Democracy is too powerful (from FCW discord)

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wieder
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Democracy is too powerful (from FCW discord)

Post by wieder »

Here we have a very very good post from Rosenblatt. Th message is from FCW discord server / open-discussions so I can't comment on there.

I'm posting this here because most of the rulesets seem to have real balance issues with democracy and while we have made lots of work on longturn.net to figure this out, there is still work left. On lt.net we basically halved the empire size, allowed max 1 unit outside the borders (without unhappiness at home) with all the wonders and and effects combined and nerfed + postponed the trade wonders on the tech tree. Now the economical rush will happen only after industrialization instead of other way around. We also gave other govs some nice features democracy doesn't have. For example federation hos has +50% boost for science. In total we ma have more than 50 changes attempting to get this right.

This may be a good start but I feel that there is more to this and democracy should maybe have some other additional advantages instead of simply no incite/bribing + being a trade based economical monster. So we maybe should have more nerfing for demo but also some new good features so that it' wouldn't be no longer universally good gov.

Oh... and we also don't have rapture. Instead we have +1 trade bonus. We would add rapture it there would be a fair way to do that but at the moment we don't know how to do that. Ending up with all or most the players on demo is not that good idea.

I believe FCW had some attempts to fix this and I would be really interested to know more about how the players feel about the changes and if more people have great comments like the one from Rosenblatt. There have been some bickering in the past but if we could get past that, it would be great for the Freeciv community and for the future of the game.

The LTT (Longturn Traditional) ruleset for Freeciv 2.6 is publicly available and all comments are welcome. It's not perfect but at least not everyone was playing on demo in the last game. Talking about this issue and comparing different ideas is probably the best possible way to improve the game.

It would be great to have further comments here but if you prefer discord, you can comment this on longturn.net discord server:

https://discord.gg/pQvpFuE

Or you may want to comment this on the League of Civs server (also known as the free speech server) where talking about all flavors, FCW, LT.NET, web, native client, wasm client, Amiga ports and single player stuff is allowed and encouraged. Linking to other sites is also allowed:

https://discord.gg/dANdHrV



The post:

"Rosenblatt Today at 11:26 AM
One of the biggest reasons is rapturing. It is extremely easy to rapture and getting +1 citizen in almost all cities is very strong.

Democracy does not have any drawbacks. The war should be a drawback but it is not. One suggestion is to penalize not for the time when your unit is outside of your territory (who does it anyway???), but for every dead unit. Basically you lost a unit, you get some penalty. This is in tact with the actual situation for a democracy.

Also, give some benefits for other governments. Communism can have like +10% shield increase automatically.

Fundamentalism can have something like suicide hidden units. Basically you go, attack someone with a plane hitting any city, but no one know who does it (the unit does not show which country is it coming from and you do not need to declare a war).

------------
Basically not matter what will be done, it will be better than what do we have now. Because if you have 30 players and all 30 of them have democracy, it means that something is wrong with the balance."
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Corbeau
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Re: Democracy is too powerful (from FCW discord)

Post by Corbeau »

Here is what I did in the Sim ruleset:

* fortress doesn't claim tile (so you can't build one in Afghanistan, claim it your land and make home citizens content)
* no Women Suffrage; you want people happy - invest in stupid sitcoms and Superbowl
* max tax is 50% in Democracy
* Democracy + University (building) + unit abroad = +1 unhappy citizen

But the thing with dead units adding to unhappiness is a great idea. Only need to implement it somehow.
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Ignatus
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Re: Democracy is too powerful (from FCW discord)

Post by Ignatus »

That was one of the ideas behind the counters project: make it possible to have CivIII "war weariness" system. Each war-related event with each adverse player contributes some amount to a counter that scales an unhappiness effect until you end the war by destroying the enemy or by signing a treaty. (CivIII and later also distinguish in the initial happiness who has started the war, though it's easy to overrun this system with provacations).

Actually, we could make a Lua model of this effect: losing a unit removes an extra (several layers of extras) from one of your city centers that has a luxury output; slowly the extras may regenerate by per-turn Lua callback, or be rebuilt by workers.
Dino the Dinosore
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Re: Democracy is too powerful (from FCW discord)

Post by Dino the Dinosore »

I agree the rapture growth each turn effect is too strong. In the ruleset I've been making I tried replacing it with a food bonus (causes faster city growth, but not once every turn) - that helped but led to the situation where the city size would grow larger than could be supported when rapture ended. Instead I am now using a +1 trade per tile bonus, same as what wieder mentioned.
wieder
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Re: Democracy is too powerful (from FCW discord)

Post by wieder »

The way I see it, rapture kind of nullifies the need for food and granaries. If +1 food is optimal and you still grow equally fast as with +10 food, it simply doesn't sound right. More food should give something. with LTT it's currently growth. Another route would be making some other govs more interesting. Like I said before federation was given +50% science bonus. Now we know that it wasn't enough and the bonus was changed to 100%. If you compare this to democracy, you will now get more science but the gold production will suffer with federation. Shield production should be slightly better.

Democracy also had an empire size limit - and step - of 32 and this was changed to 16. LT58 (currently on T11) and LT60 (starting in January) will tell us how all this works out. Hopefully demo is not the only relevant government in the mid and late game.
Lexxie
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Re: Democracy is too powerful (from FCW discord)

Post by Lexxie »

People can sometimes be smarter than Civ2, it's an old game.

The hoop to jump through which proves you aren't an unqualified, is to actually explain it

so far no one has...

Civ2 dynamic is that gov is like tech, each one higher is better, so higher tech "democracy" is best of all...

simple in these days of wanting more diverse strategy

but also a ringer on dumbness for no one here to give the pros/cons, debates, historicity of it
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Corbeau
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Re: Democracy is too powerful (from FCW discord)

Post by Corbeau »

[quote="Lexxie"]Civ2 dynamic is that gov is like tech, each one higher is better, so higher tech "democracy" is best of all... [quote]
This was my idea for a long time and then, a while ago, I realised one thing and just recently another.

The first was China, the second was Afghanistan.

With all its moral, economical, industrial, military might, the West is being defeated and humiliated on several fronts.

Yes, I’d rather live in the West than in China right now. But in 20, 30, 50 years from now… Who’s to say?
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