Foreign Minister's considerations

[Ljube]

After careful analysis of our situation, I think communism won’t be the right choice of government for now.

There are two advantages communism has over fundamentalism. Spies are vet and science is better. The drawbacks are that people are unhappy and that units and infrastructure cost maintenance in shields and money.

I think communism would bring more worries than it would bring benefits and one of the key issues of communism, fast research, won’t be as fast as we thought if we can’t get the cities to celebrate at the same level as in fundamentalism. Unit support would be the plague of the new government too.

Research in fundamentalism is no longer an issue since we can have a new science every 6 turns if we set the sliders to 10/50/40 and still collect net income of 832. We don’t need that many sciences any more, possibly none, so science is not an argument for communism.

Another possible argument for communism is that it features vet spies. But I must ask the question: Do we really need spies? I mean they sure are useful, but are they necessary?
The problem with spies is that they are really prone to casualties without results if they are not vet, especially when they are performing sensitive missions such as sabotage of city walls. Even if they are vet, they are often captured after the successful destruction of the intended target. Maybe enough diplomats can do the trick, since they are guaranteed to succeed in their attempts. And we can buy many diplomats for the difference in money we get if we go ahead with zero science. On the other hand, we may want to take advantage of German form of government and use the spies to reduce the size of their cities and make them really cheap. It’s up to the citizens to decide.

Regardless of the decision whether to research espionage or not, we need much more diplomats than we currently posses. I suggest we start a diplo-building programme in more than half of our cities. I also noticed the disproportion in the number of cities building engineers and those building diplomats. Stop building engineers, we have plenty of them! I propose we stop building engineers in cities already supporting two or three of them and having negative food and start mass producing diplomats there. These diplos are going to bring down each and every last one of the city walls our cowardly enemies erect and enable our glorious armies to run through Germany and Greece like hot knife through butter.

We are not ready for the representative governments either. I suggest we don’t even think about the switch to republic or democracy until we get Bach + Women’s Suffrage brilliant Greeks are building for us. And even then, if we decide to switch to demo, we should stay demo only long enough to celebrate all our cities to their maximum capacity and after that switch back to fundamentalism. It is possible that celebrated growth of our cities won’t be enough to justify the loss of turns our senate is likely going to impose on us forcing peace treaties with heathen Greeks and Germans.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Originally posted by ljcvetko
We don’t need that many sciences any more, possibly none, so science is not an argument for communism.

Hey, who's the Science Minister?

The problem with spies is that they are really prone to casualties without results if they are not vet, especially when they are performing sensitive missions such as sabotage of city walls. Even if they are vet, they are often captured after the successful destruction of the intended target. Maybe enough diplomats can do the trick, since they are guaranteed to succeed in their attempts.

Kind of misleading. Diplomats are 100% casualties. Spies may be prone to casualties, but they don't all get caught, vet or no.

Diplomats are guaranteed to succeed in their attempts, yes. So are Spies, if you give them the basic tasks that Diplomats perform. Only if you give a Spy a specific task (e.g. 'Steal Nuclear Fission', 'Destroy the Courthouse') is there a chance of failure. But at least we won't be needlessly destroying useful improvements in an attempt to get the walls, as can happen with Diplomats.

Regardless of the decision whether to research espionage or not, we need much more diplomats than we currently posses. I suggest we start a diplo-building programme in more than half of our cities. I also noticed the disproportion in the number of cities building engineers and those building diplomats. Stop building engineers, we have plenty of them! I propose we stop building engineers in cities already supporting two or three of them and having negative food and start mass producing diplomats there.

I wouldn't say we have too many Engineers, but I have noticed that a number of cities are looking at starvation if they complete the Engineers in production. We probably should rehome some Engineers to cities with food surplus, if we want more of them. But that's the City-Planner's call.

More Diplos & Spies

We are not ready for the representative governments either. I suggest we don’t even think about the switch to republic or democracy until we get Bach + Women’s Suffrage brilliant Greeks are building for us. And even then, if we decide to switch to demo, we should stay demo only long enough to celebrate all our cities to their maximum capacity and after that switch back to fundamentalism. It is possible that celebrated growth of our cities won’t be enough to justify the loss of turns our senate is likely going to impose on us forcing peace treaties with heathen Greeks and Germans.

Again, the City-Planner should look at whether we can support all our units, if we're considering a government that doesn't provide any free unit support.

[Ljube]

Well, at this point the considerations of the Foreign Minister partially overlap those of other departments.

Thank you for your support for the diplo-building programme

[atawa]

Either we build more dips or cannons to smash the units behind city walls, It's a tossup with strong arguments on both sides.

But as I dont like to see our units die I support the mass-dip building.

[Ben Kenobi]

I support building many diplomats, seeing as they cost 30 shields vs. 40 for the cannons. However, against units not on a river, our vets have close to a 1:1 ratio, so we could just use the diplomats on particularly resistant cities on defensive terrain.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Originally posted by ljcvetko
Well, at this point the considerations of the Foreign Minister partially overlap those of other departments.

How is the government we choose and the science rate, a Foreign Ministry concern?

[Ben Kenobi]

Someone has to poll on the government.

As for the tech, I see this poll as the request of the foreign minister. The science minster poll will determine whether or not we bother to research, and the path that we take.

[shade]

We really should try to get those spies, which govt we will be shouldn't be an issue, Commie would speed the research up, but we would need to rehome way to many units. So it seems logical to stay Fundy and give science a boost for a longer period...and leave the bribing of cities for a while.

Shade

[cavebear]

We only want to discover Communism so we can research Espionage and get Spies. Just because we *can* become Communist doesn't mean we have to do that. Let's get the Spies.

Would our Diplomats upgrade to Spies? I don't recall playing a game where Leo's was still operational by the time Spies came along.

[Ljube]

Yes, diplomats upgrade to spies on discovery of espionage provided you possess Leo's.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Some great points, ljcvetko

I think members of the Government have been concerned that we have far less thatn 2-3 Engineers per ciy, in fact IIRC we have less than one per 2 cities! The problems seems to be less number and more location - more Engineers need to be built (or homed) in places that do not support them already.

What do we need Spies for? Are there any large difficult targets that will still be around in the 10-20 turns needed to get Espionage?

But as for Communism, yes, it seems this world should be united under a fanatic banner rather than a Worker Paradise one.

[atawa]

The great thing about spies (apart from their 3 moves ) is that they can target specific city improvements like city walls.

[cavebear]

I would rather use a couple of Spies to successfully target just the City Walls than 6 Dips who have to destroy everything in the city before they get to the Walls.

The extra move is nice, too.