(3-NS) Fealty Changes with Siege Provisions

[DeAnno]

Right now I actually do think Fealty is in a pretty OK place, but one thing I don't like about it is how unexciting Divine Right is. It's a Culture policy right next to Serfdom, which is a different, more fun Culture policy with a leaf after it too. It makes choosing between them pretty lame since you'll pretty much always take Serfdom first, and it makes the middle part of the tree feel very samey. Therefore I want to basically move all of the culture together onto Serfdom, and make Divine Right into a new policy focused on food and defense, other concepts of the Fealty tree.

Also, I want to emphasize non-specialist play with Fealty, both by intensifying the culture dependency on that and by changing the bonus on Organized Religion slightly.

For reference, right now we have:

Divine Right
25% of Happiness produced in each City is added to the City's Culture per Turn. -2 Unhappiness from Boredom in all Cities.

Serfdom
Pastures generate +2 Production and +1 Gold. +1 Culture in Cities for every 4 non-Specialist Citizens. +33% Yields from Internal Trade Routes.

Organized Religion
+50% Pressure in all nearby Cities without your majority Religion, and +1 Faith from Specialists.

I want to change these into:

Siege Provisions
15% of Food is carried over after a new Citizen is born. +50% Yields from Internal Trade Routes. +100 HP in every City.

Serfdom
Pastures generate +1 Production and Gold. +1 Culture in Cities for every 2 non-Specialist Citizens.

Organized Religion
+50% Pressure in all nearby Cities without your majority Religion, and +1 Faith in Cities for every three Followers of your majority Religion.

Overall, the culture will be about the same; if we imagined before that an empire had about as much happiness as non-specialist citizens, both policies used to produce equal culture, and now Serfdom does double that. Serfdom in compensation loses one of its Pasture production and the whole trade route bonus (which goes on the other policy.)

We lose the Boredom reduction entirely too, but in compensation for that (and the lost Pasture hammer) get an extra Granary effect (with an aqueduct this is equivalent to +27% Growth), +100 HP in each city, as well as a slightly stronger trade route bonus. The Faith on Organized Religion moves away from Specialists to be different from the two other middle Policy Trees, and will produce about the same amount of faith (probably more if your cities are more cleanly your religion, probably less if they're barely hanging on.)

This change aims to make Fealty better at things it's supposed to be good at, and to make all of its policies feel more different from each other.

 

[Anarcomu]

As it stands now, all medieval policies have a bonus to specialist : culture from aesthetic, faith from fealty, science from statecraft.
Whilst it does give a common identity to all medieval policy, I do like the fact that fealty could be the "no specialists" tree instead.

 

[pineappledan]

When I saw the titles, I got excited because we actually don't have any policies or tenets that boost siege units. But then I saw that's not what this is about

 

[Stalker0]

I'll have to dig in to see if I like the numbers, but I do like the idea of fealty being the "big pop" tree. We already have policies that help grow your civ but not a lot that leverages the big pop for benefits. Fealty seems a reasonable fit there.

 

[azum4roll]

How much food is kept on growth when you have Medical Lab now?

Granary/Ger: 15%
Aqueduct/Harappan Reservoir: 15%/20%
Grocer/Coffee House: 15%
Medical Lab: 15%

An extra 15% food kept makes it 75% for all civs and 80% for India. Could be a bit too much.

And why buff city HP more? There's already too much HP in cities with or without Fealty.

 

[pineappledan]

100 HP is equivalent to 10 . That ability only exists to slow down another conqueror attacking your cities, or make your city sieges more grindy. I don't think that improves the game; just makes it slower.

The current policies are Divine Right, Nobility, Organized Religion, Serfdom, and Fiefs. I like how all the current names for policies reference one of the 3 estates, and the political organization of feudal society. 'Siege Provisions' is a combo breaker there.

Honestly, I just think we should add 1 different yield to the excess happiness scaler and lower it to 1/3 or 1/2. I'm wondering if part of the reason why this policy feels so bad right now is because it relies on local happiness and culture rounds down when calculated? At 25% excess to , you need 4 excess happiness in a single city to get 1. That's really hard, and requires your cities to be pretty big before they can even get happiness deltas that big. Also, this policy commits the cardinal sin of almost entirely consisting of paying for a policy that gives . It's the policy equivalent of a toll booth.

Before taking a big swing, adding 3 new DLL abilities to the policies table, and restructuring the entire tree -- which I think is doing just fine despite this 1 policy -- I think we should take a look at this happiness scaler and see if there isn't something we can do to massage it a bit.

Like, can we talk about formulating what we want from policies before creating such drastic proposals, and then making us vote on them? I feel like we've skipped a consultation and policy design phase.

 

[DeAnno]

First off I apologize if the DLL on this one is too big an ask. I'd thought that even though there were some new abilities, their presence in other parts of the code would make things more reasonable: naively you could accomplish everything on the new policy with one dummy building (using pieces of walls and granary), and the code on Organized Religion at least uses the same mechanic follower beliefs already use. If that understanding was oversimplified, no hard feelings if this fails the sponsorship phase.

But I don't feel like this proposal was particularly drastic from a game balance sense. I see it as taking themes of a policy tree that already exist and making them more present and visible. One policy is totally changed, and the two more are either getting a very soft push or being reshuffled just to accommodate. Since I see the biggest original issue as two adjacent culture policies, changing both of them was kind of required if we didn't want to slice the tree's culture in half.

As for talking things out before proposals of X size, we don't have any real rules or even culture for that shaken out yet. We routinely see huge proposals put out that were only talked about on Discord by 2-3 people, or proposals that were maybe posted outside and didn't get much comment, or proposals that are just coming out of the deep blue sea. I do think it makes sense not to change part of some system without considering the rest, but this is a relatively wholistic change isolated to the themes of one policy tree.

Ultimately I'd be glad just to see discussion on this Divine Right issue get going, and I'd love to see counterproposals to address it in different ways. I just regret always getting to Fealty 4 and having the same obvious non-decision staring me in the face.

 

[pineappledan]

First off I apologize if the DLL on this one is too big an ask. I'd thought that even though there were some new abilities, their presence in other parts of the code would make things more reasonable: naively you could accomplish everything on the new policy with one dummy building (using pieces of walls and granary), and the code on Organized Religion at least uses the same mechanic follower beliefs already use. If that understanding was oversimplified, no hard feelings if this fails the sponsorship phase.

Nothing is particularly hard, someone will pipe up if what you are suggesting has hidden complexity. Something that already exists somewhere else is very easy in that respect. However, there is always a minimum amount of work in creating a new ability column, the documentation, compiling, and testing for it. Writing a new column is often more work than the ability itself. If anything, this makes novel, harder, more complex things more attractive for DLL modders, because more of their time will be spent solving problems and coding a new ability as a proportion of the total time, rather than on the equivalent of admin work.

It also isn't attractive for modders, because if these abilities exist as building abilities then any modmodder can already code a policy that gives that ability with dummies, because we already have a policy that can give a free building in all cities, or in X cities. Any building ability is already a policy ability if you are willing to add a bit of jank. It doesn't even require any knowledge of lua, it can be done entirely with database entries.

TL;DR - the act of making a new ability is always at least some work, and the easier the ability is, the more that work consists entirely of the worst parts of modding.

As for talking things out before proposals of X size, we don't have any real rules or even culture for that shaken out yet. We routinely see huge proposals put out that were only talked about on Discord by 2-3 people, or proposals that were maybe posted outside and didn't get much comment

That's still an invitation for discussion somewhere where the stakes were lower. If people don't comment then that's their decision; silence doesn't imply consent, but it's not a rejection either. Like posting the new plans for a project at the community hall for X days before breaking ground, it's up to people to comment. Throwing something directly into a proposal is like just pulling up with the bulldozers.

I just regret always getting to Fealty 4 and having the same obvious non-decision staring me in the face.

Yup, I agree that Fealty is not currently the best version of itself.

 

[Recursive]

Proposal failed due to lack of sponsorship.