Culture redistribution idea

[The Rusty Gamer]

Here's an idea I'd like to see either for a civic or a wonder.

When you change to this as yet unnamed civic or build this wonder, the culture is redistributed evenly throughout your civilization. This could radically alter the borders of your civilization but this is the way I envision it would work.

1. Any cumulated culture points would be immeditately redistributed evenly thoughout all your cities. This may drastically alter the borders. Some may shrink and others may expand.

2. Any future culture is automatically also distributed evenly throughout your citites (rounded down).

3. This effect would end once either the wonder expires or you change the associated civic.

4. Under this option, for game balance there may be need to be some sort of penalty - perhaps some culture is lost in the redistribution due to corruption which may or may not be offset by anti-corruption buildings.

5. Perhaps once this effect is over, cities would automatically return to their former cumulative or "real" culture points or perhaps not - perhaps the effect is permanent.

The repercussions of this in gameplay could be quite major. Whenever you build a new city, for instance, you get some instant culture for that new city but it will take some away from your other cities so there may be some expansion and shrinkage of borders all at once.

The question is for those who have being doing mods etc - is this idea possible in the code? Can anyone tell me please? I'd love to see this idea implemented somehow.

[Locutus]

Sure, easy peasy in Python: At the start of every turn of a player (onBeginPlayerTurn), check with CyPlayer.getCivics() if he has the civic in question, if so, divide CyPlayer.countTotalCulture() by CyPlayer.getNumCities() and cycle through all cities to give them the resulting value as culture value with CyCity.setCulture().

The one problem is that the UI would still display different growth per turn values for different cities, if you'd want that to be accurate you'd have to modify all affected UI screens as well and calculate every time such a screen is displayed what the average growth per city is for the entire civ. That's possible but a bit of work since there's no API function that gives you culture growth, you'd have to calculate it manually (adding up all culture buildings and wonders, tax rate, religion bonuses, civ traits, etc).

[platypotamus]

That is NOT a civic or wonder you'd want to build while going for cultural victory

Unless, of course, you had three cities, then it would probably work out ok (depending on the "loss" due to inefficiency)

[Willem]

Re: Culture redistribution idea

Originally posted by The Rusty Gamer
The repercussions of this in gameplay could be quite major. Whenever you build a new city, for instance, you get some instant culture for that new city but it will take some away from your other cities so there may be some expansion and shrinkage of borders all at once.

You might even find that a city that loses culture gets flipped because it can no longer compete with a culture heavy neighbour.

[Unimatrix11]

I just wonder what you would call such a civic/wonder, and what in reality it would depict... Not mocking, just really curious - i like game-concept altering ideas

[alms66]

Well, it could be seen as an attempt to homogenize the culture (national identity), which is something many empires have struggled with throughout history - and it seems to just get worse the closer you get to modern times. Take Iraq for example. There the US and Iraqi governments are working hard to make Iraqis think of themselves as one people - as Iraqis. It's not working though, Shiites still think of themselves as Shiites, Sunnis as Sunnis and Kurds as Kurds. As for what to call it, Nationalism? Unification?

IMHO, civ would have to get a bit more complicated - with ethnic strife, religious strife, successions, civil wars, etc., for the cultural redistribution option to ever be worth doing, and lessening the effects of ethnic/religious strife might be another effect of the civic/wonder.

On the other hand, what this idea is really great for is food redistribution tied to a civic/national wonder/something. Or wealth redistribution? Population? There are many possibilities here.

[The Rusty Gamer]

Aha! - Perhaps the wonder could be called "redistribution centre" and after you build it, you get to choose one thing to redistribute.

Or the civic "communism" might be perfect for evening things out all over as it were.

Actually, I like the idea of redistributing population in some way in general. In particular, when you have overpopulation and so you have people sitting on their bums doing nothing and you don't yet have the ability to make them work it would be good to be able to send them to an underpopulated city.

However this idea may be a completely separate thing to what we are talking about. What about "Immigration Centre" or somesuch which then allows population to drift in from other cities - in particular population which is sitting around doing nothing elsewhere and is therefore disatisfied and looking for work.

[The Rusty Gamer]

Hmmm...another thought and a complement to "Immigration Centre" would be "Emmigration Centre". And here's another idea to add to the mix. If the unemployed can't find work ANYWHERE in your civilization they might actually drift off to a neighbouring civlization and join them if they feel the conditions are better there. What do you think of THAT idea?

Heres' another idea. If the unemployed sit around for too long, they then loose the impetus to work at all and then start demanding social welfare. If you can't get them to work, you might find these layabouts becoming increasingly expensive.

[Locutus]

That's possible but a bit of work since there's no API function that gives you culture growth, you'd have to calculate it manually (adding up all culture buildings and wonders, tax rate, religion bonuses, civ traits, etc).

Correction, there *is* an API function for it: CyPlayer.getCommerceRate(CommerceTypes.COMMERCE_CU LTURE) (works for CyCity as well). That makes it very simple to implement this, just display said function divided by CyPlayer.getNumCities() wherever in the UI the culture rate is listed (just city screen and domestic advisor I think?)

[The Rusty Gamer]

It would be good to have another option for those famous people who can drop culture bombs too - they could also drop a reverse culture bomb on another civilization's city (they'd have to be at war with them perhaps) and that would destroy a whole lot of culture points from that city.

[phlucas]

I think it would be too powerful to redistribute the complete culture. Instead, a civic could make it so that only culture produced by the culture slider goes into a national pool (just as the beakers and coins) and is then distributed fairly across all cities, with a certain loss. Culture produces by GPs and buildings in a city would stay in that city. This would help the player expanding border cities more quickly, yet not lead to widespread leveling of culture; and it also makes more sense.