In the tournament game in the newest beta, even crappy players like me can feel the tourism insanity. I realized (too late perhaps) that the key to winning this scenario quickly is to get influence as fast as humanly possible. I am definitely going to win, but it took a while to realize the fastest way to do so.

The tourney has something like 12-15 habitable planets in total. With all of them full, that's still a pretty low total galactic population, which I believe is the basis for tourism. Even so, now that my influence covers about half the galaxy, tourism is about 67% of my tax income. Taxes are at 79%, economy has a 31% boost (racial bonuses and anomalies), I'm under a star federation (+30% more econ), I am universalist (+5% more econ), I have 8 planets for a total of 70 billion people, and every planet has at least a banking center, with my capital sporting the econ capital. With all that, for tourism to be that close to tax revenue is very disturbing (no events have altered tourism income).

EDIT: The other problem I see with such high tourism rates is it defeats the purpose of strong economy builds like the Altarians. All econ bonuses, since they only affect tax income, are minimal in usefulness if tourism is going to provide such a large portion of our income. Additionally, the morale bonuses also become less useful since it's become so easy to keep morale up by just lowering tax rate.

I, too, vote for a tourism boost of no more than 3x DA levels. In fact, I'd rather see tourism left alone than see the economy of GC2:TA based so much on influence.

Wrong.

Assuming we all were, what would it matter? The tourney is medium, and it's the only TA game I've been playing since the update. So what? If medium games are broken, that's still not a good thing!

I guess MaxAstro pretty much already said it all. Oh well.

I agree whole heartedly.

Before tourism was pretty useless, never even bothered with the temples. But now it's way crazy. Some middle ground would be best, so that the colony faze isn't to hamstrung but it shouldn't, like most people have said, make every economy tech redundant.

I just finished my first Obscene and with ~4000 in tourism income it felt more like painful.

Not every one likes or have time for the biggest maps. If it's broken on tiny/small/medium it is a problem. If the game was meant to be played only on the biggest sizes the small ones wouldn't be an option.

IMO the best option would be to have tourism scale with the map size. Now it seems to be too god on small, and not so much on the bigger ones (I have however not tried the bigger sizes my self).

I'd really like to hear from the devs on this - is it something they want to do a quick-fix for (i.e., change to a lower value), something they plan to scale based on map size, or something they just want to leave in?

It is called common sense. Influence = tourism $$$$. Influence you know the color of your civ. If you play on smaller maps it is easy to hurry up and cover more than half of the map with your influence, since tourism is tied to how much influence you have. It is easy to get a ton of tourism $$$ early in the game. On gigantic or immense it is much harder to got tourism $$$$.

No one is arguing that. I think your missing the point.

Would it not be easy then to have some sort of map modifier?

So whatever calculation is used to figure out how much money you get currently from tourism would be multiplied by your map modifier. Small maps could be say 0.25 whilst Gigantic maps could be say 1.25. If medium maps currently get too much then halve the income gained from them by making your map modifier value 0.5.

Obviously the numbers aren't fixed but it may prove easier to add something like this rather than try to rework the whole tourism thing?

i am Noob and i am finding it to easy, tourism way to much dont have to worry about negative income at all.

I'm playing a gigantic Arcean game with the beta and have never had so much difficulty building my economy. While I've only gathered 100BC from anomolies in the 1st two game years, I've succesfully dealt with this before in DA.

For the 1st time since I've been playing GalCiv, I've had to completely halt military and social production (except for market places) for an extended period while I complete some economy enhancing techs and get some market places up on some adequately populated planets.

This is especially painfull in this game because I hit the jackpot with a purple star surrounded by class 26, 20, and 19 planets right next to another purple star with a class 26 planet.

Maybe concentrating on influence enhancing techs is a better idea here considering the current discussion.

I think a bit of game balancing is in order.

I am not sure why it was felt there was a need to change how tourism works. I thought that the economic crash during colonization was a GOOD thing - I mean wasn't the new planet environments introduced precisely to slow down the Colony Rush? Same thing with the economy crash. Furthermore, doesn't this just make larger empires that much more unassailable?

On the other hand it is nice for influence to get some purpose (on larger maps its not that important).

Here are some ideas that may address these concerns

1) Make tourism a settable game factor (like galaxy size). Not sure about the metaverse though ... I never submit to that.

OR

2) You could have tourism vary so that the effects are not linear, but depend on the size of your current empire (i.e. you get diminishing gains after a particular point)

OR

3) You ONLY get tourism money when you are not at war with any major power (or maybe only a fraction depending on how many wars you are fighting). This REALLY makes it a tough decision as to whether grab a bunch of planets or keep raking in the peace cash. This could also allow a bunch of smaller empires to really hurt a larger empire even if they can't mount an effective defense.

OR

4) Tourism is reverted back to the standard 1X, BUT it increases by some factor proportional to the number of races you are friendly with and their population. Now it REALLY pays to be a "Nice guy" (even if they do finish last). Afterall, don't other races go on holiday to see other empires?

OR

5) Tourism factor is variable but it depends on how much cash you pour into Tourism. The more you put in, the higher the factor - though it probably has a sliding scale. This would represent the cash you are investing in to make your empire more tourist friendly. Maybe this tourist "Rating" also competes with other empires you are not at war with stealing away their potential tourist factor. BEHOLD! THE STAR SHATTERING POWER OF THE TOURIST WARS!!!!

Just by 2 BC

Dano

I agree that tourism seems to generate too much revenue. I wish the devs would comment so that we could get an idea of what they have in mind so as to better direct our thoughts. I just played a game (well, right now I'm hovering over the decision to win w/ an Alliance or not) and I could have outright purchased a Large hulled vessel every other turn. I had the Tourism mega event, but still, I was comfortable even before that.

Also, is tourism based solely on other races visiting? I would think that it's a combination of other races and your own (to address the questions about, say, evil civs having tourism). After all, plenty of people travel to other locals within the same country - I can't imagine it being different if multiple planets were available.