Finally one advantage of monarchy/communism

[pureciv]

Probably more effective in v.1 where marshall law is not limited to 3.
Go find the enemy, take a boat if you have to, bring your diplomat and $.
Find some (attack>0) units further from their base so to be cheaper, but not so far that they are closer to any of your cities. Bribe them.
Bring them home and now you have support-less, cost-less happiness enforcers.

 

[tupi]

Cannot say that monarchy is too bad in v01.
Because of unlimited (?) martial law monarchy/communism is actually pretty good in v.01. If not the total 128 unit limit, it would be even better. And with NONE units it is even better, yes. In v03-05 mon/comm are nerfed too much and kinda works only on lower difficulties. It still lowers your corruption and also lowers number of red-shirts in big empires, but this is not enough.

And even anarchy is not so bad. You don't pay for maintenance, and you can (and should) go 100% luxury (taxes and science are not accumulated anyway). So it can be good in 2 cases: 1) when your despot empire cannot reastically research anything anyway (tens of turns), and you struggle with tax collecting even with 100% taxes or 2) your cities have everything, you discovered everything, and you want to switch to military conquest strategy with 100% luxuries and don't want to pay maintenance.

Another idea to vindicate mon/comm: you can launch "we love the king/comrade" to get +1 republic trade bonus and then lower luxuries (because after when WLTK launched, you need much less luxuries thanks to that "republic bonus". And also martial law still works!). I never tried this strategy and I don't know how viable it is in practice.

 

[pureciv]

I play without using WLTK because it is just too much in rep/dem!
Maritial laws really slips in beneath the radar, but crucial is the ratio value of resources vs. trade.. which is locked in at 1-sell/2-buy (unless you mod it).
I made libraries/marketplace cost 2upkeep and banks/unis 4, and made the factories/plants cost less upkeep to favor resources vs trade, which is too much when you add in the 3 trade routes also.
I'm considering upkeep for happiness buildings, I think they should be in-between, on an increasing scale, probably temple-0, colosseum-2, cathedral-1, with much higher build shield costs.
With v.01 if you do the slave-gathering it is very OP.. but 3 is low.. anyways it is good you can choose.

 

[Mize]

I haven't played version .01 since so long ago that I've forgotten that there is no martial law cap. Is this a dream?
Monarchy still works in .05 but only under certain circumstances. You can go for it early for growth and production, especially if you get some starting tech that leads to it (sometimes you get 4 techs and you can even start with it), but you have to have good tiles--game, fish, oil, river, etc. WLTK is definitely the way to go, but not necessarily in all cities, just the best trading ones. A big city with good trade routes and a marketplace and bank can keep its republican level trade output up at 20% luxuries. Bump up to 30-40 for one turn to get it to celebrate, then when it gets the bonus trade you can bring luxuries down a notch and the city will still be happy. With martial law and no unhappiness for roaming units, quelling riots and defending borders becomes very easy. The only problem is slow growth. The solution is to switch to republic during peacetime, bring in or disband units that are outside of your cities, grow, switch back to monarchy/communism when you max out. This is quite useful if the AI beats you to Bach's and Women's Suffrage and you're waging too many wars to deal with the unhappiness. The freedom of being able to break treaties at will and demand tribute is also a bonus. If you're strong, you can get a lot of cash this way.

 

[pureciv]

I'd thought you'd known, Mize.
There are like 2 differences between the versions!
To accentuate monarchy I made a lot of the tile outputs hit "3": eg. fish is 3f/3t, ocean 3t (no food), so as to make monarchy better lol.
I also halved overall trade by making plains 3f,1r (no trade) so essentially plain -equartorial- cities are f-ed.. but they are faster to develope, travel faster, and with city improvements that cost less for resource-aplification it really makes you scout out cities for trade OR resouce specialization (high upkeep for lib.markeplaces etc.) means the threshhold for any trade enchancement is also higher.
Thus, like I'm forcing you to use monarchy/communism more.