Democracy vs. dictatorship

[bortas]

After playing around a bit with both paths I have to say that democracy seems to be superior, because being promoted to captain causes more problems than it solves.

In the mid- to lategame it's pretty easy to keep trust high as well as faction relations to favorable or even devoted for all factions, so you can basically do whatever you want regardless. You are not going to need a lot of law changes at this point anyway.

The main problem I'm seeing is when you have captain rights, every vote will count as "guided voting", which will greatly damage faction relations permanently, even on easy votes, you wouldn't need to rig in the first place. This damage adds up over time, especially when you decide to become captain early and still have many laws to pass.

In a democratic setup this is no problem. You can even use the powerful "grant agenda" on a regular basis and just let the vote fail with a little bit of negotioation if necessary and still keep the relation boost. Granting the next vote doesn't mean it has to pass. It's a democracy after all, so not your fault, if it fails.

As captain this is pointless, because the guided vote will do more harm than good.

IMO to balance this out a bit, guided voting damage should not be permanent. If they forgot it after 50-100 weeks or so, it would be more useful.

What's your opinion on this? Did I miss any major benefits of being dictator in FP2?

[qwerlancer]

I neither passed Guide Voting nor any things in "Rules" section for a whole game but still passing every laws/tech I wants as long as Grant Agenda/Negotiate is available.

Something very odd is when you granted agenda to Faction X, X proposed a law you don't want. Then you negotiate with other to vote against it. X won't lose trust in you but gain trust in you because you let them propose it. They don't care the result, they just enjoy voting!

Democracy is indeed too easy in FP2.

[Chimpson]

Difficulty setting?

[Harris]

OP just doesn't get it.

Trivializing trust is a massive boon because you:
- no longer have to worry about one of the only two potential lose conditions
- get to spam demand funds from every faction because relations are no longer relevant
- get to spam rush research indiscriminately and get it done much faster
- get to spam buildings that normally tank trust but got no disadvantages anymore
- get to benefit from all the bonuses that have periodic deaths side-effect

Faction relations are meaningless. There's no point to keeping them happy because most of the perks or abilities they give you scale poorly into late game and can't ever hope to outweigh the benefits I listed above. And for some of them like Icebloods the rewards stay with you for the whole game, so there are no drawbacks to getting rid of a faction after it's served its purpose.

There is no damage from guided voting to speak of, because the worst thing they could possibly do is a civil war, at which point you round them up in pen and wait until they freeze. Indeed, the Order path is the optimal one, because even if you go banishment and keep the one currently loyal to you around, the relations will eventually tank anyway as a result of deaths, unless you go out of your way to maintain them. And in the late game when you have multiple colonies, you want to get rid of annoying micro as much as possible.

[brooklyncontrivance]

Originally posted by Harris:

OP just doesn't get it.

I agree with him.

[Airatome]

Isn't it great how we're seeing two very different yet both highly viable playstyles here? 😅

I have played both styles, and various mixes of the two in utopia mode, and there's truly no one way to get results. It boils down to play style. I am currently doing a highly optimized Adaptation run where all 5 of my factions love me while I run exclusively off of steam and my Tier III adaptation generator. I don't need to control council votes because trust is a non issue and they aren't even fighting with each other when I lock in a Cornerstone.

But that's MY play style and it works for me in a highly efficient manageable way.

If you want or feel you need to Captain up because you don't want to care about trust, faction happiness, and dealing with population death (my answer is just don't let them die in the first place..?) because you love the bonuses that generally result in people dying (or you need people to die because food shortages..) then that's also completely valid and a strategic way to play!

Isn't that great? There's no "you must go this route or perish!" going on here. And frankly I admire that.