Policies

Or not... Just looked through the Policies XML file, wow that's a bit limiting .

 

Yeah, that's why I'm limiting myself to mostly numerical edits for now, while saving out-of-the-box ideas on a 'investigate in the future' list.

 

Here is a list of big policy changes I've been thinking about. Thas, I know your interested in smaller changes right now, so if these are a bit radical for you I will likely make the mod myself. But I figured since you helped me out so much with your mod I'd give you first crack.


Policy Changes

NOTE: My main goal is to focus on conceptual ideas, not get the number exactly right. Feel free to tweak the numbers to make it appropriate.

Cultural Victory – Should be number of policies, not number of trees.
This allows for much easier future balancing of the game. If expansions added policies or branches it doesn't throw off the cultural victory. It allows allows better balance between trees with different numbers of policies.


Tradition
I feel that the main focus of this tree is supposed to be on small civs...which means your capital is the mainstay building. I have heightened that focus and empowered some of the late techs.

Tradition (+1 food → +2 food)
This is mainly to make entering the tree more desirable, especially since I've tweaked aristocracy.

Aristocracy - +20 % gold output in capital
The wonder bonus got a little extreme (even if many wonders are weak right now, that may change), and generally was useful in big civs and small. This change focuses on the capital.
Oligarchy - +33% City Combat Strength
This ability was swapped with Universal Suffrage. Early game your few cities are a mainstay part of your military and your land tends to be small. I figured this made more sense for an early game tree.
Landed Elite - +4 population in Capital
50% growth rate sounds great, but it takes so much food to grow large cities that often you didn't get a lot of benefit out of the policy. The new change is an immediate one time bump to your capital.
Monarchy - +20% production in capital
The original cheaper land made no sense to me for monarchy. Further, I still wanted to provide wonder production benefits, but not on the original scale. This change gives the capital a powerful general production bonus.
Legalism - -33% → - 50% unhappiness in Capital
Just a strong bump to a generally weak policy.


Liberty
Overall I think this tree does exactly what its supposed to do, help to grow and maintain a large empire.

Representation - +1 culture → +2 culture
People who favor liberty favor big empires, meaning the culture bonus isn't generally going for culture wins...but for early border expansion. This bump helps to make that work a little faster.

Piety
Mandate of Heaven – 50% less culture required to acquire land in all cities.

A lot of talk has gone into this policy. Overall, I don't like the idea of policies solely made for culture victories...which is what the original policy does. Instead, since piety focus on culture and happiness, I wanted a person to get to use that culture more actively. Flavorwise, this represents the spread and influence of religion over neighboring areas.

Commerce – Maintenance paid on roads and railroads reduced by 30%. Harbor maintenance reduced by 1.
The original capital only bonus seemed to fit better with tradition, so I moved it there. I used the only trade union bonus and put it here with a slight bump. Also, I thought was strange that a sea faring tree would favor land based roads and give nothing to sea cities, so I threw them the harbor change.

Merchant Navy - +5 gold in all coastal cities
I really liked the old bonus, I felt it was very strong. However, commerce is all about money! Also, I think it helps represent the flavor of maritime civs, which historically were almost always richer than their landlocked neighbors due to the ease of sea trade.

Trade Unions – Trade Route income increased by 1.
Commerce is all about trade after all!

Freedom
Universal Suffrage - +33% combat strength to units within the
empire’s borders

Swapped this around with Tradition's Oligarchy. Flavorwise, it made sense that free people would protect their lands better and land tends to be larger at the time this policy becomes available.


Autocracy
My main problem with this tree is that its so late in the game, and it negates 3 other policy trees!

I have no idea if this is possible right now, but what is choosing autocracy automatically removed all the choices made from the 3 banned trees (except the one time bonuses like reformation) and allowed you to rechoose?

That way a person could go hard core autocracy late game if they wanted to and wouldn't miss out because of early game choices.

 

Except when I played as India I got a 39 sized Delhi before I won cultural victory , very useful policy when you focus on making food in capital.

Then autocracy would work as a major reset and people could switch out of Freedom/liberty and get order and rationalism, then get all the golden ages and 2 techs instantly.

 

@Stalker0
All very interesting ideas, I especially like the first one, where victory is achieved for policies rather than trees. This could be tied in with a change where each tree has a bonus for completing it (policy at the end for 0 cost tying all the others together). Then you still get a reward for completing a tree, but have the option of not doing so. More interesting choices lead to more fun!

I don't want to limit your creativity, so go for it! It'll be a great opportunity to learn modding with a topic you're interested in.

 

As I mentioned, you wouldn't allow it to reset "one time policies" like golden ages.

I admit its a very rough idea, but I do feel there needs to be something to make the late game policies more accessible.

 

Been playing a game with France rexing with Collective Rule, and I'm starting to see why it's the way it is. I've got like 6 cities up and running when the most I've seen for the AI is 2. I'm about ready to quit the game just because I'm so far ahead I don't see how I can fail to lose at this point.

 

Your collective mod thread shows this component is at v3 whereas the title of this thread is v1, the mod index in-game also shows only v1 available.

 

i wrote about this in another thread.
my idea is to make policies cost rise not from overall policies number but from number of policies in a particular tree.
e.g. you adopt tradition for say X culture, then you can buy a second policy in tradition tree for X*K or adopt Liberty for X . so there will be no relation in cost between policies of different trees and adoption of new trees will be much more accessible. policy cost may also depend on era, for early game policies to be cheaper.
thus policy cost would be equal to X*EraCoefficient*F(N) where N is a policy's number in its tree and F is a some function.

 

@AlienFromBeyond
Consider the value of the tree is still questionable compared to other alternatives, such as going Honor and rushing a nearby enemy with warriors or horsemen, which are currently some of the only strats viable on some difficulty settings (though that's more due to the bad AI). Likewise, a CS slingshot for Patronage is still arguably stronger in many situations than going for the Liberty tree.

What size map, speed and difficulty are you playing on, and what other mods are you using? Was it a good start location or a poor one, and how's your happiness doing? More information is needed to get an idea of what effect the change is having. I could reduce the effect from +33% to +15% if you feel it's warranted.

Anyone else tried out a rex strategy and have some opinions on the subject?

Oddly, I feel Arabia could be a more powerful Rex strategy than France, with the balance - civilizations mod. 2 gold per city is quite a bit that early in the game, and if they're closely spaced it's easy to get some roads up. That's what I've been playing around with lately.

@DrunkenPirate
I've been waiting a bit to upload a new version to the mod browser because of the critical ModBuddy crash issue (see sig) that prevents me from removing v1 from the browser. V1 is going to be stuck up there forever until they fix that bug, so there will be two copies of this online. It's sort of frustrating. As a result though, I'm trying to gather more changes to all include in one update, rather than updating with each small change like before.

@killmeplease
This is actually something I was thinking about when first playing Civ, too. Probably something better for the culture calibration mod than one aimed at simply balancing the existing mechanics, though.

 

I very much like the Idea of Having a number of policies required for cultural victory and giving extra benefits for completing a tree. It gives everyone an incentive to complete a tree.
The Victory Progress screen is also terribly missleading currently - it only shows how many trees players have completed. (AI never goes for cultural Victory anyways in my experience)

REXing with the new Liberty tree is very powerful and fun. I don't think it is overpowered - always depends on difficulty though.

 

I meant the Rationalism golden age. You haven't touched the policy tree yet, and all of a sudden you get all its benefits including the golden age it triggers when you adopt it.

 

The problem with Piety is that it's failing to perform its primary function. Peity's primary function is making excess happiness more valuble. It does this through reducing the happiness bucket for GAs and giving you culture for excess happiness. Yet there's not enough policies in the tree that enchance this function, and there's also not enough reasons to keep excess happiness floating around - since those luxuries can be sold to the AI for 300 gold a pop.

There's really only one situation in which you have a ton of excess happiness and that's when you have a small empire with a ton of city-state allies that are gifting you resources that can't be resold to the AI for profit (and you probably got those allies by selling your resources to the AI in the first place).

But in that case, if you have a ton of city-state allies, you'll get more benefit out of Patronage than you would Piety, unless you are going for culture and are picking up both trees anyways.

I think something really needs to be done with Reformation - an additional ability that would make excess happiness more valuble. Perhaps a hammer boost? What about a flat +15% bonus to hammer production if your empire has 15+ excess happiness (like Rationalism's Soveignity, but with higher requirements) or a percentage increase based on the amount of excess happiness.

Or perhaps the happiness bucket should be adjusted down (though with a eye on how this will effect Persia), and Great People as well should be balanced more so that people don't just rely on spamming them for thier Golden Ages.

The primary problem with Peity is that excess happiness is not valuble enough and Peity does not make it much more valuble.

I do agree that MoH should be either 100% or at the very least 75% of excess happiness gets recouped as culture.

Could you elaborate on that statement? Do you mean that you shouldn't reach the industrial era if you are warmongering or that it's just not worth it for the point that you get it? I think that Autocracy has one of the most powerful Policies in the game: Militarism (-33% purchase cost on units). Combined with Big Ben and Commerce you get a whopping -83% discount on purchased units that you can all rush-buy in a city with a military academy and possibly the Heroic Epic. You can even keep gifting these elite units to a city-state being besiged by a rival to clear the city-hex and rush-buy more in the city with the most military buildings.

 

I like the idea of giving a production bonus for excess happiness, possibly +1% per ...? It certainly would be an interesting mechanic.

Regarding Autocracy, if you're warmongering chances are by this point in the game you already have a sizeable, experienced army, and probably got the Honor policy tree. With these and the poor AI, there's not really any reason to get further bonuses to combat, as it's relatively easy at this point anyway.

 

This would probably need the C++ sdk, but what about applying nonlinear feedback to the surplus bonuses. For instance, at 10 surplus you'd get 10 culture, but it'd ramp down up to the point that at 100 surplus you'd get just 50 extra culture or something. This has the downside of possibly making the aspect too cryptic to the player though.

 

Don't know if this is possible but you could also simply double the happiness bonus for the GA meter. So for GA purposes, happiness is twice as valuable. I do like the %hammer idea, though maybe 1% per 2 happiness, got to be careful scaling with that one.

Build my miniworkshop...I mean collesseum!:

 

I've added a few suggestions to the mod.

 

Adding a growth percentage to tradition (as you did by taking the landed elite bonus) I think is a good idea, but the base percentage is probably too high (I think its currently 33%?).

From a flavor standpoint the +1 science to specialists with landed elite seems strange to me. Its a nation wide bonus in the small civ tree, and the rest of the tree has nothing to do with science or specialists.

Now we could go with specialists in the capital. What if specialists in the capital generated +1 food. That combined with freedom would allow you to have a lot of specialists in the capital. Or perhaps specialists in the capital provide two bonuses, like +1 science and +1 culture?

Why take down liberty start at 2 to 1.5...did you see a balance concern there?

 

I wavered between 25% and 33% a lot actually... changed several times, so 33% isn't a final decision and is simply what I last had it on when I finished the other changes. So, feedback is helpful in that regard! Do you think it should get a nerf to 25% since it's higher up in the tree, or does the overall buff to the tree help bring the tree up to par, since it's often perceived as underwhelming compared to Honor or Patronage? These are basically the two factors I've been considering, and I'm not sure which should have a higher priority.

The rationale for improving specialists is based on reasoning by bobbyboy29 in the Specialists and GP improvement mod thread here, but is also in the realm of the social policy mod. I'll put details of the reasoning in the original post.

 

I'm not questioning the desire to improve specialists or to do it through social policies...I'm simply questioning the appropriateness of the bonus as you have done it. For me +1 science specialist in the tradition tree seems an oddity for the tree.