Rate the Social Polices: The Results Part I

Say what you will about Rationalism, it's at least realistic that it is the best Policy tree, seeing as the "civs" that embraced the values of the Enlightenment ended up founding numerous empires "on which the sun never set".

Greizer85 said:

Imo the Rationalism tree should be nerfed heavily or even removed altogether. It's so good atm that if you want to play optimally you *must* take it in every game, especially on the higher difficulties (where the whole play revolves around beelining to Rationalism and the various science buildings). The trouble stems from the fact that science is needed equally urgently for all victory types (well, most urgently for spaceship but the others are close), i.e. every victory is a science victory to some degree. If Rationalism were removed then all other policies that grant direct science should be changed too, so that they wouldn't become the next 'mandatory' policies. I do think the game would be better without Rationalism, but I doubt many people will agree.

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You could just move some of the benefits to other trees so it's almost impossible to get all of them.

Secularism - Patronage
Humanism - Aesthetics
Free Thought - Piety
Scientific Revolution - Commerce

You can gain some scientific benefits but it's spread out all of the policy tree so you have to choose which one's to benefit. Have the above 4 replace the worst policies that exist in those trees.

I think they definitely need to focus on the opener trees. Depending on map size, civilisation and playstyle, Liberty and Tradition are both usable choices (though my own preference is Tradition by a mile), Piety and Honour just don't seem to stack up. Honour runs into big money and happiness problems (sure, you conquered an extra capital, but someone else in the world still has a better empire than you do) and Piety feels like cranking the difficulty up a bunch of notches.

Consulates (in the Patronage tree) combined with the Pledge to Protect giving you permanent friend-status with every city-state on the entire map for a mere two social policies invested is basically exploiting, too.

Zezima said:

I miss the commerce policy that gave a reduction on gold purchasing anything for this reason. IIRC, it was 33% + 33% + 15% for Commerce, Autocracy, and Big Ben (dunno if it was additive or multiplicative but either way it made rush buying units dirt cheap). Combined with the gold boost/upgrade cost reduction of Honor and Pentagon, late game warmongering became VERY viable and stupidly fun. Pretty sure all those reductions applied to nukes too...

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Ehm, the policy still exists. It's a 25% reduction on top of other bonuses.

So yes, warmongering with commerce and autocracy still is dirt cheap.

I think piety's fatal flaw is that reformation beliefs can be spread to your competitors. Why would I ever bother to invest tons of culture into piety when I can get Jesuit Education or The Glory of God handed to me for free by the AI in every other game I play? Rest of the tree is just filler till you pick a reformation anyway. For all its faults, at least honor will directly help you in a specific victory type and not your competitors.

The problem is that the tress just can't compete with liberty/tradition/rationalism and that there's very little time in between those trees and when that's done you'll be onto an ideology.

Once you get the tenets you want from the ideology it's pretty late in the game to get much use from dipping back into the trees.

You either need longer between the core trees (liberty/tradition, rationalism, ideology) or you need to nerf those trees/make the others comparable.

I would take the results of this vote with a grain of salt. There is no context for the vote. If you are in a teamer skirmish game or Pangea, liberty is clearly superior to tradition. If you are on an island map or continents with no neighbors then tradition is clearly best. It is also the case that the vote of a total noob weighs equally with that of a pro. I would rather know how the top 20 players vote these policies than the general public. If 80% of the population believes that soda is better for you than water that doesn't make it so.

If someone is interested in nerfing Rationalism without nerfing Rationalism -) ) here are some tips:
Change Opener to affect only capital but on 25%. That means the will be finite, and if someone choose to go super tall to abuse this, in the same time he sacrifizes: culture, production, gold, tourism so it even out. Not to mention that everything else (exept finisher) benefits wide more.

Kick secularism to finisher. I bet we can agree that secularism is 10/10 policy, and having it so easy (even more when rationalism opener is quite good) is just over the top, while postponing it untill whole tree complete, that lower it power.

Make Humanis and Sovereign no req policies. Since both are nice but not impresive.

Make Research Agreements benefit more the less developed civ. The more behind you are the more you benefit.

So basicly even without changing single value, the whole rationalism could be tuned down.

Some of the worst policies are the ones that just give a small flat gold bonus per trade route: Wagon Trains, Merchant Confederacy. I think these could be fixed by changing them to multipliers. Wagon trains could put a 1.5x multiplier on caravans to make them more competitive with the 2x multiplier on sea trade routes, and similarly change Merchant Confederacy to a +50% multiplier on trade routes with city states.

As for Entrepreneurship, this would be decent if generating great merchants were a better option. Splitting the great person counters for scientists, engineers, and merchants could work, but I'm not sure if that would make it too easy to generate engineers. The great merchant's tile improvement should also be buffed. If an academy can give 8 science before being boosted, a customs house should give at least 8 gold.

Greizer85 said:

Imo the Rationalism tree should be nerfed heavily or even removed altogether. It's so good atm that if you want to play optimally you *must* take it in every game, especially on the higher difficulties (where the whole play revolves around beelining to Rationalism and the various science buildings). The trouble stems from the fact that science is needed equally urgently for all victory types (well, most urgently for spaceship but the others are close), i.e. every victory is a science victory to some degree. If Rationalism were removed then all other policies that grant direct science should be changed too, so that they wouldn't become the next 'mandatory' policies. I do think the game would be better without Rationalism, but I doubt many people will agree.

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Not entirely true, while ratio is one of the best trees, I have played deity games without it for most part. Domination ones, that is, other types still need it asap.

It has already been nerfed heavily in BNW, and it with it in the game you still make strategic decisions on which part of it to pursue, when, in what order and what other SP to open.

You can't really nerf rationalism without making science victories impossible. I'd say the focus should be on improving the lower rated trees, such as exploration.

RealHuhn said:

Ehm, the policy still exists. It's a 25% reduction on top of other bonuses.

So yes, warmongering with commerce and autocracy still is dirt cheap.

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It does? Huh. I thought it was replaced when I was glancing over the changes. Think I've only taken commerce once since I got BNW so admittedly I haven't paid much attention to it.

I don't think Rationalism needs anymore nerfs, and certainly shouldn't be removed (simply eliminating an imbalanced feature is not only lazy, it's poor design, removes variety, and actually causes problems if the feature had dependencies).

Rationalism helps you progress the tech tree quicker. Consequently, this means you are more likely to reach VCs sooner, yes. That's just the VCs' fundamental reliance on tech. Foregoing Rationalism doesn't mean you sacrifice victory. It means you sacrifice science (and thus the speed of victory) for some other benefit. Declaring that Rationalism NEEDS a nerf or NEEDS to be removed altogether just because it lengthens your victory is ridiculous. SV requires many many more techs than other VC types. It's pretty obvious why Rationalism exists at all.

The only instance where Rationalism can be argued as necessary to win is at Deity level play, and the reason for that is the AI bonuses make other trees very insufficient at keeping up. IMO, the issue there is that the bonuses are unreasonable and need tweaking, but honestly that could lead to a whole other issue of whether every game should be winnable for every VC...

Changing Rationalism just because it's best for optimal play would result in pro players finding new optimal methods that would become standard and perceived as "necessary", thus just contuining the cycle of complaints.

e3do said:

... at least honor will directly help you in a specific victory type and not your competitors.

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¡¡Fail!! I don't see how honor helps better while not growing, expanding, conquering and without army economic support. You better off going 4 city trad, at least you get the money for an actual army.

On the rationalism thing, I don't see it so overpowered as people say, but should be nerfed a little. Getting such huge boosts from two policies is too much. Still sometimes there are better options, that will help you more ensuring your victory.

CraigMak said:

I would take the results of this vote with a grain of salt. There is no context for the vote. If you are in a teamer skirmish game or Pangea, liberty is clearly superior to tradition. If you are on an island map or continents with no neighbors then tradition is clearly best. It is also the case that the vote of a total noob weighs equally with that of a pro. I would rather know how the top 20 players vote these policies than the general public. If 80% of the population believes that soda is better for you than water that doesn't make it so.

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As far as I know, nobody plays Civ 5 professionally. Also, while we're on the subject of context, I would rather drink a Coca Cola than dysentery-filled freshwater, or seawater.

Thanks for culling through all of that Sonic, it's really helpful to get a pulse on the community opinions.

Rationalism should be made much weaker. It should always be an option, but since tech is invariably the "safe" option, it should be weak to reflect that.

lol at Merchant Confederacy.

e3do said:

I think piety's fatal flaw is that reformation beliefs can be spread to your competitors. Why would I ever bother to invest tons of culture into piety when I can get Jesuit Education or The Glory of God handed to me for free by the AI in every other game I play? Rest of the tree is just filler till you pick a reformation anyway. For all its faults, at least honor will directly help you in a specific victory type and not your competitors.

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The founder beliefs should be stronger.
Or Piety should increase the effect of the founder belief (or give another, but that would probably be too much).
Or the reformation belief should belong to only you.
Or you should win the game if x% of the world population follows your religion + some other condition.
One of those things should happen.

Here are some thoughts about better balancing Rationalism with the other trees:

Make Secularism not apply to scientists. Let me just say, I think Secularism is a great policy. It's great because it allows you to get science boosts without focusing specifically on science. You can diversify your specialists and the flavor of your empire and still keep up in tech. What makes it over the top, is that it applies to scientists as well. Change that, and I think you would tweak it in a way that slightly weakens SV without impacting other VCs (SV players are still going to staff scientists for GSes, but CV players can staff artists/etc. and still get the +2 beakers a scientist would give).

Introduce policies that grant science boosts proportionate to other aspects of your empire. Scholasticism and Mercantilism already achieve this. They reward players that forgo obvious science benefits by allowing them to keep up with the players that do. How about a policy that grants science based on tourism? There are obviously certain policies in every tree that could use replacing. How about get rid of Fine Arts and replace it with the aforementioned tourism-science policy? What about a policy that grants beakers based on units killed in combat?

Gain gold and science for each enemy unit killed. Can purchase great generals with faith from the industrial era.

That sounds like a badass Honor closer to me, and I barely changed anything at all. Now give Honor some kind of early happiness benefit and I'd wager suddenly it competes pretty strongly with Liberty and Tradition.

How about we trash Navigation School (or at least combine its benefit with something else) and make a policy that gives us science for digging up antiquity sites? Or adds a science boost to landmarks?

There are so many interesting ways to fix the Rationalism issue without outright hammering it with nerfs, and it's intuitive changes like these that make the metagame more interesting and result in great game design.

...I think I need to go open the SDK.

it's probably not a coincidence that Rationalism fills the gulf between the Human and the most significant AI-bonus: science? although i bet many people would rank the most significant AI-bonus is happiness, either way the science is still that important.

there probably will never be a 'successful' buff/nerf on Rationalism and other policies until the game itself can somehow work without the game difficulty level = AI science bonus level?

Ninakoru said:

¡¡Fail!! I don't see how honor helps better while not growing, expanding, conquering and without army economic support. You better off going 4 city trad, at least you get the money for an actual army.

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Fail? I didn't say honor was great but that at least it helped you, and you alone. My quickest and most satisfying wins have all been mixed honor/liberty or honor/tradition starts. Military tradition is a great policy that allows you to conquer the world a lot sooner. Maybe practice your early game warmongering. If you know you want to go for a domination victory from the start, opening the left side of honor makes things a lot easier, though of course, not needed. And again, with piety, why would I bother when its biggest and best perks can be handed to me for free? The only reason I'd try piety now is if I wanted sacred sites for an early culture victory or playing as one of the faith civs. Outside of that, I'd probably never use it.