Of Civics stability

[havuoksa]

Having a good game, but same as in my first rhye-game, the civics stability plunges around 1700AD. I'm currently in constant -25 (which is nothing compared what it was in the 1st game!), there seems absolutely nothing i can do to it. I've had very few revolutions so far. One or two civs have democracy&emancipation, i'm still on representation&caste system. Being unstable, it's almost certain that i will go to collapsing if i change to democracy. Plus i have a hunch that it didn't help last time, is caste system even the reason for this?? I've began thinking that the civics category is MEANT to go way down along the game, to balance it with others, am I right? Great if anyone can help, this is the most annoying part in the otherwise great mod.

 

[PPK]

Representation penalizes you for having lots of cities (and I think the same goes for bureaucracy). It's still possible to use em if you have an excellent economy score to compensate. Otherwise If you're in danger of collapsing switch to the authoritarian civics (fascism / nationalism / communism). If you haven't reached those techs yet I think there is a small bonus for switching down to despotism / barbarism, which might put off the collapse for a few more turns so you can (maybe) grab the Taj Mahal / national park and get to the techs you need.

As for caste system I don't think it's a major source of instability. At least it doesn't feel like it in my games. It does have a penalty when combined with state property but if you have it along with police state and nationhood it should be sustainable and can be compensated easily by your economy.

 

[havuoksa]

Oh, that i didn't know (that representation gets you penalties for many cities). I'm 5 turns from democracy and have none of the "authoritarian techs", if i had only known this representation thing! Then again, isn't there a big penalty of switching to democracy from both her.r.&despo. Looks like i'm a lost case, any revolution will surely put me collapsing, giving away a city gets you penalties...

 

[Tibur753]

IIRC if you can run Universal Sufferage, Free Speech, or Emancipation and don't, there is a penalty. Also, representation and bureaucracy both give penalties for any empire over 3 or 5 cities, respectively.

 

[PPK]

By the way i believe representation is an extremely powerful civic if you use it properly. It can mean literally hundreds of extra beakers per turn in a large empire also on caste system. The thing is that you need to have a solid economy in the first place in order to withstand the massive stability drop from running it with lots of cities.

Essentially I try to focus the early game on getting cottages and farms built in preparation for a hybrid economy. Then with 3-4 specialists in all the cities and a strong economy from the growing cottages I switch to representation. After that it's a simple matter of using the extra ressearch to make a bee-line for the essential authoritarian techs. When I have them all, I do a 'big' revolution. In the first screenshot below I was running representation / bureaucracy / caste / decentralization (yea, I forgot to switch that one and at that point in the game did not want to do a revolution for free market alone) / organized religion / viceroyalty and this is right during the bee-line for fascism. The second screenshot is some turns later, after switching to police state / nationhood / state prop. Ressearch was up to 900 beakers per turn just before the revolution, and as you can see the authoritarian civics knocked it down quite a bit. Notice that in the first screenshot ressearch was at 60% and in the second it's at 90% for about the same amount of beakers. That's a pretty big difference...

However I think in this case I could have kept using representation longer since I was so stable.. oh well. Let the warmongering begin.

Spoiler :

 

[kairob]

I always assumed thats what everyone does...

I later switch to a full democracy in the 19th or 20th centuries...