I think you should do something with culture for theocracy, perhaps population based.
There are two unused culture-based stubs in the Policies table:
1> CulturePerTechResearched
and
2> CultureImprovementChange
CulturePerTechResearched has some obvious uses, but I don't like that it doesn't scale with empire size. Nearly every other possibility would scale with map size, at least indirectly; this'd be incredibly strong in a OCC, and very weak on huge maps with lots of cities.
CultureImprovementChange apparently boosts the culture of +culture improvements. The complete list of which includes: the Landmark, and now my Monolith. Not exactly the most useful stub they've ever added. Or maybe it boosts EVERY improvement, in which case it's horribly overpowered; maybe I should test it, but either way, I wouldn't use it except as part of a package effect.
There are other options, though:
3> the Policy_BuildingClassCultureChanges table. It's currently only being used to give the Palace +3 culture at Tradition, but you can easily use it to give, say, +2 culture per Theater.
4> Add a custom promotion that a policy gives to all units, or to all units of a specific combat class. While this would be extremely flexible, there's a limit to how many custom promotions the game can handle (about 60, IIRC, across all mods running at a time), so I don't want to add more of these if I don't need to.
5> The final option would be to simply have a policy that gives free units of some kind. The problem here is that other than my tech-gated future policies, you couldn't give any kind of military unit at an earlier policy. That's why this is currently only used for Workers, Settlers, and Great Generals on existing policies.
I don't really like the concept of a policy you can get in the classical era getting something specifically for a building MUCH later in the game
If that was the only benefit of the policy then I'd absolutely agree. But consider the Republic policy; in my version, it's +1 production in every city and +10% to trade route income. In the early game the first effect dominates and the second is almost worthless, but in the late game it's the production boost that's negligible. I actually sort of like that transitional system.
And if they ever fixed the +happiness to not double, you could split it. Like, +1 Happiness per Temple, -10% population unhappiness, +1 Happiness per Hologram Theater. One early-game, one that kicks in in the midgame, and one that comes near the end.
But generally speaking, yes, I agree that it'd be problematic to tie part of the effect to a later building.
Sjru said:
I've stumbled upon a crash, the log returned this;
Looking through the vanilla database and the UI files, there are no files that use {4_num} that deal with unhappiness. (And why you'd have 4 arguments when the text message clearly only uses one? Maybe they meant 1_num.)
It's not in the free Mongol DLC either, and I don't have any of the others. And it's definitely not one of mine; for one thing, it's not in English.
So whatever's causing that problem, it isn't me. I'm assuming you're using no mods other than mine; if you are, then you'll need to check those for yourself. What you can do is go into your XML database, search for that exact line, and tell me which file it's in and the text key name. It'd be easy then to see whether Firaxis just made a mistake in one specific localization.