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.