Civics Improvements Suggestions

[<Nexus>]

Yeah, the idea was just to make specialists cost slightly less food with Caste, except I dont think there is an easy way to do that, the +1 is just an inelegant workaround, but I wanted to at least bring it up.

But that just gives an other idea: I remember that in FF2 the bonus for some undead civs is that their population consumes only 1 not 2.

So (maybe) Caste could do this:

• each population consumes 2 instead of 3
• cities require +50% more to grow

But I don't think it can be done through python only and 45 is not much around these days to do any dll modding. So I think that my original idea is still the easiest and best solution.

 

[Colon]

It's a bit immersion-breaking when 20-odd AI civs are all republics, including the one that has monarchy as fav civic. I don't know whether that's a matter of AI-coding or of balancing the civic, but it'd be nice if there'd be more variation in this regard. There seems to be a pretty strong tendency for civs to simply have the most recent civic in each category. Certainly in government/power. The most developed ones now all have democracy/president in my game.

 

[Vokarya]

It's a bit immersion-breaking when 20-odd AI civs are all republics, including the one that has monarchy as fav civic. I don't know whether that's a matter of AI-coding or of balancing the civic, but it'd be nice if there'd be more variation in this regard. There seems to be a pretty strong tendency for civs to simply have the most recent civic in each category. Certainly in government/power. The most developed ones now all have democracy/president in my game.

Both Monarchy and Republic have an AI weight of 0 and no flavors, so I don't think that has an effect.

Are you playing with Revolutions on? I suspect that is what is going on. The Revolution mod encourages changing to representative governments. Once you have access to a civic with a positive democracy index, that makes civic revolutions possible which will request changing from a negative democracy index civic, like Monarchy, to a positive democracy index, like Republic. Access to a positively-democratic civic also doubles the instability from running a civic with a negative democracy index.

The most elegant solution would be to reduce Republic's democracy index to 0. This would turn off any penalties to running Monarchy. However, there are some checks in the Revolution code that don't like a democracy level of exactly 0. I'm not sure why.

 

[Colon]

I don't really understand this. The AI is basically forced to treat non-democratic civics as worthless when they aren't? That sounds like you might as well not bother putting non-democratic civics in the game. And what about the power civics? They all go for president when they can. Why doesn't any of them choose senate instead?

 

[Vokarya]

I don't really understand this. The AI is basically forced to treat non-democratic civics as worthless when they aren't? That sounds like you might as well not bother putting non-democratic civics in the game. And what about the power civics? They all go for president when they can. Why doesn't any of them choose senate instead?

I think it's a case of what happens when you don't consider the full implications of what you're adding. The Revolutions component was written for vanilla BTS. The first democratic government in BTS is Representation, which is not available until the late Renaissance. AND's Republic government is a throwback to earlier versions of Civ, where there was generally an early democracy government available. But the Revolutions code just goes by the democracy levels as programmed, which results in pro-democracy pressure much earlier than expected. I can try to look into it, but what I want to do now is wrap up the XML ideas I have before moving into heavy troubleshooting.

 

[Colon]

And what if all civics have the same, positive civic level? Would that work?

 

[Colon]

Did a quick test with the democracy level of all civics at 1, giving all AIs the techs for monarchy and republic. They would still all choose republic. Maybe that's just because they all had just 1 city though. When I tested the save I'm currently playing the AI also still immediatly switches to democracy/presidential when given the tech, but I didn't think XML changes have an effect in old saves anyway.

 

[Vokarya]

Did a quick test with the democracy level of all civics at 1, giving all AIs the techs for monarchy and republic. They would still all choose republic. Maybe that's just because they all had just 1 city though. When I tested the save I'm currently playing the AI also still immediatly switches to democracy/presidential when given the tech, but I didn't think XML changes have an effect in old saves anyway.

Republic is going to be better than Monarchy for small civilizations. That's the way we're intending it. The problem is getting Monarchy to be more attractive to larger civilizations.

I would expect Democracy/President to be more powerful civics because of how much later they appear in-game. There is a curve from the starter civics that are almost purely negative to the end-game civics that are much better. If there should be a plateau point, I would expect it to be somewhere around the Industrial Era if we're pacing the game appropriately.

 

[Colon]

Shouldn't senate be part of that plateau, since the description suggests it stands for legislatures in general? The choice between democracy/senate and democracy/president would be like of between parliamentary and presidential systems.

 

[Vokarya]

Shouldn't senate be part of that plateau, since the description suggests it stands for legislatures in general? The choice between democracy/senate and democracy/president would be like of between parliamentary and presidential systems.

There is a separate Parliament civic for modern parliamentary democracy. I decided to resurrect it (it was in old versions of AND, then deleted). Senate is meant to be more of an early oligarchy. Senate is the most democratic Rule civic available for its time, but it shouldn't be as good as Parliament/President/Virtual.

 

[Colon]

Where do you download the version you brought back the parliament civic?

 

[Vokarya]

Where do you download the version you brought back the parliament civic?

To be honest, I don't know any other way to get the latest version other than through TortoiseSVN; providing other versions has never been something I have been responsible for. TortoiseSVN what I use for both downloading and uploading. The download links that I can find seem to point to rev1062, and the current version is 1068.

 

[<Nexus>]

Try downloading rev1062, than use the checker or the [Tool] AND offline updater to update the game to rev1068.

 

[Colon]

Ah I guess it pays to hit that see latest changes button.

 

[<Nexus>]

-Excuse me. How do I get out of this building?
-Do you see that door with the EXIT sign?
-Yes, yes, but how do I get out?

 

[Vokarya]

I did some coding and I can get Caste to work the way I want it without tons of bullet points: if I make Artist/Engineer/Merchant/Priest/Scientist/Noble give the same +1 food each, it comes out as one bullet point rather than 6. I'd have to learn DLL modding to create flat +yields from ALL specialists.

I think Proletariat and Feudal are where I want them. Not so with Bourgeois.

Bourgeois currently is a mix of positives and negatives: it gives +1 gold from Bazaar/Market and +1 gold from Merchant, +10% production, and -1 to both happiness and health. The -1 health seems especially out of place. Also, I want to keep Slavery as the best production Society civic at this point in the game.

I am leaning towards removing both the health/happiness penalties and the production bonus, leaving just +1 gold from Bazaar/Market and +1 gold from Merchant. Is there any other mechanic that might work? I don't want Bourgeois to tread too close to Slavery.

 

[Vokarya]

Here is an idea I had for a mini-theme. Leaving aside Caste and Post-Scarcity, for each standard type of specialist, there is one civic (not caring about category) that allows that specialist type in unlimited quantities:

• Artist: Liberal, removing this from Pacifism. I feel like there is a lot of overlap between Liberal
• Engineer: Technocracy. I feel Great Engineers are very powerful so I don't want too many Engineer specialists available too early, otherwise I would say Public Works.
  
• Merchant: Corporate.
• Priest: Divine Cult. I think this fits better than Theocracy.
• Scientist: Atheist.
• Spy: Single Party. This is already in place.
• Magistrate: Bureaucracy.
  
• Noble: Nobility.
• Slaves: Slavery.

Android Worker and Celebrity are only granted under specific circumstances.

 

[Vokarya]

Also with Liberal, I would like to remove the happiness bonus and the hammer/commerce penalties. I'm leaning towards trying to reduce penalties in general (and yes, I'm probably going to take the culture penalty off Cosmopolitan as well). I'm also considering boosting the culture bonus. While there are more sources of culture available in AND, the culture levels are also inflated 2x over what would be expected just from the length of game alone. +25% is the minimum; I wonder if +50% wouldn't be too bad. This would focus Liberal as the culture civic.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

BTS doesn't allow Engineers through Caste, so I agree that delaying any Unlimited Engineer abilities is right. Public Works could have synergy with Engineers, to correspond to how engineers have this stable source of demand from the government.

I like the return to minimal Civic penalties, but I do not want to deaden the distinctions between each choice by pushing their end results so close together that way. I'd like to see the same opportunity cost preserved by spreading modest bonuses around on all the alternatives to a given civic that is editing its penalties. This would increase bullet points, so it's not fantastic either.

This may already be true for certain civics, but I just want every option to produce a clear effect, distinguished by a significant magnitude from its alternatives - excepting the ancient policies which are appropriately weaker.

 

[<Nexus>]

Caste system:
I really don't like the idea of all specialist providing and I admit that my previous idea about "a wall of bonuses" looks too ugly in game (I tried it).
So an other idea to solve Caste civic: Could a python code provide a free specialist for every worked tile of the city? This way the number of free specialist are tied to city size and would represent well a caste society.
An other idea is to provide a free specialist for every (say) 3 levels of city size.