Hey everybody. Over the past few weeks, I've been making steady work on implementing a culture system that combines the best aspects of BE's virtues and Alpha Centauri's Social Engineering. All in all, I've finally gotten to the point where I can start seeing and testing my changes in-game!

http://i.imgur.com/Yd1njta.png

For those who aren't familiar with Alpha Centauri's Social Engineering, it was a method of selecting different styles of governance, economics, and aspects of daily life which would give you both benefits and drawbacks. For example, player's would need to choose between exercising a free market or a planned economy, and switching between the two might better adapt them for the current situation, but would prove costly in the short term. The system has a few additional quirks to it that I can't go into detail here.

Lots of things are going to be changing as time goes on. I'll be playing around with dependencies, creating art, and of course fleshing out what bonuses the virtues will actually have. I'm making this thread to both share my progress as well as get early feedback on ideas and suggestions before I release a playable version.

What I have at the moment:
- A perfectly clean slate. All virtues appear and are adoptable. Kicker virtues for each branch are implemented as 3/2/2. Adopting a branch in one category will block off your ability to adopt virtues in the other 2. There is no ability to switch your branch atm.

What I'm thinking of doing:
- The ability to switch between different branches of each category. Player's would only be able to switch when they have a free virtue and will lose that virtue upon switching. I'm uncertain how many virtues should be refunded from the branch that is being abandoned.

- Kicker policies award penalties rather than bonuses. This is to represent the player specializing in a particular social value and incurring penalties for doing so. This will be counter balanced by relatively strong "third-level" virtues that are easy to access. This will also encourage players to fully "flesh-out" their government by developing all areas.

- Having the virtues selected affect diplomacy. Of course the Diplomacy category will play a factor in this, but also I plan to add to the various factions preferences and aversions that affect their outlook on others. Selecting a factions preference, such as Hutama's preference for Wealth, will make him look more favorably on you, while selecting a faction's aversion, such as Kavitha's aversion to aggression, will make cause tension between you and them. Also, playing as a particular faction will disallow you from selecting their aversion.

- Nice new backgrounds for each of the branches, similar to Civ5's social policies, to make it look a little more unique from BE's current system.

At this point I haven't put any thought into the virtues themselves. Considering there are 42 new virtues (including the kickers) I will need to add, ideas for their bonuses and affects are certainly appreciated! Like really, REALLY appreciated! An ETA on release is unknown. I don't see myself finishing this for a few months at least.