The new system definitively feel better than the Civics from Victor. Influence feel valuable, and I had to make some hard decisions on wheter to expand or pick up new civics.

I do want to second that influence growth is still a bit too easy. Unless I am compeeting with an Aesthethe AI, my culture easily manages to dominate everyone. In my first game, I once again was flooded with unfluence points, but far later than in Victor. It would have been about the point I rolled out of the medieval era. I did take a lot of discount Civics, which may have snowballed into having a lot of Influence.

As a side tangent, the Influence costs for building inside outposts need to scale better. When the last Colony option costs less than a 100 influence, something is wrong.

Sometimes there are civics where I want neither option. Slaves is a prime example. I do not want slaves in my empire. I want only free people.

There needs to be a third option for each civic: Not interested. This option would mark the civic as "enacted" but for no effect.

The primary reason this would be useful is to make the "enactable civic" counter be zero, and to stop the glow on the main civics page.

Influence and Stability lock down early game for all peaceful playstyles.

This leads to a situation where an aggressive warlike playstyle is the only competitive one against higher lvl AI.

Trade and money has been severely nerfed since the AI isn't reliable at all + hard to convince to go for it. You also suddenly have no bonus ability anymore, since the new one is just useless and costs Influence instead of money...
Industry/Agrarian is limited by Influence/Stability, so you just build units and play warlike.

The last build was way more open to other strategies, but this build feels very narrow in terms of what works.

Civics seem to be extremely effective at pushing the government style. Too effective, in my book. I was pinned to my desired government with far less civics than I felt I should have needed.

FinalFreak16 wrote:

I liked the change of spending influence to get Civics, early on this gave me some interesting decisions. Did I want to get a new civic or build the outpost or city? I'd say the first 2-3 Era's felt fairly balanced in terms of influence generation and having things to spend it on.

However after this point my need for influence kind of dried up, no new civics to purchase, all available wonders purchased and the cost of new outposts etc were pretty trivial with my banked influence at that point. From then on my influence just snowballed into the thousands and tens of thousands with nothing to use it on.

So my suggestion is to either try and rein in that snowball on influence or give me more things to spend my influence on. I feel like Diplomacy is the best place to be able to utilise excess influence. Maybe we could use it to bully the AI into accepting deals they otherwise wouldn't want (but generating greivances?). This has historical precedent. "Open up to trade or else!"

As far as I can tell influence can only be spent and there isnt anything that passively consumes influence right? Parhaps it should cost influence per turn for some things, such as maintaining lots of territories, being over my city admin cap, maintaining a vassal state, managing colonies on distant continents etc.

I use my influence to over-expand by being double the cities cap. That gives costs me -30 per territories, so big penalty to influence when you have too many.

Hi there! I love the change that you enact civis with influence now, feels much more . However, this shows that you haven't balanced the influence sources yet. My main concerns in the early game (up to the classical area) are the two civics Natural Right and Open Minded with there 5 influence per territory (and also the polytheism affinity). As civis produced per territory heavily supports snowballing (more influence -> more territory/citys attached -> more influnece and so on) I'm swimming in influence in the classical era right now, and even without chossing a influence focussed nation I not only got the 3 influence era stars way before my culture focused era stars, I also could go to the civics like nothing (which supports snowballing even more).

So please have a detailled look at the influence sources to support this change, for example heavily reduce the influence income of the natural right and open minded civics and the polytheism affinity (2 influence per territory sounded like a more proper value).

And for the argument of @AkashaX1885, perhaps there could be a mechanic that uses influence in a warlike playthrough as well, so that the influence mechanic balanced expansion in all ways?

whartanto wrote:

AkashaX1885 wrote:

Influence and Stability lock down early game for all peaceful playstyles.

This leads to a situation where an aggressive warlike playstyle is the only competitive one against higher lvl AI.

Trade and money has been severely nerfed since the AI isn't reliable at all + hard to convince to go for it. You also suddenly have no bonus ability anymore, since the new one is just useless and costs Influence instead of money...
Industry/Agrarian is limited by Influence/Stability, so you just build units and play warlike.

The last build was way more open to other strategies, but this build feels very narrow in terms of what works.

I agree that Trade being useless with stupid AI, but Agrarian can be played peacefully (assuming you don't get attacked). Just sacrifice your population to the dark lord of hell every few turns and get free building/district per turn (incl. garrison/common quarter so stability is ok). In fact building units is too slow for me to cut down my people (they grow too fast, hence the regular human sacrifice to buy out buildings).

All I noticed for Agrarian is that you get less returns in terms of Industry boost per population compared to last patch. And then you are still stuck because you lack influence/ the stability wall.
If you can spam a huge army, using it is mandatory, the AI on higher difficulties is merciless.

What difficulty did you play on?

In my opinion, the main issue with the current civics is that they really don't do much to colour or flavor the story. They're like trying to season a dish with some very old spices that don't taste anything.

One big aspect of creating a story for a civilization/culture is experimenting with various ideologies/utopias/dystopia. What level of freedom do the people have, what type of government is ruling their lives, how are successions determined, how is education provided, how is the treasury managed, etc, etc.

As it is now, only a few civics contribute well to the story. Slavery, for example has a clear cut impact on the story but a lot of other civics don't.

I think a few things like some forms of governments (centralized, decentralized) or more granular types of governments (democracy, theocracy, technocracy, etc.) would add a lot to the strategic aspects as well as the "storytelling" ones.

There could also be some social civics like, for example, military service vs civil service or the event where we decide who spread the religion (men, women, both) could be turned into a civic (with clear impact for each choices, which the current event doesn't seem to have).

On a side note, I quite liked the system where civics are bought by influence but what unlocked each civics wasn't clear at all.

Undernier wrote:

In my opinion, the main issue with the current civics is that they really don't do much to colour or flavor the story. They're like trying to season a dish with some very old spices that don't taste anything.

One big aspect of creating a story for a civilization/culture is experimenting with various ideologies/utopias/dystopia. What level of freedom do the people have, what type of government is ruling their lives, how are successions determined, how is education provided, how is the treasury managed, etc, etc.

As it is now, only a few civics contribute well to the story. Slavery, for example has a clear cut impact on the story but a lot of other civics don't.

I think a few things like some forms of governments (centralized, decentralized) or more granular types of governments (democracy, theocracy, technocracy, etc.) would add a lot to the strategic aspects as well as the "storytelling" ones.

There could also be some social civics like, for example, military service vs civil service or the event where we decide who spread the religion (men, women, both) could be turned into a civic (with clear impact for each choices, which the current event doesn't seem to have).

On a side note, I quite liked the system where civics are bought by influence but what unlocked each civics wasn't clear at all.

I think the story part is not the issue, its that they don't do anything important gameplay wise (most of them are quite underpowered) and that you do not now what you have to do to unlock them. Not to mention that not taking them makes it easier to have higher stability, so if you never look at the civic screen (except for the +influence from territory), you're fine.

Story wise, I found that the worst part of it is that you get some of them faaaar too early. Irreligion, press freedom, the production ownership one. Didn't make any sense in my game. Some should have an era requirement...

I really don't like the civics and ideologies.

The way stability is tied to ideologies makes it very punitive to go on way or another. Most of the time I just stay right in the middle if I can.

Civics are not really impactful. Some of the games I played I didn't touch the civic screen at all (except for the 1 city cap and 5 influence and army composition) and didn't see a difference in my performance compared to game I made a choice for all the civics I unlocked.

The way civics are unlocked is not clear and really not historical. I remember getting press freedom during classical age...

I think when a civic is unlocked the player should be forced to make a choice. I doesn't make sens for a lot of these civics to be stuck in limbo. "Hey ruler, who should fight for the empire? Hmm let me think about that for 1000 years".

I've seen a lot of positive comment about the influence cost on civic, but I disagree. It make it so that if you have the choice between more influence or something else, you will always take the influence and switch it later when you have too much of it.

This is probably a very radical thing to say but I think they should scrap the whole civic system and replace it with a second tech tree. That Civic tree would be exactly like the tech tree, but instead of tech, they would be the civics and when you finish "researching it" you would be forced to make the choice for the civic. Influence would act as research for that tree and we could replace most of the influence costs in the game with money cost.

waven wrote:

I think when a civic is unlocked the player should be forced to make a choice. I doesn't make sens for a lot of these civics to be stuck in limbo. "Hey ruler, who should fight for the empire? Hmm let me think about that for 1000 years".

I disagree with this entirely, unless they offer a third option of "neither" for many of them. I cite my example above about slaves. This would be a deal breaker for me to be *forced* to have slaves. I would sooner refund the game than be forced to enslave people (even fictitious people) for any reason.

I found some of the narrative events frustrating as they presented me options on two or more unrelated axis, with no option to opt out when I did not want to move either axis or did not approve of any of the answers. There should be something like "Let the people figure it out" to refuse to move the axis for the culture when those come up. I like to work towards specific ideologies while 'roleplaying' a particular empire in my head or going with my own views (Tends to be heavily progressive and liberty centric, with a worldly perspective, albeit not to the extreme of ignoring homeland needs, but balanced collectivist/individualist!)

Other than that, the new civic points/influence seems ideal, at least in my play-through.

Regarding Events:
Generally flavourful, however some of the mid game events seem like they are just "a bad thing happened, throw as much X at it to reduce the risk" wich i like less than more opportunity cost heavy choices. In later eras the f.e. money costs were so low they could just not be there at all, occasionally reducing them to roleplay.

Ideologies itself felt fun and added some nice interactions with the AI due to cultural proximity changes.

Regarding Civics:

I really like the replacement of civic points by influence, it adds interesting choices to the early game. However the way civics are unlocked should be more transparent in my opinion. Not only do i not know what a locked civic is about, I also dont know how to unlock it, resulting in me not caring or at least not planning around them.
This idea might be out there, but given the lack of uses for influence in the mid-late game when all infrastructure and territory is already claimed, I feel like I'd prefer the civic screen to act more like its own influence fueled tech tree. With some more options to generate influence this concept would at least feel more interactive, strategic and fun.

I agree with Xahutek that the narrative events have really low costs associated with them in the end game. I think the industrial era costs are appropriately scaled to the classical era. What is 25 science per turn on all my cities going to do when techs cost 10k science in the industrial era. If you're going to have opportunities and costs associated with these events then please scale them to be appropriate for the era that they're in. I'm always so disappointed after reading the cool event, making my role-play choice and then realizing that it has no impact on the game.

Also, the fact that stability is weighted the same as other resources in narrative event rewards (and religion) is quite silly. 10 stability lets you build another district, potentially getting you 50 of a yield if it's a good EQ and/or you have lots of infrastructure already. This could be solved also by making the rewards/downsides of narrative events percent-based.