Hi everyone,

Orginally, I was going to post all these in the stickied thread "Feedback: Cultures", but the post became quite big. So I decided to put them up here instead as a separate topic.

Agrarian Culture & Food as a resource & Hard Pop Growth Limit

First of all, I personally do not think food cultures are that bad overall. However, there are a number of issues that other players including myself encountered in game in regards to food economy and other game mechanics that can affect Agrarian cultures. There are 3 points I wish to highlight:

1. Poor Food Economy Simulation

From what I read around these forums, a fair number of players seem to state that food economy is poorly simulated and/or balanced. As some of us know, it is very easy to reach Food level of Abundance in Lucy build. I for one agree on this point. Even other non-Agrarian cultures can reach that level too easily in their cities without having to be Agrarian themselves. So some people may ask themselves why bother playing as Agrarian cultures then?

Furthermore, any more food production above Abundance (or once they have reached it but still going over that) seem to be redundant. The only other thing many of us know is high food production helps with increasing stability, which can be a good counter arguement for an incentive to have high food production. However, once we manage to research and build Commons Quarters (which exist in Classical Era research, IIRC) for real permanent stability, this point becomes moot. Given the game pace in Lucy build, it did not seem to take long for players to get these if we go beeline straight for the research.

Going back to stability... What do we gain from having high stability? Other than faster Civic point generation, there seem to be no other benefits. As far as I am concerned, devs should consider other rewards or something to give players for reaching high stability of 90+ in a city. Maybe something like +5% to all FISM rss yields? (FISM = Food,Industry,Science,Money. Not Endless FISD.) I don't know, you decide. If there is something good, players may be more inclined to maintain high stability and playing Agrarian cultures can be one of possible solutions/paths to take. (Okay, maybe not exclusively as a main solution, because there is a limit of how much stability we can gain from high food production if not mistaken, but every little bit helps.)

2. Hard Pop Growth Limit

Some people did point out the issue of pop growth hard limit of +1 pop per turn for each city. I also did think at one point that this game design is bad in a way, because such pop growth limit may encourage players to make more of multiple small cities instead of few mega cities. Why? Just so that they can take advantage of more possible population growth not being limited in a turn. (eg. 1 City with 3 territories = 1 pop per turn, which is less than 3 cities with 1 territory each that could give 3 pop per turn.)

That being said, after looking at the other side, I think such hard limit may also be a good idea. This is because it would encourage players to actually just keep merging cities and territories together without having to think much. If everything can be centralised with no real drawback for macro-management, why not? This is what some of them might be thinking.

This is a matter of centralisation VS decentralisation or simply balance between micro and macro-macromanagement playstyle. So it is important for every players to decide where to strike this balace when merging cities/territories together and ask yourself how large should each of your cities be at any given moment? Additionally, I would also like to point out that some players tend to merge few territories together early in order to take advantage of increase in rss production of a city as a start-up. (At least, I did do this myself.)

Let us be realistic here, it is not easy for a city with just 1 territory to be able to ramp up high food production (and/or any other rss) quickly in a few turns. So in order to accomplish this, some players would have to resort to merging a city with another 1 or 2 territories early in the game just by spending some influence. (Normally starting from their capitals) This is unless, of course, we are capable of investing a lot into 1 small city allowing it to be self-sufficient in a couple of turns. (Which may be as a part of snowballing effect.)

How is this issue related to Agrarian culture? It is directly linked, as this culture fosters pop growth by increasing food production. However, if there is such hard limit, some players can and may feel that this culture got short end of stick compared to other cultures where they allow production overflow like industry and science. As a result, some may be less inclined to pick Agrarian cultures to play. Having said this, the next point may change some people mind.

3. Slow Powerful Ability Gauge/Bar

From my gameplay, this culture ability gauge seem to take a long time to fill up even with huge food production in couple of my cities. I did not count how many turns it took to fill the bar, but it was definitely more than 10 turns. As a result, I can understand why some players feel that they are not able to utilise Agrarian culture fully or have fun with it. When I did actually manage to fill the bar up and tried out 2 Agrarian abilities, I noticed that they can potentially be powerful and abusive if not for the slow ability gauge.

Mother's Milk ability, as I recall, instant +1 pop per territory in ALL of your cities? This is very powerful if we own many territories which is particularly true for large/wide empires. The other one, Land of Plenty, steal 1 pop from each adjacent opponent territory? This one is probably a little less powerful than Mother's Milk but can be potentially great and nasty if we use this on a city that has many enemy lands close to it. Imagine taking away 2-5 pops from your opponent(s) in one move and add them all to one of your cities.

It is a bit hard for me to decide whether or not Agrarian abilities do deserve slow gauge rate. I am sure we would not want these powers to be played a lot and often. Gaining a fair (or large) number of pops over the hard limit of 1 pop per turn for each city can be very OP. This is particularly true if such abilities can be used often hence probably why the devs decided to make it harder for Agrarian cultures to play either of those 2 abilities. However, the cost or con for such approach results in some players feel less enjoyable when playing as Agrarian cultures simply because they do not get to play with such cool gimmicks/abilities often like other cultures do and instantly.


Conclusion and Solutions?

As I do not fully know the formula for food production to reach certain level(s) of Subsistence, Plenty, and Abundance in a city, I cannot really comment much on how to tackle the issue of food economy. However, something should be done with high food production other than increasing stability and also at the same time, not taking away the hard pop growth limit per turn. (Because it would ruin the whole balance of micro VS macro play in decision making) Ultimately, we should aim to make players who pick Agrarian cultures feel more rewarding and enjoy playing as them. Obviously, this should not be to the point where they are too OP compared to other cultures.

I did see few people suggested things like making food as part of unit upkeep. Another idea is being able to convert/trade food into money, but I am not going into long details about these here for now.

Having said that, one thing I could suggest is perhaps tweaking two of Agrarian abilities, Mother's Milk and Land of Plenty, so that they can be played a bit more often but less powerful than what they currently are.

Just to throw some ideas for the tweak/changes around left for open discussion:

Mother's Milk
- Target one city only
- Gives a random number of 1 to 2 pops for each time?
- No cooldown allowing Agrarian to be able to selectively boost certain city population quite regularly where players want in their empire. (Assuming the gauge/bar can be filled up every 5-6 turns similar to Aesthete cultures.)

Land of Plenty
- Same as before but impose a cooldown of at least 10 turns to avoid abuse and for balance


Thank you for reading

I believe that the problem with food is not its quantity, but its uselessness.
Civ 5 had the greatest incentive to increase population. People were needed to process tiles and produce unique resources (culture or science that was not on the map)
In HK districts for some reason cultivate the territory not with the help of labor, but by magic).
Also, specialists are not very needed, as they produce the same resources as districts, but in smaller quantities.
I suggest that districts need either food or population for their construction. Specialists should be needed to, for example, produce stability, as was the case in the first OpenDev.

What I could see to make food useful.                      

1.  increase specialist yield and increase population food maintenance cost (say from 4 to 10)              

2.  have army pop units cost food maintenance just like city pops do (have armies take from all cities ?& outpost? proportional to their excess food).                                                                 

3. have population “built” with excess food not spent on armies (say 200 cost, max spend 15+5/pop).                                                            

4. remaining food gives stability (max 30 stability ...each point of stability costs 1.5+0.5/pop food) this way big cities are harder to keep stable.                                            

5. unadministered cities would have double cost for population and stability.                             6. To make stability more important, it should affect influence spreading and the stability cost of districts should go up each era (but things like commons quarters not produce more)