Thalassicus
Bytes and Nibblers
The change to social policies is an idea from the Culture Calibration Mod thread. I actually intended to do this a month ago, but we did not have a function exposed in Lua to give free policies. I stumbled across it by accident today, it was added for the Mongol scenario!
Basically, the idea is policies are fun and the vanilla game severely limits the use of policies for all but 1 victory type. This gives everyone 6 more policies to play with, one per era. It fits in with my primary philosophy of these mods: more strategic flexibility = more enjoyable game.
The buff to happiness is due to a general feeling it's better to export luxuries or increase population instead of going for a happy golden age. Golden ages increase production and gold, two things you can do by settling more cities or letting your existing ones grow (and more population improves science as well). I've seen several other points made over the weeks about the underwhelming benefits of high happiness, but don't remember them all right now. +50% duration for happiness GAs makes it more valuable. I might even increase it to +100% if it still feels as worthless as vanilla.
A tricky thing to remember is you don't accumulate points to another happy golden age until the current one is completed. This is a tempering factor. If you were in a GA for 10 turns and out for 30 in vanilla, with +100% duration it's 20 and 30. The actual increase in proportional time spent in a GA is only +60% in this situation. It also has a larger impact with later GAs because 10/100->20/110 is more significant than 10/20->20/30.
In addition, this indirectly improves the Piety tree (Mandate of Heaven). I've been trying to figure out ways to buff this policy tree for some time.
Basically, the idea is policies are fun and the vanilla game severely limits the use of policies for all but 1 victory type. This gives everyone 6 more policies to play with, one per era. It fits in with my primary philosophy of these mods: more strategic flexibility = more enjoyable game.
The buff to happiness is due to a general feeling it's better to export luxuries or increase population instead of going for a happy golden age. Golden ages increase production and gold, two things you can do by settling more cities or letting your existing ones grow (and more population improves science as well). I've seen several other points made over the weeks about the underwhelming benefits of high happiness, but don't remember them all right now. +50% duration for happiness GAs makes it more valuable. I might even increase it to +100% if it still feels as worthless as vanilla.
A tricky thing to remember is you don't accumulate points to another happy golden age until the current one is completed. This is a tempering factor. If you were in a GA for 10 turns and out for 30 in vanilla, with +100% duration it's 20 and 30. The actual increase in proportional time spent in a GA is only +60% in this situation. It also has a larger impact with later GAs because 10/100->20/110 is more significant than 10/20->20/30.
In addition, this indirectly improves the Piety tree (Mandate of Heaven). I've been trying to figure out ways to buff this policy tree for some time.