Revolutions & Exile

[Clan Elder 'Keen]

After reviewing the new rules, I have some questions:

 

1) What happens if the new leader to take the throne is named "Needs Name" ? Can the character naming order be able to rename an Emporer once he takes the throne? Maybe it should...

 

2) The number-cruncher in me noticed that all of the Government types add up to 100/30. Well, except for Plutocracy which has a secondary type sum of 24. I think the value for Administrator should be 30/9 instead of 30/3.

 

3) The new exile order seems somewhat underpowered considering the number of potential leaders. If the chance is off a 1-500 roll, there is still of 50% chance of getting the leader with 250 current characters in place. That means to trim the deadwood so to speak, it will take dozens of orders to make a real impact. I suggest making the exile order accomodate up to FIVE leaders.

[RTGPete]

Right - the chart had a 3 and should have had a 9 for that entry. Corrected--thanks for pointing it out!

 

You can use the Name command to rename any leader you like - Emperor included.

 

Exiling characters is a big deal as these are legendary individuals within your empire. Even the Emperor thinks twice about banishing Albert Einstein In any event nobody has anywhere near 250 characters--the 500 limit is so huge that it will be a long time before anybody gets even close to it. Crunching the math a bit on the Exile order, let's take a look at an extreme case and then a more reasonable one, to see whether you'd actually want to issue a lot of Exile orders no matter what their efficiency happened to be.

 

Suppose you instigate a Revolution and become a Federated Technocracy, with Exploration as your Imperial Tradition. Your chance of gaining a new Explorer each turn would be 10% (base) + 50% (Technocracy) + 15% (Federated) + 25% (Imperial Tradition) = 100%. It doesn't get any better than that. Your real chance of getting a new Explorer becomes 100% x 50% (never applies for service, or dies horribly somewhere along the line) = 50%. Now you take into account the # of leaders that you already have. Suppose you've been playing for quite a while and you have 250. The new chance comes out to 100% x 50% x (250 / 500) % = 25%.

 

Ok - now you want to trim deadwood to increase this chance. Suppose you exile one leader: how much would this increase your chances of gaining a new Explorer? Well, it would change the chance to 100% x 50% x (251 / 500)% = 25.1%.

 

You gained one tenth of one percent by eliminating one of your characters. If you exiled 100 characters, your chances would have improved by 10%, to 100% x 50% x (350 / 500) = 35%. This would mean that over the next one hundred turns (about 4 years of real time) you would gain around 10 more Explorers that you would have if you hadn't executed or otherwise banished 100 of your other leaders. And you're down a whopping 100 leaders during that time. This number would slowly drop off as new leaders appeared, but it will take a while.

 

Was it worth it? If you absolutely must have more Explorers, and you already have 250 leaders, 100 of which you don't want, then Exiling 100 of them would be a good move. You lose 100 leaders and over the next 100 turns you gain roughly 10 more Explorers as a result. Your chances of getting other leaders also goes up, but you're down 100 leaders and even the extreme case of Explorers only adds something like 10 more to the pot over the long haul.

 

This was the extreme case, too--where exiling improved the chances by the maximum of one tenth of one percent. In more moderate cases (say, you have a 17% chance of getting an Administrator or Naval Officer, for instance), the benefits of exiling go way down. 17% x 50% x (250 / 500) % = 4.25% versus 17% x 50% x (251 / 500) % = 4.267%. That was an increase of only 0.017%, a pretty tiny number. It's a global effect, so you do increase your chances across the board, but even when you add it all up, it's not likely that you'd be Exiling 100 characters (even if you had that many!) any time soon....so the efficiency of the Exile order isn't a major concern.

 

With this in mind, why Exile at all? Well, if you have some characters that you have absolutely no use for, and want to improve your chances of getting better character types, a few Exile orders might work out--probably squeezed in at the end of a turnsheet when you've got a few spare orders. Though there's nothing quite like banishing massive numbers of individuals from the Empire my gut feeling is that this will be the extreme exception rather than the rule.

[Kurassier]

I would agree. In fact, I will not even consider using the Exile order unless I have 250+ characters. At the present rate of character acquistion, that could be awhile.

 

 

My follow up question: So if I understand, each turn there a 10 checks for characters (one for each type)?

[hobknob]

I take it if you just wanted to change your tradition you would still go through the entire process and lose your emperor in the process?? If you happen to lose your supreme leader in an accident, war, solar flare etc.. would that automatically trigger a Revolution? on the following turn or would that be the mechanism we would use to get a new leader?

[RTGPete]

I take it if you just wanted to change your tradition you would still go through the entire process and lose your emperor in the process?? If you happen to lose your supreme leader in an accident, war, solar flare etc.. would that automatically trigger a Revolution? on the following turn or would that be the mechanism we would use to get a new leader?

Altering your Imperial Tradition would require a revolution as it represents a huge change in your societal structure. You do lose your current Emperor and go through the whole Revolution process. Loss of your Emperor in any other way does not automatically trigger a Revolution.

[RTGPete]

I would agree. In fact, I will not even consider using the Exile order unless I have 250+ characters. At the present rate of character acquistion, that could be awhile.

 

 

My follow up question: So if I understand, each turn there a 10 checks for characters (one for each type)?

That is correct: 10 checks for as many as 10 new characters each turn. This is exceedingly unlikely, to say the least...but you can gain multiple characters.

[octagon999]

So does this mean that facilities have no influence at all on either the chances of a leader emerging, or the type of leader?

 

Any at all on promotions?

[Kurassier]

Hypothetically speaking, If I sent a Special Agent or Religious Leader to another HW, could I forment unrest and foster a revolution? Purely Hypothetically of course!

Just trying to find uses for these guys!

[RTGPete]

Special Agents have a lot of potential: I'm going to add some espionage orders to allow for their insertion onto alien worlds, followed by direct espionage and counterespionage orders. Nothing in right now, but it's definitely something I want to work on.

[woolfe99]

I have a question about legendary characters. The bonuses they give, like tech breakthroughs and production bonuses, is there a straight add for each character of a particular type, or are their diminishing returns? Say I have 20 scientists on my homeworld. Is that appreciably better than having say 2 for purposes of tech breakthroughs?

[RTGPete]

I have a question about legendary characters. The bonuses they give, like tech breakthroughs and production bonuses, is there a straight add for each character of a particular type, or are their diminishing returns? Say I have 20 scientists on my homeworld. Is that appreciably better than having say 2 for purposes of tech breakthroughs?

Production bonuses actually have increasing returns rather than diminishing - if two leaders happen to increase Crystal production, for example, the first one increases it by his amount and then the second one increases the already-increased amount. As both are percentage-based bonuses, the second increase on the same item scales favorably.

 

Multiple scientists could get hits on the same or different items - those are flat adds, with neither a favorable or diminishing returns taking effect. 20 Scientists on your homeworld is 10 times as good as having 2 in the sense that you have 10 times as many chances for a scientist "hit" on an item.

 

There is no diminishing returns for either bonus (production actually scales favorably) or chance to get a leader "hit" (ie there is no disadvantage for having 20 Administrators versus 2 on your homeworld--they each have their chance for success, independent of the presence of other leaders).

[woolfe99]

Thanks for the reply. Do scientists have a chance for a breakthrough only if they are on the HW, or can they be anywhere?

[RTGPete]

Homeworld only.

 

Edit: BAH - this is not correct - I mistook some attrition code (which checks against the homeworld during the calculations) for leader code - scientists work fine on any world. It doesn't have to be a colony world by the way - can be a conquered neutral as well, or of course your homeworld.

[woolfe99]

Thanks again. Sorry, but I just thought of another question. What is the benefit of putting a character like an administrator on a colony world if there is no diminishing return by stacking the characters on your HW?

[RTGPete]

Only if you want some sort of bonus production on the colony world instead of at home. Most of the time, the homeworld is the best choice as each leader can provide bonuses to each production area (Crystals, Iron and so on).