Policy impact

TheologiaCrucis said:

The problem with the Piety tree, I think, is Religious Tolerance. It's way too variable in terms of whether or not one of the other players has a pantheon that will be useful to you - and not only that, but it depends on at least other player founding a religion AND spreading that religion to your city.

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If you throw random pantheons at your cities something will usually stick, to the tune of 2 or so "dots" per city, which is fair for an early policy yield, or the stupid city range strength, which is also comparable to another early policy. It seems just barely functional enough to me.

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Neither of these patch changes do anything to balance these two trees. Moving policies around is not what was needed - tweaking policies and timing was.

Tradition didn't need a slower start, it needed a much weaker closer, something that wouldn't take effect so instantly (either via Engineering requirement for the free aq's or just a different, more slow-acting bonus.) It would be a simple, balanced boost to Peity and Patronage to open Tradition for the center, switch to one of those trees in classical era, and finish Tradition later without "missing" the OP closer bonus in the meantime.

Peity's problems are still more to do with the AI's religion problem. Locking Peity behind classical era wouldn't prevent the AI from founding super-early and spamming 6 prophets at you mid-game: those things should be fixed first, so that religion can be fully engaged with as a gameplay mechanic instead on Immortal and Deity, and not some all-out war for first dibs.

Do that, and you can leave Peity available to open early or take as a blended second tree and receive value from either way. Also, Temples cost too much hammers and gpt, they should be discounted anyway - getting two percentage-based bonuses on a building that early cities dont have the base hammers or gold to support really hurts the tree's early game value (the third bonus being a flat faith dot notwithstanding). Discount the over-priced building to match what cities can accommodate in the classical era, and the bonuses associated with that building will yield rewards in that same era rather than only doing so later.

Even apart from those general religious balances, Peity needs one major change, which is that Reformation, regardless of when you take the policy (or if it's moved to the closer) doesn't unlock for the player until they reach Printing Press. Delaying the reformation bonus selection would, in the first place, not delay the bonus yield since as others have mentioned most of them don't have any use before mid-game, and second of all buff the entire Peity tree by not forcing the player to rush a policy that has no early game benefit at the cost of other policies that would.

GhostSalsa said:

Tradition didn't need a slower start, it needed a much weaker closer, something that wouldn't take effect so instantly (either via Engineering requirement for the free aq's or just a different, more slow-acting bonus.) It would be a simple, balanced boost to Peity and Patronage to open Tradition for the center, switch to one of those trees in classical era, and finish Tradition later without "missing" the OP closer bonus in the meantime.

Peity's problems are still more to do with the AI's religion problem. Locking Peity behind classical era wouldn't prevent the AI from founding super-early and spamming 6 prophets at you mid-game: those things should be fixed first, so that religion can be fully engaged with as a gameplay mechanic instead on Immortal and Deity, and not some all-out war for first dibs.

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With regard to Tradition, on your idea to require Engineering for the free aqueducts, it turns out the CP mod already requires them. (Of course CBP has a lot more changes.)

I have been running mod experiments myself on locking Piety and Honor behind Classical era. It actually does help the AI out a lot with number of tiles within their cultural borders due to them being "forced" to pick an opener providing some culture.
It looks like most of the AIs complete whichever tree they started after they reach Classical era, very few actually interrupt to go to Piety. (Perhaps it only "sees" one level down past what it has.)

The religious AI missionary spam would happen regardless of tree chosen and appears to be a much more difficult problem to solve given the AI flavor logic, so as a programmer by trade I wouldn't hold up pushing back Piety for it.

But you might want to try out the CBP mod.

joncnunn said:

The religious AI missionary spam would happen regardless of tree chosen and appears to be a much more difficult problem to solve given the AI flavor logic, so as a programmer by trade I wouldn't hold up pushing back Piety for it.

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Right, not a tree problem. I can't speak to how difficult it would be to fix, but the other shared, limited resource that you have to compete for in the game is city states. Somehow the devs trained the AI not to constantly spend all available gold on city states all the time, which, if they did, would resemble the way they spend faith points - so, the AI can be tamed.

GhostSalsa said:

Right, not a tree problem. I can't speak to how difficult it would be to fix, but the other shared, limited resource that you have to compete for in the game is city states. Somehow the devs trained the AI not to constantly spend all available gold on city states all the time, which, if they did, would resemble the way they spend faith points - so, the AI can be tamed.

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The observed behavior for AI city state buying matches that of it has to do a virtual dice roll and roll above a certain number (in part based on some of the flavors) to be allowed to cash buy the city state and even when it does they'll spend the bare minimum.

The AI is not allowed to cash buy buildings at all.
With the exception of G&K (post fall G&K patch), it's only allowed to cash buy units if it falls way behind in military strength.

Gigaz said:

I find the tradition nerf so severe that I'll probably start with Liberty and the free worker most of the time. Such a start is ahead of anything else you can think of.

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Agreed, especially those of us who are bad at work stealing (also, I like continents).

After the first two policies I can decide reliably whether I want a reformation belief, a great general, many settlers or the patronage city state boosts.

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Even though I go for the Liberty worker first, I think the strongest perk in that tree is clearly the half price settlers. I can understand delaying the Liberty finisher, but it seems to me that one really needs the worker and settler asap. How can the delay to those two SP be worth the lost opportunity cost?

Liberty looks the same, like honor from all the policy changes. Tradition really looks different. I think republic had a change where the building production increased back up to 10 % where it dropped to 5% after gnk and beginning bnw. I think liberty used to 10% during vanilla.