Vitruvian Guar
Warlord
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2024
- Messages
- 153
Oh, I agree. Policy cards are worse then culture trees for a variety of reasons.If that was the design intent, the Civ 6 mechanic was a massive design failure. The policy cards trivialized the decision, because they could be swapped so frequently. It became "this is my highest priority for the next 2 turns, so I'll micro-manage my efficiency by swapping in this card for those 2 turns".
Civ 5's policy trees made for much more meaningful decisions, because you had to live with them the rest of the game. For many, that was too far in the other direction, especially given the struggle the dev team had in trying to balance the individual trees (something they never properly achieved).
The happy medium (for me) is policies that have a noticeable impact on the type of civilization you are building, which can only be changed gradually and infrequently, or with a significant cost (revolution). Ideally (again for me) those policies would have multi-faceted impacts, not just be +x% to this one specific thing, but I don't expect the current dev team to embrace that as they seem to prefer single effects. I'm hopeful, though, that they may at least cut down on the "you can change all policy cards every 1 to 3 turns" system of Civ 6.
But the point is that their badness goes in exactly the opposite way than the one @Noble Zarkon is talking about.
Previous system had small bonuses. New system got bigger bonuses. And yet this new system is worse, because there are other factors which determine whether the system works good or not and whether the player choice is meaningful and is at all a choice instead of just following mostly the same pattern in every game.
They are trying to somewhat fix the issue with the introduction of civ-specific culture trees and traditions, and we are not yet sure what is going on with the governments. But all this has nothing to do with how big or small the bonuses are.