Seconded on trying to cut down on walls of text.
Addendum to Aesthetics: there's actually a reason to go deep into Aesthetics in multiplayer for one specific civ, Persia, purely for the Great Artists. They are the only civ (maybe Brazil?) where Artistic Genius isn't terrible because they get so much out of Golden Ages.
Acken:
- Again, I honestly don't know how policies should be balanced for CV. When you're facing other humans, Futurism is the only way to win. When you're facing Prince AI, the decisions they make are so poor that even strategies that are otherwise subpar work on them. When you're facing Deity AI, the bonuses they receive in certain areas (hammers and happiness, mainly) are so huge that they're almost playing a different game entirely (you aren't, but they are). It's impossible to talk about improving policies for CV-oriented strategies without also mentioning how wonky BNW's CV actually is.
- ICS piety/liberty strategy I mentioned is definitely competitive in multiplayer though, so I wouldn't discount Mandate of Heaven and filling out Piety for Holy Sites culture and gold. Yeah, again, its usefulness is a lot more niche than Rationalism's, but it's not as niche as, say, completing Honor.
- No offense taken on not considering multiplayer. It is still something to keep in mind though, especially if the AI were tweaked to favor Rationalism the way humans do (this one is actually quite an easy tweak, via modifying Rationalism policies' flavor values to be ludicrously high): having the bonuses kick in later might actually have the opposite effect of what was originally intended if the bonuses are still just as vital as they are now. When those bonuses are harder to get, the player who gets them first has a much larger advantage than before.
- I'll admit, the effect of not being able to undo policy tree choices is much more prominent in multiplayer, but it's not necessarily because of the AI this time: it's that while singleplayer games contain one human player, multiplayer games often contain at least six. If you mess up policy trees in singleplayer, the AI doesn't care whether you are forced to restart or become irrelevant to the game as a result of hedging bets poorly. In multiplayer, all it takes is for a single person to make such a mistake, and the entire game becomes less fun for everyone involved. I cannot count the number of times I've seen 3 people hedge their bets on Liberty, only to realize 30 or so turns later that they could never get themselves up to more than 5 cities and/or could never get themselves the religion that they so sorely need; combined with how one player is usually taken out by industrial era, the result is that games that start as interesting 6 player FFA's end up boiling down to a boring 1v1. When you're the only one who suffers from not being able to undo your choices, I'll accept that as a way to punish lack of foresight, but when it affects other players as well and also isn't necessarily due to factors you could control (eg. you got a culture ruins quickly as Celts and decided to go Liberty, only to realize 20 turns later that none of your expansions would actually suit Liberty), it's just a killjoy. Besides, being able to switch policy effects could generate its own level of complexity: a lot of the strategy behind Civics in Civ4 was knowing when to switch, not just what to switch to.
- Remember that mandatory Rationalism isn't necessarily a bad thing: unlike, say, Aesthetics, Rationalism works with every strategy, so even if you were originally aiming for a Futurism CV in multiplayer but ended up getting beaten to first Autocracy, your Rationalism points won't punish you for switching strategies. Aesthetics does punish you for switching your aim to something other than CV, Honor punishes you for switching your aim to something other than DomV, and Patronage punishes your for switching your aim to something not involving CS allies. I would much prefer if every tree were made to become as useful as Rationalism over Rationalism being removed: how much more interesting would it be to realize that you could win SV through Aesthetics or Patronage, or CV through Commerce or Honor?
RuleroftheHex:
Because of the things you pointed out, Oligarchy in Tradition (and Citizenship in Liberty, to some extent) functions as the type of choice narrower that I am afraid Rationalism would have if their bonuses were pushed to later policies: because you essentially need to dedicate one extra policy point to unlock the useful Tradition policies, it means that should you ever want to mix Tradition with another policy tree, you can only really do it on the 3rd policy after unlocking Oligarchy, otherwise you'd be wasting a policy point by having Oligarchy unlocked and not immediately making use of its primary benefit, being able to unlock the more powerful Tradition policies. If Oligarchy's place in the policy tree were swapped with Monarchy's, I'd imagine it would give birth to a few viable strategies that dip into Tradition for Monarchy + Legalism before branching off to another policy tree, just like there are a lot of strategies that dip into Liberty for Republic + Collective Rule before heading off to unlock Piety or Tradition. Even if it is a bit annoying that players have to pick up bad policies just to complete the tree, I feel that the payoff for having more viable gameplay strategies overall would be worth it.
