What do you think of adopting Honor early to help with Barbarians and gain culture?

This is something I do almost every game, because it helps me deal with Barbs (especially my scouts) and it can actually make fighting them slightly fun, as well as hedge against the prospect of an unusually burdensome onslaught of barbs. In addition I tend to believe that the policy pays itself off, culturally speaking. (I usually don't adopt the other Honor policies, just the Honor tree itself).

What do you guys think of doing this? Do you think it is unwise to spend a social policy on this at the beginning, especially if you're not going to take anything else from that tree?

Athenaeum said:

This is something I do almost every game, because it helps me deal with Barbs (especially my scouts) and it can actually make fighting them slightly fun, as well as hedge against the prospect of an unusually burdensome onslaught of barbs. In addition I tend to believe that the policy pays itself off, culturally speaking. (I usually don't adopt the other Honor policies, just the Honor tree itself).

What do you guys think of doing this? Do you think it is unwise to spend a social policy on this at the beginning, especially if you're not going to take anything else from that tree?

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Mistake. Your success or failure in the game isn't closely related to how well you handle barbs. You want social policies that will help you throughout the game. Generally speaking, just one more unit is more than equal to the bonus. So the social policy is worth only some fraction of a single combat unit.

This ignores doing it just for fun.

edit: I didn't really address your culture question. So how many Barbs can you kill in a game? 20-30 is about my number. That is still not much culture return for a policy slot.

I always take it, barbarians are a total nuisance without it. Plus barb hunting gives you much needed gold in the early game and it allows you to protect your trade routes. If you want to make it more worthwhile, then build Statue of Zeus as well.

Some of the other policies in the tree can be quite helpful (Military caste, Professional army), so taking one step down early is not bad, plus knowing when camps spawn can also be very important. Also that 33% bonus may save a few units lives. It's always nice to let a barb archer feed my units experience while it sits there healing.

The honor opener is really useful. Killing barbs and revealing encampments os very useful and pays off because you get paid culture for killing barbs. Continuing with the honor social policy can allow you to achieve a domination victory because it unlocks the statue of zeus which gives you city attack bonuses.

Well, do some math.

If you think, at the end of the game, you have more policies with taking honor than without, then keep on doing that.

I, honestly, doubt it.

According to this thread the policy cost is 25+(6n)^1.7, where n is the number policies you have. This is vanilla, soii the exact formula might have changed, but in essence it is still the same I guess.

Say, in the late game, you have two full trees plus 9 in ideology, this will put you to 6 +6 + 9 = 21 policies.

Therefore, the 21. policy to get all those policies cost you:
25+(6*20)^1.7= 3449.58

But, if you took the honor opener, in order to still complete your two other policy trees, plus Ideology, you need one more policy, total 22.

Therefore, 25+(6*21)^1.7=3745.74

So, even without calculating the increase due to number of cities, you need little under300 culture from barbarians. A single brute gives around 6 culture? So you need to kill close to 50 brutes make this work. Of course, move evolved barbarians give more culture, but how often do you see a barbarian Infantry?

The longer the game is, the more policies you get, the more barbarians you need to kill. And given that barbarians get rarer and rarer the longer the game takes, you will not be able to keep up the killing to justify taking just the opener.


Taking full honor on the other hand, combined with commerce and autocracy has proven to be a valid Domination Victory strategy though.

That formula is out of date -- policy costs are generally higher in BNW, which makes taking the Honor opener even less advantageous over the long run, if your main criterion is culture costs (obviously the Honor opener confers other benefits besides culture from kills).

The current base formula (ignoring rounddown functions and the effect of number of cities and the Representation social policy) is:

Cost of Policy Number N (for one city only) = (25 + (3 * (N - 1 ))^2.01

Factoring in the more complex elements, the formula (in Excel notation) expands to:

=FLOOR(ROUNDDOWN( ( 25 + ( ( 3 * ([policy num] - 1 ) ) ^ 2.01 ) ), 0) * ( 1 +( ( 10 * (ROUNDDOWN( (100-33)/100, 1)) * ( [num cities] - 1 )) / 100) ), 5)

The first expression rounds down the first piece (raw policy cost, before the city multiplier) to the next lower integer and the second expression rounds down the city multiplier to the first decimal before converting to a percentage. If you haven't taken Representation, omit the second rounddown element.

I wouldn't do it. Filling out tradition ASAP is more important than a gaining a bit of culture. Barbs are easy enough to kill. It might be useful if you are on raging barbs without CS, then you will get swarmed and the culture could add up to quite a bit. Otherwise I would pass.

It's all about Tradition, Liberty or some mix of the two with Tradition being stronger than Liberty most of the time.

Just make 1 or 2 extra archer.

If people are willing to invest 250Hammer for the oracle they should be able to invest 80 into 2 archers and not have to take the honor opener.

Take it only if you plan on going further in honor.

The cost of opening any tree you wouldn't normally open, or isn't conducive to your chosen VC is always the last policy you unlock. Sure you might open Honor first and kill enough barbs to open Tradition but Secularism will be much later. To be effective you need to be killing barbs throughout your game and eventually all barb camps will get cleared.

"the social policy is worth only some fraction of a single combat unit"
"you need little under 300 culture from barbarians"

I think it can be worth it when you look at the big picture. It's not just about culture.

Having no barb advantage has cost me:
Losing a worker for 5-10 extra turns, I might need more units to recapture the worker.
Trade route problems, up to losing a caravan.
CS influence, much easier.
I build fewer units early when the ones I do have win v barbs, get the exp, and survive.

And the culture. I usually don't go Honor, but there have been many times I wish I had.

number51 said:

"the social policy is worth only some fraction of a single combat unit"
"you need little under 300 culture from barbarians"

I think it can be worth it when you look at the big picture. It's not just about culture.

Having no barb advantage has cost me:
Losing a worker for 5-10 extra turns, I might need more units to recapture the worker.
Trade route problems, up to losing a caravan.
CS influence, much easier.
I build fewer units early when the ones I do have win v barbs, get the exp, and survive.

And the culture. I usually don't go Honor, but there have been many times I wish I had.

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There are certainly problems with not handling the barbs well. But for most of my encounters with barbs i would prefer one additional archer to a 25% combat boost. Therefore, for combat purposes, the policy slot doesn't seem to be worth more than one unit.

Sure there are benefits from taking Honor. But culture gain is not one of them.
And do they outweigh the benefit of w/e policy you would have gotten otherwise? I do not think so.

lockandload said:

There are certainly problems with not handling the barbs well. But for most of my encounters with barbs i would prefer one additional archer to a 25% combat boost. Therefore, for combat purposes, the policy slot doesn't seem to be worth more than one unit.

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I'll take your word for it. I just don't see how one extra archer can help with:

1. Stolen worker recaptures.
2. Trade route/caravan protection.
3. Barb kills for CS influence.

That would have to be one lightening fast archer. The 25% boost is more spread out and in my experience more helpful than one archer running around trying to put out fires.

Later in the game it's meaningless with more and faster units, roads, and fewer to no barbs. But early on I've had some real setbacks because my "extra archer" was stuck in some forest after a worker recapture. Meanwhile a caravan was getting zapped, because the unit that was there was 25% too weak to stop it.

You might try to not get your worker stolen in the first place. Usually you have enough view range to prevent that from happening. Even a Scout can prevent it (cover the worker while in range of your city artillery), if played defensively. You do not need to protect your caravans if you take a route that is not going through unknown territory / fog of war.

Any Barb Kills can be done really easy with 2 Archers. It actually can be done with one Archer, because Barbarians do not heal. Just make sure to back up in time and heal a bit. Two archers can kill a barb camp with ease. No barb camp = no stolen workers, no destroyed caravans but 25g and sometimes a CS that is now your friend.

I try to use at least one of my starting units (scout or warrior) as a Barb protector, meaning I will move him back to my capital in a circle after I scouted a bit. Scouts can help by putting them on civil units while Warriors can go for some offensive Barb Kills.

Acken is certainly correct, that the play is a) not optimal, and b) easily avoidable if you have scouts and other units in the right places to protect your trade routes and improvements. Scouts are very effective at making sure barb camps don't pop up too close.

That said, if you aren't playing Diety and you enjoy it? Have at it.

Opening honor is only 15 culture which already pays off if you kill off 2 barbarians warriors at 7 culture each. If there aren't that many barbarians around then of course you wouldn't want a honor opener.

Honor opener is surprisingly good against huge swarms of barbs. It's really good against like 3-4 barb camps near your cities because then you can keep farming the barbs for XP and Culture.

It's a little slow to get used to, and the production needed to build units to combat barbs and get culture is probably not equal to opening it. But you can keep farming barb camps for culture as long as you can do it, which is really nice, opening honor for instance then going into tradition/liberty will pay off in the long run.

Honor, Raging Barbs, "Barb. Unlimited XP", "Barb. Spawn Increase", and Aztecs; what's not to like ?? This more than makes up for using 1 dip into a SPolicy, and helps even out jungle starts .

As most civs, I don't bother with Honor, but as Germany, on Pangaea, I typically open Tradition, then Honor (going no further, even later), then finish filling out Tradition.