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.

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.

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.

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

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

~J

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

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.

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

~J

*coughwasusingsarcasmcough*

So was everyone else.

No they weren't! >.>

Uh huh.

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

~J

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.

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).

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.

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.


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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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!

Well, no one ever had the audacity to ask for a city.

Just one did.

Just the one time.

They gave me their cities in return, save one that inexplicably fell into the sea as the bay expanded one night.

Very strange.

I've got to say that I really love the fact that cities can actually defend themselves. I love how my loan city managed to fend off about 10+ American troops long enough that they actually paid me to accept a peace treaty. I had like maybe 5 troops in total, and most of them were really far away from that particular city

Played for the first time yesterday in order to get smarter within the next two weeks. Still processing the experience. Very different than before. Does not appear to require a scratchpad. Will comment later.

That's rather impressive. Unless your city was heavily invested in the buildings that raise your defense score or the troops were attacking in series rather then en mass, 10 troops would have been able to easily capture the city in 2-3 turns (barring any extreme difference in unit tech levels).

I wonder how much gameplay would change if you couldn't stack dozens of wonders in one city. I guess I understand gameplay is leaned towards that, your most productive cities (which tend to be your first ones, simply due to population and hopefully good choices on land location) make the best builders, so then you end up with maybe 3 cities that largely just build wonders inbetween times you're upgrading their production facilities. I mean, I suppose there's nothing really preventing a place from having 6+ wonders all by itself, but sometimes it does feel a little off.

I think it had something to do with it still being fairly early in the game, and my city was a quite large population. I think population was 12 or so, and they mostly had spearmen and such. On the few attacks they did with their melee troops they did 1 damage and took 5+. Overall they just weren't very aggressive with the attack. I'm not sure if it was because they were trying to starve me out, or because the difficulty was only set to 2. They didn't even fire with their archers all the time, often just repositioning them. I wonder if the fact that they had 12ish units trying to attack a single city was messing with the AI's movement. Oh, I did have a trireme and a horseman in the city as well. My horseman wasn't allowed to attack though, which kind of sucked.

Your horseman was probably garrisoned. If the unit shield is on the left side, it's garrisoned. If the unit shield is on the right side, it isn't.

I just played a game last night (continents). with 8 AI total. Somehow I landed on a continent featuring myself and India. The remaining 6 AI were all on the other continent. Once I saw this, I cranked my production over to a metric crapton of Spearman and Iroquois Warriors (along with a few warriors as I was waiting for my 2nd city's production value to go up due to population increases). During this time, India expanded to about 5 cities total (kind of crazy early expansion for an AI). I positioned all my units for a hit on India's capital for two reasons. The first reason, and primary one, was that this was the highest defense city. I knew my casualty rate would be higher attacking it, hence why I massed a bunch of Iroquois Warriors and Spearmen, but some of my units would get valuable experience and India would draw back most of its military units to defend the city. The second reason is that the AI tends to be a lot more compromising in negotiating a peace treaty after you knock out its capital. After taking out their capital, they offered me a peace treaty that gave me all but one of their remaining cities (which happened to be tucked directly between my two cities borders touched). I took it and promptly ordered those cities razed (they were in poor positions, or suffered severe overlap with another city). You can't raze the capital, but it was positioned nicely so that there wasn't any overlapping with my cities and likely wouldn't overlap with other cities I would be building. After the peace treaty expired, I declared war on India and took the last city for razing.

Now I'm the only civilization on my continent leaving the other 6 AI to compete with each other.

So I guess you will be concentrating on your navy, huh?

No point, it's a combination of city building and research since I only enabled a scientific victory. A continent is a bit large to protect with an early navy and the other 6 civs will be mostly occupied with each other.

Is that a deep church bell I hear ringing in the distance?

So, I saw others talking about how Bushido from the Japanese is overpowerd? I'll tell you what is really overpowered: The Germans on a huge marathon map. I've literally built two units: a scout and a single archer, and yet I currently have about 15 units thanks to barbarians joining me. I've used my army to conquer England, a city-state (gaining me friendship with two other city-states) and just conquered one of Rome's 3 cities. No one else has more than a couple armies because it takes like 40 turns to create one unit, and I can generally get a unit every dozen or so turns from the barbs.

Only current problem is that I have about 11 unhappiness, but luckily I'm in the middle of improving on 3 luxury resources, so I hope I can get my people happy soon.

Oh, and I'm on the highest difficulty that doesn't give the AI bonuses (5 I think).

And yes, I made sure to have my conquered cities be puppet states, but there is just too much population to handle.

That's a situational benefit that is very strong in early eras but pitifully weak in later eras due to two factors. First, as the territory of civilizations expands there's less land for barbarians to spawn on. Second, barbarians don't "tech up" as quickly as the AI. Bushido is effective throughout the entire game.

Just build a navy any way you don't want some coalition or super power to try and crush you or such. Sure it might limit your victory lenght but even dediaation one cit to a navy could help a lot if you position your fleet as a deterrent and maybe even let you strike out if you need more land/resources.

That's true, it does drop off in effectiveness as time goes on due to more and more of the world being seen, but it is a tremendous advantage early on. It's kind of like Napoleon who has his advantage vanish entirely as soon as you research steam engine. Sure, it doesn't help you any more, but it has been a big boost up to that point.

Edit: Rawr! Game won't let me end my turn because one of my cities doesn't have anything building... because it is a newly acquired puppet state that is still under rebellion. Anyone know of a way to make the turn end regardless of any sort of 'may want to do this first' stuff? Or do I need to load up an autosave and hope it doesn't screw up again?

Some thoughts. I'm kinda wishing there was a way to directly give technology to other states, instead of research pacts. I've noticed that as you pull ahead in the tech game, it becomes actually rather easy to pull WAY ahead, especially if the AIs fight amongst themselves while you remain more or less unmolested. Advances lead to more advances both in production and research, which further allow leaps in research/production, plus, by being ahead of everyone in the tech cycle, it generally means you're able to also work on Wonders before anyone else can even access them, which puts you more in the lead. Finally, the AI seems to be kinda a bully, it'll pick on you if you're weak, but if it thinks you're strong, it'll leave you alone, though it will send you 'angry messages' via diplomacy every so often. Basically you tell them to STFU and they don't do anything.

My initial 1 era lead has grown rather substantially, one just entered the renaissance, the rest are medieval, i'm....Russia in the modern age. Hell I just finished the manhattan project, and can shortly begin making atom bombs, while my next highest foe is using crossbows.

Which is why I kinda want to just throw them all an era or so worth of free tech, to make things interesting. At this rate, I'll have super giant death robots before they even have firearms.

I'm wondering it this is because marathon slows everything down, but consequently can lead to bigger gaps.

Yeah, I've noticed this. I hit someone with three culture bombs and they kept getting mad at me, but despite their massive army sitting on my border, they didn't actually attack me because they were way behind me in technology. Of course, that is likely less 'the AI is a bully' than 'the AI is smart'. I mean, how often do you attack an obviously superior civilization. I mean, is it worse to take a bit of abuse in the form of culture bombs, or get totally smashed into oblivion by a stronger force?

I had the same sort of thing on my standard speed game. I was in future era while everyone else was just barely discovering gunpowder. Think it has more to do with playstyle than game speed.

Yeah, I've always found the AI diplomacy to very realistic: annoying, random, senseless, and a waste of time.

I think it has actually gotten quite good. The AI is actually willing to make trades that aren't mostly one sided. Like I was about to capture America's capitol once, and so they offered all of their other cities (About half a dozen) and money (few hundred gold) in exchange for a peace treaty. It was perhaps too generous of them, but it certainly worked. They got to keep their capitol for the entire 10 turns of the treaty, and then I went to war and took the capitol anyway

P.S. Anyone interested in multiplayer games?

Didn't need to. When I own the continent, I don't need to spend gold on strategically buying tiles. If I need a navy or army I just buy it up. The only egress onto my territory ended up by an opponent was when they slipped a settler through the one gap in my coastline of territory to establish a city. Once I achieved my science victory I went to town on the AI. I dropped nukes on their cities, then unleashed an army of Giant Death Robots to squash any remaining resistance. It also turned out that the map featured 3 continents rather than two. So it was 2 Civs, 3 Civs, 3 Civs per continent.

I have starting playing King on pangea. Much more of a challenge, getting killed a lot. In civ 4 I had trouble with Prince. Now prince is easy, need king for a challenge

I took to cheating, giving myself scads of gold which I then in turn donated to my enemies (a bit peeved at the 9999 transaction cap per exchange) in the hopes it would help boost their production, it sorta helped, but not enough to make me interested. I also decided that as soon as I could produce Giant Death Robots, I would just put everyone out of their misery. I feel a little bad, my nearest neighbor is the largest, but only at the level where its most powerful unit are swordsmen and elephant troops, which I kill with stealth bombers, helicopter gunships, rocket artillery. Then I send my death robots deep and cap cities (gunships make great city cappers too). In two rounds I've taken about 12 of the enemy cities, oneshotting all resistance. I tossed a nuke on their capital for giggles.

I figure my game will be over in about 50 turns or so, as I march through the world.

I'll definitely change some settings around next campaign, maybe start everyone's tech level a bit higher so at least by the time I'm rolling in death robots, my foes at least have tanks.

dang, i think my game got too big. Running around 607 turns, and lags really hard, or about 1 in 4 times, crash to desk top. Think the memory leak gets too big or just trying to process too many things. Unfortunate, as I just wiped out the persians and was halfway through nuking the chinese.

What difficulty setting are you on? That could have alot to do with it.

Yeah, civ 5 seems really different/easier than civ 4. Not sure if that's good or bad.

Can't say that for sure till you've beaten it on deity level. And when playing multiplayer, difficulty is entirely different. Play me and we'll see how easy the game is

P.S. The content I'm on looks suspiciously like Italy, except that it is an island instead of a peninsula.