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roquijad
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Santiago
Nov 1999
time: 05:17
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Recently I've been thinking in alternatives for the current "negotiation system" of the govt model. The reason is I know some team members don't feel very comfortable with what I proposed in the model. Some alternatives have been already presented by some of you trying to solve the bad parts of the current system, but there hasn't been consensus around them either. Since I want the vast majority in this team to like the way the govt model works, I spent some time looking for alternative ways. Here I present a new mechanism of interaction between political actors that I think will please many of those who don't like what the govt model has now. Please give your opinion!!
Very briefly, this is the problem to solve: given political actors, each with a share power and each with preferences for govt policies and govt's power distribution, we need to know what values policies will take and what power distribution will result.
The political actors are the ruler and 5 political blocks. For the purpose of explaining the new alternative system, I'll consider there're just 2 polblocks and the govt has just one policy to decide on. That policy will be Slavery (the policy can take any value between 0 and 1).
Assume agents' preferences are:
Ruler: RulerPower=60%, Polblock1Power=20%, Polblock2Power=20%, Slavery=0.2
Polblock1: RulerPower=20%, Polblock1Power=30%, Polblock2Power=50%, Slavery=0.6
Polblock2: RulerPower=30%, Polblock1Power=0%, Polblock2Power=70%, Slavery=0
Assume Current Govt Profile is:
RulerPower=25%, Polblock1Power=45%, Polblock2Power=30%, Slavery=0.4
The question is what values the Current Govt Profile will have after negotiations.
The fundamental idea of the proposed approach is political agents analyze possible small changes to current values. Let's focus on Slavery. We make agents decide if Slavery should:
a)increase from its current value
b)decrease from its current value
c)keep its current value
Slavery is currently equal to 0.4, but the ruler wants a value of 0.2, so he puts all his power (25%) to reduce it. So does polblock2 (with 30% power) who wants a value of 0. Polblock1 (with a power of 45%) wants to increase it, so, we get this scenario:
25%+30%=55% supporting a decrease
45% supporting an increase
0% supporting current value
Those shares can also be viewed as votes. The result (by simple-majority-rule): Slavery must be decreased. It does it by a fix amount (that'll be 0.01 and that's a game constant). Slavery is then set to 0.39. If we repeatedly do the same analysis you can see Slavery will constantly decrease until it gets to 0.2. When that happens, the ruler starts to vote for "keeping current value". Total votes are now:
Pro-Decrease: 30% (Polblock2)
Pro-Increase: 45% (Polblock1)
Pro-Keep: 25% (Ruler)
Now simple-majority-rule says it must increase. You can see the system will start to oscillate between 0.20 and 0.21. But don't worry about it for the moment. What's important here is a policy will either stay at its current position or increase/decrease until it reaches some point where it settles (or almost does, oscillating).
The system provides a way to model policies changes. It can also be used to model how agents decide changes to the power distribution. FE, let's see ruler's power: The ruler currently has 25% of power, but wants to have 60%, so he votes for an increase. Polblock2 also votes for an increase because this agent wants the ruler to have 30%. Polblock1 votes for a decrease, but its defeated by the combined power of the other two. Ruler power increases by the fix amount in several iterations getting to 30%. It stops there. Although the ruler has more power now, his 30% power (seen as votes) are not enough to move his power further up. Polblocks refuse to support more increases.
So, the system works for power distribution too. However, in the case of the above paragraph, if ruler power rose, the power of one or the two polblocks had to decrease. From the preferences you can see all three agents agree Polblock1 power should decrease, so this would be the one to fall. In general terms, though, the system can be used for power distribution as long as a couple conditions are met. Simply put, these conditions say "for each going up, there must be another going down". They aren't too hard to implement.
That's the basic system.
Pros and Cons?
Pros:
1) The more power an agent has, the biggest influence in final decisions.
2) Player gets nothing by "lying to the interface" (meaning he doesn't need trial and error to get what he wanted). Remember the current system needs a "trick" to avoid a lying player.
3) No machiavellian ruler (meaning the player can't take away power from others to increase his own. He could do so only if there're enough supporters who also want him to be more powerful). The current negotiation system needs to trust in the riots model to discourage "machiavellism".
4) Uses the idea of "votes" and simple-majority-rule. That would please some of you. I was always against the majority rule system because the 51% threshold converted you suddenly into a despot, but see below.
5) Easy to implement.
Cons:
1) No compromises: The final value of a given policy or polpower is one of the agents preferences. In the case of Slavery, FE, we found the final value matched ruler's desire. The current negotiation system does better on this because it allows compromises between positions as in RL negotiations.
2) 51%-rule is "active". But... (see next paragraph)
The main problem with the system is, once an agent has more than 50% power, he can do whatever he wants. From a standpoint of needing to negotiate, you jump to despotism. Also, having 51% or 100% power is the same, so you can't have degrees of despotism. You are either a despot or one more agent. Nothing in between. Some have argued that this in fact should be so, but, for arguments I refuse to state again, I think is a major flaw. But there's a way to fix it. To do it, we need to force the system to work with polpowers values equal or smaller than 51%. That means that when you get 100% power, the system interprets it as if you got 51%. In other words, we need to scale down powers before introducing them in the "negotiation machine". But this scaling can't be linear (FE, we can't simply halve polpowers) because we'd be just moving the threshold. Never mind about this mathematical stuff. Just consider this: The govt window will tell you your power is 75%, but that's not the number the system will really use. Polpowers are transformed before entering the machine through some function F. I have already found one that behaves pretty well and the next table shows examples:
shown_in_window number_used_inside
0% 0%
5% 5%
10% 10%
15% 15%
20% 20%
25% 25%
30% 30%
35% 35%
40% 38%
45% 38%
50% 39%
55% 40%
60% 41%
65% 42%
70% 44%
75% 45%
80% 46%
85% 47%
90% 49%
95% 50%
100% 51%
As you can see, in the range [0% , 35%] the machine uses the "normal" polpower value, but beyond 35% it uses and adjusted one. When polpower is 100% (absolute despotism), the machine uses a 51% that is exactly the value that allows the agent to ignore all the rest actors. Yet, the transformation is "monotonic", meaning the machine increases your influence in decisions when your power increases.
What does this mean in game terms? As a player, everything seems crystal clear: you see power divided between agents, powers sum 100% and the more power you get, the more affected govt profile is by your desires. When you get 100% you can ignore all agents and be an absolute despot.
Behind the scenes, the system works exactly like I described before, but instead of using the polpower values the player is seeing to "count votes", it uses the adjusted ones. That's something the player never sees and shouldn't care about.
Is there any cost in using adjusted values instead of the "real" ones? Yes, but IMO is small. At low values of polpower, getting 1% extra gives you more influence than getting that same amount at high levels. FE, if you have 10% power and it grows to 15%, then you get "5 more votes" (so to speak), but if you have 90% and it grows to 95% you only get 1 extra vote. The question is how upsetting that would be for players.... opinions wanted on this particularly!
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Implementation
I made experiments on an Excel sheet and it worked ok. Calculations are simple and only the conditions demanded for increasing/decreasing polpowers need some attention. Detecting oscillations also needs attention.
It's important to have all policies and polpowers rounded to the second decimal. We can't have something like Slavary=0.2345611. That's because of the fixed "delta" applied to each variable (0.01). But I'm sure nobody cares about that!
Speed of changes: The action of increasing, decreasing or preserving a policy or polpower value could be made on a turn-by-turn basis, but it's preferable to take the "Future Govt Profile" approach already existing in the model. That's because it's unrealistic if variables change always 1% regardless of the length of the game turn. When negotiations are called the game should apply the mechanism repeatedly until an equilibrium is met. By design, the maximum number of iterations is 100 and most times less would be needed. That govt profile is stored and the next turns the game converts smoothly the current govt profile into that at a pace given mostly by the years involved in game turns. That also helps optimizing things.
As a comparison, the current negotiation system gives "instantly" the Future Govt Profile, while in this proposal you have to iterate to find it.
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51% rule
Something nice is you can switch very easily from the proposed system to a "FSmith's 51%rule". If the function F used to convert polpowers into "adjusted polpowers" is replaced by the identity function, you get it. That can be implemented at a negligible cost with a 0/1 variable.
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Adding Compromises
There is a trick to add compromises if we want them. We'd have to add an artificial/auxiliary polblock that will be used only for negotiations (i.e. players will not know of its existence). We give it a piece of power (subtracted from the other polblocks) and give it a political profile built in the same way the Preliminary Govt Profile is in the current model. The PGP represents in the current model the interactions between polblocks and one of its characteristics is it merges political positions, creating compromises. Letting this special polblock play within the new proposed system (in the same stand as any other) would allow compromised solutions to have an impact. Normal polblocks would represent the "radical" positions, while the artificial polblock would represent moderates from all political spectrum looking for compromises.
Here we can have a variable to control the degree of compromises existing in a civ. The more power is subtracted from normal polblocks and assigned to the artificial one, the higher the weight of compromises in politics.
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Opinions needed!
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:17
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What you propose is not LIKE the 51%, it is EXACTLY the median system. Mathematically speaking, you are just describing another algorithm to find the median (which would be very slow btw). The idea of scaling the power shown to the player is good.
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:17
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Hi Rodrigo:
A well-reasoned argument! I have problems with the things like rescaling power. The compromises part is really good, and could well be an important component of any voting-type system. What percentage the "moderates" are could be determined using govt model parameters, so I think that is potentially interesting. I don't have a lot of time because I'm at work. I want to think about your proposal a bit more. But in the meantime a modification of your system occured to me that would fix my problems with it. (Although it might introduce others)
My modified proposal:
There would be no rescaling of ruler power. The single difference I propose is that the rate of change of the policy or power be
1)handled potentially differently for each individual policy, and
2) be proportional to the power voting in the direction of the change.
Specifically if a vote were won 51-49 it would indicate a very delictate situation where movement of the policy would have to be done Very slowly. If All votes wanted to increase a policy, it could change very rapidly, because there would be unanimous support for the change by the governmental structure.
So even if the ruler has 51% of the power, if they are substantially going against what the other 49% wants, changes would be very slow. With 100% of the power, the dictator can change anything the want in almost no time. If the 51% ruler is going in the direction much of society supports change can be very rapid. I think this dynamic is similar to what happens in the real world.
If the current value of a policy was "low" by most votes, the change could be rapid until much of the govt thought it was about right, and then its rate of change could slow drastically if the final voted value was held only by a slim margin.
I think this modification is less artificial than altering powers, easier to understand in real-world terms, and it would give an interesting dynamic to govt changes. But it might be confusing to people. There might also be overshoot issues, but they could be handled relatively easily.
What do you think?
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Plutarck
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Earth
Nov 2001
time: 23:17
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Building on what Mark said, consider this as an application of the idea to slavery, but in more rounded numbers so I don't have to use a calculator (hehe):
Slavery is currently 10 on a scale of 100. The Meanies (Political Block) hold 45% power, the Weenies hold 30% power, and the Ruler holds 25% power.
The Meanies, being the meanies that they are, want Slavery to be 20. The Weanies want it to be 0, and the Ruler wants it to be 10.
Rather than being 3 votes, there are only two - Yay and Nay (For and Against).
Now, Meanies want to Increase Slavery with their 45% power, but 55% power (the combined of Weanies and Ruler, who both don't want slavery increased) says Nay. Because they do not have a majority (51%), they loose, and the rate of Slavery does not increase.
Now comes the question of whether to Lower Slavery. The proposal succeeds 55/45, and Slavery is lowered.
Now, as stated by Mark, the rate Slavery is lowered is determined upon the disparity of powers of the involved partys.
To do this, first we see what each of the "successul" partys want, and pick the most "conservative" one (this for simplicity sake. there could be a much more complicated way to doing it to figure compromise, but let's just see how this works first). In this case that's the Rulers desire, which is to have a Slavery of 10, which is change of -10.
Now the successful partys both agree on a decrease of -10, but they only have 55% of the available power to do it. 55% of 10 is 5.5, so Slavery is planned to be reduced by that amount.
This could happen over a variable amount of turns depending on the disparity of powers, but for the sake of simplicity we'll just say that change happens over 10 turns.
So policy is set every 10 turns.
Now each turn that would mean that the rate of Slavery decreases 0.55, but we're going to round Up the nearest tenth, giving us a 0.6 change each turn, leaving us with total of 6 reduction (there's multiple reasons for rounding up, and it's not merely for aesthetic or computational reasons).
After 10 turns Slavery now sits at 14, and the proposal of slavery comes up again. The successful party still wants a reduction in slavery, and all the powers are the same.
Now Slavery get's a planned reduction of 4, leaving us with 0.04 per turn, which get's rounded Up to 0.1. At the end of 10 turns the change is -1, leaving Slavery at 13.
This last scenario will happen 3 more times until the rate of Slavery now sits at 10 (assuming no powers or opinions change).
Now with a rate of Slavery of 10, the issue comes up again.
For Raising Slavery the vote will be 45/55 (proposal fails), and for Lowering Slavery the vote will be 30/70 (proposal also fails).
What this means is that there is simply no concencus, and no change will occur. This is because in no situation could anyone succeed, because no group can act with a majority of the power (in other words, anyone trying to act will fail because their adversary is superior to them in power).
So Slavery will now be set at 10, and will not occillate, until opinions or powers change.
In the next post I'll look at some other examples of what would happen under this system.
EDIT: Changed "70/30" to "30/70". Just an error fix.
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Plutarck
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Earth
Nov 2001
time: 23:17
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Now, consider the following political makeup:
Liberatarians 25%, Anarchists 25%, Ruler 50%.
Issue: Ruler Power.
Proposal: Increase Ruler Power.
Result: 50/50, tie. For now we'll say that a tie is a failure, and in systems without some tie-breaker that could be how it works.
What could happen in case of tie is it goes to the vice-president (if there is one), who will vote his belief. If he's a Libertarian or Anarchist he'd vote Nay, if considering himself part of the Ruling class he'd vote Yay.
All kinds of possibilitys here, such as flipping a coin (random tie resolution), vice-presidential equivalent, vote of the people, goes to International Tribunal, etc.
But since we're in a system where there is no tie-breaker, the motion fails.
Proposal: Decrease Ruler Power:
Result: 50/50, tie. Same as above, which means the motion Fails.
Issue Result: No change to Ruler Power.
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axi
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Athens Greece
Sep 1999
time: 07:17
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The median in a distribution of size N is the (N+1)/2 value (sorted in ascending order) if N is odd and the avg(N/2 , N/2+1) value (sorted in ascending order) if N is even. And it doesn't matter if we're counting from the low side or the high side either, since it's the same number.
If 25% want 0,2 / 45% want 0,6 / 30% want 0,0 then the median will be the average value of the 50th and 51st vote which are both ruler's votes meaning the policy will be set to 0,2.
We could always have stochastic values for each political block's desired policy. A discrete gaussian distribution could do the job, with a standard deviation that could be related to the climate of compromise and moderation existing in one political scene. It would simulate some political figures of the same alignment "reaching" towards the left while otheers are doing the same to the right. Also artificially polarising the political scene is a fine way for some parties to win the elections.
quote:
There would be no rescaling of ruler power. The single difference I propose is that the rate of change of the policy or power be
1)handled potentially differently for each individual policy, and
2) be proportional to the power voting in the direction of the change.
Specifically if a vote were won 51-49 it would indicate a very delictate situation where movement of the policy would have to be done Very slowly. If All votes wanted to increase a policy, it could change very rapidly, because there would be unanimous support for the change by the governmental structure.
So even if the ruler has 51% of the power, if they are substantially going against what the other 49% wants, changes would be very slow. With 100% of the power, the dictator can change anything the want in almost no time. If the 51% ruler is going in the direction much of society supports change can be very rapid. I think this dynamic is similar to what happens in the real world.
If the current value of a policy was "low" by most votes, the change could be rapid until much of the govt thought it was about right, and then its rate of change could slow drastically if the final voted value was held only by a slim margin.
I think this modification is less artificial than altering powers, easier to understand in real-world terms, and it would give an interesting dynamic to govt changes. But it might be confusing to people. There might also be overshoot issues, but they could be handled relatively easily. |
I totally support Mark on this.
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Plutarck
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Earth
Nov 2001
time: 23:17
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Note: In these systems the total power always adds up to 100%, though I guess it wouldn't Have to...but it probably always should. Otherwise people will probably get Really confused. It's mostly a sepperate issue though, so I won't consider it here.
Political Blocks:
Wimps 10%, Pansys 7%, Meanies 10%, Masochists 3%, Moderates 30%, Ruler 40%.
Issue: Slavery (starts at a rate of 20 of 100, which can be represented as .2 or 20%)
Proposal: Increase Slavery.
Desires: Wimps 0, Pansys 0, Meanies 50, Masochists 100, Moderates 20, Ruler 30.
Result: Yays- Meanies, Masochists, Ruler = 53%. Nays- Wimps, Pansys, Moderates = 47%.
The Yays have it, proposal succeeds.
The smallest desire among the Yays is the Ruler's desire for a +10 to slavery. Here Yays have 53% of the available power, so they can get 53% of what they want done. So that leaves us with 5.3, which becomes 0.6 a turn, which is 6 at the end of the policy session of 10 turns.
This will continue until 30 is reached, then when the vote happens:
Proposal: Increase Slavery (currently 30).
Change in power: Ruler decreases to 35% from 40%, Moderates increase from 30% to 35%.
Reult: Yays- Meanies, Masochists. Nays- Wimps, Pansys, Moderates, Ruler. Proposal Fails.
Proposal: Decrease Slavery.
Result: Yays- Wimps, Pansys, Moderates. Nays- Meanies, Masochists, Ruler. 52/48, Yays have it, proposal succeeds.
The most conservative desire is the Moderates with the desire of -10 Slavery, using their 52% power the result is 6 change during this policy period.
And on and on, etc.
I think this is about all that needs to be used as an example of the use, and I definately agree with it now. Sounds like it would make a great addition to the game.
Howeve, one thing that Is apparent to me is that there should be a more detailed compromise mechanism, where the powers of the opinion holders are taken into consideration to decide what the planned reduction will be. But I'm not talented enough with math for that, so I won't suggest anything.
Another thing is one small addendum/change:
What will be decided in the policy meeting is the planned changes the controlling decision makes. Such as "decrease slavery by 10". What change takes effect per turn is decided by that turn's power ratio.
So if on the first turn there was 100% agreement Slavery would be reduced by 1. On the next turn the power may have eroded so that there's only 90% power, and thus Slavery is reduced by 0.9. Then there's a falling out and those in power suddenly only have 40% power, and can only manage to reduce slavery by 0.4 for each turn thereafter.
So at the end of the policy session the change is 5.1, though 10 was originally planned. And of course now in the new policy session the proposal to decrease slavery will fail, because those in favor now only hold 40% of the power.
All in all, I see no problem with the aforementioned system, unless I'm just being dense here.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:17
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When I say it is exactly the median system, look at the figures, what the median gives, and behold: The final result after infinite iterations is the median system. So the only thing which changes, but is not clearly apparent, is how many iterations you do.
Once you know what the target value is, then instead of switching to that value, the suggestion is to switch to an intermediary value, based on the polpower of those who promote that change, like going (polpower of those who want the change)% in that direction.
If the amount depends on the amount of change wanted, Machiavelism will prevail in order to increase the correct amount. With Plutarck's example, in order to get 30, you would manage it by asking for more (around 39).
We can have the amount of change fixed, but it requires knowing a scale. If that scale is open-ended, like an amount of cash to be spent, then there is no way to avoid the player cheating with numbers in order to get the result they want.
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:17
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First, a comment on Plutarck's implementation that I endorsed last night. I wasn't paying enough attention!  The proportionality constant that gives the rate of change of the policy should not be based on the absolute power of those on the yea side. That gives at most a factor 2 difference between the 51% and 100% power cases. What I had in mind was that the rate would be proportional to the Difference between powers on the winning and losing side. The amount of plurality if you will. With 100% power, the change should be almost instantaneous. For a 51-49 decision the change would then be 50x Slower! ((100-0)/(51-49)) These factors can of course be modified, but I think there shoud be at least a 10x difference in rate of change between a close vote and a unanimous one.
If the ruler pursues a 51-49 victory, it may be a Phyrric one anyway. A lot of things can change in something like 50 turns, and there is absolutely no guarantee the value will Ever get to the state the player wants. So this system give a great deal of difference between the effectiveness of a 51% power Ruler and a 100% one, which was the big goal to remove from the median case.
Having said that... now I can address Laurent's points.
I agree that the steady-state results are the same as the median. Also I agree that there can be a small benefit, a factor of approximately two if the ruler votes 39 instead of 30. (at least with Plutarck's system as outlined with only my one modification) That is indeed a defect in the proposed system, thanks for pointing it out  .
I'm not sure it is a large enough defect to need to really worry about though. By overestimating his desire for slavery, the ruler will disappoint the Moderates more than would have been the case at 30, and that disappointment might have ramifications in terms of moderate support for the ruler that cancel out any advantage. In short, I think there are tradeoffs and perhaps we can just leave this approach simple for the time being. If there are clear exploits of it, I think we'll only find out about them for sure when the game gets in playtester's hands. And we can plug any Big holes then.
Last edited by Mark_Everson on 21-02-2002 at 22:11
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Plutarck
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Earth
Nov 2001
time: 23:17
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Mark:
Actually, I was thinking the same thing about Disparity. I actually had it in my last post, but deleted it before posting it 
The thing I was thinking is, would the changes go too slowly? But perhaps it won't be as bad as I thought at first...
Now that I think about it, I've swung back to thinking it should be the Disparity in power that determines it, but I don't know exactly how it should be computed.
For instance if you only have a 1% majority, you'd only get the minimum amount of change per turn of 0.1...but actually, that would equal 1 point of change every policy period. So to get a 10 change would take 10 policy periods, which is 100 turns. But at least it wouldn't be 0.01 point of change per turn...but then again, it could be, if you Really wanted to drive home the difficulty.
So yeah, I think this would work just fine as outlined.
What could be done is use a variable (or constant) to determine what the minimum amount of change per turn will be. Will it be 1, 0.1, 0.01, 0.001, etc (not counting No Change, which is possible). I like 0.1 as it would speed up things a bit, but for longer games I could see 0.01 being fine too. There could also be a max change per turn, but none is needed for now (good to go ahead and include that though, since it probably wouldn't add but a few lines of code).
And as for how many turns between policy meetings, that should be handled as a variable also, but I think I already mentioned that.
Now, here are a few problems/scenarios, and how they could be fixed/implemented:
1) Machiavelism: In the scenario, why shouldn't the Ruler just put down 50 for Slavery? The result of the proposal would be the same if the desired variable was in the range of 21-50 (any more and it wouldn't have been the most "conservative" proposal).
FixA: The exact desires of polBlocks wouldn't be known. So as Ruler you might be able to see that the Masochists want Total Slavery, Meanies want Considerably More Slavery, while Pansys and Wimps want No Slavery. But you won't be able to know the exact numbers (except for Total and None, which are 100 and zero respectively).
So you can try to tinker around, but you never really know Exactly what the optimal number would be.
FixB: Discontent. The greater the difference between the Ruler's desire and a polBlock's desires, the less that block will like/support the Ruler.
Ruler desire would probably take "effect", for gameplay purposes, right before each policy session, remaining constant until the next policy session.
So you can't change your desire right before the session, then change it back right after so as to minimize your reputational hit (it would basically be an exploit in the making, and it reflects that people only Really care how you act/vote - but no one told the media that, apparently).
That's on the low ends of discontent. On the higher ends they could do all kinds of bad stuff, like riot or even rebel!
This would allow for an American Civil War-like scenario, so you could end up knowing how Abraham Lincoln must have felt
Or George Bush, or...well, it's probably a pretty common feeling. So you'll be forced to make compromises if you want to get anything done, which is more realistic than any system I've seen. Now just as long as people don't hate it...
Anyway, the point is that while asking for more than you want/need is an oft-repeated scenario in real life, it does have setbacks. And if you overdo it you can get yourself into some serious trouble. ("He wants what? That's it, now he has to Die!")
So over-state your desires at your own peril.
2) Intensity of belief. For instance, consider Abortion. There are people who'd be willing to compromise to get something else they want done, and then there are people who won't even consider giving a millimeter! Over their dead body will that happen, they say!
I can think of 2 ways to represent this.
A: Leeway: In the voting process, on each desire there is a specified "leeway". If the leeway is 10, for instance, and their desire for something was 30, then they'd be fully accepting of any value in the 20-40 range.
Someone who doesn't care would have a max leeway, and a real hardcore type would have a 0 - in other words if you don't agree with them completely, they won't agree with you.
So if the current value was 20-40, they will vote against any change.
B: Lack of willingness to compromise in the compromise round.
Last edited by Plutarck on 22-02-2002 at 00:28
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Plutarck
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Earth
Nov 2001
time: 23:17
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Here is how I'd think the "automatic" Policy Meeting would go.
This could actually be made into a really cool kind of actual "meeting" type, where you negotiate on issues and proposals - if you choose not to have it done automatically.
But for now, simplicity.
On the turn of the Policy Meeting (perhaps it happens after clicking End Turn, or maybe at the very begining of your turn before control is given back to you) you'll get a popup, informing you of the Policy Meeting which will occur.
You are given the option of making any changes to your policy desires, and you make sure it's just like you want it. When done you can choose "I'm ready, let the meeting begin!"
You then get the following choices:
* Watch
* Participate [For future use, but just leave it invisible/off]
* Just give me the results.
"Watch" will just treat the user to a play-by-play of what happens, at reduced speed (so they can see what's happening). The user should have the option to say "I'm done watching, just give me the results."
The Policy Meeting proceeds as follows.
Proposal Round:
The computer grabs the topic of the proposal, then puts up the proposal in favor of increasing the value, then in favor of decreasing it.
Example: "Proposal to Increase Slavery"
Voting Round:
Each party votes on the current proposal.
The options are "Yay" (In Favor), "Nay" (Opposed), and "Present"/"No Vote" (for those who just don't care either way).
Vote Tally Round:
The No Votes are discarded, then all the Yays/Nays are added up (the amount of "Votes" each party gets depends on their Power, which is currently 1% of power = 1 vote). If a 51% majority of those that voted Yay/Nay are in favor of the proposal, the proposal succeeds. If not, it fails.
If it fails then the "Negative" proposal of that topic comes up. So it would go back to the Proposal Round and be a "Proposal to Decrease Slavery".
If that also fails the proposal topic goes to the next one.
But when a proposal is successful flow continues to...
Negotiate Policy Round:
The Yays decide amongst themselves how much the topic's value should change. The simplest way is just adopting the proposal which desires the least amount of change (the most "conservative"), but this can be fleshed out a lot more in the future.
Perhaps it all depends if the majority of power is considered Conservative or Liberal, even. So a Conservative government would pick the smallest change, but a Liberal one would prefer the most drastic change. Which is what the words mean in every country but America (both are used as alternating slurs here, hehe)
Set Policy Round:
For simplicity the policy will just be set to the agreed upon amount.
What could also happen is that all the powers then vote on how much of their power they will throw behind implementing the policy, and how much power they'll use to oppose the policy (Power could come to be a set amount, so you'd have to ration your usage of support/opposition, but that's way too complicated for the present time - especially for the AI).
This could even decide how much the trait will increase/decrease per turn (refigured every turn, or every few turns, to show errosion of support of a policy).
The result of this is the final For/Against Power total, from which the disparity of powers is figured, and thus how effectively that policy will be implemented.
And then the flow goes back to the Proposal Round, going threw all the values until all have been addressed.
Then you display the final results of the meeting (they should be stored so they can be looked over at any time, at Least until the next Policy Meeting is over).
And thus the Policy Meeting comes to an end, and the game continues.
The game Pacific Theatre of Operations (1 and 2, I think)(http://www.theunderdogs.org/game.php?id=1875) did something similar to this with a card game, and it was actually one of the things I enjoyed most in the game. It just happened too rarely, and was entirely too random.
That, and the AI was incredibly stupid when it came to this (or maybe it was just a really accurate model of politicians). My plans would be vastly and unequivically better than anyone elses, but it didn't seem to matter much, because it was almost all luck when it came to who won (leaving me to have to load a save many times to get the final outcome I wanted).
The worst was the "Objectives" round, because everyone would often reccommend rediculous goals. Yeah, at the begining of the war it was be Nice to capture Tokyo or Kyoto, but that seems just a Weeee bit unrealistic, if you ask me.
Anyway, that's my stance on the issue as far.
Thoughts, opinions, comments?
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Plutarck
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Earth
Nov 2001
time: 23:17
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Mark:
LOL, not till I reread the post did I see what you mean.
I just threw in the detailed points because they came to mind, and I wanted to make sure that the system wouldn't reach such a quick dead-end that, once it came to the point of fleshing out and detailing the system, that the whole thing would just need to be almost entirely rewritten.
So I thought it out into the future just to see if it could work. And I think it could pretty easily, where you could detail one part of the system without having to really increase the complexety of the whole system.
For instance, the Proposal Round in the begining might just be "whoever wants least get's what they want", but some time in the not so distant future, in a land Far Far Away, that single round could be replaced with something much more intricate, and it wouldn't require that any other "round" be changed, or the whole system altered, or anything else rewritten.
So just ignore all the parts about "eventually", "in the future", and "What could happen", and just note the abstract of the system.
With the exception of the mentioning of "rounds" and how it would all "flow", it's basically the same system I posted on earlier
That and the introduction of the "No Vote", which I think is the only subsantive change, though it's still a "future feature".
Now I see how easy it is to make something way more detailed and complicated than you'll need it to be any time soon. 
It raises the question of whether some of the models should have a kind of version of what is expected to be done real soon, then a "Future" version, which can be as detailed and complicated as anyone wants to bother with.
But most of the models seem pretty good about this so far, so it's just an idle thought I include just because I don't want to delete it and have writting it be a Complete waste of time
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roquijad
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Santiago
Nov 1999
time: 05:17
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I thought and I thought and I thought about Mark's proposal (and Plutarck's almost equivalent system) and I just can't decide. It's simple and it works, but I admit I dislike the ruler being able to get whatever he wants when he has 51% or more power. Although the speed of changes would be slow when near 50% and maybe he won't get it anyway because many things could happen along the way (due to such low speed), I have troubles accepting it. By having 51% power you know you only have to wait to make real your wishes. You just have to wait. Players will see the 51% value as something special (and something worth fighting for) and I don't like that much.
Of course, if everyone else likes it, then there isn't much to add.
Let me propose an idea to adjust Mark's proposal to something I would feel more comfortable with:
Interpret your power as the probability of things going your way in negotiations. A proposal to increase slavery is presented. All agents' powers are summed and grouped depending on their desires. Suppose that gives us:
support increase: 30%
Refuse increase: 70%
We see them as probabilities. The probability of increasing slavery is 0.3.
A dice is rolled to determine what will happen according to those probabilities. If the increase is accepted, it does so in a magnitude that depends on the share supporting the increase. In this case it'd depend on the value 0.3. In particular and for simplicity, the increase could be set to be equal to that share, so in this case slavery would be increased by 0.3.
The same is done for the proposal of decreasing slavery. And that's it.
You can see policies will tend to move in the direction the most powerful agents prefer. And the greater the consensus, the faster the change. So this is pretty much like Mark's proposal, but instead of making changes certain, they are only probable. If you have more than 50% power it's probable things will go your way in the long run, but it's not sure. Even more, if your power is just a little above 50% and the rest of society does not support you in a given policy, then that policy will mostly preserve its current value over long periods of time (the probability of increasing and decreasing is almost the same and the magnitude of change in either directions is also almost the same).
When there's enough support for increasing (decreasing) a policy value (say 70%), then in the next turns the policy will mostly change in that direction. The ocasional decreases (increases), on the other hand, have lower magnitude, so, combining both effects, you'll see a clear evolution in the policy for a given period of time.
And when you're a total despot (100% power), changes are quick and in the exact direction you wanted.
And there's no machiavelism. There's no gain in lying to the interface and it's nearly impossible to grab more power if the rest agents don't want you to.
In essence, it's only an estochastic version of Mark's idea.
Although players don't like randomness because they don't want to save and load to get what they want, I think there's nothing to fear here. Since no policy has an all-or-nothing effect (they all indicate a degree of "something") there's no important harm if a policy goes the "opposite way" temporarily.
What do you think?
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:17
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I don't like the randomness much. It is not for save/reload, we can dedicate a random number generator to policies. I miss the point. 51% IS what politicians aim for, and 100% is another special value. When voting for a president, and thus determining who rules, we use a 51% rule in the real world.
As an additional remark, I think that negociations like that will only handle values with a clear range. Things like budget with lots of components are difficult to describe with that system. How do you propose to model it?
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Yoav Sissman
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Hi all. I'll try and carefully go around the arguments I've related to in the past. I basically agree with most of what's been said here.
(1) I don't see any reason why the NS shouldn't be activated every turn (and again in any point of the turn that the player wishes). The computional resources required are IMO negligable.
If we leave the rest of the details the same, and while the parties opinions stay constant, this will mean that the actual profile will close in on the median profile in an exponentially decreasing ratio (similar to the way that the social parameters fluctuate). So FE let us assume that we decide to close 10% of the gap on each passing turn. Then in the extreme case where the slavery policy is expected to eventually go up from 0% (current) to 100% (median of opinions), it will go up to 10% in the first turn, will be set to 19% (=10%+(100%-10%)/10) in the next turn, 27.1% on the third and so on.
I think its realistic to have government policies twist and tweak more gradually as they close on into their 'final' values. Beside, if we, for the example above, decide to have the policy change in a constant ratio (that is determined during the negotiations) we'll have to figure out a mechanisem to protect the system from manipulations by the player; otherwise if he will be enabled to initiate negotiation at will he will be able to slow down the changes by negotiating every turn.
(2) As of the way we are going to decide how much the policies are going to change every turn, I suggest that we don't use the profile that requires the smallest change. That solution would enable the ruler, should he fail to prevent a change, to slow down the rate of change to null simply by 'defecting to the yay side' and changing his profile to just near the existing government profile.
I suggest we ignore the exact 'proposed policy' of the polpowers altogether for that matter. However, I see no problem in having the rate of policy change depend on the amount of imparity in the vote.
(3) The NS suggested by Rodrigo can work fine for policies such as slavery that consist of one value, independant of that of all other policies. In the case of the decision about the political distribution of the polpower between the polblocks, we must consider the inter-relation between them.
Consider the following scenraio: the current power distribution gives polblock A, B and C each 1/3 of the votes. A's prefered condition would be to have 100% of the power for himself, and so would be that of the two others. So in the negotition there would be a majority (2 to 1) for decresing the power share of ... all of the three polblocks, and to increase the polpower of no one. 
There are various possible solutions to this, like enabling a power share change only when there is a majority for both a power increase for one block and a power decrease for another; personally I don't think that this solutions is quite satisfying but we can try it out and see how it goes.
How about if I the nominal distribution of power will require some sort of a special majority to be changed? I think it is fairly realistic since practically all civilizations has a de-facto constitution if not a formal one (though it often had to do with more then power distribution). We can decide that the polpower distribution will be reshaped only when 75% of the votes would agree that some power distribution B is preferable to the existing power distribution A. Then ES will decrease and the profile will change to the most popular profile, maybe through some iterative process?
For now its just a thought for the record. 
(4) A blast from the past: Rodrigo, why use a median based process to settle negotiations between polblocks but keep the weighted sum system to decide the stance of each polblock in itself?
Won't it be better to use the median system all across the board and have the parties run the negotiations without using the polblocks as an intermidiator? Seems to me that the same logic that applies to the governmet as a whole should apply to the polblocks, only in miniscale.
(5) I rather go without the randomness myself, for now.
(6) LGJ: I don't think that the option of voting about going to war was suggested here. As I see it, voting is used to decide general policies, not specific operational actions.
P.S. its kinda late so please forgive me for the grammer and spelling mistakes.
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roquijad
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Santiago
Nov 1999
time: 05:17
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Mark: When ruler has 100% it's certain things will go his way. If you were wondering about the quickness of changes (having 100% you say changes should happen immediately) then there's nothing to worry about. Since magnitude of changes depends on support share for changes, then we can control exactly how big is the change if you have 100% power. In the particular case I proposed to determine that magnitude in my post, the change can be as big as 100 (in a 0-100 scale), so you'd get exactly what you want the very next turn. However, I disagree things should change that fast, but that's something we can define in more detail if we want to implement the system.
quote:
It appears, though I may be misunderstanding you, that a policy can actually go in the opposite direction to the aggregate preferences of the political players. If this is so, I think players will hate that. |
A policy may in some turns go the opposite way the majority wants, but in the long run the net change will be in the direction of majority. I don't think that's too bad...
But if you're really against oscillations, then an alternative system is to make changes to policies only if there's a majority supporting it. In other words, if the probability of decreasing a policy is, say, 0.1 and the dice indicates the policy must decrease, then you don't decrease it, but preserve its current value.
quote:
Your stochastic approach just would mean things could wander around a bit more. |
hmmm, I think it's more than that. In the deterministic case it's certain you'll get what you want once you have more than 50%, but in the stochastic case it's just probable. That's IMO a significant difference. Although from a "expected value" point of view we can say the final solution is the same, the actual use of dices makes a difference. If a throw a coin 10 times in real life, I may get more or less than 5 heads, even if 5 was the expected value. Something similar will happen in the game. To my taste, that "error" is preferable compared with the certainty the magic 51% value gives you.
Anyway, Mark, since you're coding, I say just go ahead and code whatever you think is worth testing. This discussion about negotiation systems has shown to be hard to kill...
LDi:
quote:
51% IS what politicians aim for, and 100% is another special value. When voting for a president, and thus determining who rules, we use a 51% rule in the real world. |
Sure, 51% IS what we use in real life in democracies. That's the danger of insisting in viewing the games' negotiation system in terms of "votes" and demanding a "majority-rule" governs the system. The aim of the negotiation system is to represent any type of govt. While the majority rule is perfect to model democracies, I doubt it's the best way to go for, FE, pharaonic Egypt.
That's why I in general don't like the majority rule. It's just too democratic to apply it to all regimes. I initiated this thread with a new proposed system based on the majority rule only because many team members are inclined to use it, not because I like it... I was attacked by the maybe-it's-me feeling!
Could you believe I've got yet another system to propose? Let's see if this one attracts more of you:
The Round Table System
Political agents (political blocks and the ruler) are sitting in a round table. An initial value for slavery is given to one of these agents (any one) and base on that value agents have to work on. For now, assume the initial value just "fell from the sky".
Each agent has "intervention points". The more power an agent has, the more points he has. Intervention points are used to alter the slavery value.
The system goes like this: the first agent receives from the sky the slavery value and uses his points to change that value according to his desires. The new value for slavery is passed to the next agent in the table, who does the same, creating a new value that's passed to the next agent and so on. The process finishes when agents don't change the slavery value any more (either because they run out of intervention points or because the slavery value matches the one they want, so there's no need to change it).
An example:
agent1: 30% power, desired_slavery:0
agent2: 10% power, desired_slavery:25
agent3: 60% power, desired_slavery:65
Slavery from the sky: 50
For simplicity, assume intervention points are equal to power*100, so points held by each agent are:
agent1:30
agent2:10
agent3:60
iteration 1:
agent1, who plays first, uses his 30 points to reduce slavery from its initial value of 50 to 20. He's out of points now for next iterations.
agent2, playing second, receives a slavery value of 20 from agent1. He uses only 5 of his points to increase slavery to 25, which is the value he wants. He's able to save 5 points for future interventions.
agent3, playing last, receives slavery at 25 and wants it to be 65, so he uses 40 of his 60 points, letting slavery at 65 and saving 20 points for next iterations.
iteration 2:
agent1 passes, since is out of points.
agent2 reduces slavery value from 65 to 60 using the 5 points he saved in last iteration. That's the best he can do. And he's now out of points.
agent3 increases slavery back to 65 and leaves 15 points in his pocket.
iteration 3:
agent1 and 2 pass because they're out of intervention points.
agent3 doesn't use any of his remaining 15 points because slavery is already where he wants.
Process ends because no points were used in the last iteration. Slavery is then set to 65. The game turn ends. (note the result will be the same in future turns unless desires or powers change)
In this case agent3, the most powerful of them all, had exactly what he wanted, but in general it's not true the most powerful actor gets his way. If agent3 would have wanted slavery to be 90, slavery would have been resulted only in 80.
That's the method. It has good characteristics: no machiavelism, increasing influence in final value with increasing power and having 51%+ doesn't imply you get what you want.
One flaw of the system is order matters. You can get different results by making agents play in different orders. But there's a way to fix it. I'll detail that only if the proposal gains some support.
What about the "fell from the sky" value? It's clear the result depends a lot on this value, so this is important. A brief analysis:
1) it can't be the current slavery value. If the initial value comes from a prior negotiation (which would be the case if you're using current value), then an agent with 51%+ obtains whatever he wants after a few game turns.
2) one interesting option is make this value the ruler's one, like a ruler's proposal to the rest agents. In this case the ruler wouldn't be sitting at the table, just the polblocks. Sounds good, but encourages machiavelism. Instead of proposing what you really want, you'll lie to manipulate the results.
3) another option is to always start with the same number, but agents wanting a value near that have it easier than the rest... unfair!
4) the best seems to be the use of "moderates/compromisers". As I said some posts away, polblocks views could be merged to build a new political view representing the position of people looking for compromises. These "moderates" have a piece of power subtracted from the original polblocks. In the round table system, it'd be the moderates who present an initial policy value to start "discussing" about in the round table. Polblocks (with their reduced power) and the ruler would then act according to the rules of the round table I showed above.
opinions?
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roquijad
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Santiago
Nov 1999
time: 05:17
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ooooops! I wrote the last post off-line and in the mean time Lordy and Yoav posted... that's why there's no comment of mine refering to their opinions...
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Yoav Sissman
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I would like the hear the method for ignoring the polpowers order. I've got a feeling that once I hear it I won't like the Round Table (RT) system, but I don't want to criticize it until I do.
I agree with LGJ that the process must be automatic (unless we allow the other polblocks to play it wisely as well).
As for the 4 suggestions for the value dropping from the sky:
(1) I agree it can't be the current.
(2) Its a problematic suggestion since having the ruler pick the value and then not sit at the table won't leave room for he size of his power share to have impact.
(3) The constant value sits best with me. The unfairness that Rodrigo mentions is, IMHO, the principle of the RT system, and will always exist if we assume there is a priliminary suggestion that the polplayers have to spend points to change (more points the further away they are).
(4) The details are not clear enough to me.
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:17
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Hi All:
Boy, this topic sure is "the gift that keeps on giving"...
The RT system as presented doesn't do much for me. It seems a more complicated way of getting largely the same results (or would be after being tweaked). I could certainly be wrong, but that's the way it seems after just a bit of thought.
However, now I've got a modification to propose. If A Power Block's "Power Points" needed to be split selectively between All Policies in the RT system it could be very interesting and strategic. But also significantly more complicated. It would happen similarly to Rodrigo's RT proposal except that a PB's power points could only be spent once in a turn. (and probably move things more than in Rodrigo's original proposal. You would have to have all policies open for negotiation at the same time. If one PB only Really cared about a particular issue, it could use all its points there if needed. I am assuming the participants would have to set their points dedicated to each issue before the negotiations began, though it wouldn't Have to be that way.
The proposal gives rise to strategic questions like "Is it more important to reduce Slavery, increase Foreign Policy [flexibility], or maintain my power setting"? But it might be unstable since if one side goes to increase its power while others are focused elsewhere, you could get big power swings that really wouldn't happen. My guess is because of this, some special rules would need to be there to allow points allocated elsewhere to automatically be reassigned to maintaining political power.
Such a system could be really intriguing, but could also be a real nightmare for the AI and the player. For that reason I'm not advocating it, but I thought I'd put down the idea here, and see what others think.
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Yoav Sissman
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I like the idea of allowing the polplayers to choose where they would prefer to throw their weight; I like it a lot.  However I'm not very enthusiastic about making a gambling game out of the NS.
So here's my idea:
We use some variation of the system suggested in the top of this thread. Each faction is given a global number of votes equal to its power share multiplied by some convenient constant (or better yet, we can use floating-point variables for this).
Next, each polpower chooses how much of its points it would like to dedicate to each of the issues which are up for a vote, and the new gov't policy is determined using the median system for each subject independently.
As a first step we have to define the objectives of each faction in doing this. For simplicity we can define a utility function from the type:
f(GPi) = - (GPi - PPi) ^ 2
Where GPi is the effective gov't profile for policy i and PPi is the party profile for that policy.
Besides that we have to assign each party a vector of scalars - 'A' to determine the relative importance of each policy for the party. The objective of the party would be to maximize the value of:
A(1)*f(GP1) + A(2)*f(GP2) + ... + A(n)*f(GPn)
where n is the number of different issues up for vote.
We may want to make use of this value for other parts of the game as well. (Riots model?)
The purpose is to create complete transparency to all sides, so each will know what will be the political result of his point’s distribution. The paradox is that the result depends on the way others use their points, which is influenced by the way everybody but them uses theirs, and so on.
So to go around this we should find out if passing control between the polpowers in a round table order, and have each redistribute its points on its turn as necessary to optimize his utility function for that condition, will result in an equilibrium after a reasonable number of iterations.
As of the ruler, he may be flesh and blood so we can't force him to participate in the iterative process. Therefore we can have him input his distribution first and allow the other polpowers to view it as constant (skipping him in the RT). If the ruler isn't happy with the results, then he can just change his preferences and hit his 'negotiate!' button again, until he is satisfied.
Of course that this too requires micromanagment from his behalf so we can enable him to choose to leave it as an automatic process, that will input his preferences and treat him like it treats the other polplayer.
Makes sense?
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:17
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A RT where each party has a limited number of points is interesting, but will be nightmarish from the AI point of view, in particular because it cannot know what the player wants to do, so the parties may put all their votes where that pleases the ruler and the player, by saving/reloading, may be able to determine how to vote to get the best of the system. So, although I like the idea, I think it would:
1) be very complicated for the ai to handle
2) lead to abuse
LGJ, why do you want something other than political power to have an influence on the number of votes?
quote:
Sure, 51% IS what we use in real life in democracies. That's the danger of insisting in viewing the games' negotiation system in terms of "votes" and demanding a "majority-rule" governs the system. The aim of the negotiation system is to represent any type of govt. While the majority rule is perfect to model democracies, I doubt it's the best way to go for, FE, pharaonic Egypt. |
I don't know about Egypt. I know however that Louis XVI's France was based roughly on very small ruler power with roughly:
10%ruler, 30%noble, 30%clergy, 30%"Tiers Etat". Nobility, clergy and "the rest" had equal power, and thus the first two always got what they wanted because they voted together. The Tiers Etat never got anything. That is why the Revolution came, because they had no way to influence the policy, even though they had 1/3rd of the votes. Now, admittedly, the ruler's power could have been more important, but it was relinquished by the king in order to avoid riots. I think a model that would allow Tiers Etat to change things with their 1/3rd of votes would be historically inaccurate.
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20-02-2002 11:46
I'm not sure. Can you enlighten us?
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