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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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Okay so a bit of a coding status here. In a few words:
It mostly works.
I got the government model hooked in to the point it's usable. The only things I'm not sure about are the one equation which could yield < 0 result (I arbitrarily added 1 to prevent that) (civil rights). The results seem quite correct with that fix.
One thing I didn't code is the dominant religion stuff when there is no state religion. This means that without state religion, noone wants religious discrimination, which is obviously wrong, but I couldn't find how to compute simply the dominant religion and in the early game there won't be secular states anyway.
I didn't meddle with regimes for the moment.
Taking Rodrigo's govt technical doc, here's more or less what is coded:
I. Computing Real Power Distribution:
Not coded- It's a constant fixed in the scenario files.
II. Creating the Conservative Govt Profile:
Not coded (not yet used).
III. Computing the 5 Political Powers shares for a social class:
Mostly coded. I will be adding the discrimination factors today. Province isolation is not for the foreseeable future.
IV. Computing preferences for DNPs for a social class:
Done.
V. Creating the Support Regimes Shares for a social class:
No regime stuff coded for now.
VI. Creating the 5 Political Block Profiles:
Done.
VII. Creating the Society's Govt Profile:
Done.
VIII. Creating the Future Govt Profile:
Done
IX. Creating the Current Govt Profile:
Currently, the future govt profile is applied immediately. (I am not sure how we can show the information to the player correctly, or if we have to.)
X. Determining the demographic share for a social class:
Specified in the scenario files.
XI. Determining Knowledge and Development levels for a Regime:
Not coded nor used. It will require the tech model to show many more techs and applications before coding this becomes worthwhile.
XII. Determining the Govt-Regime Distance and the Ruler-Regime Distance for a Regime:
Regimes not done.
XIII. Determining Social Class' Historical PCI:
Not done.
XIV. Updating Empire's Stability:
Not done. Depends on the length of the game, which I don't feel confident with for the moment.
XV. Determining Optimum Institutional Infrastructure (OII) needed in a province:
Not done. I do'nt know what this one is for.
XVI. Determining the Number of Administrators Needed (NAN) in a province:
Not done. Again, don't know what it's for.
XVII. Determining Administration Effectiveness Level (AEL) for a province:
Not done. What for?
XVIII. Determining the Maximum Number of Feudal Units (MNFU) in a province:
Not done. This verges on the riots model, and more importantly it requires some stuff to handle feudal units in the diplomacy/military code, which is probably not top priority.
XIX. Determining Govt's Official Religion:
This is specified in the scenario files for now. This means the official religion can't change for the moment. I have to know what dominant religion is for these purposes, and since state religion and religion with the most followers aren't always the same (think Kashmir), I believe there are things to do when computing the dominant religion which may not be straightforward; Maybe multiplying the number of followers of nondominant religion by ReligiousDiscrimination when computing the total number of followers?
With that big list of 'not done', you may think I am talking nonsense when saying it mostly works, but I do say this. Regimes are a refinement which probably require tech to work, and there are hooks to the tech model and length of game I don't feel comfortable coding until we have a tech tree and some length of the game.
I must say that the fact that desired policies depend on the culture of each ethnic group and then on the social classes inside the group will make for a really fun game, as the various ethnic groups want different policies, and this results in a lot of different desires from different ethnic groups, which with ethnic riotting and bad policies riotting add some spice to the game.
Congrats Rodrigo.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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I'm tackling the regimes now, and I have a few questions about the equations and the model.
1) Why do we use exactly 3 regimes in addition to ruler and conservative? Why not 4 or 2 or all the known regimes?
What if only 1 or 2 regimes are known at that tech level? If it is here to ease computation, I'll gladly get rid of it because it makes for more programming.
2) Attractiveness of conservative regime: Why bureaucracy + warfare? This means the military is always conservative. If so, why not ethics? Churches tend to be as conservative as the military IMO.
3) Details about the equations for support regimes:
3.1)
S1=20*IND*(p+Sign(L)*PPW+A*BURPW)
Why Sign(L) when everything else usesvalue * powershare? Coded anyway.
3.2)
S2=-10*(1-ASC)*(Abs(SP-(1-(IND*(1-p)+p))) + Abs(PP-ECON*Rexp(2,-8,1-OB)*(0.3+0.7*IND)+(1-ECON*Rexp(2,-8,1-OB))*(0.3+0.4*IND)))
Argg... I rewrite this as:
-10 * (1-ASC) * (abs(S21) + abs(s22)) where:
s21 = SP + (p-1) * (1-IND) where p is combined ethics/warfare/capital power. What does this term mean?
s22 = (Private Property) + 0.3 + 0.4*ind - econ*f(OB)*(ind*1.1 + 0.6)
It's exactly the same, but simplified a bit. Still a big murky thing for me. Can be worth up to 1.7. Is it normal? Is there a + instead of a minus sign somewhere?
3.3)
S3=-30*(Abs(Rexp(3,-4,IR)-RPW)+Abs(Rexp(6,-7,AGG)-MPW)+Abs(Rexp(6,-6,(1-ASC)*IND)-CPW))
This one I think I get. If religion is important, ethics having more power is more attractive, same for military, and asceticism/capital (inverted).
3.4)
S4=-30*Abs(Rexp(4,-6,1-OB)-PPW)
Same as above except obediance/ruler. I gather from other equations and bits of code that obediance = RExp(-4,14,human) where human is the regime's human(people) power share? Am I right about obedience here?
3.5)
S5=5*(HPCI/PCI)*SP*Sign(L)
What does PCI do here?
3.6)
S6=50*Exp(-5+5*(1-ES))*RULERPW
What's ES? Empire Stability I guess? Meaning again?
4)What's the exact role of the ruler regime? The conservative government regime seems to be used only in riots, but it and the ruler regime are often excluded from the list of regimes to be checked. Why? What name can I put on functions that -retrieve all regimes and -retrieve all regimes except ruler and conservative?
5)What's the regime banning factor? It is set by who, how?
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wormbyte
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Bedfordshire, UK
Feb 2004
time: 05:15
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Here is something completely different but relevant. Its called the "International Interaction Game". I post the follwing text under the "Dplomatic UI" thread but I feel it might be worth mentioning here.
Here is what I said on the Diplomatic UI thread.....
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Has anyone heard of the Internal Interaction Game. I believe is was first published in a book called "War & Peace".
Check out the attached GIF of an Extended Tree form of the International Interaction Game.
It works best under uncertainty. Basically you have to reach an end node to complete the game. Each end node yields a utility payoff, some are higher than others. The value of the expected utility is equal to "Benefit value - Cost Value". Naturally a player wants to get to the node that give the best utility. But at the same time the player has to consider what the other player will choose at the next step.
The other crucial factors are "Preferences" and "Perceptions".
Each player has their own preference of the preferred end result of the game. Every player has a perception of what the other player preferences are. But nobody knows for sure and thus uncertainty and risk kicks in.
For example...
Player A chooses to make a demand. He does not expect player B to acquiesce and fully expects player B to make a counter-demand. Player B does indeed make a counter demand. Player A chose this route because he expects player B to then negotiate.
But then he finds his perceptions on this were incorrect. Instead Player B attacks Player A because Player B atcually thinks that his negotiating powers would not yield a high utility return and he would come out alot worse on the negotiating table. Player B also believes that Player A does not want a war and therefore will capitulate to Player B's demands.
Not the case though. Because Player A has a higher utility associated with the "War Started by B" then to the "A Capitulates to B" so Player A retaliates.
End result WAR. A outcome that neither side wanted by ending getting because the misunderstood the preferences of its opponent.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The reason I have posted it here is because the utility payoffs would be directly linked to the Government model.
 Attachment: iig.gif
This has been downloaded 86 time(s).
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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I'm trying to find how to show the regimes to the player and how the choice of a regime works.
I have several gripes, beginning with 'how do we show this to the player' and ending with 'how should that be':
The current user interface is a bit misleading because regimes don't appear there, and half of the information shown is about regimes. If you look at the screenshot on the previous page (http://apolyton.net/forums/showthre...30&pagenumber=2), you can see that preferred social roles (power distribution) is on the left while regime policies is on the right, below the negotiated policies. Although it seems consistent to show all policies in one column, they belong with the other regime stuff.
Now, this 'regime' stuff is shown and can be acted upon, but, while negotiated policies are negotiated one by one by the various power blocks, the regime thing is negotiated as a whole, and has meaningful names like 'Monarchy', 'Despotism', etc. plus the ruler's regime. But these names show nowhere. Worse, even if the player's regime matches exactly an existing regime, there's no way I can show the regime name, nor is there a chance for the player to actually know he has picked the 'Banana Republic' regime.
So the model lets people find out regimes based on known regimes (probably obtained through tech), but lets the ruler pick any regime he wants. The regime would tend to revert to a known regime, except that people can support the current regime. The flavor of regime names is lost if the player doesn't pick their regime out of a list.
All in all, I feel rather uncomfortable with the regime part of the model. If I can pick any figure, the existing regimes are just meaningless names that can't be shown. The player can't know what regime they're in. The only time when a regime name appears is if people revolt, when they will say 'Down with the ruler's regime, let's have a Monarchy'. Next turn, the Monarchy is tweaked again towards the ruler's preferences and is no longer a Monarchy.
So I'd rather have the player pick their regime among a list of existing regimes, and be allowed to tweak the default regime values by a set number depending on the ruler's power. For instance in a despotism, the player can choose any value for private property/social policy, and that's still a despotism. In a monarchy, they can tweak less. If you want to change the value more, you have to pick another regime. This way, regimes would be more meaningful because I could show the name of the current regime in the panel.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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One of my gripes is:
How come in the 5th century BC you could be able to issue a ruler regime of 'Communism'?
I'm not sure letting the player total freedom from the start about regime policies is a good thing. Discovering new regimes will be of little direct interest to players in such a case, and they will feel that discovering a new regime just changes the amount of support they get from the population, but that doesn't feel like a revolution.
Dividing the space into names is feasible, but in a multidimensional space, some names may seem strange: Democracy-Despotism may be impossible, but even Democracy-Monarchy doesn't sound as good as Constitutional Monarchy, which would probably be a regime unto itself, so we could end up with a Democracy-Constitutional Monarchy or Despotism-Constitutional Monarchy, which sound weird.
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Max Sinister
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Hybrid governments... well, I think they could be relatively easily coded as tuples of numbers (90% democracy, 40% social state, 100% capitalism, 30% religious, 70% militaristic...), but the bigger question is: What does that mean for gameplay?
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Max Sinister
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Maybe "Gameplay" wasn't the right word, but what does it mean during a game if I change "capitalism" from 60% to 70%? What does it change? More income from taxes / trade routes / luxuries?
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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I'll give a brief explanation here of how the govt model works:
The player decides of a set of policies. He wants for instance that the power be divided evenly between the ruler (50%) and the people (50%), that slavery should be abolished (0%) and that private property should be illegal (0%). Meanwhile, the existing government structure says that the ruler only has 10% of the power and that 90 remaining % are at the hands of aristocrats, who want 100% slavery and the current policy is 100% private property.
There is a negotiation system that takes place, which will lead to slavery (being a directly negotiated policy) having a value of 90% (weighted average). The other values (power distribution and private property) are part of a "regime" (used to be called ideology). Instead of directly negotiating either one, each social class (here the aristocrats, who are the sole in power) decides it prefers a regime or another one, which means that distribution of powers, private property and social policy are viewed as a whole by the social classes in power.
So the player can try to alter the existing regime policies, but it depends on which regimes the people support. There may be a revolution in some cases (riots model), promoting a change of regime.
If this regime stuff showed something for the player, I would code it now. But as it is, I have a lot of trouble understanding what it gives in terms of game play. When a civ discovers the regime 'communism', the immediate effect is that maybe a civilization will support this regime instead of another one, resulting in a change of the power shares and policies. But the name doesn't show. When you add to this the fact that the current regime and the policies the ruler wants are also considered by each social class, it means that the result of a change of the player's desired policies will be very hard to predict other than by trial and error. The flavour given by the name 'Monarchy' or some such is also lost. The information is in there, but I can't see how to show it.
So the current system models quite properly the changes of the government inside a given regime, but the effects of a change of tech (discovery of a new regime) is quite weird. It can either promote a 'soft' revolution (people start supporting a new regime) or cause a revolution through riots. But knowing what the current government is is hard.
I'd like to be able to
1- know what kind of government this is without looking at a half dozen figures (not currently possible)
2- show what types of governments are supported by the population (possible)
3- show the effects that the player's desired policy will have on the actual policies and on the riot/revolution chances. (the former is possible, but hard to explain, the latter is very hard to show or even get an idea of except through point 2 above)
4- when a new regime/ideology is discovered, show the consequences of this discovery (possible but hard with the current model - the figures would be subtly altered and it's hard to track the root causes of the change, as knowledge of the regime grows over time and doesn't appear immediately in the whole population).
So my unadressed problems are points 1 and 4.
1 would lead to weird names with the curent system where the player can provide any input. Note the weird names can also appear during revolution if the ruler has little power and the people want to revolt towards the ruler's desired regime policies. I can bypass the problem by limiting the choices the player has to a window around any one of the known regimes.
4 is just a lack of effect when a new tech is found. Although the government model may be realistic here, the point is that the discovery doesn't provide anything to the player: no additional choices available, only different effects when some sliders are changed. That's again why I'd like to limit the available policies to those known, because it gives new choices to the player when a new regime type is discovered.
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:15
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Hi All:
First, in responding to Gary, I believe the model prevents all the sillinesses in civ games that are cited in the post. It's certainly possible there are things that are a bit weird, but I'm confident that we can ID them in playtesting and figure ways around any that might exist. The only govt form where the player can change things at will is in moving from a state of near-total control -- basically a despotism. And that makes sense to me in RW terms.
On a side note, I can't remember why Rodrigo wanted to change the name from ideology to regime. BTW I've emailed him to let him know about this thread.
On Laurent's latest post. . .
I agree #1 is a potential issue, but think that my proposed solution above somewhat covers it. I know that you may not be able to get one or two regimes that encapsulate all the settings, but think it is a pretty good shorthand. If the player is that concerned with the details, then they can look at the specifics IMO. I really don't like the idea of arbitrarily restricting the player regime to a range around the defined ones. Such an approach would, I expect, hugely frustrate me as a player.
We need to do #4 anyway for the AI. I think it can be done with simulation based on a crude abstraction of what the civ looks like extrapolated say 20 turns into the future. I think players will get a hang of the effects of different regimes appearing after the first few games they play anyway, so I think this concern of yours may be less important than the others. YMMV. 
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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#4 is more of a gameplay issue. I would like the discovery of a new regime to enable the player to do more things. If you would find it frustrating, then I guess we have to code it some way and see how it feels.
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roquijad
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Santiago
Nov 1999
time: 05:15
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Hi all,
Congratulations, Laurent, for all your progress!!
It's true: the current regime is just a group a variables taking different values. That's the beauty of it in terms of possibilities: any form of regime and anything in between is possible. But yes, it's also true that that's totally ugly and makes more difficult to know in a simple way, what regime I'm in.
My idea has always been (and I don't remember if I wrote it in any of the documents) something like Mark proposed. The game "analyzes" the current setting and produces coherent texts that, briefly (a phrase), tell the player what he has as form of government. Something like "The empire is under a form of Theocracy that also rests on a powerful bureacracy", for example.
I admit I haven't thought about that too much, but I think is doable. For now, I'd suggest just a comparison of current setting with coded regimes that provides a text "The civ is under a form of " [closest_regime], with "closest" derived from closest distance in hyper-space.
Anyway, I had my doubts too, like yours, about the player having too much freedom to set his preferences, and actually trying to have modern regimes in ancient times, which I assume we all consider bizarre. And I too thought at that time of limiting player's liberty to set values as a solution. I think it's probable that we'll have to do that. But I wouldn't worry about it yet.
Quickly:
quote:
1) Why do we use exactly 3 regimes in addition to ruler and conservative? Why not 4 or 2 or all the known regimes?
What if only 1 or 2 regimes are known at that tech level? If it is here to ease computation, I'll gladly get rid of it because it makes for more programming.
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Yes, it was for easing computation, but also to simplify player's understanding of people's preferrence. If you feel is better to not limit the number, do it.
quote:
2) Attractiveness of conservative regime: Why bureaucracy + warfare? This means the military is always conservative. If so, why not ethics? Churches tend to be as conservative as the military IMO.
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Just a modelling decision.
quote:
3.6)
S6=50*Exp(-5+5*(1-ES))*RULERPW
What's ES? Empire Stability I guess? Meaning again?
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Yes, ES=Empire Stability. ES represents people's perception of how stable is the government and the empire.
[quote[
4)What's the exact role of the ruler regime? The conservative government regime seems to be used only in riots, but it and the ruler regime are often excluded from the list of regimes to be checked. Why?
[/quote]
Ruler's regime appears to let people choose it as their preferred regime just like any other. If people like what the ruler's pushing for, they'll support those ideas. The same with conservative. If people prefer what the govt has been, they'll push to keep it.
quote:
5)What's the regime banning factor? It is set by who, how?
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It's a way to introduce banned regimes. If you want to prohibit democratic ideas in your evil dictatorship, you change the banning factor. For now, IIRC, the model allows the ruler to ban regimes, as long as he is powerful enough.
I'll give you answers for what you asked about equations when I have a little more time. I'm going home now!
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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Hi Rodrigo!
Any idea how best to present the player what 'the people' and the various political blocks want?
Currently the only ways to know population desires are:
-when they riot, you will know why. That's good, but a bit late.
-when you change policies, you see you can't get farther than this or that, which means that the power blocks want a value that can be guessed. That's also efficient for tuning things a bit, but doesn't give details on which political block wants what.
Any ideas on how to show that to the player would be welcome (that's user interface, and I don't like designing these things, so ideas are welcome).
I'm coding the regimes. That's more or less done, but I've problems with the user interface (looks like the power structure sliders do not always add up to 1 all the time when they should, which kind of wrecks the equations afterwards). I still have to show where people are.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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How much knowledge should the player be given of what the population actually wants in terms of policies?
As I said, you can currently infer some information from the negotiation system, but you can't know which social class wants what.
The system is quite complex, as each social class of each ethnic group in each province or even square may have different feelings. Showing this level of detail would require an elaborate user interface, and wouldn't be realistic since IRL you'd need polls, statistics, and some psychology in order to gather the correct information, which would be expensive. I also think it would be pretty useless because it'd be too much micromanagement.
I think showing the preferred negotiated policies and regimes per social class empire-wide would be necessary (in order to know which regime allows the ruler to reach their ends best and to avoid riots more effectively). I could offer a filter per ethnicity too, probably as a filter over the social classes, empire-wide.
I don't think details per province or per square need be provided. Per province could make sense, but province-specific user interface would require some work in order to have a generic way of entering a 'province management mode' by opposition to 'empire management mode'.
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roquijad
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Santiago
Nov 1999
time: 05:15
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Hi Laurent. Here are some answers:
quote:
S1=20*IND*(p+Sign(L)*PPW+A*BURPW)
Why Sign(L) when everything else usesvalue * powershare? Coded anyway.
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S1 represents how much a social class likes the distribution of power offered by a given regime, particularly how much power the social class gets. Workers classes get power only through the People's Political Block. This block represents the democratic ideal of "one man, one vote", so any social class with L greater than zero will appreciate a regime proportionally to how large PPB's power is. But all those social classes with L greater than zero must appreciate the regime in the same way, regardless of how large or small their particular value L is, because they won't get more or less "votes" depending on their L value, simply because in PPB, one man is just one vote. Therefore, we only need to know if the social class is or isn't a worker class, which is the reason to use Sign(L).
Note that in the rest Political Blocks, social classes do get more power proportionally to their social role value (a "High Priests class" would get more "votes" than the "Regular Monks class"), so in that case we need to multiply for E (Ethics Value) in order to consider how much more the High Priests love a religious regime compared to the Regular Monks.
quote:
S22 can be worth up to 1.7. Is it normal? Is there a + instead of a minus sign somewhere?
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S22 actually has a mistake. Glad you noticed it, Laurent! The problem is incorrect arrengement of parenthesis. S22 should be:
Abs(PP-(ECON*Rexp(2,-8,1-OB)*(0.3+0.7*IND)+(1-ECON)*Rexp(2,-8,1-OB)*(0.3+0.4*IND))
Brief explanation:
S22 represents the evaluation the social class does about the level of Private Property a regime offers.
The more individualistic and the less "obedient" (*) you are, the more you will embrace regimes with high Private Property (ie, regimes where few economic activities are in the hands of the king/State).
But the equation also acknowledges that even if you're very individualistic and very disobedient, you won't push it as far as demanding a PP=100%, unless the "concept" of a completely liberal/capitalistic economy is developed. So, prior to modern times, individualistic and disobedient persons (ethnic groups, really) will embrace regimes with PP up to 70%. Only when the knowledge about how economies function and the ideas of free market and capitalism are fully developed (ECON=1), ethnic groups will be able to support regimes with PP=100%.
That's why the equation has the form Abs(PP - (ECON*A + (1-ECON)*B). A can take a value up to 1 (100%) and B up to 0.7 (70%).
(*) "Obedience" (OB) is one of the Ethnic Groups descriptors and tells us how pyramidal people think society should be. High levels of obedience imply people believe there're a few "illuminated" persons that should run and decide everything because "they know better". In this equation OB is used to make people dislike high levels of Private Property, representing people's belief that the ruler and their staff will probably run the economy better than passing economic activities to a larger group of people (that sure will make a mess with them! ).
quote:
where p is combined ethics/warfare/capital power. What does this term mean?
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"p" is a meassure of the "elitistic" power a social class has. Since it's computed as E*RPW+W*MPW+K*CPW and since those Political Blocks represent the gathering of social classes with the "special" influence of religion, military and/or capital (as opposed to a representative power), p reflects how "special" the social class is respect to the rest of the people. It helps manage better the different behavior of "elite" social classes.
quote:
S3: This one I think I get. If religion is important, ethics having more power is more attractive, same for military, and asceticism/capital (inverted).
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Exactly.
quote:
I gather from other equations and bits of code that obediance = RExp(-4,14,human) where human is the regime's human(people) power share? Am I right about obedience here? |
hmmm, I don't fully understand this....
quote:
S5=5*(HPCI/PCI)*SP*Sign(L)
What does PCI do here?
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S5 represents how much a workers social class likes the Social Policies level the regime offers, considering the recent evolution of workers' income. PCI is social class' current Per Capita Income, while HPCI is social class' Historical PCI. If HPCI is higher than PCI, then it means the social class has become poorer during the years and then the workers are more enthusiastic about more welfare (higher SP). And vice versa.
I'm going home. Next time I'll comment on data available for the player about social classes preferences.
Cya!
Edit: bas use of italics
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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quote:
Originally posted by Gary Thomas
Rulers in the archaic pre-poll and pre-statistics era had ways of judging the mood of the population, probably more efficient than polls and statistics. Roman Emporers were known to mingle, icognito, with the population. Spanish Kings (and other rulers of that time, including Elizabeth of England) had a very well developed spy system, loyal to them personally. Variants of these methods were widely used. Any ruler who did not at least try to get some feedback on popular feeling tended to be toast when the crunch came.
Cheers |
Yes, as you point out they had means to get the information, but that information cost them money. I know there's an internal intelligence level somewhere in the models. What I'd like to know is how much information we want to give (up to what detail: square or province or ?) and how accurate is it, based on intelligence spending (probably a logarithmic funcrion or square root or some such with big diminishing returns).
Rodrigo, the obediance = RExp(-4,14,human) part is extrapolated from other parts of the model where that bit of equation (with maybe L instead of H) occurs here and there in various equations.
I'll be integrating the corrections in the code.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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Another point I don't get well:
We have several social roles:
warfare, ethics, capital, worker, human, bureaucracy.
However, in the political power blocks, we have all of these plus ruler minus worker. This means although I share the same object for both representations, I must weed out workers from the political power blocks. Why aren't workers be shown as a political power?
It looks like workers favor democracy rather than a proletariat dictatorship, because this one can't really be modelled if you skip a 'workers' political block (which IRL is represented by labour unions).
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roquijad
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Santiago
Nov 1999
time: 05:15
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Laurent, here are my thoughts on some of the issues you rose:
About info available to the player:
As you say, eventually we can choose to go as detailed as letting the player know what a social class with a given nationality and religious preference (ie from a given EG) living in a certain square of one province, wants and feels.... Although possible, I'm not sure if that could really be considered useful. The "must have" info IMO is (considering riots+govt+social models):
Civ-wide:
1) The society’s political profile, ie the aggregation of all political blocks. Here we’re telling the player what the social classes want, proportionally to their power shares. In other words, the direction where the govt will be pushed to if social classes would be left alone to decide the govt destiny.
2) The political profile of each political block. If I know what the military want, I can give them something and get’em off my back...
3) The aggregation of PAF values (unhappiness levels) per social class. what’s bothering social classes right now?
4) The aggregation of PAF values per EG (nationality X religion). Are all those ethnicities I’ve conquered calmed enough?
5) Demographic chart pies: by religion, ethnicity (nationality), social class and regimes supported. What religions are there in my empire? What’s the relative importance of each? What kind of govt the people want?
Province:
1) PAF values per social class. Am I going to face protests, independence attempts, etc in this province?
2) PAF values per ethnicity (nationality). Am I going to see Guerrilla Units any time soon in this province for nationalistic reasons?
About a “workers’ political block”
I can explain the absence of such block in two ways:
a) The already existent power blocks (with the exception of People’s PB) represent the privilege of some social classes to influence the govt above the masses. If your society has no privileges for anybody, then those PBs have all zero power and all power is given to People’s PB, where they’re all equally weighted. Introducing a workers PB would imply they could have some privilege over the rest, which hasn’t been the case in RL. (interpreting those powers as privileges is useful for practical terms - see below)
b) If we add a workers PB, then we have to get rid of the People’s PB because it becomes redundant (you’d have one PB for each social role). Although this could be a possible modelling strategy, it rises a problem: in representative forms of govt, each PB should get as much power as its demographic representation. Since the actual demographic distribution of social classes changes from civ to civ, and as time passes by (one civ may have a larger middle class than other, FE, and it could growth or shrink in time), then the power distribution among PBs in representative forms of govt will change, even if your political system remains stable. This will confuse players. If the Capitalist PB increases its power, is it because they increased their demographic share or are they just getting more power than they should and my civ is actually becoming some sort of oligarchy? Having a People’s PB instead of a workers PB simplifies the scenery a lot: as long as your govt is representative, you should see power shares of all other PBs at zero. If someone is getting some sort of privilege on govt, the corresponding PB will have a non-zero value. One look at your power structure and you’ll know exactly how representative your govt is and if it’s not, who’s having special powers.
See you!
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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Tanks for the explanation on workers. Convincing enough.
I think the information detail you want are good, we will need some UI design before we can show all this.
One more point about the equation:
Tax Rate=(((p-K*CPW)/3)+0.4*Min(SP , (1-(IND*(1-p)+p)))+AGG*0.1)*(1-FE*FR)
This leads to huge figures like 0.18 or 0.35 in the Delenda scenario.
There's mostly no discrimination to consider here, so the last parameter is mostly 1.
For parameters around p = 0.6, SP = 0.35, IND = 0.2, AGG = 0.8, K or CPW = 0, you get desired tax rates of:
0.2 + 0.4 * Min(0.35,0.26)+0.08 = 0.2 + 0.4*0.26 + 0.08 = 0.384.
This is huge according to what Mark expects (we currently had tax rates <= 0.1).
Of course, you get a lower total value for groups with lower p, but given the regime, they tend to have lower political powers, so we end up with huge tax rates.
The equation looks a bit wrong to me because:
Since: 1 - (IND*(1-p)+p) = (1-p)*(1 -IND).
The formula can lead to max values when CPW = 0, IND = 0, FE = FR = 0, AGG = 1, SP = 1. This gives an equation of:
p/3 + 0.4* (1-p) + 0.1 = 0.5 - p*(0.067).
So the max value is 0.5. I think this should probably be scaled down. I'd like to hear from Marl about the max tax rate the econ model can allow.
We can either rescale it down (i.e. multiply the result 0.2 if we want a max tax of 0.1 whatever the regime) - I think it's a bit extreme as 0.5 looks good as an extreme.
Or we can apply a function to lower the values, like rescaling to a 0-1 scale, squaring, and rescaling to the correct range. This means a 0.38 value out of 0.5 would become only 0,29.
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roquijad
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Santiago
Nov 1999
time: 05:15
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I admit I'm ignorant to say if a tax rate of 35% is huge or not. I recall reading in the newspaper (when a debate on rising taxes here in Chile was taking place) that, considering all taxes from all sources, the average US citizen payed something more than 30% of his/her income. And that in several countries in Europe, the figure was something like 45%. If so, I imagine taxes in antiquity were even higher. But yes, I might be remembering it wrongly and also assuming nonsenses about antiquity.
Bottom line: I suggest we use our current equation now, with a scaling factor on front. Fix that factor's value in whatever number the econ model needs currently. We can change the scaling factor later if we manage to gather historical info about tax values. And even later we can change the equation if it doesn't give us reasonable results. Agreed?
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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I'll start by putting a scaling factor of 1/3.
I think taxes of about 30% are perfectly legit for modern day countries. I just don't know the effect of such high rates on older economies. Sparta had such a system that I wonder how you'd model taxes there anyway.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:15
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Here's a new mock-up of user interface.
The bar on the bottom with placeholder art (obviously) would be a bar of buttons. The leftmost one is the ruler button, which lets the player modify the sliders he can act upon.
The other buttons would replace the sliders by a panel showing the military (selected button), ethics, capital, human and bureaucracy desired government policies. I might even add a 'total' profile for desited views.
This would let the player click the ruler button and browse from what he can change to what the various political power blocks want in the same window.
The placeholder art buttons could be icons or faces of advisors. If advisor faces, it would be easy to have them evolve depending on techs.
The panel shown on top would change to show the desired regime and negotiated policies, along with the support shares for various regimes. We might even add some room for 'advice' like the advisors did in civ (though of course, the advice was often poor, and with no ai to give it it wouldn't go vary far).
 Attachment: governmentinterface.jpg
This has been downloaded 20 time(s).
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19-02-2004 16:01
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