Patronage
A closer look at the social policy branch
A closer look at the social policy branch
Introduction
The PoliciesGeneral Use
The Policies

Patronage

Cuts 25% from the base amount of influence degraded each turn, which can be seen by hovering over the influence bar of a friendly city state. This stacks multiplicatively with Greece's 50% base rate, so is still a 25% reduction for them.

Philanthropy


The influence gained is rounded to a multiple of five, so generally slightly less than the full 25% will be gained.

Aesthetics
Minimum
Immediately sets influence with all city states to 20, and additionally sets influence to 20 after any turn in which it was lower (such as after passing troops through or after making peace). This policy does have the benefit of putting the player in ally range via any quest completion or friend range via worker return.

Scholasticism
All City-States which are Allies provide a
Requires: Philanthropy
A city state produces research just as any civilization does, through its population and the buildings it has constructed. They start with a palace for +3 research, and generally will have a library built before Scholasticism is reached, so at minimum will generally provide 0.75 + 0.375 * population research. At some later point they will generally build a university changing the base gain to 1 + 0.5 * population (+6


Cultural Diplomacy
Quantity of Resources gifted by City-States increased by 100%.
Requires: Scholasticism
Doubles the amount of gifted strategic resources, and provides +2


Educated Elite
Allied City-States will occasionally gift you
Requires: Aesthetics, Scholasticism
Once this is taken, assuming at least one ally is maintained, a random allied city state will provide a random great person (including khans) about once every 40 turns on standard speed. The initial great person received will take about half as long, and each additional ally reduces the number of turns between gifted great people by about one to a minimum of about once per 30 turns with 10+ allies.

Finisher
Adopting all policies in the Patronage tree will make other players'
This adds a 33% of base into the influence lost per turn, more than negating the reduction the opener gives. If multiple civs finish the patronage branch, this can be added multiple times. Gaining the finisher indirectly makes it easier to maintain alliances by reducing competition. Given that the final policies are some of the best in the branch, completing the branch is worthwhile regardless of the value of the finisher.
General Use
Patronage can work for any victory goal. Its worth is directly proportional to how much is invested into city states. The three early policies reduce the amount of gold required to get and maintain an alliances by more than one third. Patronage makes an excellent choice as one of the five branches to complete for a cultural victory, given that as many cultural city states as possible should be kept as allies. The occasional random great person from Educated Elite could be an artist for another landmark, or a key engineer or scientist.A few particular civs have especially strong synergy with the Patronage branch:
- Siam - their unique trait provides an additional 50% benefit for cultural and maritime city state alliances, which makes both this branch and city state alliances in general more attractive.
- Greece - their unique trait causes alliances to degrade 50% slower, which effectively allows them to maintain nearly twice as many alliances as other civs.
- Persia - their golden age length boost helps provide gold to get and maintain alliances, and any random great person from Educated Elite can be turned into another extended golden age.
- Arabia - the bazaar allows them to peacefully siphon more gold from AIs than any other civ, allowing for more alliances with less competition.
Patch version of this article: 1.0.1.383