Should you open honour before other policies?

[Cedbird]

It's a really pitiful amount of culture. Honor is kind of a crappy tree, compared to Liberty and especially Tradition. It's good for specific civs that rely heavily on creeping (Songhai, Germany, Aztecs, maybe Celts). Also an alright choice for heavy domination civs like China. But I wouldn't open it just for the culture bonus, definitely not a good investment.

I agree . If you want to knock some heads off early . Go for it . There is no weak opener . Only openers that fit your strategy . Ask yourself . What is my strategy ? Once you answer your question than decide which opener fits it best .
If you have a GG and 15% extra with adjacent melee units . That even might be enough to win you two a three important cities from a neighbor . Huge jump on the game .

 

[KGPurrs]

Normally you will take all liberty, then all of the right side of honor, and then oligarchy in tradition.

Get holy warriors from religion and scout up every city. I like to go pilgrimage founder.

 

[Xiao Xiong]

I find scouts make the best barb killers, especially if you take honour. They're cheap, and while they're slow, they're effective. Promote them up the survivalism line, once they have survivalism II they are almost impossible to kill. Fortify them in a forest next to a barb camp and wait for the barb to attack, or if there are no other barbs about, maybe even attack first. You'll do minimal damage to the barbs, but considering how fast you recover your health it doesn't matter--after a few rounds of healing you can kill any barb and clear the camp.

Sometimes if the barbs are heavy you need to bring an archer a long with the scout. Ideally, you have a scout that popped up to an archer off a hut and can cross terrain like other scouts.

Warriors are not good barb killers because they take too long to heal. Archers are OK so long as you can keep them out of range so the barbs don't take them down--in combination with a scout, archers are great.

 

[_hero_]

The opener is far more valuable if you're playing with raging barbs on and/or with a civ that benefits from fighting barbs (Aztec, Germany and Songhai all benefit greatly from the opener).

But don't take the opener simply for culture. Even if you plan on finishing the tree (it's an underrated tree IMO*) You're better off filling out tradition first or even liberty for the free GP.

As for honor being underrated, no single tree provides more theoretical happiness. The combat bonus isn't huge but in a close fight it may just be the difference between winning and losing. Cheaper unit upgrades can save a *ton* of gold in a domination focused game.

The problem with honor is that most people don't want to game their strategies around it. And perhaps on the highest difficulties it is very difficult to do so. A little more juice (maybe cheaper rush buy of units) would really benefit it on those difficulties.

 

[Heretiv]

Honour is appealing but sadly there are great practical benefits from both tradition and liberty that make them much more appealing.
I guess in a wide game the free happiness from garrisons and military buildings would rock - bext try it out!

 

[Sidor1982]

There was a similar thread to this one not so long ago, you could search for it.

However basically every conclusion you could get is that opening honor only for the culture is not worth it.
Whether you'll be able to adopt 2 - 3 tradition/liberty policies earlier thanks to the honor culture depends on the amount of barbs found and killed, the additional policy cost snowballs in later stages and delays rationalism/order policies by a lot.
Any cost/benefit culture analisys will provide the same results.

 

[sufficiency]

I just played a game as Ethiopia which I went for Honor + Autocracy and won by domination. It was actually rather fun and effective. Honor + Oligonarchy is roughly the same as Liberty, but with some strengths and weaknesses.

Here's an LP:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=12218738#post12218738