Proposal: Randomize Policies

[gunnergoz]

One thing that I find a bit repetitive is that policies are fixed in place and order, so that one tends to follow certain patterns that are more logical/productive.

History does not work this way; in practice, policies sort of evolve by trial and error.

I'd like to see a mod where policies are randomly jumbled within their trees every game. This way there is no "set" way to approach a given policy family. It may also make some policies more interesting and attractive than others, in new and provocative ways.

Anyone interested? I'm no programmer, so if an interested party is one, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

PS I'd also be happy to see expanded policy divisions and trees within them.

 

[Darac]

That does sound cool. Reminds me of the random tech tree in sword of the stars. The difference in sword of the stars though was that you could not see what the next tech would be. So couldn't plan a b-line for anything in particular. I don't know if that would work with social policies though.

But yes, I'd like to try random social policies.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Anyone interested? I'm no programmer, so if an interested party is one, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

All of the gamedata information, including policy and tech dependencies, is set when the mod is first loaded into memory. We don't really have very much ability to make changes to it once that's happened, not without breaking all sorts of other things. We can make some changes, under certain conditions, but in the case of Policies there are all sorts of other issues to consider; some policies are meant to be stronger than others, because they come later in a tree. And how exactly would you re-define the prerequisites? And what about the AI, which uses Flavor values to decide which policies are better than others, but which won't look at the placement of individual policies within a branch when deciding which branch to open next?

Once the DLL is out we'll probably have more flexibility on this, but for now, I'd say forget about it. Too much of the current policy UI is hard-coded anyway, so you wouldn't have much room for randomness; it's basically limited to a 3x3 grid (technically, 3x5 with half-spacing on the 5), and if you don't want the prerequisite arrows to look all screwy there'll be a few other limitations on placement.