Favorite Social Policy trees?

Which social policy trees do you use most?

  • Tradition

    Votes: 61 12.0%

  • Liberty

    Votes: 124 24.5%

  • Honour

    Votes: 145 28.6%

  • Piety

    Votes: 82 16.2%

  • Patronage

    Votes: 192 37.9%

  • Order

    Votes: 111 21.9%

  • Autocracy

    Votes: 12 2.4%

  • Freedom

    Votes: 88 17.4%

  • Rationalism

    Votes: 110 21.7%

  • Commerce

    Votes: 88 17.4%
  • Total voters
    507
O

Optimizer

Sthlm, SWE
Joined
Dec 29, 2001
Messages
692
I played only twice now, but I like Freedom and Order a lot.

With Bismarck Honour is a big help to get the avalanche kicked off, so thats more a special case than a general preference.
 
Piety seems to be the way early on...

I read somewhere about hoarding those social policy improvements until the middle ages...it worked for me in my last game, contributing to a stable, happy mid-sized empire with a strong economy.

Having said that I've not played with the other ones enough to say for sure what is best, but Piety is my fave at this moment.
 
Honor and Patronage here, because I think the two are great regardless of your Civ and intended strategy. Just in opening the two trees up, you get a huge boost against Barbs as well as instant recon about where their encampments are. You can use this to leverage your defense against pillagers etc.
Patronage is good because they amplify the already-amazing City States, to the point of almost cheating.
 
I used Honor and Patronage a lot last time, but that's because I had a dual strategy of befriending City-States and conquering those that wouldn't befriend me.

Piety strikes me as a good option next time. The trick is to keep happiness up initially. Reducing the total happiness towards a Golden Age didn't seem all that useful when I was running a consistent -1 happy ;)
 
Honor is helpful against fighting barbs. It helps me alot because I like to warmonger asap :D
 
Order by a long shot. Halved unhappiness from number of cities and then +5 production to every city is ridiculous.
 
Looks like people need to use Commerce more. Mercantilism (-25% rush buy cost) and Protectionism (+1 happy from all luxury resources) are very nice.
 
Haven't been able to test Autocracy and Order yet, but I've been very happy to open up Commerce when I can. Like Wulf38, Mercantilism and Protectionism are great!
 
I like freedom and patronage the most, plus traditions -33% wonder cost, and -50% tile purchase cost can be very helpful, but the latter needs too many policies spent that are better spent elsewhere.
 
In my mind, while the two are not mutially exclusive the way rationalism and piety are, I feel that patronage and commerce are two policies competing against one anther. Commerce encourages investing your gold in your cities, while Patronage encourages investing gold in city-states. Commerce boosts the effects of your existing luxuries while patronage makes it easier to get new types of luxuries (by befriending city-states)

So far, I've stuck with commerce, but I'm curious to give patronage a go.
 
Patronage is the most broken tree for the easiest win strategy, so, I use it nearly every game!

Honour tree for when fighting is in the plan, and almost always Commerce if there's even a tiny reason to do so.

Patronage, Rationalism, Commerce and the one that ends in Communism
 
Autocracy is the only tree that excludes two other trees. That seems to be a big drawback. (Haven't played the full game yet, will hopefully do tomorrow.)
 
Liberty seems like utter junk to me, compared to others.
It supports (weakly!) ReXing, and ReXing is not really a good strategy in this game.

Unlike Honor or Tradition, which both have some nice bonuses that hang around all game (Oligarchy, Professional Military) the Liberty bonuses are rapidly outclassed.
 
I can't say I've studied the social policy tree yet and I'm still only just in the middle ages in my first game but I did go with honor this time.

Honor seemed quite obvious as I choose to go with Monty in this game, Monty is a warmonger and should always be, and with every killed enemy gaining me some culture I sent my proud jaguars out early to kill whatever they found not inside a city...
 
the two that give bonuses to specialist and patronage. Use those 3 together and you will have mega cities that are just insane in every aspect.
 
Honor. With honor, a GG + adjacent unit combo allows contemporary units to easily beat opposing units in the field and take cities w/o losses (4 horseman > every opponent on the continent).

When going for a slaughterfest, this tree is money. The :mad: reduction from military garrisons is a nice bonus too. If you manage to combine that bonus with the liberty's meritocracy and pick up the 50% from #cities reduction wonder @ banking (forbidden palace), you can probably ICS effectively. Hell, even without the wonder you would only need minimal investment beyond the garrisons.

The 15% bonus from adjacent units is not talked about much on here. It's usually possible to get 30% from that policy, which combined with the flanking bonus + great general leads to some lopsided nonsense quickly.
 
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