Wow, a new one already?
Anyway, given what youve said, are you planning on improving the honor branch's policies?
I've thought of it, but honestly, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to TOTALLY redesign the earlier game. I've already gone further on the existing policies than I intended to, changing Constitution, Piety, Planned Economy, Republic, Secularism, and rearranging many of the dependencies. In most of the above cases, the problem was that they, like the Pentagon, became extremely unbalanced in a game that no longer ends in the Modern Era. Constitution, for instance, gives x2 culture for cities with Wonders in the vanilla game. I had to reduce that to x1.5 because, with the increased number of Wonders, you'd have far more cities triggering this.
A lot of changes were like that; I didn't change them because I thought the balance was off, I changed them because some aspect of my mod interacted with them to make the balance be VERY off. Take Republic, for instance; +1 production per city was a bit on the weak side, but it was tolerable. The problem was that if an AI reached the point where he was heavily into the Order tree, then he'd value that +1 just as much as the +5 from Communism. This isn't a problem in vanilla games since the AI will never REACH communism (A tree that unlocks in the Industrial?), but in my mod it'd be a common occurrence. So Republic needed to be worth taking over Communism, because otherwise the player would have a huge advantage over an AI.
Thalassicus has been working on a mod to improve all of the weaker policies, but I don't want to go THAT far. If I were to go back and redesign the existing policies, I'd rework the Commerce and Autocracy trees, because right now I NEVER use them. But most of the rest seem fine.
The other thing about the Honor tree is, it's got two GREAT policies at the end (Professional Army and Power), but the earlier five are generally weak. (Okay, +50% XP is pretty nice. But most of the others aren't good.) If I improve the earlier ones, then I run into exactly the problem I mentioned above with the Pentagon, and I'd have to tone down Professional Army. Most of the other branches have good policies mixed throughout; look at Tradition, where some of its best bonuses are in the first tier.
The biggest problem with redesigning like this is that buildings, at least, had a huge number of stubs (many unused) that I could mix and match to create unique effects. Policies are MUCH more limited; I could make a custom promotion given by a policy, and that'd give a nice way to create some new effects, but barring that there's really not a whole lot I CAN fit into a military-themed branch.
