I have noticed that is it actually kind of easy to manipulate the ideology trees, so you could end up getting pretty much all of the "perks" from all trees eventually. Like for example you make Malevolent choices until you can make the building that generates malevolent points every turn for you. Then you switch to making Benevolent choices until you get the building that makes those points for you every turn. I mean sure, I like taking advantage of cheezy tactics to crush my enemies just as much as the next guy; but it just seems a little wrong that you can get all of the advantages for being "evil" along with all of the advantages for being "good" at the same time.
I'm sure this has been mentioned and thought of by the devs before. I just want to give a little reminder that it needs fixed
You know, I had a bit of a problem with taking multiple ideologies before the current iteration, but now I don't. I think the reason is that now it feels like 12 trees that just happen to be in three groups, rather than three opposing trees. It didn't make that much sense to be benevolent and malevolent, but I have no problem being enlightened and aggressive or prominent and awe-inspiring. Before I usually stuck to 1 tree, but now I'm enjoying my pragmatic and malevolent Yor and I don't find it to be illogical or to break the illusion.
I have no problem doing multiple trees at the same time. However, I agree, it is easily abused and needs balance. I am not in favor of blocking out trees on account of choices in another. I would be okay with making some other trees more expensive, however - specifically for subtrees which are actually in conceptual opposition to another. For example, "Outreach" and "Aggression" appear to be competing values based on their descriptions (not so much in their basic term meanings... but how they are explained in the game). Maybe spending on one makes spending on the other more expensive.
No space emperor is going to be just pragmatic, malevolent or beneficent. As Turkwise said that is just boring and unrealistic.
I agree that some of the traits seem to conflict and should be mutually exclusive, but that can be fixed. If each race has it's own tech tree they can certainly have a 3 way ideology table for each race that avoids the love/hate issues mentioned.
A player's ideology should be malleable enough to be morphed into an ideology of their own choice, as it was in GCII.
I play mostly pragmatic, but I have never gone through a game choosing only one or the other ideology exclusively and I should not be penalized in any special way for my choices. The penalty, as it were, will be that while points are accumulated normally for all choices, it will take longer to get to the more valuable traits no matter how you cut it.
I think certain Ideology choices should be confirmed by the system with the sound of a huge metal door slamming shut. IE Choosing Malevolent 7 means you can not, no way no how siree bob go down the Benevolent tree any further than you have gone. Or make you pay some kind of penalty for achieving something in another ideological tree - something equivalent to "You've not studied this thing for four months, which would have been two hour a month so 8 hours, now the night before the exam you decide you want it to pass, that means studying up for 24 straight hours!" And on top of that, taking diplomacy hits with AI who thought your ideology was aligned with theirs, now suddenly you're going soft of them.
Also linked to this - and as others have pointed out - there's the ideology you know you are from the choices you've made/you will make and the ideology the various AIs will think you are due to choices they know you've made. Which begs the question: Galactic Events - who knows I've made the choice to allow the radiation to kill 500 millions civilians for the 500bc and 20% wealth? Obviously the game does, but how does the choice I make on the screen affect my ongoing relationship with the Drengin, who might be yelling "Girl! Only 500 million! What kinda evil tyrant are ya!", versus the Altarians who might be crying themselves to sleep over the 500 million dead and swearing bloody revenge on me on the dead's behalf? Can that ideological view ever be changed after making that kind of decision? Or, if it can, will the Alterians always hold that decision against you so as far as they are concerned, whatever ethical choices you make subsequent to the killing 500 million, even Benevolent to the max, you'll be at best Malevolent Lite.
I would say just make switching trees cost prohibitive, so you could technically do it if you want, but it couldn't be abused. Remember it's not just the rulers ideology, it's the whole civilizations ideology. You shouldn't be able to switch from good to evil on a dime just to get the bonuses. Choosing which ideological route your race goes down should be a major decision made in the early game, with lasting effects for the whole game.
I can see both sides of this coin and understand where the freedom and flexibility side are coming from. That being said I fall on the other side of the fence. I also think there at least should be either a penalty or complete lockout.
My main reasons are two fold
First is abuse of the system. The first few play trough's I have done have shown me that ideology really means nothing. All I see when they pop is oh goodie new bonus picking time. I just pick whatever bonus adds up best for me. And honestly I have seen absolutely no downside to flip flopping like a fish out of water. This doesn't represent choice as much as a power grab. Choice by it's nature is a sacrifice. When you make a choice you are sacrificing one option for another. Right now there really doesn't feel like the choices are sacrifice.
My favorite game of all time is MOO2. I absolutely loved and hated the tech tree all at the same time. Yeah some categories were no brainers (Battle Pods v Survival Pods) but other choices were painful as hell (More Production v Less Pollution). And we always banned Creative as that just made the game stupidly easy.
The second issue is MP. GC was fine as free and flexible when it was and is single (let the player play however they like) player. With the addition of MP, balance and fairness take more of a role than power gaming. In Multiplayer choices really need to matter, and as such the sacrifice of each choice has to be more pronounced.
It is the MMO dilemma when they have PVE and PVP. PVE players always want cool, enticing and fun skills. PvP players want balance (as long as it is in their favor ). And the poor devs never have the time and resources to make two different rule sets. Or if they try it never gets done right.
Forcing or pressuring (via penalty) a player to stick with one and only one ideology will never feel right to me. The races in the game are rarely presented as pure good/evil/neutral. While you can count on the Drengin to be vile and aggressive, the Yor seem to be more calculating (pragmatic), the Krynn are fundamentally good-natured but not opposed to violence in the name of religion And humans, well, we are really good at justifying a civilization with extraordinary contradictions, and the game makes note of that.
It makes little sense to lock a civilization to a particular path when the lore of the game doesn't support that notion at all.
As for balance - forcing people to stick to one tree would make for more imbalance than flexibility. Let's be honest, certain trees are better than others. The only reason Pragmatic is "good" for many people is because of the starbase spam - from 6 bases/planet - that needs to be removed from the game asap, otherwise it's very specialized for certain styles of play. Benevolent and Malevolent have a broad range of strategies that benefit from many of their bonuses - Outreach, Aggression, Enlightenment, Affinity, Motivation, and Greed benefit just about anyone, while most of Pragmatic can easily be skipped if you aren't pursuing a particular strategy. This means that most players would go Good or Evil and pass on Pragmatic - being able to mix and match suddenly makes Pragmatic much more viable to pursue, as it means you don't get locked out of such potentially game-changing bonuses as found in the other trees.
Possible solution: mega-traits. Unlocking X number of traits in a tree gives access to a really cool, expensive mega-trait. Encouragement without forcing or penalizing.
I don't mean to imply that certain races should always be locked into certain ideologies, like Drengin always evil. I believe that the ideology your civilization embraces should be one of your early game decisions, but I believe bouncing between all three just to get certain benefits is pretty lame. Switching ideologies should be a major undertaking if you want to do it.
What I mean is that any civilization should be able to select from multiple trees at the same time - forcing the player to choose just one is weird. In the context of game lore, it makes no sense, as most of the races aren't strictly good or evil or neutral. Being able to mix it up allows for a broader, rather than more narrow, range of strategies a player can pursue. Sticking to a single tree makes strategic options more limited.
I don't know. Deciding that an entire civilization is evil for a few months, then suddenly becomes good for a months, then back to evil because you see a nifty bonus you want...that's pretty weird. And I don't really think a player should be completely locked out of the other trees, just that the deeper you get into one, should make it more and more difficult to switch to another.
But you're not switching from good to evil. You're adding to the traits that define your culture. No (real) culture (and very few fictional ones) can be defined as purely benevolent or purely pragmatic, etc. A culture can be greedy traders, right? Affinity and aggression? Those can go hand-in-hand. Even ones that at first glance seem to be completely contradictory are arguable compatible - human cultures, past and present, are full of such contradictions. The US will bomb a country to pieces while dropping food and water at the same time - all to the end of satisfying its diverse and conflicted society. It doesn't have to make perfect logical sense - we don't make sense, so why would we expect alien cultures to do so?
We all take actions that can be considered to fall under the scope of the three ideologies, both as individuals and as societies. Every culture is different, no two following the same ideological path.
Any way I look at it - logically, historically, gameplay, lore, balance - it doesn't work for me if we are forced to stick with one tree. It's certainly not perfect, but I feel like being able to mix it up with little penalty is a lot better than "Oh, you chose 'Enlightenment?' You're purely benevolent from now on!" There's no context in which that sits well with me.
EDIT: I know you aren't arguing for locked trees, but some are. I'm saying I want near-total freedom. Currently your first choice chooses what you "Ideology" is for diplomatic purposes, you can't actually switch from that. Right now that doesn't really mean much at all as far as diplomacy goes, though.
One of the problems here is that ideology in one respect is radically different in GC III than it was in GC II. In GC II, you amassed ideology by colonizing planets (an the occasional mega event) and then finalized it by choosing one of the three ideologies when Xeno Ethics was unlocked (including being able to "buy in" to a radically different ideology that you had been pursuing with the right amount of cash). Once chosen, you were locked in. At the same time, once you chose an ideology, you couldn't get planet colonization events anymore, nor any more ideological mega events. This often forced, at least in my experience, people to wait to choose an ideology until all of the planets in the galaxy were colonized. Or at least most of them.
In GC III, however, ideology is far more splintered at the macro level. Instead of one all-encompassing choice, you have up to 75 choices to make. And you keep making ideological decisions while you colonize planets (and building choice and possibly other vectors that might be put into the game). If the player is forced to commit to an ideology early, then how do they gain ideology points to move up the tree? A set amount a turn? Alright, but it takes player choice out of the equation. Stick with planet colonization events? OK, but then what do they do with all of those other ideological points that are piling up? Forcing people to build ideological improvements on planets? OK. But then we get into planet management complaints.
IF there wasn't a points based ideology system that was navigated by player choice, then that might be more palatable. As it is though, if there is a points based system that gives the players certain traits for decisions made in the game, it seems illogical from a game play point of view to say, "No, you can't do this anymore at all, even if you are still being given options to be another ideological trait." To put it another way, why be given the option to be malevolent when you are committed to benevolence. Yet you need that option to go up the benevolent tree in the first place.
If there are RP or immersion objections, then don't choose those options in your local game. One can choose to be ideologically pure, after all. If there are balance concerns, then let the devs know about them and see if they want to tweak it or not. And, as said, I certainly think making it more difficult to go up one tree the further one gets up another is valid both from an immersion and a balance viewpoint. But to take it away altogether for everyone, regardless of playstyle, seems to be a bridge too far IMO.
I understand what you're saying here.
"... but it just seems a little wrong that you can get all of the advantages for being "evil" along with all of the advantages for being "good" at the same time."
That's called politics.
My issue with the current Ideology system is with immersion... I suspect that a lot of this is due to it being in beta and the dev's want it to be tested and broken to see the effects.
as previously stated...
As Ideology is a best seen as a path that a civilization takes over TIME I really hate how the first colonization event can potentially lock you in on an ideology. if the fist even has a really great Option for Bene, but crappy ones for the rest the player will almost always choose the best "for now" option. then the Ideology table comes up and BOOM the system thinks you are playing tree hugging Robots...I think the ideology tab should be locked out until the age of war. This makes the age of war actually MEAN something.I also think there should be an option to have micro-events that pop up every turn. If these micro events do micro things.. like a 1% bonus on one given planet in question and then count 1 point to a given ideology... the player would build choices over a number of turns to build up their chosen ideology.I also think any of the Random event Ideology choices should have at least five choices perhaps more. I would love to have a Middle ground choice.. Money PLUS people die.. Pragmatic/Mal Money PLUS the worms get to live Pragmatic/Bene that perhaps allows us to do that middle ground option.Furthermore I think once the Ideology table is unlocked the first thing we see is going to be a screen similar to the xeno ethics choice screen. The player could then choose for free to go down the path they have been going, or pay credits to go down a different path. I would not make this path choice a lockout but rather I would give the choice a X2 multiplier for all points earned. This would mean if my Primary Ideology is Bene and there is an event that gives 5/5/5 I could still choose the Mal and still take Mal traits.. but it would be much easier to focus on the Bene and get those traits.I would also make EVERY single option on the Ideology table much more expensive. This would not lock the tree but would push the player to focus on one or perhaps two ideologies.
Lastly... I would like to see the return of Ideology based research trees. If you choose Bene, there should be some additional happy options that you actually have to research in the tech tree... or Weapons for Mal or Money things for Prag...
Right now Ideology does not feel like it is complete.. it just feels like whackamole bonus land.... it should FEEL like my choices matter or that not making a choice might have a cost later down the road...
The point I am trying to make is that the way I prefer to play the game is to make ideology decisions as I would in a real situation rather than picking one or the other ideology simply because that is the path I have chosen. If that is the way you want to do it why bother to even read the choices?
My choice to kill off a bunch of bugs and to save a million of my own species does not make me good or evil. Penalties are built into nearly every ideology decision, so there are your penalties if you insist.
I don't deny that there is a tendency to do as you suggest in order to get deeper into your favorite ideology traits faster, and I often find myself making choices I would not make for that reason. I am just saying, if that is the way to play the game, the devs have wasted their time creating ideology choices and they should just have ideology be a pregame choice and only present trait choice for the chosen ideology. I am certainly not going to pay attention to the reasoning for choices when choosing anything but a single ideology will have a negative effect on my ability to win the game.
IMO, penalties fo choosing multiple ideology choices detract from the character of the game and add more mindless clicking where there is already too much of that.
Since idealogy is majority if thinking. I think things should be added in two ways first you could add all points together requiring techs to be more expensive. Then add each choice. Which chpice has the most is what you pick except when antagonistic and benevolent are equal this causes pragmatic. Or when eithet benevolent or antagonistic equals pragmatic as top making pragmatic the choice. This can be figured for each tech. Causing tree changes by choices instead of adding points for each tech otherwise it is cheasy. If you have pragmatic and benolent then the choice is benevolent. If pragmatic snd antagonistic then antagonistic. If all three then pragmatic hut kost likeky one will dominate at any situation. Instead of lockibg yhis down use the dominating tree at sny situation.
Even though you make a good argument for civics instead of idealogies.
Benevolence means im good to everyone. While antagonistic means i fight with everyone. There e rffectts not csuses. Still alignments. Idealogies are scientific religious survival of yhe fittest if it feals good do it logical everyone is equal yhe golden rule karma not renamed alignments.
The point I am trying to make is that the way I prefer to play the game is to make ideology decisions as I would in a real situation rather than picking one or the other ideology simply because that is the path I have chosen. If that is the way you want to do it why bother to even read the choices?My choice to kill off a bunch of bugs and to save a million of my own species does not make me good or evil. Penalties are built into nearly every ideology decision, so there are your penalties if you insist.I don't deny that there is a tendency to do as you suggest in order to get deeper into your favorite ideology traits faster, and I often find myself making choices I would not make for that reason. I am just saying, if that is the way to play the game, the devs have wasted their time creating ideology choices and they should just have ideology be a pregame choice and only present trait choice for the chosen ideology. I am certainly not going to pay attention to the reasoning for choices when choosing anything but a single ideology will have a negative effect on my ability to win the game.IMO, penalties fo choosing multiple ideology choices detract from the character of the game and add more mindless clicking where there is already too much of that.
The way it is set up at the moment makes it just feel like just another tech tree.
Why bother to have it separate. You might just as well tack it to the existing tech tree.
If ideology is an integral part of the game it should be more meaningful. Staying true to your civilisations ideology should bring greater long term benefits.
Making these choices should be difficult. Its too shallow as it stands.
The difficulty is deciding how to classify your civilisation. An option? A decision?
I think this is were I and some other differ from your vision of what ideology means. Instead of thinking of my civ as having a set ideology that I can "stay true" to or not, I see my civ's ideology as emerging during game-play through the ideology system. This is why I really like that there is no penalty between ideology trees in the current system.
I agree with this. A civilizations ideology shouldn't just be another tech tree that you can bounce around in depending on what benefit you want at a given time. It should be a long term direction that your civ heads in throughout the game.
I honestly abhor evil. However I have always strongly advocated for a strong military. I know that its just a game with no impact. Still its so against my character and who I am even the notion of pretending to be evil irritates me to no end. So da evilz tree is a no go no matter what goodies are in it. I just really hate the notion that only evil gets warlike abilities.
I can see you point.
What I dislike is the ease in which you can cherry pick from any path, just to get the bonus.
What if when selecting an option, instead of just giving you + points towards the chosen path it also gave you -ve points in the other two.
You could still pick traits from any path, but it would make you think / work harder.
This is why instead three point systems they should make it one. Adding your choices up to decide what tree you are using. This would still have a switching between trees with less control.
If they keep the '5-points-per-building' rule, and don't have a Pragmatic building that generates points every turn, then I will mod the buildings so that they produce something like .5 points per turn.
The problem is that certain "ideological" choices are either mutually exclusive (in the real world) with each other, or are significantly difficult to reconcile.
For example, having a strong military where everyone serves mandatory military service for a fixed term is significantly harder to integrate with a belief that individual liberty is much more important than collective need, vs a society which follows fascism. They're obviously not incompatible, but a society that wants both has to work a WHOLE lot harder trying to get them to work together than a society that only wants one of the two.
I'd rather not have to have GC3 micromanage the relationships in some sort of uber-tech-tree web where all sorts of dependencies were laid out.
Rather, I think the rational way to handle this, as well as reflect how a society might change ideology over time is this:
(1) as far as the AI is concerned, you "alignment" is determined by whichever ideology has the highest level choice made first. For example, if you have a level 1 Benevolent choice and a Level 2 Malevolent choice, then the AI considers you a Malevolent society. If you have two Level 3 Benevolents and only one Level 3 Malevolent, BUT you choice the Malevolent Level 3 first, then you're a Malevolent society. In the latter case, you could switch to being a Benevolent society if you chose a Level 4 Benevolent ability.
(2) All abilities in all ideologies are still available. BUT, all costs for abilities outside the ideology you are currently considered to be (as per #1) should be 2x what your main ideology is.
This way, you can mix and match, but there's a cost to trying to integrate all the conflicting abilities together. You can also switch main ideologies under this system, but, once again, there has to be some considerable effort to do so.
The fact is, certain memes and societal beliefs don't mix well. Allowing people to merely hop around the ideology tree without recognizing this issue is a major game-breaker.
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