Is Anyone Deviating from the Political Philosophy Beeline?

[CaiusDrewart]

This seems like the most obvious way to handle the early game civics tree. Political philosophy is really powerful--doubling the number of policies you can use, plus granting you way more envoys and some nice government bonuses. It seems like it makes sense to head straight for this 98% of the time.

Political philosophy itself also has a pretty easily achievable inspiration (meet 3 city states), assuming you built a scout or two.

Has anyone come up with good reasons not to do this? Would the game be better if political philosophy were split into three different techs in different places on the culture tree, so that there were a greater number of viable early game paths?

 

[King Jason]

Early drama and poetry doesn't seem that bad, especially if you grabbed a wonder.

 

[Biz_]

i sometimes delay it slightly because i'm waiting for one of the inspirations

 

[Zantetsuken]

Sometimes in my Greece games I'll deviate for the great prophet point card early to get a religion, since they have that nifty wildcard slot

 

[RaidandTrade]

I generally "meander" towards it but deviate to tick off some low cost cards when I want to trigger policy changes. For example, if I know I'm going to have a spate of builder needs I flip to a low cost item, change my policy to put everyone building builders and then flip out to another low cost item to flip back to "the path". I'll also occasionally deviate if there's a Eureka I want to trigger.

I used to be really bad at timing my policies in Civ V so I like this system much more.

 

[Zantetsuken]

On a side note, how is the cost of resetting policies? Early on I feel that the gold cost isn't too bad, though I usually unlock culture fast enough to change them with that, but I was wondering how the cost scaled into the late game, I know there is some issues with production scaling, didn't know if there were other issues as well

 

[Frank327]

The main deviations are probably military tradition for civs with an early cavalry UU and theology if you want to build the oracle. And Greece has a good reason to deviate for earlier wildcard policies.

Maybe in MP it might be useful to go for games and recreation for the Colosseum. It seems like a really powerful wonder.