Do you think the social policies are evenly balanced now?

[ense7en]

Depends on the city you capture. It's a boost of 10x the culture output. Knock out a wonder-spammer and you can get a nice gain

It's pretty huge when you are capping a lot of cities, especially if it's AI with tons of wonders.
I actually FINISHED the Autocracy tree in my Immortal Carthage Large Islands game.
If you can get your war machine or fleet going, it puts you into beast mode pretty fast!



Honestly, i am very happy with Tradition now, and almost never take Liberty. Both are excellent choices now though, whereas before it was Liberty 90% of the time.

Honor is the biggest disappointment to me.
I really wanted to be able to take it to start, and it really does not compare to Tradition or Liberty as a tree to start and then finish in succession. It's still strong late game, but it tends to be too late then for it to matter, as a good start is much more important than a good middle or latter game...

Piety also feels too heavily nerfed as well, and i don't see the use for it anymore other than in cultural games, whereas before i used to take it a lot for domination (at least a couple of the policies).

Patronage is okay as usual.

Commerce is fantastic. I liked the Commerce tree before, but felt it was a bit weaker than it should be, and now it's excellent.

Rationalism got a much needed nerf; balanced pretty well now i think.

Freedom is still nice for tall empires, and being moved till later is fine with me.

Autocracy and getting heaps of culture when capturing a culture-heavy city is awesome.
Really amazing how you can actually finish the tree now when in domination or capping a ton of cities.

Order has always been great, just suspect that as usual it's too tough to ever finish the tree...

 

[PostConsumerWat]

Piety seems like it could be useful for a wide faith-oriented game. More temples and shrines mean more faith. More prophets, missionaries, buildings, and pre-industrial units.

With Askia I was doing pretty well with holy warriors. I gave up though because I basically had it beat pretty early in the game...

The interesting thing is that I do not understand religion yet. I tend to grab the same perks, but the learning is interesting. And then when I decide that I picked the wrong one I quit.

But I was pulling over 90 faith a turn and buying the UU horse unit like every 3 turns. I also had "Messiah", but I had wished that I had chosen a different one.

 

[PhilBowles]

This has been weakened a lot by the greater variety of ways to gain and keep influence through quests, and the changes to "resting influence" (so you no longer get 20 influence no matter what, you can still piss the CS off if you've been at war long enough, elections are rigged, you trespass whole your influence is below 30 or whatever) - you'll gradually crawl back up to +20 (+30 with pledging), at a normal rate of +1 influence a turn, but if you start from 0 it will still take you 30 turns to get back into friendship territory. For instance in my current game I have actually taken Patronage, but Zanzibar is currently very angry with me because of some long-term trespassing while I was engaged in a long-running attack on Coventry (CS territory was the best place to site the trebuchet, as well as on the route for my other units).

I now rarely use Patronage even for diplo victories - insofar as gold is still useful for securing them (which has been overstated), Commerce offers a better way to get that bonus from the opener alone (as my capital tends to be my main gold farm anyway). Most of the advantages you list come from the CSes, not from the patronage tree, and fully three of the Patronage policies - science, extra happiness/resources, great people - are wholly reliant on being full-time allies with as many CSes as possible to be useful, although the rest of the Patronage tree doesn't really give you any advantages in making alliances any way other than spending gold - which again comes down to "which is better, increasing the effect of gold payments to CSes specifically, or increasing the actual amount of gold I have to play with?".

Having said all this, as I noted I did indeed use Patronage in my latest diplo game, and having now played it all the way through prompted me to reevaluate its value - at least for Siam, since the "we automatically become friends again after someone else rigs our election" element of the resting influence policy worked out very nicely (and I doubt you need to be Siam to appreciate free culture). I ended up with two long-term allies, and accumulated more leading up to the victory, which gave the science boost particularly more payoff late in the game - and it is now very hard to lose allied status if you keep fulfilling the quests. "Constant coups" are just a symptom of not knowing the way the system now works well enough - my influence was sufficiently high that in a diplo game, no coups were even attempted against my CSes (although election rigging failures in the last election round before the UN vote indicated that enemy spies were active there - not active enough to overcome more than 350 influence in each state). At one point Elizabeth had such high influence in Kuala Lumpur and an agent who'd been there so long that even with 255 influence and a Special Agent, I had a 13% chance of a successful coup. This makes you appreciate just how valuable both the Patronage opener and the finisher are, as you need the absolute maximum influence you can get to ensure you keep the CSes for yourself.

 

[TheHanzou]

Unless you are Siam or Greece you get more benefit from puppeteering the CS than skilling patronage. But if you pick those, chances are everyone else will puppet the city states to destroy your game plan.

Greece is nice since you can get the Influence loss to zero and can ally with CS a lot faster than usual.

In Multiplayer merchant policies are not bad, but i would not invest points into it unless you are planing on producing more culture than usual and get at least the whole tree. In my last multiplayer game i got +650 Gold per turn and could buy 2 late game Units each turn, this tree scales verys well with puppets.

 

[Liegence]

After reading all the posts and weighing in on each opinion, it appears to me that by average view of the players they are actually pretty balanced - except Piety.

 

[Tachii]

Unless you are Siam or Greece you get more benefit from puppeteering the CS than skilling patronage. But if you pick those, chances are everyone else will puppet the city states to destroy your game plan.

Not really. Unless you are talking about multiplayer or something. Unless I'm going for a culture victory I often want to CS as many as I can. Then take advantage of Patronage to get more happiness and science. Because the biggest problem on Immortal for me is the happiness dip. And CS's luxuries are a godsend. I don't want to puppet their large populated cities when I can get the +4 happiness and whatever their city gives me.

I don't really get why a large number of people are complaining about constant coups. I rarely have trouble with them since I'm usually making enough gold to bribe them again. And it's always fun to see their coup fail, I often just celebrate with "F* yeah" when they do. Well, that's just my play style I guess.

 

[Hammer Rabbi]

i have no idea how you have enough money on deity to just buy them back. on lower diffs, yeah, its easy but on deity? you are probably a lot better than me.

 

[Udey1]

I have to scoff at the idea that being the victim of a coup is a result of "not knowing the system well enough" as spy work is dreadfully simple. I think more it matters which city stats the AI is gunning for, and at what diff you are playing.

 

[Tachii]

i have no idea how you have enough money on deity to just buy them back. on lower diffs, yeah, its easy but on deity? you are probably a lot better than me.

As I said I play on Immortal. Never tried Deity and will likely never do. From some LPs I've seen it looks like the playing field is way one-sided.

 

[Roxlimn]

Notable things I didn't know about Tradition and Commerce:

You don't need the tech or the cities founded to get your Aqueducts. If you're getting the tech only for the Aqueducts, Tradition essentially grants the tech's benefit to you for free, in addition to the hammers. Growing a city from size 1 with an already working Aqueduct happens really fast.

Commerce grants you an ocean-going Great Admiral whether or not you have Astronomy. This allows you to meet and greet other Civs on other continents who can never have heard of you and will not hear from your rival Civs at home for centuries to come. As long as you eliminate everyone on the home continent before they get Caravels, you can conquer and connive without diplomatic penalties.

Piety's settled and cheap Great Prophets (with the finisher) goes well with Commerce's gold boosts and Freedom's doubled Great Person output. The remarkably strong Faith output of a settled Great Prophet center with a ton of Holy Sites around it can generate enough Faith for even a mid empire to essentially enter unending Golden Age in the latter half of the game (Piety+Freedom).

It is possible to win Culture in this manner before time runs out even if you annex a crap-ton of cities. The key is lots of Faith income to buy lots of GPs - Great Artists in particular. Getting Mosques, Pagodas and other Faith income beliefs is helpful as well. Under Freedom's finisher, Piety's Finisher makes settled Great Prophets into monster tiles +3 Gold, +3 Culture, and +12 Faith.

Piety is most useful when taking beliefs that allow you to buy things with Faith - Holy Warriors, Cathedrals, Pagodas and such. It halves the hammer cost of building Shrines and Temples and greatly increases gold-to-faith conversion in them. Large faith income translates into large gold income later on (or early if you get Tithe or Church Property).

Admittedly, this is on a setting at which I find it really easy to win. Piety may be harder to leverage if you cannot get the beliefs you want.

 

[PhilBowles]

I don't really get why a large number of people are complaining about constant coups. I rarely have trouble with them since I'm usually making enough gold to bribe them again. And it's always fun to see their coup fail, I often just celebrate with "F* yeah" when they do. Well, that's just my play style I guess.

I think it's just a holdover from playing Civ V diplo games the "wrong" (i.e. lazy) way in vanilla - people still expect to be able to put no effort into a CS during the game and just buy it up at the last minute. The system now works the way it was seemingly intended to in the past - it rewards players who put effort into establishing and maintaining influence with CSes, with the main emphasis on quests (which almost all give at least 40 influence, more than you'll get for any single gold payment). If you have enough influence, the AI won't even bother to try launching a coup because its equivalent of the tooltip will tell it it has effectively no chance of success.

 

[Peacemongerer]

If you have enough influence, the AI won't even bother to try launching a coup because its equivalent of the tooltip will tell it it has effectively no chance of success.

If we have the same AI that will attack you with an army half the size of yours, I wouldn't put it past them to try a coup with 0% chance of success.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Piety's settled and cheap Great Prophets (with the finisher) goes well with Commerce's gold boosts and Freedom's doubled Great Person output. The remarkably strong Faith output of a settled Great Prophet center with a ton of Holy Sites around it can generate enough Faith for even a mid empire to essentially enter unending Golden Age in the latter half of the game (Piety+Freedom).

Settled GPs are exceptionally great with Korea, since you get another +2 science from the tile. That turns holy sites into the ultimate allround improvement.

 

[PhilBowles]

If we have the same AI that will attack you with an army half the size of yours, I wouldn't put it past them to try a coup with 0% chance of success.

Well, I can say that in the game I finished yesterday there were spies in both my long-term allies, as I know because my usual election-rigging failed at the expense of England. But as I had over 350 influence to begin with and Elizabeth hadn't paid either CS any attention, she wouldn't have had a hope with a coup. And she didn't attempt one.

I'm coming to the conclusion that coups will only have a high chance of success if you're very close to the ally's level of influence yourself, in which case they often aren't worth the risk. In that game my special agent was patiently waiting for KL's influence with me to reach a level where I had a reasonable chance of pulling off a coup. By the time it hit 81%, I was sufficiently close to parity with England that the CS turned to me after the next election round anyway (I hadn't risked the agent - I have bad memories of losing a special agent with an 81% chance of success, and by that point the game was close enough to the end that I couldn't afford the risk of losing an embedded agent, which would effectively cost me KL permanently).

 

[bayes]

Let just make one thing clear, honor is not any worse than liberty or tradition. They all got different purposes, lets take tradition. Great for making tall empires because of its great growth bonuses and monarchy. Liberty is much more of a kickstarter, but requires a better area so you got better spots to place your cities. Honor is for those situations where you are going to war EARLY. If you`re not hiwatha(or playing on strategic balance) you probably want to go to war before ironworking. This is because you sacrifice so much early infastructure for a early war, you want it to be as early as possible. Lets look at what honor gives you : The opener is fine, it gives you a more of a hit or miss culture gain, but makes it alot easier creating a safe enviorment for your workers and making helping city states easier. The reason honor is so great for early war is that it gives you guaranteed 30 % more combat strength early on. The 1 + hapiness and 2 + culuture for each garisson is really strong, especially early on. Proffesional army is just amazing. All in all each city is guaranteed to get a 2 + happiness boost early, 2 from garrison and a wall, and 3 + happiness bonus at a pretty reasonable rate from a extra castle. Lets not forget military tradition that just makes your army so much more snowbally. There is always getting free worker and settler then switching into honor for the right branch.

 

[jango76]

One of the problems with Honor is the opener. For it to be a benefit, you basically need to take it as one of your first couple of policies. Depending on how many barbs are around, the extra culture may put you ahead in the long run, but in the short term you're delaying getting through either Tradition or Liberty, which you want to do ASAP to get your empire on a sound foundation.

 

[GhostSalsa]

There are 2 things that I feel that is unbalanced
-Its olmost impossible to finish end game policies they need to rework the policy costs in late game or something else because i've never finished late game policies in my life..

I always finish my industrial policy -- though, granted, my victories are post-1900. Still I've usually beelined into s.theory or industrialization and can open my industrial policy (usually Order) way before a victory.

Are you finishing Rationalism before your industrial policy? If so, why? The Rationalism closer (two free techs) is something that you can wait until Information Era for. Besides the left side, I leave rationalism and come back after Order is closed. (With the new DOF requirement, I don't find the RAx1.50 rewarding of a two-policy slog*.)

For Piety, it should really be divorced from culture victories AND faith.

As others have already noted, faith does what faith does, piety doesn't need to do it too. Faith is going to trend based on empire size. Throwing culture at faith does nothing. Making yet another policy that tries to divide small and large empires is stupid. I like faith and I like the idea of having a piety tree as opposed to a secular tree: but I think faith and piety should be separate things. The United States is a secular republic (it is not a theology) but it is full of fervent believers. Faith should just be what it is. Whether to govern based on faith is separate.

But I think most of the problems with culture in CiV stem from the fact that it is too loaded with bonuses and too hard to come by.

We can talk about how they penalize expansion etc. but when you start to imagine reworking the mechanic, it just gets more complex and more like what they changed away from with V.

To really get into fixing culture, I think they would need to redefine culture victories (finishing branches just to collect five is intensely stupid) and make policy balancing something you need to navigate to advance into future tech eras. But then, it would be a very different game. CiV is intentionally keeping policies simple.

*EDIT: I was remembering this wrong, RAx1.5 is on the left, too. I still ignore it.

 

[Le Roi Soleil]

I'll join those with some kind words for Honor, particularly if you take the Honor opener after the Tradition opener. The extra culture that you receive for killing Barbs, coupled with the fact that you know where to find them can significantly aid in working through Tradition. Filling the Honor tree provides, to my mind, more tangible benefits than adopting Piety or Patronage while waiting for Rationalism.

Precisely. The fastest way to accumulate early-game culture is Tradition opener, followed by Legalism/Honor opener, in whichever order you prefer (depends on how fast you are harvesting barbs). The Honor opener is very useful for early culture earning, and also helps in defending cities from barbs early when your army is thin. Once Tradition is filled out, I find that continuing with Honor (right side has first preference for Military Caste) ends up being better than the other pre-Renaissance trees about 80% of the time.

The Tradition/Honor opener is a killer right now.

 

[ahawk]

Precisely. The fastest way to accumulate early-game culture is Tradition opener, followed by Legalism/Honor opener, in whichever order you prefer (depends on how fast you are harvesting barbs). The Honor opener is very useful for early culture earning, and also helps in defending cities from barbs early when your army is thin. Once Tradition is filled out, I find that continuing with Honor (right side has first preference for Military Caste) ends up being better than the other pre-Renaissance trees about 80% of the time.

The Tradition/Honor opener is a killer right now.

The Aztecs are awesome because of this sort of strategy. With a couple Jaguar Warriors, I can often skip Honor and simply go through Tradition immediately by knocking off barbarians. That way, you get through Tradition a bit faster, which as Aztecs is incredibly nice since you'll have Floating Gardens to add to the food bonuses from Tradition, meaning a nice early food boost without needing the almost impossible to get Temple of Artemis (which has a 10% bonus to food).