Stalker0

Join Date 04/2009

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Tourism Buildings (Balance)

This thread is to take a look at tourism buildings from a balance perspective. I outline my the issues with each building in this post. Two posts below that I outline my general fixes.

Spice Market

This is a very special, one time only building (that you need a specific tech to research), so your expecting it to be pretty nice. It also requires an arnor spice, a rare resource. However, it is a pretty cheap building, only costing 75 manu.

It gives +5% tourism, which is effectively +2.5% influence and +2.5% income. However, at 1% crime, unless crime is completely removed, that lowers the income bonus to +1.5%. Meanwhile a financial district gives 6% as a baseline (and often +9-12 with a little bit of synergy), and cultural district +10% (and cultural districts get major boosts for doing a triangle with their +2 level bonus, its quite easy to have +20-+30%). So tile for tile, the bonus on the Spice Market is very low.
Activating the level bonus for a tourism building is hard. Tourism bonuses are rare, generally only granted by rare terrain, a few +1 all type buildings, and other tourism buildings. So you would expect the bonus to be pretty darn cool. However, this one is +1% gross income per level....financial districts give +3%!
The last possible saving grace are the adjacency boosts (some buildings aren't that great themselves, but they are great boosters for other tiles). And here we are once again disappointed, a meer +1 level to wealth (which I can already get with the superior financial district), and +1 to tourism (which again isn't that great because tourism level bonuses arent very strong).

Conclusion: The spice market fails in every category. It is not a good building initially, not good when leveled up, and provides no strong adjacency incentive. There is, frankly, no reason to build this building.

Grand Casino

The thulium cost doesn't sound like much, until you realize that I could sell that 5 on the Galactic Bazaar for say...100 credits (as a sanity check, Thulium is going on the market for 37 in my current game). Now take a 10 income planet (which is a pretty solid money maker), with the standard 33% tax rate, I need ~30% boost in income to generate 1 credit per turn. The Grand Casino gives me ~7% gross income if I'm being very generous (+2 tourism level, which is hard to find, and I'll assume I have enough crime reducers not to care). So at a very ballpark number, my casino is generating ~.25 credits per turn. So it will take a nice little 400 turns to pay off as compared to just selling the Thulium and calling it a day. Also remember, the stronger my planet's base income is...the more I'm incentivized to just put another financial district. So if I'm not making this guy for money, I guess its influence....but I can do that way easier with a cultural district.
Similar to the Spice Market, very poor level bonuses and adjacency boosts, nothing here to get excited about.

Conclusion: Another dud.

Galactic Zoo

At least before the buildings were cheap in manu cost, but 500!....yikes. Plus the thulium, and now two precious strategic resources (especially techapods, I use those every chance I can get on mining bases). And the bonus is no greater than the Grand Casino.
Now our level bonus is a low boost to approval, again very mediocre. Our only boost here is the +2 to tourism, which could be good....if tourism level bonuses were worth anything.

Conclusion: While the others were bad, this is really really bad, just extremely expensive for what it offers.

Utopian Resort

Hopefully we are seeing the pattern. Huge manu cost, mediocre base bonus, almost non-existent leveling bonus.

Restaurant of Eternity

So sake of argument, lets say I made the "Tourism Triangle". I put the Restaurant of Eternity, Utopian Resort, and Galactic Zoo together. Lets take stock.
The Cost: 2300 manu (aka 57 financial districts), 3tiles, 15 thulium, 1 snuggler, 1 techapod, 1 E Pollen, 1 H Crystal, 1 A Viries, 1 Arnor Spice. (ballpark Galactic Bazaar Sell Price: 15x20 + 6x35 = ~510 credits (aka enough to dump a leader into the faction area and get a few global % bonuses that way, maybe even 2). About double that if I needed to buy the materials.
Benefits: +15% income, +15% influence, +11% Approval, +5 food, +3 Individualism.

Conclusion: Now in terms of regular buildings, I can do all of that (except the ideology) with 7-8 tiles. So on tile efficiency, tourism seems alright at first glance (not great but alright). But when you consider the insane cost, I can have up regular buildings enormously quicker, and with just a little bit of adjacency extra the regular building bonuses skyrocket in comparison.

So I think its clear that all of the tourism buildings need some work. This post is already long enough, so I will give my thoughts on solutions in Post 3 (two posts down) below.

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Commander4X

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Join Date 06/2012

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What adjustements would you make to the spice market?

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Fixing the Tourism Buildings

Part 1: The Problem with Tourism

Tourism is a weak yield, because GC rewards specialization over generalization.

The core yields + adjacency system + special building multipliers all work towards specialization in GC. It is far more effective to create a "money planet" and an "influence planet" than it is to create "2 half money/half influence" planets. Take the Galactic Bank as an example, that building with proper adjacency can generate the vast majority of your entire civs income, and as such I will throw every income bonus I can with it. Likewise the Beacon of Babylon with a strong ring of cultural districts will generate far more influence than a smattering of influence across planets.

This means that yields that are "hybrids" like tourism are innately weaker than buildings focused on a single yield and maxing it to the best possible. That doesn't mean tourism as a yield is worthless, I'm all for getting my minister of tourism or using control on the Galactic Festival. Getting tourism is fine. Its when you have to choose tourism OVER another yield, ie build a tourism building rather than XYZ. At that point, all things being equal, tourism will always lose.

Part 2: Redefining the Tourism Building Niche

Right now tourism tries to play in the same sandbox as everything else, and it fails. Tourism is more of a "jack of all trades" yield, it wants to be sprinkled in like seasoning amongst a world of specialized buildings, but there is no incentive to do that. Instead, Tourism buildings all seem like they want to be smashed together in one triangle....except even then its not that great a bonus.

My goals here:

Make Tourism boosters very rare, but very strong. A player should jump for joy when they place a tourism building on that +3 tile, or use that special +1 to all building to boost their tourism building.
Tourism buildings become strong adjacency boosters, but NOT for themselves. The idea here is that tourism buildings should be scattered into area of buildings, giving them major boosts. But tourism buildings do not give tourism boosts themselves, we want them spread out doing the Way's work, not all crunched together like every other building type. Tourism is "special", we want it to act that way.
Tourism cannot generate a single yield as much as specialized buildings, but it provides a good number of different yields...so that the sum total is still attractive.

Part 3: Our new Tourism Buildings

Spice Market

Cost: 75 Manu, 1 Arnor Spice
Core Benefit: +5% Tourism, +1% Crime, +1 Individualism
Level Benefit: +10% Tourism Per level
Adjacency Boost: +2 to Population/Approval/Influence/Wealth

Commentary: Now at first glance, that level benefit seems really high right? But consider, cultural gives +5% per level (which is the same as this), income gives 3% (only slightly lower than this, and financial district adjacencies are common). Now that tourism boosters are much rarer, and these buildings are special, we want to make that leveling powerful and special. Our other big difference is the adjacency, we want buildings around our market (just like in real life), and this encourages people to make rings of various buildings around our tourism buildings. Also, considering growth is a bit weak at the moment, this is a way to further boost growth on hospitals and pop caps should you want to.

Grand Casino

Cost: 75 Manu, 3 Thulium
Core Benefit: +10% Tourism, +2% Crime, +1 Liberty
Level Benefit: +10% Tourism per level
Adjacency Boost: +2 to Population/Approval/Influence/Wealth

Commentary: The Grand Casino and the Spice Market are pretty similar, so we keep their benefits similar. We are swapping a special resource for 3 of a more common one, to give some variance in case someone can build one but not the other.

Galactic Zoo

Cost: 250 Manu, 5 Thulium, 1 Snuggler Colony
Core Benefit: +15% Tourism, +5% Approval, +1 Individualism
Level Benefit: +10% Tourism/+5% Approval per level
Adjacency Boost: +2 to Population/Approval/Influence/Wealth

Commentary: We will give the zoo some approval bonuses to highlight it, with a slight increase in base tourism. The price is also a good bit cheaper.

Utopian Resort

Cost: 250 Manu, 5 Thulium, 1 Harmony Crystal
Core Benefit: +15% Tourism, +5% Approval, +1 Individualism
Level Benefit: +10% Tourism/+5% Approval per level
Adjacency Boost: +2 to Population/Approval/Influence/Wealth

Commentary: Like the Spice Market/Casino, this and the zoo are already very similar in design. I gave it a different resource but otherwise its the same benefits.

Restaurant of Eternity

Cost: 750 Manu, 5 Thulium, 1 A Viries
Core Benefit: +15% Tourism, +25% Growth, +1 Individualism
Level Benefit: +10% Tourism, +10% Growth per level
Adjacency Boost: +3 to Population/Approval/Influence/Wealth

Commentary: There is room in the game for more growth bonuses, especially if the person is using the population bonuses on the tourism buildings to build really big worlds. Our ultimate tourism buildings provides a massive multipler to surrounding buildings.

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The tourism modifiers seem to be based on how tourism works in GC3. In #3 a +10% tourism is huge.

I did not read everything, but what I read I like.

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Infinite Garden, now THAT is a cool tourism building!

Decently cheap to make, very nice tourism bonus. A level bonus that is solid (and considering its a food building, you can go nuts with it if you ring it with farms), incredible adjacency booster, and a culture point!

Frankly, this one building beats ALL of the other tourism buildings....combined.

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It is a food building with a tourism bonus. I think that stresses your point well enough. The tourism buildings are junk, as-is the mechanic.

I am a GalCiv4 newbie but I've been avoiding investing in tourism as I figure out the new mechanics of GC4 because it didn't appear worth it to me. Appreciate your insights in this thread that support my rough understanding.

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