What kind of changes would you like to see to governments in Express? What might be too strong? What might need a boost?

For the sake of simplicity, try to think of the governments as standalone for this discussion rather than strategy-based. IE: Communism vs commie indy, or tyranny vs tyr techer, etc.

Gov Revision 3 for reference

you should of posted this to Primeval :P

Monarchy None

Fascism
+15% Food Production
+50% Oil Production
-10% Maximum Per Capita Income
-15% Population

Tyranny
+20% Attack Gains
-10% Military Upkeep Costs
Only 1 Turn Required Per Attack
-25% Maximum Per Capita Income

Dictatorship
+25% Military Strength
+30% Spy Effectiveness
-30% Construction Speed
+33% Ghost Acres

Communism
+20% Technology Effectiveness
+35% Industrial Production
+35% Market Sale Size Cap
10% Market Commissions

Theocracy
-20% Private Market Military Costs
+40% Construction Speed
-35% Maximum Technology
+50% Maximum Population
Double GDI Expenses

Republic
+20% Land Exploration
+20% Maximum Per Capita Income
-10% Military Strength

Democracy
0% Market Commissions
3 Turns Required Per Attack
+10% Maximum Technology

for express because its so short I think Rep should get -15% strength but +30% explore

I concur

Idk but techers def need to be nerfed, +50% population on top of build bonus makes it too easy to get fat quick and dominate from there on. Would love to see oilers be viable given right conditions. Commies are competitive, would love to see farmers and cashers in the mix, maybe boost rep explore rate and buff fascist tech effiecieny?

for elliot post instead of boosting tech efficiency maybe on express have agri tech also effect oil production as well if gov is fascist.

Just a reminder to keep it government-specific for the sake of this topic. I completely understand what you are trying to say, but we can't assume that all "techers" are Theocracy.

fascist and demo should have private market sell prices increased for food and oil. increase oil to a base of maybe 100, food base to 35. let tech still increase it.

increasing those prices will make those strats live off their private market to a greater extent, which essentially makes oiler and farmer into cashers.

fascist selling oil at 100 within protection with 0 tech is one heck of an income in the start-up, greater than a casher til it reaches 130% tech, which takes a long time and a lot of investments in tech while the oiler gets it automatically, without even waiting for pci to grow.

If you want to nerf techers, govts are the wrong way to do it, it needs to be done through bot changes, because the way the bots buy tech is the problem. trying to solve it with govt changes will be like trying to cure cancer with a bandaid.
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On topic I don't have many govt changes to propose though a change that would make sellers a little less overpowered and its to reduce the amount of goods/tech that can be on market. I think its at 45% now and for C/I it's well over 60% which is not meaningful as theres rarely a reason to sell that much. If it was reduced to 30-35% as base, the commie advantage would be useful and techers would be forced to sell a bit more often and perhaps be a little less powerful.

Only govt change I'd see as useful right now is to remove the -10% mil strength on rep as that govt is terribly underrepresented in the top results and its largely due to other things but also that topfeeds are damned near guaranteed if a rep ever gets fat enough to score well.

Theos and dems can hide stock on the market, allowing them to be over powered.
Dictatorships are not allowed to use their strengths so they are under powered.

Easy fix.
Dictatorships have unlimited spy ops, Dictatorships can raid food stores and commit espionage
against assets on the market.

how come dicts can't hide their stocks on market?

Just a note, two other governments have recently performed worse in the top ranks than Republic

Having just t10'd each government type, I'd say Fascist is hardest and Dictator is 2nd hardest. Monarch is probably one of the two underrepresented ones, but that would be because most switch government types. Lowering private market buy prices (not to the level of a theo, but lower) might help those three govts. Maybe larger private markets.

I tend to agree with whoever above that the problem isn't with the govt. types, it's with one strat overpowering the rest. -v

Change the way bonuses on theos and reps are allocated by making their bonuses integrated into the % of bus/res buildings they own. For example, Reps get +1-25/30% per capita income based on 0-50% bus built, theos get 25-60% max population based on 0-50% res built. That would effectively nerf techers slightly and make cashers viable.

Give a bonus to fascists on pm for oil and food prices. ie. raise their max pm food sell to 35-36 and oil sell to 100 to encourage farmers and make oiler a viable strategy. (obviously just threw those numbers out as placeholders to give you an idea)

Three reps have won in the last 13 months, one techer in a normal reset and two thin reps during sets when the bots were offline part or most of the time. :)

But yeah I might have been a bit hasty with that as the rep techer will be legit good if you remove the -10% and it still wont make the rep casher competetive with the bots as they are.

I think it would be interesting to change govts somewhat even tho I dont have all that many ideas for it.

Not specific to express but I think the most overpowered govt in many settings is Tyranny, with the 1 turn attack being the strongest single govt bonus in the game imo, and the +20% attack returns being strong as well and actually working very well together with the 1 turn attack.

What if the +20% attack gains was moved to commie and tyr got some more benign bonus while the commie had either the market sales cap bonus removed or the indy boost lowered?

I really dont like seeing the way some tyrannies mindlessly grabbing techer bots with 0 defence for 20-30 acres a hit 20-30 times a day or more instead of actually looking for targets. Enhanced exploring should be more costly or they should have to do the work.

I am one of the biggest abusers of the tyr govt in the game, so I'm not trying to destroy a govt i don't play or boost one I'm always playing.

You can measure the success of the governments a few different ways. All I'm saying is two of them are still finishing worse than Republic - whether you look at #1 finish or top10 finishes




We will likely need to look at these ideas based on a specific server for that very reason. Tyranny is very strong in FFA, for instance, but appears to under-perform in the top ranks on most servers. This could be attributed to the fact that top finishes are somewhat skewed if the player plays 1 government for the majority of the round but then changes late to finish.

Tyranny is going to underperform in ranks because its strength is war.

You're not going to kill a player single-handedly with a demo., but you can with Tyranny. That's the trade off.

I would have to agree with a point made earlier by Gerdler:
- Tweak the bots over government changes.

I haven't played in quite some time, but I recall techers and commies basically winning every set. Perhaps tweak the bots to buy oil. Of course they can't use it, but it would help oiler strat which is basically non-existent mid-game onwards. One oiler can basically supply entire server.

Other items which could be bought with bots are: Tanks & Troops. Which could help resellers. The GDI system on EXPRESS makes it almost a pointless strategy.

Food should be bought more for stocking & saved on market, and then used in destocking with bots.

Give more perks to non-GDI players is an idea. It would basically help all warring players. Currently it should be 10% gains, but I would go as far as saying increasing that number to 30%. They literally have to balance their entire army to avoid special attacks.

If there are to be any govt changes, then 30% explore -15% military is very reasonable.

The problem with express' balance is that stocking is too easy, bots buy far more tech than is useful at too high a price and GDI blocks espionage.

I for one am disgusted with techers selling to bots, buying stock at $30 a bushel, carrying no spies and acting as though $50M is some kind of accomplishment.

I like Celphi's idea about GDI. IMO, just get rid of it all together in express and then lower the 'humanitarians' ratio. -v

Yes for sure.

The recent alliance game that ended had the entire top 6 play tyranny at one stage for example.

In Primary and tournament not so much. And not that common in team either tho it has won and taken other top spots recently. But as celphi says, tyranny is really powerful for its warring abilities, this is very much noticeable in express with the solo kill option being so much easier with tyranny. Since you basically have 2 war govts in tyr and dict if one of them is also really strong at netting and argueably is stronger at war in most scenarios as well then I think it's a bit overpowered in general. :)

It's strength is also land gains, which is critical to most top finishing strategies of play



I anticipated this would be one of the responses to this topic. I do not know much about coding the bots and I do not have the time right now to take on learning them. For those of you that understand the code and their performance better than I, there is an AI forum to make suggestions and potential edit ideas to the bot codes. It is my understanding that the bots are also semi-reactive to the gameplay and market activity of the actual players. One can only assume that any changes to the game itself (like governments) will be reactive.

well if you change the code for the techers explore, instead of only exploring when their land drops below server average to a lesser threshold so they explore less and tech more to add tech to the market to reduce prices making human players have to reduce their prices to not be undercut by bots it might make a small impact.

IDKA

Remove the public market and bring forth the rainbow rebellion!

Make Theo unable to join GDI or not use bonuses to make it free, bet that will change the power of teacher a bit.

Increase attack gain on Tyranny.

I think the rebellion has already begun.

Dictators -
50% more spy ops per day.

Republic -
40% land explore.
-15% military strength

Tyranny -
8% market commissions (corruption)
25% attack gains

Theo -
(Increase GDI cost overall)(so that the GDI double cost penalty actually does something)
10% market commissions (tithing is 10% people).

Commie -
+40% Market Sale Size Cap
+30% Industrial Production

Fascism
leave as is.

Demo
4 turns to attack. (because let's face it, congress takes forever to do anything).

I love you but I hate almost all your suggestions. :)

Dict- well I can see that, the problem is that spy DR is still unchanged which limits the usefulness.

Rep- hate it. -10% is already a problem since it cant grab from even NW as easily and because people can grab it from whatever nw ratio they feel like. if you made the mil strength apply to only offencive military operations you could make it -30% for all I care but on express mil power really matters.

tyr - I hate it and it would only give me a bigger NW record. :) the 20% attack gains is already overpowered coupled with the 1 turn attack.

Demo - wont do anything except make me switch from tyr when I want to do demo techer (which I do most of the time anyway). Farmers would likely still work with 4 turn attack since farmers are not turn constrained in express.

Commie- sales cap is already really high on express so I dont see how a commie would really make use of it, if a commie needs to sell 63% of its military its gonna be problematic.

Theo - GDI is already free, everyone uses the bonus. if you make commissions 10% the only govts viable for techer are demo and, assuming your changes are not used, republic.

Fascism - I dont entirely disagree :)

In response-

I don't see disagreement as opposition. I encourage it!

Dict- More ops does matter when you have more than one target you're attacking.

Rep- With -15%, I agree. Staying at -10% still seems reasonable.

Alt - 40% explore only.

Tyr - 5% gains for 8% market commissions? Wouldnt you lose $? Sure, you gain land slightly faster, but $ made from market would be less. Perhaps a larger market commissions then?

Alt - 25% gains, 15% market commission.

Demo - The idea is to make demos less likely to retal or grab land.

Commie - The main idea is the drop in unit production.

Alt - 25% industrial production

Theo - (remove GDI penalty bonus on server).

Bring back old political parties such as the "Whig" and add the Green Party.

why not keep all the current govern't pros/cons in play but every set primeval uses a random number generator to cut or add to each one and nobody gets to know until set ends what the changes were for that set.

I like the idea, lol. Though for fairness I'd want it posted.. if you get like fascist gets +30% food production one set more ppl will go Fasc farmer and they will do better thereby increasing the agri prices and dropping the food prices so they will do worse. :)

The market is a great equalizer(when the bots dont pull so hard in one direction).

How about you get randomly assigned a government at the start of the set and cannot change it? That'd be epic. All Random All Express

I like this idea. It would force everyone to learn more than 1 strat. Unless ofc they run rainbows anyways.

How about on saturday, the server picks a few players at random to swap countries?

no, in best case those players would finish normally and in worst case those players would suicide.

I don't like this at all lol.

Agreed, whoever ends up with Jayr's country will be committing suicide.

Pretty sure it would just incentivise building bad countries and express top 10 cutoff would be like 5 million networth Lol

You could also change monarchy and instead of having no pro's and con's you could assign some. That would be the easiest change to make, and I doubt it would bother too many people.

the pro of mon is that it has no cons, you can even switch from it with no cost.


Thats a bad idea imo. Original, creative, but bad. :)


I would love this like every third set or so, not every reset. but it would really force players to try new things and be open to anything. The same players would still win ofc, but it would be fun nonetheless.

Yeah that sounds fun, I would play express again every other set

problem with this is would be alot of red countries every set as people would delete and reacreate until they got what they want.