Best "standard" governor policy?

[Tomice]

I really like "encourage trade" as the standard policy in most provinces.
As most of our income comes from commerce, it offers a nice boost. It also gives some food and has no drawbacks.

"Bleed them dry" and "Aqu. of Wealth" are just weaker versions of the above due to the commerce-centered economy of 2.0.

"Civ effort": while civ is usually very useful, it may reach an upper cap that makes the policy obsolete.

"Borderlands" is very situational - Neither manpower nor fort defense is usually in high demand.

Religious conversion works much faster than cultural assimilation, making the first usually the higher priority. There is also the alternative of cultural integration, making religious conversion seem like the more useful policy.

Social mobility, centralization, and decentralization might be useful for shaping and optimizing a province, but with nerfed megacities they are less important than in version 1.5.

Local autonomy seems like a band-aid for a problem that should be tackled at the root.

Haven't needed "harsh treatment" yet, don't know if it can be useful sometimes?

 

[Daft]

I've used Harsh Treatment to whip the northern provinces into shape after they thought their old, barbarian ways could fly in the glorious Republic and they started to lose loyalty.

Knocked that right out of them with a bit of Roman spanking, lol.

 

[Spike05]

Local autonomy seems like a band-aid for a problem that should be tackled at the root.

Haven't needed "harsh treatment" yet, don't know if it can be useful sometimes?

Local autonomy I use on new provinces where nobles and citizens are a problem and the policy effect is enough to fix. Once they'll lose the "new conquest" maluses and a few pops will be converted and assimilated, I'll switch to something else. While it reduce the output, the happines from the policy, and maybe some imports for more happines can not only fix the unrest, but somewhat offset the output penality.

Harsh treatment I needed just once, where local autonomy was not nearly enough, there where a lot of rebellious nobles and nothing else worked. Keeped it for roughtly 5 years, then shifted to local autonomy and finally to assimilation. Was a very unruly province.

 

[Sparticulous]

I tend to like assimilation. Roman is the only true ethnicity. Would be cool for them to become like gallo-roman and other mixed groups. But oh well

 

[turokhalo]

If I want to keep provinces of different culture/religion from revolting, I often need harsh treatment, especially in the early- to mid-game, when I lack the neccessary modifiers for pop happiness from inventions or wonders. Maybe local autonomy would manage to keep the province from revolting, but I´d rather use harsh treatment for a couple of years and then switch back to conversion or assimilation.

 

[Hannibal_theCannibal]

I really like "encourage trade" as the standard policy in most provinces.
As most of our income comes from commerce, it offers a nice boost. It also gives some food and has no drawbacks.

"Bleed them dry" and "Aqu. of Wealth" are just weaker versions of the above due to the commerce-centered economy of 2.0.

"Civ effort": while civ is usually very useful, it may reach an upper cap that makes the policy obsolete.

"Borderlands" is very situational - Neither manpower nor fort defense is usually in high demand.

Religious conversion works much faster than cultural assimilation, making the first usually the higher priority. There is also the alternative of cultural integration, making religious conversion seem like the more useful policy.

Social mobility, centralization, and decentralization might be useful for shaping and optimizing a province, but with nerfed megacities they are less important than in version 1.5.

Local autonomy seems like a band-aid for a problem that should be tackled at the root.

Haven't needed "harsh treatment" yet, don't know if it can be useful sometimes?

I think you're right in that due to the changes to commerce in 2.0, many policies have been made irrelevant. And even those that aren't irrelevant, they tend to lose their identity in the mix. I think from where we stand today, there should be a couple of adjustments to better reflect the reality of the current economy.

Acquisition of Wealth - Increase Local Tax from 10% to 25% due to Tax Nerf. This can be useful in high slave, low trade value provinces like grain, wood, vegetables, furs, etc.

Bleed Them Dry - Increase Local Tax from 30% to 40%; Keep Local provincial loyalty at -0.25; Increase province commerce from 20% to 25%; Keep local monthly food modifier; ADD -5% population happiness. You need these pops to be super on edge, more likely to rebel, more likely to risk their lives than live under the tyranny of a governor cruel enough to institute these policies.

Borderlands - Keep local manpower at +25% and local fort defense at 20%; ADD increase levy size by +2.5%. Due to the introduce of levies and the rapid manpower regeneration, total manpower amount is still not a terribly important value. When religious/cultural assimilation offer stability and most other policies either give lots of additional money or gardening effects, there has to be a good reason to pick this policy and i think that's mobilizing a large percentage of the population as levies (or troops for the legions). Even historically, as the Roman Empire progressed, the "inner" provinces began focusing on commerce while the "outer provinces" focused on manpower and defense. Is this not what this policy was intended for?

Encourage Trade - Keep the same but add 10% governor wage. Gotta keep those tariff kickbacks in place, amirite?

Harsh Treatment - Keep everything more or less the same but hear me out: this policy (and possibly also bleed them dry) should occasionally give random events that damage the health of the governor, result in the governor fleeing his post, or result in outright assassination. Obviously, this reflects the population's discontent in being mistreated. I say random events because i don't want this to be a gamey way of getting rid of governor's you don't like. The point is to increase the risk of selecting these policies; do I really want to avoid a rebellion or am I worried about my primary heir dying and causing a succession crisis? Those kinds of questions.

Local Autonomy - I still don't actually get how useful this is to be honest. I have never seen this policy be the deciding factor in whether or not a province stays loyal.

Religious Conversion, Cultural Assimilation, Social Mobility, Civilization Effort, Centralize/Decentralize Population are mostly fine and don't need much tweaking. Maybe give centralize population a small freeman happiness bonus and decentralize a small noble bonus?

 

[Gomissar]

Decentralize population seems to be pretty useless, or maybe I don't understand how it works. I used it for my capital province since it had way too many slaves from conquests and I couldn't move them because it had a holy site, but I didn't see any outgoing migration in 10+ years.

 

[Hannibal_theCannibal]

Decentralize population seems to be pretty useless, or maybe I don't understand how it works. I used it for my capital province since it had way too many slaves from conquests and I couldn't move them because it had a holy site, but I didn't see any outgoing migration in 10+ years.

Decentralize population can be useful at the fringes of your empire where you're hoping to colonize. It's usually easier to pay the gold to move the pops in the correct format but the governor policy helps too.

 

[Dayvit78]

I've found one singular use for the "Social Mobility" policy.

If play in the Tarim basin (Himalaya) region, you start getting these Yuezhi tribal migration events. You may think not to do it, because it eventually turns into a flood and overflows the provinces, along with eating way more food than available and generally causing loyalty problems.
However, you can actually benefit from accepting all of them. If you use social mobility in those provinces to quickly turn them from tribesmen -> slaves. They convert very fast. Then you can move them out of the region into your more productive regions. They just keep coming and coming, and I keep moving and moving. Ended the game with 943 Yuezhi pops (none were tribesmen anymore).

So that confirms the policy works as intended, but I really haven't found any other use for it.

 

[Jarolleon]

I think you're right in that due to the changes to commerce in 2.0, many policies have been made irrelevant. And even those that aren't irrelevant, they tend to lose their identity in the mix. I think from where we stand today, there should be a couple of adjustments to better reflect the reality of the current economy.

Acquisition of Wealth - Increase Local Tax from 10% to 25% due to Tax Nerf. This can be useful in high slave, low trade value provinces like grain, wood, vegetables, furs, etc.

Bleed Them Dry - Increase Local Tax from 30% to 40%; Keep Local provincial loyalty at -0.25; Increase province commerce from 20% to 25%; Keep local monthly food modifier; ADD -5% population happiness. You need these pops to be super on edge, more likely to rebel, more likely to risk their lives than live under the tyranny of a governor cruel enough to institute these policies.

Borderlands - Keep local manpower at +25% and local fort defense at 20%; ADD increase levy size by +2.5%. Due to the introduce of levies and the rapid manpower regeneration, total manpower amount is still not a terribly important value. When religious/cultural assimilation offer stability and most other policies either give lots of additional money or gardening effects, there has to be a good reason to pick this policy and i think that's mobilizing a large percentage of the population as levies (or troops for the legions). Even historically, as the Roman Empire progressed, the "inner" provinces began focusing on commerce while the "outer provinces" focused on manpower and defense. Is this not what this policy was intended for?

Encourage Trade - Keep the same but add 10% governor wage. Gotta keep those tariff kickbacks in place, amirite?

Harsh Treatment - Keep everything more or less the same but hear me out: this policy (and possibly also bleed them dry) should occasionally give random events that damage the health of the governor, result in the governor fleeing his post, or result in outright assassination. Obviously, this reflects the population's discontent in being mistreated. I say random events because i don't want this to be a gamey way of getting rid of governor's you don't like. The point is to increase the risk of selecting these policies; do I really want to avoid a rebellion or am I worried about my primary heir dying and causing a succession crisis? Those kinds of questions.

Local Autonomy - I still don't actually get how useful this is to be honest. I have never seen this policy be the deciding factor in whether or not a province stays loyal.

Religious Conversion, Cultural Assimilation, Social Mobility, Civilization Effort, Centralize/Decentralize Population are mostly fine and don't need much tweaking. Maybe give centralize population a small freeman happiness bonus and decentralize a small noble bonus?

I think acquisition of wealth is bad on purpose, it's the drawback of hiring a greedy governor and not spending the PI to change his policy.

I tend to like assimilation. Roman is the only true ethnicity. Would be cool for them to become like gallo-roman and other mixed groups. But oh well

But what will you do with all that extra military experience if you can't dip into other culture's trees?

 

[Pro]

Decentralize population seems to be pretty useless, or maybe I don't understand how it works. I used it for my capital province since it had way too many slaves from conquests and I couldn't move them because it had a holy site, but I didn't see any outgoing migration in 10+ years.

Slaves basically don't migrate. They have a base progress rate of 0.05% per month, which means at 100% migration speed it will take 166 years for a single slave pop to migrate. If the province they move from is coastal there's a flat +0.25% per month base progress, which means 6 times faster migration for slaves.

 

[Sparticulous]

I think acquisition of wealth is bad on purpose, it's the drawback of hiring a greedy governor and not spending the PI to change his policy.

But what will you do with all that extra military experience if you can't dip into other culture's trees?

I do keep macedonia, punic

 

[Herennius]

I have no clear favourite, just some tendencies (e.g. most of the times autonomy is just no help with illoyal provinces and only harsh treatment has some effect). Civilization probably has more value now, Assimilation as well. Centralization can sometimes help a bit with the Holy-Site-No-Slave-Movement issue and is obviously a strong choice for creating Metropolisses.

The overall balance among the policies may not be perfect, but I consider this as a fairly minor problem, as long as the entire system suffers from its current problems. The question the OP raised is mainly one worth to discuss for your capital region. It is e.g. a nice idea that Decentralization might help you with colonization, but as long as big question is, if it is worth to change policies manually at all, it is a strategy with limited value, IMHO. I found myself in need to change governors fairly often (which overrides any manual choices)- and if you begin to rely on their own choices (which you can only slightly direct by taking in account their personality: https://imperator.paradoxwikis.com/Province#Governor_policies ) at least partly, which you probably have to (as controlling everything manually would eat up our entire PI), you have one more good reason to shuffle them from time to time (as they don't "update" their choices based on things like declining province loyalty).

So I fear any balancing effort has fairly little impact on how the game actucally plays; I would suggest instead first some small changes to how the policies are picked/changed: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...nual-assignment-of-governor-policies.1460396/ After that balance pass for the policies itself can follow.

 

[Munin]

Assimilation as Rome! more roman citizens = more Roman nobles (good for research) & more levy troops. Not sure how it impacts legions, does anyone know?

 

[Pro]

Assimilation as Rome! more roman citizens = more Roman nobles (good for research) & more levy troops. Not sure how it impacts legions, does anyone know?

Your research rate is determined by your research points relative to your integrated culture population. So assimilating people to get more research points doesn't actually give any benefit. The amount of research points you need rises just as fast as your research point production does.

 

[Munin]

Your research rate is determined by your research points relative to your integrated culture population. So assimilating people to get more research points doesn't actually give any benefit. The amount of research points you need rises just as fast as your research point production does.

What about libaries (buildings), is their research production not influenced by pops?

 

[Pro]

What about libaries (buildings), is their research production not influenced by pops?

They increase the research production in that territory by a percentage, so they give a bigger benefit the larger part of your integrated cultures are citizens or nobles in that territory.

 

[Munin]

They increase the research production in that territory by a percentage, so they give a bigger benefit the larger part of your integrated cultures are citizens or nobles in that territory.

Ok thx for clearing that up

 

[Todie]

Slaves basically don't migrate. They have a base progress rate of 0.05% per month

True, but there are possible mosifiers to base migration speed, like centralize /decentralize / harsh treatment.

 

[Pro]

Good point. Although relying on governor policies seems to expensive for a large empire.