Democratic leaders seem to be unbalanced...

[Jorgen_CAB]

I have played many AI versus AI games for testing purposes and I have seen that democratic governments generally never do well in the hands of the AI. Their leaders generally tank their economy quite badly and then to top it off they also kill other leaders when they go and they are elected fairly often.

I think that democratic leaders need a bit less harsh negative traits... the fact is that a -5% penalty is much worse than what a +5% penalty is good.

I have played Democratic governments allot and I have to keep dismissing my leaders as the economy always always tank severely efter a year or two.

In general I think that even allowing players to just dismiss their leaders in the first place should not be possible. Leaders should only be removed through events and regular reasons.

I have no issues if there where the occasional bad leader but the leader being really bad almost every time seem overly harsh, especially in democratic governments that should generally have better quality leaders than more autocratic government types.

Mortalen leaders also seem to be greatly shafted as well, this is often why I see the Mortalen at the bottom of the power lost in most games, they struggle quite badly under Feudalism as I tend to give them that government. I just recently played the Mortalen under a Feudalist government and I usually had to dismiss leaders about four or five times before I got a decent one, it is always worth the penalties for a new leader to do so.

[Gessie]

You're right, and the devs have announced their intent to overhaul various "old" government types after power-creeping Republic, Hive Mind and Mercantile Guild (its main bonus, from treaties, isn't even attached to difficulty). These three are the unopposed, overpowered options, especially Mercantile Guild on high difficulty, which makes it trivial.

If anything, I'd oppose the tendency to power-creep. It causes more work in the development process, effectively "chasing the dragon", while there are core problems which need addressing. Simply making Military Dictatorship, Surveillance Oligarchy, Technocracy and such viable would've solved the government imbalances, but now there's no balance between them - most are awful, and choosing them is a form of deliberately handicapping your playthrough (which does have its uses). Democracy is at least one of the decent options.

It's certainly unrealistic that democratically elected leaders can be autocratically dismissed. But, if democracy were realistic, the base government would have massive economic bonuses due to the unwillingness to wage war, which is at least weakly reflected by the war weariness malus, but every leader would be grossly incompetent to compensate, as predicted by Greek philosophers 2500 years ago. Everyone got their popcorn for the 2024 U.S. elections? ^^

P.S. It's easy to empirically evaluate government types using a test setup and letting the game idle for a while, with all empires being of the same species to eliminate complicating factors. I assume the devs are already using this method, since a keen understanding of the game's balance is key to the balancing process.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I do think it is perfectly OK that some government forms are better than others but the gap can not be too large. I think democracy government is pretty strong, but when the leader frequently nullify all the advantages of the government (or worse) it is a problem.

They could add events where bad leaders get replaced earlier and also "fix" the traits to not be so severe in the negative department.

It also would be interesting if it was way more difficult to be the aggressor in war using some of the government forms. Especially if you have powerful economic benefits it should be very hard or restrictive to be the aggressor. But very different if you are defending. War weariness should be very different if you are the aggressor or defender in a war. It should also be penalised to go on the offensive and invade enemy worlds in defensive wars, not impossible just difficult and restrictive. There should be a way to temporarily occupy enemy planets... in fact this should always be the case and who will get what should be settled by peace negotiations.

Simply put better diplomatic relations and interactions are needed too.