Balance liberty/conformance

[Oberlus]

After a change in priorities I made recently, Liberty is now even stronger for good/great research species. I'm making a PR with wobbly's ideas and some of my own. Since no one stated preference for any of the alternatives he provided, I'm doing this:

Conformance:
- Halves the stability malus from disliked content, but doesn't touch the bonus from liked content. Fluff: people is taught to not complain about the bad stuff and just be grateful for the good one.
- +2 stability bonus.
No RP malus: the exclusions with other RP-boosting policies is enough punishment.
No infrastructure and stockpiling bonuses because those make no sense with conformance and are of little help in any case.
-> good policy to keep stable populations without good species-likes matching and without crippling RP.


Liberty:
- Boosts unfocused RP: +max(0,(stability-5)/5), so +0 for stability<=5, +1 RP for stability 10, +3 for stability 20. Fluff: you let people do whatever they want and share their ideas and knowledge, and some of them do produce useful knowledge in their free time.
- Doubles the stability malus from disliked content, but doesn't touch the bonus from liked content. Fluff: people frowns upon whatever they dislike, and since they have Liberty to express themselves, discontent do spread out, but no one complains about good stuff.
-> very good policy for research, specially for industrial empires (unfocused), but it's hard to pull out depending on your species and strategy, and makes bad species-likes matches unbearable, so it's a more restrictive policy.


This change will bring in lower average stability values when playing with Liberty and higher average stability when playing Conformance, but in general it will make harder to reach stability 20, specially with Liberty but also with Conformance. A fix for that might me necessary in a following PR.

[Oberlus]

New PR https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/pull/3794

I playtested it a bit, in a previous game, from turn 132 to 135. I am unsure if this is not enough of a nerf for Liberty, my RP and stability numbers kept similar (not the same individually, but similar overall). But at least Conformance is better now.

[wobbly]

After a change in priorities I made recently, Liberty is now even stronger for good/great research species. I'm making a PR with wobbly's ideas and some of my own. Since no one stated preference for any of the alternatives he provided, I'm doing this:

Conformance:
- Halves the stability malus from disliked content, but doesn't touch the bonus from liked content. Fluff: people is taught to not complain about the bad stuff and just be grateful for the good one.
- +2 stability bonus.
No RP malus: the exclusions with other RP-boosting policies is enough punishment.
No infrastructure and stockpiling bonuses because those make no sense with conformance and are of little help in any case.
-> good policy to keep stable populations without good species-likes matching and without crippling RP.


Liberty:
- Boosts unfocused RP: +max(0,(stability-5)/5), so +0 for stability<=5, +1 RP for stability 10, +3 for stability 20. Fluff: you let people do whatever they want and share their ideas and knowledge, and some of them do produce useful knowledge in their free time.
- Doubles the stability malus from disliked content, but doesn't touch the bonus from liked content. Fluff: people frowns upon whatever they dislike, and since they have Liberty to express themselves, discontent do spread out, but no one complains about good stuff.
-> very good policy for research, specially for industrial empires (unfocused), but it's hard to pull out depending on your species and strategy, and makes bad species-likes matches unbearable, so it's a more restrictive policy.


This change will bring in lower average stability values when playing with Liberty and higher average stability when playing Conformance, but in general it will make harder to reach stability 20, specially with Liberty but also with Conformance. A fix for that might me necessary in a following PR.

Looks ok to me.

[LienRag]

Removing what makes Conformance and Liberty special is not what I would consider the right direction to re-equilibrate them...

[Oberlus]

Removing what makes Conformance and Liberty special is not what I would consider the right direction to re-equilibrate them...

Could you develop? What is that thing that made them special and I removed?

[LienRag]

The bonus and malus for liked and disliked content.

Basically, Conformance is for when you want to adopt Policies/build Buildings that your Species dislike, and Liberty when you want to tailor your Policies and Buildings to the likes of your Species (or the other way around, which may be more frequent).

Imho the main problem comes from the difficulty to get good Research that leads to the Liberty bonus being nearly mandatory to get.

[Oberlus]

The bonus and malus for liked and disliked content.

Basically, Conformance is for when you want to adopt Policies/build Buildings that your Species dislike, and Liberty when you want to tailor your Policies and Buildings to the likes of your Species (or the other way around, which may be more frequent).

I don't know which Conformance/Liberte versions you refer to here. I'll answer for both alternatives.

A. You mean current implementation of the policies is for when...
Not really. Conformance is to allow adoption of Indoctrination then drop Conformance. Conformance is a pain in the ass: if you have more disliked than liked content, the malus is halved, not bad but also not good because it still means a malus to stability: if you build/adopt disliked content, your stability goes down and you can't get the benefits from most of that content. If you have more liked than disliked content, Conformance is just aweful (a net malus to stability).
Liberty is for everyone that is not going the Indoctrination route (I say no one doing it yet). Liberty's +2 RP are just awesome. Together with the extra stability from doubled liked stuff, Liberty is a must.
There is consensus about this, in this thread, perhaps you want to reread.

B. You mean the suggested implementation in my PR
More or less: Conformance allows empires to adopt more disliked policies without it making too much of an impact (get 1 liked per each 2 disliked and stability stays equal), and it is also needed to go the Indoctrination route (more stability and less research from Liberty). Liberty allows empires that can reach high stability to also get RP from that stability, but they cannot do it if they need to adopt disliked content (need 2 liked to counter 1 disliked). This change makes Liberty less intereresting depending on situation (species availability mostly, that determines likes and dislikes) and harder to pull out a great RP bonus from it. To get on average +2 RP per planet you need an average of stability 15 in your planets. That means Liberty won't reach a +2 RP in most planets until mid game, except your capital. This is overall a nerf of Liberty.

Imho the main problem comes from the difficulty to get good Research that leads to the Liberty bonus being nearly mandatory to get.

So the change, that makes harder to get RP from Liberty, must be of your like?

[wobbly]

Some feedback on current balance from MP. I switched over from liberty/diversity/artisan to conformance/indoctrination/divine authority.

Numbers tanked across the board. They recover as indoctrination builds up, but leave you behind for too long.
Take away: indoctrination is viable but too slow. Suggestion: double build up rate

Divine authority is better then it looks, partly because of the influence x large number of late game planets. It's however only good at a stage where most research is complete and you'd like to switch to mostly PP spam. Also only good with a lot of 20 stability stuff already in play.
Take away: Better then it looks when theory crafting, probably needs minor tweaks.

Artisan's market needs slight nerf

Diversity probably ok.

Liberty/conformance suggestions by Oberlus probably on the right track.

[LienRag]

Take away: indoctrination is viable but too slow. Suggestion: double build up rate

I didn't test it, but usually "too slow" is a good thing, it means something needs to be planned carefully and in advance rather than switched on a whim.
And especially for Policies, it makes sense to have switching them produce a result slowly.

[LienRag]

The problem with the balance between Liberty and Conformance doesn't come neither from Liberty nor Conformance, but from the +15 Stability bonus given by Protection focus.

Without it (I don't know whether I played without noticing this bonus or whether it wasn't there in early versions of the Influence release) you had to play Liberty very carefully, since adopting it at the wrong time (or with the wrong Policies) would mean losing a bunch of your planets.
It also put much higher restrictions on the buildings one could build.
With the Protection focus giving +15 Stability, worse case is that the player will have to put some planets on this focus. It means losing their production/influence/research, yes, but that's all - very different.

Conformance was penalizing, but also made the game really easier to play.

That means that the choice was between two very different playstyles, while now we only have to choose which bonus we want the most.

It seems to me very clear that the solution is to tackle the real problem, the Protection bonus to Stability, rather than removing the diversity in gameplay that the opposition Liberty/Conformance induced.

I understand that the -10 Stability penalty for being cut from Capitol was making too easy to destroy an Empire by just cutting his Supply and letting his planets revolt, but then the Protection bonus should just do that, remove the penalty from "no Capitol connexion".
If someone relies on other things (luxuries, World Tree, whatever) to assure the Stability of his planets, then it's his responsibility to have done so, and cutting his Supply should be a viable strategy.

[Oberlus]

"the diversity in gameplay that the opposition Liberty/Conformance induced" is still there. Now better, because Liberty is not OP anymore, and Conformance is a bit better than before.

Planets set to protection are still upping your influence upkeep, so you don't really want them, except maybe one for each species, if you are using Diversity. And now that Liberty's RP bonus is research-focused, the protection focus has only two purposes: avoid rebellion and up defenses. And that is reasonable.

So I disagree with everything you said in your post.

[wobbly]

The problem with the balance between Liberty and Conformance doesn't come neither from Liberty nor Conformance, but from the +15 Stability bonus given by Protection focus.

Without it (I don't know whether I played without noticing this bonus or whether it wasn't there in early versions of the Influence release) you had to play Liberty very carefully, since adopting it at the wrong time (or with the wrong Policies) would mean losing a bunch of your planets.
It also put much higher restrictions on the buildings one could build.
With the Protection focus giving +15 Stability, worse case is that the player will have to put some planets on this focus. It means losing their production/influence/research, yes, but that's all - very different.

Conformance was penalizing, but also made the game really easier to play.

That means that the choice was between two very different playstyles, while now we only have to choose which bonus we want the most.

It seems to me very clear that the solution is to tackle the real problem, the Protection bonus to Stability, rather than removing the diversity in gameplay that the opposition Liberty/Conformance induced.

I understand that the -10 Stability penalty for being cut from Capitol was making too easy to destroy an Empire by just cutting his Supply and letting his planets revolt, but then the Protection bonus should just do that, remove the penalty from "no Capitol connexion".
If someone relies on other things (luxuries, World Tree, whatever) to assure the Stability of his planets, then it's his responsibility to have done so, and cutting his Supply should be a viable strategy.

If whats bothering you is based on current MP there are changes that went in after we started.