Social Policy: Patronage (G&K)

Introduction

Patronage, available in the medieval era, contains policies entirely devoted to relationships with city states. The initially available half of the branch contains policies that ease the procurement and maintenance of alliances, and the other half provides enhancements for having these alliances.

The Policies

• Patronage
• Philanthropy
• Aesthetics
• Scholasticism
• Cultural Diplomacy
• Educated Elite
• Finisher

General Use

The Policies

Patronage

Influence with City-States degrades 25% slower than normal.

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 it's still a 25% reduction.

Philanthropy

Gold gifts to City-States produce 25% more Influence.

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

Aesthetics

Resting point for Influence all City-States is increased by 20.

It gradually raises the influence resting point with all city states by 20 points. If your current influence with a city state is below the new resting point, your influence will gradually rise over a number of turns to the new resting point. This policy does have the benefit of putting the player in ally range via any quest completion or friend range via worker return. Moreover, the policy allows you to ally with city states easier since you have a lead with 20 influence. Note that the bonus stacks additively with Papal Primacy, which further increases resting points by 15, and Pledge to Protect, which further raises resting points by 10.

Scholasticism

All City-States which are Allies provide a Science bonus equal to 25% of what they produce for themselves.
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 for a 10 population CS), and later still further science boosting buildings. As difficulty increases, city states' rate of construction and rate of growth increase and thus the research gain provided by Scholasticism also increases, making scholasticism more powerful in higher difficulty settings. Note that a city state that has been captured will have lost some of its buildings and had its population cut in half, so a liberated city state tends to produce significantly less science than normal.

Cultural Diplomacy

Quantity of Resources gifted by City-States increased by 100%. Happiness from gifted Luxuries increased by 50%.
Requires: Scholasticism

Doubles the amount of gifted strategic resources, and provides +2 per unique luxury you are receiving as a gift (even if you have a local source of that luxury). You could consider spending 200 to rush improve a luxury resource near allied city states now. This policy is very situational; there are generally better policy choices for boosting happiness, and the usefulness of CS strategic resources is very game dependent. It may provide critical late game strategic resources, or city states may have none or lack the technology to provide them to you. City state tech rate is approximately the same as the average civ, so if you have a significant tech lead you will have access to strategics such as oil and aluminum long before a CS can see and gift them to you.

Educated Elite

Allied City-States will occasionally gift you Great People.
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. However, note that the free Great Person increases the cost of your cities' Great People generation.

Finisher

Adopting all policies in the Patronage tree will make other players' Influence with City-States decrease 33% more per turn than usual.

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

The three early policies (Patronage, Philanthropy and Aesthetics) reduce the amount of gold required to form and maintain a CS friendship or alliance substantially, in most cases by more than one third. Patronage is especially useful for those pursuing a cultural victory, given that such a game would typically involve alliances with as many cultural city states as possible - Patronage makes these easier to maintain.

A few particular civs have especially strong synergy with the Patronage branch:

• Siam - Father Governs Children provides an additional 50% benefit for cultural, religious and maritime city state friends and alliances, which makes both this branch and city state friends in general more attractive.
  
  
• Greece - Hellenic League causes influence to degrade 50% slower, which effectively allows them to maintain nearly twice as many alliances as other civs. With shared religion, Patronage opener and the UA, influences with city states will stop to drop.
  
  
• Persia - their golden age length boost helps provide gold to get and maintain friendships and alliances, and any Great Artists from Educated Elite can be turned into another extended golden age.
  
  
• Sweden - Nobel Prize provides 10% GP points for every declaration of friendship and 90 influence points towards each gifted Great Person to a city state. You will maintain a lot of city-state allies by using Patronage.
  
  
• Austria - to maximize the benefit from Diplomatic Marriage, a number of CS allies is required. Increased resting points, more effective gold gifts, as well as the decreased dropping rate from Opener help you get more allies. However, the rest policies in Patronage are not so useful as you will be buying out the CSs out.

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