Puppet Empire with Social Policies

[historix69]

A puppet city does contribute culture, gold, science to your empire.
A puppet city does not increase culture cost for new social policies.
A puppet city does profit from social policies, e.g. it does receive Food-Bonus, Production-Bonus, Happiness-Bonus, Culture-Bonus, etc.

Is there a rational explanation how puppet cities can profit from social policies without increasing their costs? Or is it just a Game Design Decision?

I always thought that culture costs increasing with number of own / annexed cities were somehow related to the increased build up of social / political infrastructure. If so, then puppets should not profit from social policies since they are lacking the social infrastructure which is neccessary to profit from social policies.

So from a rational point of view I would expect puppets either
- to not increase s.p. costs and to not profit from s.p. or
- to increase s.p. costs and to profit from s.p.

The current system rewards to build a huge puppet empire, get all the interesting social policies at lower costs and then to mass annex the puppets (if you really want to annex them).

 

[The Pilgrim]

Then there would be no reason whatsoever to have them. Multi-razing + ICS.

 

[joncnunn]

Current system if you leave them all as puppets is subject to happiness limits as the pupets are slow to build happiness structures.

(The Honor policy will greatly help.)

But still, since the courthouse removes base city unhappiness, in terms of happiness your still better off annexing & rushing courthouses.

And yup; if the courthouse only brought the city back to even, people would raze and replace cities wholesale to avoid the building & maintenance costs of the court house.

 

[Ajuga]

The thing with annexing is that the culture cost goes up so if you want a cultural victory you might not want to annex cities.
I like puppets as they are now in regard to policies.

They gain the advantage of your policies (which makes sense as they are cities adopted into the empire) and they provide some culture, money, science etc.
However the trade-off is that you can't choose what they produce. Which in turns means that they might not get all the cultural buildings that are available.

 

[historix69]

The problem is :
Using a Puppet Empire which benefits from social policies without increasing costs is so unrealistic and inconsistant that it feels like an exploit.

For interested readers :
I summarized some thoughts and concept ideas on a new social policy system and policy costs in a new thread : A new approach to Social Policies (Cost and Upkeep)