Artemis and Salt Monopoly is still better, I think. %Food is significantly stronger than Growth. If anything, Goddess of the Home may need a slight buff.

IIRC, %Growth bonuses apply after calculating Food consumed by Citizens and Specialists. %Food bonuses are added before. Could anyone confirm if I'm misremembering?

 

[statusquo]

That doesn't sound right? Temple of Artemis and Salt Monopoly is still better, I think. %Food is significantly stronger than Growth. If anything, Goddess of the Home may need a slight buff.

You killed me with this, now i have to do extensive testing xD

 

[azum4roll]

%Food can help with working specialists. You don't have to grow to benefit from it.

%Growth only benefits population growth.

 

[statusquo]

%Food can help with working specialists. You don't have to grow to benefit from it.
%Growth only benefits population growth.

Maybe i'm sleepy, maybe i'm not-wise , but lets assume in a moment im just tired, can You explain in more detail? Like with some example?
I did some quick excel, to understand the correct formula, and honestly i still dont know:

I did fast game with Ghandi, for insta Pantheon, and starting from classical, so that i got insta 2 policies+tech, just enough to build Temple of Artemis.
On map, where i got easily salt monopoly, and got this.
I mean, the closest to my understanding is version, where both work the same. But from show values, seems i'm still missing some factor.
But from what you told, it seems increase food works on base, while growth only on excess? Like @Alpharius said.

Can you explain then, why excess before eaten shows 6 not 4? (There were no specialists, to be clear)
Ah, and also, i did look at food before and after i hit to get monopoly, and food from terrain increased from 10 to 11.. Why from terrain?
EDIT: Ok, i know how, i locked all tiles and blocked city growth, but my settler was on desert salt with 1 turn before salt improvement, so
then i clicked to finish and get monopoly, tile gain 1 food I was tired

So the misc modifiers, influence really the Base? so those three procent upper values.
So the order isn't random, meaning only those procents below "excess" apply to excess?

Am i understand correctly.. if you then play on deity, and have problems with happiness, then basically you wont utilize %growth from Goddess of Home Early Game?
Since happiness cripple your food, and low food cripples your excess any way..

I'm sorry for so much questions, but it seems like didn't correctly understood some absolutely crucial things about such trivial thing like food and growth

Hmm, but wouldn't changing %growth to flat growth, buff early game? Since early game you struggle for happiness and excess values are not that impressive any way?

 

[msw1]

That doesn't sound right? Temple of Artemis and Salt Monopoly is still better, I think. %Food is significantly stronger than Growth. If anything, Goddess of the Home may need a slight buff.

IIRC, %Growth bonuses apply after calculating Food consumed by Citizens and Specialists. %Food bonuses are added before. Could anyone confirm if I'm misremembering?

Ah, I didn't know that. That makes a lot more sense.

 

[Anarcomu]

Food bonuses all applies before consumption, and are additive between themselves. When food produced is calculated, it is reduced by consumption (population + specialists). Then, all growth bonuses applies to the rest, and are additive between themselves too. However, food bonuses and growth bonuses are multiplicative between them. You want to diversify your bonuses.

Lets assume you produce 30 food in a 10 pop city without specialist, with two +10% food and a +25% growth.

Calculation :

• Base food is 30
• Food after bonus is 30 * (1 + 0.1 + 0.1) = 36
• Food after consumption is 36 - 10 * 2 = 16
• Final growth is 16 * (1 + 0.25) = 20

Each turn, you city progress 20 food towards its next citizen.

 

[Anarcomu]

@statusquo looking at your example :

• Base food : 12
• Food bonuses : 10 + 10 + 3 = 23%
• Consumption : 8
• Growth : 8 + 25 + 4 = 37%

Calculation : (12 * (1 + 0.23) - 8) * (1 + 0.37) = 9.2612, rounded to 9.26

 

[statusquo]

@statusquo looking at your example :

Thanks. It seems i was assuming Base-Eaten comes first then apply %Food, while in fact
Base+%Food comes first then apply Eaten, now everything makes sense again !!
So in fact, it seems i assume two things wrongly in the formula that had 3 variables XD
Cant wait new game if this will translate for me to bigger cities, since i was kinda struggling to keep up with AIs, and didn't really understood why xD

PS. Kinda have taste for playing India now, seems op

Just to not throw my work to trash, maybe it will be informative also for somebody else:

 

[pineappledan]

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	+2 Food, Citizen, and Happiness in the Capital. +1 Culture in the Capital for every 2 Citizens. +5% Growth in all Cities.	+2 Food, Citizen, and Happiness in the Capital. +1 Culture in the Capital for every 2 Citizens. +5% Growth in all Cities.	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	+1 Science in the Capital. +3% Growth in all Cities.	+1 Science in the Capital. +1 Food in all Cities. +3% Growth in all Cities.	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	+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 Production in every City. Cities gain +50% Ranged Combat Strength. Royal Guardhouse (+3 Production, Engineer Slot, +2 Defense, +50 HP, +1 Supply).	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	+1 happiness from National Wonders with Building Requirements +25% production towards National Wonders with Building Requirements Court Astrologer (+3 science, +1 science to all Councils, Smokehouses, and Herbalists, Scientist Slot)	+1 happiness from National Wonders with Building Requirements +25% production towards National Wonders with Building Requirements -2 Unhappiness from Urbanization in all cities. Court Astrologer (+3 science, +1 science to all Councils, Smokehouses, and Herbalists, Scientist Slot)	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	Earn 50 Culture when you expend a Great Person, scaling with Era. State Treasury (+4 Gold, Merchant Slot, +2 Culture to Monuments, Gardens, and Baths)	Earn 50 Culture when you expend a Great Person, scaling with Era. Specialists in all cities gain +1 Culture. State Treasury (+4 Gold, Merchant Slot, +2 Culture to Monuments, Gardens, and Baths)	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	Specialists in the Capital consume half Food. Palace Gardens (+5 Food, Writer Slot, +25% Great People Generation, -2 Urbanization Unhappiness)	Specialists in the Capital consume half Food, -1 food in all other cities. +50 points towards all Great People in the Capital. Palace Gardens (+5 Food, Writer Slot, 1 Great Work of Writing Slot with a pre-built Great Work of Writing, +25% Great People Generation, -2 Urbanization Unhappiness)	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.

I’ve tuned out most of this discussion but I just want to say I dislike pretty much all of this.

You’re proposing to just copy the scaler from Fealty and copy 3 different abilities from Artistry without changing those other trees. If your solution to every balance problem is just to remove unique features and make policies do fewer unique things then I guess you’ll get there some day; perfect balance will be achieved once all of the policies give the same bonuses.

I have said it a million times before. The problem is not tradition being too weak. The other two ancient trees are too strong. You’re overtaking the medieval trees by addressing power creep with more power creep. In this case that’s quite literal, because you are just pulling parts off the medieval trees and sticking them on Tradition.

 

[pineappledan]

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:

1. 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?
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

As you say in point 3, Converting a civ to your religion already gives a tourism modifier. Also giving a religious pressure modifier for tourism influence would be circular. You’re knowingly proposing we implement a %-based positive feedback loop.

 

[CppMaster]

The problem is not tradition being too weak. The other two ancient trees are too strong.

Isn't it the same?

 

[Anarcomu]

Those policies are still pickable in the later part of the game, buffing tradition to match Authority and Progress also makes later policies less attractive, which may or may not be desirable. You might need to buff medieval trees to make them competitive with ancient ones ; in the end, you will be balancing 4 trees instead of just 2.

 

[ma_kuh]

I think in an ideal world the Ancient policy trees would mainly be geared towards up-front bonuses and bridging the gap between early-game and mid-game. I don't think you should be picking your "win condition" in the Ancient era, so having significant scaling at this stage of the game isn't really something I'm interested in. That includes the MASSIVE border and food growth from Tradition, the population birth and building scaling from Progress, and the kill and border expansion scaling on Authority. I think these are all generally fine for the Ancient and Classical eras but honestly shouldn't be era scaling.

In fact, that's one of the main reasons I liked keeping the Garrison bonus on Authority, and not adding it to Imperialism. When you enter Industrial, you ARE choosing your win condition, so knowing that you want full-military aggression is right for this stage. In the Ancient era, you may want to focus on building units for other reasons, but if you get a garrison bonus, you have a use for those units between wars/barb hunts, which is way healthier than trying to tune on-kill effects based on how many people are hunting barbarians in your neighborhood.

One thing I liked about Civ6 is that their policies obsolete (which might be unpopular, I don't know), which has the specific effect that once you move past a certain era, your strategy doesn't need to continue hinging on that previous choice. You can pivot in a new direction. Of course they screwed it up by letting you swap policies all the time, but that's beside the point...

 

[Tekamthi]

Proposal idea:. Early form of open borders, "open borderlands". Would require DLL work, cannot be database modded without huge workarounds in lua

Prereqs: writing researched/embassy established, DoF

Core Function: available via trade/diplomacy screen, if granted by a player to another, allows the grantee player's units to travel through all land and water plots that are the permitting player's territorial borders, ie the plots that either are adjacent to unowned or rival player plots.

Optional function: open borderlands is pre-req to open borders, possibly simplifying things for AI: when open borders becomes available, they won't have to decide between both simultaneously. Alternatively open borders could just replace borderlands, but imo I'd still like to have choice for either in later parts of game.

AI logic: same evaluation as open borders, just earlier

Purpose & rationale:
1. Add some depth to early warfare, add some weight to war declarations that are borderlocked into never attacking anyway, etc.
2. Give stuck scouts a way to get home. The common argument here is that stuck scouts are a failed skill check -- but diplomacy game requires some skill to manage too, so we're just shifting the skill required.
3. Improved thematic/gameplay alignment: ancient borders as represented in civ 5 are too restrictive compared to historical examples, especially water borders

 

[msw1]

As you say in point 3, Converting a civ to your religion already gives a tourism modifier. Also giving a religious pressure modifier for tourism influence would be circular. You’re knowingly proposing we implement a %-based positive feedback loop.

The point was that the increased religious pressure only applies to civs with which your culture is already dominant. Additional tourism beyond dominant has no effect and doesn't matter.

 

[Stalker0]

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.

Thus, the goal of my proposal was to increase Tradition's strength in the early game, better its chances for survival, and increase its flexibility, all while nerfing its snowball, via leaning into its GP-focused and defensive identity.

I actually think its completely the opposite.

Tradition is strong early game. It scales quicker than progress in my experience. You actually can expand faster as tradition (when I did exact same starts going tradition vs progress I found this to be true for the first several cities), your culture is also faster (progress has the fastest time to get to the 2nd policy, authority to the 3rd with the right barb play, and tradition will finish its tree the fastest), and your production in the capital dwarfs the satellite cities in terms of pumping out units and things. Tradition's border growth is MUCH faster than progress, and it saves you a surprising amount of gold early compared to having to buy key tiles. I think tradition can war early better than progress can. And again this isn't just circumstantial evidence, I literally did runs where I did the exact same start as tradition, and repeated it as progress to see how it looked.

Its later that progress starts to overtake as it fills in more infrastructure, it expands further, and with GP buys it has a far superior GP buy (writers) versus the engineers of tradition. Further, Talls supply and force projection problems start to manifest if other civs are able to stay competitive with you.