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I have questions for Soren, or anyone else at Firaxis in the know. Why the double change to whip/draft penalties?
The whip was being exploited due to lack of "negative happiness". That part's been corrected now, so wouldn't doubling the duration penalty push the whip over into "useless" for all but cities only able to muster 1 shield per turn? Is that the intent?
Did you guys test the Negative Happiness (at the same 20 duration penalty) and find it not strong enough of a new penalty to achieve the desired balance? I'm looking to understand the reasoning for adding two new penalties. From my perspective, that sounds like a bit of overkill.
The same goes for the draft. I found a way to exploit that one and discovered that it wrecked the game when I did, so I backed off using it. But that, too, is entirely corrected with the advent of Negative Happiness, as you can only get a couple of units out of a city before that city is permanently crippled, so why the extended time penalty? Isn't the duration automatically extended with each new whip/draft operation? I thought 20 turns was too long for the draft. The civilopedia claimed the penalty would only last 10 turns and it took me months to catch on to 20 turn penalty. I always wondered why even two or three units of conscription wrecked my cities, or why captured AI cities would take forever to calm down.
I'll tell you this much: 40 turns is such a SEVERE penalty for one conscript unit, I'll be shelving that option in my games. Not going to be worth using, even in desperate times -- and I've been one of the few players around to value the draft much at all with the current penalties. I ask again, was this the intent of this change? To make these two options so unappealing, they go from the extreme of exploitation to the other extreme of abandonment and gathering dust, unused? I could be wrong, but that's what it sounds like to me.
What I was hoping to see was just the Negative Happiness correction. I thought the rest was pretty fairly balanced, or perhaps lower the draft penalty duration to 15 or even 10. With Negative Happiness, the penalty would actually be felt. That the penalty was sometimes ignored was the exploit problem, not its duration. How do you even know what the true value of the old penalty duration was, when the overriding contentment concealed the effects of any heavy use? Wouldn't the auto mechanic's principle of "Tinker with One Thing at a Time" have been more prudent here? Or did you do that and find the results lacking?
Since the AI's tend to draft more than the typical human player, and whip more in the industrial era, won't these penalties further weaken the AI performance at that stage of the game?
In a separate question, what will happen to saved games from the last patch? If I load up a game in which I've whipped a city 18 turns ago, will its penalty still vanish in two more turns, or will it be extended to 22 more turns?
- Sirian
The whip was being exploited due to lack of "negative happiness". That part's been corrected now, so wouldn't doubling the duration penalty push the whip over into "useless" for all but cities only able to muster 1 shield per turn? Is that the intent?
Did you guys test the Negative Happiness (at the same 20 duration penalty) and find it not strong enough of a new penalty to achieve the desired balance? I'm looking to understand the reasoning for adding two new penalties. From my perspective, that sounds like a bit of overkill.
The same goes for the draft. I found a way to exploit that one and discovered that it wrecked the game when I did, so I backed off using it. But that, too, is entirely corrected with the advent of Negative Happiness, as you can only get a couple of units out of a city before that city is permanently crippled, so why the extended time penalty? Isn't the duration automatically extended with each new whip/draft operation? I thought 20 turns was too long for the draft. The civilopedia claimed the penalty would only last 10 turns and it took me months to catch on to 20 turn penalty. I always wondered why even two or three units of conscription wrecked my cities, or why captured AI cities would take forever to calm down.
I'll tell you this much: 40 turns is such a SEVERE penalty for one conscript unit, I'll be shelving that option in my games. Not going to be worth using, even in desperate times -- and I've been one of the few players around to value the draft much at all with the current penalties. I ask again, was this the intent of this change? To make these two options so unappealing, they go from the extreme of exploitation to the other extreme of abandonment and gathering dust, unused? I could be wrong, but that's what it sounds like to me.
What I was hoping to see was just the Negative Happiness correction. I thought the rest was pretty fairly balanced, or perhaps lower the draft penalty duration to 15 or even 10. With Negative Happiness, the penalty would actually be felt. That the penalty was sometimes ignored was the exploit problem, not its duration. How do you even know what the true value of the old penalty duration was, when the overriding contentment concealed the effects of any heavy use? Wouldn't the auto mechanic's principle of "Tinker with One Thing at a Time" have been more prudent here? Or did you do that and find the results lacking?
Since the AI's tend to draft more than the typical human player, and whip more in the industrial era, won't these penalties further weaken the AI performance at that stage of the game?
In a separate question, what will happen to saved games from the last patch? If I load up a game in which I've whipped a city 18 turns ago, will its penalty still vanish in two more turns, or will it be extended to 22 more turns?
- Sirian
And don't flame me about city trading exploitation (which didn't always worked). The problem could of been fixed otherwise.
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