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.

let me guess you are all playing on medium maps or smaller

Wrong.

Also, saying "it's only broken on medium maps or smaller" is like saying, "It's only broken if you are playing Neutral". It gonna ruin the game for some people; just because it doesn't bother you is no reason it shouldn't be changed.

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.

Yeah, I'm worried about this pretty hardcore too. I'd much much rather see it toned down than have the game be completed with it in it's current incarnation.

The fact that I no longer have to worry about money in a game like this is pretty disheartening, and it gives civs with + influence a HUGE bonus.

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.

It is not broken small map it is easy to have 50% to 60% of influense on the map.

Play on gigantic or immense maps you will still be in a cash crunch. On smaller maps your influence is half of the map so get get the big pop in tourism. On a immense map you dont.

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).

Medium maps are the mainstream map size, especially among newer players. If it's broken on medium maps, the game is broken. The "doc it hurts when I do this/so don't do this" defense of flawed game mechanics is never helpful.

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?

Yes, we need some feedback from the devs on whether this is working as intended, or needs a re-balance. I never thought the economy crash during the colony rush was such a big deal. That's one way you learn, as a newbie, how the economy works in the game. Once you learn how that works, you can deal with anything.

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 $$$$.

Agree, had 'mega?' event of tourism kick off and the cash was in the 100k's after a month.

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

I agree on scaling tourism with the map size. On smaller maps where influence is easier to come by it's insane to have so much money on hand and, therefore, requires no strategy on how to handle funds, which defeats half the point of the game. It currently stays that way up to I presume Large, where it starts to even out a bit, up to Gigantic and Immense where you are still getting about 5bc a turn from tourism, which is just as stupid as it was before, except we start off with less funds making it even harder.

And about the 10x Tourism mega event, allowing for 100x tourism, my last post with the link to the picture shows what it does on a medium map (the value has increased to over 6k a week now). Something should be done to stop that.

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?

Alternately, instead of being based on % of influence, tourism could simply be based on the number of sectors or partial sectors you control. That way, it would naturally "scale down" on a smaller map (fewer sectors to control), and eventually only become truly massive on a giant map that you are dominating a large portion of.

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 losing patience with you now. I'm not even sure I agree with your point that it doesnt need addressed on ALL map sizes, as Im not sure I want the AI to have all that excessive tourism money on larger maps while theyre huge and I'm tiny, and even so, you're completely missing the point of the issue, and have been told so time and time again by handfuls of posters in this thread. A larger map simply means it'll delay the windfall til about midgame when you'll get even more money because of more influence, and frankly, very few people actually want to play gigantic or immense maps on a regular basis, especially during beta testing when we need quick games.


It's something that's out of whack right now, and needs addressed, unless your point is the devs should simply remove any maps smaller than Gigantic from the game so no one experiences this...in which case you're a very silly person.


Why are you defending a Beta so vehemently? This is the whole point of beta to feedback on issues like this. Do you want a broken game, or a game that only works on a certain map size? There are many more ways to boost player economy in the game that would actually add to gameplay, other than the currently ridiculous rate of free tourism money, which adds nothing, and takes away skill and infrastructure significance.


I don't think people really needed any incentives to build influence, as 1)It wins you the game, 2)Gets you free planets/defends yours culturally, and 3)is The unavoidable byproduct of succesful conquest anyway. I personally would like my starting purse back, and a reason to build more than a couple early game antiwar tradeships, a reason to research the trade tree, AI that doesnt gimp itself by wasting reasearch time on trade, and maybe a reason to actually care about maintaining a traderoute.

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.

As long as the metaverse is off, we can use the free cash for experimenting with the new stuff - which I quite like.

But then again, it is no help when it comes to balancing issues...

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

It doesn't seem very logical to me that tourism income should be strictly tied to cultural influence anyway (assuming that's how it's working). Arguing from Earth history... tourists do flock to culture-rich zones like Rome, Florence, and Venice. But they also go to places like Tahiti or even Antarctica for the natural beauty. They go to other places for sports-related reasons like diving the Red Sea, or skiing in B.C., Canada. In a real galactic civilization, there might be culture-free planets with similar attractions, including hunting exotic wildlife. Tourists would go there for the planet's own attractions, not the "influence" of whoever happened to be running the local hot dog stands. After all, the Predator species from the movie series wasn't exactly visiting Earth to see the artworks in Venice. This would also be a rationale for tourism income for Evil races. Tourists from Good and Neutral civs might just be visiting the exotica of the minor planets they control, and staying away from the big cities, the slave pits, etc.

Anyway, that's one argument for either breaking the link to influence, or at least minimizing it and tying it to something else like number of planets you've colonized, so you don't have even more incentive to go for an influence-based strategy.

Since trade could use a little love, why not base at least a portion of tourism income on the number of trade routes? Historically, the first tourists weren't far behind the first traders to open up a route to an exotic place. There would also be a natural fall-off of tourism income when war breaks out and eliminates trade routes. It would just have to be balanced so that there isn't too much of a boost from setting up trade routes, so that doesn't become an insta-win or "must build" strategy.

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.