Free Speech Vs. Bureaucracy

[Gwynnja]

This is by far, the hardest civic swap decision I ever have to make. I know that if I'm going for a culture win it's free speech immediately, but during games that last into the modern age and I'm still relying on my research slider, I'm going to want to optimize my beakers per turn. Is there a certain number of towns outside my capital I should have before switching into free speech? I know the answer to these sort of things are usually "it depends" but for the sake of clarity I'll say that my playstyle often means prioritizing riverside cottages when possible, prioritizing Bureaucracy, prioritizing Oxford in my capital, and rarely building an Academy outside of my Oxford city.

 

[fed1943]

It looks just a question of making the math:
How many commerce will be lost? How many won (cottage x2)?
If more commerce is won than lost, perhaps 1H=1,5C.
If you have the time and mud, calculate commerce and hammers after modification, if not stay with raw.

 

[Gwynnja]

I can, with favorable map conditions, win regularly on Immortal. But figuring out algebraic formulae is simply not going to make this game more enjoyable to me. At this point, I'm willing to reload and take an alternate path if my civic change is detrimental. The problem I have is that Bureau is an immediate boost and it's hard to quantify where the +50% hammers fit in.

 

[BornInCantaloup]

Well... I'm not sure you really need to factor in the hammer boost. Maybe your priorities are more important.

"Number of towns*2" vs "base commerce in capital" gives an ok estimate of your gains or losses.

From there, you can ponder according to the following points:
- Bureaucracy is a high cost civic.
- Non-capital cities will have lower commerce multipliers.
- Do you need the hammers in the capital? If you got a wonder to build or some more infrastructure...
- Do you need the culture in your border cities?

Calculating the exact ratio would be troublesome, I agree, but you only need 2 basic numbers to start really thinking about it. City screen or F1 will give commerce in capital; stats screen will give number of towns.

Still, it's one of those difficult choices. Late-game civic choices can be a pain to make, unless one runs a fully specialized economy, which, of course, almost never happens...

 

[Izuul]

One big thing to consider is your research multipliers. If you are decking out your capitol with Libary, Uni, Observatory, Academy, and Oxford as you say, then it will have a +225% research modifier. Your other cities probably have 25-50% unless you waste a bunch of hammers in all of them.

In a late game scenario where your capitol is really well developed, you will probably have a net loss of something in the neighborhood of 20-25 commerce in the cap by switching to FS. If 20, then 20 commerce * 3.25 = 65 beakers lost. 20-25 commerce lost is just a ballpark figure, but it's really easy to calculate in your own game. Bureau commerce bonus - (towns worked in cap *2).

Now if we are generous and say that you have Library + Uni in every other city in your empire that is working at least one town, you would need to generate at least 44 more commerce to see a net gain in total research. That would require 22+ towns in this example. If you've done a good bit of conquering you will probably have that because the AI likes to build them everywhere and it makes sense to keep some of the more developed ones.

The other factor i left out above would be civic upkeep cost because Bureau is definitely more expensive. That may actually translate directly into beakers by being able to switch some Wealth builds to Research. If you have a large empire that will be pretty significant. And there's also the hammer loss in the capitol, so it is a pretty complicated decision. I would imagine large empires with like 20-30 cities will favor FS, where smaller ones will be better with Buruea, but if you are really curious you should probably just save the game, switch, and evaluate the difference.

*I think all of that is right, but I'm tired

 

[blunderwonder]

I think in *most situations, if you have less than 6 or 7 cities, beau is going to be better, the hammers and the commerce is not easily gained elsewhere. if you have dozens of cities then the extra culture and commerce in other cities is more valuable. Usually theres some farms or other things, not just straight towns across the board, and even when there is, the kind of beauro cap your talking about with oxford and all those other things, the multipliers are so big that the extra 50% commerce is a huge bonus especially if its a big city, and the hammers are always nice as well.

in general i think of free speech as a cultural move, otherwise i think people mostly stay in the other civics.

 

[erajah]

I think this is one of the few gripes I have with Civ4. SMAC did it right by allowing you to "reverse" any decisions you made during the turn with regard to government. Of course, you can't do that with Civ4 because of anarchy, but it would've been a nice feature before you revolt to "preview" what your civilization would look like under different options.

Similar to Gwynnja, for the economic policy, I'd like to see how things would look under different policies. Before state property, I'd like to know how mercantilsm and free market would affect my empire.

 

[Patchface]

Maybe a simple math you can do is, what percentage of your total beaker output is being generated by your bureau capital? I think if its more than 1/3 or so, you stay in bureau. OTOH if you are so big and spread out that its lower (and you have a fair number of cottage spam), then switch into FS.

 

[GKey]

That's not too easy despite possibility to calculate exact numbers.

The loss from abandoning Buro is easiest to calculate, BUG mode provides nice info:

Spoiler :

So base is 106 and Buro gives us 53 base . Now apply multipliers you have in your capital, in this example we have libr+uni+academy+Oxford+observatory = 225%, so loss will be 53 * 2.25 = 119.25

Of cause it's with 100% slider. Having slider say at 30% makes it not much more complicated.

30% of base = 53 * 0.3 = 16 commerce going into , multiply it by 2.25 = 36 loss.

then calculate how much will you lose:
70% of base = 53 * 0.7 = 37 commerce going into , apply multipliers you have and get loss.

To calculate the gain from using FS you need to count towns(soon will be towns) in each city and apply multipliers to numbers of improvements * 2 in each city - that is complicated indeed, but once it's done, you finally have exact number to compare.

Check gain from switching from Buro into FS in civics screen, in above example with big empire it will be 23 per turn!

 

[rfcfanatic]

I guess Bureaucracy is more like Medieval-Renaissance era civic and Free Speech is Industrial-Modern era civic. Bureaucracy+Academy+Library+University+Observatory+Oxford can provide a fancy amount of research. But as fancy it is - it has its limits. Some really good Bureaucracy-suitable capitals can yield as much as 600 /turn. Really, I mean REALLY good players can maybe get out as much as 1000 /turn from a Bureaucracy capital city.

But Modern era technologies cost several thousand which even the best Bureau cap cannot produce. That's why it's necessary to expand to huge amount of cities and cottage the crap out of the land surrounding Modern era cities.

 

[ben-jammin]

It wouldn't be that hard to calculate the net gain or loss. You can see all your improvements on the info screen, you can see the commerce and hammers your capital gets, and you can see all the hammers and commerce you lose with a turn of anarchy.