Hey all!

The Lucy OpenDev was the first chance for our players to try out the Civics and Ideologies. Using Civics to shape the laws and customs of your people and nudging their ideologies with your choices in narrative events resonated well with many players, though many felt that pushing to the end of an ideology axis was always the best choice, that some ideologies were more valuable than others, or were frustrated by not knowing how to unlock more civics.

While our efforts to improve clarity on how to unlock each Civic are not ready for the Victor OpenDev, we made some changes to the effects of Civics to address the balance:

• Balanced ideology axes now grant a bonus to Stability
• Changed the effect of several ideologies:
  • Tradition now gives Faith instead of Influence
  • Liberty gives Influence on cities
  • Authority slows down Influence conversion of your territories
  • Homeland gives fixed percent food bonus
  • World gives a percent food bonus scaled with number of alliances

Let us know what you think about Civics and the rebalanced ideology effects!

Irreligion's effects (regardless of the choice chosen) doesn't seem to be clear enough, i.e. spending a point in that choice will irreversibly lock you out of religion for the rest of the game.

Or more simply, not making a choice should be highlighted as a valid choice.

Same as with religion, I don't feel like I am doing an important choice here that reflects on my game, a lot of time there is no different in A and B option for me. I think those choices must be far more important and flavorful they should define your strategy.

ellebae wrote:

Irreligion's effects (regardless of the choice chosen) doesn't seem to be clear enough, i.e. spending a point in that choice will irreversibly lock you out of religion for the rest of the game.

Or more simply, not making a choice should be highlighted as a valid choice.

I agree, I don't know if it was just a glitch for me but only the tooltip for state atheism made it clear that I'd be locked out of religion. Secularism didn't specify so I assumed it would be different.

This is more of a UI feedback related to civics, but I could not find a specific UI feedback forum, so I apologize if this is not in the correct place. There are certain events that can skew towards a specific ideology and the UI does a good job of showing the change. However, it would be really helpful to be able to mouse over the codified laws pop-up on the event screen to see the quantifiable changes like you would on the actual civics screen. For example, if an event choice will shift my civic towards progress, it would be great to see in the same screen exactly how much my science and stability will be changing.

I like the idea of the middle of ideologies give stability, it make the choices overall more interesting, but I think the ideologies themself is not all that interesting:

• Collectivism vs individualism is just more industry vs more money, I would suggest a change so that collectivism for example give farmers and worker +2 food and +2 industry while individualism give merchant and scientist +2 of their respecitive yield.
• Homeland vs world do the exact same thing so depending on how many allies you have one is going to be better than the other. I would suggest homeland give you more militia and combat strength on home territories, including those under your cultural sphere while world could keep its current effect.
• Liberalism +4 influence is great early game but become less and less noticeable overtime I would suggest it to become something like +2 influence per commons quarter.
• Authoritarian seems useless I would suggest going back to the bonuses it had to the capital.
• Tradition become useless if you pick secularism if I'm not wrong.
• Progress is okay, but the bonus is pretty boring

As mentioned above this irreligion civic really needs some work. I did once the mistake to go for this atheism choice which meant my religion which was super strong went out of the window in my country. It was kind of fun to see other empires lambasting me for not following my own previous religion anymore, but in the end I collected 11 civic points pretty quickly (by way how that irreligion choice works), yet could not find enough other civics to invest them in. So both religion and civics in that play through became pretty unimportant.

Civics seems pretty random and confusing. Most of the time I'm not sure what I will be getting, and I ended up not always using my civic points.

Also I have absolutely no idea what I need to do to unlock certain civics.

The civics also seem to vary wildly as to how powerful they are, so if I have some "meh" civics available, it feels like it's better to just save the points in case I end up unlocking something really powerful.

It would make more sense to have a bunch of Deed type things that you need to do to advance a civic category and have the more powerful civics to require you to pick the lower powered ones from the same category.

The different benefits from the four sliders that give different bonuses also seem to be hard to understand. Most of the time it seems it would be nice to just try to keep it in the middle so I maximise stability across the empire. It's also a bit difficult to grasp or even notice both those effects and the direct effects from the civic itself at the same time.

It would be very useful if when selecting civics, the tooltips would show what the instant effects to your per turn generation would be to your Empire.

Now to the boni of the different ideologies: Here I also agree with some other observations already made. Homeland and Globalism giving a similar bonus but in a different form is weird and makes it hard to judge. I like the idea of somekind of homeland defense plus maybe the additional turns against influence conversion (and give something else to Authority).

kaskarn wrote:

Civics themselves are A-ok, although some numbers need balancing (early influence civics much too strong, most later civics feel unimpactful). 

In my opinion, the sliders still have too little effect, and are too out of the way for the player to care or feel compelled to interact with them in a meaningful way. As things stand, I would only expect the most dedicated of min-maxers to even bother optimizing using sliders. Maybe others had a different experience.

A way to punch up the effect of sliders could be to tie units, districts, diplomatic actions or some other mechanic to particular slider ranges. For instance, highly individualistic empires might gain free trade routes on a timer to represent the effect of private enterprise, while communal empires could gain a special district representing some collectivized activity. Another approach might be to substantially increase the bonuses granted by extreme slider values, at the cost of a major gameplay limitation (highly worldly empires might gain a large trade / relation bonus, but lost the ability to declare a surprise war, or gain war enthusiasm at a decreased pace)

I think the sliders should have event effects if that makes sense? like too much nationalism and you get issues with your people beginning to attack people from other nations or whatever.
You get the idea.

3 playthroughs of Victor, I think I always took the same Civics to increase stability.

I feel I get civic points too quickly. Maybe that aspect of the game could be more meaningful if civic points were rarer ?

I feel the system symbolises a increasing cohesion of a growing empire, so instead of a per citizen growth, it would require some kind of "cohesion" milestones : number of cities connected ? (I know roads appear automatically, maybe make this a task?), organizing some kind of "people's assembly" to get the civic points ?

 I had some thoughts on how to improve (or perhaps expand) civics.

Concerns:

1. Sliders do not really noticeably impact much.
   
2. Some decisions have side effects that may make certain choices far more desirable (if you want to be a liberty oriented society, an authority option might just give you a way better bonus).
3. An overabundance of civic points (they tend to pile up very quickly without new decisions).
4. An overabundance on influence in the mid-late game (especially if you accidentally pick the civic that lets you buy land with gold).

1. The sliders control the slots; what types of cards you can place in your governance. Go heavy into liberty and get lots of /liberty/ style card slots; etc.
2. Sliders can perhaps be affected by the player's stockpiles of influence to nudge them in certain directions in the absence of events or decisions; or perhaps in other ways.
3. Decisions rather than simply just pushing the sliders, unlock cards instead of having side effects. 
4. Spare civic points can be spent simply buying cards; maybe generic cards; maybe cards based on the slider orientations.
5. Maybe the sliders are jus primarily controlled by influence; and civic points are what unlock cards (though obviously decisions can still do both)

Obviously this is a rough draft of an idea; there is likely a fair bit of balancing to do here; and solve the issue of rapidly changing governance modifying slots (Perhaps this causes stability maluses without actually removing the cards immediately once their slots expire). But I feel like it would make the process of interacting with civics (and influence) a fair bit more interesting if we had something along these lines.

Tnecniw wrote:

kaskarn wrote:

Civics themselves are A-ok, although some numbers need balancing (early influence civics much too strong, most later civics feel unimpactful). 

In my opinion, the sliders still have too little effect, and are too out of the way for the player to care or feel compelled to interact with them in a meaningful way. As things stand, I would only expect the most dedicated of min-maxers to even bother optimizing using sliders. Maybe others had a different experience.

A way to punch up the effect of sliders could be to tie units, districts, diplomatic actions or some other mechanic to particular slider ranges. For instance, highly individualistic empires might gain free trade routes on a timer to represent the effect of private enterprise, while communal empires could gain a special district representing some collectivized activity. Another approach might be to substantially increase the bonuses granted by extreme slider values, at the cost of a major gameplay limitation (highly worldly empires might gain a large trade / relation bonus, but lost the ability to declare a surprise war, or gain war enthusiasm at a decreased pace)

I think the sliders should have event effects if that makes sense? like too much nationalism and you get issues with your people beginning to attack people from other nations or whatever.
You get the idea.

Right, there needs to be some connection between slider values and life in the empire beyond minor resource bonuses. Ethos-specific event chains would go a long way!

I'm expecting alot of these civics to be tied to events later on. But maybe that has not been implemented yet.

I just want to give the example of Old World, which has a huge number of events and keeps you interested (for the most part). Depending on what you do, you will get different events.