Just one wee question for Firaxis on 1.21f...

[=DrJambo=]

Has the self destructing AI under Communism been addressed? By this i mean where all their cities end up size 1 and permanently unhappy due to conscription and forced labour. If so, how?

You see, I have read the readme and it wasn't clear from this how this has been tackled other than by reducing the number of unhappy turns sacrificing population causes to 20...

If this is the only modification implemented to prevent the AI from sacrificing till all their cities are size 1 and permanently unhappy, then i am concerned. Reason being, the AI has a real appetite for forced labour and drafting citizens under Communism and thus i can't see how the 20 turns would make a great deal of difference to 40?!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated..

Thanks in advance and great work

[Carbon Copy]

For starters, the penalty for whipping/drafting has gone back to 20 turns instead of 40 like you mentioned, which was the way it was back in 1.16, so the duration of unhappiness should be considerably shorter and if the AI has been reprogrammed to take a little more care when burning population points it should be less prone to self-destruction. At worst, it's no worse than it is currently and furthermore, any AI cities you capture will recover from the former regime much quicker (assuming that they didn't get rid of the fact that citizens will blame you for whippings the other guy did).

Besides, some of the problem lies with Communism itself. Have you ever tried to do any research with it? The Communal corruption model does make every city equal, sure...equally PATHETIC. Your gold and shields per turn civ-wide actually DECREASE the larger your empire becomes, assuming you're already past the "optimal number of cities", whipping by then is about the only way to get things done in any sort of reasonable time, and by then it's almost always going to cost you multiple citizens. And the AI will still pick it over Monarchy even if the only two victory types available are spaceship and histograph.

Monarchy is really much better overall than Communism, and just the fact that the AI will try to use Communism is half of its problem. In this regard, Japan and England and the other civs that have Monarchy as their favored government tend to put up a better fight in the Industrial ages, but usually by then the human can't be stopped in his quest for global domination so it really doesn't make much of a difference except in how long it takes them to fold.

[player1]

I had 20 turn setting in MY OWN MOD, and haven't had problems with unhappiness.

[=DrJambo=]

You're right CC, a lot of the problems with this lie with Communism itself and the way it uses forced labour as opposed to paid.

I found one way around that was to create a similar Government which used paid labour instead of forced labour... called Socialism.

At present 1.21f will still be different to 1.16f since in that patch the citizens sacrificed were the unhappy ones, so no unhappiness was ever transferred to the populace as a result.

I would still like to hear an official statement from Firaxis on this though, even if it just serves to clear this matter up. You see, for me, the self destruction of the AI was by far the worst aspect of 1.17f and made the late game far too easy and hopelessly uncompetitive.

Just going to war with the AI civs, would be enough to win the game as they all soon go Communist and sacrifice their cities to size 1, permanent unhappiness! The German's could offer some resistance as they'd always prefer Monarchy over Communism.