On the other side, how the model uses "ideologies" presents another problem. Ideologies have fixed values and they should cover all the relevant regimes the game is expected to have. If a scenario designer chooses to have 10 classes instead of the original setting, the number of ideologies needed for the minimum flavor increases Extensively.

Ideologies have yet another problem. For representative regimes, pol.power shares must go according to demographic shares. Since pol.power shares are fixed in ideologies, this means the ideology itself needs to determine demographic shares, so coherency can be obtained. This isn't much of a problem with the current classes we're dealing with (excluding middle class) if we accept demographic shares are given by the values of PP, EP and SP, but if now one imagines adding/changing classes, then the relationship between demographic shares and ideologies can be very complicated.

IMO the govt model is simply not expandible. If this characteristic is a must in the team's view, then a radical change is needed in the model. I never thought about expanding classes, so it's my mistake.
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IMO some kinda balance is needed. It doesn't haveto be as customizable as the technology model is (which you can add/delete/change any application tech and probably and basic tech, pretty much anything but the technology engine itself).

You said yourself you don't want scerio designers to get frustrated at designing new kindof classes for scerios. IMO if you want to design a class for a scerio that cannot be done any other way, you should be able to do that. FE: One might want a small, but non-the-less important "Gestapo" type class or in an expansion for magic and such a wizard class (which i want and if there was an add-on for this could probably boost clash's userbase alot, atleast the people i know,but that's for later since right now were working on clash in the real world).

I'm stuck on trying to code that now. I'm thinking on my feet, but how about this, it's very similar to what you have above, but reorganized --

Each SocialClass has/chooses an Ideology, as above.

An Ideology holds:

1) Tolerance for ruler absolutism (a %?).
2) Their preference on govt spending (econ, social, military).
3) A list of Social classes the ideology has an opinion about. If no opinion, then a 'default' value will be used.

Then a Govt has a 'PowerStructure' object, which defines which SocialClasses have which level/percent of political power in that govt?

Then using these two, you could achieve all you asked above, and still expand it to include any number and type of Social Classes.

Perhaps I'll try this. Maybe it'll fail miserably. I'm just not sure how else to proceed, and I feel like coding. What the heck, I'll give it a spin.

Yes, ideologies are a problem for model expandability, but you're taking a rather dramatic way out! If you change what an ideology is (holds), you're changing one of the cornerstones of the model... I simply cannot imagine what am I going to do with your invention! For a start, the main reason for introducing the concept of ideologies in the model was that it was going to hold a political structure (classes and their respective pol.powers). Now you put totally different info. You also are making each class choose an ideology, while several ideologies can be supported by the same class. Your prototype will be something totally different from what I planned!

1) I didn't understand the table of my example either. It is now obsolete so forget about it. It has grown since... I have everything in an Excel spreadsheet and I am finishing details. (btw, can you help me with a macro I want to make, to make turns pass?)

2) Currently, the definition of the MC that I am using is being economically independant, possesing the capital to employ their own labor. That means that they will lean ideologically from time to time towards the UC or the LC, while in an earlier approach, their income was strictly 50-50, and so would be their profile. Any more ideas are welcome, after you all have seen my progress.

3) It's a hard time for us commies my friend...

Man, there has been a lot of action since I was last here... I'm going to respond to the coding debate in the other thread.

Unless I'm missing something, the only other thing that I really need to respond to is Rodrigo's question about the problems in the Econ model when there is only a lower and upperclass. (And also taking as the definition that the lower class cannot control any capital or land.) I have already described the problem in my post of July 5. I will elaborate on it a little bit here. The main problem comes near subsistence. If we assume that the UC controls all capital and land, it is natural to assume that they get a part of the profits proportional to the capital and land value in the production process. So I have assumed in trying to match the economic and government models that the class that controls a particular input to the production process gets a proportional amount of the production to call theirs. To figure out the value of each input to the production process (labor, capital, and land in the farm sector for example) I assume that the marginal productivity due to that resource indicates its value in the production process.

To make this concrete, the values that are at the top of the Econ spreadsheet for the very poor low-tech province show the extra amount produced if adding a single unit of each of labor, land, and capital in the farming sector. These amounts are 3.68 for labor, 0.93 from land, and 0.81 from capital. So if we assume that the UC gets all the food produced due to its contributions (both land and capital) in the current model it will get (0.93+ 0.81)/(3.68+ 0.93+ 0.81) = 32% of the food credited to it. Only the remaining 68% would be what the LC could call its own. So even Before Any Taxation the food left to the LC would be 68% x 5.27 = 3.6 units of food. This is on the brink of catastrophic starvation! (4 units of food per head are required for minimal nutrition and no net population growth) At this level of food the population will be declining approximately 1% per year! And this is a province with pretty good agricultural land, it would be much worse in a less well-endowed province.

So that is why I think we need one of two things, either an LC that allows for some control of capital, or a middle class. I think Axi's suggestion about calling free subsistence farmers middle class is basically a good one... We could also mess around with the way the Econ model works to avoid this problem, but the Econ model also has a lot of work in it, and is somewhat difficult to balance. I have already cited numerous other arguments for why a middle class is, I think, a good idea, and I won't repeat them here.

The beast is about ready to be put to work. After some cosmetic cleanup, I'll be spending time on the turnhandler code tonight. Which leaves me with a few questions:

1. Tax Rate -- Right now, the govt's tax rate policy automatically becomes the ruler's tax rate pref after one turn. I was wondering if the majority EthnicGroup (in the proportions of the govt's power structure) should have a say in taxation.
   
2. Numbers -- As I look at and play with this, it is slightly confusing for slavery and a few others to not use the 0%-100% range. Might just be me, but should we standardize the numbers?
   
3. Economic Class v. 'Job' -- it made most sense, from a data storage viewpoint, to seperate these two. But this will be seamless and invisible to the player. The values will cumulate and look exactly as ya'll have laid out.
   
4. Political Power Structure -- right now, the player can set the %'s. I assume that they have to add up to 100% total (might have been in the text and I missed it)? I think perhaps I'm suppose to have a selection of govt types (the ones in the 'ideologies' section of the govt post) for the player to chose from? If so, anyone want to come up with values there?
   

I tried to play with the beast last night and windows crashed while doing it. I'll try again tonight to give you more feedback.

As for the questions you rise now,

1)It's perfect how you have it now. We haven't invented a way (in terms of equations) to make a class choose a desired tax rate. Probably it won't be ness. either. Keept it how you have it.

2)There're some good reasons for the ranges I chose. It has to do with the outcomes needed. Preserve ranges as they're.

3)Job? I don't know what you mean, but if it's something you'll keep hidden and I can still be thinking of our regular social classes, I don't mind.

Oh, god, I'm sorry it crashed Windoze. That's not suppose to happen with Java, altho using IE as the platform can create problems. If it happens again, please let me know. Do be warned, the GUI stuff is *very* slow to load . . . my webspace is the freebie space that comes with my cable modem, and it's poor. Altho on my machine here at home it loads in about 15-20 seconds (at work it takes about 30-40 seconds).

The downloadable zip (which doesn't have the newest stuff yet, maybe I'll put that together tommorrow) has an application that alleviatest that problem, if you don't have a cablemodem yourself.

I am dying to get your feedback. I'm sure I've missed the boat on a few things, and I'm anxious to finish this baby and get on to other models.

For the last weeks I've been considering how to increase flexibility and scalability concerning social classes. This was triggered by F_Smith and others who wanted to see more classes than the ones I and Axi considered originally for the model. Unfortunately, I don't bring good news. I decided to change a couple of things to allow some more flexibility, but it's far from being what some of you wanted.

In order to let you all know why adding more classes is no easy task, I'm gonna enter in some details. Hopefuly this will help understanding the problem.

From the computational point of view, it's quite easy to add any number of social classes. You just have to add more objects and that's it. The problem comes in modeling classes' behavior. Objects hold two things. Data and procedures for the data. Procedures take data and process it with some equations to produce something we call "class' behavior", which is nothing but another set of numbers we interpret as classes' decisions. In order to have an arbitrary number of classes AND their behaviors, we need equations (procedures) that are common to all of them. Having common equations for all social classes is what makes possible scalability, because if you need to code new procedures for new behaviors each time you add a social class, then you have to admit there's no real scalability.

Having a common set of equations for all social classes assumes their behavior is similar. In that case it's the data (class' attributes) that produces the small differences. This is FE what we see in the military area. Each time we want to add a new unit, we just specify its attributes (attack strength, speed, etc) and the game engine uses the same procedures with these new numbers to generate the unit's behavior in the battle field. And this is good because military units are indeed very similar. Having a common set of equations for all units (of most of them) makes sense and therefore you have scalability.

Unfortunately this is not the case with social classes. If one starts to imagine classes like "farmers", "scientists", "religious warriors", "land-based aristocracy", "trade-based aristocracy", "freed slaves", "greenpeace fighters", "jedi knights", "elves", "robots", and a very long "etc", then it's pretty obvious that behaviors can get to be very different. If you try to create a set of equations valid for all of them it becomes a monumental task. Having a set of equations common to all classes was very problematic when I was developing the model and I only had 5 classes! I actually didn't achieve it. I found that to have a reasonable and believable class behavior for each of them I needed class-specific procedures in many parts of the game. Generic (or parametric)equations are hard to create, specially if you want social classes to have a sophisticated behavior like the one we're trying to implement.

Equation sophistication is just a part of the problem. Data input you need for behavioral equations will not be entirely held in classes' attributes. Scientists will be interested in tech variables, aristocrats in economic data, greepeace in ecological data, etc. A generic class behavior equation would actually have to access all available info in the game!

It's the nature of human behavior that complicates things. It can be so complex and different from group to group that it's ambicious to resume it all in a few equations, even if you are focusing only in some aspects of behavior.

Coding will allow us to create any number of social classes we want, but we have to realize this coding flexibility doesn't mean game flexibility. When a new social class is added, it will use the same procedures older ones used and so, class' behavior will be almost the same. The new social class is useless and senseless. It will behave as the others do, which means the game hasn't really changed. You can add 20 more classes and the same happens. We'd be fooling ourselves if we trust that adding more social_class objects will bring us new and different scenarios.

So, I'm sorry to say it, but the model doesn't have the capacity to scale up. One solution is to change the model and create a new one with a much simpler behavior for social classes. Simple enough so we can have generic procedures for all classes. But I wouldn't take that road. On one side the model will lose flavor and in the other it implies a more homogeneous behavior for all classes (as it happens with military units), and homogenity is the greatest enemy to social classes, because the fun in having more classes is having new behaviors.

The other solution is to allow scenario designers to code new behaviors. Add a class and code whatever it feels good for the class behavior. But, well, if players can get into coding, the word "game flexibility" takes another meaning...

This ends my explanation. Now I present to you the update to the govt model. It will allow having an arbitrary number of the so-called "economic classes". The model originally included the Upper Class and the Lower Class. With this update we can (if we want) include the Middle Class and as many other economic classes we want without reducing behavior flavor we have till now. The model, then, will have N economic classes, plus the Warriors Class (formerly known as Military Class), the Religious Class and the Bureaucratic Elite.

The update replaces UC and LC behavior equations with a generic set of behavior equations for "Socio-economic classes" (I hope the word "socio-economic" exists in english). I prefer the term "socio-economic" to simply "economic" because class behavior will be given by economic role AND cultural info. The scenario designer and we (when creating the "by default" game setting) have to choose a number of socio-economic classes and for each of them need only to specify 1)the degree in which the socio-economic class controls kapital and 2)the degree in which it provides labor. The exact measure in which both variables will be handled is still TBD depending on how they best serve the econ model. Political and economic behavior for socio-economic classes will be given using these two variables and cultural info from the social model. Equations for socio-economic classes' behavior will wait until we decide how variables for provision of kapital and labor will be measured. Equations shouldn't be a problem once that is solved.

One of the problems of adding more classes was ideologies. Ideologies were meant to have a list of all social classes and their respective political powers. Adding more social classes would make the list longer, which isn't a problem, but would complicate defining how any govt type should look like regarding pol.power distribution and would also encourage the introduction of an important amount of extra ideologies. To solve this, instead of a list of all classes, ideologies will posses this info:

Ruler's pol.power
People's pol.power
Capitalists pol.power
Religious Class pol.power
Warrior Class pol.power

(if you don't know why the Bureaucratic Elite doesn't appear here, refer to the model document)
This means Upper Class pol.power and Lower Class pol.power were replaced by People's pol.power and Capitalists pol.power. People's pol.power is pol.power granted to the masses in terms "one man, one vote". This means a social class has access to this pol.power proportionally to its demographic share. The RC and WC are very small because they're respectively the religious leaders and the high officers of the army. Then, demographically they're assumed to have a share of 0%. Then, only socio-economic classes have relevant demographic sizes and therefore only them have access to People's pol.power. Demographic shares for each socio-economic class are given by a TBD procedure currently in discussion in the govt-econ thread.

Capitalists pol.power is the pol.power granted to socio-economic classes that provide kapital. These classes have access to this pol.power proportionally to the amount of kapital controlled.

Having ideologies defined like this implies that socio-economic classes have a total pol.power computed as the sum of the People's pol.power granted in terms of demography (which may be interpreted as "votes") and the Capitalists pol.power granted because of its control over kapital (which may be interpreted as aristocracy privieleges).

Just as an example, the ideology for a democracy would look like this:
Ruler's pol.power___________20%
People's pol.power__________80%
Capitalists pol.power_______0%
Religious Class pol.power___0%
Warrior Class pol.power_____0%

Even though Capitalists pol.power is null, socio-economic classes providing kapital have pol.power anyway through People's pol.power, but only proportionally to their demographic share. In this way, you can see why Capitalists pol.power can be considered a priveledge. It gives more power than the demographic share.

Finally, this change in how ideologies are defined implies a change in how Warrior Class' mentality is computed. It was formerly computed as partly influenced by the Upper Class and partly by the Lower Class. It will be now computed using People's pol.power, Capitalists pol.power, demographic shares and kapital shares in a way I won't detail now.

One advantage of the new way to specify ideologies is that computing demographic shares can be (if desired) totally independent from ideologies themselves (that is, independent from the economic variables ideologies specify). In the old system, it was very "advisable" to compute demographic shares using ideologies info to achieve consistency.

It should be said that in order to make this update useful, the govt-econ interactions must be able to manipulate an arbitrary number of socio-economic classes. Since that thread is still under development, I guess we're still on time to get that done the right way.

I like it. I like it a lot.

I have to disagree, what you've built scales nicely and would allow a large number of different types of 'social classes' to be defined that acted very differently. Varying the values of the ideology produces a very different social class behavior.

I like 'ruler', 'people', 'capital' as an object design for political power. Then including any collection of 'social classes' defined for that game is fine.

We can define yours as the 'basic' social classes, for now -- in fact, I'll do that soon, in the beast.

And other 'social classes' with their own ideologies can be defined. Adding a 'Scientific community' social class can be a matter of defining it's ideology.

Obviously you thought about this a lot. Great solution!

I don't want to muddy the issue any, but I had one vague thought. For arbitrary class behavior of the 'scientist' type we might be able to use the tags that the tech system already has. If mostly using the tags some simple system that fit with your existing equations could be designed, then all you would have to do is interface with the 'hard science' tag (don't think there is one...). We are trying to keep the list of tags down to 10-20 or so, but still that would give potentially 10-20 additional classes that could be added based on tags. FE farmers... The Elves are clearly on their own

About the scientific class: If we accept the number of classes is a key decision, then we can start discussing about it. If, as a team, we feel a sci class is needed, then I have no problem generating equations for its behavior. Just please let's focus first in the arbitrary vs fixed number of social classes. IMO this is a more important subject and relevant for coding matters.

F_Smith:
Based on your comments above and some you gave in the object builder thread, I believe you have a little confusion with ideologies. I'll give a brief explanation below about them. If this confusion of your was only in my imagination, just ignore me.

Class behavior and ideologies:
Ideologies are a description of how the govt should work, regarding 1)who has the political power, and 2)what economic regime to implement. Variables describing an ideology are the same for all of them. Only numbers change from one to another. FE, a capitalist democracy ideology and a communist dictatorship ideology:

Variable__________capit.democr______comm.dict.
Ruler's pol.power__________20%_________70%
Capitalists pol.power______0%__________0%
Religious Class pol.power__0%__________0%
Warriors Class pol.power___0%__________30%
People's pol.power_________80%_________0%
Private Property___________90%_________0%
Social Policies____________15%_________100%
Economic Planning__________X%__________Y%

(I didn't put values for EP because we're not sure anymore how to handle this variable and it's likely to disappear from the game)

Just like the two examples above, we'll have around 20 ideologies in the game covering all the govt types we've seen in history. The values for each ideology are fixed during gameplay. Ideologies will be discovered as techs, just how in civ2 you discover "monarchy", "communism", etc.

Each social class has a behavior (or mentality). A social class has NOT an ideology. A social class' mentality covers several things, like its preference about slavery (not covered in ideologies as can be seen). As a part of social class' behavior, class members choose the ideology of its preference (among those discovered). FE, Lower Class members in western countries would be inclined to choose democracy as their preferred ideology. The model actually allows classes to be divided. Some class members may choose democracy while others choose communism. FE, the following is possible:

Class______communism_____democracy____monarchy
WarriorClass___5%_____________85%________10%
LowerClass___26%____________71%________3%

which means, FE, that 26% of the people within the lower class supports communism.

Class preferences for available ideologies vary depending on things like culture. Because of this, as culture changes, preferences do too. People can support monarchy in ancient times, but dislike it in modern ages.

The above shows that behavior/mentality is not equal to ideology. That's why a phrase like "Adding a 'Scientific community' social class can be a matter of defining it's ideology." is not correct. The sci class has a behavior which may include things like a preference for scientific investements. The sci class can choose, as only a part of its wider behavior, an ideology. This choice represents the sci class preference for govt type. In fact, several classes can choose the same ideology and still have different behaviors in other aspects.

I was not suggesting the scientists class as something that should be in the basic game. Rather it was just an example of something a scenario designer might like to do. I did not mean to throw off the discussion of the basic system you outlined, which I think is really good, with my comments about flexibility. My idea was simply one that to model a "landed aristocracy" class that one could basically use something that extends the behavior of the UC. So our landed aristocracy class would simply be a class that behaves like the UC in most ways, except that some fraction of its happiness with the government would involve increases in economic behavior related to "farming" tags in the technology model.

I think I understand the difficulties involved with creating an arbitrary number of social classes. In addition to interacting with things like the economic model, the classes interact with each other. Thus, the complexity of the system increases exponentially as more classes are added.

However, I think we should include the functionality anyway. The ability to design custom social classes is a powerful design tool. Perhaps the designer of a modern scenario would want to take out the Military Elite and replace it with Entertainer Elite. It would be hard to do it properly, but if the good Civ 2 scenarios are any indication, some people are willing to put lots of time and care into scenarios.

I think I do understand. Let me verify:

I need to give each civ a collection of known 'ideologies', correct?

Then each 'social class' needs to pick from among those available 'ideologies', and store it's choice?

Should the ruler also chose an 'ideology'?

Oops -- yes, that was suppose to be to Rodrigo.

Yep you did point out a glaring flaw in my ideology design. Your right we should have 2 basic idea stuctures for ideologies, social and economic, but under social there can be more than 1. I'll take your example of a democratic military rule. Those are both social ideologies, each one seperate. So what we need is to define certain groups for each, FE you cannot want a momarchial oligarchy...that just doesn't make sence.
Right now there are 3 possible 4 groups for idelogies.
Group 1: Economic Ideology
Group 2: Ruling Class Ideology
Group 3: Ruling Style Ideology
Group 4: Misc (Maybe Ethical Ideology(ies))

You got it. Just remember classes don't pick just one ideology. Whithin classes can be division as in my example above.

The ruler doesn't pick an ideology. At least human players won't. I don't know how AI players will be handled. (still unsolved). Players will put in the values for each individual variable in ideologies instead of picking the whole pre-set thing.
Allowing the player to choose each value for each of the variables in ideologies gives a huge of flexibility to the game. Even having a fix number of ideologies in the tech tree, the number of different govt types will be vast thanks to player intervention.

Mark (and all):
The thing is where the limit is drawn. We can have the landed aristocracy if behavioral equations take food production (for example) in consideration. A scientific class can exist if equations consider tech info. And so on. I know scenario designers can be interested in things like a sci-class or whatever. I'm saying we can't provide that flexibility without extremely complex equations accessing all sorts of info from other models. Richard said "My General Policy: If the programmer says it is feasable and the model lead can add it to the model without much trouble, I say go for it." I agree completely. But I have to say we cannot have whatever social class a designer may imagine.

If you all want a scientific class, I think we can make it. If you all want economic classes with some more specific behavior (traders class, land-aristocracy class, etc), I think we can make it too. What I'm saying is we can have several more classes, but each one (sometimes with luck, each family of classes) needs time to be developed (creating equations for them). So we have to draw a line. We need to decide what classes will be there (in all games, not only the "basic" game).

All I'm saying is the model has no flexibility (almost not at all). The social classes we choose, those will be there in every game. The only flexibility the model has now is allowing an arbitray number of socio-economic classes. But all games will have socio-economic classes (one or more).

I'll now take my own advice:
Sci Elite is differnet from other classes currently out there is that it has one goal for the most part, to further the knowledge of science. This can me adapted to fit whatever the circumstances are, such as within religious tolerance, etc. But that is first and foremost and will usually go against such things.

I admit to not being familiar with all the mathematical guts of the model. If you say we can't have flexibility, then we can't have it. In my example of the landed aristocracy class, I was only citing them as an example of flexibility. I don't think they in particular are more necessary than any of a handful of other possible classes I might select as important.

I support Rodrigo's classes as they are for the base game, which is what we are going to be working on for a Long time. For the "economic classes" I think we should stick to upper, middle, and lower class at least for the first round of playtesting of the model.

First, we're going to worry about how the govt policies play out. For now, we'll allow the tester/player to simply choose the govt type at will, without worrying about the people's govt choice. So you've got time to keep thinking along these lines.

2) This is just a suggestion, please don't take it as a challenge or anything -- but perhaps this type of 'ideology' object isn't really the proper way to handle a govt choice by the people during a popular revolution?

It doesn't seem to reflect how things actually happen. I don't think that the people of the French Revolution were screaming for Democracy, they just were dissatisfied and demanded change. Which in large part explains what happened.

I think that how it works even today is that when people are unhappy, they sieze on any change available. We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this.

The actual direction of the change is entirely dependant on the individual that ends up with the most public support. Napolean. George Washington/Thomas Jefferson/etc. Lenin/Stalin.

The biggest difference between these revolutions was the goals of the men that lead them.

So, to sum up, I think that if people are "happy" (well fed and prosperous, and feel somewhat 'involved' in the national debate), they will not want govt change. Don't change horses in midstream, and all that. Only the ruler/rulers will attempt to affect change.

Until the people are unhappy. And then, they pick leaders (perhaps based upon nationality/religion/whatever). And those leaders set the course.

At least, that's what I see around me even today.

Rodrigo's idea to include a "People's power", shared by any demographic class, is really great. What really dissapointed me is the "Capitalist power" thingy which seems to be able to represent only a capitalist society, like the modern ones. As a Marxist, the first thing that came to my mind after reading the update is the case of a communist revolution: Marx has taught us that, during the transitional stage of communism, a "dictatorship of the proletariat" should be established, so no other economic class but the LC should hold pol.power (ideally, the LC should hold ALL the power, but in most known cases, the largest part of power was held by the ruler, the WC and the BE). But if we, in Clash, made people's power=100%, then the UC and the MC would hold some power too; while communism, in the transitional stage, is NOT democratic, so the correct value would be people's power=0%. Democratism exists, but only because the ruling class is the majority of the population instead of the minority, so it assumes democratic forms instead of oligarchic ones. At the final stage of communism, classes are abolished, so all people participate equally in public affairs and democracy is restored (people's power becomes 100%).
Although these