(Despotism vs) Monarchy vs Republic

I find myself pondering are Republic's benefits worth having to take the tech slider down a few notches. Sure it comes with a tech and various other bonuses, but for a semi-large empire the costs get really high.
If I happen to play Rome on the TSL Earth map, I run it for RP purposes, no matter the cost. Otherwise, hail to the king baby...
Your opinions? I'd also like to hear Despotism fans, considering I only use it as a placeholder for Monarchy.

(Is it just me or is this text huge? I'm on my phone)

It's designed to work like that.

Yes, I realised that, I just felt like asking for opinions.

I find that the maintenance costs of republic are so high as to not make it worth it. I have been playing high-to-low a bit, so end up with small empires sometimes. Last time I switched to a 3 city empire in Monarchy, I traded for Democracy and switched and my science slider dropped from ~60% to ~20% to break even. It was not worth the costs for the military production.

I've had no problem switching to Republic. You need to have a really strong infrastructure in place before you do, but with 5-6 cities I've had my income increase after switching to Republic. Monarchy is almost always better for large empires, but that's kinda the point, so I think it's currently balanced very well.

Normally Republic works for really small civs (3-5 cities at most) so that maintenance costs are still manageable, and that's how it was designed.

However I found that you can also make it viable with a large civ (more than 10 cities), but to survive the maintenance you need to have a really good income. A holy city with shrine for a reasonably spread religion and/or a few settled Great Merchants and Great Prophets allow you to take advantage of that +25% and offset the insane maintenance costs.

In my last few games I switched to Republic somewhere in the middle ages, after I had settled (and conquered) several cities and grown them for a bit, obtained a shrine (usually by conquest), and was moving towards Banking, as the Banks are a fantastic help to make more gold.

Of course the first 50 or so turns the research rate will have to be lowered significantly, and Courthouses are a mandatory build in each city, but as the cities grow and buildings get built (good complementary civics are any that give a maintenance reducing civic building, like Senate or Bureaucracy, personally I prefer Bureaucracy for the bonus) income will rise noticeably.

Randomness said:

I've had no problem switching to Republic. You need to have a really strong infrastructure in place before you do, but with 5-6 cities I've had my income increase after switching to Republic. Monarchy is almost always better for large empires, but that's kinda the point, so I think it's currently balanced very well.

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Monarchy is almost always better compared to Republic for large empires.But generally speaking isn't a good civic for large empires IMHO because it gives +2 local instability and the local instability factor due to distance from capital is already a problem for such empires.

I've had a few games where I could run Science at 50 ~ 75 (And still research faster than my rivals) while owning more than thirty cities with Republic. As stated before, with the right setup you can survive those costs and it can be fairly nice - but it's now designed to focus on the small 'empires' that don't have many cities, to help them out while they're small and all that.

It can be used with larger empires, but it's not often worth it.

nionios said:

Monarchy is almost always better compared to Republic for large empires.But generally speaking isn't a good civic for large empires IMHO because it gives +2 local instability and the local instability factor due to distance from capital is already a problem for such empires.

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I'm doing fine running Monarchy in a large intercontinental empire, I even keep getting lots of WLTK days, and I haven't even built a Summer Palace yet.
I wonder why Communism was removed as a gov civic though, its feature of having distance from capital not matter was very useful for large empires. Currently there's no civic representing a Communist type gov in the game, I think it should be re-added.

Sindy said:

I'm doing fine running Monarchy in a large intercontinental empire, I even keep getting lots of WLTK days, and I haven't even built a Summer Palace yet.
I wonder why Communism was removed as a gov civic though, its feature of having distance from capital not matter was very useful for large empires. Currently there's no civic representing a Communist type gov in the game, I think it should be re-added.

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The Communistic government civic was removed because there is no such thing as a communist government. There never has been and never will be.

However, there have been oligarchical dictatorships that practiced a communistic economy. You can still do this with the right civics in RAND.

was the "unlimited spy" fascist civic from AND or C2C? If it was from AND, why it was removed?

Slarki said:

was the "unlimited spy" fascist civic from AND or C2C? If it was from AND, why it was removed?

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It was in AND, but removed. I put in something very similar with the Single Party civic in my latest build, but it's a Rule civic, not a Government.

Vokarya said:

It was in AND, but removed. I put in something very similar with the Single Party civic in my latest build, but it's a Rule civic, not a Government.

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Yes, and I started a new game for this <3

Republic is great, the amount of extra production to produce buildings/wonders and extra research you get in return eliminates almost any negative from the increased maintenance unless you plan to have a REALLY large empire really quickly. Running Republic, Bureaucracy, Tribal, Slavery, State Church, and Church and you get an 85% production boost to buildings/wonders and 60% to units. Run Vassalage and you get Shanty Town which cuts the 50% increase to food that Tribal give by a bit and gives even more production. My current game has 13 cities and I match and surpass 20 city kingdoms because all of my cities can build every building in an instant.

I've made Republic work for a truly large empire, but then I had a huge shrine income of like 100 + gold from my shrine plus state church. Also, after you get to virtual, I find that you can build a voting link in enough cities that Republic's extra maintenance doesn't matter anymore. After going virtual and building a few voting links I was actually making a profit at 95% science slider.