The Culture Rate

[Verrucosus]

gdgrimm's scenario #3 (empire without a real core) and Ijuin's scenario of a late-game empire with similarly huge cities are valid examples of using the culture slider without much of the inefficiency I was worried about in my earlier posts. In my experience these situations do occur occasionally and when they do it's worth remembering that I have a culture rate to play with.

Raising the culture rate may not be part of the standard repertoire of strategies used in almost every game, but there is quite a number of situations where it can work efficiently. Because of the nature of those situations it's important to keep a perspective on the structure of the empire in order to know when it's time to "turn on the music". I rather like that.

[Stickyman]

How do you feel about having the ability to adjust the sliders city by city. I've always thought that it would be an very useful tool, especially given the city specialization that Civ4 requires.

Do you think that it was intentionally left out for gameplay reasons?

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Stickyman
How do you feel about having the ability to adjust the sliders city by city. I've always thought that it would be an very useful tool, especially given the city specialization that Civ4 requires.

Do you think that it was intentionally left out for gameplay reasons?

Yeah...I do.

The game is designed where you can effect both the economic focus of your entire empire. Part of the reason you would want to build specilists is because that allows you to specilize your cities, while the sliders are for your empire as a whole.

Also, it's designed to reduce mico-management ("Ok, I'm running out of money, I have to click on all 15 cities and tweak the gold/science ratio in every one of them this turn...")

[Verrucosus]

I agree.

The basic concept of the Civilization games has always been that you rule an empire consisting of decentralised production centers, a federation of city states if you will. The original game's manual contains an excellent four-page-summary of the game mechanism titled "Cities and Civilizations". Most of it, particularly the idea that civilizations are built from cities, is still relevant for the current version. While managing the individual cities in a way that they themselves grow and prosper is fun, the real magic comes from doing that in a way that makes sure that your empire as a whole has whatever troops, money and research it needs at a given point in the game.

In contrast to the intricate tweaking of independent, but interconnected cities, the element of empire-level decision-making has traditionally been weak. I may be overlooking something, but I think there were only four areas in the original game:
(1) foreign affairs (diplomacy)
(2) form of government
(3) directing research
(4) setting the tax/science/luxury rate

That's not an awful lot when you compare it to the complexities of city management. Some people have even complained that playing Civ - as much fun as it is - makes you feel more like a mayor of twenty cities at the same time than like an emperor. In response, the designers of the sequels have strengthened empire-level decisions by giving us more complex and interesting choices in the areas of diplomacy and government.

Allowing city-specific research and culture rates would have been a move against the attempt to strengthen empire-level decision-making, but I'm sure it crossed their minds because, superficially, it would have fit perfectly with the new emphasis on specialisation. The cities with the best researchers and science buildings would almost inevitably enjoy a research rate of 100 % while border cities get flooded with culture and the rest of the empire is made to pay the bills. The science cities would not even need a market (except maybe for the happiness effect) and the gold cities not even a library.

I'm glad they didn't go down that route, because that would have removed the interesting tradeoffs that are involved with setting the science and culture rates. In this thread many situations are shown in which it is beneficial to raise the culture rate, but the posters' reasoning always reflects a weighing of costs and benefits that makes the decision interesting. Whenever I tweak the research or culture rate, I feel that I make an important decision that could put my standing in the tech race or my ability to expand or upgrade troups at risk. I'm quite certain that it would feel less important to make that kind of decision on a city-level and, moreover, I fear that there wouldn't even be a tradeoff. I would probably decide at an early stage which cities would become my science/culture/money cities and build infrastructure accordingly. City management would be heavily specialised, but somehow boring.

Summing up my ramblings, I think I'm quite happy with the way things are.

Oh, two (somewhat) related notes:
1) If you want heavy specialisation you can avoid the effect of the rate settings by minimizing commerce and maximizing food output in order to support specialists.
2) The ability to adjust sliders city by city would have been a real game-breaker in the good old days of the luxury-induced pop-boom (last seen in Alpha Centauri, I believe). Part of the fun was to set up the empire in a way that you could do the pop-boom in a few turns before returning to research and taxation. If you had been able to do it city by city, it would just have been another exercise in micromanagement.

[Ijuin]

For adjusting city by city, I'd like to see the empire-wide sliders stay, but in the city screen you could adjust the sliders for that city separately (after clicking a toggle to "unhitch" the city setting from the empire setting). This way you could, for example, direct 100% of your science city's output to science without reducing the tax income from the rest of your empire.

[fed1943]

I agree with Verrucosus.The current way is more balanced and interesting.Just one slider,the player can "balance"it,but each possible move has a price.
Sure,in civ4 the thing is more complicated,culture is always useful,while in previous games more luxuries than needed was useless.
Best regards,