The cornerstone Trade Hub is easily exploitable

[BadAssMilkDaddy]

I just had a game (Viceroy Difficulty) where I rolled trade hub, the buff that gives you 1 reputation for ever 60 amber worth of goods sold. It was only year 5 and I still needed 9 reputation to win. So I experimented with simply selling off all of my stuff in return for the traders stuff, then calling the next trader, rinse repeat. 3 traders later and I had generated 9 reputation over the course of about a single drizzle season. I had pretty much no resources left by the end but it didn't really matter because the game was just over. It was practically instant victory the moment Trade Hub was offered to me. A whopping 9 reputation points away...

I feel like this shouldn't be possible. It's so easy to brute force a victory at almost any point in the game with this cornerstone that I feel like it needs balancing. I love the cornerstone because I love trade builds and I don't want it to get nerfed into obscurity, but maybe limit it to 2 or even 1 reputation per trader or something because this is just busted as it stands.

[arjensmit79]

Just progress in difficulty.
The trader in general makes the game way easy up to P9, even without that corner stone. (you can after all also just trade almost everything you got for service and advanced food items to make your people happy enough to gain those 9 rep in the timespan of about 1 year without the need for any production chains of yourself really)

After that the fun is over and the real game begins.
(p9 is imo by far the most influential prestige modifier, nicely placed in the middle of the bunch)

[Hariman]

Originally posted by arjensmit79:

Just progress in difficulty.
The trader in general makes the game way easy up to P9, even without that corner stone. (you can after all also just trade almost everything you got for service and advanced food items to make your people happy enough to gain those 9 rep in the timespan of about 1 year without the need for any production chains of yourself really)

After that the fun is over and the real game begins.
(p9 is imo by far the most influential prestige modifier, nicely placed in the middle of the bunch)

Yeah, Prestige 5, 9, 12, 13, 15 and a couple others are the biggest difficulty spikes, with p9 being the biggest break point.

Trading changes from "I'll just buy whatever I need!" to "I'll scrimp and save for that one vital item or two that will keep this run going, be it a resource, a luxury item, a complex food, or blueprints and cornerstones" instantly with the value change.

It's a huge change, and takes a lot of getting used to.

[BadAssMilkDaddy]

Originally posted by arjensmit79:

Just progress in difficulty.
The trader in general makes the game way easy up to P9.
After that the fun is over and the real game begins.
(p9 is imo by far the most influential prestige modifier, nicely placed in the middle of the bunch)

So I understand this exploit becomes harder as the difficulty increases and resources become more limited, but it still effectively lowers the reputation required to win by an insane amount on any difficulty. Even if you have to wait till year 10 on higher difficulties you'll still hit a point where you can generate 5+ reputation on a whim to close out a game. AND you still get large bursts of reputation up until that point by just playing the game normally. The cornerstone might as well read "gain 1 reputation for every 60 amber worth of goods sold and lower reputation required for victory by a random number between 5 and 10". There's no way this isn't broken even on higher difficulties as the cornerstone is already on of the best in the game on it's own.

[Hariman]

Honestly... Trade Hub is one of the few Cornerstones that's an almost 100% "YES PLEASE!" cornerstone.

Because you WILL trade for SOMETHING, and even one reputation point can be the difference between taking several more years and finishing early.

I had a recent run where I regretted NOT taking it, because it would have easily cut multiple years off that run.

[arjensmit79]

You do understand that the whole rince and repeat part of your openingspost is no longer relevant after P9 right ? You sell all your stuff and you get only a fraction of the value in return. Next trader you call in, you have barely anything to offer.

It also has the downside that it halves reputation trough resolve. Meaning you lose much of your standard victory condition and have to make up for that. Not saying its bad, but if i get it offered in year 2, im not super thrilled or anything. (i'd rather have a strong hostility reducing cornerstone) Ill take it sure, but its not broken i think and it surely wont cut multiple years of the run. (runs always seem to end in year 7 anyway)

The real truth i think is that the last points of the reputation bar are never hard really. The first 4-5 years, you are poor and focussing on survival and orders netting you 8-9 rep. Maybe 1-2 more from glade events. Not gaining much if any reputation trough resolve, not being super powerful in trading. Then it all starts to come together, you get your resolve into the blue for some races, and whoop all of a sudden you are generating 0.7 resolve per minute and 2 easy years later the game is over. With this corner stone you lose out on half of the resolve and instead gain a bunch of points from trade. The end result being very similar.

[BadAssMilkDaddy]

Originally posted by arjensmit79:

You do understand that the whole rince and repeat part of your openingspost is no longer relevant after P9 right ? You sell all your stuff and you get only a fraction of the value in return. Next trader you call in, you have barely anything to offer.

It also has the downside that it halves reputation trough resolve. Meaning you lose much of your standard victory condition and have to make up for that. Not saying its bad, but if i get it offered in year 2, im not super thrilled or anything. Ill take it sure, but its not broken i think.

So the strategy still works on higher difficulties even while getting half amber for trading. You'll have to do the exploit later on higher difficulties naturally, meaning you'll have more buildings set up to dismantle by the time you get around to it. You can mass dismantle your entire settlement and throw all the expensive parts and building resources into the mix. You'll likely have to keep some of your housing but you can preemptively replace all of your homes with basic housing if you need to in order to sell off building materials.

There's also the fact that you can then resell all of the goods you bought from the first trader to the second and so-on. It's not infinite money, but this strategy is so broken you can still generate 5+ reputation at a 50% efficiency rate. Like, I just generated 9 on year 5. Even at half price that would be close to 5 and a player on year 10 even on a higher difficulty will still be able to do it.

[Hariman]

Originally posted by arjensmit79:

You do understand that the whole rince and repeat part of your openingspost is no longer relevant after P9 right ? You sell all your stuff and you get only a fraction of the value in return. Next trader you call in, you have barely anything to offer.

It also has the downside that it halves reputation trough resolve. Meaning you lose much of your standard victory condition and have to make up for that. Not saying its bad, but if i get it offered in year 2, im not super thrilled or anything. (i'd rather have a strong hostility reducing cornerstone) Ill take it sure, but its not broken i think and it surely wont cut multiple years of the run. (runs always seem to end in year 7 anyway)

The real truth i think is that the last points of the reputation bar are never hard really. The first 4-5 years, you are poor and focussing on survival and orders netting you 8-9 rep. Maybe 1-2 more from glade events. Not gaining much if any reputation trough resolve, not being super powerful in trading. Then it all starts to come together, you get your resolve into the blue for some races, and whoop all of a sudden you are generating 0.7 resolve per minute and 2 easy years later the game is over. With this corner stone you lose out on half of the resolve and instead gain a bunch of points from trade. The end result being very similar.

Trade Hub halves the resolve reputation gain rate, but does not eliminate it. So you'll still get the same reputation, just over a significantly longer time.

And if you're trading anyway/have a surplus of trade goods due to overproduction on only one or two resources...

[arjensmit79]

Originally posted by BadAssMilkDaddy:

Like, I just generated 9 on year 5. Even at half price that would be close to 5 and a player on year 10 even on a higher difficulty will still be able to do it.

Its roughly like this: (dont mind the exact numbers plz, its a rough picture)
Now you started with 300 gold worth of stuff.
You traded that and got ~200 gold worth in return (300 traded)
You traded that and got ~130 gold worth in return (500 traded)
You traded that and got ~80 gold worth in return (630 traded)
You trade that and get ~50 gold worth in return (710 traded)

Now post P9 it goes like this:
Your same 300 stuff is worth 150
You trade it, you get 100 in return (150 traded)
The trader values your 100 to be worth 50
You trade it, you gain almost nothing (200 traded)

And what happens on year 10 isnt interesting at all. (the queen wouldnt even let me get to year 10 anyway)
For me about 70% games end on year 7
About 10% on year 6
About 10% on year 8
About 10% earlier or later

And there comes the point about the rep from resolve coming in at half speed. Normally in years 6 and 7 i'd gain the final ~6 rep from resolve. Now that will be halved. Surely i can get those missing 3 in years 8 and maybe even 9, but that delays victory. So by year 7, the trade benefit will have to have generated 3 rep just to not be a disadvantage. Now no doubt it generally will do that and more/earlier, but im not trying to prove that its a bad cornerstone. (it surely isn't) Im just trying to prove its not broken at high difficulties.

The right nerf would be to stop the trader cycling option and thats exactly what P9 does.

[Spacesuit Spiff]

It's busted, yeah. Before P9 its a joke, and after P9 it's still top tier. The downside is barely a downside due to how species resolve scaling works, yeah it ticks slower, but the requirements are proportional to what you gain so you get nearly all that rep you were going to get in the end anyway (you only feel it at the end of the run when everybody's at 30+ because you bought all their needs to close it out, and even 1 rep from the cornerstone is well worth it).
They should change all of these trade buffs to only trigger when you trade *for amber*. Trade routes unaffected, but reduces the amount you can squeeze out of each trader, and if you were planning on buying stuff from them you might decide to forego progress on the rep to avoid a second p9 hit, or trade your packs for amber and then the amber for stuff to progress the cornerstone rep.

This way it can also be more balanceable by tweaking the amount of amber traders have.

[Samseng Yik]

Like other said, once you reach p9, this is at most half effectiveness of your current play style.

[Clawyer]

If you can set up a game with regular trade routes you will still be trading stuff worth multiple reputation points in P9+, you will just not do that "exploit" where you generate almost all of your reputation in one sweep.
If you get Trade Hub, you can still change your production to have enough complex food to make everyone happy and then you pack everything else into packs of XYZ.. Having beavers, maybe trader's logs and at least one +1 packs cornerstone and you're good..
If you don't find Trade Hub you take the guild hall and generate resolve with all that stuff you sold.

This is also not far from opening multiple glades with 100 tools and just winning by opening caches. Or as mentioned having 30, 40 villagers and just buying all the complex food and service goods you couldn't produce yourself, raising resolve to 50 for everyone and enjoying over 1 reputation per minute.

I think it's a very strong cornerstone and I could live with it being nerfed a bit more, but there are others that can be equally strong. And if you just want to push through prestige games you will probably just use the altar anyways.

[BinaryBrain]

Of course, not everyone sees a problem here that has to be fixed. But if:

Originally posted by Spacesuit Spiff:

[...]
They should change all of these trade buffs to only trigger when you trade *for amber*. Trade routes unaffected, but reduces the amount you can squeeze out of each trader[...]

That were my thoughts exactly. Just count the amber earned, not the resources bought. No changes in trade routes and a clear limit per trader what you can get (the 30-50 amber a trader has). The trick still works, but is much less effective (each trader call increases impatience, +0.5, +1, +2, +4, +8?) so, lets say you can call a trader four times at the end. Each time you buy all his amber, around 2/3 of a reputation point, so ~3 reputation points max. Which is not so absurd like buying/selling the same stuff repeatedly again for many reputation points.

There is the time where the impatience bar is full and you can do anything for a short time window (citadel upgrade) which is countered by the fact that trader calls are not immediately. Maybe the time until the trader arrives after calling him should be rised, not sure about this, though. Might screw other situations over.

[arjensmit79]

Calling the trader many is btw another low prestige thing.
I used to call him 4 times standard and pretty early too (because the impatience reduces hostility). Until you only lose 0.5 impationce per gained reputation. Thats where you stop calling traders like that and only do it twice max.

The game is balanced/designed around p20.
Low prestige is easy mode. I don't think we need to complain that easy mode is easy.

[Asket]

Just a small reminder that only 15% of players have ever won on Viceroy
Less than 4% have won on P10+
Less than 1.5% have won on P20

1) There are a lot of ways to win the game at Viceroy
2) It's a single-player citybuilder, not a StarCraft - please, stop fixing those "abuses" and "exploits".

There are lots of "Get a perk - win a run", on top of my mind:
- No death penalty
- No agro for opening glades
- Agro is not raising with time
- Agro is dropped by archeology runes / major events / opened glades
- Main map resource brings another resource, especially tools
- Anything to spring loyalty cascade (usually works with Harpies)

Did I miss something?

[kory]

Originally posted by Asket:

1) There are a lot of ways to win the game at Viceroy
2) It's a single-player citybuilder, not a StarCraft - please, stop fixing those "abuses" and "exploits".

The fact that it is single player does not mean it shouldn't be balanced. Without balance the game would be no fun for many, it would just be a random-fest to see if you get a broken exploit. It is worth taking the time to fix the exploits as best they can.