AU mod: Balancing the Governments

[ducki]

I had completely forgotten the talk of WW and Republic - rather than further reducing unit support, I'd like to see it have harsher WW. That's just me, I'm sure all the republicans will lynch me for it.
I think further reducing unit support will make it even harder for the peaceful builder to field a meaninful defense force, but I may be wrong.

Also, boosting Fascism is, IMO, still valid. It may be that we're nearly to the point of diminishing returns for nerfing the Rep-Mon duo. Yes, I want the moderns to almost always be worth enduring anarchy, which means reducing the relative effectiveness of the ancients - I just don't know how low we can go without making a straight despot to democracy play the "best" option. Where would despotism fall on that chart, anyway? I realize Monarchy looks like a good baseline because it is straight, but I'd still like to see Despot for comparison - also so we can see if Despot-Demo is feasible for a rabid early warmonger at any point in our tweaking.

More WW for Republic!

[alexman]

I have no problem with reducing the free unit support of the Republic even further, but it's not enough to address all the issues with governments in Civ3. IMO we need to address three issues in this thread:

1) Make Feudalism more useful as a first government. I think it's widely accepted that the Republic and Monarchy are well balanced as first governments already. Options: Reduce corruption for Feudalism or remove WW for Feudalism.

2) Make Fascism more useful as a late-game warmongering government. The comparison here is to Communism, which is already an awesome warmongering government, and to the Republic, which has enough unit support to sustain a large army. Options: Reduce corruption for Fascism, or increase corruption for Fascism and add trade bonus. Also, add maximum WW to Republic, or reduce free unit support for Republic.

3) Make Democracy considerably better than the Republic for a late-game builder. Options: Change corruption model for Democracy to communal, increase free unit support for Democracy, or reduce free unit support for Republic.

Did I miss anything?

[ducki]

The only thing I'd add is probably just a simplification of those
4) Make it "worth it" for the player to switch to a modern government in the vast majority of games. Two possible ways to do this are:
a) nerf the ancient governments into the stone ages
b) boost the modern governments to the moon
c) convince Jesse to add an Anarchy cap for the player on a per level basis, just like the AI, in the editor.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by alexman
Did I miss anything?

Nope.

[alexman]

OK then, let me explain the reasons behind my favored proposal (above). Perhaps if more people do the same thing, we can arrive more easily at a proposal for voting, instead of having me guess the public support for each idea and getting in trouble all the time.

Originally posted by alexman
Reduce corruption for Feudalism or remove WW for Feudalism.

This one is easy. Remove WW from Feudalism and you make Monarchy the least useful government of the three. You would then have to either weaken the Republic and/or strengthen Monarchy to compensate, which means more changes, and more testing to make sure Monarchy and Republic remain balanced relative to each other.

Reducing corruption for Feudalism is a more elegant solution, which requires fewer changes. Each of the first three governments then have a place. Republic is best for commerce/high luxuries/low units, Feudalism for high production/limited war/many towns, Monarchy for early switch/war/many cities.

Reduce corruption for Fascism, or increase corruption for Fascism and add trade bonus. Also, add maximum WW to Republic, or reduce free unit support for Republic.

I favor increasing corruption of Fascism and adding the trade bonus because it makes this government clearly better in areas where Communism is not so good. It fills the void for late-game warmongering with a small empire, or when you want research at the expense of production.

To nerf the Republic compared to war governments, I could go either way. 1/0/0 support or no WW both would do the trick. The 1/0/0 idea is probably the smaller change, because people are used to having the Republic with less WW than Democracy, and we have already tampered with the Republic's free support.

Change corruption model for Democracy to communal, increase free unit support for Democracy, or reduce free unit support for Republic.

Here it depends on how much better we want Democracy to be compared to the Republic. The Republic will always be comparable to a Palace-centric Democracy, no matter what we do with support costs. Changing the corruption model for Democracy to communal is a big change, but it would give Democracy a unique place as well as ensure that Communism is never the best builder government. That's why I would like to see a communal democracy with no free unit support, and 1/0/0 unit support for the Republic.

[nbarclay]

Keep in mind that the balance for Republic needs to work for inexperienced players, not just for experts who know practically every trick there is for using Republic effectively as a warmongering government. If we try to balance it so that people like Dominae and me can't use it effectively for moderate warmongering, we will absolutely cripple it for novice players who don't know nearly as many tricks.

The nature of Republic is such that players who are good at operating with minimal military forces and who are good at keeping war weariness to a minimum when they fight can use it far more effectively than players who use larger militaries and are not as good at keeping war weariness down. Keeping up with tile improvements to make good use of the commerce bonus is also very important, as is the use of the luxury slider to grow cities big. (The commerce bonus of Republic and Democracy makes good use of the luxury slider a lot more valuable for those governments than for others because good use of the luxury slider can dramatically improve commerce as well as production.)

I would also point out that even for me, with all of the tricks I know to get the most out of Republic, the choice to go straight from Despotism to Republic in AU 501 was not even close to being a no-brainer. I could have switched to Monarchy earlier than Republic was viable, and that would have let me trigger my GA earlier without suffering the drawbacks of a despotic GA. That, in turn, could have let me take out the Sumerians and Hittites earlier, especially since I would not have had to worry as much about keeping my number of units down. Even though fighting as a Republic is practical within certain limits, Republic does place significant limits on warmongering that do not exist in Monarchy.

So overall, given the range of players who participate in Apolyton University, I think any significant effort to further weaken Republic would probably do more harm than good. The balance as it is now might heavily favor Republic for players who know how to make the best possible use of it, but I'm not convinced that the balance is bad overall across the full range of AU players.

Nathan

[Aqualung71]

I think Republic is well balanced. The change to unit support had a definite negative impact, accentuated by the archipelago map in AU501 which required us to maintain a larger standing army. I think reducing the unit support further would almost cripple Republic, which won't increase player choice but simply change the choice.

I've always thought that a viable solution is to move Republic to a later time. Combine that with beefing up Feudalism and you present the usual Republic player with a headache due to the substantial cost of staying in Despotism too long. While I agree that with C3C many players (including myself) are staying in Despotism longer, the cost of doing so increases dramatically through the middle ages as tech and building/unit costs increase.

This would force all players to consider an interim government (Monarchy vs Feudalism), before a second switch to an endgame government (Republic vs Deomcracy vs Communism/Fascism). Unfortunately, improving Democracy significantly would then probably make Republic the useless government, which is ironic.

Communal Democracy, while a pretty significant change to the stock game, looks to have the desired effect based on Alexman's graphs. A question though - I presume your "rampant trade-bonus" fascism curve does not take into account the pop loss when you move into Fascism, and the consequent drop in commerce? If not, perhaps a change to problematic corruption may counter this loss. Since I've never tried Fascism I don't know what the actual pop loss is - can anyone comment?

[Ision]

Keep in mind that the balance for Republic needs to work for inexperienced players, not just for experts who know practically every trick there is for using Republic effectively as a warmongering government. If we try to balance it so that people like Dominae and me can't use it effectively for moderate warmongering, we will absolutely cripple it for novice players who don't know nearly as many tricks.

The nature of Republic is such that players who are good at operating with minimal military forces and who are good at keeping war weariness to a minimum when they fight can use it far more effectively than players who use larger militaries and are not as good at keeping war weariness down.

Absolutely Correct! - I have recieved numerous PMs from regent and monarch players that use the AU mod regularly. The changes already made to Republic are more than sufficient. Care should be taken that the AU mod not become the EAU mod (Experts). I do not believe that the object of the AU mod (as some have suggested) is to make Demo clearly superior to Republic. Demo is already clearly superior - for large empires or peaceful builders. While Republic remains the mid-sized gov choice for those that want a warmonger/builder 'balance'. This is perfectly reasonable.

Democracy: Change corruption model to communal, and remove the free unit support we added in AU mod 1.03b.

Let me restate what Dominae stated - a Demo/Commie 'hybrid' is an extreme departure from stock. Communal corruption should be strictly reserved for 'Communism'. Beyond that IMO it takes away from the 'feel' of going Demo. The communal and minimal corruption models of demo and commie add a unique flavor to the game - which I would bet the designers did intentionally - in the manner of Civ traits. Should there be another Communal government option? - perhaps so, but 'theocracy' is of yet still not a CIV option. Maybe Civ IV........

Communism however, should definitely have the 'Xenophobic' option flagged. This would take a little bit of the steam out of the 'a little TOO perfect' warmonger/production beast. Besides, historically speaking this is the form of government that lead to nearly a 100 million human deaths by both genocide and war.

Fascism does need a tweak - but perhaps minimal corruption along with a trade bonus would suffice? Perhaps a 'secret police' gov specific small wonder on the PTW-Commie model already employed by the AU moders. Why must the AU mod make such a radical departure instead of a step by step approach? The rampant corruption - trade bounus approach will help a small warmonger - BUT, it precludes a large Fascist empire strat - there is no historical precedant for this. By late 1941 the German and Japanese Fascist had HUGE and militarily efficient dictatorships - and then they declared war against the world and got dogpiled! By simply reducing corruption to minimal Fascism will still remain the warmongers choice for a human player starting with a mid-sized civ - while the human player that already has a large empire by early industrial - will still opt for Commie. Lets not forget that the income graph is not the whole picture when one directly compares Commie/Fascism to Monarchy - there is the higher unit support - and forced labour pop-rushing advantage.

The suggested changes to Fuedalism - I agree with completely. Anything would be better. Personally I would love to see Feudalism scrapped altogether and its replacement with a communal theocratic governemnt.

Ision

[sabrewolf]

i don't like the idea of making standard democracy too powerful (with communal corruption AND trade bonus AND money rushes).

politically i'm completely democratic, but for the sake of gameplay, diversity is better.

alexman said earlier that if you've got 200% of OCN the game is already won. to me, that a reason to _weaken_ democracy, not to strengthen it. when dominating, you don't need to worry about WW because you can overroll the enemy in no time just with overwhelming force (or tons of bombard units).

the only time i've tried feudalism, it really hurt having the 3g-costing units. so i can't say if the balancing ideas here are appropriate or not....

[alexman]

Originally posted by Thriller
A question though - I presume your "rampant trade-bonus" fascism curve does not take into account the pop loss when you move into Fascism, and the consequent drop in commerce? If not, perhaps a change to problematic corruption may counter this loss. Since I've never tried Fascism I don't know what the actual pop loss is - can anyone comment?

The population loss is 1 pop per town, 2 per city, 3 per metro. I didn't take that into account, but in many cases the commerce loss is temporary because cities that had reached their maximum size can start growing again, and cities that became towns can grow faster. Still, you're right that it's something to keep in mind.

[alexman]

Originally posted by Ision
Communism however, should definitely have the 'Xenophobic' option flagged.

Don't you think xenophobia is as much part of Fascism's unique flavor as communal corruption is part of communism's unique flavor?

Fascism does need a tweak - but perhaps minimal corruption along with a trade bonus would suffice?

This would make Fascism the ultimate government. That's basically Democracy with no WW!

By the way, I don't agree with your Communism/Fascism reality justifications, but I won't get into that, as it is not relevant for this mod.

[Fosse]

I agree with the cautions to prevent AU from working too much for the expert crowd. Better AI isn't the same as Harder Game 100% of the time.

I'm playing with current AU rules, and I do switch from Republic to Democracy, and will occassionaly consider Monarchy if I'm religious and want to war early (in fact, then only reason I didn't go Monarchy in my current game as the Celts was that nobody would trade it to me, even though I was the only one with Republic.).

The original CIv governments (ie. not fascism or feudalism, which I've yet to use) seem balanced for this average player.

That said, communal democracy sounds really interesting to me. There is a realism argument for it: the old "San Francisco isn't corrupt because it's 3000 miles from Washington" and "You think Washington doesn't have corruption." I'd be really interested to at least try it on an AU game.

That being said... if it's better for the AI to go Demo, then would it provide a needed late game boost to the AI, especially if republic still feels "good enough" to many players? The trick there would be to make democracy good enough to help the AI, without tempting the human 100% of the time.

[Nisku]

Originally posted by alexman


Changing the rules in the bic file doesn't affect existing saves. I'm surprised you noticed any difference at all. Did you change the rules with a savegame editor?

It worked fine for me. I changed the rules in the conquest file and loaded up my save game, the next turn the changes to communual took effect. It was fairly obvious that the waste/corruption was changed to communual I would have noticed if it hadn't.

I made a mod with some of the changes you suggested and started up a game.

Monarchy-2/4/4 support, no other change
Republic-1/2/1 support, no other change
Democracy-Communual corruption, no other change
Communism-no change
Fascism-Given trade bonus, changed corruption to problematic, no other change
Feudalism-changed corruption up to nuisance, no other change

So far it's been working out good. The computer seems to prefer Feudalism to Republic in the early game and rarely goes in to monarchy. The AI does have more variety in governments then it did before. I haven't got to the more advanced forms of government yet. I've been thinking about adding a small wonder to each government just for flavour.

[alexman]

Originally posted by Nisku

Fascism-Given trade bonus, changed corruption to problematic, no other change
Feudalism-changed corruption up to nuisance, no other change

Problematic and nuisance corruption levels are remarkably similar (they have identical distance corruption, and just a 10% OCN difference). That means your change to Feudalism is trivial, and the trade bonus to Fascism might be too powefull.

[Nisku]

Originally posted by alexman

Problematic and nuisance corruption levels are remarkably similar (they have identical distance corruption, and just a 10% OCN difference). That means your change to Feudalism is trivial, and the trade bonus to Fascism might be too powefull.

Thank you I didn't know that, where do you get this information or does it come with being the king of corruption?

So you would say boost feudalism up one more notch and lower fascism down one for corruption, sounds good to me. I'm not sure about republic being 1/0/0, I think putting it at 1/2/1 would weaken it enough so that it remains a mostly peace-time only government.