(June 22nd, 2014, 07:52)SevenSpirits Wrote: The fact that the tile units are more fine-grained is a complete red herring.
Indeed, that much more surprising that you thought my point was about fine-graininess, it wasn't — the size of the grain is easily adjusted by a linear transformation as you so pointedly illustrate with the CRE case. Partly my fault, it was 2.30 at night, and I didn't realize that the difference between growing from 1 to 30 and 1 to 300 will be interpreted as a difference in slope of two linear processes — the problem with tile growth is exactly that it's non-linear with respect to city growth. You get more tiles as you get more cities, but then you also get more tiles as cities get larger; so tiles worked grow as a higher power of time than city count — if city count were approximately linear (it isn't), tile growth would be quadratic, etc. Because tile growth is more convex, a bonus which is "balanced" over, say 300 turns would always be too small in the early turns and too large in the later turns.
But I get your point that it can be fun to survive through the early turns with a mediocre trait to reap it's full bounty in the later game. In any case, Fin is far too ingrained in Civ to be removed, I wasn't suggesting to remove it.