Democracy is too powerful (from FCW discord)
Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2020 1:48 pm
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."
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."