MOD: The Ancient Mediterranean MOD 0.2.2

[conmcb25]

I think adjusting the cost maybe in order.

Im not saying make it easy, Im just saying dont make it so its really not worth it.

There has to be a middle road there somewhere

[Justus II]

OK, I got the save, I will take a look at it later tonight (hopefully!). As for the vet wonder, I was trying to avoid the Parthenon, as it is pretty much a 'human only' wonder, since it requires 4 temples, the AI is bad about building pre-requisite buildings for wonders.

[Arrian]

Yay! I finally got to Standing Military. Of course, me being me, I've been building bath houses, sewers and guard stations instead of the barracks. My upgrades are almost all done (until I get Arab Horsemen in 4 turns, that is) and the rest are easily dealt with since I now have a solid Imperial Highway net. Once you have railroads, it's a snap.

Next time I play, I will see how a powerful City States empire deals with being the aggressor in a relatively large-scale war (Media, thy time has come!). I may, however, build the TAM version of Universal Suffrage first (I'll have to double back and research Drama).

Goodnight.

-Arrian

[Justus II]

OK, I had a chance to look over the save. Your results are similar to what I do, you have a (relatively speaking) small military compared to empire size, averaging just over 2 units per city (not counting workers). So, that tends to avoid the unit-support penalties we tried to use to offset the communal corruption problem. Here's the current gov't settings for version 2.5i, and how your empire fares in each gov't. Note that since you don't have the techs for Empire or Feudalism, I've had to estimate them. Also, Despotism and Theocracy include the tile penalty. This is reflected in Commerce and Shields, but there's no easy way to sum up the total surplus food, so it's not shown. It certainly reduces population growth, and even led to starvation at a couple towns. Also, Republic and Empire have Gov-specific wonders to act as an additional FP, which are obviously not built, so that would help those 2 govs. Empire, however, also has the 'facism' resettlement penalty, so after switching, you would experience a big pop loss, and need a few turns to recover your productivity.

Here's the results:

[Justus II]

Note that City States is the hands-down cash winner, but Republic isn't too far behind, and with another FP added in, should catch up. It also has faster workers. Empire has the shield production to match, and faster workers, and would be even more productive with it's FP. The differences start to shift as the total unit count increases. Here's a couple example cases, with larger militaries (3 units per city, then 4 units per). As I mentioned, I tend to also go for smaller militaries, but many players go for larger militaries, especially during the conquest phase. This, and the WW, combine to make Empire a better pure war-mongering gov (see in the last case, it even has more net cash flow than city-state!), and Republic the best balanced gov (with the FP). I know it's far from perfect (and am very open to suggestions), we just tried to come as close as possible while still allowing communal governments.

[thamis]

We need to find a way to make the Merchant Oligarchy produce a bit more gold. Also, Republic should be superior to City States, IMHO.

[Justus II]

Originally posted by thamis
We need to find a way to make the Merchant Oligarchy produce a bit more gold. Also, Republic should be superior to City States, IMHO.

Merchant Oligarchy does provide more net gold, for smaller size empires. The problem is once you get past about 30 cities (OCNx1.5 or so), the communal governments really start outpace the others. With 20 cities or less, Merchant Oligarchy would have better cash flow.

Republic IS superior to City States, IMHO, even in these examples. First, the Forum Romanum hasn't been built, once it is, corruption will be further reduced, bringing it closer to City States. Second, the improved worker rate, and lower war weariness, make it a more flexible government than City States.

[Arrian]

Cash flow isn't the only factor. Even if Republic had beaten out City States in overall cash flow, I still would have chosen CS, because of shield waste. This shows up in your spreadsheet comparison as well. Under Republic, there would have been two sizeable portions of my empire that would have been close to useless (Phoenicia and Assyria), forcing me to cash rush anything I wanted to build there. I planned to build the extra FP small wonder in Sidon, and that surely would have helped (eventually, since that would've taken some time), but under CS, there was no need. Every city I have was immediately productive.

Note that although building the extra FP would help Republic, I did some things that helped CS as well. I had several core cities that lacked courthouses, because under a central government those cities didn't need them. Those were quickly built, making things even better under CS. The previously super-corrupt areas did the same.

IIRC, when I did my test, I rearranged the WF in my cities first (I had moved things around to prevent starvation during the 6 turns of anarchy). This resulted in 1066 raw commerce for CS, with 220 lost corruption - 20.6%. I have it written down at home.

IMO, Republic loses out to CS, and would even if my army was larger (which, having played forward into the Imperial Age, it now is).

-Arrian

[Justus II]

Unfortunately, it's always hard to get a good comparison, since how you optimize your cities would be different under each government. I agree with your point about the production advantage of CS, unfortunately there's little or nothing we can do to offset that in the government settings, Communal gov's will always have more shields available outside the core, and with larger empires, that will always outweigh the (mostly minimal) losses due to corruption in the core when you switch to communal. And as you point out, that can be easily fixed in CS by building core courthouses.

One option we discussed was to remove the trade bonus, and possibly even add in the tile penalty (the only thing which can affect sheild production), but that seems too harsh. Just removing the trade bonus basically gives you Thing Law, which is communal and comes much earlier. Making City States non-communal solves the problem, but then what's the point of the government? You'd have Merchant Oligarchy (which also originally was communal).

I'd love to hear more suggestions about ways to tweak the governments, I spent a lot of time on them and never did get what I would consider 'balance', just tried to get them to each be appealing under different circumstances. Certainly, a good human player can ocercome just about any restrictions (look at players who choose to war-monger in Democracy in the normal game), all we can do is try to make some governments a better fit for certain situations.

[Arrian]

Justus,

I was thinking about this earlier. I agree that removing the commerce bonus just leaves you with Thing Law, so that's a no-go.

Is there a way to deny the Pantheon to City States? That might make corruption more of an issue. As you noted, my empire in this case is 2x the OCN. Without a FP, my empire might actually be feeling the corruption hit.

Perhaps deny Guard Stations as well? Again, corruption stays higher, and it's harder to reduce war weariness.

I think you could further reduce the unit support (0/1/1).

-Arrian

[Justus II]

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to deny improvements/wonders for certain gov's, just enable them. That was our thought with the extra FP for Republic and Empire. We may have to look at removing the Pantheon, or making it have a different effect, so the only FPs would be Republic and Empire. Another option would be to add the FP effect to other gov-specific wonders for the other govs, but that's adding a lot more small wonders.

I can definitely reduce unit support again, that' another problem area. By the time you have a huge empire and Imperial Roads, you no longer have to garrison most towns, so the unit/city ratio starts dropping again, just when we need it to offset the lack of corruption.

As for the Guard, again, can't really deny it. We could, however, make the WW wonder be Republic-specific, though?

[Arrian]

Doh. So much for my bright ideas. As you can see, I've not done any modding myself.

Making the WW wonder Republic-specific gives a (very minor, IMO) boost to Republic. Fine by me.

Hrm. I'm blanking. Other than making having much of an army hideously expensive, I can't think of anything else (right now) to restrain CS.

-Arrian

[thamis]

What's the current cost per unit in city states? Well I'm all for reducing units per city OR increasing the unit upkeep cost by 1.

[Arrian]

3 per, right? So it's already the highest in the Mod.

It's got 0/2/2 support levels. So once you have a decent number of cities, you're all set. Dropping it to 0/1/1 makes sense, I think.

-Arrian

[Justus II]

0/1/1 unit support sounds good to me too. Any other suggestions/concerns? Glad to see the increased interest in the mod!