[SPOILERS]PB46: (In Search of) Fine Foreign Dining, by Hannibal of England

[GermanJoey]

What's the reasoning behind the Bureaucracy/Nationhood upkeep switcheroo? I'm not aware of it being perceived as being overpowered, quite the opposite, in fact... I remember using Nationhood pretty effectively in PB37, but that required a pretty involved long-term and map-specific setup to make that work, and I still switched in and out of it a bunch of times, IIRC.

The long answer is quite involved. The reasoning is one of those that starts in a completely different area, in this case, cottage pillaging, tech cost scaling and Emancipation being brought forward. Below is the current rule regarding cottage/hamlet/village/town pillaging:

Villages: Cannot be destroyed by air bomb mission or pillaged. Also provides access and tile yields to Copper, Iron, Oil, Coal, Aluminium and Uranium. (Can still be improved over by workers)

Towns: Cannot be destroyed by air bomb mission. Also provides access and tile yields to Copper, Iron, Oil, Coal, Aluminium and Uranium. (Can still be improved over by workers). Acts as cities. [Identical functionality as forts, for the purposes of rebasing air units, canals, city defense and city attack promotions etc].

So what this means, is that Hamlets and Cottages can still be pillaged into nothing, but Villages can only be removed by being improved over. Towns can get knocked down to Villages but no further (so instead of spending 70 turns to get a cottage back to a Town, it only takes 40 turns, not much of an improvement).

This means that captured cities may well lose city infrastructure (this is something I want to discuss after the game, because we probably want to streamline it a bit and remove randomness) but should not lose tile infrastrucutre that requires turns to regrow. Farms, mines, whatever, these are easily fixable, but to cottages being capturable mean that late game conquests have more commerce avaiable, so tech speed should increase. This is compounded by the tech cost scaling introduction, which lowers the late game tech costs, and suggests that more games should extend being the Rennaisance era, and more games should reach victory conditions such as Space.

Onto Emancipation: This got moved into the Legal civic column, and brought forward to Constitution. It's also free to revolt into, but costs anarchy to revolt out of. Again, players have greater opportunity to fix an economy and to rebuild a tech rate. But the +1 food/-1 commerce to Towns was implemented because without some form of a bonus to the civic itself that limited the opportunity cost of being stuck in the civic longer term. It doesn't matter per se what this long term benefit is, but it is obvious to me that without it Emancipation is still not usable without a definitive plan of how to get out of Emancipation. Emancipation doesn't necessarily speed up the game, but with Free Speech it does give the cottage spam and rush buy economy a longer term opportunity. But with a risk period where Emancipation does not give an economic boost where a civ running it could be invaded.

This puts the Legal Civic Column into an interesting position: All of the civics in this column have a strategic reason to be run. They are not like the Government, Labor or Economy civics, where there is a stepping stone civic (HR, Slavery, Merc) that you want into ASAP because it improves the economy, and out of because thee next bunch of civics are better still. The Legal Civics are like the Religious civics, where you want to pick a civic that fits the strategy you are following at that time.

And so, Vassalage is there for XP in all cities, Bureaucracy is there for the uber capital pushing research, Nationhood is there for quick unit build up and reactivity to others, and Emancipation is there to allow a rebuilt tech output. They are not supposed to be balanced such that any one of these is the "right choice", they need to be balanced such that they are all usable and none of them are invcredibly niche. This also needs to work for various game types (between a 5 player PBEM and a 30 player extravaganza). Some games the civics will be valued differently, but generally it is within the specific game that the civic valuations will be affected by the game state rather than game settings.

Therefore everything else is just finding the right general power level, taking into account the techs that enable the civics. Specifically, Vassalage is almost always available first, but even with a specific tech path, the only other civic available first is Bureaucracy. After that it is Nationhood, then Emancipation. So that weak period that Emancipation has is always going to be able to be exploited by a player running Nationhood unless specifici actiosn are taken before revolting into Emancipation (and dependant on map position, and relative tech, and available MFG and current strength etc etc).

Vassalage got double the unit cost savings. Maybe this was too much of a buff, but really it has to be valued against Emancipation running triple the cottage output. Nationhood had cost increased, because the only way to fit Bureaucracy into this, without giving it additional effects, was to make it scale into a huge map. And making it zero cost does that without changing the core purpose of that civic. Late game Bureaucracy is perhaps not that fantastic in terms of output, but when the saved civic costs go through inflation as well, it makes it a more interesting choice.

Nationhood is perhaps the most swingy of these civics, because the main purposes is to give units, and unless those units are used to take land, there isn't much purpose to it (well, defense from another but you see that is the point of how I am trying to balance the legal civics?)

I'm not saying that this is balanced correctly yet. Perhaps Bureaucracy needs to be no cost with another small buff (ie to city maintenance), and Nationhood needs to be Medium cost. Perhaps Emancipation is broken with the food bonus (although frankly I don't see how because stack the Towns so high and you run out of tiles to use for hammers and you have to run specs, so I think it's self balancing in terms of player recognition and Cash rush penalties. Kremlin times out at Computers, after all).

TBH, I think this is so out of whack I don't even know how to respond to it. How does Bureaucracy need another buff after being dropped to no-cost????? It was already often considered the "one right civic" for that column even when it was high-cost!!! When would anyone ever use any other civic but Bureaucracy the way it is now? Like, even Emancipation (which otherwise seems quite good) doesn't seem worthwhile over no-cost Bureaucracy unless you're Fin and you're planning on also being in Universal Suffrage and Free Speech.

I really don't understand why you slip in massive changes like this into mod updates for stuff that nobody else considered unbalanced in the first place.

Like, before I noticed this change I thought Emancipation was a really interesting change to tempt players into actually trying to build cottages again. But, like, in the Ren+ era the difference between a high-cost civic and a no-cost civic can be hundreds of gold per turn when you include inflation. Switching out of Bureau to grow cottages, when most players could just build workshops and run wealth for close to the same output for 1/100th the effort, doesn't seem like it would ever be a smart play. I can't even see wanting to run Vassalage in late-game, much less Nationhood, which was already a civic that most players forgot the existence of.

To be brutally honest, I think your view is anachronistic. Especially regarding Nationhood. The point of these civics is that they support different approaches to the game. I'm not sure that running bureaucracy when some is building 10 modern units per turn is a sound decision.

Anachronistic? How so? Go look at some of the more recent late-game expenses pages. If +2XP a turn is costing you 300gpt JUST IN UPKEEP EXPENSES, not even counting the increased income from the capital, maybe that's not worth it anymore! Drafting with Nationhood is also not as easy as simply gaining a free 5*110hpt in rifles or whatever; first of all, you need like 50-60 cities (including a globe city) to maintain that rate for any length of time, after you factor in the fact that you won't want to draft out of strong mature cities and you won't be able to draft at all out of fillers. Furthermore, actually getting those hammers to the front can be a struggle... it's not the same thing as gaining free hammers out of your main unit-producing cities. Take it from someone who used Nationhood long-term in his most recent pitboss game!

[Krill]

Just to be fair, I did double the free units for Vassalage, and I acknowledge that the civics aren't perfectly balanced when it comes to the costs. That's why we play test games.

[Krill]

Turn 034

TBW played it smart and moved W - NW, but we are not out of hte woods yet. He can move N - NE on T35 (1S of the rice), and then 2E to get a look at the capital, and also to enable steeping on the wheat on T37. But I trust Joey's judgement that TBW will not wheat-step.







The player that grew to size 5 is not Rusten (he whipped his capital hard, it is 2 pop max, I think he was back to 1 pop a few turns ago, and the 6 point growth is a tech). That leaves BeardBeard and Commodore with the size 5 capital. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it is Com. But more importantlt Hinduism has been Founded, and that has to be either Rusten, Com or Beard. I doubt it was Com due to start techs but I can't be sure who got it out of the other two. I hope it wasn't Rusten.





11th in crop yield but only 3 food below top.

The spoiler contains graphs on TBW. I might look at them later, but not that interested TBH.

[GermanJoey]

Well, like, what I mean is that a lot of these costs don't make sense. For example, consider the numbers from this post I made on T174 from PB37, 5 turns from before I finished Constitution:

T174.

A funny story. Like, I have a pretty good capital, right? And in a GA:




So, Bureau would net me +49 commerce per turn, +50% regardless of what slider I'm at. So, 73.5 beakers or gold per turn. However, it costs 66gpt more than Nationhood in maintenance, plus 18gpt from inflation. So Nationhood is actually the better economic civic.

Nationhood was a no-cost civic in that version of the mod, while Bureau was a high-cost civic. So, the upkeep costs for the new Emancipation would be the same as the old Bureaucracy, while the new Bureaucracy will have the upkeep costs of the old Nationhood.

So, my capital is pretty decent here, but it's not what I consider unusually good; there's no Oxford, no monasteries, no observatory, etc; so I think it's a reasonable capital for this point of the game. Now, consider switching T180 to T215 - the first turn my civ woulda been able to switch into the new Emancipation, plus 35T for newly-planted cottages to grow into towns. Assuming my civ would otherwise stay exactly static, Bureau gains 35T * 162gpt = 5670g over Emancipation, plus some bonus hpt in the capital... I don't know, call it 10hpt. So, round up 5670g up to 6000g just to keep it simple.

So, 6000g is about 3 solid Great Merchants, or about 20-25 turns saving gold at that point of the game for that civ. And what your 6000g buys you here is a bunch of towns in 35T on your newly-conquered tiles instead of workshops or whatever. Let's say that this is actually desirable, due to a plan to switch into US + FS + rushing the Kremlin or whatever, as, individually, 3/1/8 grassland tiles are certainly a hell of a lot better than 1/5/0 grassland workshops. The key question then is: how many towns do you need to convert to make your 6000g purchase worth it 35T from now? My feeling is that the answer is "a fucking lot", maybe at least 100? To many to be worth it.

What I really don't get here is why you changed the costs for Bureaucracy or Vassalage at all! It reminds me of that whole 2-free-specialist Mercantilism from a few versions ago...

[Krill]

Well, FWIW, I wouldn't worry about it.

I just checked in game, and for some reason the civics costs are unchanged. I double checked, and the changes were not implemented into 4.1.1.6 at all, so this is entirely down to me screwing up.

[Krill]

I think I understand what you are getting at, but I don't think the numbers you are using here are entirely accurate given the other changes within the game.

Part of the difficulty in balancing the civics are the way that the costs are calculated: it scales off population and cities, with a multiplier from difficulty level (but we can ignore the difficulty level component IMO).

My understanding of the basic costs (it works for a rough estimate, but full explanation is found here) are this: Each pop point after the first nine costs:

• No upkeep: 0g
  
• Low upkeep: 0.08g
  
• Medium upkeep: 0.12g
  
• High upkeep: 0.16g

And each city costs:

• No upkeep: 0g
  
• Low upkeep: 0.4g
  
• Medium upkeep: 0.5g
  
• High upkeep: 0.6g

So a player with 10 size 10 cities would pay 0g to run a no upkeep civic, and 20.4g to run a high cost civic. Low upkeep civic would cost 11.2g, then modified by inflation. Map size is irrleveant.

However, this is just the cost of the individual civic.

Core points though: You have to run a legal civic, so the only comparisons that have any meaning are to what the other choices are on a given turn, and how this affects other in game deicisions (eg tech priority and golden age timing). Tribalism is a low upkeep civic for example, so to run Bureaucracy the cost savings need to be compared to that, or the cost of running Vassalage. And because there are only four cost options, it's either 0% cost for no upkeep, 52% cost for low upkeep, then 75% and 100% at high cost. There isn't a lot of variation available through the upkeep mechanic.

In Bureau, a player would save 0.4g per city and 0.08g per population point, plus the capital output bonus compared to Tribalism. The example from T120 in PB42 is 17 cities and 80 pop: 12 gpt. This is, IMO, a good counter example of why Bureaucracy falls down if it is a high cost civic: it works in the early game, and then fails to scale as your show, where the No upkeep option of Nationhood gives greater economic output and the ability to draft (and happiness from barracks, and extra EP?!) There is no reason to use Bureaucracy, and it collapses the choices down to three, but in reality Nationhood uber alles in that set up: Vassalage unit savings don't match the cost savings from nationhood, and Environmentalism was commerce and gold that costs gold to generate anyway, so drafting provided a niche that none of the other civics matched in a strategic or tactical sense. This is why the civics benefit from the Emancipation move into Legal, but then they need rebalancing. Otherwise the Emancipation move has no effect if it can't be used.

Look, the crux is straightforward to understand: I'm not claiming the civics are correctly balanced. What I am claiming, is that if we nail Bureaucracy down as a No upkeep civic, is we have a baseline civic we can then compare the rest to, and balance the others effectively. If we leave Bureaucracy with any form of upkeep cost, we limit it's value and we end up pricing it out of usefulness. We also have to make sure that the civics aren't broken in the extremes of map settings in terms of map size as civic costs are not affected by map size: civics cost less on small maps because of fewer pop and cities, so on large maps the benefits of bureaucracy stay the same but the costs increase. How is that good for game balance?

The route I was taking to balance the civics is this:

• Keep Bureaucracy at No upkeep, and use the upkeep mechanic as a true cost mechanic for the other civics: ie it is a known value to enable drafting, extra XP or cottage growth, which gives us a gold and food to hammer conversion ratio.
  
  
• Vassalage can keep some form of upkeep cost, but we can offset this by varying the free units amount (and thus create a civic where a player has a route to maintain a large standing army, so there is a relevant choice between Bureaucracy and Vassalage in terms of an economic output, not just the idea that we need to put CP onto new units). The exact numbers I do not know right now, but it is the concept which is important: it is trivial to make Vassalage save more gold in unit upkeep than it would cost as a low upkeep civic, for example.
  
  
• Once these two civics are balanced effectively, we know that the choices are to either revolt into these and then have the decision to revolt out of them later on (and use Emancipation or Nationhood), or just suck up Tribalism for the entire game (but we are inherently making that a stupid idea). Or even to swap between these two later on. (But this is my reasoning around all four civics having strategic niches, rather than a logical progression into an end state, )
  
  
• Nationhood must become a cost civic, whether than be a low, medium or high upkeep, but we can duplicate the potential for unit costs savings from Vassalage to balance this out if we wanted. The core principle remains turning gold and food into hammers, but we can vary how this plays out (we have the draft unhappy lever, both amount of happy and length of unhappiness, unit costs, civic costs, pop per drafted unit, even the potential for tile yields, so there is no shortage of levers we can use to balance Nationhood within this model yet still keep the core design as drafting).
  
  
• Emancipation can then be fit into the legal civics in a meaningful sense: We will be able to have a better understanding of the earlier game civics in Bureaucracy and Vassalage, and we will be able to quantify the economic cost of moving into it. I will note from your example you only compared to bureaucracy output, but failed to take into account the output from new cottage growth and the food value from already developed cottages being pushed through specialists or any new tiles worked. Because it isn't possible to do that without understanding how you value those additional benefits or the value of later game commerce in terms of a space race without understand the game as a whole. But if we rebuild the rest of the legal civic columns, we can have the framework to understand what changes we need to make to the civic.
  
  
• Finally, Emancipation is currently set up to not cost anarchy to revolt into. This is unusual, but I do worry about the effect on trait balance with SPI. It is also necessary that all players have access to it for cottage growth. Mercantilism is already set up as a straight economic boost, which distorts the benefit of a GA around the completing of Banking. The difficulties around golden ages used to revolt into civics are incredibly restrictive: I don't think we can add anything else without breaking the system and buffing SPI too much. This is an area that requires more discussion, but I can see how we can end up making all legal civics free to revolt, just giving that ability to two of them, or leaving it on Emancipation.

[Coin]

I’ve got to say, this discussion on how to balance things is really interesting to follow.

[Krill]

I’ve got to say, this discussion on how to balance things is really interesting to follow.

I hope it is helpful in understanding why certain decisions have been made. If you have other questions, I will try to answer them when I have time.


Turn 035




TBW scout still has the opportunity to wheat step, and TBW may war dec next turn, even if it is not necessarily expected. The bears are more interesting. Taking the 99% combat on defense, then consider if we can promote heal to get the last XP from the other bear, and then retreat to fog busting position. Gilbert could be a medic scout if we wanted, or we could get another G2 scout. Another G2 scout could run rings around the barb warriors and archers whilst still fog busting.

[Krill]

Turn 036




I'm going for the second G2 scout. I promoted to G1 to regain 23 of the 24 lost hp, and moved the warrior to ensure perfect fog busting of the city 2 area. Greater than 99% odds of victory. Now watch it all fuck up. TBW scout moved in a rather relaxed manner, and I'm now more focused on letting him fog bust for me, to keep warrior2 safer as it moves up there from T38 (reaches copper tile T41). If TBW moves his scout N - SW (like we did to check the coast) then I think there is a single tile that will not be fog busted on T38 (plains ivory), but after that everything is covered until the final position is reached. Cavendish will also be fully healed by T38, so can move into position before barb warriors start spawning, but I moved him this turn to cover the gaps made from moving Warrior1








Commodore double whipped last turn and the 5, and that is the only whip since I last played. Therefore he was the size 5 city, which suggests he also has a granary in place. That double whip was his settler, as he has not yet planted a second city.

Second cities:
T29: OH/Hitru (IMP), Borsche (EXP).
T30: GKC (Wut? FIN/ORG, what did he do to enable this, he has to have cut corners somewhere).
T31: BeardBeard (PRO/IMP, don't see how he can have a granary), Superdeath (AGG/CHM, same questions as with GKC). BaII (he hid it in the turn roll, only noticed T36)
T32: Pindicator (EXP), Gavagai (starting to seem more reasonable for double worker openings).
T33: TBW (EXP).
T34: 2MN (EXP/PRO, could have managed to fit a granary in actually)
T35: None settled
T36: Adler (hidden on turn roll again! sneaky sneaky).

Starting to feel better about the rate of expansion. Just praying that horse pops one tile south of City 2. Still awaiting settlers from DS, Commodore, myself and Elkad now.

[Krill]

Turn 037




Dead bear, two hits again, heal in place. Next turn can promote to G2 and move 1SW and keep up the fog busting now that the workers have taken over from the warrior1. On T39, the Gilbert can move SE - NW, and uncover 1 tile of FoW and still maintain fog busting. TBW scout moved as expected so we have that one turn window of one tile uncovered, otherwise the north is clear. Cavendish is staying in place to cover the wines tile this turn and T38, T39 he will move as the wins will be covered by warrior2, and then on T40 when Cavendish reaches the desert tile he will again fog bust the wines tile for full coverage. The workers are safe because no barbs can spawn in locations that can threaten them, and there are no other barbs present as I've cleared them out.

We're saving gold for this turn, because from next turn we have 5 units outside our borders so will start paying supply costs. We should pay 1 gold on T38, 1 gold on T39 (warrior2 moves out of borders but IIUC we pay 1 gold per 2 units outside borders), 2 gold T40 (as settler moves out of borders) and then on T41 we settle and pay no unit supply costs but do pay city maintenance. The 6 gold we generate now covers those costs, and provides 9 adjusted beakers. We are 60 beakers from AH, but we make 18 adjusted beakers at mas science, so we should still finish AH eot40 to reveal horses. With any luck we'll know horse location by Sunday.





Does anyone remember how the top 5 cities are ranked? I know that output is part of the calculation, but I've never seen the full method of working it out.





Those crop yield figures are tightly packed for a 16 player game, and I think top population has 6 pop points in size 4 and size 2 cities. Bottom pop has size 2 and size 1 cities. Assuming top pop has the high crop yield and bottom pop has the bottom crop yield, both are still growing at 9fpt after population eats food.

Second cities:

Second cities:
T29: OH/Hitru (IMP), Borsche (EXP).
T30: GKC (Wut? FIN/ORG, what did he do to enable this, he has to have cut corners somewhere).
T31: BeardBeard (PRO/IMP, don't see how he can have a granary), Superdeath (AGG/CHM, same questions as with GKC). BaII (he hid it in the turn roll, only noticed T36)
T32: Pindicator (EXP), Gavagai (starting to seem more reasonable for double worker openings).
T33: TBW (EXP).
T34: 2MN (EXP/PRO, could have managed to fit a granary in actually)
T35: None settled
T36: Adler (hidden on turn roll again! sneaky sneaky). DS planted second city. Slow for EXP...