labgnome wrote: ↑Sun Aug 30, 2020 10:01 pm
That strikes me as a very arbitrary way to divide them up.
As long as you pick a way to organize this among several alternatives, you are taking an arbitrary decision.
Yours is also arbitrary, just less interesting to play with, giving less strategic variety, and rather boring.
labgnome wrote: ↑Sun Aug 30, 2020 9:56 pm
Then I am sure you can explain them here.
Sure. I don't think I can do it better than
Geoff here, but:
Military policies' concept and effects are combat-related. Main affected game mechanics: troops, shields, planet defenses, detection, stealth, ships (if not clearly related to social or economics), influence through population control...
Economic policies' concept and effects are directly related to the
economic system, and more particularly to
production and
supply (the economic concepts, not FO mechanics). Main affected game mechanics: supply range, stockpile capacity, industry, research and influence (if not clearly related to social), population...
Something about harvesting a star's energy, or getting extra output from certain resource thanks to a certain extraction/processing technique, or increasing available resources for the population to grow (artificial food), or moving stuff faster between colonies...
Social policies' concept and effects are directly related to
social systems, and particularly to how is people organized, the relation between rulers and people, ideals, public opinion control, etc. Main affected game mechanics: influence output and upkeep, colonization cost and speed, population growth, species opinion, stability...
A production boost from slaving a planets population would fall in this category instead of economics, unless we have too many social policies and not enough economic policies and thus we prefer to make it an economic policy.
It's relatively ambiguous and rather flexible, just like reality in general. In reality, strong, separate, clear categorizations are illusions/delusions, except for certain abstract or physical concepts like "atom", "mass", classes of numbers, etc.
labgnome wrote: ↑Sun Aug 30, 2020 10:01 pm
I would say that output boosting effects should take priority over other effects for classification purposes.
That seems rather arbitraty.
What would be the reason?
If we allow for a given mechanic to be affected by more than one policy category, we allow for more specialized strategies. That is good for gameplay.