Culture Points, a handful of missions then nothing?

With .77a you can also get culture points from wonders that you build on your core worlds.

Is that true? i've only ever noticed points from completing missions. I just tested now and is the Singularity Power Plant considered a "wonder"?  do you mean Galactic Achievement?  In any case this Singularity Power Plant did not grant me a point to put into the Ideology tree.  Has anyone ever played 300+ rounds and managed to fill the trees with points? or even just one tree?  Do missions just stop coming at some point for no reason you can discern?  I don't know what the expectation is so don't know if this is a bug or not.

I'm talking about wonders like the Eyes of the Universe, Elon's Lift, and the Beacon of Babylon. Although the Eyes might be bugged in .77b. And no, even with all of those and the missions I've never filled one whole tree.  I could have filled one and maybe most of another one, but so far I've tended to spread the points out more than focus on one tree.

Yeah sorry, to be clear i meant it as a physical reference to the number as i didn't pay attention to exactly how many points there are in a tree, i'd estimate you get about 10 points before you get no more.  Do you notice you stop getting missions / points after a while?  Like it seems as though you get a frequent drip of them and then they just sort of stop.  Is there a quota ?  a fixed limit ?  it literally feels like it's broken at this point, like a glitch hits and that's it no more trait points for you. lol.

If you don't play games up to 300 turns though you might not notice any of that.

I'll start a new game and confirm the 3 wonders you've mentioned provide points.  And what makes them wonders i wonder (lol), are they referenced as wonders in the tech tree or anywhere else? 

Ah nevermind, just read another thread confirming wonders/culture points are bugged or not implemented and about a dozen points then heat death of fun.

https://forums.galciv4.com/510147/page/1/#3837274

an extra culture point via a random event or something is nice, but yeah, i think there should be a more consistent way to earn both culture points and the levels that you need to spend them. and stuff like galactic achievements isn't very useful for players at higher difficulties where the AI is usually going to outbuild you if you actually try to build one.

You can also get them from hiring certain leaders. 

As it is now, you're really better off waiting to spend them until you've got more options unlocked because something like a free colony ship, even early on, is not worth even slightly as much as the perk that lets you take over all planets in your influence range or keeps your planets and starbases from flipping.

Yes, it's currently a bit easy to "farm" ideology awareness points so you can mostly unlock most trees, but then you get very little culture points.

Perhaps the two could be related? Like you gain culture points every X awareness points? Plus maybe increase the awareness for the higher levels.

I do wait to spend my Culture points. I have to, because there are so few I have to be sure to take the key items. It seems the culture trees have some very powerful choices, and some real dogs.  I skip the dogs since they let me.  If they don't let me skip the dogs, then we really need a lot more culture points.

My experience so far was that getting ideology points was virtually impossible and could only get about 10 before they ran out forever.  However as Altarian in 77b i can see everything is almost perfectly balanced (that's with my "double hull size/one-per-ship restriction removed" xml mod though, otherwise everything is just incredibly slow and my ADHD brain just switches off in the tedium).  So either RNG is broken and i just lucked out this playthrough, and that's the standard expectation whenever it's employed extensively in any game because it's difficult to get right without a pretty solid controller to mould output, or it's part of the balance and i just made a mistake in choosing Yor for my last playthrough and the playthroughs prior to that were on unbalanced / insufficiently complete versions. 

I think we're all in agreement that there are not enough ideology culture points to go around by the mid-game. However, keep in mind that many things you could spend ideology culture points are terrible. Out of the, what, 70-odd options, 25% are trash and 50% are irrelevant to the game you are trying to play. One time buffs like +50 control or a single colony ship are a total waste compared to things that will help you the whole game. Some are mandatory like eurekas and cheaper leaders. You really only have to think about a couple of them.

yeah agree, i really dislike the duality approach with traits, i almost never select them because it really relies on 2 things; that you have an absolute boon of one thing accidentally (otherwise you'd not want to sacrifice it right) and that you want the other thing.  So rarely i choose anything that takes away something else. Also really despise these sorts of loaded decisions without those stats being immediately available, i have to step out and go check my civs or units stats to see if this benefit will actually be worthwhile. Why not include the metrics with the decision.  And a 1 time buff is pointless, more so if they're static, static values in 4x choices are wild, oh yeah my civ that generates 80000 coins per turn could really use that 30 coins lol, i'd have the messenger executed for wasting my time.

I would consider spending an ideology a culture point to gain 1 control point per turn. One-time for 50? Not a chance. Same with a single colony ship. I would much rather have the option for improved growth on my home world because some races don't grow quickly and you can run out of citizens to staff colony and constructor ships. These decisions would would lose their value over time, but the value wouldn't drop to absolute zero.

Just want to mention that there are Ideology points, and there are Culture points.  You don't spend Ideology points.  I think you are referring to Culture points when you mention spending one to get a single colony ship, or getting 10% research boost empire-wide.

Yep, newbie mistake. I corrected the offending posts. I'm still getting the vernacular down.

I think we should name them ideology points and ideological awareness.  I'm not sold on the concept of it being a two-step thing.  

Instead, perhaps there should simply be ideological points earned in different categories that automatically unlock stuff once you have enough.  

The problem I see there is that the player doesn't get enough awareness of what these choices mean.  But IF you can minimize an event and then bring up the ideology screen you can then see the ramifications of your choices.

Yes being able to minimise the events so we can check other relevant data is vital to making a fully informed choice ( not just for ideology related choices).

I think "spend" is an appropriate epithet for the action of allocating an ideology point on the ideology tree.

Yeeessssss popups that forces you to make a decision without having 4 trillion points of data right in your short term memory at that exact point in time is painful lol.  Maybe absorb yourselves in ES2 for a day, learn all you can about the way they do their UI's, for me theirs is the absolute pinnacle of UI design, and it's thread runs consistent through each of their games (ES,ES2,EL). So their UI runs on popups a LOT, but each one of them can be told to not auto pop, and instead it stays in it's lane on the far right of the screen, so if you prefer not to be bothered you can turn them all off and they'll still appear in sequence on the right for you to open / minimize / dismiss.  It really should be the standard UI theory for all full screen systems, particularly 4x where you could be spending absolutely stonking volumes of times inside those ui's. The ascent/descent design also means there's symmetry on depth, you left click in, you right click out, on paper that doesn't sound like much but once you get into it i was blown away by how smooth it is, a "least energy" principal of UI design, mind blowing for me, a professional software engineer who has designed hundreds of UI's (probably none that are particularly good lol).

Yeah, I think that would be best, especially since it would "balance" the early tiers that give small bonuses since it would feel that they come as freebies instead of something you need to spend very limited points.

If the two-step system were stay, culture points could be more common but you needing to spend them in the tree in order.

That would be great, I'm really used to it in Old World, especially for events that ask you to spend money. Sometimes you don't have enough, so you sell some stuff to get it. Here is impossible.

I think you two are onto something. They will almost certainly allow events to be minimized and that would allow for last ditch "man, I have to come up with 300 credits immediately". At least that would be possible. There should probably be at least a Fibonacci progression to unlocking awards. Perhaps some of the existing things that previously awarded a culture point could award a small number of unrestricted ideology points instead.

Slight derail, but similar. I got a request from the Corporate Sector for a thousand credits, because their economy was collapsing. They were my number 1 trading partner. But I didn't have a thousand credits, I did have over seven hundred though. Their economy crashed and they blame me. They went from potential allies to potential enemies overnight. It would of been nice to have an option to pay installments over five or ten months. With shipyard missions or scrapping obsolete ships, I could of swung that. But no, I had to say not my problem.  

CS are greedy $%^&s, am i rite?   

I'm getting so few culture points per game that I give them little notice as they aren't impacting my game in any significant way. 

I don't think you should have to use the Culture Points in order in the tree. Instead, I'd like to see some type of bonus/incentive to selecting more traits in a specific ideology tree.  E.g, in innovation you could gain an extra research point each month for each selection in the tree after the first one.

This gives incentive to pick choices like "increase intelligence of each citizen by 1" or "Gain a free colony ship." because you can get a large bonus by completing the tree.