[Suggestion] Improve or remove governance

I agree. The Path of the Governor is pretty much useless now as it is. In War of Magic I actually used champions as administrators, though I can't remember what they actually did. In order to make governors useful and a viable choice, I think the following should be changed:

1. Make all cities give XP to champions (or maybe just to those who chose the Path of the Governor), preferably a low initial value (like 0.5-1 XP per turn) that can be improved by buildings that can be built in any city, not just a unique building. Perhaps the Town Hall could provide a XP bonus.

2. Besides reducing unrest, which is pretty much useless since unrest is easily manageable with a couple of cheap buildings, give some perks that do more useful things like increase the growth, production and gildar of a city. Make these bonuses % values that increase with the perk level.

3. Make special and exciting governor perks that give really cool stuff to the city they manage, like Militia Captain - increasing the defense of the city militia, Scribe - +1 Research per turn, Cultured - +1 influence per turn (this should be a really high level perk), Quartermaster - all units trained in the city start at +1 level, etc. you get the point.

All these changes combined would make keeping a champion in a city and making him governor rewarding and exciting. I would really love to see changes like these implemented. It seems like an easy thing to do and would add depth to the game.

I'm really surprised they haven't simply added +1 exp while stationed in a city if you have the Path of the Governor skill.  Even that's not enough, but it's a start.  Maybe the engine doesn't allow it?!?

There's always a workaround. Maybe they just haven't got to it yet... I hope they'll do something about it before release.

Quite a number of threads on this.  I suspect they'll rebalance the value governors provide to cities, and the experience gain they get from remaining in them, before release.  But we'll just have to wait, and see.

The unrest reduction is potentially powerful, but just doesn't work in practice because tax rate is empire-wide. I experimented with a level 5 champion who had started with path of the governor, and I got him a few upgrades to it - he could reduce unrest by some ridiculous amount (I think 50% in total? Something like that). It worked pretty well while I had one city - I pumped the tax rate up to high or brutal and still had 0% unrest, I was getting great production, research, and gold all at once. Not saying it was worth the opportunity cost of giving up a combat champion, but it was definitely useful.

Then I founded a second city, and a third, and so on.. what are you supposed to do then? If you leave your tax rate high enough to make a governor useful, you're crippling every single city without one. If you lower the tax rate, as you inevitably will have to do, your governor becomes superfluous. Governors need to provide a bonus that is always useful - a percent bonus to research/production/gildar sounds good - a bonus that is not shackled to unrest or tax rate, a bonus you can take advantage of in one city without hurting your other cities in the process.

Governors also need to gain passive xp at a reasonable rate while in any city (adventurer's guild is far too slow of a rate and only one city). Champions of every other path can gain xp while making use of their specialization, why not governors? Each city-governing trait that doesn't help you in combat needs to add to this passive xp gain; most traits help you gain xp and therefore gain more traits (by helping you in combat), the city governing traits should not be any different.

The biggest issue is having only one expensive building providing XP in just one city per faction. That basically limits your governors to 1.

only a quarter of one. Guild only gives 25% chance of xp...

Exactly this.  Governors might be better if they provided empire-wide bonuses regardless of where they were.  Then at least you can still move them around but you're sacrificing strength for building.  But the one city unrest bonus is pretty much useless as far as I can tell.  

I don't think empire-wide bonuses are a good idea. Then you could just have a couple of high level governors doing all the work from some safe location anywhere. Useful city-level bonuses are better. You could then bring high-level governors to new cities to help develop them faster. But the most important thing is to let them gain constant XP from every city.

I don't think they are as bad as people say, especially for your weaker champs.

+2 Growth is pretty useful for new cities when you have a bunch.  I think Governors are most useful for Kraxis- who can afford to buy a bunch.

It has probably been suggested somewhere, but is there a reason why the tax rate should not be managed per city, rather than empire wide?

because setting taxes for a half dozen cities is work and not fun for many people. with a good interface it could work, but thats a lot of work for small gain at this stage.

what about a system where you can assign a champion as governor to a city.

Simply stationing a champion with the Governor perks should do it. Now all we need is everything mentioned above and everything would be great

About the tax level per city, I agree it would be much work and little gain. They used the empire-wide tax in GalCiv 2 and it worked great. You are left to manage unrest in each individual planet... err city.

Totally agree with OP. Stardock - please take heed.

Adding more sources of unrest (say, per population, like Civ or MoM or...), and perhaps then adjusting the unrest penalty for taxation, would probably be a good step.

Path of the Governor is actually very useful for Altar or anyone with the Henchmen special.  I make sure to train one henchman per city as path of the governor - my sovereign can usually quest map grind a group of 5 of them to level 10 in 2-3 turns, where they'll have one or two merchant levels, one or two loremaster levels, and an admin level.  They'll knock unrest down by 15-40% (depending on luck of how many admin traints they get), add 2-5 g, and 1-3 research. That's pretty awesome mid-game, especially because it's per city

I agree that the Path of Governor is actually very useful.  But it does need to be revamped.

I always build the Adventurer's Guild.  Although, I think it needs to be improved as well.  I have had 3 champions city in the city and 1 gained a level in 100 turns.  The guild is not doing their job very well.  But it was late in the game, and I really didn't need the champions.

Ya, it could definitely use a revamp.

Taking some ideas above a little further:

1. Instead of constant xp gain (1/turn or something), do something along the lines of what Endless Space did - gain xp for building things.  I don't know what a good value is, but maybe (production / 10) or (production * level / 50) to try to balance it at higher and lower levels.  The champion just oversaw the construction of a building or the training of a unit and learned something from it.  
2. Some new governor traits (that are probably OP, but battle champions are OP and are awesome).  They'd allow even more customization of cities, which would be cool too. 
1. Farmer - adds N food per grain
2. Miner - adds N production per material and increases iron production by M%
3. Merchant - as now, also adds N% to city gildar production when stationed in a city
4. Loremaster - as now, also adds N% to city tech production when stationed in a city
5. Builder - reduces building times by N% 
6. Trainer - reduces training times by N% or gives +M attack / defense to trained troops
7. Mystic - adds 1 essence (would have to make sure the enchantment was removed when the champion left the city or was killed)
8. Attuned - adds N% to mana generation and M% to crystal production

A city with a high level governor would be a powerhouse - just like an army with a high level champion is vastly superior to an army without one.  a crappy 3/3/0 city with a high level champion governing it should be better than a 4/4/2 with no governor.  It would give the game more options - if your start is terrible, train your champion as a governor to make up for it rather than just hitting ctrl-N.

This is some great brainstorming going on in this thread. I really hope the guys from upstairs see this.