Worst BNW social policies?

Trade Unions: I do not fully agree. It rocks when you have wide empires (like 20-30 cities) on large & huge maps. Yes it's rare because normaly you play standard size but on wide empires it can easily save you like a 100-200G / turn lategame.

I agree with most things from the op however.

I churn out the culture and wait through the turns to get the policies, and I should be looking forward to getting each one. I'm often not. The trees and the groupings seem arbitrary and illogical, not a way of tailoring my empire to my strategy.

I don't know whether the developers were just narrow-minded: "if you want this, surely you must also want this" (wrong!) or sadistic: "if you want to buy stuff cheaper, first you need a policy to reduce the maintenance costs of your roads, even though you have zero roads or road maintenance costs in your archipelagic empire" (can't I choose a path that doesn't make me seem deranged?)

What would be wrong with a pool for each era, from which I can mix and match?

Enrico Swagolo said:

7) Religious Tolerance: Cities with a majority religion also get the Pantheon belief bonus of the second most popular religion. (requires Organized Religion) - okay, it's usable, but they're Pantheon beliefs. Most civs will take a pantheon because of their surroundings - you have 4 stones near the capital, good, take Stone Circles and get a guaranteed religion. Most other cities won't benefit from it, because they don't have the resources/luxuries the pantheon works with.

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One interesting thing about this policy in the early game is that it can double your own pantheon bonus in new cities. If your pantheon is still the majority religion in a city, but your actual religion gets one follower, you get the pantheon bonus again. Just had that happen with tears of the goddess in a city with five gems, which is now granting me 20 faith per turn instead of the usual 10. I think I'll keep from manually converting that city for a while, since the bonus would then be lost.

Bex said:

What would be wrong with a pool for each era, from which I can mix and match?

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I wonder: Why not use tenets like ideolgies do? Give several tier I, II and III policies to every SP group and let the player tinker together what he thinks is best for his empire.

Would also help to make the trees a bit less dependend on map settings. You could, for example, leave "trade unions" in, because on a water map the player can simply pick a different SP for that tier.

6) Treasure Fleets: +4 Gold from all your sea trade routes. Requires Merchant Navy. - at least it works on the superior routes, but still. 40 gold very late game IF you got collossus AND petra, 80 if you're Venice (which swims in money so much it doesn't care a lot).

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I found the gold to be quite useful and have trouble seeing how this is a weak promotion

GAGA Extrem said:

I wonder: Why not use tenets like ideolgies do? Give several tier I, II and III policies to every SP group and let the player tinker together what he thinks is best for his empire.

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In earlier versions of Civ V, there weren't any finisher bonuses from SP branches so essentially it was like this - there was no incentive to pick stuff from the same tree, except the fact that the openers were generally weaker than the other policies. I like the finisher bonuses, they put some more long-term strategy in SPs - it's not just "which is the best policy I can pick?" but rather one has to think ahead by a few policies.

As I already said in this thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=12621794#post12621794

I think a lot of criticism concerning the Commerce tree comes from people misunderstanding its purpose (to which, imo, the name somewhat contributes). Commerce is not, imo, for civilizations that focus on trade (there is only one policy that gives a direct bonus to trade routes) and (unlike G&K) it is not for civilizations that want to win a diplomatic victory. Commerce is for civilizations that want to be self-sufficient in terms of gold and happiness, without running into deficits and rebellions - i.e. warmongers. If you want to run a peaceful trading tall empire, Commerce is not for you, imo.

But when you have a wide warmongering empire, with a lot of puppets and everybody hating you, then having more great merchants to settle and getting bonuses from trading posts is what allows you to keep a positive cash flow - and being able to buy cheaper buildings and paying less for roads connecting your wide empire is also a huge boon.

As for the weakest tree, I think it's Exploration - mainly because the finisher is so lacklustre compared to other finishers and it focuses heavily on navies and Great Admirals, which is very situational. No matter what victory you are going for, I think there are better alternatives to Exploration, and you only want to open it to unlock Louvre if you are going for a cultural victory.

Martinus said:

As I already said in this thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=12621794#post12621794

I think a lot of criticism concerning the Commerce tree comes from people misunderstanding its purpose (to which, imo, the name somewhat contributes). Commerce is not, imo, for civilizations that focus on trade (there is only one policy that gives a direct bonus to trade routes) and (unlike G&K) it is not for civilizations that want to win a diplomatic victory. Commerce is for civilizations that want to be self-sufficient in terms of gold and happiness, without running into deficits and rebellions - i.e. warmongers. If you want to run a peaceful trading tall empire, Commerce is not for you, imo.

But when you have a wide warmongering empire, with a lot of puppets and everybody hating you, then having more great merchants to settle and getting bonuses from trading posts is what allows you to keep a positive cash flow - and being able to buy cheaper buildings and paying less for roads connecting your wide empire is also a huge boon.

As for the weakest tree, I think it's Exploration - mainly because the finisher is so lacklustre compared to other finishers and it focuses heavily on navies and Great Admirals, which is very situational. No matter what victory you are going for, I think there are better alternatives to Exploration, and you only want to open it to unlock Louvre if you are going for a cultural victory.

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Agreed. As OP mentions, a lot of these policies suit Venice quite well. Venice with Big Ben to boot is an absolute juggernaut.

Are the Wagon Train and Sea Trade Route bonus gold coins applicable to internal trade routes as well? For example if sending hammers to another one of your cities?

nope5

VainoValkea said:

Is scholasticism bad? I've never actually paid much attention to how much science per CS ally it brings later on but around a few dozen beakers at the time of adoption is a significant amount IMO.

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Ulthwithian said:

Scholasticism in many of my games is about a 5-10% increase in my science output. Sure, it's not Rationalism-opener good, but it's two Eras eariler?

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It's not 10 %. 5 % is pretty accurate, and that's only if you have a lot of City State allies. I checked yesterday, I took Scholasticism at a point where I had 11 CS allies, and my Science went up from roughly 1800 to 1900. That's a 5.5 % increase, and I was allies with all City States at this point (being that Austria had annexed a couple and a couple more were gobbled up from war). This was very late in the game, but I guess CS science scales more or less with game time.

I always look at how much it gives me when I pick a policy, and every time I've taken it back in G&K it has struck me as being laughable. When I took it earlier, it would normally give me something like +20 Science when I was doing some ~500 myself.

Brugarin said:

Are the Wagon Train and Sea Trade Route bonus gold coins applicable to internal trade routes as well? For example if sending hammers to another one of your cities?

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That would actually be a nice buff to those policies.

In general, I agree with the OP although I do think that the commerce tree is fine as it is. It's the warmonger tree numero uno.
Great merchants give you double the cash after you finish the tree. Pick autocracy, build Big Ben and every GM is worth 5-7 bombers or 3-4 atomic bombs. On top of the influence boost, of course.

The most disjointed SP tree is Exploration:

A handful of maritime bonuses, with an opener that allows the Louvre, and only by the time of the closer do you get any boost to actually fill the Louvre.

It's the weirdest feeling when I'm landlocked to open a maritime SP tree just to use a GE on the Louvre... really wish both the Louvre and Uffizi were unlocked with Aesthetics. What's worse is that the closer for the tree is handy no matter what the terrain, but if you are landlocked then getting the SPs to close it means taking useless SPs for your position just to have Hidden Sites visible.

Try Commerce before you knock it. Seriously. Experiment with it a little, don't just look at what it does and say "this number is small." It's the indirect effects and synergies that make it awesome.


Exploration is the tree I've touched the least, aside, perhaps, from Piety. But even Piety has that 20% discount to faith purchases at the very top of the tree. I don't do a lot of oceanic exploration, though, so perhaps that tree simply doesn't suit my playstyle.

I'd rather think at the tree level that at the indivdual policy level.

For myself, the least useful by far would be Honor policy & Autocracy ideology. (I am a builder and not a warmonger)

It also appears to me that (at least on maps with enough water), that Exploration is always better than Commerce. (Exploration increases the yields of the sea routes which already are 2X as much as land. And even if playing Venice your puppets will build plenty of Merchants of Venice without needing faith based ones.)

Does the new Aesthetics tree (largely based on old Piety) have an exclusion with Rationalism like old Piety did? If so, that would also be a candidate for worst simply for preventing the use of Rationalism.

joncnunn said:

Does the new Aesthetics tree (largely based on old Piety) have an exclusion with Rationalism like old Piety did?

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Thankfully, no.

Part of me feels like trade routes could do with a little revamp, and be based on number of cities rather than techs, and the techs that do give trade routes instead provide range/science/gold bonuses to them. Caravansaries and Harbors should provide an additional trade route each, giving you way more incentive to build those than there currently is. It just feels odd to me that there's a hard limit on trade routes, and making them based on city count would definitely give incentive to push your empire wide early on, instead of making you hesitant to found more cities. The policy and tech penalties for founding cities were definitely meant to temper the insane bonuses city-spamming got you, but now that happiness and gold are harder to come by than they were in vanilla, getting lots of territory ends up penalizing you heavily with basically no options for short-term economic recovery. Giving you a trade route per city would definitely make you want to found new lands for the economic prosperity it can bring, and it'd make sense that the more centers of commerce you have, the more caravans you'd be sending out. Maybe to curb warmongers making stupendous amounts of money, they could make puppet cities not provide additional trade routes, you either have to found them yourself or fully annex them to get caravans working.

Venice might be a little hampered though. Maybe bumping that up to triple trade routes would keep them with their best advantage when they typically have far fewer cities than others.