Progress and early settling

[Ninal]

After a few months hiatus from playing Civilization I'm back to the best computer game I have ever played: Civ V Vox Populi. I've recently finnnished my 6th ever Deity Win with a tradition Theordora. I noticed that 4 out of my 6 wins were with a Tradition opener and 1 with both Authority and Progress. I talked to my friends who are also vivid Vox players and discussed the early policies. We have less experience with warmongering and Authority but all agreed that progress has become a real struggle.

If you want te create a large (7-10 cities) empire at Deity you need to be really fast with settling. As said the -1 population has really hurt progress. I think we definitely need to buff progress early settler production and would like to see both the production bonus and the food=production when settler producing bonus introduced. It would fit progress to be the best at early settling. Besides even if you succesfully settle quickly you still have plenty of problems as progress. You still need to defend you empire, keep it happy and advance in science and policies. All being hampered by the larger number of cities.

Right now it feels better to just stay small early game so that you can get your ealy policies fast. Than you have two options: either stay small and go tall (tradition), or go to war and conquer (authority). The more peacefull "settle quickly-survive-get infrastructure" playstyle that progress should promote just doesn;t seem viable to me at Deity at the moment.

 

[Zanteogo]

(didn't read any of the posts before this.. so forgive me if this has been brought up)

I almost voted not to change anything because in my opinion the three starting social policies are good the way they are. Giving progress anything else then it becomes just too good.

However the vote brought up something I suggested before that I agree with. Authority should not be getting a free settler. It doesn't fit the flavor of the tree. I would rather we did this:

Change the settler in the Authority tree to a Great General. Remove the yeilds from taking cities from the same policy and change it to a Great General buff. (A minor one, like +5% combat, maybe +1 speed or sight)

Change the free worker in progress to a settler.

Add a worker to the tradition tree. (One of the first two polices)

This will add a free units to each of the starting polices and give them each more "feel". The change to each will also help keep them all balanced with each other