Social Policy: Order (G&K)

Order
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
-- George Orwell

Introduction

Order, available in the industrial era, contains policies that boost a wide empire strategy. Order is best for large, sprawling empires, increasing the strength of the empire based on the number of cities it contains. However, adopting Order brings diplomatic hit to those who believe in Freedom or Autocracy.

The Policies

General Use

The Policies

Order

Adopting Order will increase Happiness by 1 per City. May purchase Great Engineers with Faith. Order cannot be active at the same time as Autocracy or Freedom.

The Order opener is a strong global :c5happy:

Happiness policy for a massive empire. On huge maps, this policy will effectively allow you to add one :c5citizen:

in every city, or use the combined happiness boost to grow a few cities very tall for late game production.

Faith-buying Great Engineers makes the Order opener more attractive since Great Engineers are suitable in any situation. Using 1000 :c5faith:

to rush build a critical wonder like The Hubble Telescope or The United Nations is quite worthwhile.

Nationalism

25% attack bonus when fighting in friendly territory.

Defending your empire just got a lot easier with Nationalism. The 25% attack boost is a nice bonus to repel those late game attacks. It stacks additively with Himeji Castle to give you a nice +40% boost when attacking in your territory.

You can also use Nationalism on the offensive. When attacking another civilization, you can take their cities, before destroying their units, to convert their territory to yours and therefore gain the Nationalism bonus while cleaning up.

United Front

Militaristic City States grant units twice as often when you are at war with a common foe.

As long as you are 'friends' or 'allies' with a Militaristic City State, and at war with someone whom they are also at war with, the time between unit spawns will be halved. This is a nice policy to boost your late game unit production as any Militaristic City State ally of yours will automatically be at war with the same civilizations you are at war with.

Planned Economy

Factories increase a cities Science output by 25%. Build Factories in half the usual time.

If you are constantly warring, and therefore can't sign Research Agreements, then this policy will give you a significant :c5science:

Science boost in your factory cities. Planned Economy stacks additively with Universities, Observatories, the National College and Research Labs. Additionally, you get +100% production bonus when building factories, making them cheaper than buildings like Opera House and Theater, and much cheaper than Windmill. Note that it doesn't decrease the purchasing cost of Factories. With cities that have high production, Planned Economy saves the money to purchase things in cities.

Socialism

Gold maintenance costs of Buildings reduced by 15%.
Requires: Planned Economy

When you are running a massive empire, your building maintenance costs rise dramatically as you keep adding new cities. Socialism reduces the global building maintenance costs enough to give you a nice GPT income boost.

Communism

+2 Production per City and +1 Production for every Mine or Quarry.
Requires: Planned Economy

A small boost to every cities, production ability near the late game is always welcome. This will generally provide an extra 4-6 :c5production:

each city, which is a big bonus. With Chemistry, each normal mine will provide 5 :c5production:

per turn.

Finisher

Adopting all Policies in the Order tree will grant +2 Food, Production, Science, Gold, and Culture per city.

The Order Finisher gives a small boost to everything you require in all cities. If you could manage to fill out all policies in Order, you will get a nice boost for your empire. The larger your empire, the more you will gain out of the Order finisher.

General Use

The most obvious use for Order is when you are playing on a Large or Huge map. On those map sizes, city sprawl tends to be much easier due to the -40% unhappiness/city modifier. This will tend to lead to much larger empires (50-60 cities by the end) so Order will be a good policy branch to boost that large empire. Gaining 50+ global happiness in one policy is hard to beat.

As well, for Domination Victories and Diplomacy Victories, there comes a point where you no longer need to produce specialists. So the benefits of Order can be used to help with finishing up those capitals or UN. With the straight happiness boost, you can gain enough global happiness to utilize that happiness within your core cities to add population, and therefore production for parts/etc.

So as long as you are continuing your expansion, by whatever means, Order will help you manage that empire more effectively and keep you going on all fronts (production, science, happiness, military, gold). The benefits or Order will be more apparent for a large puppet empire, since Order offers some direct advantages that don't need micromanaging.

Finally, a late era start (post-Renaissance) game can definitely benefit from Order. As you already start with a number of settlers and workers, and larger cities, you will be able to get a lot out of Order.

Note: Amended from vanilla Order by MadDjinn, this article is in G&K version.