When did they nerf puppets ?

[GoodSarmatian]

I just noticed that puppet cities have a 25% penalty on culture and science and don't get the +1 from Liberty. I didn't notice that before. Did they change it with G&K, the latest patch or a pre-G&K patch ?
Also does anybody know if the Order fnisher applies to puppet cities too ?

 

[Gamewizard]

Wow, thats news to me. Looks like the devs have been playing alot of VEM lately.

 

[bonafide11]

Oh wow, never noticed that either. That nerfs puppets as well as liberty in my opinion. Tradition gained a lot of ground on Liberty in G&K.

 

[zyx]

IIRC golden ages now increase culture too. So a huge puppet empire would benefit too much: no increased culture for SPs and a lot of extra culture from GA. To be honest puppets shouldn't generate culture anyway, as the SP costs stay the same. I'd like to see puppets just provide gold, because then the decision of puppeting or annexing would be: do I just need the gold or do I want to improve my Civ with all unhappiness and culture issues included.

 

[Miravlix]

Puppets doesn't work for + happiness with a garrisoned unit from honor either.

So yeah puppets has taken a significant hit to many effects.

I don't know if they used to give happiness for the building social policies, but I bet thats gone too.

Don't forget this hurt the AI more than players, since they can't annex cities.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Puppets doesn't work for + happiness with a garrisoned unit from honor either.

So yeah puppets has taken a significant hit to many effects.

I don't know if they used to give happiness for the building social policies, but I bet thats gone too.

This is wrong. Puppets do gain happiness from garrisoned units (and probably policies). It's just that 'happiness from garrisons' is not a thing any more. It's counted as Local City Happiness.

 

[Wuddel]

I was wondering why my borders would not grow at all, desipte the Liberty opener ...

 

[NotSure]

The penalty to science was one of the few things I didn't like about VEM. They didn't produce much of anything besides gold anyway. If you get one of the warmongers next to you and they get stuck on stupid, nothing short of puppeting most of their empire will stop the endless cycles of war. They already had downsides to a peaceful strategy in that they slowed the growth and potential of your own cities. Now they might be more trouble than they're worth? With the courthouse fixed, razing or raze-and-replace looks like the best approach.

The benefits from Order and some all-cities wonders like the CN tower were applied to puppets in the last game I played. I didn't know about the percentage reductions though.

 

[Yngvi]

Puppets needed a nerf anyway, IMO. My least favorite feature in Civ V.

 

[Miravlix]

This is wrong. Puppets do gain happiness from garrisoned units (and probably policies). It's just that 'happiness from garrisons' is not a thing any more. It's counted as Local City Happiness.

I don't think you understood what I said.

The Honor Policy give +1 happiness if a unit is garrisoned, that I think is gone. I'm not sure what your talking about.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

I don't think you understood what I said.

The Honor Policy give +1 happiness if a unit is garrisoned, that I think is gone. I'm not sure what your talking about.

It is not gone.
What I was talking about is how your happiness sources are listed if you mouse over the icon. '+x from garrisoned units' used to be a seperate category pre G&K but now units add to '+x from Local City Happiness'.
When I move a unit out of a puppet city I lose one from the local happiness category and when I move it back in I gain one . I checked that again ten seconds ago (I play in window mode). I believe the confusion is that a single city can never contribute more happiness than it has citizens from local happiness. If you have a size 2 city with a Circus it already has +2 local from the circus and garrisoning a unit will only add 2 and no , but if it has three citizens the unit will compensate for the from the additional citizen.

 

[zarakand]

Puppets doesn't work for + happiness with a garrisoned unit from honor either.

So yeah puppets has taken a significant hit to many effects.

I don't know if they used to give happiness for the building social policies, but I bet thats gone too.

Don't forget this hurt the AI more than players, since they can't annex cities.

AI can't annex cities??? I've never paid enough attention to that aspect of the game. What's the reasoning behind that?

 

[triheptyl]

AI can't annex cities??? I've never paid enough attention to that aspect of the game. What's the reasoning behind that?

It's not that they can't, I believe I may have seen it once, but its super-rare. The AI is just very unwilling to annex, I guess its not programmed for it. Not entirely sure why, maybe it was too hard to give the AI proper conditions for annexing and puppeting, so they just made it puppet.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

I just completed Order for my continental Hunnic empire.
The finisher does work on puppets.

 

[Andulias]

FINALLY! I absolutely hate puppeting, it makes no sense to me, it was like cheating. Finally we will be forced to actually run an empire, as opposed to controlling 3 cities and having an addition 20-30 to do the work for us. Finally there is an actual downside to puppeting.

I still think this system is one of the worst things CiV ever came up with though

 

[Naresh]

I'm happy about the nerf, I hated the idea of controlling 3 cities and having another 20 puppets.
Wouldn't they rebel or something?

I always saw it as a cheap way to increase defense / science / whatever else while you go for a culture victory.

I've always felt that puppet cities should add *something* to future policy costs, even if it's just 20% that of a normal city

 

[MadDjinn]

The only nerf to puppets was the -25% drop to culture and science.

It forces a choice now: to annex or puppet? Annex gains the +5gpt issue for the courthouse, but now it also gains +25% science and culture from the city (plus the ability to buy/build things of your choice there + manage the workers).

Unfortunately... 1-25% = 0 (round down), so that's why Liberty seems not to work. Though if you go into the city view, you'll see the +1 from Liberty there.

Ofc, you can just get the Sistine Chapel (+25%) and cancel out the culture hit.

 

[Montov]

I like the change, but I was hoping there would be patch notes of this.

 

[MadDjinn]

I like the change, but I was hoping there would be patch notes of this.

it seems the more recent patch notes have left out balance changes for some reason. This one came with the vanilla patch/G&K launch, not the recent hotfix.

 

[Slvynn]

good one. I also think that puppet citizens generate more unhappiness than regular... in my game it seems to be so.. less than annexed city ones but still seemsmore than regular pop