Well thank you!
I think we'll end up doing a lot of rebalancing in the end, regardless of which approach we pick (except for possibly the "choose Fear/Acceptance" external to Policies approach, but more on that below). Even Firaxis have had to tweak the BNW policy trees a few times (post-BNW) and they have a QA department and a whole team of devs to decide what configuration is best. One of the most recent patches tweaked the dependencies in Tradition and Liberty (possibly others) to try and make them more balanced. But yes, huge overhauls will clearly be a
lot more work, as you've said!
interesting that the recent changes appear to make liberty less good. Well, I suppose making the free settler less easy to get good doesn't make the *tree* less good, per se (in fact, maybe it simply prevents people from just grabbing two policies from it, and incentivizes the whole tree).
Reality definitely has more variety, but I think WoT goes into a fair enough amount of detail in the various different ways that kingdoms are structured for us to treat them as government types. While there are a lot of similarities between Westlands nations from an Earth point of view, here are some quick examples of the kinds of distinctions we could make (not actual suggestions, but just to give a general idea of the flavor):
Queendom (eldest daughter inherits, like Andor)
Panarchy (dual governance between a Panarch and King, like Tarabon)
Merchant Council (ruled by merchants, like Arad Doman)
Monarchy (traditional monarchy, like Manetheren, Cairhien, and others)
Council of Lords (ruled by nobility, like Tear before Rand showed up)
Empire (ruled by a supreme ruler, like Seanchan or Hawkwing)
Clan Leaders (divided up into clans, like the Aiel)
Decentralized (ungoverned, like the Tuatha'an)
These are very interesting. I do think, though, that based on the fact that CiV chose to relegate things like this to mere social policies, without concern for contradiction (e.g. "Monarchy" existing simultaneously to "Republic".... although now I that I think of it, Hello U.K.!), we are probably totally fine to do the same. You've likely given us several policy names right here.
These are good suggestions, but I was actually thinking of it a bit differently, so I can throw an option 3 into the mix!
I was thinking that players would arrive at places in the tree that used to be just one policy in BNW, but instead we've replaced it with 2 Policies, but players could only adopt one or the other. We could sprinkle Fear/Acceptance choices throughout the other trees this way without changing the fundamental balance of the policy trees. This would be a fairly transparent change to the user though - I'd imagine they would see why we did this to minimize work without having to diverge far from the BNW system.
OK, so alternate *policies* instead of fully alternate policy *paths*. I think I could mostly be ok with this. I don't know if I prefer it to the alternate paths idea, but I think it could work. I think if we could boil down our new policies into a small enough number that this would be able to be done on a consistent, but small, scale (e.g. one or two option points per tree) that it's probably the more economical way to go. More than one or two per tree, though, and I feel like it'd get kind of clunky and even overwhelming. Certainly would be less than elegant at that point.
But yes, the fact that it would keep the number of policies the same as in CiV is an excellent part of this.
I'll say more about the Fear/Acceptance thing below.
I don't think we'd want to go with optional Policies that you don't need to adopt before getting the finisher if we're keeping the general tree structure. It diverges only marginally from the BNW system but makes it easy to accidentally pick "wasteful" Policies for new players.
I can definitely see that. It also comes off as lazy, I'm sure.
Option #2 in general (multiple paths, completing one unlocks the finisher for the tree, but the other paths are still available) could be fun. It might make it feel even less varied though, because once a player has committed to one path down a tree then they feel they should power on ahead with that path to unlock the finisher soonest, even if they want a policy part of the way down the other path as well. It reinforces the limitations of the overall tree system.
Yeah. That's certainly a characteristic inherent to the SP system in general. I'm not sure this reinforces it in too bad of a way, though. I mean, it's more of the same, to me, and if it's acceptable in CiV (I'd say it is), it may be acceptable here. But, still, I do see the point, and definitely agree that in some ways it sort of presents the illusion of choice, and not necessarily a compelling choice.
I could definitely see option #1 working, because like my option #3 above, it allows us to leave the total number of Policies a given player has available throughout a game the same or very close to BNW, which helps with balancing.
I think that is an excellent point about keeping the balancing similar to BNW, and I think that's a very valid reason to go with either this or your option 3. The fact is, assuming we change some policies, or add more, or even rebalance some, we have a whole lot of testing to do and/or balancing in general in alpha and beta. If we keep the culture/policy math pretty much the same, that takes away a *huge* variable, and lets us focus on the policies themselves in our balancing. Otherwise, if one policy ends up appearing to mess up the balance of the game, we'd have to determine that the policy itself is what's doing it, and not, for instance, us doling out the policy too soon or too easily (causing its effects to scale over time or something).
In any case, I'm kind of warming to the idea of the mutually-exclusive policy paths, instead of our other two alternatives (which is not what I was thinking at first). Spoiler: I'm still of the opinion that we should go ahead and revise this stuff now, and not do a quick-dash version and save the rest for later (more on that below).
What I like about the mutual-exclusivity is it allows us to make things truly variable, and customizable, while preventing things from getting too unbalanced. Obviously, there's the thing above with culture-cost and such, but I'm thinking about something bigger picture.
Let's say these mutually-exclusive paths allow us to create two options for several of the trees. For example (not a proposal, just a thought exercise):
Honor - anti barb vs. anti shadowspawn
patronage - CSs vs. Tower and Stedding
Exploration - navy vs. T'a'r
Tradition - growth vs. Governors
CiV as it currently is is balanced to take into account a player maxing out a given policy, and adopting a set of similar Ideological Tenets. If we add new policy trees (or add additional policies that are optional but within the same trees), some of which are similar or adjacent in functionality, we're allowing players to "double down" on their specializations, and potentially throw balance way out of whack.
For example, a player taking tradition and some of the growth tenets has X growth potential. A player who does that AND goes into Governor-boosting policies, might end up with a capital that's a little too India/France for how common it is. Or, similarly, one player could dominate the CSs, the Tower, and the Steddings. A warmonger could be good against civs, barbs, and shadowspawn.
Of course, I do understand that towards the end-game, things are meant to get all swingy. Yes, we want things to go nuts once people get to those Tier three tenets. But I don't think we want such things happening in the earlier era. Somebody double-downing on tradition, for instance, is a problem. Or getting the equivalent of two honor trees worth of bonuses.
I feel like limiting things to one path creates variation that feels strategic and fun, if we balance it well. While having single-policy-options (option #3) achieves a similar effect, I feel like it won't feel as consistent and cohesive. I like the idea that we're creating "layers" of variability here, without making things actually infinitely variable. For example, a player could be:
Andor, the Shadow-leaning, Fearful, Authority civ, who excels in Tower negotiation and T'a'r.
That's somewhat cooler to me than
Andor, the Shadow-leaning, Fearful, Authority civ, who does some stuff with the Tower, CSs, and steddings, and has some navy stuff and also some T'a'r stuff.
While we provide our players options, they tend to be "chunked" in a way that helps keep things organized.
That said, the onus is on us to balance them properly - there'd be nothing worse than a situation where everybody's like "no, don't *ever* choose
that one!"
I'm a big fan of the final result of this one, but whether or not it's worth us trying to do it is the big question, really. I think I've arrived at a favored opinion for how we might approach Policies, so I'll go into it below in response to the relevant quote block.
I know we're talking about this more below, but I should say now that I'm not convinced that, all things considered, I *would* elect for this, even assuming we had tons of time. I think, perhaps, in a vacuum, these types would be nice, but CiV BNW already exists, and we are doing a mod of it. I like these radial ones, certainly, but that doesn't mean I'd elect to actually use them.
I think this is one of my favorite options from an end-result point of view. I don't think it would be significantly more balancing work than the radial options, once we throw out the trees then I think the whole Policy system will require balancing of a similar magnitude to keep it inline with what its function should be within the wider game.
I feel quite similar about this as I do about the radial things. At first I missed the "governments" when I started CiV, but the truth is, I'm fine with it now. I never was very good at the governments in other civs, anyways.
And, again, I don't think the Lore needs it. I think it's going a little far away from what the mod is "about," in a sense. I know you're suggesting that we not do it now, that we worry about it later, but I'm actually tempted to say we shouldn't do it later, either. I think that can be another mod. We could possibly create that mod, but I don't think it needs to be WotMod.
I think we could roll the naval/sea trade stuff into other places - having a few policies in other/replacement trees that help naval warfare and sea trading. It would mean that players couldn't focus explicitly on that aspect of the game (become naval superpowers or the like) but I get the impression people don't do that often anyway.
for sure.
Very good point, yes, reducing Policy cost is a much less intrusive way of compensating for having more Policies available in WoTMod than there are in BNW. If early-game Policy acquisition were to become too fast because of that change, we could change the rate that the policies get more expensive into a logarithmic kind of curve, like this:
[REDACTED]
Start out at the same price as BNW but end up at a lower one. Mimic the BNW curve at the beginning of the game, but then taper off sooner so players keep accumulating Policies faster on average over the whole game.
ooh! A Graph! I think you have the right idea here, though I have sort of convinced myself that we should probably try to keep the number of purchasable policies as close to BNW as possible, to prevent the need of something like this.
Right, here we are at my favored way of approaching Policies, but I think I'm looking at it a bit differently. I think the binary Fear/Acceptance choice, completely separate from Policies, is something that we can do to start with and have its thus-far-discussed effects. But I don't think that's what we should stick with longer term (post release). As we've both mentioned above, the WoT flavor doesn't force us into or even specifically suggest any particular set of changes to the Policy system. This makes me think that Policy changes are less important than most of the other changes we've discussed so far, which we should prioritize to have a working mod sooner.
With that in mind, I'd say we could use the Fear/Acceptance choice as a holdover that expresses our intent for the Policy system, but is much lighter weight for us to get up and running. Then we can come back and make more sweeping Policy changes that more tightly integrate Fear/Acceptance and the other parts of WoTMod when we've got a better idea of how those other parts work together, and how they've changed. (And also even what players think could be different about Policies to make them more WoT-y.) This would mean that we could pretty much leave the BNW Policies almost untouched. They wouldn't play directly into our new mechanics (yet), but they'd still support the fundamental strengths of a civ, which haven't been changed from BNW.
Thoughts? Choosing this route would kind of short circuit most of this discussion for now, and then let us re-evaluate the sweeping changes that we like above, but are unsure of whether they add enough to the mod for it to be worth it for us to do them.
Counterproposal from Counterpoint:
1 - Don't make huge, sweeping changes to the Policy System
2 - Make Fear/Acceptance an ideology-like binary choice
3 - do make some additions to existing policies. Not with additional trees, but with either alternate paths or simply alternate policies (on a smaller scale)
4 - tweak and balance as needed.
OK, so it's somewhat hard to organize these thougths, so... I won't.
First off, we've been talking about Fear/Acceptance "policies" and I've realized that I don't think we need any such thing. I think, especially when conceived as a proto-ideology, there's no reason to do anything more than simply make that binary choice - one that has no culture cost - and leave it at that. Can you think of a whole lot of specific policies that we should be limiting/tying to one kind of civ? I can imagine some effects that could be flavored to make sense as tied directly to either Fear or Acceptance, but is there a reason we should exclude Acceptance players from having the option to buy a policy that gives you +3 culture from city connections, or something else that we might flavor to be tied to Fear? It seems that, beyond the overarching effects (the FD spawn rate, Tower disposition, etc.), there doesn't seem any reason to tie Fear/Acceptance to the additional optional effects. I'd prefer not to say "ok, you chose Fear, that ALSO means you're going to be getting X and Y bonuses. That's making more out of the Binary Choice than we've intended.
Plus, Social Policies are optional. The fear/acceptance choice, presumably, will not be. Ideology is not optional (as you are of course required to pick one in the modern era). Having fear/acceptance policies that cost culture scattered throughout the optional trees seems ill-fitting.
Moving on, if we remove Fear/Acceptance - which was poised to be a large complicating agent - from the larger policy discussion, things actually get a whole lot simpler (and recall that I am suggesting we do exactly that). Sure, we have that prior list of New Content that justifies additional trees. Honestly, many of those seem to me to be rather easy to include only as single policies, or perhaps as alternatives to current lame policies. Examples of this are Govs, the white tower, the Horn, EaE, etc. In fact, we have earmarked a few trees as Lame in General - we could add some of this functionality in order to make those Less Lame in General in comparison with Trad/Lib/Rat
Others, I think could easily make sense as alternate paths in some existing trees, creating the nice customizability I discussed above. Shadowspawn could likely be worked into Honor. T'a'r into exploration or something. Channeling could perhaps be sprinkled around a few places. Alignment is tricky, but could be worked into Piety or something. That one might need it's own tree (at the expense of Exploration or something).
In any case, the point I'm trying to make is that I don't think it would take Large Scale Renovation in order to make things work the way we want them to for WotMod. Certainly we have some new policies to write, but that is a fraction of the work that would be later required for an Epic Overhaul.
Now, as to why I don't think we should "table" this and deal with it after release. Well, it's weird, I know, but I kind of don't *want* to have to deal with it post release. I can imagine the kinds of things we're going to be dealing with - getting in art, quotes, music, rebalancing, fixing bugs, adding civs - all things that are going to be high priority, because people will want them. I sort of imagine this getting put off for a long time, because it's such an epic undertaking, and not one we're likely to get as much outside help on. I can imagine it feeling like a real pain. It makes me feel like there's a rather significant likelihood that this Epic Overhaul never happens. And this lame doppleganger of BNW's system will be sitting in our game, sticking out as the one thing we were too lazy to up and deal with.
And, as I've stated, I don't think this is all important enough to do such an Epic Overhaul. Also, let's not forget, I don't necessarily like the Epic Overhaul end results more than I'd like a tweaked BNW system.
OK, end rant. I know that may not be what you want to hear, but I'm advocating we not table this, and we instead work at adapting the BNW system to fit our needs. I think the tech trees and Uniques will all be easier to do if we have a real custom-set of policies in place. I think our initial release will feel a whole lot more "real" if we do the same.
I think we may want exclusivity for other things aside from Fear/Acceptance for our more overhaul-y approaches, but they are definitely prime contributors to making mutual exclusivity useful. Pulling them off does give us the option of not having mutually exclusive policies/trees at all.
Right, as expressed above, I seem to be suggesting we pull Fear/Acceptance off of social policies but still keep mutually exclusive sub-trees... This last part I am of course not 100% on.
Tech unlock that we will come back to! Quote block preserved
Tech unlock.
True, not every minute detail. Are there any BNW systems that are missed in terms of Policy coverage?
Right, so off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of is Espionage - totally unrepresented in Policies, as far as I can tell - though totally represented in Ideologies.
We could totally do this with some of our weirder new additions - especially any of those that we want to see ramp up only in the late game. For example:
EaE
The LB in general (there's zero point to having early-mid game policies that affect this
governors
T'a'r (though this one probably works well as parts of policies
Alignment - since we've calculated alignment yields without considering SPs, I think, it might be best to add Alignment elements only into the late game (where we don't care if things get swingy)
Honestly, most of our new mechanics would probably be fine if mostly absent from the SP system, and reserved for Philosophies.
One thing of note, though, is that we probably should figure out a way to generate each LP type via SP finishers, as is the case in BNW, if I'm correct. This would mean finding a home for the Amb and the T'a'r ones (can't remember if there are any other totally new ones)
I don't think this structure of how policy tree exclusivity works tips us in favor of the binary choice. (though I am in favor of that for different reasons) What I described here is how the Policy trees used to work before BNW (Rationalism and Piety were mutually exclusive). The similarity to the feel of Ideologies is because Ideologies inherited the mechanics involved in how Policies were mutually exclusive.
If Fear/Acceptance are policy trees, then this system works fine for preventing players from flip-flopping or changing on a whim. The anarchy isn't the only cost, the player also loses accesses to all of the bonuses that used to be provided by the other mutually exclusive tree. So the player is choosing to adopt one policy from the other tree at the expense of all of the policies they've adopted already from the first tree. So if you go 3 Policies into Fear, then switching to Acceptance becomes a lot more painful for you, because you lose all 3 Policy bonuses.
For the binary choice, I agree that switching would be too easy if anarchy is the only cost. I'd be fine with us not allowing players to change in that case.
OK, so a lot of this has sort of been adjacently-covered in my above rant. I definitely agree that the simplest thing to do is just to disallow the player to change once they've chosen Fear or Acceptance. I think the choice won't be so epic in its effects, anyways, so it won't be the end of the world.
But on the other hand, it's not the end of the world to allow them to change (with anarchy) either, though it's maybe going to encourage weird situations where civs switch to Fear during certain eras and back to Acceptance during others, which is weird.
I was thinking this would be quite a minor diplomacy factor, possibly only marginally more than the embassy. So it would be very low impact, but it's just another thing to make our systems feel more like part of the wider game. I haven't found that Ideological differences always lead to civs hating me, sometimes longtime allies who choose a different Ideology from me remain allies for the rest of the game. It's just a matter of that negative being overcome by the other diplomatic events between the two players. On the level we'd be changing for the Fear/Acceptance, it would be relatively easily offset, just one factor of many that contributes to what a civ thinks of another.
Flavor wise, I'd say this is like the people from Seanchan that are shocked by everyday people's attitudes in the Westlands towards Aes Sedai. That those in Seanchan are actively fearful of un-leashed channelers. The Oppression Ideology is what leads to the leashing and the governmental structure of how channelers are treated, but it's the Fear choice that embodies everyday Seanchan citizens' reactions to meeting unchained channelers.
I think your explanation with Seanchan makes sense, and I'm on board with what you're suggesting here - a minor diplomatic effect.
Oh, still haven't found a good example from the lore of an Acceptance+Oppression civ. Got one?
Fear/Lib - Shara
Acceptance/Lib - Aiel, Sea Folk?
Fear/Auth - Tear
Acceptance/Auth - Andor
Fear/Opp - Seanchan
Acceptance/Opp - ???
Maybe Ghealdan, under the Prophet's rule?
Also, what is Amadicia (under Children control)? Fear/Opp?
Blargh, I always forget BNW changed that! I always go for Tradition or Liberty first, so I never really pay attention to the others until later. Piety used to unlock in the Classical era pre-BNW.
, Yeah I'm guessing only hardcore religious civs would go for piety first.
...stuff...
In general I think the power level of Tradition and Liberty is fun, and if we could raise the other trees up then it would make it more enjoyable for the player, rather than intentionally making those weaker in order to create uniformity. If we go for the binary choice approach though, I think rebalancing the Policies is something we don't necessarily want to spend time on.
Yeah, I think raising the others up is a good option, and certainly doable, considering the extra stuff we could throw in.
It's not that you unlock the ability to take the Rationalism tree first, it's that you needn't take any Policies from Commerce or Exploration before reaching the Renaissance. If you're fast enough at reaching Renaissance, then you may never end up in a situation where the Commerce or Exploration Policies are your best choice. You might still be finishing off Tradition/Liberty or Patronage, and then once Rationalism is available, it's the better choice than starting either Commerce or Exploration.
Right, also, this can happen if you have awful culture output. I've had some games where I just barely get to Rationalism before I get ideologies....
That would mean an LB tree is in the runnings - which would probably be a hybrid channeling/LB tree? (Also, Domination is sad that it only gets Honor!) If we decide to change the Policies now, that is.
I mentioned this above, but I don't think LB should have a tree. There's a few reasons for this:
1) (as stated above) it is all late-game, so should likely be contained within Philosophies
2) the LB is a combination of other things - fighting, science, etc. There are actually very few "LB only" things, and they are all either highly esoteric (seals), tied to one side and not the others (Dragon), or late-game only. All of these make them ill-fitting for policies. . Alignment is the exception to this, but even then, might make sense best as having its own tree (or none, see above), rather than an "LB tree"
re: Honor. Yeah, well we should make honor better then!
I will be back tomorrow though!