AU mod: Balancing the Governments

[Nisku]

Thriller: The whip is the same for feudalism as it is for any other government. I use it occasionaly for whipping out military units/temples/barracks. The happiness penalty isn't that much of a problem when your cities are size 6 or less.

Dominae: I've tried republic I always go bankrupt, the unit costs are just way too high fo me to maintain an army + a workforce that early in the game. Maybe I'm a poor player and can't make it work? You are right that you have to change governments later in the game with feudalism. I've found that to be true for monarchy also. Communism and democracy are just way to good to stay in monarchy or feudalism. Communism is the natural progression for feudalism, communism has 6/6/6 unit support, good for those small towns. Fascism is the progression for monarchy. I usually have gotten rid of my small towns by the point that these governments are available so I go into democracy almost always.

Feudalism does come a bit late and that is a definite disadvantage, war weariness is a disadvantage in my opinion WW should be done away with. I think the strong point is the unit support. I know for my games I'd never be able to have the military that I've used without feudalism. I've checked using religous civs and for the way I place my towns feudalism is always the best choice with monarchy coming at a close second.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by alexman
It seems to me that if you add war weariness to Monarchy, it will become an ancient-only government for the special case where you don't have access to enough luxuries. As a result, people will choose Republic as their first government even more often than they do now.

This is why I suggested the 1/1/1 unit support for Republic a while back.


Dominae

[Krill]

If we think of the ancient governments as suited more for builders and warmongers, then compare them to the industrial govs, we get this:

Builder - middle groud - warmonger

Republic - Monarchy - Fuadalism

Democracy- Fascism - communism

All we need to do is either make the ancient era govs worse or the industrial ones better. Make republic 1/2/3 but with 3gpt unit funding, give monarchy pop rushing (or something even worse), but give Fuadalism 1gpt/unt.
Republic is to expensive for wars, Monarchy is brought into line with Fuadalism, which is now on level peging with the others. This makes the industrial govs better in comparisson, with better abilities, repaying the production lost in anarchy with the upgrades offered.

[MqsTout]

I've got a game right now I'm playing that it is being very difficult for me to choose a government. (True that it's only on Chieftain [31civ, huge 60% pangea, average as the Vikings, stock rules], but hear me out). I'd just like to show that modern governments are useful, especially with a hybrid play style.

I'm a Monarchy. It was a tough choice between Monarchy and Republic, for me. Feudalism was out of the question because I already had a few nice 7+ cities and many that were on their way there quickly. I opted for Monarchy because I (rightfully) figured that war weariness would be a problem with Republic. I expanded really well through the middle ages, both by filling in holes I left during REX and a few rather successful wars. As the middle ages came to a close and the industrial era opened, the game started to feel wrong.

I enjoyed a decent tech lead throughout the ancient and middle ages, but I'm only 3 techs into the industrial era and I am quickly being cought up to. My research has really slowed down, largely because of corruption. When I capture new cities (either via war or culture flip), they're useless for the longest time. I am always finding myself rush-building at a courthouse. But, now, even that doesn't make the city productive anymore.

I am in desperate need to decide on a government.

-Despotism? Never.
-Stay Monarchy? I'd continue to be caught up to, though I'd always maintain a lead. Domination and conquest victories are still very far away, so winning that way would be very painful.
-Republic? ...I haven't much considered it due to WW, though I am considering a good prebuild on Universal Sufferage and making that my first Industrial era wonder to become a Republic. (But it's silly to move sideways, shouldn't it be?) More productive and slightly larger cores would make up for the fringes being insanely corrupted.
-Democracy? I've seriously considered cutting a lot of the militarism out of my strategy and going with Democracy. It's a good option. Minimal corruption would make at least my non-fringes productive enough to keep going.
-Communism? Communal corruption would be a godsent. The only thing keeping me from researching & switching to Communism? I want to continue to gold-rush rather than pop-rush.
-Fascism? Lack of WW would be good if I want to continue the war portion of my play, and I'd wage war just for the increased worker rate, especially with how many slaves I have, and that I just discovered RR. Nuisance corruption would let me maintain a hugely productive wonder core. Again, the only thing that keeps me leery of the switch is I'd have to poprush.

It's very tough for me to decide. It looks like Communism and Fascism, in my case, are only downplayed because of poprushing, though it'd still be tough for me to decide between them.

[Krill]

I'm not the best player, just a good monarch/ runner-up emperor player, but if you've surpassed the OCN number by war, why not just keep the war up for the next 100 turns, and kill everyone? works for me. Really, though, best if you choose how you want to win, then pick the government best for that win. Don't forget that both Fascism and communism have different unit support costs.
If war is the way forward, i'd pick the communism, and build the SPHQ, FP, and palace in a triangle, right around the most productive part of the empire, build up tanks, and slaugther the AI. (Sometimes i wish i had the paitients to win peacefully).

[MqsTout]

Actually, my most productive cities are all on the edges. I started on the coast (as seafaring) and most of the best cities are around the coastlines. The middle of the pangaea is all desert and mountain. It was definitely a very interesting map as I explored it.

True, they do have different unit support costs. If I were religious, I'd be fascist until I was done railroading and then switch again. Three government switches in a non-religious civ is far too destuctive, though.

But, not to discuss my game -- That'd be for elsewhere. I just wanted a nice picture of a game where late government both change is necessary and choice is difficult.

[Nisku]

I've done some fooling around with my save games. I've changed feudalism in the editor to communual corruption just to see what diffrence this makes.

It really didn't have a huge impact until my civ began to get much larger and I had my FP built, I would save about 5-15 gold per turn with communual. It also had the set back of spreading out the waste, this was both good and bad but in my opinion more bad then good.

I do have to say communual corruption had a signifigant impact once I had the FP and had a decent number of cities. In one of my save games I was in my golden age and changing feudalism to communual corruption saved me around 100 gold per turn.

My opinion on the governments:

Get rid of feudalism's war weariness, could leave or take communual corruption. This makes feudalism good for ICS warmongers like myself or people that are stuck in a hard starting position and having the low unit support for metros/cities forces a government change later in the game.

Keep monarchy as is, this leaves monarchy for a typical warmonger. Maybe give monarchy reduced unit support for metros, just to give a little push so that changing to a modern goverment would be a bigger advantage.

Republic seems to be good with the reduced unit support that has been implemented, I don't know much about republic in C3C since I rarely use it.

[Krill]

Keep monarchy as is, this leaves monarchy for a typical warmonger. Maybe give monarchy reduced unit support for metros, just to give a little push so that changing to a modern goverment would be a bigger advantage.

Thank you, that's going in my personal mod.

[Krill]

Double post

[nbarclay]

I don't see why removing war weariness from Feudalism would require adding it to Monarchy. Weakening Monarchy would just make Republic more attractive by comparison than it already is.

Nisku, did your experiments with communal corruption take into account the fact that when you first make the switch to communal corruption, your core cities have more improvements than outlying ones, but over time, communal corruption would help the outlying ones catch up? If not, a lot of the potential benefit of communal corruption went unnoticed.

[ducki]

I think the thought behind moving War Weariness from Feudalism to Monarchy was that some are of the opinion that Feudalism should be the ultimate ancient warmonger government(I disagree, but am the minority), and as such, should have no WW.
But Monarchy is still too strong, so giving it WW would bring it down to the level of Republic and Feudalism.

Personally, (I've been vocal) I'd like to see all the ancient governments be weakened - enough to make switching to a modern government almost always worth it. I'd like to see the 1-revolution game be the oddity that the 2-revolution game currently is.

I disagree that Feudalism should have the ability to wage endless wars - if you thought ICS was strong before, how about zero WW and 5 free units for every settler you squeeze out, pop-rushing to keep the pop down under 7 if you accidentally settled on a river.

If anything could make me the rabid warmonger that Theseus calls for in my sig, that's it. Feudalism needs to keep its WW, we just need to ding Monarchy a tad.

Feudalism should not be the ultimate warmonger government. I know a lot of folks see that 5 free units and thing "whee", let's go drink some blood, but I don't think that's the spirit of Feudalism that Firaxis had in mind and it doesn't jive with my idea of historical feudalism - you know, where wars were fought on a schedule because the footsoldiers had crops to sow and reap at other times of the year?
Not exactly conducive to war neverending in my opinion.

[nbarclay]

The right way to make 1-revolution games rare is something only Firaxis can do: make changing governments not be ridiculously painful for non-religious civs. Three or four turns of anarchy would be plenty to give players an incentive not to go around changing governments on the slightest whim, but would put a significant element of strategy into the choice of what government to use when. Last I heard, I think Firaxis did have plans to tone down anarchy lengths at least somewhat, although I don't think they planned quite as big a reduction as I'd really like to see.

I have two objections to trying to force players to make two government changes in spite of the current anarchy. First, I'm concerned about how significantly weakening the ancient governments would impact the goal of preserving a feel close to the stock game. And second, anarchy on higher levels right now is painful enough that I really don't like the idea of being deliberately forced through more of it. I'm hoping that if anarchy becomes more reasonable, the changes Firaxis made to Communism and the ones we already made to Democracy in the AU Mod will combine to make 2-revolution games a lot more common.

By the way, I think the relative weakness of the Forbidden Palace in C3C already offers some significant boost to the idea of switching governments twice. Maintaining a 4-turn tech pace through the industrial and modern ages is a lot harder now, so there are fewer games where there is a feeling of, "I'm already researching as fast as the game allows, so what's the point of wasting time switching to a better government?" As a result, I already switch governments twice more often now than I did prior to C3C.

Nathan

[Nisku]

Originally posted by nbarclay

Nisku, did your experiments with communal corruption take into account the fact that when you first make the switch to communal corruption, your core cities have more improvements than outlying ones, but over time, communal corruption would help the outlying ones catch up? If not, a lot of the potential benefit of communal corruption went unnoticed.

I"m not exactly sure I understand what you mean. If I understand you correctly this would have little effect on my game. The way I play most of my cities have little improvements and are just temporary, they could be relocated at any time. Usually I just have a barracks and sometimes a temple in the majority of my cities.

I haven't actually played out a whole game with communual corruption for feudalism. What I did was just switch the corruption with the editor. I then loaded up some save games and played one turn, it takes the computer one turn to recalculate when you make a change with the editor.

[alexman]

Originally posted by Nisku

What I did was just switch the corruption with the editor. I then loaded up some save games and played one turn...

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?

[alexman]

After some investigation, I think that giving communal corruption to Feudalism would hurt this government more than it would help it.

Feudalism seems to be designed as a catch-up/REX government, and this clashes with the communal corruption model, which really starts to show its benefits for empires with over OCN number of cities, spaced relatively far apart from each other.

Also, the reduced unit support that we have implemented in the latest version of the mod doesn't seem to have much effect. The free unit support limit is rarely reached, so Feudalism remains in effect a pop-rushing Monarchy with war weariness. Hardly enough difference to justify a distinct government, IMHO.

After some thought, I would like to propose the following change to Feudalism:

1. Restore unit support to 3gpt.
2. Add a government-specific Small Wonder with the properties of Longevity, which expires with Steam Power.

I have no idea what to call this Small Wonder, but it would ensure that Feudalism gets used as intended: a middle ages REX government, which is not better for war than Monarchy. It should be cheap enough so that it can be built quickly, as it expires after the Middle Ages, and Feudalism will consist mostly of towns.

[ducki]

Longevity does what again? Double growth - 2 pop instead of 1? Sorry, but since I rarely build it, I don't recall. (Note rarely = never, not since Cheiftan/Warlord anyways).

[alexman]

Yes, double population growth. It's effectively like the Pyramids.

[ducki]

Except with starvation.
j/k

An interesting idea, but I don't know that I agree that Feudalism is supposed to be a Rex government. I'd be more likely to use it as a pop-rushing Oscillating War gov - assuming the info I've read is correct that WW is on a per civ basis:
Lots of small towns supporting lots of units(plenty for both MPs and Active military) with WW just screams "Trim each neighbor in turn" to me.
It also screams "Save yourself some time and skip 2 optional techs(3 in the AU Mod).
Zip to Feudalism tech ASAP, start hitting border towns, pop rush temples/barracks, make peace, acquire new target.

At least, that's how I see it. It seems tailor-made for Oscillating wars where you honor the 20 turn peace treaty with each civ individually allowing WW to dissipate. The huge support means you have enough units to start and end the war in short order.

Theoretically.

[alexman]

Also, there is something terribly wrong with Fascism. This government just about as good as Monarchy, and it comes two ages later. With the 1.15 FP it's no match for Communism as a war-time government in most cases, and worst of all, the AI loves it.

So I propose to reduce Fascism's corruption level to minimal (like Democracy, except there would be no tade bonus, of course).

This change would actually make Fascism better than Communism for relatively small empires.

[alexman]

If you intend to use Feudalism for war, the optional tech you skip is just one: Monarchy.

On the other hand, you can get Monarchy much earlier with a beeline, it's useful for much longer than Feudalism, and it has no WW, so you don't have to restrict yourself to short wars. The better free unit support offered by Feudalism rarely comes into play when you are not REXing. Monarchy usually offers more than enough free units for war, especially after you have conquered a few AI cities.

No, I can't see myself choosing Feudalism over Monarchy for war very often. Even someone from Firaxis answered that it's good for when you have fallen behind in expansion, when asked what's this government's strength.

[ducki]

Well that seems a bit silly - if you fell behind on expansion and have just entered the Middle Ages, an Expansionist government isn't going to help. Or is it? Maybe I'm missing something.

In Monarchy, don't you need cities for sufficient unit support? So you'll need either rivers or lakes or to build Aqueducts in every town to have 20% less unit support.

Still, I don't see how the Firaxian statement makes sense with Feudalism's timing. Odd...

[alexman]

Here are some results from my little experiment.
I arranged 35 cities spaced 3 tiles apart, with decreasing population as you get farther from the Palace, to simulate the fact that older cities usually have more population and/or more city improvements. Here is the pattern (C=capital, F=FP):

X..X..X..X..X..X..X
...................
...................
X..X..X..X..X..X..X
...................
...................
X..C..X..F..X..X..X
...................
...................
X..X..X..X..X..X..X
...................
...................
X..X..X..X..X..X..X

Then I observed the difference in income for various values of OCN for each government. The results, normalized by Monarchy's income, are shown below. The x-axis shows what percentage of the map OCN were those 35 cities (50% means that the map OCN was 70, and 500% means that the map OCN was 7, for example)

Note that unit support, effect of luxuries, and MP, are not taken into account in this study.

[alexman]

Here is the same graph for the following changes:
1. Fascism changed to minimal corruption
2. Democracy changed to communal corruption

Note that Democracy becomes much better than the Republic for large empires. The game is usually won by the time you reach 200% of the map's OCN, so I don't think it's bad to give Democracy such a huge boost after that point.

So this proposed change has the following advantages:

• Fascism becomes a good alternative to Communism for war for small empires, and it's considerably better than Monarchy.
• Democracy gives an incentive to the builder to switch out of the Republic, and removes the possibility that Communism is the best government for both building and warmongering for large empires.

Feudalism is identical to Monarchy in these plots.

[ducki]

Wow, the corruption king is at it again!

Observations:
Stock-
-Republic and Democracy are nearly identical at ~2x Monarchy's income for any empire size.
-Fascism is so close to Monarchy in income that its other benefits are competing solely against Anarchy it seems
-With a vast empire, Communism is "pretty darn good" fiscally. I wonder what happens with a SPHQ tacked on...
-The curve shown by Republic, Democracy and barely by Fascism sure looks "odd". Is there a further penalty at 200% OCN or is that just a quirk of the city layout?

Proposed Mod-
-Wow, check out the imperialist capitalist pigs! It "makes sense" IMO, but still, WOW! I'm already a Demo fan. Whee!
-Again, I wonder if Communism overtakes Republic with an SPHQ...
--I'd like to see the Republic suffer more as the %OCN increases to make the moderns more attractive, but we probably can't do that ourselves.


Wishlist:
Another test with the SPHQ in there.
A "timeline" version - map # cities to assumed govt tech discoveries. Must assume early (avg) expansion, wartime (avg) expansion, conquest (avg) expansion, assume max anarchy. Probably too much work with too many assumptions and no valid "averages". Hey, I did say "wish list".

Pie-in-the-sky dreaming aside, great stuff alexman! I'm so glad we've got folks like you around who will take the time and put in the effort to run tests like this AND present them in an easy to consume format.

I like the Demo curve, wish the Rep curve trended downward more proportionally with %OCN after 200 and would like Commie and Fascism to look a little bit better, but since this doesn't show shields, they probably are considerably better than the commerce-only curves suggest.

Great stuff!

[ZargonX]

I too like the Demo curve in your proposed changes. And the idea of Facism being a good substitute for a smaller civilization appeals to me as well. Anything that gives more options for different styles sounds good to me, as long as it doesn't throw balance completely out of whack.

[Theseus]

Great work, alex.

Got me thinking though:

* Shouldn't the analysis be modified for range of size of town / city?

* Further to the above, taking into account unit costs?

* What happened to Feudalism?

Reserving judgement for after a little more thought and discussion, but directionally very good... I concur with the general idea that different gov's should have different applications and provide for different styles to boot.

[alexman]

Originally posted by Theseus
* Shouldn't the analysis be modified for range of size of town / city?
* Further to the above, taking into account unit costs?
* What happened to Feudalism?

If you add things like that to the analysis, it will no longer be possible to present it in a simple graph. There are just too many variables, and I had to fix some of them.

Just try to imagine that Democracy's curve will be shifted down a bit towards Monarchy, for example. The actual amount of the shift depends on the city improvements in each city, population, and town/city ratio. Similarly with the other governments.

So without considering unit support costs, Feudalism is identical to Monarchy.

[Theseus]

Fair enough. Backing away from hard analysis then, and KISS, whaddya think of this?

[Theseus]

(although I think this all still leaves Republic as a go-to and never switch alternative)

[alexman]

Originally posted by ducki
-Republic and Democracy are nearly identical at ~2x Monarchy's income for any empire size.

That's because I used exclusively terrain with 1 commerce, which becomes 2 commerce with the trade bonus. I figured that's an average between coast, roaded plains, and no commerce at all.

I wonder what happens with a SPHQ tacked on...

The curve is not as different as you might think, but I'll try and make one tomorrow anyway.

-The curve shown by Republic, Democracy and barely by Fascism sure looks "odd". Is there a further penalty at 200% OCN or is that just a quirk of the city layout?

The curves start dipping towards Monarchy's level of corruption because more and more cities become totally corrupt, so the OCN bonus from those governments doesn't make any difference after a certain point.

Theseus, I'm not sure we can get those downward sloping curves you suggest for Fascism and Feudalism. For sure you would need a trade bonus to start so high at low OCN, and you would also need crippling corruption at high OCN, which we don't have much control over. I will try Despotic (Rampant) corruption with a trade bonus tomorrow to see what happens.