This has been mentioned deep in the thread before, but does anyone share my opinion that Planned Economy should reduce city maintenance from number of cities rather than from distance to capital? City maintenance from distance tends to be a far smaller number anyway, and in my most recent game I won on Monarch, I experimented switching out of Free Market while having a large empire of 30ish cities, and it absolutely tanked my economy which just prior was roaring. It wasn't immediately apparent, but the 5 Year Plan is a large enhancement which has the civic as a prerequisite (and Motherland Calls could be incredibly powerful in certain situations, while definitely scaling positively with one's number of cities), though I still don't see how this would be a better choice overall than FM in all but rare circumstances. Reducing maintenance from number of cities likely would not overpower the trade route benefits of Free Market in a strictly economic sense, but it does retain benefits for waging war which FM penalizes, so I think that would bring it into better balance. As it is, I don't think they're strategically rich alternatives of one another the way that the game intends to model the 20th century ideology struggle corollary to the in-game civic choice. Thoughts?
EDIT: I've gone ahead and swapped it in the XML and made number of cities -50% rather than mirroring the prior distance bonus of -75%, while reducing the latter to zero. The fact that you can't wage total war in FM without great difficulty due to WE is a real drawback, so I think FM should be economically more powerful for peaceful situations, but distance maintenance makes no sense for communism from a historical standpoint IMO (I'm not sure what the rationale for that was), and it needs to be at least not economic suicide in the late game to switch to PE. (After all, the Soviet Union was the United State's rival in research throughout the whole cold war where each one represented one of these economic systems, and neither state was decisively ahead of the other across the board throughout the whole modern era as it's represented in the game - though through that lens, losing over half of your commerce would certainly invalidate that possibility.) I'm not sure if this will throw it out of balance, but I think it's a positive change, and I'll play a game and see how it goes. It seems that AIs' preferences for it is already strong enough in spite of this, so I bet it will get plenty of use-cases in even a single game.
) in the late modern era.
) in the 10th century"?
