Policies

[Giskler]

59 cities is outside the realm of my imagination. In most of my games, there aren't that many cities on the entire map! What were your settings? How long did the game last? Did you stock every city with all available culture buildings?

Standard map, no city states, game lasted til turn 420 something. I built all possible culture buildings in my core empire that spanned one continent and three large islands.

I ended up with 59 cities because I invaded the second continent and conquered all the remaining civs.

 

[Ahriman]

On the 8.4 changes to policies, initial impressions:

Spoiler :

Aristocracy: +2 for each National and World Wonder, and +10% production while constructing National and World Wonders (was a free Great Engineer and 10% for national and world wonders).

10% still feels a little blah (I'd rather have a powerful effect than two so-so effects) but this will need testing.

Meritocracy: +1 for each Connected city and +25% from trade routes (was 0.5 happy)

I suspect this will have overcompensated and made the policy too strong. +25% trade route yield is very powerful.

I'm starting to worry that, given how little happiness you can get from buildings, a policy approach that cherry-picks the happiness policies and ignores the rest is going to be pretty dominant.

Universal Suffrage: +10% City defense and +1 for each Defense Building (was 25% city defense and 25% specialist building construction rate).

Seems weak. 10% city defense is barely noticeable, and 1 culture for each defensive building isn't enough to bother constructing them.

Constitution: +25% Great Person creation rate and 1 free Great Person of choice (was 2 culture on Wonders).

Feels slightly weak; gpp% bonuses aren't that hot, because of the way in which great person gpp costs increase with each one you get. Might consider boosting to +33%.

Nationalism: +10% attack in friendly territory and +1 for Smithies and Factories (was 25% attack bonus)

Bonus for smithies and factories feels pretty nonsensical for nationalism. Would make a bit of sense for a Fascism policy, or some kind of Labor Union policy, but from Nationalism??
+10% attack in friendly territory is also pretty weak.
The policy feels boring. This is late-game; these policies should feel powerful!

* * *
Overall, I would get away from this idea of having two mediocre effects. The player doesn't really feel effects on the order of 10%. Go for one powerful effect per policy instead. At the very least, make sure that multiple effects actually have synergies. There is no synergy for example between bonus happiness from smithies and attack % bonus in friendly territory, these are entirely different kinds of effects.
A policy should make you want to change how you play. These 10% bonuses don't really do that.

[On a similar note: 15% for buildings with the flatland building (Workshops) (was 20%).
15% Factories (was 25%). are lame. The bonuses are too small. The industrial revolution should feel like a big deal. Coal should be a powerful and important resource that you really want. 15% production just doesn't do that.]

 

[Txurce]

I'm still playing with 8.3, but had some initial impressions about the new list:

Most of it looks like a step in the right direction.

I agree with Ahriman that Aristocracy feels weak. Unlike others, I liked it the way it was.

I also agree that Universal Suffrage and Nationalism don't seem very attractive.

Speaking on firmer ground - 8.3 - the Factory's 15% bump with +4 hammers gave a notable bump to my production in a city that already had a lot of production.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

I agree the new Universal Suffrage policy is garbage. How about Universal Suffrage: 1 per 2 in each city (or tweak those numbers to whatever is balanced).

And I vote for curving policy generation a bit more.

 

[Thalassicus]

I like emphasizing the happiness bonus over the production bonus on Aristocracy for a few reasons:

1. The happiness boost is tall-empire friendly, while the production boost is wide-friendly.
2. The happiness bonus is more useful than the production bonus on high difficulty levels.
3. I like giving bonuses that help National Wonders a lot.

1) Fixed per-player happiness is more useful for tall empires than wide. The reason for the happiness advantage is clear: as we get more cities, the proportional effect of a fixed income reduces.

In contrast, a production bonus is more useful for wide empires. This is somewhat less obvious, but consider one basic thing about wide empires... they're usually expanding. Each new city adds to the cost of national wonders, so production bonuses to get the NW built quicker (before the cost can go up further) are a big help. In contrast... a production bonus for a tall empire will only shave a turn or two off the build time regardless of circumstances.


2) At higher difficulty levels it becomes very hard to get world wonders. The AIs are usually ahead of us technologically, and have massive production bonuses that let them build things faster. In addition, losing a manually-built wonder race can significantly change the outcome int he game.

The place where the human has an advantage over the AI is planning. A human can strategize their early game to get a great engineer, saving it up for one specific wonder. This is why many players only build wonders with Great Engineers. As a result, the production bonus is not particularly useful on hard difficulty levels.


3) The advantage of national wonders is they're assured... we can't lose a race to get one. This is mainly useful on high difficulty levels. With just these national wonders:

• National College
• National Epic
• National Treasury
• Circus Maximus
• +1 world wonder

We've already got 10, same as the Notre Dame world wonder that's been getting a lot of attention lately. That's a decent amount of happiness from a policy like this.

1 per 2 in each city (or tweak those numbers to whatever is balanced).

This is not possible without the c++ only Firaxis has access to, but I'm always open to other ideas if you can think of anything.

I suspect this will have overcompensated and made [Meritocracy] too strong. +25% trade route yield is very powerful.

These are the net changes to the Liberty tree:

• Free great person removed
• Happiness bonus moved up a tier from Meritocracy to Finisher
• +0.5 per city and 25% trade route bonus

The first two are somewhat significant nerfs, so I do want to balance that out and keep the overall tree useful.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

This is not possible.

This is probably way convoluted, but maybe you could go about it in a roundabout way? Implement a a new unbuildable maintenance free building called "Polling Place" that has the same effect and have US grant the building free in every city. Or is it just not possible to tie building culture generation to population like the library does with science?

^^Grasping at straws.

but I'm always open to other ideas if you can think of anything.

So do you think the mechanic is at least sound? I figure this is a pretty decent boost (probably caps out at 4+ CPT) to new to middle aged cities for wide empires and ramps up border pops a bit if they want to go Freedom for some reason, and this is a huge (10+ CPT) boon to developed cities in tall empires, especially w/ multipliers from other culture buildings. Could even be necessary to drop it to a 1:3 ratio.

 

[Thalassicus]

have US grant the building free in every city

This is not possible.

We've basically reached the limit of what can be done with policies, without c++ access. Unless an effect is already in the game somewhere, it's difficult-to-impossible to add it. For example, a month ago I did some research into when policies are acquired... a network message is sent, but it's not part of the normal event generation system, so there was no way to directly detect when a player clicks a policy on the policy window and use that information to create gameplay effects.

Policies providing bonus yield on a building type is a concept already in the game, so it's easy to copy, and why I'm using it so much recently. There's not many other options.

Even culture-from-population on the Museum is something that's not in the game. I coded the effect myself, and it took about five hours of work to do so. It only takes a few minutes to use an effect already available. This huge time difference is why I usually copy concepts already in the game, wherever possible. It's easier to create new building effects than policy effects, because we have more tools available to us to do so for buildings.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

This is not possible.

Isn't that what Legalism does? If the problem is just that you can't code "Every City" just set the value to some arbitrarily high number and make the tooltip say "every."

 

[Thalassicus]

This is Legalism:

<Type>POLICY_LEGALISM</Type>
<Description>TXT_KEY_POLICY_LEGALISM</Description>
<Civilopedia>TXT_KEY_POLICY_LEGALISM_TEXT</Civilopedia>
<Help>TXT_KEY_POLICY_LEGALISM_HELP</Help>
<PolicyBranchType>POLICY_BRANCH_TRADITION</PolicyBranchType>
<CultureCost>10</CultureCost>
<OneShot>true</OneShot>
<GridX>3</GridX>
<GridY>1</GridY>
<NumCitiesFreeCultureBuilding>4</NumCitiesFreeCultureBuilding>
<PortraitIndex>57</PortraitIndex>
<IconAtlas>POLICY_ATLAS</IconAtlas>
<IconAtlasAchieved>POLICY_A_ATLAS</IconAtlasAchieved>

Legalism gives the next-best culture building in X cities. We're unable to change what it gives or how it gives them. Other than the city count X, everything else is coded in the c++ only Firaxis has access to. This could not be used to give a special normally-inaccessible building because it chooses only from accessible buildings.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Okay I'll shut up now. Was trying to think outside the box on this one, but apparently the box is somewhat small, misshapen and lacks sufficient air holes.

Gotta make you work for your living.

 

[Thalassicus]

New ideas are fantastic for buildings, traits, wonders, units and so on! I don't want to discourage that and like out of the box ideas. It's only with policies that we're really limited.

A culture bonus on defense buildings is possible with the options available, and seems like a logical counterpart to the city-defense modifier on Universal Suffrage. I've buffed its numbers in the next version to make it more useful.

I usually "go low" when introducing new things. "Overpowered" gets more of an adverse reaction than something pathetically weak. Vanilla civ have great examples... Horsemen were a big deal when Civ 5 first came out, then Longswordsmen rushes. No one gets into flame wars about the Ironclad's uselessness in vanilla.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Ya I'm just busting your balls. The box thing was more a dig at Firaxis. It must be frustrating to look at variables like that culture building line and realize it would probably be insanely easy to copy the code and tweak it for similar purposes if you had C++ access.

 

[Thalassicus]

Or they could have simply made it so we can specify the type of building to look for. Culture, production, food, etc... at least it would have given some options.

 

[Ahriman]

I like emphasizing the happiness bonus over the production bonus on Monarchy

Assume you are talking about Aristocracy?
I have to test this more, I don't have a firm opinion yet.

These are the net changes to the Liberty tree:

Don't balance just at the tree level, you also have to balance at the individual policy level. The benefits from Meritocracy are arguably much larger than those from other policies.

Also "removing a great person from the tree" is highly dependent on where it was. It was the finisher, from what I recall; a benefit like that 6 policies in is decent but not super-strong, like it would be when it is only 3 policies in.

 

[Thalassicus]

The numbers for Meritocracy are very flexible and not a hard-lined point for me.

I noticed the trade bonus effect is an option in the files not currently in use, and fits for both wide empires and the policy itself. I haven't paid much attention at all to how much income actually comes from trade routes in an average game. I'd be happy to drop it lower if you feel 20% is too high. I could also reduce the happiness bonus back down to 0.5 again.

 

[Txurce]

The numbers for Meritocracy are very flexible and not a hard-lined point for me.

I noticed the trade bonus effect is an option in the files not currently in use, and fits for both wide empires and the policy itself. I haven't paid much attention at all to how much income actually comes from trade routes in an average game. I'd be happy to drop it lower if you feel 20% is too high. I could also reduce the happiness bonus back down to 0.5 again.

I would have waited to play it before changing it, but I see that 8.5 is already up.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Not that I usually dip into this forum often, but I'd like to comment on this:

I haven't paid much attention at all to how much income actually comes from trade routes in an average game. I'd be happy to drop it lower if you feel 20% is too high.

Just so you know, in my own mod I used this effect twice. First I changed the Republic policy to "+1 production per city, +10% trade route income" (and I kept it that way post-patch because it's more interesting than the half-Communism they came up with), and I changed Planned Economy to a straight "+20% trade route income". Both felt pretty balanced with those numbers, given their places in their respective trees, although Planned Economy ended up feeling a little too strong in the long term (and I've since changed it to something more interesting, although still money-related, because seriously, it's called PLANNED ECONOMY, not Research Factories).

So if you're giving +20-25% AND some Happiness benefit, I think that'll be way too strong. +10% and some small bonus seems to work well; that Republic change I mentioned has worked great because in the early game, the +1 production is great while the trade route income is nothing, while in the late game the production is negligible and the income is significant (2-3 gold per turn per city, for large cities).

The thing is, in the early game trade route income is basically negligible, and adding +10% or even +20% might only add a few gold per turn, so policies that can be taken early should have something else to make them worth having. But in the late game? Remember that the trade equation in the vanilla game is (-1 + 1.10*pop + 0.15*capital), although presumably you've tweaked that, so a vanilla empire of ten size-12 cities would generate 126 gold per turn in trade route income. For size-12 cities that's 14 gold per city (other than the capital). Adding 20% to that means adding 25.2 gold per turn; that's 2.8/city, which compares just fine to the old-fashioned Communism's +5 production. But it's not unreasonable to see that number go way up if you've been conquering other empires; twenty size-15s would be ~340 gold per turn, and 20% of that starts getting impressively large. Get to size 20 cities, and you're now looking at 24 gold per city, and 20% of that is 4.8... you very quickly exceed the old Communism that way. Even 10% would still add 2.4 per turn, which given the changes they made in the patch is still significant.

Just my opinion, of course, based only on my own mod's testing.

 

[Thalassicus]

Thank you for that helpful data Spatz, I'll change it to 10%.

 

[Babri]

Aristocracy is getting a bit too powerful. Tradition is mainly for small empires. +3 might be too big. I would say give it 2 & 15% or 20% wonder production boost instead of 10% which is barely noticeable.
And I am not sure whether United Front will be helpful. Maybe it would be good but maintaining friends along with a huge empire is really a difficult task. On the other hand allying nearby CS would become attractive.

 

[Seek]

The culture from defensive buildings on Universal Suffrage strikes me as extremely odd from a RL perspective. The defensive bonus makes sense because in civ5 the city attack/defense is an abstraction of civilians fighting with aggressors, so the more inclusive the government, the more spirited the defense would be. I don't see how culture and defensive structures correlate with allowing everyone to vote in this context. (But, hey - gameplay trumps realism, so it's no big deal.)