I don't see anything wrong with that. It means that we are incentivized to build more libraries, which we want anyway.
Paths of Civilization
- Thread starter Academia Nut
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- Original
I don't see anything wrong with that. It means that we are incentivized to build more libraries, which we want anyway.
Why do city support?
The 8 econ a turn we are taking is already offset by 5 from our Colony Taxes, and much of the rest is offset by refuges as often as not.
Not to mention that our cities often take City Support.
Not to mention that if we need Econ, using a secondary to get it is generally better than using 1.5 passive policies, given that there are a number of policies which are worth a secondary action or more.
- Location
- Austria
Still worth it, honestly. Plus Great Library is a thing.
Because we cannot touch negative Econ and thus City Support allows us waaay mere leeway in turn plan. What we get at midturn is only half the story.
As long as we keep our econ near-capped, we're fine on that side. Having "only" 20 econ of room should be plenty, we don't need all 27. And we definitely want to stay capped on econ and overflowing (below our LTE refund limit) since Expand Econ is by far our most stat-efficient action.
City Support is way more valuable than the basic stat incomes, but it's still worth a lot less than the efficient passives (Skullduggery, Infrastructure, Defense, possibly Vassal Support and Innovation)
It also means that Academies are even more massively expensive mechanically.
Building one Academy and Two Libraries costs us 3 secondaries, 9 culture, and 3 wealth, to give us +1 RA tolerance.
In comparison, building a GP costs us 3 secondaries, 9 culture, and 9 econ to give us +1 RA tolerance, +1 temp damage tolerance, +0.5 tech refund, +1 max Martial, and some fiddling with our cent range that mostly cancels out (+0.5 low cent tolerance, -1 high cent tolerance, +1/3 high cent tolerance via allowing admin-free True Cities).
Now, it is obviously true that not everything can or should be expressed mechanically - but it is generally a good thing for the mechanics to express the effects of our building, and the mechanics of the Academy are already expensive with the requirement of one matching library, much less two.
Colony taxes and refugee income offsets those costs directly; e.g. right now while sitting at 27 (+5) [+5-8], we can safely spend all 27 econ since our net income is +2. This has been confirmed by AN on at least one or two occasions.
Not sure about the golden age, but 2 loyalty is absolutely worth losing 10 stats and 1 stability.
Our best bet for gaining loyalty is Main Support Subordinate, and that costs 8 stats a piece. So our gains from this are 2 Mains and 16 stats.
In contrast, a stability costs a secondary and a stat point (via Improve Annual Festival), so we effectively gave up a secondary and 11 stats.
That is a difference of 3 secondaries and 5 stat points in favor of loyalty. Not sure how much a golden age is worth, but hopefully we can get it this turn or next...
It takes two libraries to get a mysticism refund. I don't see why Academy shouldn't require two libraries to offset knowledge not being transmitted through writing.
Refugees are temporary. Income is more reliable. I don't see any reason not to add another City Support policy to offset our cost so that econ income is positive.
- Location
- Austria
20 Econ is not that hard to spend, and reliance on Expand Econs to overflow or bust is fragile as hell. One turn when we cannot do it can fuck us up.
It can not, of course, but still. "If we take this exact action each turn and nothing goes wrong, it's all working out optimally as fuck and we are rich" is a bad angle because things always go wrong. Just look at Trelli.
What if we go back to 7-8 cities? Then it won't be offsetting enough anymore.
Once again, it is because doing that means we lose out on e.g. an Infrastructure Policy, which means we have to do a bunch more work with our own actions. The next effect is negative, if you actually go through the arithmetic.
Why shouldn't each Academy require four libraries to offset knowledge not being transmitted through writing?
Why shouldn't each Academy be a 9-progress action like the GP or Colossal Walls?
Why shouldn't each Academy costs a point of Wealth in upkeep each, like the megaproject?
Answer these, and you will have your response.
Ideally we want all but one of the cities fully offset by City Support so they aren't so incredibly fragile to things like war, trade disruptions, plague and famine. We nearly broke because of trying to scrape that bit of extra efficiency out last time.
I'd like to think we can learn
I'd like to think we can learn
We are already at 7 cities. 3 Free, and 4 non-Free.
If you mean what happens if we bring up another 3-4 cities on top of that - well, at that point it might be worthwhile to add a city support policy or two. But note that at that point we will also have another 3-4 passive policies that we can assign, so it isn't like that is a problem now.
- Location
- Austria
Eh.
I'd say that I am fine with all city Econ consumption being balanced by CSs + vassal food. Which means that 5 FCs (aka -5 Econ and -1 on top by lvl2 Redshore) are counterbalanced by Vassal food; Redshore will be balanced once Dam+Canal make transporting food from Thunder Horse viable, I think. One more CS supports two more lvl1 TCs.
So, with 7 total 1 CS, 5 of which are (going to be) FCs, is fine, I agree. If we get 8th city I am pushing for second City Support. It's not like we won't find use for extra Econ.
Extra food taxes? Though I think after the canal we're going to be doing a chunk of integrating.
One used for holding and occupying territory, siege works, et cetera.
So long as we're not trying to conquer people, it's probably not critically important, but it's something to keep in mind.
We're big enough and interconnected enough that people dying from the other three can leave us with too few people to operate our infrastructure and trigger further collapse; that might be enough to count Death as a distinct threat.
Education is fucking expensive. Not really surprising.
Pretty sure we're going to have to do most of the pushing for it ourselves, too; there's too many more interesting short-term gains for the infrastructure policies to pick up elsewhere.
I still think it is excessive.
Part of that is that I don't find the narrative explanation for the Mysticism refund malus particularly convincing.
People being more educated can make them less willing to trust "direct reference to the records", sure, but I would expect the effect to be marginal; not something that eats up the equivalent of the gains that our Library Megaproject gave us by itself.
I'm thinking we should convert two cities to Free Cities and then go pop the rest of our cities until our sanitation infrastructure catches up.
Megaproject Support seems like a very good idea now IMO
If things start going bad, our free cities can convert to City Support as their policy. We're currently at our maximum tech refund for income, so until we get more refunds we don't get much benefit from more.
Megaproject Support seems like a very good idea now IMO
Can't get it this turn, hopefully next turn yeah. Definitely the Golden Age is what I wanted, it is definitely worthwhile if we ignore that loss.
We shouldn't build ourselves to require that overflow to survive, but we should still be trying to get the overflow every turn we can.
If things start going bad, our free cities can convert to City Support as their policy. We're currently at our maximum tech refund for income, so until we get more refunds we don't get much benefit from more.
I have to wonder whether you're reversing the cause and effect, here.
What AN said was going on is that the knowledge and skill provided by Academies is less practical to transfer through writing; I'm pretty sure this means as we make Academies a larger part of our civilization, each given point of Mysticism becomes more powerful, at the cost of being less practical for a library to refund.
This makes the benefits of education (as usual) implicit, which means we can't expect our subordinates to do it for us.
Maximum tech refund for income? I was not aware we have 2 tech refund per action.
We have a lot of educated people milling around. Unfortunately, their knowledge is not being written down and/or collected. There's also not enough libraries, so people can't access books to consult.
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- Location
- United States
Yeah, it's meant to represent our education becoming more sophisticated and complex, to the point that people can't just go to the library to find all the information that they need just written down somewhere anymore.
Our palaces provide 1.5 refund currently (rounds down IIRC)
All income counts as a single action for the purposes of refunds.
I like this idea, and if that is what is going on, I would find it much more reasonable - but I don't believe AN has indicated that this is what he intended. Especially considering that mechanically, changing the value of a Mysticism point is something that would have messy effects in terms of action costs and the like.
Relevant question. What do people think the great library does?