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After playing a few bouts of CIV IV, and intentionally trying all of the different traits, I am generally pleased with how well they are balanced. My compliments to the beta team. The one trait that does not seem to excite me is the Organized trait. For those unfamillar with it, the trait reduces the upkeep costs of your civics choices. There are several problems with this that I can tell.
1. Upkeep costs in most of my games have been neglible. The main reason seems to be that many of my favorite civics choices are no or low upkeep. At most, they seem be only medium upkeep. The only high upkeep civic I use with any frequency is Organized Religion. The other ones (Police State and Environmentalism) are very situational. So basically what I am saying is I have never noticed upkeep to be much of a drain on my finances.
2. I have not tested this throughly, but my gut feeling after a few noble-level games is that financial will get you a lot more money in the average game than organized. I may be off base on this, but the first games I have played seem to support this thinking. Of course, for a balance reasons, we would want organized to reward the player with a comparable amount of extra income over the length of an average game.
The one positive thing I will say about Organized is that it gives you extra motivation to try to take advantage of any of the strategic options afforded by the high upkeep civics. For example, in a game as Tokugawa, I felt the need to stay in organized religion under circumstances I would have switched to pacifism or free religion. So the trait is not without it's uses, but I just feel that they are not as ample as those offered by the other traits. Fortunately, it is very early, and there is plenty of time to do a little tweaking. Perhaps civics costs in general need to be slighly increased to make organized's savings more substantial.
I would be particularly interested in knowing how the betas feel about organized as compared to the other traits.
1. Upkeep costs in most of my games have been neglible. The main reason seems to be that many of my favorite civics choices are no or low upkeep. At most, they seem be only medium upkeep. The only high upkeep civic I use with any frequency is Organized Religion. The other ones (Police State and Environmentalism) are very situational. So basically what I am saying is I have never noticed upkeep to be much of a drain on my finances.
2. I have not tested this throughly, but my gut feeling after a few noble-level games is that financial will get you a lot more money in the average game than organized. I may be off base on this, but the first games I have played seem to support this thinking. Of course, for a balance reasons, we would want organized to reward the player with a comparable amount of extra income over the length of an average game.
The one positive thing I will say about Organized is that it gives you extra motivation to try to take advantage of any of the strategic options afforded by the high upkeep civics. For example, in a game as Tokugawa, I felt the need to stay in organized religion under circumstances I would have switched to pacifism or free religion. So the trait is not without it's uses, but I just feel that they are not as ample as those offered by the other traits. Fortunately, it is very early, and there is plenty of time to do a little tweaking. Perhaps civics costs in general need to be slighly increased to make organized's savings more substantial.
I would be particularly interested in knowing how the betas feel about organized as compared to the other traits.
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