Government Model v.2

[F_Smith]

Rodrigo:

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'?

P.S. -- I still think custom social classes will be far easier than you realize. It's all based upon variables that can be manipulated. But that is certainly for later.
[This message has been edited by F_Smith (edited August 15, 2000).]

[Richard Bruns]

F_Smith: Was that a typo, or were you asking me about the social model? I had nothing to do with the guts of this model; I am only doing the demographics.

[F_Smith]

Richard:

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

Sorry.

[Lord God Jinnai]

This was copied from the social tech thread.

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))

Group 1 is basically how you want your ecomic situation to be done, planned or not.
Group 2 is what class should predominatly rule the society. This may seem to be redudant as each class would think itself should rule, but there are things like no one/everyone and in a few cases a class may think it best not to rule (with rulership comes responsibility after all). A RL situation is Afganistan (i believe thats the country) where there was a Military Coup. Anyway the military doesn't want to rule, but it doesn't want a corrupt civilian government to rule like was the case before. They are looking out for what is best for the nation, not themselves. Ir is the plan for them to stay in power only so long as nessasary. Things might change, but that is the ideology currently.
Group 3 is the method they rule by such as demorcary or fundimentalism
Group 4 is more of an on/off switch thing right now for things that don't fit clearly into the picture for this. Constitutions are an example. Like Rich stated, almost any, if not any, form of government can have a constitution of some sort. And the oppsoite is quite true also. One doesn't need a constitution for democracy or republic though all have them today. Rome and Athens didn't. That's what the plan i have so far, of course this is just my idea.

[roquijad]

F_Smith:

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).

[Lord God Jinnai]

I think if we're not going to have flexibility, then we need to have a sci elite class because this will be emensily important in future societies in some cases. I'm not going to push for anything beyond my models i know a lot about (such as mark's land aristorcracy) without knowing how it impacts the model and how it can't be handled otherwise. So if anybody wants something in, describe how it works and how it can't be achieved w/o it.

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.

Anyway sci elite don't care about ecomic situations, unless it directly effects them. Whereas most of the others are in for the short term gain, sci elite rarely are. They are willing to do whatever they can to further the knowledge of the universe and beyond. That isn't to say they don't have other goals, but that is what differentiates them from other classes, something no other class can really mimic, the devoting to learning more about science and technology, even if it is not culturally, politically or economically viable right this minute or in the near future.
[This message has been edited by Lord God Jinnai (edited August 15, 2000).]

[Mark_Everson]

Rodrigo:

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.

I very much disagree that we should have a "scientist" class specifically. If we were going to add one more class there are 10 or 15 more important ones IMO in terms of history. And I'm a scientist! The fact is that scientists have had extremely little political power over almost the entire sweep of history. LGJ, I think I and most of the other members of the project view Clash as primarily a historical game. If we could have the flexibility to add lots of classes, I certainly think scientists for future scenarios should be among them. But it looks as though that is not going to be possible. At least without some very clever footwork by scenario designers.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Well that's the thing. If its all or nothing, we should put in now what we forsee the player may want to use. We can't forsee everything ofcourse, but we atleast try.

I mean i would also say adding a wizard class would be good then as an option soley for scerio designing. Either that or make a scripting language where they can.

[F_Smith]

1) For now, I'm moving the beast on without ideologies. We don't need them yet.

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.

Please be kind in disagreeing . . .

[axi]

Wow! There is a major overhaul planned here and luckily I'm back to prevent it from going totally astray. Rodrigo's line of thought needs a bit of expansion. This is my vision of a possible implementation. If my line of thought seems too messy, I beg your pardon; it is due to the slight fever.

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 proccupations may seem trivial to you, IMO this demonstrates the inconsistency of Rodrigo's model. To lift this inconsistency, a "Labor power" should have to be incuded along with the "Kapital power".

After this, another thought came into my mind: How about Sites? If power can be attributed to factors of production such as Kapital or Labor, why not attribute it to Sites too? Until the industrial revolution, the ruling class was the Landowning class. The capitalist class (the bourgeois) had in many cases to resort in revolution in order to take over political power from the hands of the landowning aristocracy. Of course capitalists and landowners were competing social classes for only a relatively short period of social history. In ancient economies, because of the prevalence of the primary sector and of low technology, the role of kapital was relatively insignificant and the nobility owned both land and capital. For the first time in classic antiquity (Greece and Rome) and then again during the Rennaisance, advanced merchant activity led to an enlargment of the secondary and (chiefly) the tertiary sector and to the emergence of a bourgeois class. During the industrial revolution, because of the prevalence of the secondary sector and of high technology, the bourgeois class became dominant and, after a while, it engulfed the landowning class, so that today, in the modern economies, the class distinction between landowners and capitalists is again abolished. So, IMO, "Landowner's power" should be also included.

How about the Middle Class? I believe that further flexibility concerning the economic classes should be avoided., because it increases complexity enormously (specially if we consider the economic system as 3fold, with power attributed to all 3 production factors: S, K, L), without providing us with novel behaviors. IMO, all we need is a single Middle Class, defined as follows: The Middle Class is economically independant: it posesses enough Sites and Kapital to employ it's own Labor. Thus the MC will be in the center of a 3fold socioeconomic system and it's power will derive from the power attributed to each economic factor, weighed according to the ratios demanded by the production function.

Where I believe that flexibility is really needed is in the "pure" social classes ("job" classes according to F_Smith, "non-demographic" or "institutional" classes according to me; how should we call them?). We can do that because institutional classes are much simpler; they have only a political role and not an economic one; they don't have demographics. Political power should be attiributed to each of the social contributions as well as to each of the economic ones; simple or complex institutional classes can be defined according to the type and analogy of their contributions (We can have f.e. a holy warriors class that provides 40% of the society's security and 20% of it's ethics, while a monks class provides 60% ethics, a mandarin class with the rest 20% ethics and 100% admin and finally a generals class with the rest 60% security). Their pol.power can be derived from the power attributed to their contributions. Their research and investment profiles can also be derived from their contributions, using the research tags and infrastructure classes related to their contributions. Their cultural profiles should derive from the majorities cultural profiles, differentiated by arbitrary bias, set by the author. Of course, (as Rodrigo has pointed out before) there is the ecxeption of the RC which relates it's cultural attributes to an independant religion submodel (RCM instead of MCA), but, as F_Smith has once stated, this type of behavior can be used by other classes too (wizards of different "spheres", scientists of different "philosophic schools", etc). Their (the institutional classes) ideologic profiles should derive in the same way, as it already happens in the formula given in Rodrigo's govt model.

I also feel that even mixed classes are possible for scenario creating purposes. Whole or part of a social contribution can be arbitrarily attributed to one of the given economic classes, so that it's power will be respectively augmented (Landowners that are also warriors and administrators are more powerful than simple landowners; that's the difference between Feudalism and Aristocracy). But no matter how mixed the classes are, the economic classes will never be more than 4 (That means that you can't have simple landowners AND feudal lords at the same time).

What we only need strict control of is the social contributions included in the game, because it will be them (and not the actual social classes) that will be directly related to the gamedata. Compartmentalisation of the game would help us alot, but I sincerely doubt that a scenario editor would simply be able to add a novel contribution to the system without editing the whole game. We should make provisions for some more possible contributions, even if they do not make it to the standard game. This is a list of possible areas that could be associated with a social contribution and be related to one or more institutional classes:

• Ecology/Nature/Environmentalism
• Media/Informations/Communications
• Entertainment
• Science/Education
• Wizardry/Psionics

Just as a reminder, the standard list of social contributions contains:

• Ethics
• Security
• Administration

So an ideology in a standard game should hold the following (the actual names are TBD)

• Autocratic power
• Democratic power
  
• Landowner power
• Capitalist power
• Labor power
  
• Administrative power
• Religious power
• Military power
  
• Private Property
• Social Policies
• Economic Planning

Then, according to the classes that exist in the game, the ideologic structure should be translated into a class power structure. Democratic power is distributed according to demographics. Landowner, Capitalist and Labor powers according to the percentage of each factor's units that each class provides. Administrative, Religious and Military powers according to the percentage of each contribution that a certain class is stated to provide to society. With this layered approach (3 layers of power: political, economic and social), any ideology can be related to any class system.

I also think that this way we do not really need to distinguish between nominal and de facto pol.powers, but we have to discuss that a bit, since I'm not sure about this. Maybe the formulae for the de facto powers could provide us with some minimums for the powers of the respective contributions. The powers of the contributions seem more of the de facto type to me, although there is a multitude of historic examples of legal sanctions for these powers.

It is interesting to notice that, by autonomising the ideologies from the class system, we can achieve the creation and the destruction of social classes according to social evolution; we can achieve a dynamic class system, instead of a static one. We can start the game with a landowner class and, once kc (kapital per capita) surpasses a certain limit, we can generate a bourgeois class; once the Kapital to Sites ratio rises above another limit, we can merge the two classes anew. We can start the game with a RC and, once IR (importance of religion) drops below a certain point, abolish the RC. After RP per capita production has reached a certain level, we can introduce a scientist class. Even complex classes can be created (in an otherwise standard game) if cultural conditions allow it. This sounds like flexibility to me much more than the ability to have N middle classes.

I will adress other issues later, in their respective threads...

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"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell
[This message has been edited by axi (edited August 16, 2000).]

[Mark_Everson]

quote: Originally posted by F_Smith on 08-15-2000 11:51 PM 1) For now, I'm moving the beast on without ideologies. We don't need them yet. 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.

So what exactly are you testing???

On your revolutions idea, clearly people being fed up with the current system is among the most important. And what comes out of a revolution is not easy to predict. But I think the underlying ideologies of blocks of the people Does influence strongly who comes out on top. So I think the truth lies between 'social determinism' and 'individual determinism'.

Axi:

Our inability to model the minor details of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is IMO not important. I agree your point about land-power (or resource-power) is a good one. But in many cases capital and land power go hand in hand, at least after some transition period. We just need to ask our selves if the added complexity is worth it. I am not sure either way yet...

Versatility is good. But have you looked over all Rodrigo's equations and seen how such an idea can work within the system? He thinks you can't do it, so you will probably have to give specific examples of how it can be done.

Although a dynamic class system is intriguing I think it may confuse a lot of players... Even if its more realistic, I'm not sure its such a good idea.

[F_Smith]

Mark:

We'll be testing 'govt policies' turn logic code this weekend.

The beast now saves and loads

1) ruler govt prefs.
2) govt policies
3) political structure
4) Cultural Attributes details

All I have to add in tonight is the 'religion' details. Then the playtesters can either

A) change the ruler's govt prefs, and watch how it affects the actual govt's policies

B) change the govt type/political structure, and watch how that affects the govt policies

C) change the 'Cultural Attributes' of a civ's people, and watch how that affects govt policies

D) change the 'Religion' details of a civ's people, and watch how they affect govt policies

Or any combo of the above.

For the moment, the tester can just set the political structure values at will. Later we can work in ideologies to exert a change in the govt political structure at the appropriate times.

Lisa, my wife, goes out of town on Friday. Friday night I will be hammering on the code for the turn logic, and sometime late Fri or early Sat I'll need some critique/help.

We'll be sticking to the scenario 4000bce, which is now loaded with basic data (all data is an off the wall guess -- any requests/suggestions/corrections on values please let me know).
[This message has been edited by F_Smith (edited August 16, 2000).]

[axi]

I knew it was a bad idea to use the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as an example, but unfortunately this is how my line of thought got to the conclusion that I tried (unsuccessfully as it seems) to express in my last post: Labor and Sites are, as factors of production, equally entitled to be the vessels of political power as Kapital is. Why should the capitalist class have the chance to be the ruling class, but not the labor class? Giving the capability for "extra" political power only to the holders of Kapital sounds inconsistent to me.

Anyway, labor power has it's place in more ideologies than just the "dictatorship of the proletariat". It has it's place in a "meritocracy", where everybody's income depends on the quality of his work. It also belongs to an utopian "libertarian" society (where free market rules); there should be no democratic power and all power should be divided among the 3 factors of production according to their "market value" (remember the econ model's marginal profits). Do not also forget that in the current implementation, the MC generally provides more labor than the LC, because of it's higher education level (skilled labor), so granting power to labor would greatly affect MCpp as well as LCpp. If one proceeds to more liberal thoughts, one can also grant power to the labor of the exploited class, which of course will not be theirs, but be attributed to their owners/employers, which would be the state (ruler and BE) and the UC. So the slaveowner's pp may be enhanced by the labor of their slaves.

As for the contrast between landowners and bourgeois, I believe that, apart from the reasons of pure model consistency, there are severe gameplay reasons that dictate the use of both classes instead of the UC and, more important, the use of a dynamic class system. This contrast has been the motive power behind the social changes during the most interesting part of human history so far. So, if we do not include more than one middle class, (which I repeat that we don't need to) and keep the economic classes hardcoded into the design so than nothing more can be done upon them except the overlaying of parts or wholes of one or more social contributions, then we can achieve the desired simplicity and compatibility.

Flexibility concerning the institutional classes is totally feasible at the grade I have prescribed, given that the whole collection of contributions is either preset by us or provided for by us in advance. This flexibility doesn't make so much sense in a standard game, but it is desperately needed in scenarios, so that the author can create whatever class he wants. Notice that this kind of flexibility would be unattainable if the institutional classes were not devoid of economic and demographic data. Rodrigo's concerns about the complexity of the formulae are reasonable, but if the collection of existant and possible contributions is limited, there will be no problem. The formulae will have to be a little bit more orthologic than they currently are (f.e. we will have to readress the behavior of classes that provide security, like the WC), but the basic forms of class behavior are there (It was F_Smith who first made such a statement in some other thread). Of course, behaviors of complex classes will obviously be the weighted averages of the behaviors dictated by the respective contributions.

As you can see, in contrast to Rodrigo's suggestion, I propose that the flexibility is needed for the institutional and not for the economic classes. The funny thing is that Rodrigo's suggestion will mean more work for me, while my suggestion means more work for him. But of course my suggestion is way, way better...

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"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

[roquijad]

Several "hard" comments to the govt model... I must say that I LOVE that type of comments! It's then when real discussions start!

To the point...

F_Smith:
Your suggestion that maybe what matters are leaders and not ideologies is quite clever. It sounds great for an alternative govt model. I really think so! However, there're two things to say:
1) Ideologies are not the elements preventing greater flexibility. They can be changed and adapted preserving their role to accomodate more classes. I've already done it concerning economic classes, as you saw. The problem with flexibility is at the behavior level. Creating more classes leads to creating more behaviors, not more ideologies. So, I think ideologies are not the center of attention by now.

2) Even if we go for the leaders approach (believing it's better than using ideologies), we'll get to the point of how people choose their leaders. I disagree if we say "if upset, people take whatever leader they find". In the 60's in the US there was a lot of discontent, but the masses never took Malcom X's ideas and founded an islamic regime... Choosing a leader would be the key in this alternative model and we'd probably end agreeing that people choose leaders more or less inclined to what the leader proposes as a solution for current problems. But a leader's "proposal" is nothing but an ideology, in essence. Leaders like Lenin or Jefferson had a vision and they tried to "sell" that vision to the masses (successfully in those two cases). Russians and Americans followed them for what they offered and Americans didn't follow Malcom X for what he offered. And the "offer" is a vision of how things should be. The "vision" is in its core the same thing ideologies are. So, I believe we would end up just where we're now if we took the leaders approach.
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F_Smith: I'll comment your list about the beast in the other thread.
-----------------

Axi:
You have expressed you ideas very nicely. That's maybe the best post I've seen from you

As a matter of fact, much of your analysis matches perfectly with my own thinking (off-forum) when considering flexibility issues. Here are my answers/comments:

1) I did consider putting the "Workers Class" (Labor providers) in ideologies like I did with capitalists. But it's redundant, so I took it away. I know you're concerned about (Marx's) communism and having it well modeled, even though it has never been implemented IRL. Believe me: I care a lot about it too. But your line of thoughts which takes you to the conclusion that my proposed update can't handle communism is wrong. During a communist revolution, kapital (and here I'm considering all kapital: land + infrastructure) is taken away from capitalists. By force, according to Marx. In Clash this means PP goes to zero. If PP=0%, then demographically there's NO upper class or middle class (or, in general, all economic classes that provide kapital disappear). Then, only the Lower class exists. Whatever level of People's pol.power the revolution ends up with is therefore controled solely by the LC. This shows why your analysis was wrong.

However, it can be argued that a workers class is still needed to simulate regimes where there ARE classes providing kapital and yet they have LESS power than classes that provide labor. This type of govt has for sure never existed and to me sounds extremely weird. Therefore, no need for a workers class.

Having the Capitalists and People Classes explicitly in ideologies let us model any type of govt known AND the never-implemented "real" communism. Sci-fi stuff out of the question (at least for now).


2) I share your thoughts about landed-aristocracy vs merchant/factory-based/service-based aristocracy. That part of history is for me very interesting too. But I'm sure you agree that what's really interesting about that part of history is how nobility found its end. And we must not get confused here. We could have, if we want, economic_sector-specific classes (like land-based aristocracy) if we sit down for a while to develop them. But this won't model nobility because nobility wasn't simply a land-based aristocracy. l-b aristocracy exists today in western countries while nobility doesn't. "Landowning", as you mention in your post, doesn't imply nobility. What made nobility what it was, was not its economic control of the land, but the military control of it. Nobility existed because feudalism existed. Feudalism existed because there was no real military and political control by a unique authority (unique govt). Each noble was actually the ruler in his land.

So I'm saying two things here:
a) Creating economic classes specific to economic sectors is IMO feasible, but useless. The behavior of those who produce apples and those who produce cars won't be different enough to add any flavor to the game. Also, this doesn't solve the nobility thing.

b) Nobility is something I'd like to model, but I'm not sure how. Maybe as a class... but then it doesn't make sense in my mind a noble participating in a non-existent central govt about policies that don't affect him. Nobility/feudalism is something that since the beggining of the model development bothered me. A territory ruled by a bunch of warlords instead of a centralized govt and where the king is nothing but a figure of weak union with close to null control beyond his feud is something I haven't solved and I feel it's more complicated than simply adding a nobility class.

Anyway, I'm saying this only to propose we have no economic_sector-specific classes. At a glance you have just seen one of the most secret unsolved parts of the model...


3) You tend to separate land and infrastructure/equipment and call kapital only the latter. I find this division unnecessary. I feel you do it because of the nobility thing. I hope the lines above encourage you to include all in kapital.


4) Middle Class and socio-economic classes: I feel too it's enough with the middle class. I only tried to give the model some more flexibility under everybody's preassure to do so.
Anyway, with the update players will be able to have:
>>Just one socio-economic class (if not interested about the conflict between them... boring right? )
>>The original model's two classes, UC and LC,
>>The extended, "Mark-styled" , LC, UC, MC
>>More than three (who knows what for)

I like this modest flexibility.


5) Real flexibility:
Your speech was fantastic! You have a very good vision of what the problem is about. As you stated, we can have an arbitrary number of classes if we have only a few "pure" classes and their behaviors based on what you call "contributions". Any class is then created as a mix class with mix behaviors. It's such a good idea that I thought about it too! I'm happy you wrote all that, so people can see things I had already dicussed with myself without any writting of my own

Here are the problems of that approach (and why I believe it's not useful):
a) Behaviors cannot be derived from contributions. The economic classes, FE, are based on econ role PLUS cultural info. Contributions are very poor variables to generate a behavior. The best example is the WC. Can the amount of tanks or any such measure produce a realistic behavior? I'm sure you remember our off-forums discussions about how difficult was to give the military a realistic behavior. Once one accepts that this info is not enough, then you have to think what is needed for better modeling. And in this process you end up creating a behavior that's very specific. The equations we have for WC behavior currently are useless to model low-rank soldiers, mercenaries, samurais and other military-related classes we can come up with. It's not an accident the model has almost one set of equations for each class. Behaviors we developed for each of them makes them interesting, but at the cost of being very specific and hardly usable for other classes.
In short, when adding a new class you'll be running way too short in defining its behavior via "contribution" parameters. It will act pretty much the same as the others you already have. This is, btw, why you find so boring having a lot of middle classes...

b)the approach tends to make inevitable the usage of a dynamic class system as you mentioned. I like this, but it forces you to control when classes appear and when fade away for historical consistency (so you won't have "holy warriors" in modern times). Since you have to make the class existence dependant on other variables like Importance of Religion, like you suggested, you'll find there're no general solutions (in fact you showed it with examples in your 2nd post). IR may work for holy warriors, but what about the "scholar monks class"? you know, those who were copying books and teaching math at the monastery's backyard... I don't think it was IR that took them out of business, but tech development. So in this case class existence must be refered to tech variables... and that's just a simple example. Imagine the "warrior middle class"!


So, contribution-based behaviors run too short and in the other side, complex (mixed) classes can arise and fade away depending on too many different things.

You know in detail the model, Axi, so if you really think this approach can work and want to insist, please, as Mark says, give me more (math) details on how to do it.
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All:
I'm affraid I can be appearing as totally opposed to flexibility/scalability or to any change to the model. It's not of course my intention. The model has shown to be very rigid if one decides to keep its good things. I still believe is a good model for a historical game, but if any of you has a great idea for a totally different govt model, just name it and we'll discuss it.

[F_Smith]

Rodrigo:

Cool. It was just a suggestion.

Perhaps as an alternate choice, later. I was thinking that the leader gets chosen by the people also. But I was thinking that the leader choice would base first on 'shared' values -- an EthnicGroup would follow the leader that shared their etnicity, religion, Group Attributes and Tendencies -- and based upon a 'charisma' variable in the leader's 'GameCharacter' stats.

Axi:

Boy, would I like to talk about this over some beers and snacks.

I have a lot of questions and comments about Marxism that might be out of place here. For now, please don't take any of this as an attack, it is merely my silly opinion.

I'll just say that I believe 'Labor workers who don't own the capital produced from their labor' by definition will never have any real political power, regardless of what the political system claims/pretends to give them. Because 'capital' is power, even to 'pure communist' governments/systems. Even tho they pretend it isn't. There is no way around that rule -- 'he who has the gold makes the rules'. When a resource is scarce, the govt managers in charge of distributing that resource becoming their own 'priviledged' class -- by definition.

That's yy problem with Marx's theories -- they in no way reflect reality as I observe it. I am certain that's why no one has ever made one happen. It's as impossible as saying 'can't we all just get along'?

In summary, I would say that Rodrigo's system already allows a 'Communist' system. It just faces the game govt trying that with the same realities that a real 'Communist' system would have. Giving the vote to people who have no control over any assets will always be a hollow gesture, since those who do control scarce resources will use that control to twist the system (corruption/hoarding/refusal to comply/etc).

One good example would be the collectivisation of farms that has happened in various places from time to time. The people/govt never gain real control over the farms output. Hoarding and corruption always ensue. And the govt workers with access to scarce goods become their own 'priveledged' class.