Thunderbrd
C2C War Dog
Hydro has implemented a very interesting system of Law Enforcement buildings vs Crime buildings. In general it currently works as such:
Law Enforcement = +
, -
, +
, +
vs
Crime = -, +, +often a unique unit access and/or military exp benes.
I've read a bit of discussion on this matter and I recall it stemming from some discussions between you and I, Hydro, at an earlier date.
I'm glad you implemented it so we could playtest it. But so far its causing a lot of conflicts in strategy, giving the ai absolute hell, and, imo, is actually coming across a little bit illogical.
On the positive side, the conflicts in strategy might be, by Sid's original game theories, a good thing. It forces us to make 'interestingly difficult decisions' in that if we want a city to be both our military production center and our espionage center (which is classically how I run things... grrr...) then we end up in vast conflict unless we accept that our roguish units must be built as substandard and inferior units produced in an outlying city. To gain access to them in our military city makes our military city a terrible place to focus on espionage, but there's a LOT of later game reasons to make the military production city the same as the espionage city as spy points and espionage bonuses come along WITH military benefits on many buildings.
As stated, Sid would approve. I just find it damned frustrating that my espionage center ends up sucking. Admittedly, I play with unlimited wonders (something I don't know how anyone DOESN'T play with in this mod that has so many national wonders that should go in the same city - namely the capital.) and my strategies there would probably differ and I'd have to accept a lot of sucky alternatives if I didn't.
Now, my strategy so far has been to, aside from in my capital, build ONLY the law buildings. I'm tempted to not even build them as they provide a net loss overall if you consider that the gold loss balances to the espionage gain and then there's unhappiness AND unhealth on top of it all. But I build them because the espionage is worth just a bit more than the gold later in the game as you end up overwhelmed with a lot of gold and its nice to have the easy street to getting on top of the AI espionage levels. And then, in the capital, I build the crime buildings and take that ultra frustrating hit on espionage, exacerbated by the fact that my capital also builds all the +% espionage national wonders and such to increase spy points and overall GP pts.
I don't see a better way than to just get frustrated with the blunted espionage center.
Its easy to see why the AI makes poor decisions here.
Now before jumping into looking at it as if it just needs some balance solutions or it may be just the sort of strategic tough decision we want, we should look at the theory behind it and see if it's reflective of rational real-world results.
Here's what I think about that:
In this we have a difference of opinion on what, exactly, espionage IS. I don't think it can be made to be a measure of crime at all. But crime does play a role in it.
Espionage is a metric which measures the degree of information you have on your opponent nations. The more knowledge you have of what THEY are up to, the more defense you have against them knowing what YOU are up to as well, as in the cloak and dagger world, you can use that information to understand their intelligence means and disable them. Therefore, the more points you have into a nation, the more they need into you to be able to accomplish various tasks and the easier it is for you to accomplish espionage missions on their soil.
How would crime and its enforcement play into such a system?
Both would assist you. That's right, this means that both the subtle support of criminal organization by the state and the enforcement of crime becomes an espionage benefit to the state. Why?
When you support crime (aka build such buildings as the Assassin's den and Bandit Camp) you are supporting the training and development of espionage skills among the populace. Your best spies and state funded criminals that go forth to cause trouble for OTHER nations would be trained and harbored in your own criminal buildings. Additionally, these criminals would keep the state in the loop as to what's going on in the social underworld, giving you visibility on your populace and anything suspicious taking place at all levels. Therefore, crime should equal +
What you sacrifice by embracing the darkness and harboring evil is some national stability. You're enabling criminal activity, which would cause maintenance to skyrocket (the state loses taxes due to theft and white collar crimes, must often end up with the burden of losses to citizens and businesses, and must compensate for a great deal of vandalism against state property), and unhappiness to be rife (the very concept of people not working is reflective of crime... what are they doing to feed themselves then? People unhappy with the state are going to turn to crime and crime tends to make the people unhappy as it victimizes and cannibalizes on society itself.)
I strongly agree with the concept of unit access and experience point bonuses though. In fact, I'd challenge us to make almost every crime building grant a unique unit (and I'd even put Privateers in that category, linking them to the Pirate Cove building.) I mean, that's just the coolest thing.
So my suggestion on Crime buildings amounts to:
Crime = +, +Maintenance Penalty (fairly strong, say increments of 5%), -% (to double up on the gold hit... make these buildings really hemmorage your gold if overbuilt, just as the banditry units themselves can do!), +, +Unit Access and/or Exp pt benefits
Then with Law Enforcement we have another benefit to Espionage taking place. We're catching the enemies of the state in crime raids. We're interrogating them both for local and state officials. We're leveraging our criminals for information on the underworld. We're handing out heavy handed threats to those who don't comply. It is with law buildings that we make the Criminal ones more effective. So here we should apply not a +# as we do with criminal buildings, but a +% . Like markets are to gold, law enforcement efforts are to espionage.
Whether a law building creates
or would pretty much be a case of if it was fair and just or heavy handed and cruel. Thus you'd find that Crucifixion Crosses may indeed create a while a Jail would create effect. If people live in fear, they will be more unhappy. If they live with a sense of security they'll be happy.
Some will be made happy and secure by that which will make others fear the state itself so we can remit some of the unhappiness from some of the heavy handed methods by utilizing the Maintenance metric. In short, this means that with 'evil' law buildings we'll see an increase in but a far more profound effect at reducing % Maintenance. And conversely, with 'good' law buildings we'll see an increase in but not quite as strong an effect on Maintenance. When both are put into effect, they should balance out the curses brought on your empire by each other, and mitigate the financial effect from crime, leaving us only just a bit less happy overall.
Law should give us troop access as well. Town Guardsmen, Sherrifs and Police officers should be accessed by these buildings. They need to be trained and appointed somewhere first no?
Such buildings would be expensive, however, as they must be funded by the state. So all in all, for supporting crime and for enforcing it, we're taking a net loss of gold for an overall gain in military and espionage efficiency.
Fair law enforcement would lose gold as a percentage because this is the kind of patient staffing that needs to scale with the level of crime which would be based on the level of commerce taking place in the city in the first place. Conversely, Cruel law enforcement would cost a flat rate gold as it is a flat rate answer. We have the stocks in the middle of town or the crucifixion crosses on the hill, that serves all levels of crime and makes examples there for all to see.
This would mean that we have:
'Fair' Law Enforcement: +%:Espionage:, -%, +, -%Maintenance Cost (a benefit) (a bit, say 1/4 of what the era equivalent Crime building would penalize us with), Troop Access.
'Cruel' Law Enforcement: +%:Espionage:, -, +, -%Maintenance Cost (a benefit)(a lot, 3/4 of what the era equivalent Crime building would penalize us with)
If you're all ok with this game theory, I'd be happy to attempt to make some edits once I'm on the SVN. What do you think?
Law Enforcement = +
, -, +, +vs
Crime = -
, +, +often a unique unit access and/or military exp benes.I've read a bit of discussion on this matter and I recall it stemming from some discussions between you and I, Hydro, at an earlier date.
I'm glad you implemented it so we could playtest it. But so far its causing a lot of conflicts in strategy, giving the ai absolute hell, and, imo, is actually coming across a little bit illogical.
On the positive side, the conflicts in strategy might be, by Sid's original game theories, a good thing. It forces us to make 'interestingly difficult decisions' in that if we want a city to be both our military production center and our espionage center (which is classically how I run things... grrr...) then we end up in vast conflict unless we accept that our roguish units must be built as substandard and inferior units produced in an outlying city. To gain access to them in our military city makes our military city a terrible place to focus on espionage, but there's a LOT of later game reasons to make the military production city the same as the espionage city as spy points and espionage bonuses come along WITH military benefits on many buildings.
As stated, Sid would approve. I just find it damned frustrating that my espionage center ends up sucking. Admittedly, I play with unlimited wonders (something I don't know how anyone DOESN'T play with in this mod that has so many national wonders that should go in the same city - namely the capital.) and my strategies there would probably differ and I'd have to accept a lot of sucky alternatives if I didn't.
Now, my strategy so far has been to, aside from in my capital, build ONLY the law buildings. I'm tempted to not even build them as they provide a net loss overall if you consider that the gold loss balances to the espionage gain and then there's unhappiness AND unhealth on top of it all. But I build them because the espionage is worth just a bit more than the gold later in the game as you end up overwhelmed with a lot of gold and its nice to have the easy street to getting on top of the AI espionage levels. And then, in the capital, I build the crime buildings and take that ultra frustrating hit on espionage, exacerbated by the fact that my capital also builds all the +% espionage national wonders and such to increase spy points and overall GP pts.
I don't see a better way than to just get frustrated with the blunted espionage center.
Its easy to see why the AI makes poor decisions here.
Now before jumping into looking at it as if it just needs some balance solutions or it may be just the sort of strategic tough decision we want, we should look at the theory behind it and see if it's reflective of rational real-world results.
Here's what I think about that:
In this we have a difference of opinion on what, exactly, espionage IS. I don't think it can be made to be a measure of crime at all. But crime does play a role in it.
Espionage is a metric which measures the degree of information you have on your opponent nations. The more knowledge you have of what THEY are up to, the more defense you have against them knowing what YOU are up to as well, as in the cloak and dagger world, you can use that information to understand their intelligence means and disable them. Therefore, the more points you have into a nation, the more they need into you to be able to accomplish various tasks and the easier it is for you to accomplish espionage missions on their soil.
How would crime and its enforcement play into such a system?
Both would assist you. That's right, this means that both the subtle support of criminal organization by the state and the enforcement of crime becomes an espionage benefit to the state. Why?
When you support crime (aka build such buildings as the Assassin's den and Bandit Camp) you are supporting the training and development of espionage skills among the populace. Your best spies and state funded criminals that go forth to cause trouble for OTHER nations would be trained and harbored in your own criminal buildings. Additionally, these criminals would keep the state in the loop as to what's going on in the social underworld, giving you visibility on your populace and anything suspicious taking place at all levels. Therefore, crime should equal +
What you sacrifice by embracing the darkness and harboring evil is some national stability. You're enabling criminal activity, which would cause maintenance to skyrocket (the state loses taxes due to theft and white collar crimes, must often end up with the burden of losses to citizens and businesses, and must compensate for a great deal of vandalism against state property), and unhappiness to be rife (the very concept of people not working is reflective of crime... what are they doing to feed themselves then? People unhappy with the state are going to turn to crime and crime tends to make the people unhappy as it victimizes and cannibalizes on society itself.)
I strongly agree with the concept of unit access and experience point bonuses though. In fact, I'd challenge us to make almost every crime building grant a unique unit (and I'd even put Privateers in that category, linking them to the Pirate Cove building.) I mean, that's just the coolest thing.
So my suggestion on Crime buildings amounts to:
Crime = +
, +Maintenance Penalty (fairly strong, say increments of 5%), -% (to double up on the gold hit... make these buildings really hemmorage your gold if overbuilt, just as the banditry units themselves can do!), +, +Unit Access and/or Exp pt benefitsThen with Law Enforcement we have another benefit to Espionage taking place. We're catching the enemies of the state in crime raids. We're interrogating them both for local and state officials. We're leveraging our criminals for information on the underworld. We're handing out heavy handed threats to those who don't comply. It is with law buildings that we make the Criminal ones more effective. So here we should apply not a +#
as we do with criminal buildings, but a +% . Like markets are to gold, law enforcement efforts are to espionage.Whether a law building creates
or would pretty much be a case of if it was fair and just or heavy handed and cruel. Thus you'd find that Crucifixion Crosses may indeed create a while a Jail would create effect. If people live in fear, they will be more unhappy. If they live with a sense of security they'll be happy. Some will be made happy and secure by that which will make others fear the state itself so we can remit some of the unhappiness from some of the heavy handed methods by utilizing the Maintenance metric. In short, this means that with 'evil' law buildings we'll see an increase in
but a far more profound effect at reducing % Maintenance. And conversely, with 'good' law buildings we'll see an increase in but not quite as strong an effect on Maintenance. When both are put into effect, they should balance out the curses brought on your empire by each other, and mitigate the financial effect from crime, leaving us only just a bit less happy overall.Law should give us troop access as well. Town Guardsmen, Sherrifs and Police officers should be accessed by these buildings. They need to be trained and appointed somewhere first no?
Such buildings would be expensive, however, as they must be funded by the state. So all in all, for supporting crime and for enforcing it, we're taking a net loss of gold for an overall gain in military and espionage efficiency.
Fair law enforcement would lose gold as a percentage because this is the kind of patient staffing that needs to scale with the level of crime which would be based on the level of commerce taking place in the city in the first place. Conversely, Cruel law enforcement would cost a flat rate gold as it is a flat rate answer. We have the stocks in the middle of town or the crucifixion crosses on the hill, that serves all levels of crime and makes examples there for all to see.
This would mean that we have:
'Fair' Law Enforcement: +%:Espionage:, -%
, +, -%Maintenance Cost (a benefit) (a bit, say 1/4 of what the era equivalent Crime building would penalize us with), Troop Access.'Cruel' Law Enforcement: +%:Espionage:, -
, +, -%Maintenance Cost (a benefit)(a lot, 3/4 of what the era equivalent Crime building would penalize us with)If you're all ok with this game theory, I'd be happy to attempt to make some edits once I'm on the SVN. What do you think?
and maybe random events like bank rubbery. Its more affected by the buildings and the number of population in your city than by civics, crime rate should be affected by crisis like starvations too. But only start when the city reachs level ten ore so, because smoler towns have naturaly a lower crime rate and it should not cripple early growing. 
