Man Longsword Rushes got nerfed HARD.
No free meritocracy GS to bulb, reduced strength, harder to RA slingshot, AND metal casting now requires construction so that is even more techs you need to gain access to them.
This patch continues the Firaxis tradition of locating strong player strategies and nerfing them massively. It also applies the same principles to culture, happiness and to a lesser extent gold that the march patch applied to production. What htey did there is reduce all large multipliers, give more base units, and spread the bonuses across the tech eras more equally.
For culture, all the massive bonuses, Cristo, constitution, free speech, got reduced or changed and they put more culture earlier. With the reduced culture cost per city and the piety buffs to culture production it looks like they want you to build culture in more cities and annexed puppets. Increased culture per building though temple and smaller modifiers, along with reduced sp costs per city means lesser culture cities can still at least pay their way more effectively. The new piety and hermitage are meant to give earlier less severe boosts to that growth, as is the new honor. Increases to a number of wonder culture outputs and the new constituion are other new sources of base culture. This replaces no brainer choices like freedom and spreads the gain out. I remember concern over production being nerfed back in February and that was not the case, they just moved it.
For happiness they moved it from one main policy, Theocracy to many subsidiary ones, and made it more building focused. This leads to happiness being involved in the majority of social poliocy and building choices. It also makes puppeting more complex. With the right policies annexing is a happiness BOOST, not a drop. Wonder's also give more happiness adding yet another source. That forces happiness to come from more places. Its spread throughout the tech tree now considering the number of buildings that can boost it now, and is found in most policy trees. The bonuses to observatory and monastery happiness follow the intent of the circus to make terrain more important. The stables and forge did the same thing for production.
For gold its less obvious. They nerfed the strongest gold wonder in Big ben. They also added gold to a number of other wonders, and strengthened Machu Picchu. Ironically enough the best gold boost policy is NOT in commerce, but in Piety. 10% gold boost per city with a temple means the boost will affect your whole original empire and many of your puppets. It blows the 25% capital bonus to shreds, except in a OCC of course. Though Mercantilism is still the strongest gold multiplier though, at least for production. Theocracy is the new shrine income to me, though I don't plan to use it much.
The biggest change to gold income is probably going to be puppet empires. With the new focus on happiness from buildings they'll become a happiness sink more quickly. Yes they build wallls and monuments/ temples, but never all of the affected buildings. I don't remember many if any of my puppets building universities or public schools, so if you go rationalism instead of piety they're even more of a happiness hole.Without the puppet empire to provide the economic base, the sources of gold might vary greatly. Especially if reduced luxury happiness requires us to trade for ai luxuries removing the other linchpin of the current economy.
Thats just my look at it and I hope it makes sense to others. If the new patch solves puupet tp spam, allows me to build and control more buildings and makes diplomacy somewhat work then I don't think I'll miss the old ways too much
