Would you choose Republic + collective rule, or go for Meritocary ?
Then i guees open tradition and go for monarchy ?
Can ANYTHING beat TARF? (Tradition-Aesthetics-Rationalism-Freedom)
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Would you choose Republic + collective rule, or go for Meritocary ?
Then i guees open tradition and go for monarchy ?
redwings1340
Emperor
I thought autocracy was underwhelming when I first looked at it too, but there are actually a lot of great things that can come from it. If you're behind in tech late game, industrial espionage can be one of the best policies in the game. The other level one tenants aren't all that great, but they can be somewhat useful in various situations.
The level 2 tenants are where autocracy really shines though. Militarism (+2 happiness per barracks, armory, and military academy) can be great, because these buildings are cheaper than normal happiness buildings, and have a secondary benefit on the side. Police State (+3 happiness per courthouse, halves building time) is great for domination oriented empires, Nationalism (-33% unit maintenance cost) can save you a lot of gold, and Total War (+25% production towards military units, +15 exp for units) can give you airplanes that start with air repair. Let me repeat that: bombers and fighters that start with air repair. You should be able to kill any computer really easily with these things.
Autocracy is not a bad policy tree at all, but you need to go to war to use it effectively. Whenever I've gotten it I've never regretted it in the end. If you're tall and peaceful, freedom is generally the best choice, because it makes specialists so good. Use internal food trade routes with freedom, grow your cities, and you're golden. If you're going to do only a little warmongering or have a wide empire where you will want to buy a lot of buildings, order is probably the best policy. If you're behind and want to fight wars to slow others down though, autocracy is the best choice.
The level 2 tenants are where autocracy really shines though. Militarism (+2 happiness per barracks, armory, and military academy) can be great, because these buildings are cheaper than normal happiness buildings, and have a secondary benefit on the side. Police State (+3 happiness per courthouse, halves building time) is great for domination oriented empires, Nationalism (-33% unit maintenance cost) can save you a lot of gold, and Total War (+25% production towards military units, +15 exp for units) can give you airplanes that start with air repair. Let me repeat that: bombers and fighters that start with air repair. You should be able to kill any computer really easily with these things.
Autocracy is not a bad policy tree at all, but you need to go to war to use it effectively. Whenever I've gotten it I've never regretted it in the end. If you're tall and peaceful, freedom is generally the best choice, because it makes specialists so good. Use internal food trade routes with freedom, grow your cities, and you're golden. If you're going to do only a little warmongering or have a wide empire where you will want to buy a lot of buildings, order is probably the best policy. If you're behind and want to fight wars to slow others down though, autocracy is the best choice.
GhostSalsa
Emperor
The best thing about Autocracy's good-for-lagging-empires orientation is that it reflects the real pressures and motives for historic autocracies. Your citizens are struggling under a poor economy and happiness while the great powers parade around with their wonders and world-congress dominance. To these other powers you are throwing a wrench in world progress but to your own people you're just bringing home a piece of the pie. It's the most elegant micro-structure in the game right now imo, and my favorite way to play.
That makes a lot of sense actually as to why I never went Autocracy - I never played a game I was losing that far.
Usually when Im loosing out on wonders, tech, and city placement - I call it quits. Now it seems that its better to just take a chance and play through to Autocracy.
Im personally REALLY happy they locked wonders with SPs - makes some of the good ones more strategic than just being tall and grabbing them all.
Btw Order gives bonuses to purchasing and if u have a lot of cities is that it? I feel as if some policies are a bit underwhelming. Although I love the +1 production to mines quarries and all - thats awesome.
Also Spaceflight Pioneers is great.
What are the good tier 3 autocracy.
Usually when Im loosing out on wonders, tech, and city placement - I call it quits. Now it seems that its better to just take a chance and play through to Autocracy.
Im personally REALLY happy they locked wonders with SPs - makes some of the good ones more strategic than just being tall and grabbing them all.
Btw Order gives bonuses to purchasing and if u have a lot of cities is that it? I feel as if some policies are a bit underwhelming. Although I love the +1 production to mines quarries and all - thats awesome.
Also Spaceflight Pioneers is great.
What are the good tier 3 autocracy.
Arachnofiend
Perturbed Pugilist
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Cult of Personality is really delicious. It's a huge multiplier and it stacks if you're at war with multiple common enemies. Great for when you've gone the whole game expecting a culture victory but then at the end you realize that one guy has been sitting around mass producing culture and you can't reasonably expect to get enough Musicians to overcome it. You can just kill him off and get some huge tourism bonuses with whoever you can drag into the war.
Byzantine Bomb
Warlord
I win consistently on Prince without Rationalism or Freedom; TARF is certainly beatable.
redwings1340
Emperor
For tier 3 autocracy, I've heard gunboat diplomacy can be good, but since I usually just use a ton of bombers in my wars, I've never had much success with it. I also tend not to play culturally, although cult of personality seems like it could be good if you are shrewd with your diplomacy.
The fact that Clausewitz's Legacy has an expiration date makes me hesitant to pick it, but only because I don't want to lose out on its potential later. The good thing though is that you can delay this pick pretty effectively without losing much, since you'll want a lot of level 2 policies first anyway. This policy is definitely incredibly strong though when you're at war with another big power, and can definitely tip the scales in your favor. Just wait for the right time to choose it, and then devastate your big rival when the war starts.
The fact that Clausewitz's Legacy has an expiration date makes me hesitant to pick it, but only because I don't want to lose out on its potential later. The good thing though is that you can delay this pick pretty effectively without losing much, since you'll want a lot of level 2 policies first anyway. This policy is definitely incredibly strong though when you're at war with another big power, and can definitely tip the scales in your favor. Just wait for the right time to choose it, and then devastate your big rival when the war starts.
redwings1340
Emperor
Oops, sorry for the double post. I'll edit this one to make it about order.
So, order. Order gives you a lot of happiness.
Socialist realism, young pioneers, and universal healthcare can give you a fair bit of happiness on t1, and it probably has some of the strongest t1 picks of any ideology. Academy of sciences can add to that if you want, and this works incredibly well with Dictatorship of the proletariat, which gives additional tourism to civs with less happiness than you. Choose your policies right and you should lead the happiest people in the world, and get those awesome juicy tourism bonuses. Then, if they switch to order because of ideological pressure, you can hit them again with cultural revolution, giving an additional tourism bonus to order civs.
Alternatively, you can get skyscrapers, which is a fantastic policy when paired with Big Ben and Mercantilism. Get those research labs for about 400 gold. It's awesome and super fun, and then you can use hero of the people to work those specialist slots from the new buildings you just purchased. I haven't gotten resettlement or party leadership in a game yet, but with a few policies, I'm pretty sure you can found new cities and buy every building in them, and make them really good really fast late game. Those two policies do come a bit late in my mind to be incredibly viable, but this strategy does certainly sound fun!
Workers Faculties, +25% science from factories, is additional science. This is good for any game.
Patriotic War and Five Year Plan are situational but useful. Spaceflight pioneers is really awesome post patch, just for the great scientist and engineer.
I feel as though there's also an awesome Iron curtain strategy for tall empires that could be good for anything. Go to war with the rest of the world while getting ridiculous production and food at home, and then get free courthouses to offset your happiness problems. With other order happiness policies, this is almost as good as autocracy for conquering the world. Also, even peacefully the additional food from trade routes from this policy is awesome.
Basically, order is a ton of really good really versatile policies. You can use it to help out anything, no matter what you're going for. There is rarely a time where you'll go order and not have awesome policies to choose
So, order. Order gives you a lot of happiness.
Socialist realism, young pioneers, and universal healthcare can give you a fair bit of happiness on t1, and it probably has some of the strongest t1 picks of any ideology. Academy of sciences can add to that if you want, and this works incredibly well with Dictatorship of the proletariat, which gives additional tourism to civs with less happiness than you. Choose your policies right and you should lead the happiest people in the world, and get those awesome juicy tourism bonuses. Then, if they switch to order because of ideological pressure, you can hit them again with cultural revolution, giving an additional tourism bonus to order civs.
Alternatively, you can get skyscrapers, which is a fantastic policy when paired with Big Ben and Mercantilism. Get those research labs for about 400 gold. It's awesome and super fun, and then you can use hero of the people to work those specialist slots from the new buildings you just purchased. I haven't gotten resettlement or party leadership in a game yet, but with a few policies, I'm pretty sure you can found new cities and buy every building in them, and make them really good really fast late game. Those two policies do come a bit late in my mind to be incredibly viable, but this strategy does certainly sound fun!
Workers Faculties, +25% science from factories, is additional science. This is good for any game.
Patriotic War and Five Year Plan are situational but useful. Spaceflight pioneers is really awesome post patch, just for the great scientist and engineer.
I feel as though there's also an awesome Iron curtain strategy for tall empires that could be good for anything. Go to war with the rest of the world while getting ridiculous production and food at home, and then get free courthouses to offset your happiness problems. With other order happiness policies, this is almost as good as autocracy for conquering the world. Also, even peacefully the additional food from trade routes from this policy is awesome.
Basically, order is a ton of really good really versatile policies. You can use it to help out anything, no matter what you're going for. There is rarely a time where you'll go order and not have awesome policies to choose
sendos
Immortal
On emperor, I can do well by following liberty and tradition policies fully in different games (either separately or a combination of the 2). I've also won a few games using piety, honor (with tradition) and autocracy (cultural, diplomatic and domination).
Immortal, however, is a completely different kettle of fish and I have to stick with tradition to master it. Also, in MP, I always choose tradition whenever the host uses a tight map (e.g. small size for 5 players, no room for wide empires). I never choose liberty unless I see tons of room for me to expand.
Only a few exceptional policy combinations can beat TARF and that depends on the factions. For example, completing honor as Mongols, Chinese or Assyrians helps a lot for those civs because you get a free great general and you get a small benefit when attacking cities, which can make a difference between just missing out on capturing a city and capturing it. The problem for honor in MP is that if you see someone get honor, chances are that they're a warmonger, so the policy does give away your intentions. Then again, so does patronage, aestethics, rationalism and autocracy but nowhere near as much as honor. If you're going peaceful, why would you get honor? Unless you are the Aztecs and you create a dark space for barbs to spawn 'n' slay.
Immortal, however, is a completely different kettle of fish and I have to stick with tradition to master it. Also, in MP, I always choose tradition whenever the host uses a tight map (e.g. small size for 5 players, no room for wide empires). I never choose liberty unless I see tons of room for me to expand.
Only a few exceptional policy combinations can beat TARF and that depends on the factions. For example, completing honor as Mongols, Chinese or Assyrians helps a lot for those civs because you get a free great general and you get a small benefit when attacking cities, which can make a difference between just missing out on capturing a city and capturing it. The problem for honor in MP is that if you see someone get honor, chances are that they're a warmonger, so the policy does give away your intentions. Then again, so does patronage, aestethics, rationalism and autocracy but nowhere near as much as honor. If you're going peaceful, why would you get honor? Unless you are the Aztecs and you create a dark space for barbs to spawn 'n' slay.
joshua43214
King
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I really like Autocracy for longer domination games
The tenet that gives reduced purchasing costs for units comes around about the time I have a huge gold stack from conquering. Building Big Ben and Brandenburg Gate + the added exp from autocracy means I get air-repair bombers out of the gate for almost nothing.
Lastly Clausewitz's Legacy is freaking awesome, you get 50 turns of since the patch - which is way more than you should need at this point.
If my happiness is being tanked, I just switch ideologies after I buy all my junk - all I care about at that point is my final push.
The tenet that gives reduced purchasing costs for units comes around about the time I have a huge gold stack from conquering. Building Big Ben and Brandenburg Gate + the added exp from autocracy means I get air-repair bombers out of the gate for almost nothing.
Lastly Clausewitz's Legacy is freaking awesome, you get 50 turns of since the patch - which is way more than you should need at this point.
If my happiness is being tanked, I just switch ideologies after I buy all my junk - all I care about at that point is my final push.
Biologist
Emperor
Freedom can actually be a great choice if you want to pursue an aggressive "world policeman" diplo game. I won a diplomacy game as Venice using Freedom; the Foreign Legions were particularly helpful in punishing Autocracy civs and protecting my weaker Freedom allies. If you can manage to get Foreign Legions while everyone else is still in the Renaissance/Industrial eras, it's basically hax.
haha I did notice that with World Policeman - freedom helps u grow and gives small but useful military bonuses. What I liked was that with the revamped Ideologies and City States made me want to fight for them.
Is this a thing for everyone? If im allied with a city state and another civ conquers I now throw haymakers and everything I can do to get it back.
Is this a thing for everyone? If im allied with a city state and another civ conquers I now throw haymakers and everything I can do to get it back.
GhostSalsa
Emperor
Order is amazing. Ironically it's the best for Domination simply because of Iron Curtain. Iron Curtain lets you conquer constantly and never even have to pause for happiness. But as agreed here Order won't serve a struggling, behind civ as well as Autocracy would - because Autocracy's military policies come online sooner.
As such, Iron Curtain is a bit of a novelty policy rather than one you would ever take for necessity. If you're on level three of order in the modern era than you are probably dominating the world on culture and science already. I've used Iron Curtain a couple times pretty much just to take over my continent and boost my score on the way to an already-guaranteed science victory.
The perk of Order is an untouchable culture bar. A lot of your conquest cities on immortal will have radio towers in them, and you build your one-turn monuments as soon as they go out of revolt, so now you just have a whole continent pumping out purple that no one's tourism will ever touch. I learned this the hard way when the AI blocked my CV by doing exactly this.
Arachnofiend
Perturbed Pugilist
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The Foreign Legions are soooo stupid. I was able to take on a runaway Japan 1v1 with zero military investment because I beelined Radio and took Volunteer Army as my third policy after the two free ones. He was in the Industrial Era at this time and the strongest thing he had was Rifles. Not even his cities could handle my little troop of volunteers, I managed to liberate Indonesia just by smashing into the taken cities with no siege backup.
The tenant is far too powerful for warmongering for an ideology that isn't supposed to be for warmongers.
GhostSalsa
Emperor
it's not supposed to be for domination victory. but that just means it lacks a courthouse bonus, not that it's bad for warmongering in general. just like in real life, all the ideologies are pretty clever at finding ways to shoot the other guy..
Arachnofiend
Perturbed Pugilist
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Order doesn't get a way to make getting city-state allies easier and Autocracy doesn't get a way to pull ahead in science (only a way to catch up). Freedom's the anomaly here.
To be fair though, I'd rather introduce a city-state related tenant for order (maybe more Siam-like than Greece-like, so to speak) and a stronger science tenant for Autocracy than just hit Freedom with the nerf bat.
To be fair though, I'd rather introduce a city-state related tenant for order (maybe more Siam-like than Greece-like, so to speak) and a stronger science tenant for Autocracy than just hit Freedom with the nerf bat.
Ninakoru
A deity on Emperor
As you get Tradition and Rationalism, the rest of the policies can adapt. Those are the true keys to stay UP.
Generally when I go Autocracy, I pull ahead in the science race by destroying the capabilities of other empires to research (sacking cities, even if they get it back is a huge hit to science because of pop/building loss and once you raze about 1/3rd of an empire's larger cities, they'll fall way behind in the science race).
And as for getting CS allies easier with Order, I do so by large sums of gold since I have a fairly strong influx.
The reason those two are missing those aspects is due to the VC synergies... Order doesn't have synergy for Diplo and Autocracy doesn't have synergy for Science - Freedom doesn't have a Domination synergy which is why, apart from Foreign Legion, it doesn't get tenets for combat.
Arachnofiend
Perturbed Pugilist
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Freedom also has Arsenal of Democracy. A straight boost towards unit production is going to help a domination victory. So that's two tenants that are directly tied to domination.
Freedom doesn't have any happiness boosts tied directly to conquest like Autocracy and Order do but it's certainly much better for domination than the other two are for the victory conditions they aren't supposed to aim for. It's not super imbalanced or anything but it is a slap in the face to the professed game design so it's one of those things that really bugs me. >.>
Freedom doesn't have any happiness boosts tied directly to conquest like Autocracy and Order do but it's certainly much better for domination than the other two are for the victory conditions they aren't supposed to aim for. It's not super imbalanced or anything but it is a slap in the face to the professed game design so it's one of those things that really bugs me. >.>
redwings1340
Emperor
I think the ideologies are really well balanced and executed actually.
I won an order emperor diplomatic victory as The Netherlands a few days ago (Emperor). I didn't have too many direct city state bonuses this way, but I was able to save a ton of money buying buildings in my cities, and then used all that money I saved to buy city states. Order isn't completely built for diplo, but it is very good for a good economy, which you can use for diplo.
If you're even with another civ in tech and go autocracy, just choose a slightly different tech path than the other civ and spam research agreements. You can steal the research the computer gets, and then get your own that much faster. Science victory is still possible using this strategy, as CountAccountant proved in his first diety game a while back as Venice.
We've already went over freedom domination in the past couple of posts. Arsenal of Democracy plus foreign legions can lead to a pretty nice aggressive or defensive army.
I won an order emperor diplomatic victory as The Netherlands a few days ago (Emperor). I didn't have too many direct city state bonuses this way, but I was able to save a ton of money buying buildings in my cities, and then used all that money I saved to buy city states. Order isn't completely built for diplo, but it is very good for a good economy, which you can use for diplo.
If you're even with another civ in tech and go autocracy, just choose a slightly different tech path than the other civ and spam research agreements. You can steal the research the computer gets, and then get your own that much faster. Science victory is still possible using this strategy, as CountAccountant proved in his first diety game a while back as Venice.
We've already went over freedom domination in the past couple of posts. Arsenal of Democracy plus foreign legions can lead to a pretty nice aggressive or defensive army.
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