Theocracy vs Organized Religion vs Pacifism

[couerdelion]

I believe the analysis is independent of on the duration for which Pacifism is run. Only the specific numbers of GPs are dependent on this.

The main point I am making is while it might seem obvious that Pacifism works well with a Philosophic trait, the numbers show that it works better with a non-philosophic leader. Whether people are using it more under philosophy or not is a different matter to whether they should be doing this.

One thing I would find it very hard to support is the idea that GPs are not important in some games. In my view, whatever style of game you are playing, the generation of a “healthy” number of GPs will make that game stronger that it would be otherwise. For me there is no such thing as a GP-driven strategy. They are part of the game as much as religion and resources and should be an important element of any strategy.

[PaganPaulwhisky]

couerdelion, we are talking about two different things here. I know that pacifism is more efficient in terms of GP production for non-philo civs than philo civs. The numbers prove that and I am not disputing that.

It is my opinion that pacifism is more USEFULL to philo civs than non-philo civs in general. Although this could just be a bias based on my style of play. I find that whenever I switch to this civic, I take a big cash dive because of the number of troops I have on hand.

As far as GP being a crucial part of every strategy, In many of my games they are not as I have won many domination games when producing only a few.

[Yosho]

Yeah, you can win a game without making GP's a center part of your stratagy. There have been games where I've focused on city growth and economic development, and never got a single GP point until I built the great library, and still won. It all depends what you choose to focus on in any specific game, and what you let slide.

That being said, if you're not running a philosophical leader and still want to devote a significant amount of resoruces to making great people (and it can still be worthwhile to do so, in a lot of situations) then pacificm becomes very useful. (shrug) In fact, because of the way the cost of great leaders scale up, it might almost be better for a philosophical leader to get some great people early, and then pretty much not worry about them or devote any major amount of resources to getting them, for the rest of the game.

[couerdelion]

The importance of GPs

This might simply be a question of circumstances and I am certainly not proposing that a civ should adopt pacifism all the time. What I am saying is that, in any given circumstances, the case for switching to Pacifism will be stronger for a civilisation if it did not have the philosophic trait.

At certain difficulty levels, for example, you can happily survive without GPs because it is easy enough to win with almost any strategy. But with higher levels, the GPs become more important with the extra value that they provide being part of a more optimal overall strategy for driving tech advancement or generating gold. For me, GPs are so important that the extra cost for running the pacifism civic with a strong military, will be more than compensated, over time, by the return gained from those GPs.

GPs may not be crucial to a strategy but I can confidently say that they will improve it.