What Social Policy Should Really Be

[langdon]

※ This post has been modified significantly. Please read through again before further commenting.

Social policies is a great improvement in Civ V, replacing government forms in previous Civs. However, "social policies" in the game are just "benefits of accumulated culture points." They are nice buffs, but really helpful in the overall gaming.

Policies are different from pure benefits. Generally, policies turns one types of yield in other ones. Right now, there are not many ways we can do that. For examples, please see post #15.

By turning on and off policies, we can manage and adjust all types of yield according to the current situation. When you are invaded by other civs, you can turn on all the defensive policies to make sure you can survive. When you are behind in technologies, you can adopt all the science policies so that you can catch up.

Policies will have benefits and costs. Here are some examples:

Public Transit:

• Benefits: +1 production, +1 gold, and +1 happiness per city
• Cost: 3 gold per turn for maintenance

Green Energy:

• Benefits: +2 production from Solar and Hydro Plants
• Cost: +2 maintenance per Solar and Hydro Plants

Organized Religion (This one is directly from the current "social policies"):

• Benefits: +1 faith from Shrines and Temples
• Cost: +1 maintenance per Shine and Temple

Public Health Care:

• Benefits: 20% of food is reserved when a new citizen is born
• Cost: +1 maintenance per hospital

Patents:

• Benefits: +20% science from Research Labs
• Cost: +2 maintenance per Research Lab

Agriculture industrialization:

• Benefits: +1 food per farm
• Cost: 1 gold per 2 farm tiles upon adopting; all future farms will need one more turn to build

Mathematics Contests:

• Benefits: +1 science for every 2 citizen from Public Schools
• Cost: +1 maintenance per Public Schools

Opera Performances:

• Benefits: +1 happiness from Opera Houses
• Cost: +1 maintenance per Opera House

Employee Rights:

• Benefits: +15% production from factories
• Cost: +1 maintenance per factory

Social Welfare:

• Benefits: +1 happiness in 5 citizens
• Cost: 1 gold per turn per 5 citizens

Each policy also comes with an "ideology points." For example, "Social Welfare" will produce one Socialism point. The total ideology will determine the government type of a civ, which will have a great impact in diplomacy in late eras.

What about culture points? I think it can be treated similarly as faith points. Culture points can be used to buy culture buildings such as Opera Houses, and be used to buy great artists.

Please discuss! More suggestions are welcomed.

[Vlynor]

Well, culture is a group's way of life, so having certain 'policies' makes sense.

I'm not sure where I stand on this, though. It could be interesting if elaborated on, just one thing, though.

Social Welfare:

Benefits: +1 happiness in every city
Cost: 10 gold per turn

Should scale by population.

[PachaMinnie]

Social Welfare:

• Benefits: +1 happiness in every city
• Cost: 10 gold per turn

10 gold per turn? No one is going to adopt this. The cost is to high.

Agriculture industrialization:
Benefits: +1 food per farm
Cost: 1000 gold

Same as above. 1000 gold is a lot of gold.


The game doesn't need to be realistic it needs to be fun. This doesn't sound as fun as the current unique social policies the game has. Although I will hand it to you that it is well thought out, I still do not like this idea.

[langdon]

10 gold per turn? No one is going to adopt this. The cost is to high.

Don't you realize that is how much the current governments spend on social welfare? I would scale up the happiness production a bit. If you have ten cities in late eras, a happiness cost one gold per turn is fairly cheap.

Also 1000 gold is not really a huge amount of money, since Agriculture industrialization will be unlocked in Industrial era.

I made these suggestions because every time at the end of the game, most of all civs have super high gold per turn. Some civs also accumulated tons of gold unspent. It is somehow unbalanced in the money part in this game.

Of course the game doesn't have to be realistic, but I would say the current policies still need some tweaking.

[Vlynor]

Don't you realize that is how much the current governments spend on social welfare?

What? The government spends 10 gold for welfare? Like I said before, if you want realism, make it scale by population.

[Artifex]

Patents: Benefits: +20% science

More like -20% science, and perhaps +gold.

And yea, as above, gold income scales with empire size and era. Flat costs are not a good idea.

[stethnorun]

10 gold per turn? No one is going to adopt this. The cost is to high.

Does anyone else laugh when they read this and think about the real world equivalent? "No one would pay for an entitlement society! The cost is too high!"

Hehehehe

[ejafus]

I agree that social policies don't work. To me they are just things that make my empire work better, but I don't feel like they provide any sense of realism to the game.

Bring back governments as one mechanic.

For social policies, I feel like they are missing that realism factor, so find a way to capture that. langdon's suggestions are great examples. Those I would add for later in the game would be concepts dealing with healthcare, military, immigration, currency/economics, etc.

Example for health care: universal health care, private health care, etc.
Example for immigration: have an immigration policy, accept immigrants, accept refugees, support cultural diffusion, support cultural absorption.
Example for economics: centralized currency, adopt international currency, subsidized housing, etc.
Example for military: all populace must serve 1 year, conscription, etc.

[TheEarthSheep]

So, what you're saying is, you want Civics from cIV back. It's funny that 2/3 of suggestions here are just bringing back concepts from cIV. It still exists, if that's what you want, you can play that.

Social Policies using culture is the only reason that militaristic, scientific, economic, expansionistic, religious, or diplomatic civs have any reason to build up their culture, that keeps the game balanced.

It does make sense that having a strong culture could give you a settler. If a culture believes that it should expand to cover the earth, members of its society will do that. There are examples of this all over history, American Manifest Destiny for example.

I do think that there is some amount of problem with the system in place though. It's silly to me that you can adopt seemingly conflicting policies (Tradition has both Monarchy and Oligarchy) and that you have to adopt a full tree to get the benefit from it. The way I see it, Social Policies should be shaped more like a pedigree chart, where every rung you go down gives you two options for the next policy, and eliminates the one you didn't choose. You could have five or so of these operating in tandem. So, in the Government tree, the first thing you could choose is whether you want a Democracy or a Monarchy. Monarchy could then choose between Hereditary Rule or Rule by Right, which would then choose between Mandate of Heaven or Might of Arms. Democracy could choose between Aristocracy and... something else you get the idea.

[dennylc]

I like the idea but would keep the culture points how they are but reaching each cultural level would allow you to add one additional policy. For example you culture reached 25 you can now have 1 culture policy active. The policies could be changed during the game with a waiting period to make the change of 2-3 turns. During that time you lose the old policy but don't gain the new one until the turns are up. You could even make the changing of the policy cost additional culture if you felt the waiting period wasn't enough of a penalty for making the change. This way it will make getting culture important is it will determine how many policies you can have active at once.

[Silverdawn]

Social policies aren't supposed to feel realistic. They're more semiotic than realistic. Social policies exist in response to the pacing of the game rather than in response to a need for believable socio-political evolution. Does the concept of Liberty suggest more 'productive' cities? Does the concept of Freedom suggest a military that works for free? Of course not. The social policy trees exist in order to facilitate gameplay rather than simulate society.

That's the key here. Civ 5 is not a history sim. Its association with history is purely semiotic. At its core, if you strip away all the historical references, it's a 5X game on a hex grid reminiscent of a wargame.

I'm totally in favor in taking another look at Social Policies and changing them. But I think what you're suggesting requires a different game design principle than the one Civ 5 follows. Civ 5 isn't built for realism. It just borrows inspiration from history.


Also, I feel that your suggestions are more geared toward alleviating the money-bloat by endgame. If you want to create a gold-sink, I'm totally in favor of checking out some ideas, but making social policies more costly is a punitive idea that just hurts players for having big gold stockpiles. A better solution might be to figure out why gold per turn tends to be very high by endgame and why it's not often spent.

[circuitrider]

The proposed changes are of no interest to me. I would stay with the system as it is.

For one, I do not have gobs of gold at the end of the game or, for that matter, at any time during the game.

If the game were like the OP proposes, I would feel I had wasted money on a game I would not play.

[MegaBearsFan]

Sounds like what the OP is going for is a setup similar to SimCity's "City Ordinances". I've been experimenting with similar ideas, but haven't come up with a working system yet.

I agree that there should be a collection of permanent buffs, as well as policies that can be toggled on/off which come with pros and cons, and also exclusive government types that can be changed over time (either through the will of the people or by an act of the player).

I like your idea of ideology, but I'm concerned that the game is starting to have too many "yields" that need to be micromanaged. Having all these numbers makes the game feel less organic and more mechanical. Perhaps, when a more democratic government is selected, these ideologies will have a direct influence on what policies can be selected; whereas, a more totalitarian government can select any policies, but at the risk of causing social unrest if the policies are ideologically unpopular.

I think the complete lack of any internal management really causes the second half of the game to drag. Once all the land has been settled, the whole game just boils down to queuing up your techs, and city-builds and hitting "End Turn", stopping ever 10 or 20 turns to adopt a policy or make a trade deal. Unless you're in a constant state of war, the Renaissance onward can be very boring to play.

I was hoping that Privateers, religion, spies, and new CS missions would help fix this problem, but they don't. The Privateers still can't do anything unless you're in an open state of war (so they're just like every other warship, but start with an extra promo). Yawn. Spies are too passive and don't do anything to help you actually damage the other players. I really preferred how Civ IV spies were units that you moved around on the map, and which you could use to sabotage cities and tile improvements. It was very active, and gave the player something to do. Not the case in Civ V. The new CS missions also are disappointing in that they are way too passive. Most of them end up being "accumulate the most yield". You can't really actively do anything to accomplish this goal unless you want to divert your entire economy into producing buildings that produce the appropriate yield, but that's usually not practical, and the desires of the CSes will usually be contradictory. Just keep doing what you're doing, and some CSes will like you without you having to do anything.

So I support any efforts by the community to make the late-game more actively require player involvement, since apparently the developers don't have any interest in doing so...

[PachaMinnie]

I agree that social policies don't work. To me they are just things that make my empire work better, but I don't feel like they provide any sense of realism to the game.

Bring back governments as one mechanic.

For social policies, I feel like they are missing that realism factor, so find a way to capture that. langdon's suggestions are great examples. Those I would add for later in the game would be concepts dealing with healthcare, military, immigration, currency/economics, etc.

Example for health care: universal health care, private health care, etc.
Example for immigration: have an immigration policy, accept immigrants, accept refugees, support cultural diffusion, support cultural absorption.
Example for economics: centralized currency, adopt international currency, subsidized housing, etc.
Example for military: all populace must serve 1 year, conscription, etc.

Why don't you just go play a Paradox game? I would point you to Victoria 2.

[langdon]

Under the current Civ V culture and social policy system, I would say the ten branches should not be called "social policies," but "benefits from accumulated culture points." Those bonuses do not cost anything except time. They are not a bad buff after all.

Policies, by definition, are different from pure benefits. Policies are more like trading and exchanging. For example, By spending money in maintaining employee rights, you get high productive workers, or production. Policies should allow more trading and exchanging options (ideally). Currently in Civ V, there are not many options around, even with the most flexible unit, money:

(besides via buildings, or maintenance costs)

money → food: none
money → production: instantly having a building or unit
money → science: research agreements (also costs time)
money → culture: none
money → faith: none
money → happiness: none

And the other way around:

food → money: none
production → money: you can work to produce gold, at a rate of 4:1
science → money: none (maybe this type of conversion is not needed)
culture → money: some "policies" gives you money related benefits, but no direct conversion
faith → money: some belief gives you money related benefits, but no direct conversion
happiness → money: golden ages, but no direct conversion

I am hoping to see most of these conversions made possible, not only to tweak the late game experience, but also to make some small or poorly managed empires to have a better chance to win.

[SlickSlicer]

yeah no

The game works fine as it is. Trying to shoehorn in your idea of realism into the game is a bad idea.

[langdon]

yeah no

The game works fine as it is. Trying to shoehorn in your idea of realism into the game is a bad idea.

I am not talking about realism anymore. What I am hoping is there should be more ways that we can convert one unit to other units, so that we can make the best use of them. If you are behind in technologies in a Civ V game, you will want to focus on science more in near future. Right now there is no way to do so, but policies can achieve that, by turning money, production, or other things into beakers.

I will fix my opening post so that people won't get confused.

[ejafus]

Why don't you just go play a Paradox game? I would point you to Victoria 2.

I had never heard of this game. Seems a bit limited in some ways but looks interesting. I'll think about it .

[ejafus]

Under the current Civ V culture and social policy system, I would say the ten branches should not be called "social policies," but "benefits from accumulated culture points."

OMG, __YES__. This is such an accurate description of Civ5 policies.

[ejafus]

yeah no

The game works fine as it is. Trying to shoehorn in your idea of realism into the game is a bad idea.

Doesn't have to be this game, could be Civ6. But I don't see what's wrong with putting in some realism. Going too far with realism, yeah, that's a problem (see MOO3), but aspects of realism help you to immerse in the game, and policies are the only thing in the game that I say, 'well, that's nice... not sure why I get this other than the culture mechanic lets me, but..nice to have the bonus', versus, 'I understand what I did what I did and why I wanted to go in this direction and... it really fits into what my civ is all about'.

[Silverdawn]

Sorry. I'm usually all for immersion, but immersion doesn't really hold water as a valid argument for implementing new design in Civ 5.

My immersion goes out a window when I see English Longbowmen attack a coastal city from another continent.

[Mega-Dolphin]

So the only problem with Social Policies is their name. I don't see any need to change social policies into civics. Also, a civ that is behind on science can just choose rationalism or other science-boosting policies and thus turn their culture into boosts for other resources. Social Policies are the focal point of the cultural aspect of Civ5 gameplay, just as the tech tree is the focal point of science, religions are the focal point of faith, cities and populations are the focus of happiness, and so on. Social Policies are not meant to be this medium of exchange for other resources, they are supposed to be a mechanic that makes cultural growth useful.