A Better Culture Model

[kilane royalist]

The long discussions over REX/rush/raze as a strategy point to a basic problem in CivIII - the designers did not go far enough in implementing their own model.

My suggestion is that culture be handled in a way similar to money. Instead of piling up forever, have it be that culture points are like gold pieces, and can - or must - be spent to perform certain tasks.

My idea is this - culture points can be used to buy away unhappiness, and certain actions have a culture point cost that must be paid. If others are trying to take away your cities, then they can pay with culture points which are factored against yours. There could even be some kind of auction system where you pay culture points in, and the enemy can either match them or lose the city.

Poprushing could be balanced, instead of by having poprush unhappiness floating around, to simply having a culture point cost. The player is then essentially buying units with culture and people rather than gold, and the cost is self enforcing - cultures that use the whip too much are sitting ducks for others to start pulling cities into a more enlightened cultural sphere. Instead of being a deus ex machina event, flipping a city will be, like any other civ action, part of a strategy. This makes sense - making overtures to the most disgruntled areas of a society is long standing historical practice.

Culture points could be used to push the UN election in your favor, and allow a variety of other actions. Insufficent available culture points means you can't act in certain ways, and actions which incur an automatic cost - such as a city falling into disorder - might cause the entire society a penalty. One specific idea is to have it cost already produced science, and if catastrophic, even an already purchased advance. Dark ages have happened before...

My last suggestion is that science should also be spendable on things other than advancements. Upgrading units should have a science cost, and a reduced monetary cost, rush buying of improvments with money should also have a science cost. In otherwords - channel the game along lines of figuring out how to grow cities.

This also opens up a better way of AI balancing than merely cheating, they could get increasingly favorable breaks on culture or science costs.

In otherwords - culture is a good concept, but it needs to be integrated across all of the game. One should have to spend culture to keep up an expanded sphere of influence, limiting the amount of time a culture can live on past glories. One should have a choice about where culture points go.

But most of all, if the game designers want to balance the despotic strategies - force the players that choose them to either except the risks of being the knuckle draggers of the world, or act as many despots have - to finance huge amounts of culture to maintain their prodigal use of blood mixed with earth to make bricks.

[korn469]

The long discussions over REX/rush/raze as a strategy point to a basic problem in CivIII - the designers did not go far enough in implementing their own model.

possibly, but exploiting pop rushing is EASILY fixed, just make each city have to have at least one laborer

My suggestion is that culture be handled in a way similar to money. Instead of piling up forever, have it be that culture points are like gold pieces, and can - or must - be spent to perform certain tasks

interesting idea, but it has problems, one of the main ones being that it wouldn't add that many actual new features while on the other hand it add micromanagement

culture points can be used to buy away unhappiness

unhappiness is easy to get rid of, so there is no real need for culture counteracting it as well

There could even be some kind of auction system where you pay culture points in, and the enemy can either match them or lose the city.

this seems like it could be open to exploit...you make an AI over bid on a city, then you buy it the next turn after the AI has wasted their culture in the auction

Poprushing could be balanced, instead of by having poprush unhappiness floating around, to simply having a culture point cost. The player is then essentially buying units with culture and people rather than gold

i don't see how you get from culture takes away unhappiness to culture is buying units...unless firaxis fixes the size one exploit then this won't counteract it
that is unless every time you use the whip it actually costs culture, which added to the other costs of pop rushing would mean that it is virtually useless

Instead of being a deus ex machina event, flipping a city will be, like any other civ action, part of a strategy.

well i think that firaxis could expand on culture without using it to make people happy, to buy units, or to buy cities in culture auctions

Culture points could be used to push the UN election in your favor, and allow a variety of other actions.

i like that idea, maybe they could use a range of features to add up U.N. votes, so as culture, population, gold reserves, techs, military units, MPP, etc

Insufficent available culture points means you can't act in certain ways

like in what ways? i'm not sure about this

ctions which incur an automatic cost - such as a city falling into disorder

now that is an idea i like, each time a city goes into disorder that city loses culture points, either stored culture points, or it doesn't generate culture for as many turns as it was in disorder after order was restored

My last suggestion is that science should also be spendable on things other than advancements. Upgrading units should have a science cost, and a reduced monetary cost, rush buying of improvments with money should also have a science cost. In otherwords - channel the game along lines of figuring out how to grow cities

i don't see how this idea improves the game, nor do i see how it forces the player into figuring out how best to make the cities grow

This also opens up a better way of AI balancing than merely cheating, they could get increasingly favorable breaks on culture or science costs.

good idea

In otherwords - culture is a good concept, but it needs to be integrated across all of the game. One should have to spend culture to keep up an expanded sphere of influence, limiting the amount of time a culture can live on past glories

cultural upkeep for borders is a good idea

One should have a choice about where culture points go.

this adds micromanagement, opens the game up for more exploits, and i just don't see how having culture do everything improves gameplay

But most of all, if the game designers want to balance the despotic strategies - force the players that choose them to either except the risks of being the knuckle draggers of the world, or act as many despots have - to finance huge amounts of culture to maintain their prodigal use of blood mixed with earth to make bricks.

or require all cities to have at least one laborer...that way the unhappiness penalties actually get enforced, that is the simplest yet most effect way of balancing pop rushing

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here are a few of the way that i would like to see firaxis improve culture

using the same rules for what happens after you generate culture, here are some new ways to generate culture

*add in buildings that only produce culture, force the player to choose between tech/happiness low culture buildings and culture only high culture buildings
*add in a cultural specialist
*make every happy person generate +1 culture, and every unhappy person generate -1 culture
*when your city is in a we love day, make every building that is already generating at least one point of culture generate an addition +1 culture
*when your civ is in a golden age then every cultural building that generate at least one point of culture generates and additional +2 culture, and every cultural specialist also generates an additional +1 culture
*when your civ is at war all nonmilitary buildings that generate culture produce 1 point less culture
*every time a unit earns an advancement your capital recieves +1 culture
*firaxis should implement the olympic games as a cultural event that happens once every ten turns and one city gets choosen for it and this city recieves extra cultural points (i can explain this in more detail if you like)

that's most of the ways but there are more...i think the culture system is good but it just needs a little more polish

[kilane royalist]

Actually the fix is what has made me basically give up in disgust with the game - it is clear that poprushing is really meant by the designers to be an AI cheat. The player can only use it a little, but the AI can basically burn people to get things. The way they have "fixed" it doesn't speak well of its design.

On higher levels you get cities with one unhappy person by default. Essentially screwing many strategies from the outset at higher levels. The "one laborer" rule works at low levels, but not at higher ones.

It doesn't fix the exploits - it breaks the game in another fashion.

My formal proposal is this - have four currencies -

Coins
Notes
Shields
Beakers

Have actions cost a combination of the four calculated by your current status. Thus a rapid buy might cost you only coins in some cases, but might cost notes or science in others.

Each of these is matched with burdens:

Corruption/Waste
Unhappiness/Assimilation
Pollution

To which should be added others, such as Disease.

The burden can be allowed to pile up, where it will eventually cause a catastrophic problem, or the player may build an improvement that "fixes" the problem - if they have the tech, or the player may take some action that will patch the problem.

Let's take a current example, unhappiness.

One can build a happiness improvement or wonder, or hook in luxuries. One can spread the unhappy people out if they are from another culture. These are fixes.

One can simply ignore unhappiness, but the potential cost is the city being liberated.

The patch is the entertainer.

This model should apply to most other burdens, with the possibility of "paying" in other currencies to make the problem go away. For example, disease can be reduced by a hospital improvment, or paying cultural points - representing adaptations made to deal with the disease. Upgrading units could require science cost if the tech has just been discovered.

This actually reduces the chances for exploits, because one no longer has mechanisms which are "outside" of the games economic system, which is what poprushing is - it allows a player to trade people for production. The reason it is an ill considered innovation, is that the entire history of Civ is that the "challenge model" was that you had too many people, and had to develope a civilization to keep them happy. In otherwords, much of the point of developing a civilizaiton was to produce more and better opiates for the massses. The cost of a population point was just about 0, since the player would have been working to stop the pop from coming into being in the first place. Before there were low value ways of trading population for something - starvation shows (entertainers that put the city into negative food) or specialists to slow down growth - but poprushing went against the challenge model.

If one has four different currencies that work the same way money does now, then it is much easier to balance them, and what is more, balance them over time. This is because the exchange rate between the different types can be a calculation based on the players situation. For example, imagine a society which already has pollution problems, the player procedes to research another tech which is going to exacerbate the situation, when he has enough beakers, he will find that he also has to pay cultural cost for the advancement, because of resistance in his own society.

Poprushing was merely the example which showed that the CivIII model isn't a good implementation. Instead, the designers should have had faith in the way markets work - give people a kind of exchange that they can get more of by making improvments, and let them decide to figure out how best to spend it - and learn from their mistakes. Instead of having several different money models, have one model, which has different types of currency, each having its own uses.

[korn469]

kilane royalist

Actually the fix is what has made me basically give up in disgust with the game - it is clear that poprushing is really meant by the designers to be an AI cheat. The player can only use it a little, but the AI can basically burn people to get things. The way they have "fixed" it doesn't speak well of its design

first thing there isn't a one laborer rule in the game, you can turn the citizen into an entertainer and add workers then whip them for as long as you want, you could do this once every turn and it would never catch up to you

they fixed it by having the rush use the unhappy people instead of the happy people, so when you rush you are stuck with those upset people, but since in all civ games you never have to have disorder unless you choose to (mostly through not keeping up with happiness)

with the one laborer rule after you rushed if you didn't have a military unit, luxury, or a happiness structure the city would go into disorder and you couldn't rush again until you made that laborer happy or until the effects of a rush wore off

right now although the penalties for whipping your cities has changed the AI doesn't realize this and over uses it, i don't think it was designed as an AI cheat though

On higher levels you get cities with one unhappy person by default. Essentially screwing many strategies from the outset at higher levels. The "one laborer" rule works at low levels, but not at higher ones

few strategies call for using cities that if they weren't paralyized by rush unhappiness, would be paralyized by corruption

My formal proposal is this - have four currencies -

Coins
Notes
Shields
Beakers

why so many? and basically coins and beakers are both just trade collected off of the land, so they are the same base currency just multiplied by a different set of buildings, so immeadiately you can get rid of beakers for non research related matters

i'll give you that shields and notes are different though, but shields at least already have a use, why complicate things?

Have actions cost a combination of the four calculated by your current status. Thus a rapid buy might cost you only coins in some cases, but might cost notes or science in others

why would a rush ever cost science?

Let's take a current example, unhappiness.

One can build a happiness improvement or wonder, or hook in luxuries. One can spread the unhappy people out if they are from another culture. These are fixes.

One can simply ignore unhappiness, but the potential cost is the city being liberated.

The patch is the entertainer.

This model should apply to most other burdens, with the possibility of "paying" in other currencies to make the problem go away

first thing is i don't see where any of the other currency would come into effect, except if you are implying that it should cost cultural points to use entertainers, which would burn through your culture really quickly on emperor or deity

secondly you are already paying, though indirectly with all of the other currencies beside culture to keep people happy...taxes to fund happiness structures and happiness spending, science to discover happiness structures, and shields to build them...so i don't see why either shields or science should make people happy directly, because they already do indirectly, and normal taxes can already be used to make the people happy directly, and all that leaves is culture though i don't see why a player would ever use culture to keep their people happy in a normal situation unless you are talking about culturally bidding for a city

This actually reduces the chances for exploits, because one no longer has mechanisms which are "outside" of the games economic system, which is what poprushing is - it allows a player to trade people for production.

but people are production, or they were until the civ3 corruption model made them worthless...if there wasn't any corruption in a city then in almost every case it would be better to gain the benefits of your population instead of burning them up, on a mine that one population your burning could be producing as many as 3 shields and two gold a turn before any railroad bonuses or factory bonuses or science building bonuses...after railroads with a factory and a nuclear plant that worker is worth 10 shields a turn, and who knows how much science

it is just because of high corruption that makes far away cities worthless, all of the relatively unproductive captured workers you manage to aquire that won't be useful either in the field or in a city and the relatively low cost of units that makes it easy to turn pop into production that perpetuates this practice...really how many people pop rush in their capital when they don't have to?

at worst they simply need to drop pop rushing, but i think they can fix it, lowering corruption would also give a good counter argument for not burning your population

The reason it is an ill considered innovation, is that the entire history of Civ is that the "challenge model" was that you had too many people, and had to develope a civilization to keep them happy. In otherwords, much of the point of developing a civilizaiton was to produce more and better opiates for the massses.

i disagree, having more population, while challenging is almost universally helpful, and no matter what size your city is, in any civ game it only riots if you don't make sure it doesn't...if you are paying attention then it is impossible to actually have a riot, they spring from your planning (or lack there of) simply change people to entertainers and presto! no more riots, this was even true in SMAC where you got bureaucracy drones and would have cities on diety start out with everyone unhappy, but still cities only riots if you didn't prevent them...in civ3 it is better to have an entertainer and a larger city than nothing because the larger your city is the better the defensive rating is

The cost of a population point was just about 0, since the player would have been working to stop the pop from coming into being in the first place. Before there were low value ways of trading population for something - starvation shows (entertainers that put the city into negative food) or specialists to slow down growth - but poprushing went against the challenge model.

population is far from 0 value since population is the basis for all production, and since although pop rushing decreases population, it doesn't violate your challenge model because it makes the remaining population more unhappy, and thus with a lower production value

about the only thing that really comes close to your challenge model is the drone penalty the UoP had in SMAC, every time your city increased by four people you would get 5 unhappy people instead of 4, so the value of getting more UoP pop was possibly lower than than either maintaining or decreasing in pop, which is what i think you are trying to say with your challenge model, but since in civ3 at least you get bonuses for having large cities (and the same thing in SMAC because the happiness specialists generated science and trade as well) it is always more valuable to have more pop

If one has four different currencies that work the same way money does now, then it is much easier to balance them, and what is more, balance them over time. This is because the exchange rate between the different types can be a calculation based on the players situation.

basically you are free to interchange shields, taxes, and science right now by making use of the tax rates, rush buying, and wealth production, so they are not four independent currencies, they are four interdependent currencies

Poprushing was merely the example which showed that the CivIII model isn't a good implementation. Instead, the designers should have had faith in the way markets work - give people a kind of exchange that they can get more of by making improvments, and let them decide to figure out how best to spend it - and learn from their mistakes.

hehe that's kinda a long winded way of saying civ3 sucks don't you think?

Instead of having several different money models, have one model, which has different types of currency, each having its own uses.

uhhh, that is the way it is now, beakers and taxes both come from trade, and one can turn taxes into science or science into taxes by simply adjusting the tax rates, then taxes can be turned into shields by rush buying, and shields can be turned into taxes by wealth production...also taxes can be turned into happiness by upping the lux. spending bar, and that happiness can be turned into shields by having those previously unproductive entertainers now become workers

____________________________________

one more question, so besides requiring culture to avert negative gameplay consequences at some points, is the main focus of your post to suggest that the player should basically be able to fund propaganda missions through the use of cultural points which now store in an account instead of being outside of normal gameplay? while there still might be gold propaganda mission, cultural subversion is now fully dependent upon "bids" made by each player?

so the actual proposals are

culture averts negative consequences that happened either because of a random event or the poor allocation of shield/trade resources

and

now cultural subversion and reversion are handled directly instead of indirectly by an auction/bid system

are there any other things i missed?

[kilane royalist]

Actually a lot of things you seem to be missing, so I will go over them one at a time.

Population, itself, isn't worth anything - it is productive population that is the basis of the game. The challenge in all previous games of civ boild down to this: people multiplied into producing unproductive people, a problem, and the player had ot work to turn them into productive people.

The current game basically maintains this model, though it adds in more sophisticated control of space, and a bit more diplomacy. Poprushing was unbalancing because one was throwing away people who would not normally hav been created, but would have been traded for very little, or nothing at all. After all, a city with pop 2, one of whom is an entertainer to keep it from going to revolt, is no better than a pop 1 city with one laborer in it. Pop rushing was disbalancing because it allowed players to cashier that dead weight one - which produced nothing for a very long time - into military units whch could be used now. Thus, most pop rushing had a cost of 0, because the small city was going to have a long period of being unhappy anyway, and the extra person wasn't going to be adding anything to the economy.

Why four different currencies? Because each one has different properties, and can be exchanged in different ways. The player has sunk costs in turning land utilization into either money, beakers, shields or culture. One trade arrow can become money, production (by rushing), culture or science, but they aren't equal. This means that the ultimate unit of work is the pop/turn of utilization, which the player tries to turn into resources which can either be used to improve capital - produce more or better pop/turn utilization - or to conquer other civs.

Thus trade isn't currency, it is turned into different currencies, and the switching cost represents part of the economic model of civ.

[kilane royalist]

Since you seem to have missed it the first time, the virtues of a consistent economic model in a CivIII environment.

1. No exploits that require convoluted if/then patches, any time it becomes clear that something is mispriced, it is a trivial matter to fix it by changing its cost formula.

2. No repeated attempts to fix a particular action, simply change the cost, and introduce a exponential cost curve for actions that are supposed to be difficult or rare.

3. Greater flexibility, any action that can be taken can be costed out as to what the "dead variable" game theory matrix would be, and the Nash equilibrium can be determined. For you non-game theory mavens, a Nash equilbrium is a point where no player can unilaterally improve his position by changing his choice.

4. Unifies the results of problems - corruption, unhappiness, pollution and anything else simply become a burden which is offered different matrixes of fix/patch/ignore. This means that different victory strategies would still have to balance the other kinds of currency. What unbalances the game is when one strategy can easily just ignore everything else. This would make it easier to prevent this, not just in the basic game, but in any scenario or MP. This would also make it easier to add problems, either for a scenario or to the game, since every problem becomes a resource cost matrix with a payoff/penalty.

5. Better for diplomacy - one could cost deals in any currency, and thus trade for whatever the other civ has with the best possible deal. More win/win deals mean a tougher game. Also better for MP.

6. Better for MP, a unified model means that any strategy is easier to assure being good as any other strategy with equivalent execution.

7. Less need for AI "cheats", instead, while the AI could be given progressive breaks on cost formulas (as they already are on production and science), they would still be behaving "rationally" from the point of view of the player - that is their cost decisions would still be based on the same information his are, merely that they have an advantage in them, which the player must overcome by being more efficent in his allocation of production/turns and more efficent in his use of the results.

One consistent result from game theory is how simple minded strategies can often do quite well in a game theory matrix with repeated trials. In otherwords, one doesn't need a smart AI, merely an AI that pursues a strategy that is tough to beat. "*** for Tat" type strategies consistently do well in repeated game theory trials, even though it is one of the most simple minded strategies there is.

8. More control for the player. Instead of cities "deciding" to flip, the player would decide whether to use his cultural advantage on spreading over the world - or to buffer the hardships that a crash military program would provide.

It would also mean that players would have to generally live with past decisions more, without them being albatrosses.



This is a generally better model - relying on monetization of advantages, the creation of a decision tree, and an emphasis on the balancing of utility with barrier to entry and sunk costs.

[kilane royalist]

Have got to love the cuss filter. Use of the word T*t in a standard technical term is bad, but the use of the word "butt" is ok. I would be willing to bet that merde is OK too, but not sh*t.

[korn469]

Population, itself, isn't worth anything - it is productive population that is the basis of the game.

completely unproductive population isn't worth much, but it is still worth something, especially in civ3, it is at the very least worth extra defense, and you can also fairly cheaply turn population into workers and move them to more productive places...plus once your city hits a certain size, then the laborers are always happy because you have so many entertainers, and having population creates another advantage, if you simply don't build an aqueduct or a hospital so you don't have to deal with extra population then you could be losing any advantage from food production

people multiplied into producing unproductive people, a problem, and the player had ot work to turn them into productive people.

correct, but this is usually quite simple in civ3, especially with market places and lots of luxuries (like 20 happiness with all 8 luxuries)

Poprushing was unbalancing because one was throwing away people who would not normally hav been created, but would have been traded for very little, or nothing at all. After all, a city with pop 2, one of whom is an entertainer to keep it from going to revolt, is no better than a pop 1 city with one laborer in it.

but it is the corruption model that is causing this, pop rushing happens because as you say those citizens aren't productive, but their happiness has little to do with their productivity as long as corruption wastes everything they produce
the happiness model is only really flawed when you are dealing with a size one city or with a size 25+ city

Thus, most pop rushing had a cost of 0, because the small city was going to have a long period of being unhappy anyway, and the extra person wasn't going to be adding anything to the economy

again not unhappiness, but corruption was the cause of this, the only thing happiness has to do with this at all is that with a pop 1 city that has the only citizen as an entertainer you can negate all of the happiness penalties any other sized city would have to deal with, that is where the happiness model failed, in preventing an exploit, not in causing a player to want to get rid of their citizens because they were worthless...this was the fault of the corruption model

even a citizen that only produces 3 food is worth something, because he can help the population to grow and support scientists or tax collectors for example...however specialist are surprisingly underpowered, and although they can get around corruption penalties iirc, it would take 80 turns to get the same benefits out of them compared to pop rushing them, so weak specialists and massive corruption means that the only way you can get value from your pop is by pop rushing...those are the reasons not happiness

The player has sunk costs in turning land utilization into either money, beakers, shields or culture.

as civ3 stands right now, there is no differences between following a culture maxing strategy and a tech maxing strategy, and culture is the only game currency that doesn't already interact...three of your four currencies already interact, and culture is almost completely an indirect indicator of science...there is a direct correlation between high science scores and high culture scores

for example in the ancient and middle ages non capital cities can produce a maximum of 14 culture before age benefits, half of that coming from 2 science buildings, the other half coming from 3 happiness buildings, the two science buildings cost less than the three happiness buildings, plus scientific civs get cheaper scientific buildings and religious civs get cheaper happiness buildings, so a civ trying to max science by having large cities with lots of science buildings will max culture by default and not by strategy

One trade arrow can become money, production (by rushing), culture or science, but they aren't equal.

one trade arrow cannot directly become culture, however if a city has both a library and a bank they are already completely interchangable

set your science rate to 100% and you will produce the exact same amount of beakers as what you would taxes if you set your tax rate 100%

then you can directly change taxes into shields, at a rate of 4 taxes to one shield and you can directly change shields into taxes at a rate of at first 8 shields to one tax then after economics 4 shields to one tax

This means that the ultimate unit of work is the pop/turn of utilization, which the player tries to turn into resources which can either be used to improve capital - produce more or better pop/turn utilization - or to conquer other civs.

workers do not produce culture at all and your improved culture model didn't offer any way to do that either...and as long as corruption is the way it is, your citizens happy or not won't be worth much

Thus trade isn't currency, it is turned into different currencies, and the switching cost represents part of the economic model of civ.

trade is directly turned into taxes or beakers at a 1:1 basis only modified by buildings, trade can be turned into shields at a 4:1 basis not modified by anything, and shields can be turned into trade again at an 8:1 then a 4:1 basis modified by factories and powerplants, both shield and trade and directly dependent on population and low corruption rates to actually contribute anything to your civ, and if you are not a despot or communist you don't have the ability to liquidate unproductive pop into shields

but all of this is beside the point, your original idea was this

My suggestion is that culture be handled in a way similar to money. Instead of piling up forever, have it be that culture points are like gold pieces, and can - or must - be spent to perform certain tasks.

My idea is this - culture points can be used to buy away unhappiness, and certain actions have a culture point cost that must be paid.

after stating that then you started going off track

science should also be spendable on things other than advancements. Upgrading units should have a science cost, and a reduced monetary cost, rush buying of improvments with money should also have a science cost.

this idea doesn't have anything to do with your original point and it adds nothing to the system that i think you were trying to propose...requiring beakers instead of taxes is completely redundant since they are interchangable anyway, and even requiring shields and gold would really be raising the upgrade cost by four gold for every shield...even if the upgrade cost was completely in shields it would still really just cost four times as much gold, so making those changes add little in the way in actual strategy but lots in the way of micromanagement

so lets drop that idea, because it is just completely superfluous and focus on the cultural idea

you were trying to propose how culture would somehow end pop rushing abuses, so explain that and the other uses for culture to me instead of the other ideas

[kilane royalist]

Your post is of extremely poor quality, for example - you take my argument on sunk costs, and then say "well if you have sunk costs equally to both sides, then everything is equal again." As even a teenager can say "well duh". The correct comparison is not "if you have both a bank and a library", the correct comparison is between the specrum of having built everything into science, versus a mixture, versus having everything in economic improvments. Looked across this spectrum, the existence of a middle point startegy where the two are equivalent doesn't prove that there are strategies where the two are not equivalent.

There are so many errors of this sort in your post that it really isn't worth continuing to discuss anything with you, since you are not only thinking badly, but utterly convinced that you are right. There might well be an argument against the model that I have proposed, but what you have offered is "well the current game isn't completely broken." Well that's true, but it isn't working very well either.

[korn469]

Since you seem to have missed it the first time, the virtues of a consistent economic model in a CivIII environment

well for it to be consistant it would require population management to impact cultural output, something i mentioned earlier

1. No exploits that require convoluted if/then patches, any time it becomes clear that something is mispriced, it is a trivial matter to fix it by changing its cost formula

despot pop rushing is attractive because corruption artifically lowers the value of the workers, and the 1 pop exploit basically makes the cost of pop rushing free because it circumvents the negatives of pop rushing, that is why i consider it an exploit because it only applies to very small cities

4. Unifies the results of problems - corruption, unhappiness, pollution and anything else simply become a burden which is offered different matrixes of fix/patch/ignore. This means that different victory strategies would still have to balance the other kinds of currency. What unbalances the game is when one strategy can easily just ignore everything else. This would make it easier to prevent this, not just in the basic game, but in any scenario or MP.

so basically 20 gold, 5 beakers, and 10 shields will make a citizen happy, just as 5 gold 35 beakers, 5 shields, and two culture

that might work if beakers and gold weren't completely interchangable and if population allocation actually could modify culture production like it does taxes, beakers, and shields...what would make this work is if each tile had a tax/shield/science/cultural/food(growth) rating instead of a shield/commerce/food(growth) rating and if the different currencies were slightly harder to exchange

8. More control for the player. Instead of cities "deciding" to flip, the player would decide whether to use his cultural advantage on spreading over the world - or to buffer the hardships that a crash military program would provide.

cities don't simply decide to flip, while it is indirect and not as precise as what you are proposing the player who invests more into culture is going to take the city

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first thing, while actions should pan out over the long run in many cases good investments yield no results because of random outcomes and unexpected events

the AI in civ3 has fairly simple choices when it comes to constructing an attack force, and because of the limited choices it usually has a good mix of offensive units, and because of production bonuses that the AI has on higher difficulties it can field far larger armies than the human can

despite that fact, the human almost always wins even though they spent less on their force, now what what effect would that have on the equilibrium?

if two players make the same choice, yet the one who invests less resources almost always comes out on top how would that help to make useful choices?

[korn469]

Your post is of extremely poor quality

i appologize i'm obviously an idot

for example - you take my argument on sunk costs, and then say "well if you have sunk costs equally to both sides, then everything is equal again."

i said nothing of the sort, i stated that trade taxes and science are not independent that they are rather easily substitued by moving a slider, yes a library and a bank can modify the outcome, but you cannot do it on a city by city basis, it is done on a civ wide basis, and it is quite easy to figure out given the price of any item in beakers and taxes what the best allocation is, because it is lies somewhere from 0 to 100% on the tax rate scale

There are so many errors of this sort in your post that it really isn't worth continuing to discuss anything with you

no please do, i take great pride in not personally insulting people, so while i will certainly attack your arguments with what i believe to be right it won't get ugly and who knows i might actually learn something

utterly convinced that you are right

i'm stubborn, but also i haven't seen an argument that i think is convincing yet, i am opened minded enough though that i will change my mind if i see some actual proof

There might well be an argument against the model that I have proposed, but what you have offered is "well the current game isn't completely broken."

the same goes for the game IS completely broken

mainly i assumed you were posting suggestions that built on the already established system instead of assuming we would junk the current system and start all over again

but seriously, please continue

[kilane royalist]

For me the convincing argument was not pop rushing being broken, though that was what made me stop playing the game until the patch, it was that the next best winning strategy was to find ways of harnessing the clearly crocked AI system, or go for an early win with the Aztecs.

I'm not interested in games that rely on figuing out flaws in the game designers model, simply because it shows that the game is now game designer versus the player, rather than player versus the game. Its the same reason I don't like taking SAT type tests, it isn't your knowledge that is being tested, it is your knowledge of how the SAT author thinks that is being tested. If I want to match wits over cracking code, I can get paid money for working on UNIX security, were exploits have real consequences.

The basic attraction of Civ as a series is that thinking historically often suggests strategies, and games often follow, broadly speaking, historical patterns. CivIII really has failed to do this, not once, but twice, with the patch.

This is a shame, because it is clear that this version, more than any other civ type game, wanted to make a diversity of strategies workable, and introduce several good ideas - linking culture and boundaries, adding culture as separate from mere happiness and so on.

My analogy is the popularity of the French Defense in Chess - while the pieces move in exactly the same way in all of the different variations, some produce raging sacrifices and gambit play, others favor sharp tactical variations with pressure of knights against bishops, and still others long term positional play where relentless pursuit of small advantages leads to a won end game. CivIII really does offer a chance to make equivalent types of strategies workable, the way to do this is not to offer people basically separate games, but to introduce complications into the relationships between different parts that make some decisions very good for some positions and stratgeies, and very bad for others.

It also would make the AI easier to keep even. AI's are good at book keeping and punishing players for small lapses in judgement. As long as the AI has too many different lines to look at, it will play a far inferior game to the human, and the designers will be tempted to add in AI crocks that rebalance the game by having the AI's simply pull advances and production out of thin air.



However, the game designers made the mistake of giving each new idea a basically separate game system. Each system needed to be debugged and balanced separately, and their relationship to each other needed to be debugged.

The result - even with the patch - is that levels of play are still broken, diplomacy isn't much fun, and the tactics that seem to be working well are mere echoes of older tactics. Basically the players have realized we can't beat a cheating AI, and the only road is to find flaws in the game design to exploit. The game is playable, but what we are looking for is the equivalent of buffer overflows in an http exploit.

The suggestion I've put forward, even while it looks radical, really isn't. It would take the code the currently runs money, and make it run everything the civ can produce. Then the balancing point would be the fungibility of different kinds of production, and the barrier to entry and sunk costs problem of each of these different roads. Each road to victory would then be about, not only maximizing ones chosen road, but finding ways of being good enough at the others to hold ones own.

Civ2's game play had reached an endpoint, some people were really looking for an "improved Civ2". CivIII really is like an alpha of CivI - it is a new type of game that bears some resemblence to older games, but there are a host of changes that need to be made before it really works well.

The model I'm suggesting would require the game designers start taking advantage of the different end points of production, but then, in their design, they have said that they want different strategies to be workable. All well and good, but the best way of doing that isn't bey developing several different code bases, and trying to keep them all together, but to develop one code base which works differently based on the smaller differences between them.

My analogy for CivIII is that is like Go to CivII's chess. Civ II was about cities and units. It was the clash of mechanized divisions - tactical combat leading to a break through that decided the game. CivIII's basic outlook is about control of space and market share, the designers should realize this and shift the focus of balancing the game away from cities, and towards space, diplomacy and production.

The crucial use of a better model is that it would make diplomacy infinitely more nuanced and flexible, it would make different societies differentiable, not by special units, so much as different exchange rates between culture/science/gold/production - something which is more subtle because it will effect the long term results of decisions more.

It would also be easier to debug and maintain, which is ultimately important for more releases.

The game prepatch was complete broken. The game post patch is really an exersize in getting around the heavy screws that the player works under, and the solution doesn't seem to be "figure out how the CivIII growth model works and get better at it than the AI" it is "figure out how the CivIII AI model works, and find where it is badly programmed."

[kilane royalist]

But where I am going with this is scenarios. With one unified model, it becomes easier to rebalance scenarios so that they work well. An example is the Roman scn from Civ2. How does one win it? There is a crucial bottleneck early to get to a stable society, after that, it is rush to magnetism and finishing off the game with... engineers and howitzers.

What would make historical scn's in CivIII be really different is that each one could have its own table of exchange between types, and thus explicitly favor different strategies more easily. I would much rather have seen the game go in a way that matches history - the Roman's could raise larger armies and field them with better generals, they didn't have recoilless 16 inch guns.

The current hodgepodge approach doesn't make this easy to do, since there will be no easy way to create a file that one can edit to get the balance for an scn.

The same goes for multiplayer. MP is ruthless about finding which strategy the game really prefers, since players are much better at exploiting the game than any AI v player situation is. The current system would be a night mare to balance, and I will bet a good deal that we will find that CTP type client stating is going to be far and away the best road. CTP is a great game, but we don't need an updated version of it.

[Thrawn05]

I think the culture system is fine. What I would like to see in furture patches or expansion packs, is the ability to buy/sell/lease land under territory. Of course it wouldn't be cheap, and you can't do this on land within the 21 tiles of a city. Just thought I might get my two cents into this debait.

[korn469]

First you state that population isn't worth anything, that it is simply the production capacity of the population unit in question that gives it value. You also state that the player would want to limit the number of their population, because greater population causes greater problems. You specifically give the example of a size 2 city with one laborer and one entertainer is no better than a size one city.

First i agree with you that population is only valuable if it produces something, that being said, all population in Civ3 produces or stores something. Civfanatics states that theire are 540 turns in Civ3, so this gives us the time frame for establishing a theoretical maximum amount of production any one citizen can contribute to their civ. Now we already that every time a civ pop rushes that citizen is instanly and permanently converted into 20 shields. Those 20 shields would cost 80 gold from the treasury. Depending what the citizen was used to complete it could impact the production of other citizens for the better. In addition each time a player pop rushes that citizen then generates one additional unhappiness in the city which impacts other citizens for the worst. The smaller the population of the city the greater the total impact of the pop rush. Allowing population to work over the long term should give you a higher return on that population when corruption doesn't make the population point useless.

In a size three city on diety there are two naturally unhappy population; however, after you pop rush your city goes to size two yet it maintains the exact same amount of unhappiness. So while you have liquidated an unproductive citizen based on happiness, for the next forty turns as of 1.17f you still have the exact same amount of unhappiness and therefore unproductivity by result of unhappiness that you had before the pop rush. Also if the player had used the population point in any other way the unhappiness penalty would have fallen to only one, instead of two. Under my understanding of the new rules, it would take two sources of happiness to make the first citizen happy if the second citizen was a specialist and the first were a laborer. Because the base square only provides two extra food, if you turn both citizens into specialists, one will eventually starve once the food box runs out, costing you twenty food iirc, and the time it would take to grow back to size 2.

Now if the town had a temple in it that along with the entertainer made the first citizen happy, the player could again pop rush. That would leave the town at size one, but for nearly the next forty turns the town would experience 2 unhappiness eventhough it was a size one city, and wouldn't normally experience any unhappiness at all. Now this is where the exploit comes in, without the entertainer the temple would no longer be able to keep the laborer happy, so the player converts the laborer into a specialist, a tax collector for example, and can now add captured population to this city and can convert them into shields and side step the unhappiness penalty. That is an exploit that firaxis needs to address, and it is an old exploit. That is why i suggested the one laborer rule.

Because of the ill effects of pop rushing, it is a less desirable form of rushing compared to paid labor, because it although it gives the a low upfront cost of gaining quick shields, in the long run it will end up costing the player far more because not only did the player lose a source of production (not taking corruption into effect) from the citizens used in the rush, but the remaining citizens will require the same amount of happiness to keep them productive.

The only reason in my opinion why a player would use forced labor pop rushes is because corruption combined with the possibility of a cultural reversion makes occupied territory both usless as a normal production city and the possibility of reversion make it dangerous to troops stationed there. Once you combine that with ways to avoid the happiness penalty you have an attractive little exploit.

Without massive corruption, even if that size two city had an laborer and an entertainer, the entertainer has value, for example if you move a military unit into that town and gain a police bonus then that entertainer can become a laborer and it saves you not only the 40 food it would cost to grow another laborer, but it would also give you turns of free production compared to a size one city growing to a size two. Then there are intangiable benefits like the AI might possibly consider you slightly more powerful if you have a larger population.

Also the problem of quelling each new citizen isn't the most pressing problem to production in my opinion for a number of reasons. First you can pick when you want your city to grow after it moves beyond size one. Secondly each new citizen has the power to become an entertainer and basically trade away their production bonus for their unhappiness penalty. You make the claim that the citizens are dead weight and that pop rushing will have a cost of zero. I think the fact that all citizens can come in without adding production or unhappiness proves that each new citizen has a cost of zero. While each pop rush will keep the amount of unhappiness the same while lowering the city's long term production for a short term production gain. I think of all of your population on hand, as kinetic energy, if you can make them happy then they can add to your production right away, so having more of them won't hurt, but will be neutral at most.

I'm guessing your last statement on the issue about the city being unhappy for a long time comes from the assement that the city is captured and of another nationality. If unhappiness was the sole problem there are a number of ways in civ3 to take care of it, everything from luxury spending to building a temple, to garrisoning military units. The Civ series provides a number of ways to counteract unhappiness. Yet, corruption in civ3 is another matter, that while it can be counteracted to an extent it can never be completely taken care of, unlike happiness which disappears permanently once the city is of a large engough size. This simply makes outlying cities have little value, and the players actions cannot really change that. If they move the capital other cities experience corruption, and the tools at the player's disposal can only decrease corruption so far. One of the best tools for counter acting corruption so far has been pop rushing, so i consider it a responce to the real problem and not the true problem.

You talk about monetizing culture. As it is right now in civ3, the generation of culture is unlike the generation of other the other resources, and until culture comes more from the population of the city with better control than treating it as a static resource it won't fit into your system. All of the other resources are dynamic and there are a number of configurations the player can make each turn by allocating workers to different jobs. Once the player allocates their workers then they can fine tune the actual generation of the various resources by changing the tax and luxury rates. The player cannot allocate culture point generation at all after they build the buildings. Your system must bridge this gap before it can work, and so far (i haven't looked at your last post in detail) i haven't seen you present a firm description of how you will make population essential to the generation of culture, or if you don't make population essential directly, there still has to be some kind of dynamic factor to the generation of culture if you are going to use it as you said.

[kilane royalist]

This is an example of why a four currency model would be better. What you are asking for is another patch to add on another specific ability with a separate code base, for no other reason than you like it.

In the model I am proposing, it would be much simpler to implement:

1. I've already stated that one would get an "income" of "notes".

2. Notes could be "spent" to maintain a larger sphere of influence.

3. Thus a lease would be easy to add to diplomacy - the AI can figure

a. How many notes would be required for the player to simply take the area in question? What is the cost of this number of notes in coins? The result is the twice the maximum the AI could charge, because otherwise the player is better off just taking it with culture.

b. What is the present value of the expected production? Since coins/beekers/shields/notes all have an exchange rate, the AI can figure what it could get out of the land, and what you can get out of the land priced in coins - or any other currency for that matter.

c. What is my pressing need? The AI could value currencies it needs more strongly. For example, let us suppose that 1 coin can be converted by the AI to .5 of a beaker through its own economy. But it really needs beakers. Normally it would value 1 coin = .5 beekers and convert, but it would know that 1 coin = 1 beeker in production cost, and so might take less total payment, if more of it was in beekers, hoping the player might make the deal.

In otherwords, in the hodgepodge system, the ability might lead to an exploit, or it might be a useless feature that no one will use except out of emotional attachment. In an exchange model, the price of any action becomes easier to compute, and hence the present value of that action is easier to compute and balance. Renting land might be expensive, it might be cheap, but it would be easy for the AI to figure, and hence it could also make offers for renting your land...


The same is true with almost any trade - it becomes much easier if everything is treated as exchange to price the present expected value. More over, the AI would no longer need as many trade cheats - a competitive bidding market would probably net an AI a better position than the old boy networks, since while some AI's benefit from it, some clearly lose more than they gain by such collusive arrangements.

Again - in MP, this becomes a crucial issue.

[kilane royalist]

Korn brings up one of the problems with the current Civ design - and that is that the different kinds of advantage a civ can pile up are very close together. A high science civ gets both good military and good culture by default, and the current luxury system means that good culture means good territory which means luxuries, which means happiness.

Instead what should be done is taking steps to differentiate the kinds of production. He mentions happiness, let me tak an example.

Let's imagine you have a science oriented culture, and you have an unhappy person. That unhappy person will demand more of what you don't have. Where as a culture that is short on science but long on culture might well be able to make an unhappy person happy with less science, since that is what he is short on.

My suggestion is to have greater differentiation.

One possibility is have the knowledge producing improvments be setable as to what they are making. So imagine a library could be set to producing all culture, all science, or some mixture, rather than the mix being set by the game and fixed. I am not sure whether it would be better to allow these values to be changed, or fixed when first built. I favor the later, but haven't had time to look into.

In this implementation, a civ going for science would be building libraries, but their trade arrow conversion would add only to science. Where as another civ that is trying for a pure culture win would weigh in towards producing culture with its libraries etc.

The other option is to have them resetable at lower levels, and fixed at higher levels.

- - -

The other point this brings up is in the cost of local versus global. Global money/shields/culture/beakers are better than local. The correct local/global exchange rate seems to be close to 2-1, sometimes even 4-1. That is, it takes 2-4 global whatevers to be as useful as 1 local one. So an unhappiness can be cured by an entertainer, who is producing culture only useful in his city, while the same person could be made happy by spending more global culture.

This is my incentive for proposing that many actions should start having collateral costs in unbalanced civilizations - a civ with all science would start to find that it would have to pay some culture to go forward, a civ with all culture would start to find that it would suffer social diseases (the historical result of decadence!) that would need science to keep at bay.

[korn469]

kilane royalist

while we may disagree on the specifics to get where we are going, i think we both want a diversity of meaningful strategic choices each of which has its own merits and flaws but all have the same ability to allow the player to win the game.

Now i have a question: When you say that it should require research as well as taxes to upgrade, why exactly do you think that this would be a good idea? Maybe I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective, but it seems to me if a warrior had a flat upgrade cost of 20 taxes and 20 science that with their current exchange rate being the same before structures, the biggest benefits would come from always going with a middle of the road strategy. By sacrificing one or the other you would always suffer a gameplay penalty. In my opinion, a much better solution would be to have an optional tech that decreased the cost of upgrades once you discovered it, but with a properly balanced tech tree, it could be on the opposite side from techs you need to achieve an economic victory for example. It seems that the most interesting choices forces you between two diametrically opposed paths, with the player having to determine which is better books or bricks, guns or butter, etc.

Am i missing something?

[kilane royalist]

My idea with collateral costs is this:

1. A newly discovered tech will require science beakers to imediately build or upgrade units.

2. After that, and until another tech is discovered, there will be a smaller science cost.

3. After the next tech discovery of the same kind, the collateral cost will drop to 0.

The idea here is that if the player wants to rush, they pay, not just money, but science as well. Worth it if the unit is needed now, less pressing for later. Leonardo's workshop would remove this cost. The science cost for upgrade would be multiplied by the same curve as tech cost is.

The effect of this - which would increase with difficulty levels - would be to make techs that you have traded for be utilizable immeadiately, only if you are willing to sacrifice some of your own research efforts. The player could of course spend gold (at a higher rate than their conversion for beakers of course) to overcome this problem.

Again - the idea here is to create mechanisms for game balance that focus on exchange and control of space rather than cities. By having collateral costs go up, it will force civilizations to be more balanced. The collateral cost won't be a constant, but instead be calculated based on scarcity. Middle of the road civs will have more options, but pay more for everything. Extreme civs will pay less (in terms of pop/turns of production) but have their freedom of action hampered by their civs weakest link. What actions will be hampered will be determined by the particular civ.

Thus at low levels - no collateral cost, at medium levels, a small amount, at high levels even more. The lagging AI societies will pay somewhat less than the player (though still some).

[kilane royalist]

A yet more sophisticated model of collateral costs would have resource tiles produce varying amounts of a resource, and the collateral cost be calcuated by how much short of the ideal you are. For example, let us imagine than a society had 15 iron on hand, and an upgrade required 5 iron. The player wants to upgrade 4 units, which would mean that he would have to pay beakers to make up the difference, each unit of iron short would cost progressively more beakers, going up on a rather stiff scale.

This would mean that trade agreements would be for amounts, and again, the computer could cost the resource correctly.