@BarnCape You have to select the megacorp authority first. Which requires the megacorp DLC. Once you pick megacorp authority you will see the megacorp civics, which include criminal and church
Issue: Criminal Syndicate, The AI and endless enforcer spam....
- Thread starter Paestan
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I observed similar behaviour on my first real 2.2 game. I was a regular empire and started close to a criminal syndicate.
At worst the syndicate was mildly annoying - one enforcer building on each planet and a penal colony prevented them from having any foothold. Other AI empires, on the other hand, were pretty screwed. They seemed to spend at least half their building slots into precinct houses. The end result was an economically crippled galaxy: normal empires' economies were horrible due to too many enforcers and the criminal syndicate was crippled because every empire was basically a police state.
Enter contingency, 3 machine uprisings and a caretaker going berserk. Couple million fleet power versus around 10k per empire, ouch... This was on admiral difficulty.
At worst the syndicate was mildly annoying - one enforcer building on each planet and a penal colony prevented them from having any foothold. Other AI empires, on the other hand, were pretty screwed. They seemed to spend at least half their building slots into precinct houses. The end result was an economically crippled galaxy: normal empires' economies were horrible due to too many enforcers and the criminal syndicate was crippled because every empire was basically a police state.
Enter contingency, 3 machine uprisings and a caretaker going berserk. Couple million fleet power versus around 10k per empire, ouch... This was on admiral difficulty.
AI don't seem to repair buildings either... There was a branch office on my capital world and when i reached 50 pops the AI built a building, but i resttled some pops of my capital to a new foudn colony, bringing me below 50 pops and ruining the branch office building, it never got repaired eventough the same planet houses over 100 pops now
There needs to be a social cost to show the problems of just paving a planet in goverment santioned enforcers. Police states are not stable things and large bodies of police quickly become self justifying. That would give a way to balance it out ina more R-P-S way, if too much crime then police, if too many police then unrest, if high unrest, then to quote prachet "If you are going to have crime it might as well be organised crime" yo might see a situation where turning a blind eye to the Astro-mob is better than facing political insurection.
I think we might also need some sort of, corruption index, based on wealth disparity across a civ and things to better target crime.
I think we might also need some sort of, corruption index, based on wealth disparity across a civ and things to better target crime.
The problem may lay with the fact that crime can go to zero. If you make it so you have diminishing returns with a soft cap on the minimum level of crime and you might make criminal syndicates playable. Basically make the only sure fire counter to be a governor with the righteous trait.
Crime is 25% do I build a 4th precinct to lower crime by 2.5% per enforcer and lower it to 20% or do I call 25% good enough and build something useful?
Fact you might find funny: The first time I saw the trait righteous was when my starting governor got it at level two. We are a subversive cult. LOL
possibly but I'm always on look out for things that add more instibilityto empires and have to be managed via a choice, where as deminishing returns dosent really add much choice beyond 'how badly do I want this number slightly smaller?'
That said the 2 apraches are perfectly compatable and it'd even add realisim to combine them.
In another thread, it was mentioned that the ai could not distinguish between exactly 0 crime, and negative 300. I wonder if that is partially responsible.
Crime is broken in both directions, if you let it be is upward spirals out of control, riots break out, leaders get addicted to drugs, and everything goes to hell in a handbasket. If low level crime didn't get out of control so quickly then there would be less incentive to spam precinct houses. Because crime gets so destabilizing so fast there is incentive to spam precinct houses. It would be more an interesting decision if crime was tolerable
@SteelVolt , the way crime works needs to be rethought. currently its a % that starts at 0 and can swing 50 points with a single building. that is like the old happiness system on crack. most planets should have some value of crime, there should be a window where a criminal corporation can function and a planet also not be ridden with crime, truely expelling a syndicate from your empire with law enforcement alone needs to be hard, but completely eliminating the downsides with some investment should be very possible.
i dont know what the exact numbers need to be, but you should have something like 10-20% crime on your homeworld in 2200, and anything in the game that currently affects crime should be cut to roughly a 5th of its current value depending on what it is(final values pending). bad things should only start happening at 25% and terrible things at 50%. when a syndicate sets shop up on my homeworld, building one precinct shouldn't turn it into a crime-less paradise, and making one smugglers port shouldn't make 4 of my 36 pops criminals. its annoying as all hell, nobody on either side of this exchange is having any fun.
ill go a step further and say crime is a large part of a lot of AI failures, too. i see empires with 6-10 precincts on all of their new colonies, its absurd. crime needs to be tolerable so that the AI can tolerate crime better. the only time a world should ever be beholden to crime should be if its been taken over by a syndicate with little effort to ward them off, its a poorly managed ecumenopolis, or its an extraordinarily poorly managed (war wracked?) regular planet.
EDIT: i was brainstorming and i thought, instead of there being a "crime ridden" planet modifier why not turn crime into an inefficency modifier that affects you by turning a portion of your pops to crime. say 1 in every 50 pops take the criminal job per every 20% crime(rounded down to the nearest whole pop always, never rounded up) and crime hovers around 20% for the standard 2200 model capital planet. make enforcers require consumer goods but give more unity, and now there crime mechanic and the crime busting mechanic has a purpose.
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this is really a major issue.
crime syndicates are kinda crippled because they there is no crime on any branch office... and the AI empires cripple themselfes alot with 5-6 police stations. devs should do further investigation in this case, put the weight for the AI to like 0 crime... instead of -300 or tolerate at least a bit crime.
crime syndicates are kinda crippled because they there is no crime on any branch office... and the AI empires cripple themselfes alot with 5-6 police stations. devs should do further investigation in this case, put the weight for the AI to like 0 crime... instead of -300 or tolerate at least a bit crime.
Another issue with crime being so easy to manage, is that it makes the really cool concept of penal worlds obsolite. No need for them.
Now that ya mention it & I think about it... I wonder if Crime Corps can put Branch Offices on Penal Colonies...?
The problem I have is the criminal office wont go away even when my planet has overkill crime reduction. Am I not understanding how this works? D:
So you would want the system to be something like: crime = crime_generation / crime_suppression, right? With some basic crime suppression just coming from the government building. That way, at least you would never get crime down to zero, but enough enforcement would push it into single digits.
A possible solution for criminal empires never getting off the ground may be to make low levels of crime desirable.
criminal empires add beneficial jobs when they upgrade their branch office, so the ideal would be after a balance pass a world could have enforcers lowering the crime to acceptable levels and also benefiting from the 'perks' of crime too.
maybe give a benefit for having under 0 crime and a benefit for it being between 0 and 20%, but the benefits are equally powerful and entirely different. the 0-20% could be a commerce boost and the under 0% could be a stability boost.
REally I think the moast realistic way to handle it is to a) reduce the effect of enforcers, and b) cause Enforcers to produce a happyness mallus. (Possibly a scaling one where each enforcer makes the mallus from each enforcer worse?)
That fits the themes because, think of a world where there is litteraly 0 crime, not jaywalking or littering, think of every corner having a cop poised to call out the least little wrongdoing?
Think of how oppresave living under a judgemental panopticon of all seeing camea drones, or a shrine world where any one you see might be in pay of the Inqusition would be?
Perhaps base things on authority?
That fits the themes because, think of a world where there is litteraly 0 crime, not jaywalking or littering, think of every corner having a cop poised to call out the least little wrongdoing?
Think of how oppresave living under a judgemental panopticon of all seeing camea drones, or a shrine world where any one you see might be in pay of the Inqusition would be?
Perhaps base things on authority?
i mean the real issue isn't that it's undesireable (there are benefits to hosting a criminal megacorp, just like a regular one, and the fact that u have to spend building slots and pops on fighting crime is an opportunity cost) it's that the ai is weighted to always choose to eliminate crime, and very aggressively, which is facilitated by the balance of crime being strongly skewed towards fighting it.