[FIXED] Piety finisher increases SP cost

So I just adopted Free Religion and took Theocracy as my free SP completing the Piety tree and I expected the cost of the next policy to go down, and lo and behold it went up from 2000 to 2135 .


Savegame attached

I was just about to finish Tradition and saw a policy cost increase from, 3010 to 3995.
I reloaded and chose a new policy which only increased cost to 3485. I reloaded again, finished Piety again and compared the cost. then I went back to older savegames....you get the idea.
Long story short, I was wrong: The Piety finisher works and does lower policy cost by 10%, but whenever you finish a tree you skip the next threshhold and cost increases as if you just adopted two policies.

Example from my game
Policy 14 cost 2575
Policy 15 costs 3010
Policy 16 costs 3485

But when I finish a tree with my 14th policy the cost for the 15th policy increases to 3485 instead of 3010.
The question is: is this intentional or is it a bug ? I don't really belive this was planned. Policy finishers should be a nice bonus. A reward for concentrating on one tree and not picking whatever seems opportune at the moment.

So you're saying that finishing a tree increases the policy cost as if you researched 2 policies? That is most certainly a bug, and a big one at that. Ooh.

Thanks for spotting this, we're correcting it now. On the plus side, the game was balanced with the current values, so it will not throw off the culture game. This will be adjusted when we post an update.

@dshirk: since the game is balanced with the bug in place, does this mean that you will no longer have finishers count as 2 policies but the total amount of culture needed for a diplo win will remain the same? So the average cost per policy will go up slightly, right?

Correct.

I think that when you finish a policy tree you get a 7th policy which you do not directly pay for. When I was playing it showed(smiles, shines(gold), stick(weapons), tech, SP) how many polices each player had. I had 7X the policy trees finished + the tree I was working on.

Red Pearl said:

I think that when you finish a policy tree you get a 7th policy which you do not directly pay for.

Click to expand...

Correct. When you gain a Policy, through ANY means, the costs increase. The game should be looking at the <CultureCost> variable of a policy when determining how much it adds to the future costs, but currently that variable seems to be ignored. All policies count, including Finishers.

This is very annoying for me, because in my own mod to get certain things working (mainly a negative happiness value for certain buildings) I had to create a custom policy which is awarded to every player at the start of the game. This, however, threw off the whole cost curve since it now treated every player as having 1 more policy than they really did, so I had to spend a while getting the numbers to balance out well enough. Obviously, then, if the devs can fix it so that Finishers do not add to culture costs of future policies, I'll be able to use similar logic for that policy of my own.

I think that if you get a free policy (Oracle or sydney Opera House) it does not increase the policy cost.

Red Pearl said:

I think that if you get a free policy (Oracle or sydney Opera House) it does not increase the policy cost.

Click to expand...

That's a different mechanism from the finishers.

Spatzimaus said:

Correct. When you gain a Policy, through ANY means, the costs increase.

Click to expand...

I think that if you get a free policy (Oracle or sydney Opera House) it does not increase the policy cost. Sorry forgot to quote last time.

This bug has been fixed in patch 1.0.1.348 (hotfix).

Thanks, i updated the list .