Story of my game, let's have a space race before we can build oceangoing ships, while a gaggle of Great Writers look on in despair!
I decided to play around with the half-price Holy Sites and Theater Squares for a Culture victory, founded a religion to enable purchases of Theater Square buildings with Faith (Jesuit Education), and very quickly realized that the scaling cost of districts would be the hard cap on how much tourism I could generate. Each city could only store 1 piece of Writing and either 3 pieces of Art or 3 Artifacts (the game ended before I reached Radio for Music slots), but I was getting every available Great Writer and Artist from the Theater Square spam, so I ended up with half a dozen unused Great People milling around Kyoto (maybe they were busking for the tourists, waiting anxiously for new museums and amphitheaters to open up
). I didn't build a single military unit past the three Archers that staved off the early Barbarians, and the AI never gave me any trouble beyond Cleopatra denouncing me every so often. I ended up finishing the relevant branch of the culture tree by t214, even without any Inspiration boosts. I won a Culture Victory on t236.Screenshots:
Endgame Demographics Snapshot:
Why does everything in the lategame cost so much? Archaeologists were 1400-1600 hammers, Naturalists cost 1500+ faith, and the modern wonders (the only way I could get Music slots) were all in the 1700-2300 hammer range. I ended up using excess faith to buy three Great Engineers to rush wonders, but there's no way to rush Districts outside of chops, which are great early but have no way of keeping up. Throughout the game, I noticed that unit costs weren't scaling, so I think my next game will be always war on a higher difficulty, to see how that plays out.
Overall, a mixed first impression for me. Past the early game, the various gameplay systems never really clicked in the satisfying kind of way that I was hoping for. The biggest culprit was the scaling district cost - realizing that there was no reason to settle more cities really took the wind out of my sails. I have a suspicion that the developers expected players to take a more balanced approach to development, and the numbers aren't quite properly tuned on a lot of the policy cards and building costs/payoffs as a result.