Autocracy Either Needs Buff or Remake

Arachnofiend said:

Nope
Nope nope nope

Other than Total War, Industrial Espionage is the best tenet in Autocracy and the #1 reason you might want to pick it up if you aren't planning on taking all the capitals. You can pretty much catch up to the tech leaders with the lightning fast steals you get out of it.

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Weird my experience with industrial espionage is due to it lacking a bonus in your chance to steal is it being a way to machine gun your spies off to their death and not any sort of help at all.

It's either faster steals or safer steals. With the improved speed, you can pick a secondary city as a target without being too slow but being safer.

I consider Autocraty to be a very well designed ideology. It was really well tough out to help you catch up in higher difficulties. Getting double (in fact as someone mentionned triple) steal rate and buying units for 350-400 gold with the trinity (big ben + mercantilism+mobilization) when you are easily reaching 500+ gpt is just great and cult of personality has been my only way to win a cultural victory on deity so far.
The only thing but it is a bit common to all ideologies , is that they are 2 super good level 1 and the rest of them are well , not that good. But that s basically the same on freedom and order and since the level 2 are so powerfull I guess you need an 'investment mechanism'.

The problem with ideologies is balance.

The game states you this: each ideology is good for three victory conditions. Each is good for culture, Freedom for science and diplomacy too, Order for domination and science too, Autocracy for domination and diplomacy too.

Now, it doesn't really work that way.

First of all, Freedom and Autocracy aren't good at diplomatic victory. Autocracy is great at it and Freedom is phenomenally super awesome at it, to the point that an Order civ can't reasonably compete with either exploiting their diplomatic abilities. Diplomatic victory is practically reserved for those two.

As for domination and science, every ideology can do it. Autocracy and Order have more useful tenets for it, but unlike the situation with diplomatic victory, Freedom isn't hopelessly powerless against Autocrats and Order civs. War is still decided by bombers and battleships, science by population and buildings, and ideologies don't grant easy victories like they do with diplomacy.

Culturally, I find Autocracy to be a bit situational and weak. Getting that +50% bonus would be awesome, of course, but it would be useless against more pacifistic culture hoarders.

Chiatroll said:

Weird my experience with industrial espionage is due to it lacking a bonus in your chance to steal is it being a way to machine gun your spies off to their death and not any sort of help at all.

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You just have to know who to steal from. I use my steals mainly to supplement beelines (IE rushing the top half of the tech tree while stealing the bottom half to maintain military parity). Because of this, I can usually afford to not steal from the tech leader and pick up a lot of cheap techs very quickly from civs who's spies are busy elsewhere.

Chiatroll said:

That's way too drastic. I'd make a MUCH smaller level of change. And I don't know about change that makes it even better domination players because it's already the hands down best at domination without contest.

Maybe just a small change

Industrial Espionage replaced with
Propaganda: Spies can choose to boost tourism to a civ instead of steal a technology.

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I think it would be better if Ind Espionage instead gave an additional boost to the amount of influence you get from CS propaganda as well as it's base increase in tech stealing. That way it would help you with your diplo victory if you happened to be leading in tech. As it is now, it's completely useless if you are top in tech, which can happen if you've been conquering good cities, like you should be.

I think as far as boosting tourism, I think it would be better to boost the tenet that gives tourism for GA, GW, GM (can't seem to remember the name now), like, say make it give tourism = 50% the cost of the GP instead of just a flat 100 tourism. Since these GP can often cost 500+ points by the late game (if you built those guilds early), that would provide a more useful tourism boost that would scale with the extra time it takes to generate them.

Cult of Personality seems to be made for what I call "the Mussolini run", that is, you wage war only against the cultural leaders - which are often great turtles and techies, hence the need for autocracy. You steal their wonders and great works, leaving the rest of the world to be dominated by your brown shirts and tuba music. Just make sure to bring in some allies to the fight and prolong the war the most you can (except when there are other targets that need to be dealt with). It's great for civs with late era unique units, as Brazil - if you lost all the wonders to those pesky Egyptians during the Renaissance, don't sweat, they don't know what's coming to them.

- Industrial Espionage (double tech steal rate): Horrible. Completely useless with the way tech stealing is designed.

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Why is a spy who steals 2x as fast ever a bad thing? This is (imo) the strongest t1 tentet for autocracy. could you elaborate on why you don't like it?

I think getting autocracy is highly dependent on your tourism strength, diplomatic strength and timing. In my Portugal game on emperor difficulty, I managed to get autocracy in the 1600's (standard speed) before anyone chose their ideology. Since I amassed lots of gold, I bought 3 factories ASAP. Thank goodness I had a CS who offered me some coal.

Eventually, every other civ (12 civs) besides 4 chose autocracy. Thanks to strong tourism and world ideology - autocracy, I managed to get a freedom civ and an order civ to flip to autocracy in the same game. Along with that, I got lots of friends, got cult of personality, and got my autocrat buddies to gang up on the non-autocrat civs. I won a diplomatic victory, but I could have chosen to win a cultural victory too as I was about to get the internet which would have doubled my tourism from 200 to 400. Add cult of personality + open borders + trade route, that's 800 tourism after buffs.

So to conlude, if you are going to get autocracy, get it as early as possible and not when several other civs have chosen their ideology, mainly order considering that civs love to expand out.

As for industrial espionage, it is rather situational but a good way to use it is to send it to mediocre/good AI cities, if you can see them and hopefully the tech steal progress isn't so long.

As for clauswitz' legacy, you should only get that tenet between turn 300 and turn 360. Too early, and you waste the ability, unless the other civs are far behind in tech. Too late and the game will be just about over if you aren't winning yet.

livsbrand said:

I love CoP and Gunboat Diplomacy from a fun/role-playing perspective. I've also used them to great success in standard settings Immortal games. Tier 2 has good stuff all around. Tier 1 is uninspired but I don't have a huge problem with that. In my experience Autocracy is about as likely to be picked by the AI as Freedom is. I would have to be a Deity player to start talking balancing issues.

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That's not true. Balance issues should be tested at prince as its the designated normal difficulty. Balance testing of games must be on the normal difficulty otherwise its not a true read, its often the difficulty settings that cause unintended situations.

I think the problen with auto is you never start a game wanting to take it. It really needs you to behind for it really shine. Its situationally really good, but not from a position you ever want to try abd engineer

GamerFlair said:

That's not true. Balance issues should be tested at prince as its the designated normal difficulty. Balance testing of games must be on the normal difficulty otherwise its not a true read, its often the difficulty settings that cause unintended situations.

I think the problen with auto is you never start a game wanting to take it. It really needs you to behind for it really shine. Its situationally really good, but not from a position you ever want to try abd engineer

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Devs disagree with you, considering who they had play test the game before release.

Prince is hardly the "normal" difficulty anyways; it's the one where the AI has only a very minor bonus versus the human player, but it has almost nothing to help compensate against the power of human intellect. I would think that most of the people who play the game regularly are around King/Emperor level anyways, though the case to balance around the highest difficulties can be made due to the average Deity player probably caring more about balance and game design than the average King player.

Arachnofiend said:

Devs disagree with you, considering who they had play test the game before release.

Prince is hardly the "normal" difficulty anyways; it's the one where the AI has only a very minor bonus versus the human player, but it has almost nothing to help compensate against the power of human intellect. I would think that most of the people who play the game regularly are around King/Emperor level anyways, though the case to balance around the highest difficulties can be made due to the average Deity player probably caring more about balance and game design than the average King player.

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If that's true, I'm shocked and they need to go back to design school. You always test the baseline otherwise you have unwanted factor influencing test results. Prince is the baseline as its the one they tag as normal and you will find the majority of players (ie, the ones that aren't hardcore gamers with forum accounts will play on prince or lower.

An example could be a civ with a warrior replacement uu which is fine except wheb the ai gets to start with 3 and rolls everything. The unit is not itself broken but the difficulty level. You balance the game on normal first theb balance the difficulty levels

There are people of all difficulty levels testing the game.

No, you should always balance a game around the best players for it's hardest difficulty, then scale back. If you scale back, the error margin can be much wider than when you balance for mediocrity, and then scale it upwards.
It's very hard to find the most mediocre player, since players on Prince vary from being still learning, to having preference of a very limited playstyle, to playing with heavy modifications to their game, and so on.
However, it's very easy to find the people that are the very best at a game and balance the highest difficulty setting around what they can do, and then just scale that back until the average player can beat it.

It's not balanced around deity entirely well (Honor, half of Commerce etcetera need some help), but a lot of it is, and it's working very well.

Autocracy as I said before is great, and yes I do regularly start a game with going Tradition/Commerce/Autocracy in mind from as early as turn 10 or so. It's the best happiness provider, it's great for stealing techs, and it works wonders on your GPT.

I find autocracy a rather powerful ideology (unlike honor that is useless). Lots of happiness for wide conquer and some bonuses to make your troops overpowered and keep up tech.

BTW Lightning Warfare is awesome. Calvary->Tanks are decent for anything if you are used to have them around, poking units or taking cities and troops far from frontiers. With extra combat bonuses are hard to beat, and with extra movement, pillage and no ZOC the are quite awesome.

I beelined to modern armor and gone Lightning Warfare twice and is something you should try, is awesome.