Realism Invictus

[tebriz]

I've got some new respect for legislator!

Legislator have always been my favourite trait in RI.
P.S. I am quite surprised to read the comments and see that people just realize what an awesome trait the Legislator is

 

[[Y]]

I'm somewhat surprised that this one isn't more popular or talked about. Since civic maintenance is mechanically an extension of city maintenance, this effectively is a subsidy for wide expansion, and can take the blunt out of adopting more expensive civics which one might otherwise be reluctant to do, wide or tall.

It's interesting how Legislator is possibly the best money-making trait (maybe outperformed by Seafarer for taller empires in the late game) while also rocking the first turns with +1. I'm inspired to play some more with it. This also makes me think just how burdening Populist could become in the later game even for not particularly wide empires. Having a minimum of 9 cities for the culture win still bumps up the civic upkeep quite high.

Legislator have always been my favourite trait in RI.
P.S. I am quite surprised to read the comments and see that people just realize what an awesome trait the Legislator is

A large part of that is that it isn't really visible. You have to go into the financial adviser to see it, but there's no cause to do that on the regular. And since that number grows gradually and slowly throughout the game with inflation, there's rarely a change that makes you feel the impact and think "oh, damn those civic maintenance costs!" Changing civics doesn't even usually make you feel it since those changes have huge impacts anyway.

Well, consider the real use cases. When a spammable improvement is barely better than everything else it replaces, you barely get any additional benefit. This is the case with Timar - its total benefit is quite limited. You get one per farm it replaces, and that's with an additional investment into a building you might not otherwise need. Compare Poland, where you get +1 and +1 per farm replaced - so you'd need twice as many Timars per city to get to the same marginal benefit (if we consider all yields as equal in value). And that's not considering that for full benefit, you'd need to run a civic that might not be optimal in many situations (whereas you're also not considering the likely scenario that at the time you'd be running Serfdom, so another +1 to farms). It's ok in that it provides a bit of everything, but its marginal benefits are relatively low compared to most other NIs.

I agree in general. I think what the explanation above doesn't account for is the ease of building it. Even if it has marginally more use than a normal farm/windmill and marginally less utility than other spammable NIs, it has the benefit of being qualified to be built just about anywhere, not limited by irrigation or hills, so you get more timars than you would farms and windmills. I think it's still a very strong NI. Not too strong, but something noteworthy. And while it might be just one hammer more per farm it replaces, it basically turns the stable into a better workshop, so worthy of being built in each city without a doubt.

And for a nitpick, I did consider the Serfdom scenario when I accounted for manors.

All of this seems to support bumping progressive to 10%. +1 per scientist might look better than it actually is, as you're unlikely to get anywhere near the amount of additional +5%. One interesting note though is that AI progressive leaders seem to generally perform better than average. Might have to do with their AI prioritising research more, or cheaper research-related buildings (which again means they are more attractive and built earlier by the AI).

Agreed on +1 not being much of a help. +10% sounds like a good upgrade.

For an experiment, it could be interesting to remove the research increase entirely and see if it affects how the AI progressive leaders perform.

-50% upgrade cost from Progressive is not negligible though. I had a game where I spent ~3000-5000 gold on upgrading my army and navy to Renaissance grade units (non-Progressive leader), it was around turn 800-1000. Progressive leader would make it ~1500-2500. So this alone is technically like 1.5-3 GPT with the big drawback of only coming into play in the middle of the match. I've also had cases of upgrading drafted irregulars when threatened by a surprise invasion, in that case Progressive could've really saved me in a pinch given how costly upgrading from irregulars is. But again, drafting becomes a thing only in Renaissance.

I feel you here! I usually pay 4000-5000 gold to upgrade my composite bowmen into longbowmen and 10,000-20,000 gold to upgrade units in the rennaisance. Progressive's savings would be a huge gold saver! But usually, at these points in the game, generating gold isn't difficult. If you manage your economy well, you put your research slider down to 0 for 10-20 turns and boom, you have one of the most modern armies on the planet. Generating research is much harder to do, and the 5% fails to impress in that regard. So if looking at it with the lens of "what problems does Progressive solve", at the current rate, it doesn't solve much that can't be handled already. Hopefully a bump to 10% changes that.

 

[FlimsyWhimsy]

I feel you here! I usually pay 4000-5000 gold to upgrade my composite bowmen into longbowmen and 10,000-20,000 gold to upgrade units in the rennaisance. Progressive's savings would be a huge gold saver! But usually, at these points in the game, generating gold isn't difficult. If you manage your economy well, you put your research slider down to 0 for 10-20 turns and boom, you have one of the most modern armies on the planet. Generating research is much harder to do, and the 5% fails to impress in that regard. So if looking at it with the lens of "what problems does Progressive solve", at the current rate, it doesn't solve much that can't be handled already. Hopefully a bump to 10% changes that.

If what it takes to upgrade an army is 10-20 turns of 0 research slider, then Progressive would make it 5-10 turns, thus getting in some extra turns of research. But I guess what you meant is that at this point in the game, tech costs are just much higher than army upgrade costs and converting 10-20 turns of research into army upgrade gold isn't going to affect research on the large scale.