confused about anarchism . . . .

[Nicci]

today i was playing a game with the greeks and once i discovered 'republic' i switched government. the next turn he asked me what type of government i wanted. usually this takes several turns . . . .
i noticed a difference in the duration of anarchism between 2 types of government before, but i can't remember it being 1 turn.
what determines the length of the anarchie-period?

 

[TyranusBonehead]

That's a good question, I'm not sure what determines the length of time in anarchy, but I do know the time can vary, and go as high as 9 turns.

 

[HungryMouse]

yep, 1 turn is a really short duration for anarchy. and as far as I know the length of anarchy is a random variable. can be mistaken though.

 

[Scuffer]

If you are religious it takes only 1 turn (2 in conquests) to switch. Other than that I think there is random factor, up to 9 in rare cases.

 

[Nicci]

random? mmmm. i thought maby it had something to do with how many goodies u own or something . . .
or how many temples etc. u have.

 

[wilbill]

There are two factors that determine length of anarchy. The size of your empire (# of cities) which, IIRC, can range from 1 to 6 turns plus a random 1 to 3 turns. I may be off by a turn. It did change in C3C. In Vanilla and PTW the limit was 8 turns.

 

[Zelda's Man]

the size of the empire is the biggest determining factor as wilbill said so it is even more important to switch gov'ts earlier in the game rather than later.

 

[Trotskij]

I had a very long anarchy period before...it must have been like 100 turns...my whole empire got trashed. Oh well....okay....9 turns atleast......

 

[Grille]

Yeah, what wilbill said; note that the "empire size" anarchy length contribution (probably # of cities) seems to be adapted to the map size (so probably OCN-dependent). At least I have the impression that anarchy lasts longer (on avarage...) on tiny maps than on huge maps, assuming you have roughly the same amount of cities.

Now since there's this map-size bug (OCN, research costs) in C3C when launching hand made maps, one would expect a related impact on anarchy duration in case the OCN-dependency was correct.

 

[Nicci]

i'm playing the biggest map possible . . . . that could be it. i don't have an enormous number of cities.

 

[henry k c]

Anarchy is usually 6 turns, rarely longer

 

[Lockesdonkey]

When I play, my computer has a whole bunch of quirks. It always, for example, lumps the Bablylonians and Persians with the Egyptians, Romans, Carthaginians, and Greeks! And then the Byzantines always get lumped on the other continent. One very useful quirk, though is that it always makes Anarchy exactly 5 turns (unless Im religious civ) Weird...

 

[Grille]

Well, AFAIK the RNG draws uniformly distributed numbers (in a sample being big enough), so you would expect a bit of a variety even if the empire size is constant...

There's somewhere a thread about it. IIRC Soren or Mike of Firaxis explained it (for vanilla in the first place), although the exact empire-size relation is missing.

edit:
ok, at least I've found Soren's rather short post on Poly...
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?threadid=42739&perpage=20&pagenumber=2

.. but there should be a number of threads here as well.

 

[wilbill]

Anarchy is usually 6 turns, rarely longer

I suspect your observation is based on changing government at about the same point (and about the same # of cities) in most of your games. Wait a little later, after you have more cities. It's not hard to get into the 7, 8, or 9 (C3C) turn range.
Learning how the turns of anarchy was calculated was what caused me to start switching govs only once per game most of the time.

 

[RegentMan]

Bah, I change when I need to, usually twice per game. Whenever I discover a new government tech that I want to switch to, I click the "What's the big picture?" option, go to the domestic advisor, and revolt. Then I see how many turns I got. If I see 7+ or feel like gambling, I exit out of the screen and get the pop-up: "Sire, our people yearn for a change in government! Should we support a revolution?" and I select the revolution option. It's funny though; the other option is "No, we're happy with anarchy."