Difficulty levels

[Guspasho]

I tried my hand at the third difficulty level for the first time today and noticed that Republic and Democracy support NO units. I don't seem to remember this in the lower levels so I assume it changed with the difficulty level. Is this correct? And what other differences are there between difficuly levels? Thanks.

[vmxa1]

What do mean by no support? Are you talking about the cost of support ? They have no martial law, is that what you are talking about? The levels do not affect it, they do impact how many citizen you get before they become unhappy.

[vmxa1]

The civped gives you what the government provide. The editor is the best place to see the changes between levels, such as how many and what units the ai gets and what it cost them to do research.

[Guspasho]

By support I mean how many units per town/city/metropolis you can have before you start paying unit costs. When I played the third difficulty level and went to Republic I was losing a lot of money to unit costs even though I had a minimal defensive military (1-2 pikemen per city.)

EDIT: I forgot workers count in unit costs. It added up to about 42g/turn before I reduced my pikemen to 1 per town, then it was 31g/turn. The military advisor screen said my government type supported 0 units. I don't remember that being normal for Republic. Am I just screwed up?

[Theseus]

You are correct. You must pay for all units in Rep and Dem.

[Todd Hawks]

Like Theseus already said, you have to pay for all units (including worker) in Rep and Dem.

At every difficulty level! There is no difference towards unit support in the different levels. And it has always been that way.


For your game: I don't know how far you are into republic, but I often have a deficit (sp?) after switching to Rep. It will go away when your cities get bigger. If you can't afford to wait for so long, switch back to despotism for a while or try to sell techs to the AI if you have a tech lead. (or, of course, disband some units/worker).

[alva]

Don't switch to republic until:

- you have a least a couple of cities with infrastructure in place (marketplaces being the key here)
- At least 2-3 luxuries are in your possesion ( trading for them is ok)
- cities are connected and roads are plentyfull

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Guspasho
When I played the third difficulty level and went to Republic I was losing a lot of money to unit costs even though I had a minimal defensive military (1-2 pikemen per city.)

EDIT: I forgot workers count in unit costs. It added up to about 42g/turn before I reduced my pikemen to 1 per town, then it was 31g/turn. The military advisor screen said my government type supported 0 units. I don't remember that being normal for Republic. Am I just screwed up?

That is normal. You need to have those units, unless your mil advisor says you are strong compared to all others. The best way to handle it is to have strong production in your core cities. If you are running with 0% for lux and around 60% for the research, you should not be in defict at Regent. If you are then look at each city to see if it is optimized for shields. No tile improvements that are not going to be worked until you get hospitals up. Irrigation on the least number of tiles needed to support the population. Infrastructure in place. That means markets for cities with size 12, banks when you get to them. No structures in small cities that can not benefit from them, such as university in a size 3 city. If you build a building that has 3 shields for maint and it boosts your shield output by 50%, but you are only making 2 shields, that will not help. I see lots of games where the player has only 1 or 2 shields and a ton of food.