I've been thinking about Republic and Democracy's usefulness recently and decided to post some of my rambling musings here.
Republic, while a lot more useful in early game with the new minimum slots, still has an issue with being more useful for long term games rather than short term games that dominates the early republics. While very useful for Italy and Holland, it runs into a different problem with them where it's often better to take the stability hit from Republic rather than switch to Democracy. While an interesting gameplay interaction, I'm not sure it's intended or fits the game's philosophy.
Weirdly enough, Democracy's effect would be amazing for Greece and Rome- to the point that Greece more or less already has it as their UP. Were Democracy to be given +1 Food per Specialist and Republic to lose the -Food on Farms, Cottage Lines, and Plantations and be given +100% Great Person Birth Rate we would run into a few balance issues:
- Democracy would have too much food and we can't apply Republic's food effect for obvious reasons. The first thing to spring to mind is to add -X% Food in all cities, though that would make it harder to grow new cities.
- Greece. Greece would need a new UP. This is outside the scope of exploring the possible effects Republic and Democracy could have, especially since there's such a wealth of info about Greece that choosing a new UP would be rather trivial.
There is also the existence of a particular effect that I've seen lying around the XML: +X Specialist in Core Cities. This would work amazingly in place of Republic's food based effects for Greece and Rome, but runs into issue with every single other Republic, whose cores are either small, or they're named Carthage and their situation is designed to disincentivise settling Core Cities.
Altogether, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to improve Republic's effect. While it is ahistorically useful for many Civs, the addition of minimum slots makes it amazing for historical Civs as well and I fear that trying to restrict it's usefulness for ahistorical Civs would only break its intended usefulness. If the main issues are its appeal to ahistorical nations and superiority to Democracy for nations that find it useful, it seems the best option to fix that would be to fix it in a way that doesn't change Republic.