Consulates social policy is too overpowered

Currently, the Consulates social policy in the Patronage tree bumps up the resting influence level with city-states by +20. The net effect of this is that, if you pledge to protect a city-state and have adopted this social policy, you’re resting influence level with that city-states is 30, which gives you “friends” benefits with any such city-states. Whether or not this is overpowered or not is the subject of the following thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=506442

My rationale for reporting this issue as a bug is as follows:

• Selecting this social policy may not create an overpowering advantage if there are only a small number of city-states, but it is hugely overpowered if there are 40 or more city-states in the game– getting +2 or +3 culture, happiness or faith from a large proportion of those 40 city-states at once seems WAY better than any other social policy.

• Although a human player can tell that the benefit of this policy scales linearly with the number of city-states in the game, the AI is not smart enough, as far as I can tell, to make such a distinction; thus the AI is at an extreme disadvantage if you play a game with 40 or so city-states, since only a few civ AIs seem to be hard-coded to prefer the patronage tree (I’ve noticed Spain and America…).

• I don’t think that playing with 40 of more city-states is an “unusual” situation that needn’t be considered when balancing the game. To me, playing with about 20 civs and 40 city-states on a huge-sized map seems like the most “realistic” way to play the game – there is plenty of room to maneuver units in an interesting way, and you really get the feel of a big world filled with lots of different types of people, as in real-life. Thus, I feel strongly that this should be addressed as a bug fix rather than relegated to “if you don’t like it, just make a mod.”

I think the bug could be fixed in one of the following ways (some of these are discussed in the above thread, but I am repeating them here as a summary):

1. 
   Reduce the amount of influence that is bumped up by this policy to +10 instead of +20. As a comparision, the Papal Primacy religious tenet bumps up your resting influence level with city-states to +15, but that’s only for city-states to which your religion has spread, not to ALL city-states. Since the Consulates social policy affects all city-states, it seems that its effect per city-state should be LESS, not MORE, than the effect per city-state of the Papal Primacy policy (I think this would be the easiest and preferred fix).

• 
  Leave the maximum amount of influence bump for Consulates at +20, but reduce it the farther away the city-state is (this would be effective as well, but it would be more work, harder to test, and not really clear that it would be a more realistic approach than the first solution)

• 
  Make the AI smart enough to understand how much better this social policy is when there are a lot of city-states in the game (I don’t recommend this fix; anytime you say “the AI should be smarter,” you are opening up a can of worms….)