Civ 5, My impressions Options

[StealthSigma]

Tell me more about social policies, please.

Civ V features 10 social policy tracks. Here's a breakdown of how the system works.

Every city will generate a number of culture points per turn. Culture points have a dual purpose. The first and primary purpose is to fuel the acquisition of social policies. The second purpose is to foster natural expansion of your territory by acquiring tiles.

The amount of culture points necessary to get a social policy goes up as you acquire new social policies. The culture point cost also goes up as acquire more cities (each additional city increases the cost by a certain percent and I'm not sure if this percent varies). So if your first social policy unlocks tradition for 10 culture points, your second social policy can unlock a second social policy or get one of the first tier social policies in the Tradition tree. Social policies provide passive benefits to your civilization. For instance, unlocking Liberty cuts the training time of your settlers in half. Generally, each track is focused towards providing a benefit in an area. Additionally, each social track requires you to be in a certain age to acquire. You start out with access to just Tradition, Liberty, and Honor.

Tradition: Excellent for small city count civilizations. It provides a lot of boosts to your capital city and some territory benefits in order to allow you to better compete with larger civilizations.
Liberty: Excellent for high city count civilizations. Some of the bonuses are good regardless (+1 culture per city, +1 production per city) but the others really shine with more cities.
Honor: Excellent for military focused civilizations. Provides a lot of boosts that increase combat effectiveness or ancillary effects related to soldiers.
Piety: Perfect complement to small civilizations focusing on culture. One of the final social policies grants free social policies.
Patronage: Perfect complement to civilizations seeking a diplomatic victory. Provides a lot of benefits related to city-states.
Commerce: Provides you money or saves you money. It's not geared towards any specific victory type, but all of its social policies are useful.
Freedom: Another perfect complement to a cultural victory. This has two major boons to culture. The first is doubling culture production in any city that has a world wonder. The second is to halve the cultural point cost of all future social policies.
Rationalism: The science track. Everything about it is related to science or because of science producing buildings. Universities give happiness, a happy society increases science rate. In addition, you can get 2 free technologies from the social track as well.
Order: This appears to be a track geared towards expansive civilizations. It has a policy that decreases unhappiness from the number of cities you have. It increase your production rate as well gives bonuses to your units while in your territory.
Autocracy: This is the mack daddy of military policies. Decreased cost for purchasing your units (33% from this and 25% from Commerce). You reduce the unhappiness from annexed cities (though you could always raze or make them a puppet). Causes your damaged units to have +25% damage. Doubles your strategic resource output (necessary for the better units). Finally, there's the one policy you activate just prior to going to war with a major enemy. For 20 turns you get a 33% bonus to your combat strength. These are huge bonuses, but they come at a cost that I explain below.

You can pick and choose from policies as you see fit with two exceptions. The first exception is that you must have acquired all the prerequisite social policies in previous tiers for a track in order to access latter tiers. The second exception is with the Liberty, Freedom, and Autocracy tracks along with the Piety and Rationalism tracks. If you take Autocracy, you cannot take Liberty or Freedom without giving up all the social policies you've earned in Autocracy. The same exists for Piety and Rationalism.

The easiest path to a social victory is using India and going the Bollywood method. The Bollywood method is to obtain the cultural victory with only 3 cities. India is perfect for this because the unhappiness you gain from population is halved, while the unhappiness you get from cities is doubled. When I did this method I was earning my 19th and higher social policies at a rate of about one every 10 to 12 turns.

[Voran]

Currently in turn 218 or so of a marathon huge civ war on an alternate earth-type world. Playing as the ruskies. Have managed to fend for myself well, I'm roughly 1 'era' ahead of my competition, midway through medieval while everyone else is either middle classical or just entered classical. For giggles I downloaded the 'always get xp from barbarians' mod, and cranked barbarian spawn up to max. I've managed to fend off the wandering hordes, and gain some nice xp from them. Wiped out the arabian civ a few turns ago, as they were uncomfortably close in one of my border areas. The USA civ is also right under me, and I'm thinking of keeping them sorta isolated while they build up, then swoop in and take them.

Only at crappy trieme level naval forces at the moment, and it seems like there's a few civilizations that are advancing more or less unhindered in some unknown part of the map, they're the ones that are at higher tech level than the others, tho still behind me. Only have 1 coastal ship myself, but since he's been more or less solo in his barbarian hunting, he's actually pretty powerful. Hope to keep him alive long enough to upgrade him to a frigate or something in another era or two.

[nezumi]

Wow, those sound awesome.

Do social policies cause conflicts between nations? For instance, are two high-liberty nations going to naturally fight against an autocracy? (I'd love to set up a WWII scenario which extends beyond just setting military units out. I'd love to have a scenario where the nations are fighting because one nation is doing X horrible atrocity, rather than just because the game is programmed to say 'turn 15, you declare war'.)

[StealthSigma]

Wow, those sound awesome.

Do social policies cause conflicts between nations? For instance, are two high-liberty nations going to naturally fight against an autocracy? (I'd love to set up a WWII scenario which extends beyond just setting military units out. I'd love to have a scenario where the nations are fighting because one nation is doing X horrible atrocity, rather than just because the game is programmed to say 'turn 15, you declare war'.)

I'm not aware of any overt tensions caused by differing social policies. If you avoid Autocracy and either Piety or Rationalism, you can get 8 of the 10 social policies fully researched. It's not like religion in Civ 4.

[Fix-it]

no. social policies do not cause standing changes with other civs.

[Kagetenshi]

Do social policies cause conflicts between nations? For instance, are two high-liberty nations going to naturally fight against an autocracy?

I hope not—it certainly isn't supported by real-world examples!

~J

[pbangarth]

I hope not—it certainly isn't supported by real-world examples!

That's because 'high-liberty' nations really aren't. Oh shit. Political content.

[Karoline]

I hope not—it certainly isn't supported by real-world examples!

~J

Yeah, there are no historical real world examples of embargoes or wars happening because of forms of government. There wasn't a cold war because of the different ideals behind communism and capitalism. And there certainly haven't been any democratic nations that have bombed other countries because they didn't like their form of government.

One thing that I did just realize about Civ in general is that all wars are basically waged for personal gain as opposed to religious values or anything like that.

P.S. Downloading the demo on Steam right now. I'm kind of hoping I don't like it, because I really don't want to end up spending $50 on it.

[Kagetenshi]

there certainly haven't been any democratic nations that have bombed other countries because they didn't like their form of government.

Oh, there certainly have been. Of course, they weren't always bombing autocracies to set up democracy…

~J

[Karoline]

Oh, there certainly have been. Of course, they weren't always bombing autocracies to set up democracy…

~J

*coughwasusingsarcasmcough*

[Doc Chase]

*coughwasusingsarcasmcough*

So was everyone else.

[Yerameyahu]

No they weren't! >.>

[Doc Chase]

Uh huh. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Kagetenshi]

*coughwasusingsarcasmcough*

I got that. My argument stands—different ideologies may make enemies, but the support for similar ideologies making friends is much weaker.

~J

[nezumi]

One thing that I did just realize about Civ in general is that all wars are basically waged for personal gain as opposed to religious values or anything like that.

Exactly. That's one aspect of Civ which has always made me a little bonkers. I really want to see A and B go to war because of a difference in beliefs, and for no other reason.

[Tanegar]

One thing that I did just realize about Civ in general is that all wars are basically waged for personal gain as opposed to religious values or anything like that.

How is that different from real life? "They don't share our values" might be the propaganda used to drum up support, but the vast majority of wars have been fought for material gain. Anytime you see two countries fighting, you can bet your ass that somebody, somewhere is either getting rich(er) or about to get rich(er).

[Dumori]

Or is at least hoping to. Its not worth the cost logically or not if you gain nothing but you just dislike them. To start a fight though I will argue that this added wealth may not be metrial. Some times the chance of respect will tip the scales though not very often on a large scale. Lucky when views really coilide they tend to also have a taking something away from one side aspect.

[Karoline]

I got that. My argument stands—different ideologies may make enemies, but the support for similar ideologies making friends is much weaker.

~J

Oh, didn't realize that is what you meant. But there is plenty of support for it actually. Remember how all those communist countries banded together after WWII? And all the democratic ones did the same? There is quite a bit of support for similar ideologies banding together.

How is that different from real life? "They don't share our values" might be the propaganda used to drum up support, but the vast majority of wars have been fought for material gain. Anytime you see two countries fighting, you can bet your ass that somebody, somewhere is either getting rich(er) or about to get rich(er).

I'm thinking more holy wars. Crusades, terror attacks, 'liberation', etc. Alot of these are done for the sake of religion or ideology as opposed to material gain.

Exactly. That's one aspect of Civ which has always made me a little bonkers. I really want to see A and B go to war because of a difference in beliefs, and for no other reason.

I didn't play it much, but I know religion was fairly important in Civ IV. Would have been a great opportunity for holy wars and such.

[StealthSigma]

One thing that I did just realize about Civ in general is that all wars are basically waged for personal gain as opposed to religious values or anything like that.

I suggest you play Civ IV then. That one featured religion. Woe is me that one game where I was playing as Taoist Japan and Islamic France decided they didn't quite like me because I was Taoist and consequently nuked my cities despite having an awesome history of no war.

[Voran]

Man, I think the last version of Civ I played before this was #2 (holy crap, 1996). My marathon russian game continues, up to like 260 turns or so, still in BC (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) I just entered the renaissance, one of my opponents just entered medieval, rest are classical, I just wiped the 4 cities of the United States off the map (well...annexed 2, razed 2). Thus far I am noticing some odd placement issues from my AI foes, two civs so far have decided to cluster their primary cities, yet then start one waaay off away from the others, practically in the middle of territory held by me and 2 other people. Also, AI civs aren't so good about maximizing their tiles, the USA decided to place two cities practically on top of each other...

I'm rather enjoying the rapid spawn of barbarian tribes, its been a challenge keeping fog of war areas away from my cities, without diverting military units to just sit in hexes to maintain visuals. At the moment I need those military units to help clean up my borders, so its a nice mini-running game within my own borders. On the other hand, being able to count on a steady supply of barbarians to farm xp from has resulted in some fairly powerful military units with the fun 'multi-attack' ranking powers.

[nezumi]

Second question, does Civ V support things like rebellions, etc.? Rhye's and Fall had this, where when a civilization gets too big and isn't producing enough culture, it literally schisms, and colonists declare independence. In Civ IV and prior, the only way you could get that was if your capital falls. So you can never have things like the United States actually breaking off unless you actually destroy London first.

[Doc Chase]

I suggest you play Civ IV then. That one featured religion. Woe is me that one game where I was playing as Taoist Japan and Islamic France decided they didn't quite like me because I was Taoist and consequently nuked my cities despite having an awesome history of no war.

Somehow the Civ4 game I played had me as the cradle of every religion. Like, in the same damn city, even. Boggled my mind.

[Yerameyahu]

Yeah, that used to be my goal: found every last religion. A couple are trickily-close to each other, so you usually miss one, even on the lower difficulties.

[Doc Chase]

Yeah, that used to be my goal: found every last religion. A couple are trickily-close to each other, so you usually miss one, even on the lower difficulties.

Rest of the world: "GIVE US SAN FRANSISCO IT HAS EVERYTHING"
Me: o.O Nnnnno? O hey! I can see everything in your cities! Hooray! Poor man's satellite view!

[Yerameyahu]

Well, no one ever had the audacity to ask for a city. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)