(June 21st, 2014, 16:16)Lord Parkin Wrote: PRO only has an effect on plains hills, Copper, Iron and sometimes Horse tiles in the early-mid game - all of which you're going to want to be mining (or pasturing) anyway. AGR only has an effect on food resources, which you're obviously going to be putting the correct improvement on regardless (farm/pasture/camp/fishing boat). The only other tile AGR affects before Biology is Flood Plain, which you typically don't have a lot of around in balanced maps. But even so, having a choice between an AGR farm and a cottage on a Flood Plain adds an interesting element to the game - and it's not always a clear choice which way to go.
Sure, in the early-mid game you are already on rails, you don't even have a reasonable choice to make regarding improvements, so Agr/Pro in their current form don't restrict you any more than you already are and you could even argue that Agr might make you consider farming FP's. I don't quite follow why we are paying attention only to the early-mid game only, though, surely the period where Agr/Pro become widely applicable is a more interesting and relevant period to consider.
Another reason not to like traits messing with tile yields is consistency -- Exp, Org, Cre, Ind, Phi, Chm all give per-city bonuses, Spi is weird and special giving an empire-wide effect, vanilla Agg and Pro combine a per-city bonus with a per-unit bonus, Fin is the only one to give a per-tile bonus and guess what, it is far and away the most game-determining one in vanilla BtS. ToW's fix for FIN is thoroughly driven by the beakers-at-start-of-game valuation and works to balance it's effect in the early-mid game, but in the end the trait still gives the player an absolute advantage in productivity that simply cannot be met by other means at equal size of empire. It's a bad trait as long as other traits don't work on a per-tile basis and they don't. If you are intent on giving food and hammers, give them to the city, you just save yourself a hopeless situation of trying to calibrate a multiplicative benefit on a base which ranges from 1 to 300+ over the course of the game (# of tiles worked) to match a multiplicative benefit on a base which ranges from 1 to 30 (# of cities), an order of magnitude less.
And yeah, needless to say, Agricultural/Productive throw all notion of "minimalism" out the door. A minimalist and theme-neutral, net present value based fix to Aggressive/Protective would give those traits a beaker or two per city — boosting beaker-based NPV is much more straightforward than cutting it.