Crime & Punishment

[damerell]

Ah, thank you. What I didn't appreciate was that detection and being able to handcuff them were so distinct; in the past, they've been handcuffable as soon as I knew they were there. My backup approach of building a flying squad of coppers may be correct.

ETA: I don't know quite what happened but the Flying Squad is there and crime is plummeting.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

I am finding the hidden criminals and investigators to be too much. Can we please move this aspect to a later era eg after Code of Laws or something. It is detracting from the prehistoric and ancient eras when there are lots of other things to do and worry about.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Are you having a hard time keeping crime eliminated?

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

No my crime is -ve, at least -100, in all cities but that does not stop criminals from popping up every now and then.

 

[Thunderbrd]

It should. It's impossible for cities to spawn criminals at negative crime. If you're getting them showing up then its because you're letting them get into the city from outside the city. The chance of spawning is directly based on the crime level.

I'll have to review that because this is the second time somebody has said they thought it possible when their city was at negative crime levels. hmm... perhaps a bug is afoot.

 

[pepper2000]

Could it also be that those criminals had been hiding out for a long time and spawned back when crime rates were positive? In my playing, I've seen thieves and rogues get spotted probably two or three eras after they should have spawned.

However, I think there is some merit to postponing the spawning of criminals to the Classical Era. There is a concept in game design known as onboarding, where the game starts simple and new features are introduced as the game progresses, so the player can figure them out one at a time. I remember how overwhelmed I felt the first time I played C2C, and many new features have been added since then.

 

[Thunderbrd]

There's a form of onboarding taking place here, which is that Exiles you spawn cannot reenter your own nation, so there's actually a positive to having high crime before crimes actually present a problem - this gives the possibility that you can spawn out plenty of Barbarian Exiles that can go and mess with the enemy.

Consider then too the reality of it. As soon as people start thinking about trying to get away with stealing from one another, just like children, these early less advanced people will be very likely to do a lot of it. IF the society is uplifting and a strong sense of community overrides this then it can be controlled. Otherwise it would be all too common.

 

[Shadowclaw]

I have cities with "-" crime. And some of them keep spawning criminals (sometimes even dozens in each turn in some cities). All that cities are captured.
Later I can provide save file.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

It should. It's impossible for cities to spawn criminals at negative crime. If you're getting them showing up then its because you're letting them get into the city from outside the city. The chance of spawning is directly based on the crime level.

I'll have to review that because this is the second time somebody has said they thought it possible when their city was at negative crime levels. hmm... perhaps a bug is afoot.

I am on a continent all by my self. I was testing something else so got rid of all the ai on the continent at the start so I would not have to be side tracked in the testing.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Ok... report the bug then. Sorry for that.

 

[MacCoise]

Has any thought being given to penalties for lack of crime?

Crazy I know but imagine a society so rigid and obedient that it suffers other problems like Boredom, Uniformity, Complacency, Paranoia, Intolerance of Dissent

I am suggesting small penalties like a 2% hit to culture or Science and only at extreme levels of negative crime.

It might add a tactical angle of having to not go too far in just building anti crime buildings

 

[tmv]

It has been thought of many times. The answer is always the same: The AI can't handle it.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

And you end up with something that is bad no matter what you do so you stop playing.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Has any thought being given to penalties for lack of crime?

Crazy I know but imagine a society so rigid and obedient that it suffers other problems like Boredom, Uniformity, Complacency, Paranoia, Intolerance of Dissent

I am suggesting small penalties like a 2% hit to culture or Science and only at extreme levels of negative crime.

It might add a tactical angle of having to not go too far in just building anti crime buildings

I've always been a personal fan of this idea. I'd call it 'suppression' or something along those lines. But ...

It has been thought of many times. The answer is always the same: The AI can't handle it.

This is generally the problem. At the moment the AI is instructed to consider property values as being either 'we want them to be low' or 'we want them to be high' and there's no programming for 'we want them to be at 0'. Not to say it couldn't be done but Koshling was right that it'd be a pain. It could also lead to a ping pong effect where the AI builds a unit to counter crime but then builds another to create crime once the crime becomes negative.

And you end up with something that is bad no matter what you do so you stop playing.

It's not that really... challenging one to get to 0 and to recognize a penalty in going further is not necessarily bad game design. Just tough for the AI.

 

[MacCoise]

I hear you guys but there are a lot of things that are difficult for the AI....

 

[Noriad2]

Has any thought being given to penalties for lack of crime?

Crazy I know but imagine a society so rigid and obedient that it suffers other problems like Boredom, Uniformity, Complacency, Paranoia, Intolerance of Dissent

I am suggesting small penalties like a 2% hit to culture or Science and only at extreme levels of negative crime.

It might add a tactical angle of having to not go too far in just building anti crime buildings

Lack of crime is never bad. The methods to lower crime however can come with restricted freedoms (ultimately leading to a police state). There are also the issues of political dissent being redefined as crime, the fact that people doing police work aren't doing more productive things, and abuse of police powers for personal gain. So any negative stuff should come from the level of policing, not the resulting crime level per se.

I also disagree with the Marxist ideology currently prevailing in Western society that crime comes from poverty and "discrimination". The causative direction is wrong. In modern society, both poverty and crime are caused by inferior personal values which for a significant part derives from inferior cultural values (but that can easily lead to a lengthy off-topic discussion).

 

[Thunderbrd]

I hear you guys but there are a lot of things that are difficult for the AI....

Thus why I would prefer to get on top of those things before introducing more difficulties to resolve. When we say something is hard for the AI we are really saying it's going to be a lot of work to make the AI good at managing it.

 

[Faustmouse]

IMO we reached a point in the mod where crime is not THE main thing to control in the mod, but rather a side distraction that can mess you up when you don't pay attention. It's not a no-brainer to control, but in the beginning you need quite a bit of attention to manage it. Later you have good enough infrastructure to stop constantly thinking about it (unless the AI spreads it into your cities) but if it gets out of hand, you will be punished a lot.
In other words: It's just right. It's perfect. Impactfull, but not taking the fun and attention away from the real game. Why would you want to change it?

What I COULD imagine is that later (around early TH Era) anti-crime buildings would cause more unhappyness. Partly, because crime is quite non-existent in the TH era because you have sooooo many countermeasures, and partly because if there are cameras EVERYWHERE and police that can bust you before you did something (minority report) and is probably subjected to errors, that will make you feel paranoid.

 

[pepper2000]

An interesting analysis that lends support to the idea of decreasing crime over time:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/06/long-term-trend-in-homicide-rates.html

Steven Pinker also writes a lot about this. A short summary of what I gather from his work is that, even today, criminologists cannot explain very well why crimes rates rise or fall over time. There are many theories, such as the development of Jurisprudence (nonviolent alternatives to dispute resolution), increasing affluence (more to lose and less to gain from crime), and exotic ideas such as phasing out leaded gasoline (lead is a known neurotoxin that can cause aggression). I have yet to see what to me is a convincing explanation of why some OECD countries have much higher crime rates than others.

In the future, crime (or activities classified as such by governments) could be driven by a variety of factors. There is disturbing evidence that freedom in the world is leveling off or even going into decline, which could provoke dissatisfaction. Governments, rebels, and criminals also exist in a kind of arms race, where the growth of power on one side is countered by new measures on the other. In particular, criminal organizations can now operate more easily than ever before on an international scale, greatly helped by modern telecommunications and the existence of failed states or ungoverned or badly governed regions. It's reached the point where most people in the world are more threatened by civil conflict, drug conflict, human trafficking, or terrorists than they are by other nation states.

Circling all this back to C2C, it makes sense for crime to play a declining role as the game progresses, but it may also change form, and it should not be expected to go away any time soon. For the most part I like how it functions, but one thing I don't like is the emphasis on big stacks of policing units. It can turn crime management into a one-dimensional picture of forceful suppression, which ignores many dimensions of how law and order function. If it wouldn't unbalance things too much, perhaps we could nerf the law enforcement units (or somehow implement a system of diminishing returns on them) to force a little more creativity in managing crime.

 

[tmv]

There are buildings that can reduce crime, and some of them emphasize other ways of combating crime. The problem is that you can build each of these buildings only once in a city, whereas crime fighters are units. You could perhaps introduce units that use other ways, but they should not work at all in a high crime situation, so that would only introduce a lot of micromanagement for little gain.

Please keep in mind that the police units are not just crime fighters but also investigators so that makes it a natural unit class to combat crime. And if additional unit classes are introduced for this, we might have a - rather disturbing - discussion on our hands if lawyers should increase or decrease crime.