How to Fix Liberty

Personally I don't like what many here suggest. I don't think taking away stuff / nerfing Tradition is a good idea. Taking away stuff is never a good idea for enjoyment of the game, unless it's something REALLY ridiculous. Instead stuff should be added to Liberty so to achieve them both being really good, not make one of them less.
 
Yes there's an issue. Here it is, exactly:
OP said:
Monarchy is pretty OP

Even if you open liberty, even if you're low on culture, monarchy is still worth getting in the mid game. It just changes the math rule for unhappiness.

I roll my eyes every time i see every other player doing all out tradition... especially in 1v1... hilarious IMO.

Keep rolling your eyes.

Maybe someday you meet someone who can snowball properly via tradition.
 
Personally I don't like what many here suggest. I don't think taking away stuff / nerfing Tradition is a good idea. Taking away stuff is never a good idea for enjoyment of the game, unless it's something REALLY ridiculous. Instead stuff should be added to Liberty so to achieve them both being really good, not make one of them less.

Yeah, that's about it:

- +3 Culture and 25% border growth is ridiculous.

- +1 Happiness/gold when the entire game was rebalanced to make those resources scarce early is ridiculous.

As I sais I wouldn't take away stuff if the policy works wonders, just lower a bit some bonuses and we're set.
 
Personally I don't like what many here suggest. I don't think taking away stuff / nerfing Tradition is a good idea. Taking away stuff is never a good idea for enjoyment of the game, unless it's something REALLY ridiculous. Instead stuff should be added to Liberty so to achieve them both being really good, not make one of them less.

I disagree with you on all fronts.

The game shouldn't be "balanced" around casuals who can't re-evaluate facts.

Buffing liberty, as you suggest, will make current unviable honor/piety openers even less viable.

If something needs to be nerfed - it needs to be nerfed, no need to buff everything else to "match" it. Monarchy needs to be nerfed, clearly OP in anything bigger than 2p game while it has to be situational, best in about 20-30% of cases.
 
IMO the National Wonders shouldn't require other cities to build things. The base cost of the building should just be high (say 50% higher than it is now) and go up based on empire size. There don't need to be any rules around what is built in other cities because there is already a hammer penalty. The way the National College and Ironworks work right now really hamstrings the game.

Perhaps cost depends on # of cities without a X building

So Cost=
145+25/city +additional 75/city without required building

I disagree with you on all fronts.

The game shouldn't be "balanced" around casuals who can't re-evaluate facts.

Buffing liberty, as you suggest, will make current unviable honor/piety openers even less viable.

If something needs to be nerfed - it needs to be nerfed, no need to buff everything else to "match" it. Monarchy needs to be nerfed, clearly OP in anything bigger than 2p game while it has to be situational, best in about 20-30% of cases.

If buffing Liberty makes honor/piety less viable, then also buff honor/piety.

In general buffing 3 trees is better than nerfing 1 because that makes the choices more significant. (unless culture is too powerful.. THEN we should talk about nerfing tradition instead of buffing the others)
 
Personally I don't like what many here suggest. I don't think taking away stuff / nerfing Tradition is a good idea. Taking away stuff is never a good idea for enjoyment of the game, unless it's something REALLY ridiculous. Instead stuff should be added to Liberty so to achieve them both being really good, not make one of them less.

Agreed. The policies are designed to be good, desirable things. We don't want to nerf them into the ground to the point that they all feel "meh" (isn't that one of the complaints with the vanilla game when it was first released?).

I think Tradition should remove the 4 Free Monuments from Legalism. It makes the Tree very strong to begin since the +3 culture opener plus the +2 of the Monument allows you to pick at least 3 social policies very early. And I'm not even considering the possibility of the +20 culture ruin. It doesn't end there, since the Free Monuments also saves you gold and hammers, extrapoling what should be the Tree's focus. Changing Legalism into other less significant thing would cut a good amount of gold, production and culture, making Tradition more even, maybe.

Depending on how you ordered your policy choices, you can even get free Amphitheaters (with Great Work slots), and it saves more maintenance!

There are two choices: strengthen liberty a little or weaken tradition. Tradition sets the standard for starting policies. With liberty, the main issues are gold and happiness. The following suggestions would liberty a bit more attractive and balanced to tradition:

- free granary in first 3-5 cities
- +10% gold from city connections added to meritocracy and -15% unhappiness from cities connected to capitol, rather than -5%.
- free library in first 4-6 cities

I also support weakening the NC's bonus to 25% and giving the other 25% to Oxford.

Well, not necessarily. One of the problems with having to chose Tradition or Liberty is that the choice needs to be made ASAP. Assuming that you don't get culture from a ruin, you're adopting your first policy within 10-20 turns depending on game speed and how long it takes to pop out a Monument. The game basically forces you (especially at higher levels) to go into the game with an exact plan of how you are going to try to play/win.

That's hardly even enough time to send a Warrior in a complete circle around your capital; let alone produce a Scout and start doing any serious exploring. You're being forced to "commit" to one tree or the other long before you have enough information to know which strategy is going to be preferable.

You might plan on chosing Liberty and going wide, only to find out that you're stuck on an island that will only support 3 or 4 cities anyway, or that you're surrounded by city states, or that you simply don't have enough distinct luxuries available in the region to support a large number of cities. Alternatively, you may adopt Tradition and then find that all the neighboring CSes are Mercantile (giving you plenty of happiness to support more cities), and that you have half of a whole continent to yourself: plenty of room for uncontested Medieval expansion.

Granted, there's nothing stopping you from adopting one or the other and then switching to the other. But on higher difficulties, that's a lot of wasted policies and a significant delay to getting the finishers - unless you're Poland.

Perhaps what the game really needs is more early social policy options that have less effect on long-term game strategy, or a way of "repealing" a policy tree in favor of a different one. This is one of the reasons that I kind of prefer Civ IV's civic system: you can pivot your strategy on a dime as game conditions change. In context of Civ V, this is also one of the reasons that I like taking Honor or Piety. Maybe this isn't as viable on Diety (I still play mostly on King). It lets me defer the decision to go wide or tall until I have the information to make a better decision. Yeah, this still has the same problem of delaying the Tradition or Liberty finishers, but at least I'm giving myself early access to other finishers (more religious beliefs or free gold from kills). The nice thing about Piety is that it requires minimal investment (spend 3 or 4 turns building a shrine), since most of the religion features are tied to faith yield and don't require production or gold. And on larger maps and longer game speeds, Honor becomes much more viable as an early policy choice due to how much empty space there is for barbarians to spawn - especially if Raging is on.

Personally, I would prefer that the game should give the player more time at the very beginning to explore the map a little and get a general lay of the land before having to commit to things like social policy choices or wonders. Heck, the first few tech choices are also pretty much set in stone as far as most players seem to be concerned: 1.) Pottery 2.) Writing (for library) 3.) Animal Husbandry (for the trade route).

One of the things that I've been experimenting with as an idea for a mod is adding 2 or 3 new ancient policy trees and moving Tradition and/or Liberty into the Classical era. The new trees would be focused more around early map optimization and civilization flavor rather than long-term wide v tall strategies. Ideas that I've had include:

  • Seafaring = move some of the naval/coastal-themed bonuses from Exploration, and add production boosts for work boats. This would be designed to favor civs with high naval focus like England, Vikings, Polynesia, Ottomans, etc, but would be useful for anyone who happens to get a coastal start.
  • Labor = would include slavery / indentured servitude policies geared towards wonder-building and early game production boosts. The free worker from Liberty would likely be moved here. I haven't put too much thought into balancing this sort of tree, so it may not work well...
  • Castes = Policies that enhance yields of certain improvements / resources. For example, a "farmer caste" policy may add an extra food to farms; a "priest caste" policy might buff Shrines and/or Monuments; a "smith caste" policy might buff mines and quaries; a "worker caste" policy might give more gold or production to plantations; and so on. It might also have later policies focused around specialists and/or great people. I also haven't put too much thought into balancing this one yet...

Another possibility would be to re-theme the Tradition and Liberty trees, and then add new Classical and/or Medieval trees that specialize the civ for tall or wide. For example: Imperialism (wide) and Isolationism (tall)?

Of course, none of this is likely to happen, since it seems that Civ V development is done. So any rebalancing of social policies (especially adding new trees or functionality) is strictly in the domain of mods at this point.
 
In general buffing 3 trees is better than nerfing 1 because that makes the choices more significant. (unless culture is too powerful.. THEN we should talk about nerfing tradition instead of buffing the others)

Especially true considering how strong Rationalism is. It would be nice to have other powerful trees, so I don't feel like I have to adopt Rationalism as soon as I hit Renaisssance just to stay competitive at higher difficulties.
 
Depending on how you ordered your policy choices, you can even get free Amphitheaters (with Great Work slots), and it saves more maintenance!

You won't have enough Great Works of Art to fill up those four slots plus the one in your Palace until late Renaissance or early Industrial, at which point it takes about 3 turns to build an Amphitheater. Delaying Legalism (and Landed Elite and Monarchy) for Amphitheaters could sometimes be useful in G&K, it just isn't worth it in BNW. Instead of spending hammers on building Monuments, it's more worth it to get Granaries up quicker.

Well, not necessarily. One of the problems with having to chose Tradition or Liberty is that the choice needs to be made ASAP. Assuming that you don't get culture from a ruin, you're adopting your first policy within 10-20 turns depending on game speed and how long it takes to pop out a Monument. The game basically forces you (especially at higher levels) to go into the game with an exact plan of how you are going to try to play/win.

That's hardly even enough time to send a Warrior in a complete circle around your capital; let alone produce a Scout and start doing any serious exploring. You're being forced to "commit" to one tree or the other long before you have enough information to know which strategy is going to be preferable.

In most of my games I know whether I'm going to pick Tradition or Liberty the moment I have settled my capital. Like the game I started yesterday, I took one or two turns moving my settler and ended up on a hill/river/coastal tile with 3 Stone, a Marble, a Gold, a Fish and a dozen or so riverside tiles in range (it was a delta of 3 or 4 rivers). Not going to pick Liberty in that spot.
 
In general buffing 3 trees is better than nerfing 1 because that makes the choices more significant. (unless culture is too powerful.. THEN we should talk about nerfing tradition instead of buffing the others)

It's all about opinions. I personally think that policies while should support a play style, objective, whatever, shouldn't be so important as Tradition can be on higher diff levels.

To me liberty should be the gold standard, nerf Tradition a liiitle bit, up honor and piety so they are more viable choices.
 
I disagree with you on all fronts.

The game shouldn't be "balanced" around casuals who can't re-evaluate facts.

Buffing liberty, as you suggest, will make current unviable honor/piety openers even less viable.

If something needs to be nerfed - it needs to be nerfed, no need to buff everything else to "match" it. Monarchy needs to be nerfed, clearly OP in anything bigger than 2p game while it has to be situational, best in about 20-30% of cases.

I agree, the developers should go to the "pro's" for advice on how to balance the game. They should be listening to people like Tommynt, Merle, Yoruus etc... Casual players should be completely ignored if they want this game to be balanced for fair play. The game should be balanced around high levels of competitive play and not steam rolling the AI with OP abilities that are completely absurd.

Monarchy is currently OP and needs to be toned down and that's just for starters. I often go straight for Monarchy after Liberty or mix Liberty with Tradition going straight for Monarchy. Liberty should be strong enough that you have no desire to mix it with Tradition. It should stand up on its own accord. However, it is currently only super useful in Duels and Teamers.

There is of course a whole slew of other changes that would be required to balance the civs and religious tenets/pantheons to get this game up to par. Also massively buffing Honor and Piety to make them some what useful in some sort of situations.
 
I think making wide play slightly more attractive will boost Liberty enough. That is, reduce the science penalty per city by a small amount.
 
I think making wide play slightly more attractive will boost Liberty enough. That is, reduce the science penalty per city by a small amount.

The disparity between Monarchy's huge gold/happiness boost and Liberty's complete lack of gold is too large in BNW. In G&K it was not an issue because gold was abundant. In BNW it is just too apparent and obviously a problem.
 
Just give Liberty an extra trade route, perhaps in the opener (much earlier than Monarchy, but still have to build a caravan or cargo ship). That should address the Trad/Lib gold gap (the gold from Monarchy and from the trade route will both rise during the course of the game). And, at least on higher difficulties, the trade route will provide a modest science boost, as a partial counterweight to Tradition's growth bonuses.

The easiest nerf to Tradition, that would do the least damage to the tree, would be for the finisher's free aqueducts to appear only when you've researched Engineering. It would provide a modest disincentive to mindlessly beeline Education, and would be consistent with how Legalism works.
 
Just give Liberty an extra trade route, perhaps in the opener (much earlier than Monarchy, but still have to build a caravan or cargo ship). That should address the Trad/Lib gold gap (the gold from Monarchy and from the trade route will both rise during the course of the game). And, at least on higher difficulties, the trade route will provide a modest science boost, as a partial counterweight to Tradition's growth bonuses.

This is actually a nice idea that flows well with Liberty, however large benefits should not be in the openers. People should be forced to commit to a tree in order to reaps its best benefits. I think this is the main reason that Liberty's settler bonus was moved down. So that people couldn't get the settler bonus real quick and then move on to Tradition.
 
Fair enough. I thought about recommending the trade route come with Republic, rather than the opener.

Could also move the border expansion piece of Tradition from the opener to Legalism (perhaps you need a body of laws to facilitate easier claiming of tiles). As you say, the opener of any tree should not be so compelling that it is the only policy claimed.
 
Fair enough. I thought about recommending the trade route come with Republic, rather than the opener.

Could also move the border expansion piece of Tradition from the opener to Legalism (perhaps you need a body of laws to facilitate easier claiming of tiles). As you say, the opener of any tree should not be so compelling that it is the only policy claimed.

I agree that the Tradition opener is quite strong. I often open it up even when I plan to go Liberty. It saves you a ton of gold, not having to buy stuff that your city refuses to pick up.
 
Just give Liberty an extra trade route, perhaps in the opener (much earlier than Monarchy, but still have to build a caravan or cargo ship). That should address the Trad/Lib gold gap (the gold from Monarchy and from the trade route will both rise during the course of the game). And, at least on higher difficulties, the trade route will provide a modest science boost, as a partial counterweight to Tradition's growth bonuses.

The easiest nerf to Tradition, that would do the least damage to the tree, would be for the finisher's free aqueducts to appear only when you've researched Engineering. It would provide a modest disincentive to mindlessly beeline Education, and would be consistent with how Legalism works.

I think those are both really great ideas. Wide empires generally need more ITRs to get satellites going quickly and could really use the extra route. The extra beakers from the extra route could help keep a fast expanding empire in the science race in the early game.

The aqueduct thing only makes sense too. I always wondered why it works like it does now. It allows a 4 city tradition empire to ignore engineering a lot longer than they should be able to. It wasn't a big deal in G&K where founding a new city was almost always a positive for science but it kind of is a big deal now.
 
Free aquaducts in Tradition 100 % should require Engineering, full support on that.

As for the gold issues with Liberty, I still say give them the 50 % discount on road prices with Meritocracy. This will also be a huge synergy boost for current Meritocracy effect, because it will allow you to build the roads and therefore get the happiness much faster without losing gold on road support.

An extra Trade Route should go in Commerce. After all Commerce == trade, while Liberty is much more about general empire management which suites the infrastruture better.
 
Free aquaducts in Tradition 100 % should require Engineering, full support on that.

As for the gold issues with Liberty, I still say give them the 50 % discount on road prices with Meritocracy. This will also be a huge synergy boost for current Meritocracy effect, because it will allow you to build the roads and therefore get the happiness much faster without losing gold on road support.

An extra Trade Route should go in Commerce. After all Commerce == trade, while Liberty is much more about general empire management which suites the infrastruture better.

So replace the road maintenance on wagon trains with the extra route and put it into Meritocracy? That's another great idea.
 
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