We didn't do any real analysis on what the gold cap change means so I thought we should...a bit too late but better than never.
Assuming a tax of 2 (amount is not relevant) and no additional gold buildings (would overcomplicate things for no real new information), for each "max pop" amount shown by the surveyor on the map :
The green line is the base gold you'll get from any non-Nomad city if you don't have roads.
Assuming you have roads connecting enough population to reach the cap, the red line is the old system (cap of 3%/pop), the yellow line is the current one (5%/pop but max of 75).
For nomad cities, the purple line is the old, the blue is the new system. Note that Nomad cities don't get a Granary so they don't have +5 population added to the map amount. Everyone else does.
What this means is...
-The new system is closer to being linear than the old one - each extra people generate roughly the same profit instead of more.
-The old system was slightly non-linear - the closer the pop grew to the max, the more profitable each people became. This rewarded the use of population raising effects (Change Terrain, Gaea's Blessing, Omniscient). It also rewarded using population shrinking effects on larger cities (Corruption, Call the Void, Pestilence). Instead the new system rewards shrinking effects on smaller cities where doing so is naturally less effective due to how the spells work.
-The old system had a single cutoff : After pop 20, any additional pop from the terrain was useless as granary and farmer's market maxed it anyway. However pop between 15-20 were quite significant.
-The new system has two : First, pop after 20 still doesn't matter (except for nomads), but pop in the 10-20 range matters LESS while pop 0-10 matters more. In other words the new system rewards the "3 cities on pop 12 is better than two on pop 18" mentality even further and that is already overly relevant as cities have a lot of capacity to produce resources independent of the population size.
-Nomads are buffed quite a bit - They don't actually need the roads to receive the bonus, so the change makes their economy more front-loaded.
-Players get move gold overall as a generic rule, and roads are more powerful.
Whether these changes are good or bad are subjective and we should discuss it but I am worried they are overall harmful for the game instead of improving it. In fact almost every effect seems to be going towards the wrong direction...
Assuming a tax of 2 (amount is not relevant) and no additional gold buildings (would overcomplicate things for no real new information), for each "max pop" amount shown by the surveyor on the map :
The green line is the base gold you'll get from any non-Nomad city if you don't have roads.
Assuming you have roads connecting enough population to reach the cap, the red line is the old system (cap of 3%/pop), the yellow line is the current one (5%/pop but max of 75).
For nomad cities, the purple line is the old, the blue is the new system. Note that Nomad cities don't get a Granary so they don't have +5 population added to the map amount. Everyone else does.
What this means is...
-The new system is closer to being linear than the old one - each extra people generate roughly the same profit instead of more.
-The old system was slightly non-linear - the closer the pop grew to the max, the more profitable each people became. This rewarded the use of population raising effects (Change Terrain, Gaea's Blessing, Omniscient). It also rewarded using population shrinking effects on larger cities (Corruption, Call the Void, Pestilence). Instead the new system rewards shrinking effects on smaller cities where doing so is naturally less effective due to how the spells work.
-The old system had a single cutoff : After pop 20, any additional pop from the terrain was useless as granary and farmer's market maxed it anyway. However pop between 15-20 were quite significant.
-The new system has two : First, pop after 20 still doesn't matter (except for nomads), but pop in the 10-20 range matters LESS while pop 0-10 matters more. In other words the new system rewards the "3 cities on pop 12 is better than two on pop 18" mentality even further and that is already overly relevant as cities have a lot of capacity to produce resources independent of the population size.
-Nomads are buffed quite a bit - They don't actually need the roads to receive the bonus, so the change makes their economy more front-loaded.
-Players get move gold overall as a generic rule, and roads are more powerful.
Whether these changes are good or bad are subjective and we should discuss it but I am worried they are overall harmful for the game instead of improving it. In fact almost every effect seems to be going towards the wrong direction...
