Republic

[Lethargic]

does a republic government do anything besides give you all the disadavantages of a democracy with 0 advantages?

[Jaguar]

Unit unhappiness is better in republic, but when you have the choice of democracy or republic, democracy wins hands down.

[KrazyHorse]

The advantage of Republic is a higher trade yield. This advantage is not as high as the one afforded by Democracy, however. On the other hand, you can switch to Republic quite a bit earlier than to Democracy.

[War4ever]

one of the pluses of republic over democracy is that it allows your trade vessels out and about...... democracy can cause unhappiness with any unit out of the city unless you have JSB

repub gives you much higher trade over repub.

the corruption is about the same as monarchy... unit support is costly and so is setter support.....

but repub is great for wltkd

[Exile]

Republic is not that bad.

If you can manage to play without diplomats or spies, Republic is not bad at all. If you can get Women's Suffrage, your unhappiness due to units out of city will be taken care of; no more problems in that direction. With a Republic, you can get the WLTCD, keep your science & trade rates relatively high, and still produce a large army. The only real problem then is with the stupid senate making peace with your victims behind your back.

The problem is that very few people have the courage to play without their precious diplomats and spies. These units are clearly too powerful and dreadfully unbalance the default game in favor of either Democracy or Fundamentalism. This outcome is far from realistic; try scenarios.

Exile

[Scouse Gits]

Exile is quite right - a late Republic with Women's Suffrage is a viable war-time government, it loses out financially to Fundy & Dem - hence is vulnerable to Spies & Diplos, but generally outperforms Commie...

An early Republic however, is a different thing - it only has a short lifetime, between Monarchy & Demo - SoL and your preferred long term government - but WLCD allows early exponential growth - you can bang your eight or so cities right upto size 11 or 12 pre AD

[East Street Trader]

The key feature of early Republic, for me, concerns caravans and trade.

You get an extra arrow fom each square worked which already produces an arrow in Republic but, when you make the change from Monarchy, this advantage can be pretty much totally outweighed by the fact that you suddenly have to support many units which required no support under Monarchy.

I agree with SG in pointing out that you can grow faster through WLTCDs but that is no panacea. Whether the growth will pay off can be a matter of which way quite a delicate balance falls.

Whether the balance is going to work positively or not depends, IMO, pretty much entirely on whether you can quickly develop an sustain fast and efficient foreign trade.

Because your cities have much bigger arrow counts in Republic both the up front bonus on delivering the caravan and the yield of the route are much much higher. If you were going to get a measly 60 or so gold and beakers under Monarchy and a route paying three arrows a turn, you're likely to get a 200 gold/beaker bonus and a 5 or 6 arrow a turn route under Republic. With a high value commodity and a good trade partner the payoff will be higher.

So I like to prepare for going Republic by having some caravans completed or nearly completed and a few ships built and located ready to get a ship chain going promptly. That way cash starts coming in and I can use that cash to push the production of more caravans along (recovering some of the slow down to production which comes with the loss of shields).

If you can deliver at least one good value caravan a turn, or two or three lower value ones, and combine that with WLTCDs then your research will hum and you can aim to exploit the early tech windows like the ironclads against antique/musketeer units. Or you can focus solely on research and lay the groundwork for an early landing.

If WLTCDs go well, in fact, it stops being needful to focus on foreign trade. Plenty of workers on ocean squares will make your own cities better trading partners than A1 cities. Railroads can be an important advance playing like this because it gives yet another boost to the value of domestic routes.

If a lot of cities are building caravans then they're not building settlers and it's a bit harder to sustain continued expansion. I rate early Republic a harder game to play than staying in Monarchy and continuing expansion. But both are viable and offer different sorts of satisfaction.

If you try the early Republic route I commend a very aggressive search for chances to obtain NONE units. It can pay intensionally to give up a city to barbs so as to set up a recruiting station but your exploration continues to give chances when your explorer finds barbs in a distant hut, or you may find an A1 city taken by the barbs or find some cheap A1 units wandering far from home.

[Rasputin]

Early rep is good if you have no armies marching aroun dthe world , if so stay in monarcy...

of course as soo nas you start trading better be in at elast repub to gain trade advantages... Once Demo comes around , you better have some wonders or you may end up having to build lots of city improvements to keep people from rioting everytime you move a damn ship ...

[War4ever]

i was in a game last night, four player, and with only pyramids, wall and Adam Smiths..... i was able to compete with a highly skilled player with HG, the SSC, and the other two happy wonders.... when the game ended i just edged him on the pg, even though he was supreme by 200k in population.

I spent the game setting up trade routes and decided not to build every wonder.

Now as the game proceded we had the same amount of cities 18 i believe. I should have built cops and issacs.... but didn't ..... this would hurt me later but my economy and city improvements were far ahead of anyone in the game.....and so many of them were free too.

Too anyone who says you can't compete or even be tied for the lead without the happy or leos or SOL..... bah..... obviously you only play civ when you have four special river starts

its quite fun to have to be in tune with your civ and make some "real" decisions...... nice change of pace from my bang out the settlers, bang out the caravans , bang out the opposition games

[Scouse Gits]

At times an early Republic can be a real *****! Half your empire starves to death (settlers taking 2 food), whilst the other half riots. Then there is a Senate which tells you when you can blow your nose ...

Those food rich cities in Monarchy can be useful - the ones with wheat and fish. Build food caravans or settlers in them to boost your science city.

Sure you can grow your cities quickly in Republic - but the corruption levels are high! Too many people and you start needing Aqueducts and Courthouses for sensible benefits. In addition the production is hindered by unit support. As samson has proved with his OCC using four citizens - size is not always important! A well run Monarchy - with most cities celebrating with trade routes comes close to a Republic. Head for Democracy (and SoL) for a real government - either Democracy/Fundy or Commie - the latter is a powerful option if most cities celebrate yielding double trade arrows.

OK - if you wanna land on AC in 200AD then you gotta play early Republic - but for games mere mortals play ...

----------

SG(2)

[rah]

Yes War4, you are correct. I have said it all along, and markus and a few others have proved it also.

You did have a few things in your favor, one civ allowed you to deliver caravans over land with out destroying them. (you'll remember that I didn't allow that, even though it was funny that your caravans won a few combats) and you had sea access to deliver to a few of my high trade cities(but never my cap). My navy had 0 luck destoying incoming ships (i was working toward better ships to stop that crap). But you definitely proved that the stategy can help you maintain the pace. It's too bad that the other players weren't closer on the pg. It would have been fun to continue that one to see where the advantage would be. I had everything going for my SSC which might have made the difference. It was a very interesting game. The thousands that you made in trade bonuses really can help build the happiness improvements to offset the wonders.

It was worse than our typical dirt ball world, I had no gold/iron, only two wines, one silk, one gem, no spice and just a handful of whales. Which really pushed my towards a SSC strat. (one whale and rivers and oceans was my best bet.

But I guess this shouldn't have been any surprise. Enough people have posted about it. Well done.


RAH

[War4ever]

my mistake that game was not colonizing all the land i had available....... in a normal game i would have taken on the happy problems associated with too many cities.......

this time i did not and that certainly hampered my long term growth....... however i recovered well enough to give you a run for your money

Was a weird game though, the wonders came at a slow pace for all oh well thats the beauty of civ.....keeps you guessing

[rah]

Yes, a very wierd game. I can't remember getting so many key techs second or third and still building the wonders. I kept thinking I was wasting my time building them, and sweating the whole turn, and then being surprised when i got them. Maybe one and rarely twice, but not the 4 times i did it. Every time I got a tech, barono would thank me, (GL at it's best) and I'd always scream damn knowing I wasn't first. But maybe if you had built a few I would have gotten extra trade routes. Demands to my cap were paying over 200 even after Invention. Once I got caravals, I would have tried a few foreign routes. My tirenes really sucked combat wise. Got one to a vet(only one to win one combat), and it died the next attack. It was one of those game where since I was getting a 2 techs every three turns, I'd crank up the gold once every 6 turns to make up for the caravans that were going to wonders instead of routes. Not quite markus money, but close. I didn't have my cities lined up to take advantage of the road connect bonus. Too many rivers.

RAH

[War4ever]

on these small dirt piles flanked by rocks, connecting cities is a real pain in the arse. Throw rivers in there and its even worse. Admittedly those bonuses are easier to achieve when the land is plush and green. Tis why city placement on those tiny maps is so important.

All in all had the other two been closer it would have been a fun game to continue. Hopefully fri and sat we can get our games fine tuned and hopefully so can the others..... i doubt it will be a repeat (tech and wonder wise)

[Deathwalker]

You do get some of the advantages of a Democracy, like trade. The other advantage was that you do not need to keep all your cities happy. So if your fighting near a city, you dont need to worry about it bringing downh the whole goverment.