AU mod: Balancing the Governments

[Modo44]

Originally posted by alexman
I guess it's a matter of play style. I always try to build enough workers to keep up with the number of tiles worked by my population. At the very least though, if you build the same number of workers, you will make up some of the income lost to unit support by having more roads.

Perhaps I will, perhaps not. What it does in my eyes, is further weakening the already weakened Industrious trait. I mean, why bother with better Workers, if one can have them so early anyway? And with a very good government to boot.

Originally posted by alexman
Actually, switching from Republic to Democracy is much more tempting under this proposal, since unit support costs are always halved, and the penalty for Anarchy us so much less costly. Compared to these things, the faster workers are not a significant factor in the late middle ages.

Yeah, right. Ever tried to do a fast Railroading under Republic? With Mountains all around? Sorry about the sarcasm, but I thought the point was quite obvious, actually. Worker rate is a powerful tool at all times. Increasing it for Republic will only make the government even stronger.

Nathan, I do play huge maps mostly. And I do know the difference between flat, and per-city upkeep, thank you very much. Remember AU 505? After switching to Republic, I had a few turns without any upkeep cost, and this was almost exclusively due to the flat 18. I would never be able to stay below that on a huge map, and I mean not by quite a margin.

[alexman]

Modo44, sorry but your arguments make no sense to me.

[Modo44]

In most games, I will sooner or later be draining AI treasuries of gold, or making loads of myself. This basically means, that I can support any military by the Medieval Age. There goes one reason to switch to Democracy, even from a weakened Republic. Especially in peaceful games, where the military can stay small enough to be easy paid for.

If I play a peaceful game, I have little territory compared to the big AIs, hence the Republic is just fine for corruption considerations. There goes one reason to switch to Democracy. Not even a lucky REX changes this very much. As to warmongers... they are not supposed to like Republic, right? Do you think they will like Democracy, being at war so often? Somehow, I doubt it.

What is left as the main reason to switch to Democracy, is the Worker power, coming exactly at the right time - near Railroading season. Only thing is, your proposal to change the Workers for Republic makes this irrelevant, since both governments would be just as good at improving the land.

Yes, the number of Workers is a matter of playing style. But this does not change the general impact of making those Workers much stronger.


By the way, good "argument" there.

[joncnunn]

For exactly the reasons Modo44 outlined, I'm against giving Republic faster workers.

[punkbass2000]

TBH, my main problem with Modo's argument is that it seems to put Workers at a premium. IMO, by the time you have a Republic you should have loads of Workers, such that the increase in speed is, of course, nice, but not a particularly heavily weighted component of your governmental decision. By the time Democracy comes around it is all but irrelevant. Railroading Mountains? Come on, that's rather specific and not too important. Anywhere where it matters should take no time at all.

[Modo44]

Originally posted by punkbass2000
TBH, my main problem with Modo's argument is that it seems to put Workers at a premium. IMO, by the time you have a Republic you should have loads of Workers, such that the increase in speed is, of course, nice, but not a particularly heavily weighted component of your governmental decision. By the time Democracy comes around it is all but irrelevant. Railroading Mountains? Come on, that's rather specific and not too important. Anywhere where it matters should take no time at all.

You might be right, if you consider the strongest players only. You will probably have enough Workers right when you need them. But, take a look at some succession games, and you will see how few Workers most people make. Those are extremely low numbers. Even the flatland takes forever in Republic, if it is not played right. By making those Workers stronger, one would take the numbers away, basically reducing a strategic decision's importance. I thought the AU Mod was supposed to aim for the opposite (adding strategic decisions, not removing them), is it not?

[alexman]

Since we really do need to do something about governments (I consider it the most important piece missing in this mod), I'd like to place my earlier proposal under consideration.

• Anarchy: Reduce corruption to Rampant. Remove free unit and building support.
• Republic: Remove all free unit support. Increase worker rate to 3. Restore AI favored government choices as in stock (they no longer all favor the Republic).
• Feudalism: Revert back to stock (problematic corruption).
• Democracy: Revert back to stock (no free unit support).

We will vote in a week. If this proposal doesn't pass (and somehow I don't think it will), we will keep trying until we reach a better solution than we have now.

[Aqualung71]

Weighing in late I know, but I've never been a fan of the 18 flat support rate for Republic. It gives one the opportunity to move into Republic too early without penalty, giving sufficient time to build up city size and overall commerce through improvements before the suport costs start to impact heavily on research ability. I would prefer to reduce the flat support level.

Neither do I agree with making Workers faster under Republic. Firstly, building or not building Workers is a strategic decision, and this takes away part of that decision. It also provides a greater incentive to move into Republic earlier, despite the proposoal to reduce support costs. I always thought the intention was to discourage players to move into the commerce-bonus utopia of Republic too early.

I feel the original changes to Republic had a drastic impact upon players' tendency to move into Republic too early, and this was a good thing. The choice should therefore be to move into Monarchy or Feudalism first, then choose between say Republic and Democracy later.

I think I've raised this before, but my recommendation would be to move both Republic and Democracy back in the tech tree. This would force a first change to something other than Republic, and almost necessitate a second change at some point to take advantage of the commerce bonus in order to keep up in research.

As for the Anarchy change, I'm not really in favour of it as it devalues the Religious trait, which has already been downgraded with the introduction of the Agricultural trait and the increase of Anarchy under Religious to 2 turns. But I don't have strong feelings on it.

[nbarclay]

Granted, reducing the effects of Anarchy would give the Religious trait less advantage in the government changes everyone makes. But with anarchy less serious, it would be easier to take advantage of the Religious trait to change governments more often.

Prior to C3C, Religious civs had a unique flavor in their ability to change governments almsot on a whim. With the doubled length of Anarchy for Religious civs in C3C, a lot of that flavor disappeared. Reducing the effects of Anarchy would bring that flavor back; two turns of toned-down anarchy would be an even smaller penalty than one turn of stock anarchy was.

So even though I agree that reducing the impact of Anarchy would tend to weaken the Religious trait compared with other traits in cold, purely analytical terms, I see a real possibility that the change could actually make the Religious trait more interesting to play at least part of the time in the interest of variety. In any case, I don't view the net damage to the Religious trait as serious enough to be a deal-breaker for the idea.

Nathan

[Aqualung71]

I don't see how the benefit of 2 turns of less than catastrophic Anarchy for a Religious civ can in any way be seen to outweigh the benefit of the same for say 5 to 9 turns for non-Religious civs. So therefore, there is no doubt that this change benefits non-Religious civs more, and further downgrades the utility of the Religious trait.

But with anarchy less serious, it would be easier to take advantage of the Religious trait to change governments more often.

I hardly think this would change anyone's decision to change governments if they are Religious.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Aqualung71
I don't see how the benefit of 2 turns of less than catastrophic Anarchy for a Religious civ can in any way be seen to outweigh the benefit of the same for say 5 to 9 turns for non-Religious civs. So therefore, there is no doubt that this change benefits non-Religious civs more, and further downgrades the utility of the Religious trait.

An accurate picture requires looking at both the length of each period of anarchy and the number of periods of anarchy. If a religious civ goes through two periods of anarchy where a nonreligous civ would settle for one, for example, the comparison is four turns for the religious civ versus five to nine for a nonreligious civ. Nonreligious civs would still benefit more unless a player really goes overboard taking advantage of shorter anarchy with a religious civ to change governments a lot, but nonreligious civs would not necessarily benefit as much more as it would appear at first glance just from comparing the number of turns per period of anarchy.

I've been playing a game as the Celts where I broke from my usual approach by choosing Monarchy instead of Republic as my initial non-despotic government and engaging in some serious ancient-era warfare. If I'd been thinking about being playing a Religious civ, I would have switched to Democracy as an intermediate step between my initial choice of Monarchy and my eventual target of Communism. But because I wasn't thinking of it, even playing under rules with the effects of Anarchy toned down (as I am in that game), I stayed in Monarchy until I got Communism. That's a difference of three government changes versus two, which, while not anywhere near enough to fully offset the longer anarchy for nonreligious civs, is still significant.

I hardly think this would change anyone's decision to change governments if they are Religious.

It can be in borderline situations, such as if a civ is starting to sufffer significant war weariness but really doesn't want to call off a war yet, or if a civ is thinking about going to Democracy in between its initial non-Despotic government and an eventual goal of changing to Communism. (For that matter, if a civ wants to get to Feudalism, going to Monarchy or Republic as an intermediate step would be more attractive.) With anarchy having devastating effects, it takes many turns of significant benefit to offset the cost of even just two turns of anarchy. Toning down anarchy dramatically reduces the length of time a civ has to be in a different government in order t recoup the cost of the anarchy.

Consider, especially, the difference in terms of changing governments during wartime. With the stock rules, two turns of anarchy means a two-turn delay in the production of additional units. With the effects of anarchy reduced, there would be some impact on unit production due to higher corruption, but the disruption to war production would not be anywhere near as serious. If war weariness gets to be a problem during a time when a civ needs every unit it can get, a reduction in the impact of anarchy could easily tip the balance regarding whether it is better to change governments in order to get rid of the economic impact of the war weariness or to stay in the same government in order to keep unit production rolling. Or it might allow a civ to change governments and keep fighting when otherwise it would feel no choice but to sue for peace.

[nbarclay]

I got to thinking about it, and it occurs to me that reducing the impact of anarchy would make it a whole lot more workable to change Republic's war weariness to High. Under the stock rules, the biggest problem with having High war weariness for Republic is that the impact if players have to change governments in the middle of a war is so devastating. But with Anarchy toned down, the worst-case scenarios for what could happen under Republic with High war wearness would no longer be too terrible to contemplate.

Changing war weariness for Republic to High would be more in keeping with the original design of Republic than further crippling its free unit support would. In the original design, war weariness, not unit costs, was supposed to be the main obstacle limiting warfare under Republic. Unit costs were supposed to discourage Republics from building up really huge militaries, but they weren't supposed to keep Republics from staying reasonably competitive militarily.

That paradigm, in turn, meant that Religous civs could switch back and forth fairly easily. Relatively powerful militaries built up under Monarchy could be mintained under Republic at a not-unreasonable cost, and if a Republic started having trouble with war weariness (or wanted to preclude the possibility of such trouble), it could change to Monarchy. The design was flexible.

In contrast, if we make unit costs for Republic high enough to pose a serious obstacle against warmongering in Republic, we make them high enough to make it impractical for a civ that's been fighitng in Monarchy or Feudalism to change to Republic and keep its units. And while at first glance, it might seem to make sense for civs to build down their militaries when entering a time of peace, the idea of building down the military in peacetime and building it back up again in times of danger goes completely against Civ's "build once, keep forever" unit paradigm. The cost of replacing disbanded units in Civ 3, at least prior to the mid industrial era (by which point civs should ideally be in Democacy or Communism), is too high.

Nathan

[joncnunn]

I've got some input on Anarchy with production from a recent test. It was a map I would have abandoded when The Wheel was aquired if I wasn't so interested in testing anarchy.

What I did was start with the latest AU Mod, and then make the following changes to Anarchy:

1. Corruption level : Improve to Rampent [same as despotism]
2. Unit Support costs: Reduce from All units free to 0/0/0 [NONE!]
3. Tech limit: Max science slider = 50%
4. Police: Kept no police allowed
5. Added Exnophobic.

Results:
1. Builds: Builds did get built at the same decent rate.
2. Unit Support Costs: This was a major drain on my economy during anarchy.
3. Science: I need't have bothered, I was running a deficit at 30% sicence
4. Police: I had to increase luxaries to 20% to maintaign order (without specalists)
5. Xenophobic: While I had no foreign cities, my normal cities did have some cultural expanions. This does show that this flag would have some affect. This shows that culture gets bypassed on cataclosphic corruption, and not the transistion govt.

I was also testing revised Republic 0/1/1 without the flat unit support and 2 over the limit. My testing shows it does indeed push back when you can run it without ruining your economy,.

[joncnunn]

I've exprimented with my own mod of Republic at 0/1/1 with no free units and double unit support. That has the opposite problem that AU mod does. (Republic too weak. Can't get the economy well developed to support this until there's only a few techs remaining until Democracy.)

So, perhaps the following solution:

Republic: revert to pre-Conquests settings:
(0/0/0) 1 gold for support. I think the WW should remain low.

Democracy: revert to stock conquests and add a SPHQ
(0/0/0) 1 gold for support.

New Small Wonder. FBI HQ. Same tech reuqirement and cost, and function as the SPHQ. But requires Democracy.

Basically with these two changes, a peaceful players should be able to switch to Republic after a Market place or two (assuming they've been actively roading) but then have an incentive to switch to Democracy at some point. Maybe not right away, but maybe by early industrial.

[a1979s]

Being bit of a historyfreak it seems very easy the sollution is that as you advance from one age to another the goverment style you have should also evolve, despotisme is not very likely in industreous age and later, democracy is something that only became widespread from industreous age... and so should other styles be adpated A) to the age and B) to your playestule as either warmonger or builder and the civ specific characteristics.

A.

Ps just my opinion