A Better Culture Model

[kilane royalist]

This is an example of why a four currency model would be better. What you are asking for is another patch to add on another specific ability with a separate code base, for no other reason than you like it.

In the model I am proposing, it would be much simpler to implement:

1. I've already stated that one would get an "income" of "notes".

2. Notes could be "spent" to maintain a larger sphere of influence.

3. Thus a lease would be easy to add to diplomacy - the AI can figure

a. How many notes would be required for the player to simply take the area in question? What is the cost of this number of notes in coins? The result is the twice the maximum the AI could charge, because otherwise the player is better off just taking it with culture.

b. What is the present value of the expected production? Since coins/beekers/shields/notes all have an exchange rate, the AI can figure what it could get out of the land, and what you can get out of the land priced in coins - or any other currency for that matter.

c. What is my pressing need? The AI could value currencies it needs more strongly. For example, let us suppose that 1 coin can be converted by the AI to .5 of a beaker through its own economy. But it really needs beakers. Normally it would value 1 coin = .5 beekers and convert, but it would know that 1 coin = 1 beeker in production cost, and so might take less total payment, if more of it was in beekers, hoping the player might make the deal.

In otherwords, in the hodgepodge system, the ability might lead to an exploit, or it might be a useless feature that no one will use except out of emotional attachment. In an exchange model, the price of any action becomes easier to compute, and hence the present value of that action is easier to compute and balance. Renting land might be expensive, it might be cheap, but it would be easy for the AI to figure, and hence it could also make offers for renting your land...


The same is true with almost any trade - it becomes much easier if everything is treated as exchange to price the present expected value. More over, the AI would no longer need as many trade cheats - a competitive bidding market would probably net an AI a better position than the old boy networks, since while some AI's benefit from it, some clearly lose more than they gain by such collusive arrangements.

Again - in MP, this becomes a crucial issue.

[kilane royalist]

Fungibility

Korn brings up one of the problems with the current Civ design - and that is that the different kinds of advantage a civ can pile up are very close together. A high science civ gets both good military and good culture by default, and the current luxury system means that good culture means good territory which means luxuries, which means happiness.

Instead what should be done is taking steps to differentiate the kinds of production. He mentions happiness, let me tak an example.

Let's imagine you have a science oriented culture, and you have an unhappy person. That unhappy person will demand more of what you don't have. Where as a culture that is short on science but long on culture might well be able to make an unhappy person happy with less science, since that is what he is short on.

My suggestion is to have greater differentiation.

One possibility is have the knowledge producing improvments be setable as to what they are making. So imagine a library could be set to producing all culture, all science, or some mixture, rather than the mix being set by the game and fixed. I am not sure whether it would be better to allow these values to be changed, or fixed when first built. I favor the later, but haven't had time to look into.

In this implementation, a civ going for science would be building libraries, but their trade arrow conversion would add only to science. Where as another civ that is trying for a pure culture win would weigh in towards producing culture with its libraries etc.

The other option is to have them resetable at lower levels, and fixed at higher levels.

- - -

The other point this brings up is in the cost of local versus global. Global money/shields/culture/beakers are better than local. The correct local/global exchange rate seems to be close to 2-1, sometimes even 4-1. That is, it takes 2-4 global whatevers to be as useful as 1 local one. So an unhappiness can be cured by an entertainer, who is producing culture only useful in his city, while the same person could be made happy by spending more global culture.

This is my incentive for proposing that many actions should start having collateral costs in unbalanced civilizations - a civ with all science would start to find that it would have to pay some culture to go forward, a civ with all culture would start to find that it would suffer social diseases (the historical result of decadence!) that would need science to keep at bay.

[korn469]

kilane royalist

while we may disagree on the specifics to get where we are going, i think we both want a diversity of meaningful strategic choices each of which has its own merits and flaws but all have the same ability to allow the player to win the game.

Now i have a question: When you say that it should require research as well as taxes to upgrade, why exactly do you think that this would be a good idea? Maybe I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective, but it seems to me if a warrior had a flat upgrade cost of 20 taxes and 20 science that with their current exchange rate being the same before structures, the biggest benefits would come from always going with a middle of the road strategy. By sacrificing one or the other you would always suffer a gameplay penalty. In my opinion, a much better solution would be to have an optional tech that decreased the cost of upgrades once you discovered it, but with a properly balanced tech tree, it could be on the opposite side from techs you need to achieve an economic victory for example. It seems that the most interesting choices forces you between two diametrically opposed paths, with the player having to determine which is better books or bricks, guns or butter, etc.

Am i missing something?

[kilane royalist]

My idea with collateral costs is this:

1. A newly discovered tech will require science beakers to imediately build or upgrade units.

2. After that, and until another tech is discovered, there will be a smaller science cost.

3. After the next tech discovery of the same kind, the collateral cost will drop to 0.

The idea here is that if the player wants to rush, they pay, not just money, but science as well. Worth it if the unit is needed now, less pressing for later. Leonardo's workshop would remove this cost. The science cost for upgrade would be multiplied by the same curve as tech cost is.

The effect of this - which would increase with difficulty levels - would be to make techs that you have traded for be utilizable immeadiately, only if you are willing to sacrifice some of your own research efforts. The player could of course spend gold (at a higher rate than their conversion for beakers of course) to overcome this problem.

Again - the idea here is to create mechanisms for game balance that focus on exchange and control of space rather than cities. By having collateral costs go up, it will force civilizations to be more balanced. The collateral cost won't be a constant, but instead be calculated based on scarcity. Middle of the road civs will have more options, but pay more for everything. Extreme civs will pay less (in terms of pop/turns of production) but have their freedom of action hampered by their civs weakest link. What actions will be hampered will be determined by the particular civ.

Thus at low levels - no collateral cost, at medium levels, a small amount, at high levels even more. The lagging AI societies will pay somewhat less than the player (though still some).

[kilane royalist]

A yet more sophisticated model of collateral costs would have resource tiles produce varying amounts of a resource, and the collateral cost be calcuated by how much short of the ideal you are. For example, let us imagine than a society had 15 iron on hand, and an upgrade required 5 iron. The player wants to upgrade 4 units, which would mean that he would have to pay beakers to make up the difference, each unit of iron short would cost progressively more beakers, going up on a rather stiff scale.

This would mean that trade agreements would be for amounts, and again, the computer could cost the resource correctly.