[SPOILERS]PB46: (In Search of) Fine Foreign Dining, by Hannibal of England

[Krill]

Request for lurker input: I'm looking for city names from the UK and Ireland to use here. Not big cities, more villages and small towns that have names that are...quaint in nature. Any suggestions are appreciated, even if I'm not promising that I'll use all of them.

[Coin]

You’re in luck: I went roaming the countryside at Easter and noted down lots of strange names for my RPG campaign.

Here’s a selection from around Sheffield:
Coal Aston
Dronfield
Unstone
Appleknowle
Mastin Moore
Owlthorpe
Morthen
Loxley
Worrall
High Bradfield
Thurgoland
Nether Haugh
Hooton Roberts

[Krill]

I like Owlthorpe for the cow city...

Thanks for the list!

[Coin]

I like Owlthorpe for the cow city...

Thanks for the list!

You’re welcome!
Owlthorpe is a great name. It sounds just on the verge of made up. Strangely enough, so do many other names in the area.
Some further south sound completely made up, such as Stretton-on-Fosse (Cotswold) and Mustard Hyrn (Near Norwich).

[Thoth]

Bell End
Brown Willy
Boggy Bottom
Twatt
Nob End
Fanny Barks
Scratchy Bottom
Minge Lane
Dicks Mount
Crotch Crescent

https://www.indy100.com/article/these-ar...W1at5pZXmW

[Krill]

I don't think any of those are quaint.

[Thoth]

[GermanJoey]

I think I understand what you are getting at, but I don't think the numbers you are using here are entirely accurate given the other changes within the game.

Part of the difficulty in balancing the civics are the way that the costs are calculated: it scales off population and cities, with a multiplier from difficulty level (but we can ignore the difficulty level component IMO).

My understanding of the basic costs (it works for a rough estimate, but full explanation is found here) are this: Each pop point after the first nine costs:

• No upkeep: 0g
  
• Low upkeep: 0.08g
  
• Medium upkeep: 0.12g
  
• High upkeep: 0.16g
  

And each city costs:

• No upkeep: 0g
  
• Low upkeep: 0.4g
  
• Medium upkeep: 0.5g
  
• High upkeep: 0.6g
  

So a player with 10 size 10 cities would pay 0g to run a no upkeep civic, and 20.4g to run a high cost civic. Low upkeep civic would cost 11.2g, then modified by inflation. Map size is irrleveant.

However, this is just the cost of the individual civic.

Core points though: You have to run a legal civic, so the only comparisons that have any meaning are to what the other choices are on a given turn, and how this affects other in game deicisions (eg tech priority and golden age timing). Tribalism is a low upkeep civic for example, so to run Bureaucracy the cost savings need to be compared to that, or the cost of running Vassalage. And because there are only four cost options, it's either 0% cost for no upkeep, 52% cost for low upkeep, then 75% and 100% at high cost. There isn't a lot of variation available through the upkeep mechanic.

In Bureau, a player would save 0.4g per city and 0.08g per population point, plus the capital output bonus compared to Tribalism. The example from T120 in PB42 is 17 cities and 80 pop: 12 gpt. This is, IMO, a good counter example of why Bureaucracy falls down if it is a high cost civic: it works in the early game, and then fails to scale as your show, where the No upkeep option of Nationhood gives greater economic output and the ability to draft (and happiness from barracks, and extra EP?!) There is no reason to use Bureaucracy, and it collapses the choices down to three, but in reality Nationhood uber alles in that set up: Vassalage unit savings don't match the cost savings from nationhood, and Environmentalism was commerce and gold that costs gold to generate anyway, so drafting provided a niche that none of the other civics matched in a strategic or tactical sense. This is why the civics benefit from the Emancipation move into Legal, but then they need rebalancing. Otherwise the Emancipation move has no effect if it can't be used.

Look, the crux is straightforward to understand: I'm not claiming the civics are correctly balanced. What I am claiming, is that if we nail Bureaucracy down as a No upkeep civic, is we have a baseline civic we can then compare the rest to, and balance the others effectively. If we leave Bureaucracy with any form of upkeep cost, we limit it's value and we end up pricing it out of usefulness. We also have to make sure that the civics aren't broken in the extremes of map settings in terms of map size as civic costs are not affected by map size: civics cost less on small maps because of fewer pop and cities, so on large maps the benefits of bureaucracy stay the same but the costs increase. How is that good for game balance?

I can see where you're coming from, but what I'm trying to say is this: Bureaucracy was already regarded as the best-choice labor civic for most of the game for civs of all sizes even when it was high-upkeep! It was good enough that civs without a religion around the Ren era would try to get one and spread it just to be able to use Theocracy instead of Vassalage for double-promo units. I think its disingenuous to compare to Tribalism because as soon as any other option is available, it will be better than Tribalism. 

As an actual example of this, I did eventually switch back to Bureau in that PB37 game I posted because I got more multipliers, specifically Oxford. I was also the biggest civ in that game, in terms of population; other civs most certainly got more relative-advantage out of Bureau vs other civics than I did. Nationhood was better for me long term because of the map situation (the best way to leverage lots of low-production, high-food islands was drafting) as well as the very high war-weariness I was suffering. Furthermore, using Nationhood long-term like I did was very much out of the meta, and very much something that was map-dependent. For another example, I'm thinking of capitals like my PB18 capital that were just crazy lucrative; I was definitely in Bureau all game for that one.

You're right that Bureaucracy could be re-balanced for the late-game by setting it to no-cost. The problem is that now the balance of the early-mid game is thrown way out of whack! Just think about the extra maintenance gold each civ gets. Lets say go with your example of 12gpt at T120, and then mine of 84 at T174. Find the average maintenance savings and sum it up: 54*(84+12)/2 = a big civ now has an extra free 2592g! That's about two free early great merchants.

On one hand, this changes pacing of the medieval/ren eras; however, it also changes balance in this era in two ways. First, big vs small civs. Big civs, at the start of the medieval era, are typically hurting economically hurt pretty badly. That instant 12g savings at T120 as compared to before is fairly significant; a big civ might be only saving gold in the low-double-digits at this point of the game. (actually, in the slower-paced PB37 I was actually losing 1gpt at 0% slider at this same turn! I remember a similar pattern from earlier games.) Furthermore, the fact that CS is now even more of a beeline-target than it already was before further advantages civs that got "good capitals" over civs that got "capitals like the one we have here."

[GermanJoey]

Sorry for derailing the thread with this.

Regarding the game, what other civs haven't settled their second city yet?

[AutomatedTeller]

I thought city ranking was first by culture, then size.

Huh, this post: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/h...st-8951926 seems to indicate it's a lot more complicated than that.