Bob's Liberty Buff

I got tired of rolling Tradition every game I played, and was starting miss the old Wide play style from pre-BNW. So, I buffed Liberty to be approximately on par with tradition...

• Opener: +1 in every City; Reduces the policy cost penalty of each City by 50%.
• Republic: +1 in every City. Workshops and Marketplaces are built in half the usual time.
• Collective Rule: A free Settler appears near the Capital; Settlers are trained 50% faster in all Cities.
• Citizenship: A free Worker appears near the Capital, Workers work 25% faster; 4 units are maintenance free.
• Representation: During Golden Ages, for every non-puppeted City receive +1 Great Merchant, Engineer, and Scientist Point in the City, where the National Epic was built. Also starts a Golden Age.
• Meritocracy: -33% from number of Cities; +1 for every City connected to the Capital.
• Finisher: Receive a bonus (up to 20%) while the empire is happy. It also allows the purchase of Golden Ages with starting in the Industrial Era.

I consider this release a semi-beta. I'm definitely looking for in-depth feedback regarding what you feel is OP or what is underperforming.

Download available here.

Interesting idea, will try it out.

sounds cool but isnt happiness the biggest constraint for wide?

Ekmek said:

sounds cool but isnt happiness the biggest constraint for wide?

Click to expand...

Yes and no. In vanilla happiness was the only constraint for Wide. In GnK, the Happiness constraint practically went out the window between Ceremonial Burial, Pagodas, etc. With BNW and the Science Penalty, the biggest thing holding Wide back is Science, by far. It's about turn 250 in my second playthrough with my new Liberty (first play through with Ethiopia, this time I'm playing China) and the only reasons I'm keeping up in the tech tree is because I've gotten quite lucky stealing techs with my spies this game (four so far) and I did manage Petra in my 2nd city.

So, yes Happiness is a big factor in Wide, but playing religiously, or playing a civ with an early happiness building (Egypt for example) can really open the world up for Wide (though you still want to pop cap MOST of your cities at some point and largely stay on either production or science focus in MOST of your cities). If I added in any additional Happiness bonuses, it would make playing Wide too easy IMO.

With all of this being said, I actually may be either keeping my current Science buff as is, or raising the cap (or maybe even scaling the cap with map size). It currently caps out at 20% bonus science at 11 cities. That's the equivalent of dropping the Science penalty from 1.5 to 1.25 (which is my exact target of a 50% reduction at the moment). The fact that the Science buff requires you to have a happy empire actually makes the bonus feel better to me. Ignoring Happiness via the Vanilla civ days should not be a viable way to play, and getting rewarded for maintaining positive Happiness feels good.

Onward to the current iteration of Representation... I still feel like this does work pretty poorly with playing Wide and I'm still open to suggestions. Great Person Points from the level 1 buildings is one thought I had. Not quite sure how that would actually work out.

And finally, The Pyramids. I'm considering some kind of buff for them as well. They're pretty meh compared to Hanging Gardens short of 1-turn repair/pillage exploiting. I was thinking about either a small amount of global Happiness (4 or so) but I don't really think that's necessary or maybe a Faith per City bonus. They need something...

Updated to Version 2.

Change Log:

• Republic now provides only 1 per city but cuts the time to build Workshops and MarketPlaces in half.
• Representation now provides bonus GPPs per turn during Golden Ages instead of reducing the excess happiness cost of Golden Ages
• The free Great Person was removed from the finisher and I implemented purchasing Golden Ages with Faith instead.

I'll be doing more play testing to make sure everything here is balanced decently. However, I doubt there will be anymore fundamental updates to the mod, just number tweaks, etc.