Buttercup said:
I stated quite clearly what the objectives of Police Stations are and why "I'm not sure that anyone's ever really got excited about their effect" which is a heck of a long way from the concept of 'never'.
Alright, let me put it to you this way. I had
already indicated that I had gotten excited about the effects of police stations, by the first post I made in this thread (the intended victory condition is NOT relevant, as the OP does NOT specify what victory condition you aim for). So, when you said "I'm not sure that anyone's ever really got excited about their effect" you had either ignored information in this thread, or you implied that I lied. A bigger problem here comes as that you don't seem to have looked around for more information before giving your reasons:
Buttercup said:
1. If your empire is so in need of 3 or 4 extra beakers from a handful of distant corrupt towns then it's unlikely you would have got to the stage of conquering them in the first place.
2. If your distant corrupt town can produce more than one shield per turn then, surely, there are better buildings/units it could be producing in the time it takes to build the Police Station. And, if you're rush-building Police Stations then surely there must be a better use of money than using all your cash to generate an extra 20 or so Beakers.
3. Police Stations are on a dead tech tree and will rarely be a priority discovery.
4. They come quite late in the game and, as so many here are obsessed with boasting, many games don't even last far enough into the Industrial age for them to be part of a long-term strategy.
You've merely engaged in a priori reasoning here,
at best. It comes as quite easy to test the effect of police stations and courthouses in games thanks to the HoF, to see if anyone else has gotten excited about them. The
highest scoring game of all time got played by Moonsinger. Did she get excited about police stations in a non-communist government?
Well, she ran a Republic as her save indicates. If we open the save I've linked to above, don't mess with the luxury slider, and take a look at Bhaal Beach we notice it has a police station (and courthouse, though not shown in this screenshot) and looks like this:
If we sell the police station it looks like this:
The implication here comes as that Moonsinger "got excited about the effects of police stations enough to make them a promotable option".
On top of this, non-histographic games, such
as this very impressive small Deity spaceship game by archpheonix used police stations extensively, or
my huge Deity spaceship game. Other significant games exist which have used police stations, such as
Elear's Huge Sid diplomatic game. Now none of these saves indicate those players excited about police stations in quite the same way as Moonsinger's save does for various reasons, and perhaps they could have done better using their shields (some of archphoenix's police stations may have gotten captured instead of built) to make something else. However, it's not easy to explain away the fact that they did have police stations in a research-oriented game, and they have number one positions on their tables.
Please do your homework, before trying to reason a priori, as you did above.
Also, even though there do exist significant differences between HoF-type and non-HoF type games... whatever this means exactly... these differences don't matter here.