Death of Conventional Strategies? [11/18 Patch Notes]

All the people hating the SP change just got too used to use the saving SP exploit. The idea behind the SP is, that a civilization gradely and steadily improves it self. Not having a rich culture and out of a sudden be immensly overpowered because of that. If you never had the chance to save up culture, you would not complain about the way it will be. You have to think how to go through the tech tree to make your SP choices reasonnable. I really like that change. There are more good points to it:

1. You can actually detect that a player is going for culture. If he saves up culture, its impossible to notice that someone comes close to the utopia project until its almost too late.

2. The AI probably can handle immidate choices better than with the saving opportunity. I think its tromendously difficoult if not impossible to make an AI that can handel that option. Therefore, the human player doesnt get a sort of unfair advantage to the AI.

3. You get social policies from the several aereas of human history. That is also just quite reasonnable.

Abusing the SP as it is now is not fun. Its boring because there is no counter. If the AI would pull something like it off, human would suspect it to be cheating. Anyway, lets see how it goes in the actual game.

If you actually read our posts, you could see that we're not just reactionary change-haters. The problem is that each SP pick becomes more expensive, so you want to spend your picks with a low number on good policies. The way to do that has hitherto been to save the picks but with the new patch, the way to go will be to stall building up culture and getting cultural CS allies until you can actually unlock the good policies.

This is a slight nerf but, above all, creates unfun micromanagement because you will now (at least if you want to play well) try to time your monument and temple builds so that you unlock a SP the turn you unlock the technology. Now some people may find that fun but most of us feel like this is excessive and unnecessary micro, on the same lines as the beaker overflow waste.

I for one would be pleasantly surprised if the AI played the broken strategies the game designers have created. Then would continue crying about them being broken in the first place.
 
But it unintentionally created an unbalanced game (that and several other features as well).

Or that the idea of increasing SP costs based on number of SP bought, no. of cities, and tech Era was unbalanced to begin with and this is just a band-aid on a bigger problem.

Mandating that a SP has to be picked at that moment is more like getting railroaded and not rewarded.
 
social policies were the only real check on mindless expansion. now that will be pretty much gone... the game was in a state of relative balance for the non early war strategies of ICS vs getting good social policies followed by ICS...

in practice nobody saves up enough culture for an actual cultural victory before spending any. that comes just way too late in the game. it's so that we dont have to pick up random crap early in the tree and can instead focus on rationalism or communism.

i guess you can still rush medieval and maybe get merchant navy but you still have to waste a few policies on something in the early tree
 
IMO they'd have better balanced SPs by reducing the ability to beeline techs than forcing immediate SP adoption.

The basic SP premise was balanced: You either took a worse policy right now with a say 2 city cost or you saved up and bought say rationalism, but you got stuck paying the cost from 8 cities as you'd expanded while teching to the era. This idea works.

Problem was that you could rush to Renaissance so early that you paid the cheap price for the good SPs early. If they made those massive tech beelines slower, a side effect is better SP balance.

Fixing the culture victory exploit of gifting all your cities could be fixed on its own without gutting the rest of the SP system.
 
But it unintentionally created an unbalanced game (that and several other features as well).

The complaint about the change to SPs is simple: it is possible to fix abuses without resorting to a global change that creates aggravating micro for other strategies. There are several major abuses that need to be corrected. The Culture win exploits need to stop, but all that requires is preventing SP costs from decreasing when your city count decreases. The Rationalism Rifle Rush is a little silly, but all that requires is forcing you to complete the Rationalism tree to get Scientific Revolution. The synergy between Police State/Planned/FP is probably overpowered, but that's easily fixed by reworking Planned and the FP to +1 Happy/city.

I for one would be pleasantly surprised if the AI played the broken strategies the game designers have created. Then would continue crying about them being broken in the first place.

At least then Deity would be hard. Imagine some isolated AI pushing Unis and Space while Alex is laying waste with a turn 70 Rifle Rush...

social policies were the only real check on mindless expansion. now that will be pretty much gone... the game was in a state of relative balance for the non early war strategies of ICS vs getting good social policies followed by ICS...

You will now be rewarded in the SP system for expanding quickly. Expanding will enable the player to dodge taking poor quality policies and suffering the resulting higher SP threshold, meaning that you get the desired late policies faster once they unlock. I wouldn't be surprised if the optimal response for many approaches is to settle on a luxury that can be Mined, resell the luxury and buy the first Settler while the second one builds, just to avoid having to take Liberty or Honor.
 
At least then Deity would be hard. Imagine some isolated AI pushing Unis and Space while Alex is laying waste with a turn 70 Rifle Rush...

Indeed. I think we would get a lot more justified whining about the blatant tech slingshots if the AI made use of them. If they used mass SP buying instead of grabbing all the early ones, they would have a better economy, too.

The AI on lower levels shouldn't do this but I thought the devs talked about how high-level AI looked a few techs into the tree to form its analysis. Although I guess that kind of behaviour would have to be implemented as a strategy itself because you would be well-advised to stockpile a couple of GS for it.

I would prefer the tech tree to have a lot more crossings so you need to research every "tier" of techs before going onto the next. Even if it were just true for eras it would probably be fine. The only point at the moment where you see something like this is with Steam Power.
 
Please, people, a kindly request, the thread is already 9 pages deep and contains a pretty thorough analysis of the gameplay consequences of the SP change.

Anyone want to comment of how this change is a direct nerf of the Aztec UA beyond Honor?

One thing this debate indicates are the basic problems with the whole culture/SP game structure. Correct me if I am wrong, but one advantage of saving SPs is that the culture threshold to the next SP does not increase. Why not eliminate that so that it increases regardless of whether one uses the SP or not?

Another possibility: Why not allow rolling over the culture-point value of SPs allocated in earlier branches into later branches as a sort of down payment (since their value will be lower) on acquiring a later SP, with the cost being deallocation of the preciously selected SP? Slightly trickier to implement, but adding another layer of choice and flexibility. Preferable to re-introducing the annoying civ4 anarchy mechanism (another mechanic I'm glad to see gone, btw also somewhat tediously "gameable" via various beelining/bulbing/GA timing approaches to avoid it).

None of the above addresses that the whole culture/SP issue can be bypassed by relentless ICS/micromanaging, and is not intended to. The intent is to avoid being forced into this bypass.
 
Thread name should be changed to : Death of any strategy?

ICS slugfest every game. Take no prisoners. Build no culture buildings. :lol:

For those who started with V and like it... I have another game to recommend, it's called Civilization IV and it is miles ahead of V in almost every relevant aspect. :lol:
 
ICS is no kind of a strat to be fair, winning by creeping death in my view - each to their own though.

The basic core strats will work with the new patch - SP are basically a gimmick; the 'polished' part of a turd. If the programmers fixed the AI then with one fell swoop the game is far better and I suspect half the balance problems would fade away to nothing.
 
SP are basically a gimmick; the 'polished' part of a turd. If the programmers fixed the AI then with one fell swoop the game is far better and I suspect half the balance problems would fade away to nothing.

:lol:

But you're absolutely right tho'. AI could be made to:

a) be generally better at everything; or
b) at least copy what the human does (save SPs, beeline techs, etc.)

and the game would be a lot harder. I'd be back at Prince difficulty no doubt.
 
b) at least copy what the human does (save SPs, beeline techs, etc.)

That was one of my objections to Civ 4. When they realized that everybody was using Slavery, they didn't redesign Slavery to be more balanced.

They taught the AI to use Slavery more efficiently at levels of play.

What I wish they'd do as far as AI is make the AI more efficient at using game concepts at higher levels of difficulty. i.e. the lower the difficulty, the more flavor influences choices such as social policy, techs, etc. while a Deity AI goes for Honor and puts together an invasion force to crush you.
 
Saving up SP points wasn't really an exploit. Sure, you could horder up your points, but then you didn't get any of the benefits of the policies until you actually bought them. So it was balanced with give-and-take. You could get cheaper policies or earlier benefits but not both. Once again, they've just made it harder to win by a method other than domination.
 
Finally made it to the end of the thread. :D

The vast majority of the changes sound good, but mandatory SPs is a bad one. At least in the context of the game as it is right now.

My attitude towards social policies changed quite a bit over time. When I first read about them months before the game was released I didn't like them because I couldn't think of anything that would be better than Civ 4 civics. Then I read some interviews how the point was to give you a feeling of steady progressiong and I warmed up to the idea. Then I got the game and actually saw how they played out and my opinion turned negative again. A month later I discovered you could save them for later by right clicking the notification, which brought them back to "okay" status.

Social policies essentially function like a secondary tech tree. That by itself is not wrong, but it does bother me how the availability of them is dependant on your progress in the primary tech tree. Having to wait until the Industrial Era before you can unlock Order is as sensible as having to wait until you complete an ancient policy tree before being able to research Iron Working.

I can live with social policies acting as a second tech tree, but they should be independant from the primary tech tree. I can think of two way to achieve that.

1) Advanced policy trees require you to complete a number of more basic policy trees.

For example Tradition, Liberty, Honor, and Piety could be basic policy trees available from the start. Once you have taken all the policies in one of the ancient trees Patronage and Commerce become available. Then when you finish a second policy tree (could be Commerce, Patronage or one of the basic ones) you unlock Rationalism and Freedom. And finally when you have finished 3 trees of policies (could even be 3 basic ones) you unlock Order and Autocracy.

Or if that is too restrictive Rationalism and Freedom could only require 1 complete policy tree while Order and Autocracy would require just 2 complete trees.

Pros:
- preserves some historical semblance (no communists in 3000 BC)
- similarity to existing setup

Cons:
- advanced trees are not used much


2) All policy trees are available from the start and rebalanced acordingly.

Yes, this is gamey and unhistorical. But it would make all policy trees equally common and viable, increasing diversity. With this setup Order would have to change from being a growth and expansion tree into being a production tree.

Pros:
- more variety both in what the AI picks and in the options and combinations that the player has

Cons:
- historically incorrect


3) Scrap social policies alltogether and bring back civics. ;)
 
But it unintentionally created an unbalanced game (that and several other features as well).

The only thing I can think of that was unbalanced about saving social policies is being able to get to the two free techs under Rationalism quickly. But getting two free techs is kind of busted anyway, no matter when it happens. Change scientific revolution (is that the one? need a good online Civ5 reference) to one free tech and problem solved.

But that's neither here nor there. It wasn't an exploit. The game clearly was designed to let me claim my policies whenever I want or never. I think if the policies themselves were better balanced, there wouldn't even be an issue. Yes, the later ones should be better than the earlier ones because you have to wait to get them, but many of the early ones are next to useless.
 
Social policies essentially function like a secondary tech tree. That by itself is not wrong, but it does bother me how the availability of them is dependant on your progress in the primary tech tree.

I don't see what's weird about that. Plenty of social/government systems just wouldn't be practicable without things like roads, printing press, banking, telegraph, flight, computers, etc.
 
Except the problem is the techs are opened by era instead of specific technologies.. so beelining for just the military part of that era gets you the biggest social benefit.

If you needed theology to open piety, banking to open commerce, printing press to open rationalism, etc, it would make a lot more sense.

But instead your big dumb military beeline civ.. that discovered rifles without inventing the calendar gets all the social benefits of being in the rennaisance.
 
1) Advanced policy trees require you to complete a number of more basic policy trees.

For example Tradition, Liberty, Honor, and Piety could be basic policy trees available from the start. Once you have taken all the policies in one of the ancient trees Patronage and Commerce become available. Then when you finish a second policy tree (could be Commerce, Patronage or one of the basic ones) you unlock Rationalism and Freedom. And finally when you have finished 3 trees of policies (could even be 3 basic ones) you unlock Order and Autocracy.

Or if that is too restrictive Rationalism and Freedom could only require 1 complete policy tree while Order and Autocracy would require just 2 complete trees.

Pros:
- preserves some historical semblance (no communists in 3000 BC)
- similarity to existing setup

Cons:
- advanced trees are not used much


It might would be useful to make it so that unlocking later trees would not require entirely filling out early ones.

Perhaps make it so that one only needs a certain amount of policies from earlier trees to unlock later ones.

Also, it might (not sure) be useful to keep era based requirements on the unlocking aspect of later trees (although this is a problem for Order and Autocracy).
 
In my current game doing it the new way, by the time I unlock the "2 Free Technology's" from Rationalism, they will be future tech's because science far outpaces culture.
 
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