personally I wish policies had a SET culture cost... just like tech... that was basically a seperate tree...
So that more cities = more culture. I don't like this BS "less cities are better" notion... its artificial and its silly. A massive empire produces far more cultural advances that some isolated tiny village in the middle of nowhere.
The only suggestion that would really work so far is the one from Celevin. To make it a bit easier to understand (and keep the integers) I would propose the following:
The culture bar should count/show "culture needed till next policy". With many cities, you have a higher number to fill up (scaling as before), but also more culture coming in from your cities. Selling of all your cities the turn before getting the policy would do nothing, cause only the "culture needed till next policy" would scale down as it should and you would have won nothing at all.
Hope I made it clear enough for everyone to understand.
This is basically what I was trying to suggest as well, but you have worded it more lucidly. It seems like the simplest fix to the exploit of selling off your whole empire to get entire SP trees at once.
You must not have been around back in the Civ3 days when fast expansion was how you had to win. Like... if you couldn't get 3-4 cities in the first 20 or so turns you fell behind (maybe not 20 turns, but you get the point).
The whole point of those games were to expand as quickly as you could. And this continued the entire campaign. If you didn't have 20-40 cities towards the end of the game, you weren't doing it right (and back then of course, there was no puppet option when you conquered a city, it was either raze or annex).
I remember in Civ4 they kind of tried to fix it by making it so that 1 big city could be just as good as 2 smaller cities. But this didn't really solve the expansion issue, more cities were always better
And on a side note, I disagree with the "more cities = more culture" idea you are throwing out. Why would that be true? And to continue this logic, more cities doesn't always mean better civilization either because if you go back historically the most populated countries weren't always the ones with the best economies or the happiest people or the most technologically advanced ones.
I'd like to see it just cost most each policy just as now, but have nothing to do with amount of cities.
If you develop more culture due to having more cities, then fine.. That's how it should be no?
You have more cities, you generate more productivity, more science output, and also more culture. Why should culture be cut if you have more cities?
Change it so that even when you are storing policies, the game tracks the cost of each new policy.
So suppose my policy increments are 500, 800, 1200, 1500 (hypothetical).
And suppose I am saving culture rather than spending.
Then make it so when I reach 1201 culture, I have 3 SPs saved, rather than having 1201 culture to spend at whatever the costs are at the time.
So that even if I lose cities, the cost of policies doesn't actually fall.
I guess a good real-world analogy for this mechanic is that you're adopting social policies with the culture you bank. So implementing any one of them, say monarchy, for instance would be much more difficult in a society composed of 10 cities than it would be for a 2-3 city nation. That makes sense to me anyway.
How do you end the turn without having to click "Adopt Policy"?
Yes. And it is. It can easily account for a third of your total culture points.Has anyone tried Siam for a cultural victory? I'm guessing the +50% culture from cultural city states is huge.
I remember in Civ4 they kind of tried to fix it by making it so that 1 big city could be just as good as 2 smaller cities. But this didn't really solve the expansion issue, more cities were always better. In this game you can win potentially with 4-5 cities, and that was unheard of up till now.