Ideology Branches Need Balancing

Some of the ideology lines are SO MUCH BETTER than the others. 

For pragmatism the overpowered line is the second one, the Constructor/Starbase line.  The "no one can declare war on you for 50 turns" ideology is pretty good, but the rest of the line is pretty useless.  

For Benevolence (larger maps): the first and last lines (Colonization and Research lines) are MUCH MORE USEFUL than the other two.

For Malevolence: The first two lines (Invasion and Production) is SIGNIFICANTLY better than the other two.  

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Reply #1 Top

For Benevolence I have found the third line (I think) to be the most overpowered.

 

The one that gives you the Benevolence building (1 point every 10 turns+influence), conbine that with an embassy and a couple of optional techs and when you get to the third trait on the list you can flip all the planets and starbases in you ZOC.

 

Give out open border treaties like sweets and watch thos AI's build loads of mining bases in your ZOC and then when you have the borders covering the ones you need/want...Flip-a-roony.

 

It's a magic win button, and if there are a few independent races in your ZOC you suddenly have fully developed class 15+ (better if you've been trading terraforming tech with them) worlds with loads of population on them.

Reply #2 Top

Yeah the benevolent third line is really powerful in part because the second trait doesn't just increase you income, it multiplies allready accrued influence so if you have a lot of it on your HW and it's pushing at the borders of someone you can suddenly flip them to having all their stuff inside your borders. Combined that once with UFP headquarters and in the space of time it took me to get 2 ideology traits mid game went from roughly 20% map control to better than 70% with oodles of extra planets in my pocket.

Reply #3 Top

The third line has some good stuff, but kinda of tails off. The third option is so good that 4 and 5 are kind of meh. In fact, other than the 5th option on the bottom line, all of Benevolent's top-tiers are a bit meh; the table as a whole has a lot of outright weak options, and this tends to get worse the higher up you go - in benevolent games I've often found myself preferring to go for lower-unlocks when given the choice, because in many cases they're more powerful than higher choices. Pragmatic's just as bad, if not worse. 

 

I'd like to see the top-tier ones buffed a lot - make them super-powerful, so that you don't find yourself deciding to pick a T2 trait over a T5 when given the option. Then make ideology harder to get (perhaps scaled by map size) so that you never really get 5/5/5/5 empires. Having only 10 or 12 trait's worth of points would make picking them into a genuine choice, where as presently you can comfortably fill out a tree and a half on the larger maps; it's another example of how the devs never thought that players would want lots of planets per empire (they seem to have assumed that anyone playing on insane would automatically be wanting 100 other small empires, rather than, say, 16 large ones - which was unfortunate when the game only shipped with a few races, so most 'insane' players first experience was the game breaking down horribly in the face of their 80-planet empire).