Leveling up in Civ games

[bayonetbrant]

So I'm playing Civ V for a few minutes, and I just had a BFO*...

Combat units win fights and gain experience.  Makes sense, right? Survive a battle and get better at fighting battles.

Why do scouts get better at scouting by surviving combat?  Shouldn't they get better at scouting by doing more scouting?  Give them experience for locating barbarian units and avoiding them instead of leveling them up for getting in a fight.

Why don't workers ever gain experience?  Why is it that worker productivity only improves with social policies?  Why not have workers that consistently build roads get better at building roads instead of build farms, mines, etc?

Just some thinking...







* blinding flash of the obvious

[son_of_montfort]

The weirder thing was, in past Civs, workers got better at doing their jobs after certain Wonders were built. And they seemed not connected, like the Great Pyramid (what did they get better because they survived the horrific working conditions of building the pyramids).

I can sort of see the social policies argument. The idea would be that the workers are getting more support from society, so they are able to be more effective at their jobs. Remember, these units are abstracted (unless you think they are vampire workers who live for centuries building roads... ooh... that would be cool), so the idea would be experienced workers die and are replaced. Units gain experience and I suppose the continued experience could be argued that, at least in pre-modern military, your veterans trained the new recruits so you got more static levels of experience.

I mean, we are talking game design theory, so that is the best analog to real life. I seem to remember one game where workers DID gain experience for working, but I don't know which one that was.

[meadbelly]

^The Pyramids still improve worker speed in Civ5. I think that's the only Wonder that does; the other paths are through the "civ values" -- I've forgotten what that stuff is actually called.

I think the link between Pyramid building and faster worker speeds is obvious -- once you've broken your back on a pyramid, you are only too happy to work arse off paving roads, building farms, and mining silver. Otherwise, it's back to the pyramids. . .

There are a number of things that are probably coded the way they are because of balance and not realism. Declining length of golden ages is one of them. It is not too difficult to start spamming golden ages otherwise, especially if you are using your golden ages for warfare and burning your generals. 20+ turns of golden ages can make a big difference in a game. 40+ years can make it impossible to lose.

[bayonetbrant]

point being, that building railroads should make workers better at building railroads...

more annoyingly, killing barbarians shouldn't be what levels-up a scout.  scouting should level up a scout.

[meadbelly]

Yes, that's perfectly logical.

But since there's no limit to scouting, and you can in effect set scouts to auto level if they gained experience by moving around, it would be a shame to play a game where you are overwhelmed at say turn 100 by auto leveled scouts with massive exp bonuses.

There could be some smart limitations built on this -- no upgrades of scouts to other units. The only scouting exp bonuses granted to things like movement and site range (which may already be in place -- my scouts typically don't gain much experience) but no combat bonuses.

Limiting worker experience makes sense from a balance pov, too. At least in my mind.

A bigger pet peeve for me is why it takes a naval ship a year to cross an ocean in the industrial age. Bombers and fighters can only fly once per year. Not particularly realistic, but I also wouldn't necessarily want Civ to move to a continuous-real-time model and not get really, really, really bored in the first 200 turns.