Maybe drop it to 10%, or remove it altogether and give Republics a different bonus. Due to the stagnation of grabbing on alliance based servers, all-explore republics are way too common. Unless we figure out a way to make all-explore less powerful, then the Republic explore bonus needs to be toned down.

Right now, on the alliance server
Evo has 32/53 are Republic
Fire has 5/15
LaF has 20/47
Monsters has 14/21
NA has 30/86
Sanct has 14/42
Omega has 23/39

That high a portion of an alliance all being Republics shows that Republic is a bit too strong right now.


edit: Specific suggestion of replacement bonus & penalty from lower in the thread
-50% building costs and +20% Military losses to replace +20% exploration rate and -10% military strength

Republics suck for war have fluffty defence and you want to take away the ONE thing that makes them good?

BAD

Is not a problem of the government type, is a problem of the server.

Republic is the safest type of government for those that lack time to search for targets and take the risk, a All X Republic hardly ever reaches top 10, even thought more than 40% of the server is one, so point denied, leave republics alone

On alliance servers, its not about your individual finish, its about your alliance's finish. How many alliances with TNW or ANW without a huge chunk of their alliance playing all-explore republics?

And Republics are good for a late set war. Use the explore bonus to get bigger in land, and then switch to monarchy a couple of days before the war, and then over to dictator once you're alliance is ready to FS. The Republic to Dictator war strategy has been done quite well.

The +20% PCI also makes them good. It is a factor when determining when to switch from republic to fascist when playing an all-explore farmer.

Given time to get badass all countries can be awesome for war, so no point there.

honestly without the tag protection Republics are mostly farmed and can only get a critical amount of land before becoming farm target... the government is more than fine to me.

-10% returns?

land destruction penalty when switching from Rep -> something else
:)

again republics are good when you can hide under a tag, there is no point to change a government just because the tag protects them.

go to any other server and republics get attacked more often than any other government, also -10% returns would be the same as a forget about the retals option.

if you want to nerf republics then give then a (-5% or -10%) on spies as well to go on hand with their -15% on attacks, that would make then a government that is WEAK on war and good to net with.

As a result you can get an FS on a netting alliance more easily on the server alliances and on other servers Republics are bound to get Robbed by Nations with high SPAL.

Sounds like a better alternative than -10% returns or increased destruction/building cost.

lol spawn

the admins will not do anything that allows a player to drop land

they have an unreasonable passion for keeping land in the game
when you read their thoughts on dropping land, it is shocking

Rep used to only have +20% gross income vs the Demo which was +10% max tech. They were both aimed for the casher strat. One day mehul removed the tech bonus from the Demo making it fluff and at the same time added the explore bonus making the Republic dominant. I like the idea of removing the explore bonus from the republic and adding something else that still leaves it primarily as a casher government but allows for some options (ie: like the population bonus on the Theo)

How about removing the exploration bonus and the military strength penalty and instead giving them -50% building costs and +20% Military losses? It keeps with the theme of making them good for growth and bad for military conflict.

All explore republic isn't a problem in Alliance. Why do you think players run all-X anyways? People in Alliance all-X because half the server is pacted out, and the other half can retal them, and the 5 untags get 50 LG's a day on them already, so why bother. It's player made policy that makes most go all explore in alliance server.

There are those also in any of the servers who don't have time to run an LGing strat anyways and chose to all-X for simplicity.

A percentage of earth will always be all explore, so why not leave an option of gov that benefits those people?

Its not a player made policy, its the game mechanics. Its way too easy for every alliance out there to have the ability to retal you, and any alliance that can't retal is quickly reduced to rubble. Grabbing alliances that can retal you both causes FA problems and limits your own country's growth, because successful growth through grabbing other alliances will only result in being grabbed by those who grow slower than you.

The game mechanics cause being grabbed by someone of similar size to be severely damaging. This is not caused by the players.

The game mechanics cause growing larger than an all-explore to put a target on your back as a topfeeding target to those who have grown slower than you and will benefit more from an exchange of 1:1 grabs than you will.

Its not player made policies, its the way the game was setup.

My problem is that Republics are so dominant as all-explore countries compared to other governments. Dictators are OP as land-trading governments, but it IS a player made policy that prevents land-trading from catching on. But its game mechanics that prevent exchanging grabs with other tags from catching on, not player made policies.

I agree with Rockman. If the Rep explore bonus was removed it would lead to the degredation of over pacting and would also open politics more. It isn't like someone would not be able to all explore, they would just have the option to all explore with any government rather than the Republic.

i like the idea of removing the rep explore bonus too, but I'm on vacation so I won't get into it right now :p

if that is going to happen, then remove the -10%

doesn't seem fair to remove the republics advantage and leave them with such a huge disadvantage

I like exploring being different for different govs personally.

that was fine in 2006, but I'm not sure that entirely applies to the game in 2011

the goal back then was to curb farming, i believe, but at this point, it's created a culture of feeling a sort of "entitlement" to explored land, and I'm not certain that's the most viable way for the game moving forward.

Rep kind of shoe-horns you into 2 strats -- farmer or casher. Obviously this would need to be considered as part of a larger discussion as well, but I'm all for things which shake up the status quo of "i'll explore for all my land, and feel entitled to keep any land I explore for"

that's even how I feel when I play an all-x rep, before I take a step back and think about the bigger picture :p

You are only entitled to the amount of land you can protect, if someone hits you, you retal, if you can't hit then you were not entitled to it... :)

Like Pang said, I just like the idea of shaking things up. We could increase explore returns at higher acres across the board for all governments and tweak republic to balance the loss of the explore bonus.