Remember that Order is exclusive to some branchs, so not everyone will pick it.
I get that, but the Honor tree is NOT exclusive, and it was the worst offender of the group. And while Order is exclusive with Autocracy and Freedom, it's also probably the best of the three in terms of general utility, and so I expect it to be the one chosen most often.
What worries me is that there's no mention in the patch notes about the double-counting of Happiness from policies that key off certain buildings (like the Rationalism policy that gives +1 happiness per University). If they haven't fixed THAT, then the four +1s at Professional Army will actually be four +2s, and that's just insanely unbalanced.
Why not just let the finisher end with the normal policies, and yours policies are an "extra" not needed for the finishers.
If I could do that I would, but I have no control over the underlying mechanism. It sounds like the Finisher kicks in when you complete a branch, regardless of how/when you completed it, using the existing Lua function for branch completion (which is also used by the Cultural Victory logic). So I have no simple way to let the Finisher kick in after the "normal" policies and not depend on my new ones.
What I could do is move all ten of my policies to an eleventh branch (say, the one I added for the start policy), to where they wouldn't be counted towards completion of the earlier branches. I believe that I could still have them depend on the policies in their original branches, so functionally it'd be exactly like what you described, except for three things:
1> It'd be extremely confusing for the player
2> The UI would need to be heavily changed
3> It'd now be possible to win a Cultural victory in the early eras again. There's a reason I'd added those policies in the first place. I could get around that by changing the Cultural threshold to six branches instead of five, but the new exclusivity rules would screw that up.
Yes, yes. But if they've chosen that changes they may have a reason for that. Perhaps we must wait to see how it goes.
The thing is, I can see their logic for those changes, and it's not bad logic. Flat boosts are far less unbalanced than a series of large multipliers, and it helps the AI in that it never builds a +50% building in a city that has nothing to multiply. The problem is that those changes lead to a fundamental shift in how the game balances, a shift that is at least partially incompatible with my own changes.
It's not like this is the first time this has come up. The Factory was originally a flat +50% Production, so my Genejack Factory was also +50% production. Then they changed the Factory to have a smaller percentage but also add a flat +Production boost. I didn't change the Genejack to follow a similar pattern, although I've thought about it.
But it now looks like they want that split effect to be the new norm, which is actually something I approve of in general. It's just that rebalancing all of my own content around these new values will take a LOT of work. For instance, look at the Stadium, Theater, and Colosseum; they're now reducing the Happiness of these by 1 and reducing the maintenance by 1. Whereas, in my mod, I reduced the Happiness of these but increased the maintenance, while giving each some other benefit (culture, gold, etc.)
This also applies to Wonder effects. Himeji Castle previously gave +25% to combat within your borders, and they're now toning that down to +15%. But the Citizens' Defense Force, a National Wonder I added, gave a similar effect at +15%, along with some other benefits. So do I have to tone down the CDF as well? And if so, then what about the Command Nexus (which gives a bonus for fighting outside of your territory)?
Yes, perhaps owning one of those wonders will throw the balance to that player too much, will make wonder races more "warry".
I'm worried less about the possibility of warfare and more about the general separation issue, where a tech leader picks up every single Wonder and therefore develops an insurmountable advantage over the rest of the pack. This is the main reason why so much of my Content mod involves National Wonders that don't require a certain building in every city. Most of the changes in my Balance mod were built around the idea of keeping weaker civs competitive, and this goes against that. What this sort of change creates is an environment where the tech leader is running at +50 Happiness and getting into golden ages and such, while the lower civs are struggling just to stay above 0.
Modern warfare is more about infantry&aircraft with armored support, but not just armor. Nowadays armors are just used to back up infantry, not the other way round.
I'm not talking about Real Life, I mean that with this change in Civ5 there'd be no reason to bring any infantry or artillery along with an assault; they'll just be too slow to contribute. Pound the defenses down with bombers and roll the 5-movement tanks in. The combined-arms approach you're describing, which is still viable in Civ5 if your civ is low on Oil, simply won't be nearly as effective any more compared to the blitzkrieg assault.
Indeed, but that's because they touched the other buildings that add more happiness and that, so they balanced it out. Sort of...
That "Sort of" is the problem. If you check the numbers, you can see what they're trying to do:
NEGATIVE:
> Each city has 1 more base unhappiness than before, at base
> Happiness-producing buildings produce 1 less than before
> Luxuries produce 1 less than before
POSITIVE:
> Many Policies generate more Happiness than before, especially if you have certain buildings in your cities
> Wonders generate more Happiness than before
So it's a shift in philosophy, where Happiness will depend more on the techs and policies each civ chooses than on the general building/luxury boosts that everyone gets. The problem,
which they've already acknowledged in the patch notes, is that on average this will lead to substantially less Happiness for most players. Less Happiness is fine, in that it's exactly what my Balance mod tries to do in the first place.
But like the above building yield changes, or the Policy finishers, the problem is that if I'm trying to accomplish a balance goal one way and they make a change that attempts to do the same thing in a different way, then the two won't be compatible. The question becomes whether I stick with my own changes, or try to rebalance them to work around the new base design, and that's not a simple process.
