As I was making a post in the express forum this idea just popped up and the more I think about it the more I like it. It has a great potential of revitalizing this game with hundreds of new strategies for both war and net gaining. The current strats for the game are well known and fairly old. this is a whole new dimension being added to the game and the combinatorics for new strats would be amazing.

So at the start of the round a player choose 2 government types or selects non-hybrid classic or just leave the second gov type as monarchy.

if they choose to go hybrid, then for a coding or order of execution perspective ask the player to select which country has precedence. If in the hybrid selection there is a conflict then simply average it out
i.e.
-- 3 Turns Required Per Attack (Demo) vs. Only 1 Turn Required Per Attack (tyr) -- (3+1)/2=2
-- -25% Maximum Per Capita Income (tyr) +20% Maximum Per Capita Income (Rep) (-25 + 20)/2 = -2.5

apply all other modifiers based on the players selection of which gov type has precedence.

for example:
Democracy
-- PRO
---- 0% Market Commissions
---- +10% Maximum Technology
-- CON
---- 3 Turns Required Per Attack -- this becomes 2 with a Tyranny

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

for the above hybrid
Turns Required Per Attack would be 3 turns (with a demo precedence) and 2 turns with a commie precedence)
alternately all odd numbered attacks take 3 turns and even numbered take 2 turns
Market Commissions would be 5%

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

a super power commie on the market and tech side, allowing for much lower tech levels, and higher % of goods on the market
cons being Demo loses its 0 commission and commie needs more turns when land grabbing.

anywho if you like then just plat with the idea and see what you can come up with. personally I think it would give the game a lot more depth and give some of the old timers something new to try out

... what kind of hybrid country would you build if the game let you do so?

Demo + rep with rep prec for casher.
Dict + rep for casher would also work. Would it need a prec?

Fascist + tyr with tyr prec for farmer/oiler

Commie + tyr with tyr prec for indy

Honestly tyr is overpowered with anything.

I think something like either picking your bonus or getting random selection of the bonuses would perhaps be more balanced. I also think the every-other attack approach is more balanced than just picking tyr prec.

I dont think its reasonable but a very fun idea to keep spinning so I approve.

yeah I don't know what the code base looks like, heard it was a mess, but with QZ updating the API maybe this can become feasible ... dunno how hard or easy it would be though.

a tyranny dictator or fascist dictator for war or fascist commie for early war :)

demo theo or rep theo -- farmer or casher for net gaining

this would be like 3-d chess

random pro/cons could work so it would give each country it's own particular set of advantages and disadvantages some would get super lucky, others might struggle a bit to get their country under control. It would give many players a nice shot at the top 10.

but if random is too problematic then a player selection could work too, but then you end up with a handful of overpowered strats... finding those and figuring out how to best play them could take a few years.

It would give some of the great players a really good reason to comeback and truly try out and even create some new strats. It could even give some new players a chance to get their names out there with some truly amazing new strats.

definitely would be fun though.

Why wouldn't you go further and make governments fully customizable?

ie. You start with a certain number of points at the beginning of each round and can allocate them as you wish; thus, people would naturally get pros and cons. It'd be more elegant and less complicated

This right here

Love it. Both are good.


Theo rep land fat cashers

if we do it this way then all we would need is to modify monarchy, unless you limit the selection list to the gov types chosen.

if it's just one gov type then all the netters will be concentrating on finding the best possible combination
same for war countries, you end up where we are now, with just a few overpowered strats. we would lose a lot of the strategic depth the suggestion is trying to enhance. players would just select the 3 best pros and 3 least detrimental cons for war or netting or start with a war selection to land grab and then switch to netting selection on land goal.

maybe randomize an extra 2 pros and two cons the player can switch/trade out with bonus points.
the randomizer selects these on creation of country so the player can decide on how to best use these when selecting their hybrid gov types. If provided after the hybrid selection is made then it could prove out to be detrimental with no way out.

alternately just keep the gov types asis and locked in, then let the player select one pro and one con from the full list to be added on with bonus points. this enhancement can also be switched out with bonus points. however this could also destroy the games strategic depth when offsetting a con with a pro and/or using a con to minimize an asis con.

a randomizer would add an unknown factor ... a player may end up playing a strat they would normally bypass in the game today. the downside could be a player deletes their country to try for a different randomized selection, unless its locked into the account and not the country itself.

the other part is would a player be allowed to switch one or both gov types using current rules.

I wasn't talking about having a list of pros and cons. I was talking about having a sliding scale of points that you select when you create your country.

ie. Start with 50 points and 10% market commission, you put 50 points into market commission to get to 0% market commission. But you could have put those 50 points into farming to get +15% from farm generation. Obviously, you'd be able to do more than one specialization but I limited it for parsimony. So there wouldn't be the best 3 pros or cons to select, only pros to select and cons would naturally materialize. There would likely be an equilibrium, yes, but there would be multiple for netting and warring as there is now.

This is not different than what your suggestion does as people would still select the 'best' strategy given your list. The difference is that strictly doing it my way is simpler and allows for much more flexibility for future game development as categories could be added quickly, points could be balanced with the change of a single number, etc. It is also more elegant and less confusing to new players. The only way players wouldn't be optimizing (which is a ridiculous thought) is with the randomizer idea -- which is a terrible, terrible idea. People would literally be put at a disadvantage due to random chance.

@sinistril when you explain it this way it makes a lot more sense... would we still keep baseline pros and cons per country tough? I still feel there should be some kind of offset when enhancing the pro side of a country. I do not understand what you mean by the cons would naturally materialize. If I use my point for farming, what would the con be? even if someone used their point for cashing it would just be both of us optimizing our selected strat.

I agree with the randomizer being a bad idea the more I think about it.

just straight hybrids using exiting formulas should be easier at the start, minimizing the amounts of code needing to writen as this would just need adjusting when there is a conflict in the formulas --- a country precedence could actually take care of this for the order in which the formulas are applied. then conflicts are applied on an odd or even based turn count.

It's encapsulated in the idea of trade-offs, which is present in the current system; however, the explicit trade-offs the current system has aren't really the prevailing ones. This would just eliminate the explicit ones and make people be forced to think about the underlying trade-offs. For example, I usually only net on FFA, and I am known to run techers, usually, and a particular kind of techer - tyr for early grabs into demo at some acreage goal. The explicitly stated negative to being a tyr is some rather insignificant detriments to running that government type. The underlying tradeoffs that cost far more are what I lose in selling tech and eventually converting to demo.

I am essentially paying a large premium for one turn attacks but that premium is not being paid in the "negative" aspects of being a tyr. Those are insignificant. They are being paid in the 14% (or whatever it is) cost of switching governments later, the cost of rebuilding at a lower bpt, and in the market commission, I am losing by not being a demo from the beginning. None of these are stated as being a cost of being a tyr but they are the obvious price I am paying and add up to tens of billions of cash - far more than the maybe low billions of losing a bit of income every turn as a tyr.

In this system, there would be no obvious negatives to investing all of your points into farming, but the same, more costly, negatives such as not being able to benefit from low market commissions or having to pay a high cost to switch government points would still exist. The advantage is such a system is easier to balance than the current system as it's not altogether clear, currently, which governments are balanced as they have to check a box. ie. Dictators have to have gains to ghost acres and are never balanced against current landgrabbing rules or bot numbers, which makes it very hard to figure out if they are overpowered or severly underpowered. If everyone had the option to get a benefit from ghost acres, then the admins could take note of the meta and think about why it exists as such. But as it stands, it is ambiguous why so few people play dictators and because so few people play them, it is very hard to balance them because no one really knows what needs to be changed in order to make them viable without making them overpowered.

With a system where everyone was free to put points where they want, allocation of points can be easily tracked and strategies that are too strong can be subtlely changed in order to achieve some equilibrium (if balance is the goal).

While you have many good points I think you might be forgetting that its possible also to balance governments but for that to happen devs have to actively take in feedback(not from players because most have no clue) from stats and making balance changes.

Possible but harder than if you could balance each attribute individually especially for the less quantitative attributes. While it is easy to figure out what the effect of an increase in farming production and a decrease in oil production would have on a fascist, it is not so easy to figure out what the effect of an increase in attack gains or ghost acres would be. Would less people play tyr with 5% attack gains? Would it be balanced relative to other strategies? What other changes could be made? You'd probably need a set of testing for each attribute change to even have an idea. If you could judge it based on relative frequency of use of an attribute, then you could change many things at once imo.

ahh but you are forgetting that we are not balancing attributes now. We are balancing govts, so its pretty simple really if one govt overperform more than you want in certain aspects or games you scale back a positive attribute or change something else in the game to get closer to balance. It doesnt even have to be the strongest attribute. Tyranny -10% expenses doesnt matter to a netting tyr techer-> demo techer in 1a, but removing it would hurt warring tyrannies

So certain attributes like the 1 turn attack, the 0% commissions and the +50% oil production are certainly overpowered attributes. I mean... they are insane in themselves. But each govt have at least one overpowered attribute to balance each others.

I would start by tinkering with the govts and certain formulas to make it less obvious what govts are best for war-wargaining- netting alike. It wouldnt be hard to make a case for changes right now based on what we know if we want to make the range of viable options broader and/or more balanced.
You mention the tyranny govt gains bonus as a potential thing to change. But why not the -10% expenses? It doesn't matter to a netting tyr techer-> demo techer in 1a, FFA or express (probably the only servers such a strat is viable for top ranks), but removing it would hurt warring tyrannies across the board. Maybe not enough to make people switch govt initially, but people will notice that carrying enough military and spies to break the dicts become harder after this.
So I would say that in more situation with such a change will dict be the primary war govt.
The -10% expenses may seem like the weakest positive attribute of the tyranny govt for some but its very noticable for others.

When was the last time that the strongest country the enemy had was a republic? Rep casher used to be beast in war because of its insane income but certain changes to spies, to other govts, the addition of Bioterror op etc make rep casher pretty much a joke in war now. So you are left with dicts and tyrannies of serveral different strats, with the occasional commie indy and fascist oiler or farmer/oiler as the only other strats that are not either niche or troll (I get that demo can be powerful on occasion but its a niche pick for sure, and it wont be your bread and butter ever). Thats it.
If pang wants to change this he doesnt need to remove governments and let us pick attributes to balance it, he can just straight up change some stuff in an intelligent way, might not get it just right the first time around but certainly should be perfectly doable to move the needle wherever he wants it over time.

I think it would be most reasonable to make adjustments to existing govs that are under utilized. I'd hate to diverge so far from the original game not to mention balancing a custom point based or otherwise type of system might become a nightmare for part time devs (at best part time at worst absent for large blocks at a time).