AU mod: Balancing the Governments

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by alexman

The idea to give low war weariness to Democracy is a good one because then you ensure that Democracy is always better than the Republic. I just feel that having special war governments for war is better for forcing the player to make choices, and for keeping the original flavor. That's why I prefer to nerf the Republic instead.

I'm not convinced that there's room to "nerf" Republic much more than we already have without causing excessive harm for players with no more than moderate levels of experience and skill. We could "nerf" it as a big-civ warmonger government by replacing some of the per-city free unit support with fixed support without regard to number of cities, albeit only at the cost of making Republic relatively better on maps with less land than on maps with more land (at least unless players and AU game designers would adjust the fixed support level depending on map size and land coverage). But as I've said before, most of the things we could do to make Republic less powerful for the players who are best at using it effectively would cause serious problems for many other players.

If one accepts that we've already "nerfed" Republic about as much as makes sense given the full range of players who use the AU Mod, all that is really left is to improve Democracy if we want it to be worth the time of switching to for human players more often. And with Communsim so much more powerful in C3C than it was previously, and if we make Fascism a bit more viable, we have some room to improve Democracy.

[Theseus]

Fair enough... I just don;t think lower WW is the way to do so.

How about crazy good unit support for metros?

[Ision]

What would be the effect of moving Feudalism to Monarchy?

Would this interefere with Alexmans 'flavors' in ant way?

What do think of a 5-3-1 --- 2 gpt ---- ?

Ision

[alexman]

Yes, the value of the Monarchy tech would certainly increase for the AI, and minor changes to flavors would have to be done to compensate.

However, it somehow feels wrong to move the Feudalism government to the Ancient Age, especially since the Feudalism technology will still be left in the Medieval tech tree. And as for tweaking unit support, it doesn't make much difference in the Medieval Age when you have a good number of cities, as I have claimed before.

[Harovan]

In what state is Republic at the moment? (Sorry, haven't been following through the versions)

[nbarclay]

At the moment, free unit support is reduced from the standard 1/3/4 to 1/2/2, but otherwise, it should be the same as the C3C default.

Now that I think of it, if we wanted to undermine Republic just a little bit more, we could bump its corruption up to the same level as Monarchy's the way we did in the PtW version of the Mod. That shouldn't hurt non-experts too much, especially since the players hurt most by slightly higher corruption would tend to be those who are successful enough to create the biggest empires.

[sabrewolf]

i've been following this thread, but i'm not sure anymore if this has been proposed already:
how about bumping up republic's war wariness to high.

that would help towards alexman's aim of getting 3 "inbetween"-governments, a warmongering one (monarchy, no WW), an economical one (republic, high WW) and an intermediary one (feudalism, low WW).

[nbarclay]

Democracy's high war weariness is offset to a certain extent by the fact that core cities generally have much higher levels of happiness to begin with by the time Democracy becomes available, or at least not a whole lot later. The discovery of Astronomy and Navigation can dramatically increase access to luxuries (with marketplaces giving the later ones enormous value), and cities not infrequently have a cathedral, a colosseum, or both. Depending on a player's skill, priorities, and luck, Sistine and/or Bach's may also be providing a happiness boost. Thus, in the era of Democracy, core cities are likely to have a good bit more happiness than they truly need in order to avoid rioting when a war starts.

In contrast, when an early Republican war starts, a player may be running the luxury slider at twenty or thirty percent before the first shot is fired. (Such settings are fairly typical for me.) High war weariness would be far more devastating under those circumstances than it generally is later in the game.

Further, the impact on the feel of the game if we would increase Republic's war weariness to high would be truly enormous. Months and even years of experience getting used to the impact of war weariness under Republic would be destroyed instantly, and we would have to start learning what we can expect to get away with and what is too risky all over again. Granted, we would not be set back quite all the way to "square 1," but we would be set back a lot closer to it than I care to get after spending so much time getting good at figuring out what is practical and what isn't under Republic. Also note that fighting under Republic would feel so different under the standard and AU Mod rules that moving back and forth could be a significant problem, although at least the difference would not be a subtle one.

If we would decide we want to reduce Democracy's war weariness, that would not cause players a lot of problems. Any strategy that works under high war weariness would also work under low war weariness, so players would not be in for any nasty surprises if they play the way they usually do under the AU rules. Further, it would be hard to find a player that is used to what war weariness is like under Democracy who is not also used to what it is like under Republic.

But the situation giving Republic Democracy's level of war weariness would be the exact opposite. Strategies that used to be practical under Republic would become disastrous, and even to the extent that people have recent experience fighting under Democracy at all, that experience would not necessarily carry over well for reasons I explained above.

Nathan

[sabrewolf]

nbarclay: i see your point. i too like starting major wars in the days of knights... (usually republic era).

but then, aren't these changes proposed here made for 2 main reasons:
1) balancing: make every governement worthwile... everything has it's strengths and weaknesses.
2) switching: to motivate people to 2 switches, even for non-religious civs.

but the only "old" governement which is useful in industrial and modern ages is the republic. you've got a great economy, hardly any WW, little corruption.
now, to get 2 switches likely, the difference between the middle and later gov-types have to be big enough. instead of only making later ones much stronger, the middle ones (well, actually only republic) could be weakened a tad bit.

your example of war under republic without enough cathedrals, luxuries, etc. would need a change of strategy, if republic's WW would be high. republic wouldn't be a good option anymore for waging bigger wars and monarchy and feudalism would be more appropriate. wouldn't this give a bigger variety of govs?

[ducki]

Another possible way to make it less painful to make a second switch would be to shift the Anarchy cap of the AIs by a difficulty level, maybe two. A shift of one would still leave Sid AI with a 1-turn cap, a shift of two would set the Sid AI with a 2-turn cap. Currently, IIRC, Sid and Deity are capped at 1-turn, Demi at 2, Emp at 3, Monarch at 4, though I could be recalling them incorrectly.

If we change them to 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, the human would be less likely to lose ground on the second switch.

The drawback is that the AI tends to change as though they have the religious trait even when they don't.

Thoughts?

[ducki]

Originally posted by ducki
I wonder if there are certain hardcoded triggers that determine which govt is "better" for the AI or if it just picks the "highest" form of govt depending on "mode", war=fascism, peace=demo.

If Fascism got a SPHQ, that would push back on the crossover point between it and Communism, right? Hmm..

Just read an article comparing Commie and Fascism over on CFC by Ision.
The last paragraph was particularly interesting to me in light of my query above..

[nbarclay]

After thinking about it a while, I've come to the conclusion that the goal of coercing players into making two government changes is not compatible with the purposes of the AU Mod. To the extent that the choice of whether to stay in Republic or switch to Democracy is currently not all that interesting, it would be useful to make it more interesting. But replacing a situation in which peaceful players almost always stay in Republic with one in which they almost always change to Democracy would depart from the standard rules without actually making the strategic choices involved any more interesting. And if players would change to Democracy more often under changed rules than they stay in Republic now, we would actually reduce how interesting the strategic choices are.

I posted a poll in a new thread to try to get us a clearer picture of what governments people used in AU 501. That may help us in determining whether we have a real, widespread problem with the balance between Monarchy and Republic or not.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by ducki
Another possible way to make it less painful to make a second switch would be to shift the Anarchy cap of the AIs by a difficulty level, maybe two. A shift of one would still leave Sid AI with a 1-turn cap, a shift of two would set the Sid AI with a 2-turn cap. Currently, IIRC, Sid and Deity are capped at 1-turn, Demi at 2, Emp at 3, Monarch at 4, though I could be recalling them incorrectly.

That would really just hurt the AIs rather than genuinely making a second change of governments more attractive. Staying in the same government while AIs waste time in anarchy switching would help human players stretch out a lead.

[ducki]

Yes, as noted in the last sentence of my post.
It's a subtler change, making it less of a disadvantage to switch, but as we both pointed out, would hurt the AI.

By the same token, even at a capped 3-turn anarchy for emperor, it's not that bad.

Heck, if I knew I was capped at 3 turns of Anarchy, I'd probably switch 3 or more times and still have less Anarchy than I did in AU501.

[alexman]

if we wanted to undermine Republic just a little bit more, we could bump its corruption up to the same level as Monarchy's the way we did in the PtW version of the Mod

The corruption increase from Nuicance to Problematic is just a 10% OCN reduction. Distance corruption remains the same.

In PTW we increased corruption for the Republic, but increasing corruption for the most used government in the game, even by such a small anount, is not a popular change. Many people (not only inexperienced players) hate corruption, and some refuse to use a mod that increases it. Sir Ralph was one of them.