Policies

[Thormodr]

Yeah Busan is nice. It's the place to be in Korea I think, except perhaps Jeju.

Anyway, I really don't want to "lambast" anyone. People are certainly entitled to voice their concerns. I just often feel people are too hasty to throw out the baby with the bath water.

That board game vs. god game distinction is interesting. I enjoy both immersion as well as strategizing around hard rules, and certainly there are always some trade offs in design. Will have to think on it more, but I'm about to start a new Civ V game. I'm thinking Suleiman, immortal, small continents, sparse resources, raging barbs. See if I can strategize on how to make the most of the much-maligned Ottoman UA while immersing myself in the role of a Sultan attempting to recruit some barbary pirates...

Actually I've also thought that combining socials policies with government might be interesting. Perhaps some interesting synergies could be created for min/maxing. Probably a task best suited to the modders (if its possible) than to the core game though. I think in time through mods both of us may be able to have our board game cake, and eat it in god mode too. Time will tell.

Nice to hear about Busan. I enjoyed the climate there much more than in Seoul. The ocean breezes seemed to clean the air much better.

I think the Ottomans would be fun except for the broken AI. The AI rarely builds ships so it'll be like whipping a man with 2 broken legs.

Time will tell. You are definitely right on that. I'm hoping mods will bring it back to the way the game should be. A god game design still has much in the way of strategizing. One just have to look at cIV. At worst, I'll just wait for Fall from Heaven 3. I'd be willing to pay a fair amount of money for that.

 

[amboo]

well I'm certainly glad I brought it up

 

[Venereus]

Do you consider comments like "the Civ V love brigade is amassing" part of civil debate? Is your intent to be inflammatory? Or are you honestly unaware that comments like that undermine rational discussion? How would you react if I started my post to you with "another member of the Civ5 hate party"? Your attempts to lump everyone who disagrees with you into some group that unconditionally loves the game weaken your argument. You should have confidence that your arguments can stand on their own without resorting to generalizations that are frankly false.

You are entitled to your own opinion. But claiming that a game that has both no-rollback and switching effects is automatically more forward-thinking than a game that has a no-rollback is flawed. Your discussion of science proves that each mechanic should be considered on a case by case basis to determine what makes logical sense (if that is even the basis for game mechanics design).

You apparently think being able to switch some fundamental ideas about how a government should function mirrors reality. There is some truth to that. It also happens to exist in Civ5 as well through the concept of mutually-exclusive trees.

I think governments far more often build on the past rather than radically switch. You have to admit the Civ4 civic system created some very unrealistic situations. Switches in and out of slavery for instance are quite unrealistic, especially on the 1 year scale later in the game. From a realism perspective, I personally could see allowing a point or two to be redistributed upon reaching a new era. That could represent an ideological shift while still taking into account that there is a certain amount of ideological inertia. From a game mechanic situation, I am against making the game in its current form any easier. I already feel the difficult could stand to be boosted. And I frankly enjoy needing to make difficult decisions like determining if an immediate bonus outweighs waiting for a more potent one later.

Lastly, I love how there is this insistence that Civ5 is catering to a more casual user. Virtually every modern RPG that has a "skill tree" also has a respec option. They have a respec option precisely because casual gamers do not like being locked into decisions. I do not understand what is beginner-friendly about a system that forces you to make difficult decisions you cannot undo. If it is frustrating veterans of the series who should be better equipped to make strategic decisions, what reason is there to believe a beginner who is less capable would be enjoying it?

I thought about editing it out but I hoped no one would take it seriously (should've thought twice about that since it seems I tend to come out hard to understand). I just found weird that a simple thread about making sense of the Social Policies from a real life perspective, suddenly turned into another Civ 5 good/bad discussion, and then, the usual suspects start popping up. It was a tongue in cheek conspiracy theory statement, nothing more. I don't need to undermine the quality of the discussion in order to improve the quality of my "preaching". Because that what we all do, "false generalizations" or not.

I'm pretty much on board with the rest of your post. Just wanted to clear that out.

 

[Stefanskantine]

Well I'm bored at work, so back to the original topic. Hopefully in a civil and non-polarizing manner!

The social policies system is one of the innovations I really like. I actually think it's more realistic than prior systems, including civ IV civics. Why? Because in real life institutions of governance do not spring up, fully formed, independent of the people which they govern. They evolve slowly and gradually, the product of a people's shared experiences and methods of social organization. Or to put it another way, their culture.

Lots of intellectuals who have written on the subject, starting mainly with the marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, write about how it's not possible to simply change governments by changing the bare institutions at the top. There is a complex network of "civil society," which is basically non-governmental organizations that keep a society "on its track" through their informal cultural power. Gramsci of course wanted a Marxist revolution, but unlike those who came before he knew it wasn't going to happen just politically. Institutions with informal cultural power, like the church, the bar association, boy scouts, the rotary club, whatever, simply wouldn't let it happen.

So if you want a Marxist revolution, you have to start small. You need to change the cultural message going out. That means to change government, you have to start with the cultural message coming out of the schools, out of the universities, out of the monuments, temples, opera houses, The Hermitage... Sound like any game you know?

Of course the game is an abstraction. But connecting culture to government is the right move IMO. In Civ IV culture always felt like a half feature. Why was I accumulating it? How was it good for my empire? A culture win meant essentially weakening your empire, you went for a victory condition sacrificing technological and other development. I really like the idea of cultural development in Civ V. Culture is powerful. A new social policy means more than a new tech. Civ V is pretty Gramsciian, really. I guess they do a good job of teaching Gramscii at Towson, if perhaps not tactical AI programming. See, I can be critical too, when its warranted.

I'll say more later as to why combing civics from certain trees instead of swapping them wholesale makes sense. But now I actually have to go do some real work for a change.

 

[charon2112]

Well this is a well thought out post, that I agree with.

Huzzah!

Well I'm bored at work, so back to the original topic. Hopefully in a civil and non-polarizing manner!

The social policies system is one of the innovations I really like. I actually think it's more realistic than prior systems, including civ IV civics. Why? Because in real life institutions of governance do not spring up, fully formed, independent of the people which they govern. They evolve slowly and gradually, the product of a people's shared experiences and methods of social organization. Or to put it another way, their culture.

Lots of intellectuals who have written on the subject, starting mainly with the marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, write about how it's not possible to simply change governments by changing the bare institutions at the top. There is a complex network of "civil society," which is basically non-governmental organizations that keep a society "on its track" through their informal cultural power. Gramsci of course wanted a Marxist revolution, but unlike those who came before he knew it wasn't going to happen just politically. Institutions with informal cultural power, like the church, the bar association, boy scouts, the rotary club, whatever, simply wouldn't let it happen.

So if you want a Marxist revolution, you have to start small. You need to change the cultural message going out. That means to change government, you have to start with the cultural message coming out of the schools, out of the universities, out of the monuments, temples, opera houses, The Hermitage... Sound like any game you know?

Of course the game is an abstraction. But connecting culture to government is the right move IMO. In Civ IV culture always felt like a half feature. Why was I accumulating it? How was it good for my empire? A culture win meant essentially weakening your empire, you went for a victory condition sacrificing technological and other development. I really like the idea of cultural development in Civ V. Culture is powerful. A new social policy means more than a new tech. Civ V is pretty Gramsciian, really. I guess they do a good job of teaching Gramscii at Towson, if perhaps not tactical AI programming. See, I can be critical too, when its warranted.

I'll say more later as to why combing civics from certain trees instead of swapping them wholesale makes sense. But now I actually have to go do some real work for a change.

 

[DalekDavros]

Of course the game is an abstraction. But connecting culture to government is the right move IMO. In Civ IV culture always felt like a half feature. Why was I accumulating it? How was it good for my empire? A culture win meant essentially weakening your empire, you went for a victory condition sacrificing technological and other development. I really like the idea of cultural development in Civ V. Culture is powerful.

I agree completely. Connecting culture to government is great. Not because of the "government" part necessarily: honestly, having culture be used for anything would have been a huge improvement over previous Civ games. However, the implementation could have been better: unless you play in a very specific way, you get so few SPs that they may as well not be there, especially the late game SP trees, the impossibility of reform (except for moving wholesale to a mutually exclusive branch) is annoying, etc.

So if you want a Marxist revolution, you have to start small. You need to change the cultural message going out. That means to change government, you have to start with the cultural message coming out of the schools, out of the universities, out of the monuments, temples, opera houses, The Hermitage... Sound like any game you know?

Marxism failed so horrifically in this goal that it destroyed all of left-wing politics along with it (i.e., it set up a world where 99% of the people will refer to centre-right ideologies as "far left"). This failure came from mistakenly assuming that a people share a unified cultural language when in reality the leadership of the hierarchies will always craft a counter-revolutionary message, even if they have to appropriate the language of revolutionaries in order to subvert their message (e.g., consider Obama's use of the phrase "Yes we can" to mean the exact opposite of what the UFW meant by it: when the official channels on both the Right and the "Left" define Obama-style corporate capitalism as "socialism" or "communism," discourse about authentically left-wing ideas becomes impossible). I'd recommend James Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance for a better look at how groups without power use culture.

 

[Venereus]

Well I'm bored at work, so back to the original topic. Hopefully in a civil and non-polarizing manner!

The social policies system is one of the innovations I really like. I actually think it's more realistic than prior systems, including civ IV civics. Why? Because in real life institutions of governance do not spring up, fully formed, independent of the people which they govern. They evolve slowly and gradually, the product of a people's shared experiences and methods of social organization. Or to put it another way, their culture.

Lots of intellectuals who have written on the subject, starting mainly with the marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, write about how it's not possible to simply change governments by changing the bare institutions at the top. There is a complex network of "civil society," which is basically non-governmental organizations that keep a society "on its track" through their informal cultural power. Gramsci of course wanted a Marxist revolution, but unlike those who came before he knew it wasn't going to happen just politically. Institutions with informal cultural power, like the church, the bar association, boy scouts, the rotary club, whatever, simply wouldn't let it happen.

So if you want a Marxist revolution, you have to start small. You need to change the cultural message going out. That means to change government, you have to start with the cultural message coming out of the schools, out of the universities, out of the monuments, temples, opera houses, The Hermitage... Sound like any game you know?

Of course the game is an abstraction. But connecting culture to government is the right move IMO. In Civ IV culture always felt like a half feature. Why was I accumulating it? How was it good for my empire? A culture win meant essentially weakening your empire, you went for a victory condition sacrificing technological and other development. I really like the idea of cultural development in Civ V. Culture is powerful. A new social policy means more than a new tech. Civ V is pretty Gramsciian, really. I guess they do a good job of teaching Gramscii at Towson, if perhaps not tactical AI programming. See, I can be critical too, when its warranted.

I'll say more later as to why combing civics from certain trees instead of swapping them wholesale makes sense. But now I actually have to go do some real work for a change.

Although that gives a good background to "culture gives civics", the OP still has a point. How is an empire running both Theocracy and Free Religion? Or Monarchy and Communism, or whatever. It's unintuitive because some are crearly contradictory but don't cancel each other's effects, like it was with Civ IV.

 

[Thormodr]

Although that gives a good background to "culture gives civics", the OP still has a point. How is an empire running both Theocracy and Free Religion? Or Monarchy and Communism, or whatever. It's unintuitive because some are crearly contradictory but don't cancel each other's effects, like it was with Civ IV.

You can be religious, freedom and liberty loving Communists as well.

 

[Venereus]

You can be religious, freedom and liberty loving Communists as well.

You can, yet the game doesn't make your empire any more unique because of it. I mean, there's no "the whole is more than the sum of it's parts" effect.

 

[Some guy]

Considering communists believe religion is a lie to exploit people, no you can't..

 

[Venereus]

Considering communists believe religion is a lie to exploit people, no you can't..

Autocratic communist leaders used propaganda to control the people. Ideology is the real people's opium. Be it a religious or a political ideology, it's mind controlling properties remain. Were I the autocratic leader of a zealoty pious nation, I'd leave Marx behind and start preaching during speeches, no matter how communist my policies are. In other words, it might make sense if you take Autocracy too!

 

[Thormodr]

Considering communists believe religion is a lie to exploit people, no you can't..

The point is that in ciV you can!

 

[drachasor]

Considering communists believe religion is a lie to exploit people, no you can't..

There's no real practical reason why a communist-like government couldn't use religion as a tool. Unless you argument is that if it hasn't happened in the real world means it shouldn't happen in Civ...in which case I'm pretty sure you could find a number of civic combos from Civ IV that don't make sense in the same fashion.

 

[Sock Bramson]

I can't remember who first said this, but I like the idea that each policy you adopt builds on top of the previous ones in the list. Your civ is no longer a theocracy once you hit Free Religion, etc. If you look at it like that, then the combos of various trees really aren't that strange. Even if you take Communism, you can still have Free Religion in your empire. Just because Marxist thought in the real world is against religion doesn't mean a Communist labor system REQUIRES a lack of religion to function (on paper, at least). You can even throw in a Free Market economy and be believable thanks to the real world example of China.

Ugh, I suppose I could edit this post for better sentence structure, but I'm sleepy and currently have no respect for the English language.

 

[Sock Bramson]

Sneaky drac, slipping in similar arguments while I'm busy writing long, unwieldy sentences.

Good point about funky Civics combos, btw. Free Speech + Serfdom = Bwuh? And you could have State Property and theocracy/organized religion/etc. (i.e. religion + communism) in CIV, too. Like we both argued, not necessarily an impossible combo.

 

[Thormodr]

Religion + Communism don't won't well together. Liberty and Freedom and Communism don't work well together. Pretty strange combos that could end up being fairly common. Cherry pick the best social policies even though some of them make zero sense together.

You won't find many people that play with serfdom and free speech on at the same time in cIV anyway. Have you ever played that way? I sure didn't.

I can't remember who first said this, but I like the idea that each policy you adopt builds on top of the previous ones in the list. Your civ is no longer a theocracy once you hit Free Religion, etc.

The idea that your Civ is progressing beyond one into another is something you find in cIV. You lose the bonus from the old civic however when you do switch which is reasonable.

In ciV, you keep the bonus if you do this "supposed progression". So you now have Free religion and are no longer Theocratic but you don't lose the bonus even though you aren't Theocratic anymore?

 

[Sock Bramson]

Sure, why not? I think the bonus for Theocracy is +2 happiness. Why not let the empire stay a little extra happy when you switch over to Free Religion? As your leader get's more pious, as it were, your civ gets happier (+2 from Theocracy, less unhappiness from pop or something from another policy) and gets whatever the other bonuses are from the other policies (too lazy to look 'em up atm ). Then, the extra 2 policies you get from Free Religion are a nice reward for pragmatically allowing different religions and different viewpoints to mingle within your empire.

As for a Civ4 Free Speech + Serfdom scenario: maybe you've recently built a bunch of new cities and want to link up dem resources all quick-like while quickly expanding your borders? I don't usually do the combo myself (mainly because I usually play RFC and weird civic combos add instability), but the point is the combo IS possible.

 

[Venereus]

Sure, why not? I think the bonus for Theocracy is +2 happiness. Why not let the empire stay a little extra happy when you switch over to Free Religion? As your leader get's more pious, as it were, your civ gets happier (+2 from Theocracy, less unhappiness from pop or something from another policy) and gets whatever the other bonuses are from the other policies (too lazy to look 'em up atm ). Then, the extra 2 policies you get from Free Religion are a nice reward for pragmatically allowing different religions and different viewpoints to mingle within your empire.

As for a Civ4 Free Speech + Serfdom scenario: maybe you've recently built a bunch of new cities and want to link up dem resources all quick-like while quickly expanding your borders? I don't usually do the combo myself (mainly because I usually play RFC and weird civic combos add instability), but the point is the combo IS possible.

In order to make sense of it, I like to think that "officially" it's no longer like a civic in action, but rather a step we've gone through, having learned something helpful, hence the bonus from that stage in history remains. It's your society evolving.

But then the deactivation of trees doesn't make sense.

 

[mercury529]

I thought about editing it out but I hoped no one would take it seriously (should've thought twice about that since it seems I tend to come out hard to understand). I just found weird that a simple thread about making sense of the Social Policies from a real life perspective, suddenly turned into another Civ 5 good/bad discussion, and then, the usual suspects start popping up. It was a tongue in cheek conspiracy theory statement, nothing more. I don't need to undermine the quality of the discussion in order to improve the quality of my "preaching". Because that what we all do, "false generalizations" or not.

I'm pretty much on board with the rest of your post. Just wanted to clear that out.

Fair enough. Given how polarizing the game has become, it's hard to be tongue and cheek.

Civ4 certainly had some weird combinations possible. State Property was a Communism civic. Communism is about having a classless society. But you could run State Property and Caste System. I found that to be a pretty funny contradiction. Funny being a relative term of course .

 

[Sock Bramson]

You can only deactivate trees by unlocking something that is incompatible with an earlier tree, right? (rationalism after piety, for example) I could probably take the time to rationalize it as your leader/empire going back on their previously held beliefs of something, but meh. I haven't had to deactivate a tree as of yet, so I've never ran into this particular intellectual quandary.