Education ramping

[morganja]

Is there any way to change this behavior? Why should education become progressively more difficult? I would rather have a larger static time to become educated then this ramping up nonsense. I placed a colonist in a school and noticed he needed 61 turns to become educated. That's just crazy.

[DarthVeda]

I can see why this is done in the Native villages, it seems pretty harsh though when it's in my cities. After training 5-8 villagers, it becomes almost pointless.

[Aerion]

AMEN!

[crantor]

AMEN!

However, for balance reasons my opinion is that it should not be completly flat. Once you have a university set up you educate _fast_, so no increase would mean super-spam of specialists.

The education values are in GlobalDefines.xml.

Change EDUCATION_THRESHOLD_INCREASE to 0 for no increase in time, ever, no matter how many colonists you train.

I have mine set at 5 and playing a game with it now. Will report findings. I might be completly wrong in how this works, but it SEEMS to work!

[DarthVeda]

Isn't the whole idea of this game to become an independent nation completely un-reliant on the mother country?

If super-spam is a problem, increase the base rates and give the player a reason to invest in upgrades. Right now it starts at "a while" and becomes "an eternity" pretty quick through the ramp.

If I spend 10000g building that University, I should get some pretty good payback. Not just stemming the tide for a few more citizens.

[Machismo]

Another issue is that if you can't afford to train them to be an elder statesman when on the turn the finish, you can't postpone it. You HAVE to choose a profession, so what could have been a stateman is now a damned farmer.

[morganja]

If I recall correctly, the original game had three levels of professions which paralleled the three levels of education buildings. Expert farmers, lumberjacks, fishermen and the like could be educated in the schoolhouse while firebrand preachers and Statesmen required the University. I really liked that.

It also required the instructor, the target profession, and not the student to actually occupy the education building creating an interesting trade-off between using your experts and professionals for their expertise or losing the use of their bonuses while they educated others.

[morganja]

I'm trying the global change in the xml file. Is there another variable that sets the original length that I could up as well or instead?

Thanks.

[morganja]

The file was hard to find. It's actually, on my machine, defaulted to C:\Program Files\2K Games\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization IV Colonization\Assets\XML.

I have no idea where the 2K Games came from and why it isn't in the firaxis folder with my civ IV, but anyhow....

There is an EDUCATION_THRESHOLD that I upped to 50. I'm thinking that will up the base education costs to compensate somewhat with the lower ramping that I put to 5.

I also reduced the native ramping to 30 from 50. I had a fisherman jump out of a village near my capital so long after I put him in there I had forgotten about him and assumed he had just gone 'native'.

Thanks for the tip on where to find this stuff.

I would be interested in hearing what people think the proper values would be to not unbalance the game but still make education a worthy endeavor.

[Iznogud]

I also don't think that the rebel sentiment should have anything to do with education. They just make this way more complicated than it should have been. Fun game though.

[DarthVeda]

Originally posted by morganja
The file was hard to find. It's actually, on my machine, defaulted to C:\Program Files\2K Games\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization IV Colonization\Assets\XML.

I have no idea where the 2K Games came from and why it isn't in the firaxis folder with my civ IV, but anyhow....

Take Two announced its acquisition Firaxis just shortly after the release of Civilization IV. It would make sense that all future titles in some way incorporated Take Two.

There is an EDUCATION_THRESHOLD that I upped to 50. I'm thinking that will up the base education costs to compensate somewhat with the lower ramping that I put to 5.

I also reduced the native ramping to 30 from 50. I had a fisherman jump out of a village near my capital so long after I put him in there I had forgotten about him and assumed he had just gone 'native'.

Thanks for the tip on where to find this stuff.

I would be interested in hearing what people think the proper values would be to not unbalance the game but still make education a worthy endeavor.

I think make the base cost high--say, 20-30 turns for a free colonist student at a schoolhouse--and the ramp nonexistant.