Let's say that you believe the Tribute nerf as it stands now is crippling both the Authority Tribute policy and the Authority finisher, and let's also say that you want to do mostly tall Warfare-as-raiding for kills and pillages and such rather than wide Warfare-as-expanding with lots of city capture. Perhaps you're playing a civ like Aztecs or Vikings that gets rewarded for such behavior.
There's a certain attraction in Opening Authority, then going straight down the right side for the strong combat bonuses which will be with you the whole game. Even the garrison policy would actually be quite powerful as a third policy for generating 1happy+2cpt per city. So you get to your fourth policy and finish Authority-Right, maybe you had some trouble settling out early but you got a lot of strong bonuses with long term power as well as a cool early steroid with the garrisons. What do you do now?
You could take Tradition and Sovereignty, but those are a bit awkward to take as a 5th and 6th policy in terms of some of what they give you. I suppose you could take them 4th and 5th and delay the combat bonus instead, but still (EDIT: This is probably correct, the cpt of those two policies combined is usually ~6-8 by then.) Taking them any earlier invalidates the strength of getting the garrison policy early. It's also a little embarrassing that you mixed two trees and didn't even manage to get both the border bonuses in doing so.
There aren't really any other great options though, because Progress doesn't have a good long term policy on the top level. You could maybe forsake the combat bonus altogether and take all three of Progress-Left instead, or you could maybe take all three of Progress Left AND all four of Authority Right, but then you'd miss two finishers or get behind in tenets by one, which probably would be too rough to bear (maybe Adopt Ideology and then go back for your second finisher after?)
What are your thoughts?
There's a certain attraction in Opening Authority, then going straight down the right side for the strong combat bonuses which will be with you the whole game. Even the garrison policy would actually be quite powerful as a third policy for generating 1happy+2cpt per city. So you get to your fourth policy and finish Authority-Right, maybe you had some trouble settling out early but you got a lot of strong bonuses with long term power as well as a cool early steroid with the garrisons. What do you do now?
You could take Tradition and Sovereignty, but those are a bit awkward to take as a 5th and 6th policy in terms of some of what they give you. I suppose you could take them 4th and 5th and delay the combat bonus instead, but still (EDIT: This is probably correct, the cpt of those two policies combined is usually ~6-8 by then.) Taking them any earlier invalidates the strength of getting the garrison policy early. It's also a little embarrassing that you mixed two trees and didn't even manage to get both the border bonuses in doing so.
There aren't really any other great options though, because Progress doesn't have a good long term policy on the top level. You could maybe forsake the combat bonus altogether and take all three of Progress-Left instead, or you could maybe take all three of Progress Left AND all four of Authority Right, but then you'd miss two finishers or get behind in tenets by one, which probably would be too rough to bear (maybe Adopt Ideology and then go back for your second finisher after?)
What are your thoughts?
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