Police Stations and Xenophobic

[Ision]

The voting is now over on ‘the balancing of the Governments’ and certain issues appear closed for now (at least until the next AU Mod revision after 1.20. That said - one issue that was never brought up was that of the xenophobic flag for Fascism. Let me start by saying that in my opinion the inclusion of ‘secret police and xenophobic’ in C3C was not well thought out by the designers – and was far more of an afterthought for the sake of ‘government uniqueness’. It was not well thought out in that a corruption reducing SPHQ was far more of a need for Fascism than Communism – historically both these totalitarian forms were notorious for their ‘secret police’. In any case, at the very least both totalitarian governments should have had the same option. The decision to include a ‘genocide flag’ (under the title of xenophobic) for Fascism while not including one for Communism is historically inaccurate to the extreme, both of these governemnts have infamous historical examples of mass genocides. It is however not my intention to focus on the degree of horror of either of these monstrous tyrannies. My primary concern is the impact that these ‘government flavors’ have on the game.

I believe that most of you would agree that the recent decision to have Fascism go to ‘minimal’ corruption does not in reality make this highly favored AI government much better – but only incrementally so. Personally I believe that combining the ‘minimal’ corruption with changing SPHQ from a Commie option to a Fascist one would; A. have only a small negative effect on Commie, and, B.go a long way towards addressing Fascisms impotence as a wartime option. This however is no longer on the table for discussion at this time.

This leaves perhaps 2 small incremental changes that can be done to give Fascism a slight boost – firstly, the elimination of the ‘xenophobic’ flag. Whether the ‘xenophobic’ flag actually represents genocide or not (I believe that it does so – and in an obvious manner) is unimportant - that in game terms it translates out into a mass population loss IS important. The AI already tends to draft and pop-rush itself to death in Fascism – xenophobic simply magnifies this effect and hastens the inefficiency of the AI. The elimination of this flag would help Fascism slightly – but they can use that ‘slight’ help. Secondly, is the issue of ‘police stations’ - here is corruption-reducing building that is available with Commie. The problem is that the Fascist AIs will never benefit from them unless they first spend another research cycle on another totalitarian government tech, after already having researched one! I will not venture as to whether police stations should more properly be available with Fascism, Espionage, or Nationalism – what I do know is that the present situation is another ‘Fascism handicap’ that this government can ill afford.

So here are my 2 proposals in brief:

1. Remove ‘Xenophobic’ flag from Fascism.

2. Move the availability of ‘police stations’ to a tech other than ‘Communism’

Ision

[nbarclay]

The SPHQ actually seems to be something Firaxis adopted from the mod community (including the AU Mod). In previous versions, Communism was so bad that it needed something like the SPHQ to make it useful. The problem is that Firaxis did so much else to improve Communism that adopting the SPHQ on top of that makes it too good, at least for big empires.

According to the editor, the flag that causs the pop loss is "Forced Resettlement," not "Xenophobic." The "Xenophobic" flag prevents cities conquered by Fascists from generating culture until at least half of their population is native.

Regarding whether or not eliminating the Forced Resettlement flag would be a good thing, Alexman's graphs imply that Fascism's special disadvantages are actually useful for game balance for civs with a size around the OCN or below. (One caveat: AI empires typically aren't as compact as the ones Alexman used in his experiments because they often have island cities and/or cities on the other side of another AI, so AIs would probably benefit from Communism at a smaller size on average.) Since AI civs seem to be smaller than the OCN a lot more often than they are larger (at least from checking a few of my own past games), Fascism is probably the right government choice for them most of the time in spite of its special penalties. The reason we humans hold Communism in such high regard and have such disdain for Fascism is that our civs are so often vastly larger, especially when we're on a millitary campaign toward domination, and Communism scales with larger numbers of cities a whole lot better than Fascism does.

That's not to say that eliminating Forced Resettlement from Fascism would be a bad thing. On average, it would almost certainly help AIs significantly more than it helps human players, although there would be exceptions when human players (especially on Deity and Sid) are stuck with small civs that late in the game. But from the perspective of typical AIs or of human players with small civs, the idea that Communism is clearly better than Fascism is inaccurate.

Nathan

[Ision]

Forced Resettlement eh? I had the distinct impression it was Xenphobic that caused the pop loss -?

all right then, I will ammend my proposals now as :

So here are my 2 proposals in brief:

1. Remove ‘the pop-loss flag’ from Fascism.

2. Move the availability of ‘police stations’ to a tech other than ‘Communism’

Ision

[Ision]

Nathan,

What about the proposed change for 'police stations'?

Ision

[nbarclay]

I didn't comment on the issue of police stations because I haven't thought it through enough. My conservative streak is screaming, "No, No, NOOOOO!!!!, but the more thoughtful part of me hasn't reached a conclusion yet.

[ZargonX]

Would you want to move Police Stations forward, backward, or laterally on the tech tree?

[ducki]

Originally posted by nbarclay
My conservative streak is screaming, "No, No, NOOOOO!!!!,

Hehe.

Originally posted by Ision
does not in reality make this highly favored AI government much better – but only incrementally so

I know we have voted on and I personally have suggested some quite radical, large changes for version 1.0 of the C3C AU mod, but now that we have a first pass, I definitely think baby steps are best.

The AU mod is a living thing - propose-debate-play-evaluate-revise-debate-rinse-repeat.

I haven't seen an AI Fascize itself to death yet - tactical and strategic stupidity seem to be the AI's HOV Lane of Doom - so I don't have any personal experience that suggests Fascism is death to the AI the same way that Old Communism was.

I agree that logically and logistically, Police Stations at Communism don't make much sense, and it may be that the gameplay balance that it originally offered is now off with the addition of Fascism, though I'm not sure where it would fit better.

Perhaps if you have some suggestion as to where it would work better, you could make your case - that might help other visualize why PSes at a different tech would help the AI without giving the human an undue advantage.


Since we can't put PSes on two techs, maybe there's a way to simulate it, though I'm no editor wiz, so bear with me...
1. Put Police Stations at Nationalism
2. Make Police Stations require/dependent on "something" - like a dummy resource or something similar.
3. Put said requirement/resource/thingy on both Communism and Fascism.

It sounds really convoluted, but the mental picture I have seems rather elegant, at least for not disadvantaging one police state over the other.
Thoughts?

[Theseus]

Thoughts?

Baby steps, yes.

We haven't seen enough of AI or human behavior with Fascism, so let's take it slowly.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by ducki

Since we can't put PSes on two techs, maybe there's a way to simulate it, though I'm no editor wiz, so bear with me...
1. Put Police Stations at Nationalism
2. Make Police Stations require/dependent on "something" - like a dummy resource or something similar.
3. Put said requirement/resource/thingy on both Communism and Fascism.

The problem is that the dummy resource would have to be something that actually exists for that to work, whereas we normally base our tricks on dummy resources that have zero occurrence on the map. If we could keep the new dummy resource from being visible or from having any effect on gameplay (including on where AIs choose to settle and attack) even though it exists, and if that resource would have no effect on the distribution of other resources, the idea might be workable (although the resource would have to exist on practically half the tiles in the game to guarantee that small civs won't ever be stuck unable to build police stations). But otherwise, it would cause too many problems.

[nbarclay]

One somewhat bizarre approach, if the AIs could cope with it properly, would be to make police stations require both Communism and Fascism. That could be accomplished by creating a small wonder associated with one government that costs only a single shield and having that small wonder enable the building of Police Stations, which themselves would be associated with the other government. If the AIs would think, "Ah, small wonder, I'll build it," that would be fully workable. If AIs would not build the small wonder almost immediately, however, their access to police stations would be delayed.

Is that a good idea? I'm not quite sure yet. Since AIs tend to get both totalitarian governments sooner or later, motivating human players to do so would presumably tend to help the AIs. On the other hand, for players with large tech leads, having to get two optional government techs instead of one to build police stations could discourage the players from detouring to get the techs needed to build police stations. And the change might be a bit awkward for players to understand and use in addition to being a departure from the default rules.

Nathan

[Ision]

very interesting idea Nathan - complex, but effective.

what do you think of espionage as the tech for PSs?

[nbarclay]

Moving Police Stations to Espionage would make Espionage a lot more interesting for civs not already motivated by the SPHQ, (I word it that way because of the proposals we're looking at to move or eliminate the SPHQ), but the big down side is that it would change things so that neither of the optional industrial government techs is important to a human player unless he wants to change governments. Since Espionage already has at least limited value (and we could give it more value by fiddling with spy mission costs) while Police Stations are the only reason either government tech matters to a player who plans to stay in a representative government, I'm inclined to think that keeping Police Stations with one of the government techs is more useful from the perspective of helping the AIs.

If we put Police Stations with just one government, Fascism would be a better choice in terms of helping the AIs because players are less likely to want that tech in order to change governments. On the other hand, that would involve moving something from where it's been ever since the very beginning of Civ 3, so conservatism argues for leaving Police Stations where they are (as I alluded to earlier).

Nathan

[alexman]

Originally posted by nbarclay
...having that small wonder enable the building of Police Stations

I don't think this is possible. The required building for city improvements has to be in the same city, so you would be able to build only one Police Station.

[nbarclay]

Oops. I guess I was crossing a few memories of different things.

[Madine]

What about removing the Facism tech, and moving Facism govt to nationalism?