Civics Improvements Suggestions

So I just noticed that Fascism was removed because of similarities to despotism.

Um, correct me if I'm wrong (or argue semantics), but to my understanding of the brief period of history that included functioning fascist states; Fascism basically consisted of a Nationalistic society with Despotic government, an early State Capitalism economic system and perhaps a Personality Cult.

To me it makes sense then why Fascism would be removed from Government, since it was technically a little more complicated than that, but what comes to mind for me is that RoM:AND has no representation of State Capitalism in the economics category. Could we find a way to add that? I think that State Capitalism as a concept is both distinct enough from any of the economic options currently available, and influential enough in recent history to be worthy of inclusion.

 

May worth considering it.
What should the effects be?

• no foreign corporations
• can hurry with gold
• and?

 

I mean, thats already a powerful combination, and only Guilds does that right now.
-I could also suggest that since from what I know State Capitalism tends not to be popular with one's neighbors you could add a penalty to foreign relations.
-It also seems to tend to have a relatively stable baseline economy, irregardless of previous or surrounding conditions, for instance it contributed strongly to pulling Weimar Germany out of economic disaster, or for instance how China's economy was comparatively unaffected by the 2008 financial crash. Thus I think a bonus for Domestic Trade routes could make sense.
-I could also suggest a gold bonus from certain natural resources, since to use Norway, Russia, and possibly certain OPEC countries as examples; State Capitalism seems to be a beneficial model for Civs trying to manage their expendable natural resources like Oil to leverage themselves, nationally, to a stronger financial position.

Beyond that at the moment I'm not sure I would be qualified to offer strong opinions, I am unfortunately not an economic expert, and not a game designer.

 

We haven't really looked at the Economic civics yet, but I'm not really sure if there is a niche for State Capitalism to fill as a separate civic. What's being discussed here seems more appropriate for Regulated. I think Regulated is now supposed to be the midpoint between Planned on one end and Free Market/Corporate on the other. So maybe can we find a new ability set for Regulated.

 

I thought of a civic building for Warrior Caste: Funeral Pyre.

I don't think its mechanics should be very complex, so no Lascaux-type effects here.

• Is a Graveyard replacement.
• Requires Woodworking tech instead of Masonry.
• +2 happiness, +1 health, +1 culture.
• Does not expire; it goes away if you switch out of Warrior Caste.

Overall, this is +1 happiness over the Graveyard.

I was also thinking about this in conjunction with Mausoleum. Mausoleum has two different advantages over the Graveyard it replaces. First is +2 happiness, and second is that Mausoleum continues to provides its benefits between Education tech (when Graveyard obsoletes) and Ecological Engineering (when Mausoleum obsoletes). Since this allows India to get +3 happiness per city from the Renaissance Era into the early Transhuman, I think it would be fair to drop Mausoleum from +3 happiness to +2. Then Mausoleum is NOT replaced by Funeral Pyre.

 

I dont pretend to speak with authority on this, but I invite you to consider that for at least many India playthroughs they benefit from Spiritual allowing them to switch to Warrior Caste for fast Military boosts, then switch out once they have prepared their army, so they spend as little time as possible suffering from the massive penalties associated with Warrior Caste.

 

But the civic building will only work as long as the civic is active. (It's not absolutely mandatory; there is a separate <bRequiresActiveCivics> tag that has to be set. I think it should be set this way for all civic buildings.) So as long as India isn't actively running Warrior Caste, they have just their Mausoleum.

 

I was just thinking about the military civics today and had a couple of ideas. First do you think that Recruitment Center should have - rather than - the would represent incentives to join the army such as college tuition paid by the state and other benefits. I was thinking maybe -10%?

Also I was wondering if you think it would be a good idea to give most military civics its own unique promotion for free either from the civic itself or from its civic building?
The reason I would like this is just to show how the different ideas and tactics behind each civic would affect the individual units themselves even from civics that don't grant free xp.

So here are the promotions I thought of.

Banditry gets nothing.

Warlords gets nothing.

Raiders already has looter.

Warrior Caste

(promotion) Courage
Suffers 20% less collateral damage

Conscription

(promotion) Reinforcements
Heals extra 10% in friendly lands
Heals extra 8% in neutral lands
Heals extra 5% in enemy lands

Mercenaries

(promotion) Cutting Edge
50% less to upgrade

Vassalage/Fealty

(promotion) Levy
+15% city defense

Standing Army

(promotion) Esprit de Corps
1 extra first strike chance (I know this is the same as drill 1 I just didn't want to give them a jump start on the drill line or mess up the Protective trait.

Volunteer Army

(promotion) Patriotism
+5% strength

Mobilization gets nothing.

MAD gets nothing.

Shadow War

(promotion) Booby Traps
+10% withdraw chance

Unmanned Warfare

(promotion) Drones
+1 visibility range

And if your still putting Navel Supremacy in I think giving it the Sea Control promotion would be appropriate.

 

I want to keep the number of free promotions as low as I can. When I cut down starting XP I also removed a few ways to get free promotions; Augmentation Center and Incubation Center were deliberately made exclusive, and the free promotion handed out by the Penicillin project was changed from Heal to Medic I so it overlaps with Red Cross instead of making it possible to focus on Augmentation Centers and still get Heal.

Otherwise you wind up with units with lots of starting promotions and that makes actual combat experience less meaningful. Some military infrastructure is good, but I want to keep it under control.

 

I agree that it is not desirable to have units with to many starting promotions. I just suggested it because I would like the military civics to have some sort of constant unified effect on the units themselves outside of the civics that grant free xp.
for example right now when you fight a civ running Conscription you know that that civ will have at least one promotion generally from barracks on its units. But they are all different some may have Combat 1 some Drill 1 or Pinch 1 etc. They are never all the same and that's good but what I would propose is if you where to give each military civic its own unique promotion for free than you can count on at least one constant thing for their army such as all Conscription units heal quickly all Shadow Warfare units have a chance to withdraw and so on.

 

I certainly like the idea
I will add them to Chronicles. Maybe with some changes but I like them
I already had some similar idea: free promotions for Workers from Labor civics and for Religious units from Religion civics.

 

Thank you

 

So, I've been looking at the early Economics Civics, I've put a fair amount of thought into it, and it seems to me that the first three; Barter, Slavery, and Coinage, are fairly underserved at the moment. The concepts for which these 3 Civics are the earliest representations of are fundamental paradigms of human exchange that are currently not really done justice. I'll try to express this in as organized a manner as I can.

Viability Issues
Coinage: I'm going to start with Coinage simply because it is, as far as I can tell, just so bad. This unless I'm missing something huge this civic is not only underpowered, its actively detrimental. The main reason for this is the fact that it consumes all Gold and Silver resource for a measly 1 and 0.5 per city respectively. Compare that to the bonus that the Jewelry Building gives for the same resources; 1 each. That 1 for the Gold resource is superior because it benefits from +% to before receiving +% to in contrast to the Coinage civic, and the 1 for the Silver resource is superior for the same reason, and because 1 > 0.5. This consumption effect also cripples the National Mint that Coinage has access to later. To use the local lingo, the only real 'trick' the civic has left is +20% from domestic , though this is offset by -20% from foreign .

Barter: This civic is currently being treated as a stepping stone civic in the same way that most of the other starter civics are. The player and ai are, because of the massive penalties associated with Barter and because of the placement of Techs, funneled into slavery basically ASAP.

Because Barter and Coinage are so bad, the player and AI have really no viable options besides Slavery until Guilds, halfway into the Medieval Era. This doesnt really make game sense, or historical sense.

The awkward position of Slavery
Slavery as a civic is in an awkward position because slavery, serfdom, and otherwise denominated human servitude have been with us for so long, since some of our earliest records of law[1] to the last vestiges of serfdom as late as 1923 in Afganistan, to the fact that forced labour still exists today. Yet many of the economies throughout history that have allowed slavery(most of them) did not mainly consist of slavery, and were not distinguished by their slavery. Slave labour may have been important, yet free labour, artisans, and other components were equally or considerably more important. This is why I would argue that a Civ with the Slavery Civic represents not an economy that has slavery, but an economy largely based on slavery. This semantic distinction allows us to treat the Barter civic as a viable early alternative to slavery, rather than as an extremely penalizing stepping stone.

Thoughts and Suggestions for Barter/Slavery
Barter
A. My main suggestion for Barter is to buff it until its a viable alternative to slavery, and possibly to nerf slavery. I think the massive penalties to both and for barter should be either removed or at least reduced, and possibly change whatever penalty remains to for thematic reasons.
B. My second suggestion for barter is to give it small bonuses for Buildings that require a resource in city vicinity(Furrier), or in some cases resources themselves(wheat and resources without city-specific buildings?) or early buildings(perhaps carpenter). Firstly this would allow barter to scale a little further into the game, as the player researches the early techs barter would gain a little bit of extra to offset the penalty. Secondly this would fit Barter thematically, because even though barter based economies did in fact trade frequently using standardized weights of precious metals, basically proto-coins it remains that diversity of available goods is especially helpful to a barter economy.
C. My third suggestion might be a little trickier, and it has to do with the differentiation of the Slavery Civic as a slave based economy, not just a society with slaves. I rather recommend that Barter, and perhaps Coinage, allow for each city to use slave specialists in a limited way. I would suggest either tying this to a building that is unlocked by researching the Slavery tech, or I would suggest allowing at least Barter to build unlimited Slave Specialists, but give their slaves - or some other penalty so that they are usable, but not optimal.

Slavery
Some people have argued that Slavery is still too strong of a Civic, and in some very strategic ways it is, which is I believe why we currently have the Slave Market going obsolete in the modern era. I would suggest that we could adjust Slavery a bit, and perhaps nerf it, in a few subtle ways:
A. Rather than having the Slave Market go obsolete, have Slavery receive a significant penalty to Foreign. This represents thematically the incompatibility between heavily slave based economies and non-slaving societies. Remember that although the vast majority of historical societies had some kind of institutionalized servitude, many of them did not support actual slave trade(they may have had serfs but serfs had rights and could not be bought or sold etc., there are many examples). The other effect of this that I believe we desire for gameplay reasons is to give both the player and the AI reasons to switch out of Slavery as the game progresses, because Foreign scales so hard in the late game.
B. My second thought about Slavery is that along with it's bonus to it should perhaps receive a penalty to . In the end this adjustment could be a nerf, or the math could be worked so that it is not a nerf, but thematically I think it could be argued that a Slave based economy would likely not have as much technological innovation as other economies.
C. Perhaps a penalty to relations with other Civs who are not using Slavery, this is another thematically supportable avenue to nerf Slavery in the later eras.

Coinage
The advent of specie currency in various places in the world is very interesting, and the introduction of coinage into the Mediterranean economy was absolutely fascinating(Mediterranean societies continued to use barter and slavery alongside their coinage btw), but frankly, most of the really fun things (debasement, influx of resource, deflationary spirals) that could be done with Coinage in a game are I think not really supportable within the Civ4 framework, the AI could not handle it.
A. My suggestion then is to use the fact that the long-term trend of Coinage is that of Inflation and Debasement, which combine into the concept of Seigniorage[2]. In game terms, the theme of Coinage would look something like a +2x% along with a -1x%.
B. My second suggestion is that Coinage should be at least Medium Upkeep, minting coins is not free, and this would encourage larger civs to abandon the Civic later in the game.
C. My third and strongest suggestion is to remove the XML that causes Coinage to consume all Gold and Silver. If we could make it consume just 1 of each I think that would be OK, but having Coinage just remove all of those resources from your empire screws with too many other buildings, bonuses, and mechanics.

I think that combined, my suggestions would be at least a step toward much more interesting and balanced early game Economics Civics. I've tried to be general enough when it comes to balance concepts to leave room for improvement. I hope my thoughts have at least been helpful.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage

 

Well, believe it or not I almost always play with coinage and I switch out of slavery as soon as I reach coinage.
Anyway your proposal sounds good to me, just one thing: are we getting rid of the gold/silver consumption mechanic? I can try and see if I can make it either gold OR silver consumption, but I remember that part of the code being tricky, I recall it wasn't working properly months ago.

 

I suspect that the gold/silver consumption mechanic is more trouble than its worth. Unless I'm mistaken if you have Gold, Silver, and a Jewelery and you then switch to Coinage; you will lose gold per turn, though I dont know if the AI actually realizes that. I believe there is a UB or two from the MegaCiv Pack that has the same issue, and I suspect the National Mint does as well unless something very specific has been done for that building.

Imo flavor for Civics is valuable, and if for purposes of flavor a bonus to Coinage from Gold and Silver is desired I might suggest a civic-specific building earlier than the National Mint for Coinage. At the time that Currency is discovered ingame coins were not in fact machined, they were hammered, or in some areas they were cast, so a building along those lines that goes obsolete at some point might be appropriate, though I have no concrete suggestions in that area.