1.55 - Cultural Trait Feedback

Thank you for making this comprehensive feedback report!

Great post.  I'll forward this.

Didn't see anything reducing pollution.  Unless you changed the pollution mechanic this is going to be a problem.

Well, you sure made picking traits a tougher decision by upping the base cost and then upping the cost of remaining picks dramatically with each new pick.  I think it would help if you added culture points to the info at the top of the main screen and let us see how they're accumulating as with Control and Wealth.

Yeah the cost of culture inflation is such a great addition now I can completely ignore this feature after a hundred or so turns.

As it is now I preferred the old system. The pacing for once was so much better with the old system and there was interesting and very useful perks to pick all over the place. A lot of them are now gone: starbase range increase, increase in culture point generation buildings, pollution reduction, etc. The old system was relevant for the entire game. Now you pick a couple of good perk in one tree and then that's it.

In all my years of gaming I usually go down the research route. In this new system, I'm back to my old habit of just going down a few perk in the progressivism tree and that's it. With the old system I actually went down other trees I wouldn't have before. Speaking of progressivism, Breakthrough should give you a one time 3000 Research or 60 research per turn for the rest of the game; that's just one example but with the cost of these perks, they really should give you an immense advantage in any specific trees.

It might just be a question of balancing the impact that event choices have on the the culture points cost, etc. But even then, I'm really missing some of the perks that were there before and are now gone. Imo, more work needs to be done here to bring back the fun and relevance of this game system.

I keep telling the Devs if it ain't broke don't fix it the culture feature wasn't broke but they "fixed" it.

The UI feedback on this screen is a train wreck.  We need a lot more information on it.

I'll be living in this thread over Memorial Day as I'm going to be focusing on the Cultural Progress trees.  The idea is that they should be pretty infrequently gotten but extremely powerful. Much more so than currently.

I think the new format is fine, I just think the cost increase formula is too unforgiven. I can generally get 2 perks "relatively easily", but then by number 3 the cost gets really steep.

The thing I did miss was that the cost was impacted with how deep in the tree you have gotten. The idea seems to be that perks deeper in the tree are meant to be "stronger", so it makes sense that cherry picking from several trees (which will already have a price because I won't have discounts in that many trees) should give me less benefit but be cheaper overall. That has been lost in the new formula, and I think that part should be reconsidered.

Agree the formula would work if it applied separately to each tree. and there were more ways (many more) to get points.

Another way of putting it would be: how many tress should you expect to be able to maximize throughout an entire game on the largest maps ? 2-3-4-5-All of them ? Depending on how you answer this question, you could calculate the amount of points needed to reach that goal and set the pacing of culture gain according to this amount.

Personally, my preference is to be able to max most of them in the longest games. I understand that this might not be the goals here, but that's what I like the most in these kind of games. At the very least, you should be able to pick some really good low hanging fruits from all the trees and be able to max 3-4 all the way. Or, lock out the highest perks so that the only ones available are those based on the choices you made when creating your civ in the beginning of a game; this way you could make them extremely powerful while still allowing us to max out most of the other trees for the fun of it. Give us plenty of good choices and let us have fun along the way (dopamine mechanism )!

One way this could work is to make the link between event choices and the cost stronger (I'm just following your current idea here). Like lets says I've mostly plated the scientific card for most of the game and now I start selecting more malevolence event choices as I progress, the cost of the malevolence tree should drastically go down and let me max it out much much more easily. I want to emphasize though that with time I should still be able to "max out" (with the above caveat) another tree even without choosing the corresponding events.

You could also play with the amount of culture points you get per turn somehow (you mentioned based on your capital I think before, etc.) to help us get there.

I'm with Draver and Gypsy2299, I really enjoyed the previous culture system and found myself bouncing around teh various different options depending on how the game was going e.g. Need that Starbase Extension, need to remove pollution, need to buff my Governors now I've got more planets.  It felt my culture was evolving depending on the differing challenges in each game and was 'interesting'.  Balancing my preference for 'fair and demographic' with the challenges of pragmatism, authority in times of war etc was fun and felt like my culture was evolving in line with the game. Now you essentially need to pick from a limited choice at the start and stick with it given the cost of changing. I just uninstalled the insider build to go back and load a previous save game and definitely prefer the increased opportunity to choose in the previous version.

Some of the trait work.

I don't like the new handling of culture at all. Already from the second selection it plays then almost no more role, since one can select for a long time nothing more.
Better back to the old handling - I want to be able to select an advantage more often. Not only every 10 hours.

Yeah, in general I think you are spot on with this.  Overall, I reall do not like the new culture trees.

My thoughts on these below.

As others noted, you removed the pollution reduction one, and there is definitely a community desire to bring that back in some form.

Was playing around again with Insider last night, and it seems that the Starbase range seems to have been extended. If this is true then it makes sense that the cultural trait to extend starbase range was removed.  But the choices to reduce leader cost  really need to be there.  Both of them and un-nerfed. The cost for leaders is rather obnoxious.  And then I noticed what others have been saying---I wasn't getting any culture points.

Also, I find it odd to have to spend a culture point to get an additional survey ship.  Need the culture points for other things.

A suggestion is to either buff the rewards or reduce the costs of the traits to something in between.