Policies

A general guideline of mine has been for specialists to be favorable for tall/peaceful empires. A free world wonder on the wonder-boosting policy in Tradition makes more sense to me than a free world wonder from the Liberty tree, which is why I moved the effect from Liberty to the wonder-improving policy. I want to move the free great person from Liberty back to Freedom and add something else in its place in Liberty, though I haven't figured out what yet. For now I'm just doing simple data edits and will eventually get to the more complicated manually-coded effects.

Freedom probably won't have a left-right specialist-improvements split the same as Commerce or Rationalism. Freedom will have 5 specialist-improving policies (including the opener) so it'll have to be some different sort of mix. I might also swap the Freedom opener with another policy in the tree, or add some new effect like how Democracy used to give a free great person.

1. It's OP when you're combing policies (Wonder production + culture-per-Wonder), which is what I believe Ahriman proposed, and I responded to.

2. If by this you mean vanilla Aristocracy, then buffing it presumably makes it even more OP on lower-difficulty games, right?

Or am I missing your point?

If policies were just directly combined they would become overpowered, but whenever I move or merge policies I also adjust the effects to keep it balanced. :)
 
I like the Nationalism bonus. It is useful, logical, thematic, and fits strategically in order (order is designed for a wide scattered empire, which means you will have lots of territory within your borders in which to get the bonus, and a relatively lower concentration of military force and weaker cities, so the bonus is a big help).

Hey Ahriman. Don't get me wrong-I'm OK with Nationalism having an in-border combat bonus. I'm just thinking that it should be nerfed, & a non-combat bonus added alongside it.

Aussie.
 
I plan on replacing the policy in Freedom with +1:c5culture: from specialists, and rearrange the tree, once I have time to write the code necessary to make that possible.

That would be a good addition. BTW, what's the ETA on the SDK?

Aussie.
 
They're updating the lua/xml/sql parts in a week or two. I don't believe the c++ part will ever be released, or at least not anytime soon, unless you've heard otherwise.
 
Hey Ahriman. Don't get me wrong-I'm OK with Nationalism having an in-border combat bonus. I'm just thinking that it should be nerfed, & a non-combat bonus added alongside it.

Aussie.

Reducing the bonus to 15%, as we did with Himeji, seems reasonable, and giving a side bonus.
 
Reducing the bonus to 15%, as we did with Himeji, seems reasonable, and giving a side bonus.

That sounds reasonable to me :)!

@ Thalassicus. Doesn't that make their claims about being "The most Moddable Civilization Ever" just empty rhetoric-given the fact that Civ4 *did* release the C++ Source?

Aussie.
 
The freedom finisher increases the effect of great person improvements +100% and golden age durations +50%.

The problem in my mind with the freedom finisher is that although the finisher itself is awesome you have to take three really bad policies to get there. I got there in one (vanilla) game and the payoff just didn't do it for me.
 
In my first post patch start with 0.8 I was struck with the speed policies are coming in now. Playing England on YNAEMP (which at standard recourse setting seems fairly resource poor) at marathon speed went with a build order of monument > worker > water mill > GL (rushed) > NC and found I filled out Tradition and got my next policy before I could reach renaissance. I ended up taking the honor opener right around the time I got two triremes out exploring and the culture just snowballed from there as I picked off costal barbarians. Not what I expected but fun regardless. Used to be I'd have 1 or maybe 2 policies left in a tree by the time the renaissance rolled around.

Are you planning on toning policy acquisition back down early on?
 
In my recent game on King difficulty, Large Archipelago; Siam unlocked the Utopia Project on Turn 159.
Luckily I got there in time and conquered their two cities, but I almost didn't notice it. I didn't expect anyone to be close to winning in the Renaissance - especially when I had built the +25% Culture Wonder.
 
In my recent game on King difficulty, Large Archipelago; Siam unlocked the Utopia Project on Turn 159.
Luckily I got there in time and conquered their two cities, but I almost didn't notice it. I didn't expect anyone to be close to winning in the Renaissance - especially when I had built the +25% Culture Wonder.

If that's on standard speed, you may have set a record. Or should I say Ramkanhaeng?
 
Here's the overall changes to policy generation:

Policies are a fun and interesting way to specialize our empire, so I increased the policies we can get by about 20%. The Utopia Project requires 6 filled policy trees, up from the 5 trees in vanilla. I increased the power of opera houses and museums to improve policy generation and help tall empires in general. Opera houses give a percentage culture boost (helpful for tall empires with Landmarks) and museums give culture-from-population (against useful for tall empires).

Click here for details on how policy costs are changed.

It's possible on some maps to achieve a domination victory very early in the game (with an achievement to do it as Alexander) so it seems logical to let peaceful players sometimes have quick victories too. Culture victories also typically get a much lower score than other victory types, so overall I wanted to give cultural players a time advantage. I shifted the era a cultural victory can be achieved from ~Modern or so to ~Industrial. Siam always tends to be earlier than average due to Ram's citystate bonuses and peaceful personality, but most leaders cannot reach a cultural victory until an era later than Siam.

Early policies also come somewhat faster, and late policies slower, than pre-patch vanilla. This part of TBC was included in the recent vanilla 1.0.1.332 patch. The reason both I and the developers shifted policies like this most policies are very early in the game. 6 out of 10 trees are unlocked by the start of the Medieval era. It makes sense to tilt things to the time when we can make more use out of it. :)
 
Culture victories typically get a much lower score than other victory types, so I wanted to give cultural players a time advantage.
I shifted the era a cultural victory can be achieved from ~Modern or so to ~Industrial.
This argument doesn't really make much sense to me. Game score shouldn't really be part of balancing, it has no impact on the actual gameplay. I think victories should be designed based on their ease of achievement. Cultural victories are entirely passive; you can get them without interacting with any of the other players at all (particularly on an Archipelago map, where the AI is not good at invading and so you can be very passive), and the only way you can stop another player from getting this is by attacking them.

So I'm not sure it should be easy to get a cultural victory before the very late industrial era.

Still, maybe the main problem here is about AI passivity, especially on archipelago maps; I am guessing that there is AI code that looks at culture borders and distance, so the AI is very unlikely to instigate intercontinental invasions.

Another thought; do you have to control your capital to get a cultural victory? If not, this might be a nice additional requirement, so you can stop anyone else from getting cultural victory by conquering their capital.
 
I didn't organize priorities in that paragraph well. The main concern is conquest victories can be achieved earlier than cultural victories on most maps. (Score is symptom of this but not the cause.) I think averaging both victory types around the Industrial era balances things out, which is my goal. Ramkam will always be earlier due to his citystate bonuses. My preferred playstyle is conquest and I like making it more challenging, so this encourages players like me to watch out for cultural AIs when normally they're not a concern. :)

Something else to point out is I altered AI personalities to better use their traits, so Ramkam really likes going for a quick tech culture victory in TBC. I think it's the best use of his culture and science bonuses, especially since he has no expansion-friendly traits like Washington.

Cultural victories are active in the sense we must maintain careful diplomatic relations to maximize our ~20% science bonuses from research agreements formed from Declarations of Friendship. Each player angry with us (or worse... at war) slows a cultural victory. This can be a difficult balancing act.

I don't believe there is any AI code which says "if a player is about to win, attack them no matter what" like a human would. We can't change this, though, and it applies equally to players racing to a science or domination victory.

We cannot directly alter victory requirements like adding a must-have-capital prereq to culture victories. It's handled in the c++ part of the code. That said... since the capital usually produces a huge amount of the culture in culture victories, and often builds the utopia project, capturing it is a crippling blow.
 
I didn't organize priorities in that paragraph well. The main concern is conquest victories can be achieved earlier than cultural victories on most maps. (Score is just a side-effect of this I'm not directly worried about.)

I had the same question that Ahriman did, but your graphs were helpful, as well as your sense that cultural victories are more or less in the same time frame as a conquest victory. (I think I mentioned that I recently lost a sure conquest win to a forgotten single-city Siam.) Let's see how it plays out over time.

I also like the idea of more available policies balances with more trees being needed to win. But wouldn't this unbalance policies for anyone not going for a cultural victory (since individual policies are easier to acquire)?
 
Policy generation in June's v8.0 has not significantly changed since April's v7.0, when I added the garrison culture and spoils of war. I feel overall policy generation has been very balanced since then (aside from minor adjustments to SoW's strength).

The culture difference between pre-patch and post-patch TBC is tall empires are buffed and conquerors nerfed, with peaceful expansionists largely unchanged.

  • The policy cost curve is unchanged, as shown here.
  • Wide-empire and Conquest per city policy costs are unchanged, since the per-city cost with Representation is back to where it used to be.
  • Tall empire culture is faster since per-city policy costs are lower for empires without Representation.
  • Warmonger culture is slower in the late game since Firaxis went with a barbarians-only approach for the Spoils of War effect.
 
The culture difference between pre-patch and post-patch TBC is tall empires are buffed and conquerors nerfed, with peaceful expansionists largely unchanged.

  • Tall empire culture is faster since per-city policy costs are lower for empires without Representation.
  • Warmonger culture is slower in the late game since Firaxis went with a barbarians-only approach for the Spoils of War effect.

This has been my experience post-patch. That's why that Siam score blew my mind (although you explained it afterward).
 
The main concern is conquest victories can be achieved earlier than cultural victories on most maps.
I don't think this is a problem. Conquest is an active victory type, culture is passive. An active victory type should be possible to achieve earlier than a passive one. Just like how, in Civ4, you could achieve a domination victory earlier than a space race victory, by killing off enough enemies.

This doesn't necessarily mean that a conquest victory is *easy* to achieve. If you're on high enough difficulty, I don't think it is too easy.
[Or at least, the real problems are all still in how the tactical combat AI.]

We cannot directly alter victory requirements like adding a must-have-capital prereq to culture victories.
As a workaround, you could make the Utopia project require the palace, so it was only buildable in the capital. But maybe that would be too much of a hack to solve a low-significance problem.

Cultural victories are active in the sense we must maintain careful diplomatic relations to maximize our ~20% science bonuses from research agreements formed from Declarations of Friendship.
I don't really see anything active here. You just don't attack anyone, it is pretty easy to remain at peace with most players all game.

I find those games pretty dull.
 
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