Government Model v.2

[axi]

Government Model

I. Introduction

This model tries to simulate the political games within the govt of your civ. What makes it interesting and challenging is the fact that people won't stare passively at you while ruling the empire and they won't just react to your decisions, but will be able to take decisions of their own and change things at the govt if they have the power to do so. In very despotic regimes the game will give you only people's reactions, from protests to revolutions, which is covered in the Riots Model. People reacting to your rule is by itself a more sophisticated element compared to what we're used to in games like this, giving you a more defying game, even in despotic regimes. But if your civ happens to move to other forms of governments, through violent events or peacefully, you'll have to share power with others. The masses if it's a sort of democracy, or the military maybe, or the church if a fundamentalist regime arises. Now people won't just react, they'll act. And they'll actually use their power to make whatever they think is best for the civ. Under these circumstances, having only a share of total power and having less control of the civ's future, the civ might take paths you didn't expected. Will this be for better or for worse? Will you accept sharing power with others or will you just impose your will at all cost?


II. Model Overview

There'll be a list of govt policies (or govt laws, if you prefer) affecting the civ in several ways. What is needed is to set the values for each policy. Changing policies you change the civ's behavior. The player knows what he wants for each policy, but it's those with political power the ones deciding what values policies will take. The player will always have some political power, but it can be low, high or even absolute. In fact the share of total power he has and how much other political entities have is also a matter of discussion.

Society is divided in classes. The aristocracy, the military, etc. Classes and the ruler will have to interact to define how much political power each should have and what values policies should take. To achieve this, the game will give an interface to the player where he'll be able to put in the values he thinks are best. On the other side, the model simulates what people in classes think, mostly given by the culture they posses, and through this, what they want for policies values and political power distribution. The link with culture (social model) makes people inclined to certain forms of govt and opposed to others, giving the game a more stable and true-to-life look, with no arbitrary or ridiculous govt shifts. Also, as culture slowly changes overtime, people can change their minds, so if they felt alright with a monarchy in the past, it might not be the case now.

The player is expected to move wisely when interacting with classes, choosing govt styles not too disturbing for classes, controlling how much political power he has, how much others have, specially those with opposite ideas, and even dealing with corruption. Under a more questionable strategy, the player will be able to use Special Actions, like bribing politicians, killing adversaries, closing the parliament, etc.

Two definitions are needed before continuing, only to be precise about what we're talking about:

Government: All persons who take part in defining policies. It can be the great priest and the great military leader in a small tribe or the whole senate plus the elected administration in a modern democracy.

Political power: The power or capability to influence the final value of govt policies. Any form of influence is counted in, legal or not. In a modern democracy, any party with at least one senator in the senate has political power, for example (very small in this case, though).

After reading the model you can see it working (at least most of its features) downloading this MS-EXCEL Workbook.


III. General Definitions

III.1 Govt. Policies

The following are the policies the govt. must decide on. They'll be explained and understood better later. This is list is not supposed to be complete. It contains what is felt as the minimum set of policies. According to other models' needs, the list can be enlarged.

-Tax Rate (0-100%): Tax is imposed on privates. Individuals, landowners, company owners and so on. In a pure communist regime, tax rate is irrelevant since no private sector exists.

-Civil Rights (CR): (0-100) The greater the number, the more liberties the people has concerning lifestyle, freedom of speech, etc...

-Religion Discrimination (RD): (0-5) This variable describes the relationship between govt and religion. If RD=0 the State is secular. If 1<=RD<=5, there's an official religion and people practicing other beliefs are considered minorities. The type of treatment toward other beliefs becomes more intolerant the higher RD is.

-Ethnic Discrimination (ED): (0-10) This variable defines if there's or not an ethnic group above the rest and if so, what kind of treatment other ethnic groups get. If ED=0, all ethnic groups are considered equal and the civ is said to be "multiethnic". If 1<=ED<=10, there's a preferred ethnic group (FE, romans in roman empire) and all the rest are considered minorities (this is the most common case). The type of treatment other ethnic groups get is more disrespectful the higher ED is.

-Slavery (SL): (0-2) Defines if minorities can be slavered or not. 0=Slavery is not allowed, 1=It is allowed in its most common form. This means some people in minorities is slavered with some laws regulating it like the possibility to buy freedom. If SL=2 it is the same as in SL=1, but some specific ethnic groups can be totally slavered in a more brutal way, like it was with africans. For now and until a better procedure is developed, it'll be the ruler's decision which exact tribes can be slavered this way when SL=2.

-Private Property (PP): (0%-100%) Defines what share of total economic activities lie in the hands of the private sector. The rest is owned by the State or the king himself (for ancient regimes).

-Economic Planning (EP): (0%-100%) Defines how much control govt has over economy, both private and public sector. It includes things like prices setting, limits on production, etc.

-Social Policies (SP): (0%-100%) This will define how much of a welfare state the civ has. It will include all redistribution practices, social security, healthcare, free education, etc.

-Foreign Affairs (FA): (0-100) Defines the level of aggressiveness the ruler is allowed to be in the international arena. 0 means passive/peaceful and 100 means world conquest.


The ruler/player will want a specific value for each of these policies. The ruler's preferences will be called "Ruler's Govt Profile". The real set of values the civ has is called "Govt Profile".


III.2 Majorities and Minorities

The empire can hold several ethnic groups, as described in the social model. Normally only one of them is considered the "civ's people" like romans in the roman empire. In this case romans are said to be the majorities population (not necessarily being majority in terms of demography) and all other ethnic groups are said to be minorities. In some cases, though, the govt might do no discrimination at all. In this case all ethnic groups are considered within majorities. People supporting non-official religions are also considered minorities.

For all what follows minorities are irrelevant. That's because this model simulates the political game in the govt leading to set the values for each govt policy and minorities are definitely out of the govt and have no pol.power to play this game. The political game minorities play is only at the level of protests and rebellions trying to stop being a minority or at least have a better treatment from majorities. That's covered in the Riots Model.

As will be shown, people in majorities will be able to participate in the govt depending on the regime. When they participate, they do it deeply influenced by their culture. The govt model stores cultural information of majorities from the social model in the Majorities Cultural Attributes (MCA). See Appendix 2 for more details on how info is transformed from the social model to MCA.


III.3 Classes

Majorities population (not religiously or ethnically discriminated peoples) are divided in classes:

The Upper Class (UC): The aristocracy. The people who owns the means of production. Landowners, company owners, capitalists, nobility, etc.

The Lower Class (LC): The common people. Workers, professionals, peasants, proletarians, etc.

The Religious Class (RC): High priests in command of the Church. If there is an official religion, RC represents the clergy of this religion. If there's no official religion (a secular State), the class contains all high priests from all present religions in equal conditions.

The Military Class (MC): High officers of the army. NOT the whole army. The common soldier belongs to the LC.

The Bureaucratic Elite (BE): Govt employees in key positions in the bureaucratic apparatus. They control most of the govt's administration and live an accommodated life. It's a wealthy class. The USSR had a powerful BE and no Upper Class, for example.

Each class has its own mentality (idea of how the govt should look like). UC and LC are deeply influenced by culture and have some differences about how economy should work. The religious class is mostly guided by its doctrine (taken from the social model) and shares some ideas with normal people. Appendix 2 shows how the info from the social model is transformed to create RCM (Religious Class Mentality). The BE always wants to preserve the current form of govt, since its welfare comes from the particular way the govt is currently working. As for MC, the mentality high officers in the army have is given by their origin. They can come from the LC or the UC. If they come from the LC, then are LC minded and the same for UC. In general, they come partly from the UC and partly from LC. Also, the ruler has an influence over MC mentality through "choosing the right men". The level at which each of these three factors influences MC mentality is explained later.


III.4 Political Structure & Hidden Policies

The distribution of political power among classes and the ruler is called the political structure. For example, a Political Structure might look like this:

Class___Political Power
Ruler_____25%
UC_______8%
LC_______25%
RC_______26%
MC_______6%
BE_______10%

The main role of the Political Structure is saying how much power each entity has. But, at the same time, some policies are "hidden" in the political structure. These "hidden policies" are:

-Privileges: If the relative political power held by the UC (relative to LC pol.power) is greater than its relative demographic share (relative to LC demographic share), it'll be understood as UC having special privileges over the LC. These are privileges given to the UC by law like those nobility had in middle ages. The magnitude of privileges will affect income distribution and influence over the military. Privileges are computed as:

MAX(0;UCpol.power-(UCpolpower+LCpolpower)*UCdemogshare/(UCdemogshare+LCdemogshare))


-Influence over the Military Class: As said before, the political structure partly defines what type of mentality MC has. Ruler's pol.power and privileges are used to determine MC preferences, like this:
MC share with Ruler's mentality (MC_R): Exp(-0.03*(110-Ruler_polpower*100))
MC share with UC mentality (MC_U): (1-MC_R)*(0.5+0.5*Privileges)
MC share with LC mentality (MC_L): 1-MC_R-MC_U

The term "hidden policies" does not mean people don't realize about these effects. It means we don't need a special policy like "UC Privileges" explicitly, and we can build the privileges effect from info in the Political Structure.


III.5 Political Power: Law and influences

The distribution of power among classes and the ruler (Political Structure) is built using two sets of values. The first is the "nominal" Political Structure. It's the pol.power given to each entity "by law". The second is the "de facto influence" each entity has. If the ruler uses bribes on "politicians" of other classes, FE, he has more power than his nominal value. Each class has its own level of de facto influence and a method to compute real pol.power, as will be described later in section IV.1.

III.6 Some Civ-Level Important Variables

-Dominant Religion (DR): The religion with most followers within majorities.

-Empire's Stability (ES): (0-10) This is a measure of how stable the empire is seen by the people. Events decrease ES, like losing a province, having a riot or if the ruler is being replaced by force. Every game turn ES is increased a bit, so if these events don't happen often, the feeling goes continuously upwards.

-Income Distribution (ID): How many times UC per capita income is greater than LC per capita income: UC_PCI/LC_PCI, where UC_PCI and LC_PCI come from the economic model.


III.7 Ideologies

An ideology is a coherent set of values for the political structure and some of the govt policies. The govt policies included in ideologies are:
-Economic Planning
-Social Policies
-Private Property

So, an ideology is a view about how the govt should be regarding 1)who has the power (nominal political structure); 2)economy; and 3)privileges and the composition of high military command (hidden policies). This is what an ideology may look like:

Ruler's pol.power_________70%
UC pol.power____________15%
LC pol.power_____________0%
RC pol.power_____________5%
MC pol.power____________10%
Private Property__________65%
Economic Planning_______10%
Social Policies____________5%

People will choose the ideology best fitting their desires and will use any pol.power they posses to try to impose that view in the govt. The game will have a pool of ideologies representing the most common forms of govt seen in history and some more, like this:

Ancient Despotism (warlord rule), Divine Monarchy, Monarchy, Constitutional Monarchy, Oligarchy, Republic, Capitalist Democracy, Democratic Communism, Social Democracy, Fundamentalism, Communist Dictatorship and Capitalist Dictatorship.


III.8 Types of Policies

There are 3 types of policies:

1) Ruler's Exclusive Policies: Policies the ruler/player can decide alone about. For now, only the tax rate is in this category. This category exist only because of the difficulty in finding a reasonable way to simulate what people want for them.

2) Ideologically Negotiated Policies (INP): Policies the ruler negotiates with the rest classes and where classes define what they want based on ideologies. They're:
-Hidden Policies/Political Structure
-Economic Planning
-Social Policies
-Private Property

3) Directly Negotiated Policies (DNP): Policies the ruler/player must negotiate with classes, where classes define what they want directly for each policy as opposed to choosing an ideology and from it a value for the policy. They are:
-Slavery
-Ethnic Discrimination
-Religious Discrimination
-Civil Rights
-Foreign Policies

IV. How the Model Works

IV.1 Computing De Facto Influences

In the next sections pol.power will be used by classes and the ruler to change govt policies. That pol.power is real pol.power, which counts in the nominal or by law pol.power and de facto influences classes have leading to a higher pol.power than law says they should have. De facto influences are the way this model provides inter-classes interactions, allowing the UC to bribe high officers in the MC, FE. To compute real pol.power for each class we need the nominal values from the Govt Profile and de facto influences. Here's how de facto influences are calculated:

Ruler: He can bribe other "politicians" to gain their sympathy. De facto influence is computed as a scale parameter multiplying the total spending in bribes.

Upper Class: UC de facto influence comes from its control over economy. They can bribe, they can endorse election campaigns and ask favors afterwards, use propaganda through the media or directly to their workers, etc. De facto influence is computed as 0.3*PrivateProperty*(1-EconomicPlanning).

Religious Class: RC de facto influence comes from the respect and worshiping they receive from the rest of society. The more intolerant the religion is, the more willing to use this influence is. That's because intolerant means religion sees itself as the only way to live, so it tries to impose that. De facto influence is computed as 0.2*MCA_ImportanceOfReligion*(100-RCM_ReligiousTolerance)/10000.

Military Class: MC de facto influence comes from its ability to militarily threat the govt and politicians. De facto influence in this case is a constant around 0.15.

Bureaucratic Elite: BE de facto influence comes, by its definition, from its influence on the govt from the inside and its control over administration. BE's nominal pol.power is always zero, since BE's pol.power comes only from its de facto influence. BE's power is really unwanted. It's the unwanted result of a large bureaucratic apparatus. A measure of the size of bureaucracy is used to compute BE de facto influence: 0.5*Average(1-PrivateProperty;EconomicPlanning;SocialPolicies).

Lower Class: LC de facto influence comes from labor unions and the ability to threat with labor strikes. This influence increases with higher Social Policies (which protect workers), with higher Civil Rights (which allow the formation of syndicates and allow strikes legally) and with the level of syndicating, seen as a social development in the tech tree:
0.3*(1/(1+exp(-2+10*SocialPolicies)))*(CivilRights/100)*Syndicating.
(assuming Syndicating Tech Development in 0-100% range)

For the ruler and all classes except BE, de facto power is really the capability of gaining other classes' power by some means. It represents how a class X can buy the sympathy of other classes to encourage them to use their legal (nominal) power in the benefit of class X. Because of this, all values described above should be multiplied by the total nominal pol.power other classes have. In other words, the MC cannot threat others encouraging them to do as the military want if those others cannot really help because they don't have any nominal power to please the military. That's why de facto influences are really those values given above, but multiplied by all possible nominal power the class can actually "buy" from others, which excludes the ruler (otherwise the player would be giving away power without wanting it) and excludes the power high officers loyal to the ruler in the MC have.

In the case of BE, de facto influence is its only source of power and it represents actual control over govt policies and administration. It's not, as opposed to the other entities, power to buy other classes nominal power, but power it indeed possesses. So, even when the ruler thinks he has absolute power, the BE still can have some control.

Some of the sources for de facto influences can be undoubtedly recognized as corruption. The civ will be able to fight corruption decreasing de facto influences and forcing political entities to rely only on their nominal (legal) pol.powers. Although not yet determined, this will probably be done using the media and Civil Rights. In this way, civs with a free enough society (independent media) and having a decent tech level for media and communications, will be able to reduce the level of corruption.

Once we have de facto influences, we must compute real pol.powers. BE real pol.power is directly its de facto influence, as per definition. Pol.power the BE doesn't control is what all other classes and the ruler have left. This remaining power is distributed as:

Ruler: Nominal+DeFactoInfluence

UC, LC, RC and MC: (1-Ruler_polpower)*(Class_NominalPolpower+Class_DeFac toInfluence)/(UC_nominalpp+UC_defactopp+ LC_nominalpp+LC_defactopp+ RC_nominalpp+RC_defactopp+ MC_nominalpp+MC_defactopp)

IV.2 People's Preferences

People have a clear opinion of what they'd like to see in the govt. As everything, people see things through the eyes of culture, so cultural attributes from the social model are taken in to drive people choosing what they'd want for the govt. What we need is an opinion from every person for each govt policy that needs to be negotiated (i.e. all policies except tax rate) and for the political structure.

What the people want for some of the policies can be computed straight forward from cultural attributes and individually for each policy, while others need more sophistication. This sophistication arises from the need of coherency between variables. It's necessary to avoid people from choosing at the same time RC pol.power share equal to 80% and LC pol.power share equal to 50%, since all shares must sum 100%. Or, we must avoid people choosing a politically powerful aristocracy (high UC pol.power share) and at the same time choosing economic policies producing a communist system. So, economic variables and the political structure are all in "packages". This packages are built in the game guaranteeing internal consistency between variables, so people, through culture, only needs to pick the package they see as the best. These packages are called ideologies.

Ideologies not only help doing a consistent modeling, but also add flavor to the game since now people with different ideologies can collide. For example, the french revolution was nothing but the battle of two ideologies: monarchy vs democracy.

So, before people acts in the political arena, we need to know which ideology they support and what they think about those other policies that can be analyzed individually outside the frame of ideologies (Directly Negotiated Policies). The following section IV.2.1 and IV.2.2 show how this is made.


IV.2.1 People's Preferences on Directly Negotiated Policies

The policies in this category are:
-Slavery
-Ethnic Discrimination
-Religious Discrimination
-Civil Rights
-Foreign Policies

In the following lines it's shown what the people in UC and LC want for each policy, mostly given by cultural information stored in MCA (Majorities Cultural Attributes) and what the RC members want, mostly based on religion's doctrine, stored in RCM (Religious Class Mentality). BE wants to preserve whatever value the govt currently has. What the MC wants is given by the relative influences it receives from UC, LC and the ruler, as explained earlier. So, for a given policy X, having what the UC and LC want (say, UC_X and LC_X) and what the ruler wants (from the Ruler's Govt Profile, Ruler_X), then what MC wants for policy X is
MCM*(MC_U*UC_X + MC_L*LC_X + MC_R*Ruler_X)

where MCM is a Military Class Modifier allowing MC members so slightly adapt their mentality depending on the policy and MC_U, MC_L and MC_R are the respective influences over the MC by UC, LC and the ruler.

Slavery (SL)
LC wants: SL=2*square_root((100-MCA_EthnicTolerance)*(100-MCA_Asceticism)/10000), rounded to the closest integer.
UC wants: SL=1.2*2*square_root((100-MCA_EthnicTolerance)*(100-MCA_Asceticism)/10000), rounded to the closest integer.
RC wants: SL=2*square_root((100-RCM_EthnicTolerance)*(100-RCM_Asceticism)/10000), rounded to the closest integer.
MCM=1

Formulas say slavery will tend to be accepted if there's low respect for other tribes and a high desire for wealth. Because of the latter, the UC will be a little more inclined to slavery (20% more).

Ethnic Discrimination (ED)
UC and LC want ED=(1/(1+exp(5-MCA_Nationalism/10)))*(100-MCA_EthnicTolerance)/10, rounded to the closest integer.
RC wants ED=(1/(1+exp(5-RCM_Nationalism/10)))*(100-RCM_EthnicTolerance)/10, rounded to the closest integer.
MCM=1.1

Religious Discrimination (RD)
RC wants RD=(100-RCM_ReligiousTolerance)*5/100, rounded to the closest integer.
Both the UC and LC want: RD=(100-MCA_ReligiousTolerance)*5/100, rounded to the closest integer.
MCM=1

Civil Rights (CR)
RC wants: CR=RCM_Individualism
UC and LC want: CR=MCA_Individualism
MCM=0.9

Foreign Affairs (FA)
RC wants: FA=RCM_Aggressiveness
UC wants: FA=MCA_Aggressiveness
LC wants: FA=MCA_Aggressiveness*0.9
MCM=1.2

In this case LC wants a FA policy a little less aggressive than the aggressiveness of its culture because, after all, it's them that are going to war. The military prefers a policy a little more aggressive.


IV.2.2 People's Preferences: Choosing Ideologies

Each person will look at the available ideologies (discovered/invented ideologies) and will choose one depending mostly on his culture and how good it is to his class. To do this, the model computes an attractiveness for each ideology, on a class basis. That is, the same ideology has different levels of attractiveness depending on the class observing it. This will be made for UC, LC and RC but not for MC nor BE. As in IV.1.1, MC preferences depend on what UC, LC and the ruler want and BE wants always to preserve the current form of govt.

All persons measure the attractiveness for a given ideology with these four questions:

• How much power the ideology offers to the class I belong to? (Desire for Power Attractiveness-DPA)
• How much the ideology reflects my culture? (Cultural Attractiveness-CA)
• How good the ideology is to solve my economic aspirations? (Economic Attractiveness-EA)
• How good the ideology is to solve other problems my civ is going through? (Current Circumstances Attractiveness-CCA)

Each question leads to an attractiveness level (DPA, CA, EA and CCA). Summing all four we get the total attractiveness the ideology has for someone in a given class. The following shows how to compute the four effects for a given ideology seen by class C. Variables in brackets [] represent info taken from the ideology being processed:

1) DPA=K1*[C_pol.power]
i.e., the greater the pol.power the ideology offers to class C, the greater the attractiveness.

2) CA=K2*exp(-(ABS([RCpolpower]-exp(-0.04*(105-ImportanceReligion)))+ ABS([MCpolpower]-exp(-0.04*(105-Aggressiveness)))+ABS((Individualism/100)-(0.2*[PP]+0.8*(1-[SP])))

i.e., the following cultural effects are counted in:

• The higher the cultural attribute "Importance of Religion" is, the greater the attractiveness ideologies offering high RCpol.power have, and vise versa.
• The higher the cultural attribute "Individualism" is, the greater the attractiveness ideologies offering capitalistic economic systems have, and vise versa.
• The higher the cultural attribute "Aggressiveness" is, the greater the attractiveness ideologies offering high MCpol.power have, and vise versa.

3) EA=K3*(A1*[PP] + A2*[EP] + (A3+A4*(ID/3)+A5*(100-RCM_Individualism)/100)*[SP])
where
CLASS__A1______A2_____A3______A4_____A5
LC______3.5_____-3______-1_______0_______0
UC______0______0.5______0_______2_______0
RC______0_______0______0_______0_______4

In essence this says the UC likes an economic system with high private property, low economic planning and no too high social policies. The LC doesn't care about private property, cares something about economic planning (because this means some level of control on abusing employers) and cares very much about social policies. Indeed, LC has growing care with the more differences between rich and poor (ID=Income Distribution). RC only cares about social policies and it's a growing care the less individualistic religion is.

4) CCA=K4*[Ruler_pol.power]/ES
What's said here is people will find more attractive those ideologies with high ruler pol.power when the empire is seen unstable (ES=Empire's Stability) as if they were "looking for the ruler's leadership".


Having total attractiveness for each ideology seen by each class, each ideology is multiplied by its corresponding "Knowledge Level".

Knowledge Level (KL): How known an ideology is. It goes in the range 0-100%. If 100% it means the ideology is perfectly known by the population. When the ideology tech has not been discovered yet, KL=0%. At the moment of discovery it becomes 10%. From that point and ahead, KL increases its magnitude (up to 100%) every turn based on communications techs available.

What KL tries to do is simulate how ideologies spread through the people slowly. When an ideology exist (the tech has been discovered), it's known slowly by people at a rate given by the com techs available. This way when ideologies are discovered, no sudden changes occur. Multiplying attractiveness by KL with a low KL will turn ideology's attractiveness really small, so people won't be very enthusiastic about them. When KL=100%, people can see all the pros and cons of the ideology and it appears with its whole attractiveness.

Since the current Govt Profile can also be seen as an ideology and since the same happens with the Ruler's Govt Profile, attractiveness are computed for them too. This is like people measuring how attractive is their current govt and how attractive ruler's ideas are.

From this point ahead, only 5 ideologies are kept. The Ruler's Govt Profile, the Govt Profile and the 3 highest built-in-the-game ideologies processed. So what we have up to now is a matrix of attractiveness. Something like this:

CLASS__Ideology1__Ideology2__Ideology3__Ruler's Govt Profile__Govt Profile
LC_______110_______83_______94___________73_______ ______88
UC_______90_______117______127__________117_______ _____119
RC_______82________63______157___________67_______ _____103

These numbers are used to determine what share of the population in each class support each ideology. This new matrix of support shares will be called SSM-Support Shares Matrix. We'll say the support share for ideology I in class C is:
exp(W*TotalAttract_I)/sum_over_i(exp(W*TotalAttract_i))

where W is a scale parameter. Using this exponential formula, differences in attractiveness are exaggerated and classes tend to concentrate in the most attractive ideologies. For the matrix of total attractiveness of the example above, the SSM results in (with W=0.05):

CLASS__Ideology1__Ideology2__Ideology3__Ruler's Govt Profile__Govt Profile
LC_______46%______12%______20%__________7%________ ___15%
UC_______5%_______20%______33%_________20%________ ___22%
RC_______2%________1%______90%__________1%________ ____6%

So, FE, 15% of the LC likes the current state of things. 90% of the RC supports ideology3.

In this matrix MC and BE are missing. In the case of BE, we can add a row with zeroes in all cells except Govt Profile having 100%. This comes from BE definition.
For the Military Class, as said earlier, high officers mentality is given by relative influences of LC, UC and the ruler. The support share the Ruler's Govt Profile has in MC is

MC_R+(1- MC_R)*(UC_X*MC_U+LC_X*MC_L)

where UC_X and LC_X are the support shares for the Ruler's Govt Profile in the UC and LC respectively. For any other ideology I, the MC support shares are computed as

LC_I*MC_L + UC_I*MC_U

where UC_I and LC_I are the support shares for ideology I in UC and LC respectively.

Having the SSM matrix, we have what we needed in section IV.1, that is, what the people want for every single policy.

IV.3 Setting Government Policies
Knowing what people want, now we can model how they'll use their real pol.power to actually change govt policies to their convenience.

IV.3.1 Directly Negotiated Policies
Using the procedures stated in section IV.1, suppose we have each class preferences for each Directly Negotiated Policies and through a proper interface the player putted the values he wants for each, so we have something like this:

Policy\Class____________UC____LC____RC____MC____BE ____Ruler
Slavery_________________1_____0______0______0_____ 0_____0
Ethnic Discrimination______2_____2______2______4_____3___ __6
Religious Discrimination____2_____2______4______1_____2_____ 0
Foreign Affairs__________37____33_____21_____43____32_____ 40
Civil Rights_____________70____70_____44_____67____65___ __85

Suppose the actual real pol.power shares are:

Class____Real pol.power
Ruler____18%
UC______12%
LC______25%
RC______26%
MC_______7%
BE______11%

To compute the final value the govt will take for the Foreign Affairs policy, we make a weighted sum of the values each entity wants, where weights are the respective pol.power shares:
FA=37*12% + 33*25% + 21*26% + 43*7% + 32*11% + 40*18% = 32

The civ's govt will have a Foreign Affairs policy of 32. The same is done for each policy. This mechanism allows each policy to take a value which is more sensitive to the desires of those with larger pol.power. In other words, the more power an entity has, the more successful it is imposing its view on each policy. The mechanism was named "Negotiation Procedure" because it simulates how different entities, having each its own view on some issue, produce a single output. This output is not one of the originals in dispute, but a new "negotiated" one, reflecting the fact that no entity was able to fully impose its opinion. The procedure is general enough to cover a scenario in which all actors have relevant pol.power shares, like in the above example, and also situations where a despotic ruler holds all power. In this latter case the procedure, without any change, makes the final govt policy value equal to what the ruler wanted.


IV.3.2 Ideologically Negotiated Policies
Again we'll use the Negotiation Procedure, but in this case classes don't have a unique value they want. A class, as shown in section IV.1.2, may have its population divided between several ideologies, so there's no way to determine specifically what a class wants, as a whole, for any of the Ideologically Negotiated Policies. That's why we'll use the Negotiation Procedure on a "party" basis. It'll be like each ideology has a party in the govt trying to impose its ideology and each party has a pol.power to do it.

To compute pol.power each party has is easy. If, for example, LC has 30% pol.power and 12% of the people in LC supports ideologyX, then 12% of LC pol.power is held by ideologyX supporters. Doing this analysis for each class and ideology we can compute all pol.power each ideology gets from different entities and then sum up. Taking the Support Shares Matrix example in section IV.1.2 and the pol.power shares in the example right above, the ideologies pol.powers would be:

Ideology1__Ideology2__Ideology3__Ruler's Govt Profile__Govt Profile
__8%_______8%_______36%_________27%___________21%

So, people wanting to preserve the govt as it is (supporting the Govt Profile) have 21% of total pol.power. This one is like the "Conservative Party".

You can see that the ruler, although having only 18% of total pol.power, will be able to effectively impose his position on Ideologically Negotiated Values at 27% because, as can be seen in the Support Shares Matrix, the values he proposes found followers in classes, like in the UC where 20% of them support him and therefore will use their pol.power to back ruler's view. Also, since he has influence over the military, he can also get some support from there.

The Negotiation Procedure is ready to be applied. Suppose ideologies look like these:

________________Ideology1__Ideology2__Ideology3__R uler's Govt Profile__Govt Profile
Ruler's pol.power____70%______20%______20%__________20%___ _______25%
UC pol.power______15%______10%_______5%___________10% ___________8%
LC pol.power_______0%______70%_______10%__________70% __________35%
RC pol.power_______5%_______0%_______55%___________0% __________26%
MC pol.power______10%_______0%_______10%___________0% ___________6%
Private Property____65%______85%_______60%__________75%___ _______68%
Economic Planning__10%______25%_______45%__________35%_____ _____36%
Social Policies______5%______35%_______55%__________40%__ ________43%

Using this info and the pol.powers each ideology has, the Negotiation Procedure would give us for Social Policies:
SP=5%*8% + 35%*8% + 55%*36% + 40%*27% + 43%*21% = 43%

Again, it can be seen how the Negotiation Procedure's final value tends to be closer to what ideologies with higher pol.power encourage.

It was assumed here that all ideologies were allowed to participate in the political process. This won't be always the case because through Special Actions the ruler will be allowed to ban ideologies forbidding them to participate. That's why instead of using the SSM directly to compute ideologies pol.powers, we'll use a "Representation Matrix" which is equal to SSM when no ideology is banned and it's an altered SSM when banning exists. The procedure to compute the Representation Matrix is explained in Appendix 3.

IV.4 Circular Effects
Although the Negotiation Procedure is simple to apply, we'll need to apply it several times in order to reach final values. This happens because there're circular effects involved. FE, when Private Property is changed, it is changed using, among other things, real UC pol.power. But real UC pol.power depends on Private Property through de facto influences. So a change in PP leads to a change in UC pol.power, which leads to a change in the entire Political Structure, which leads to more changes, like the relative influences UC, LC and the ruler have over the military, leading to a change in MC preferences. This might look like a mess, but it's not too bad. Some of the calculations described in previous sections must be carried on several times to achieve an equilibrium point, but there're two good things: 1) The process is needed only when negotiations are called, not every turn; 2) It takes only about 10 iterations to reach equilibrium, which is quite fast.

You can see more of this in the provided Excel Workbook.
[This message has been edited by little green men from Mars (edited June 23, 2000).]
[This message has been edited by axi (edited June 23, 2000).]

[axi]

V. Effects of the Government Model over the Rest Models

Once govt policies are finally set as described in section IV, they affect the civ in several ways. The following are the effects policies will have in general terms:

V.1. Effects over economy

• Private Property, Social Policies, Economic Planning and Tax Rate will be taken in by Mark's economic model to change the behavior of economy. These variables should be able to drive the economic model from pure capitalism to pure communism.
• Income Distribution will change, not only because of the above variables, but also through the existence of privileges for the Upper Class given by the Political Structure.
• Finally, the existence of slavery will also affect economy, providing higher productivity at a cheap cost in slavered peoples. Hopefully, the Merchants Model will be able to take advantage of this and provide trade of slaves for further flavor in the game.

V.2. Effects over the social model
The govt defines the environment people live in through economic policies, Civil Rights and other policies. The environment will affect people's culture slowly as time advances, so culture will change influenced, at least partly, by the govt.

V.3. Effects over the tech model
Tech development in the civ should depend partly on Civil Rights and Empire's Stability. These two govt model's variables should be taken in the tech model to be used in the Research Points production process.

V.4. Effects over diplomacy
The future diplomacy model should use the Foreign Affairs policy to control ruler's activities while negotiating, so the player won't be allowed to simply declare war if FA is low.

V.5. Effects over the riots model

• People will be upset if the govt isn't what they want. This, along with other things, will produce a discontent that might end in bloody events.
• The existence of ideologies provides the riots model with a flavoring element to generate ideological civil wars and that sort of things.
• Slavery, Ethnic Discrimination and Religious Discrimination will also play a role generating discontent on minorities and the possibility of rebellions.

V.6 Effects over the govt model (feedback)
When policies change the following conditions are checked comparing previous and new values for Religious Discrimination and Ethnic Discrimination:
1) The civ has stopped having an official religion and became secular.
2) The civ has stopped being secular and adopted an official religion.
3) The civ has no longer preference for a tribe and became multiethnic.
4) The civ stopped being multiethnic.

If any of those are true, all ethnic groups in the civ are analyzed in order to give them majorities or minorities status according to the rules explained in Appendix 1. Then, MCA (Majorities Cultural Attributes) and RCM (Religious Class Mentality) are updated as described in Appendix 2.

VI. Playing the Game and Running the Model

VI.1. What will the player do when playing the game?
Mainly, the player will use an interface to put in the values he thinks are best for each policy. Anytime he change his mind and enters new values, he will hit a "Negotiate!" button triggering the Negotiation Procedure and related calculations described in section IV. What's fun about that? Well, far beyond the govt model, he'll be affecting several things in his civ as explained in section V. The challenge is he'll have to strategically play his game trying not to upset powerful classes and trying to take away power from those classes that doesn't allow him to do what he wants. The player will have to move, or at least try to move, from despotic rules to more representative systems and vise versa as needed in order to survive and make his civ progress.

The player will also be able to make Special Actions, making the game more interesting. Special Actions will include:

-Banning ideologies: Ideologies can be banned by the ruler. All ideologies the ruler bans will have their Knowledge Levels diminished and will continue going downwards for as long as the banning persist. Representation values for banned ideologies is set to zero, which makes those ideologies unable to influence govt policies. (Representation Values and Representation Matrix are explained in Appendix 3).

-Propaganda: It's the opposite case. The ruler's govt profile or the govt profile is presented to the public as the best and propaganda is carried on to encourage people to choose it. KL for it is increased depending on total money spent in propaganda.

-Foul play: The ruler kills key politicians supporting an ideology he dislikes to keep it away from the political arena for a while. Representation value is reduced for the ideology. It has transitory effects since Representation for the ideology will slowly rise if not banned.

-Closing the Parliament: The ruler can close the parliament, setting UC and LC pol.powers to zero. If the ruler doesn't take more radical actions like this, eventually UC and LC will recover slowly their power with the help of MC and RC, since these two classes probably support ideologies where UC and LC have more than zero pol.power and will use their pol.power to make it real.

-Bribing politicians: Increases ruler's de facto influence.

-Internal Intelligence Services: In order to destroy the capabilities of the people to threatening the establishment (riot, revolutions, etc), the ruler activate these services. They'll reduce all Events probabilities in the Riots Model.

Some of the actions above should cost money or have some type of requisites. These actions are just examples of what can be done and with some more imagination others can be included.


VI.2 When does the model work?
Mainly when negotiations are called, so the model will do very little in a typical game turn. Negotiations are called when the player hits the "Negotiate!" button and when "enough" time has passed. The latter means after some time (let's say twice a century) it's necessary to update people's preferences to catch up with changes in culture, higher Knowledge Levels for ideologies and other events.

When any of these two occurs (player hitting the button or the game automatically calling negotiations with updated info), the model will compute people's preferences and apply the negotiation procedure several times until an equilibrium point in all variables is achieved. This new Govt Profile will be stored. The model will slowly move each game turn current values toward the equilibrium point, representing the political process over the years leading to a new Govt Profile. The speed of the change is given by the length in years of the game turn and the magnitude of BE pol.power. This latter appears here because BE's intention is to keep things as currently are, so the greater its pol.power, the more successful it is slowing any changes.

VII. Administrating the Empire

Previous sections explain how the govt decides the general frame for the civ (major decisions valid for all provinces). We'll assume there're always more decisions that must be taken to solve local problems in a much more detailed level, like providing a local justice system. This leads to the idea of local governments implementing both general govt policies and local solutions. This section explains how power is handled between central and local administration and the implications of it.

To generate local administration you need local infrastructure. This type of infrastructure is called Institutional Infrastructure (II) in the econ model. II provides the capability to implement global and local solutions. We'll define the Administration Effectiveness Level (AEL) as that capability in the 0-100% range. When AEL=100% it means administration is effective enough to run the province at its best, while AEL=0% means there's no real administration at all. AEL will affect people's welfare in the province reflecting the impact on population of bad or good administration. A far away province can be more difficult to run, specially under a centralized govt. A centralized administration is less sensitive to local problems in distant provinces and so, less effective. On the contrary, if local administration is managed mostly by a local governor (or any other local authority), effectiveness is increased in general terms. So, AEL will be given by:

AEL=(C*exp(-K*PI)+(1-C)*(0.8+0.2/(1+PI)))*(1-(H-II)/TPP)

where C is the centralization level (0-100%), PI is Province Isolation, i.e. a measure of how far the province is from the capital at the current level of transportation and communications techs, H is a game constant indicating the amount of Institutional Infrastructure per person needed in a province for optimum effectiveness, II is the current level of Institutional Infrastructure and TPP is Total Province Population.

The player will have to decide the value for C in each province, that is, how much he wants province administration depends on central govt employees. The closer the province is to the capital, the less important this decision is, but in distant provinces it is relevant. The formula encourages him to choose a low centralization, but this desire for better administration effectiveness has a trade off. Low centralization means autonomy, so in the Riots Model isolated provinces seeing themselves too autonomous will tend to think about independence. There should also be economic trade offs between low and high centralization, but that's still a thread to come.


Appendix 1: Discrimination Laws

ED (Ethnic Discrimination) and RD (Religious Discrimination) policies are the discrimination laws. They define what ethnic groups in the civ are considered majorities and what minorities. An ethnic group is considered minority if:

• It hasn't the civ's nationality and ED>0
• It doesn't follow the Dominant Religion and RD>0
• It hasn't the civ's nationality and RD>0 and the Dominant Religion is a Primitive Religion (as defined in the social model)

Otherwise it's considered in majorities.


Appendix 2: Majorities Cultural Attributes and Religious Class Mentality

MCA-Majorities Cultural Attributes
MCA stores the cultural information majorities have in order to have UC and LC politically acting according to their culture. MCA values are in essence just a copy of the cultural values in the social model for attributes Individualism, Asceticism, Religious Tolerance, Ethnic Tolerance, Importance of Religion, Nationalism and Aggressiveness. The question is from what ethnic group (EG) this info must be read.

Ethnic Discrimination and Religious Discrimination policies define what EGs in the civ are in majorities and what in minorities. MCA attributes are a weighted sum of cultural attributes of EGs with majorities status, using populations as weights. This is done for Individualism, Asceticism and Aggressiveness. For the rest a weighted sum is also used, but cultural values are altered before entering in the sum according to these rules:
1) If the EG hasn't the civ's nationality, it appears in the weighted sum having Nationalism=0 and Ethnic Tolerance=100.
2) If the EG doesn't follow the Dominant Religion (as defined in III.6), it appears in the weighted sum having Importance of Religion=0 and Religious Tolerance=100.


RCM-Religious Class Mentality
RCM contains religious attributes of the RC. The list of attributes is the same MCA has. Attributes Nationalism and Ethnic Tolerance are made equal to the values in MCA. Importance of Religion is made equal to 0.2*100+0.8*MCA_ImportanceReligion. For Individualism, Asceticism, Religious Tolerance and Aggressiveness, there're two cases:
1) There's an official religion: RCM values are equal to the values stored in the social model for the religion that happens to be official (religion's moral code).
2) There's no official religion (secular State): RCM values are the average of moral code's values of all present religions.


Appendix 3: Representation Values and Representation Matrix

Instead of using the Support Shares Matrix in section IV.3.2. to compute pol.powers for ideologies, a Representation Matrix will be used to allow the existence of obstacles to ideologies. By obstacles I mean ideology-specific difficulties imposed by the ruler or others, like forbidding a specific ideology or killing "politicians" supporting a specific ideology. In those cases, the pol.power the affected ideology has is decreased, transitorily or constantly. The idea is a govt can give pol.power to a class, but not allow it to support any ideology or do it under-represented (that is, with lower effectiveness).

To achieve this, the model uses Representation Values. There's one RV for each ideology indicating what level of imposed difficulties it is facing. If RV=100% it means nothing is artificially affecting the ideology. If RV<100%, some difficulties have been imposed on it and its supporters. RV can only decrease by special actions. Representation Values increase slowly each turn up to 100%, so any effect is transitory and the ideology eventually will recover. Banning the ideology is the only way to keep the respective RV each turn at 0%.

To build the Representation Matrix, first each column in SSM is multiplied by the Representation Value for the specific ideology, leading to a Pre Representation Matrix, like in this example:

Suppose SSM is:

_______Ideology1__Ideology2__Ideology3__Ruler's Govt Profile__Govt Profile
UC______46%______12%______20%___________7%________ __15%
LC_______5%______20%______33%__________20%________ __22%
RC_______2%_______1%______90%___________1%________ ___6%
MC______13%______12%______20%__________42%________ __14%

and Representation Values are Ideology1-0%, Ideology2-75%, Ideology3-100% (Govt Profile and Ruler's Govt Profile always have RV=100%). The Pre Representation Matrix is:

_______Ideology1__Ideology2__Ideology3__Ruler's Govt Profile__Govt Profile
UC_______0%_______9%______20%___________7%________ _15%
LC_______0%______15%______33%__________20%________ _22%
RC_______0%_______1%______90%___________1%________ __6%
MC_______0%_______9%______20%__________42%________ _14%

Now, to build the Representation Matrix, each row is scaled to make it sum 100%:

_______Ideology1__Ideology2__Ideology3__Ruler's Govt Profile__Govt Profile
UC_______0%______17%______40%__________14%________ __30%
LC_______0%______16%______37%__________22%________ __25%
RC_______0%_______1%______92%___________1%________ ___6%
MC_______0%______10%______23%__________50%________ __16%

Using this matrix instead of SSM in the negotiations ensure banned ideologies, like ideology1, won't be able to affect the govt, and ideologies having problems with their politicians being effective, like ideology2, will be less effective in changing the govt policies.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Again another good model, much better than the last gov model. Good Job!

Now for the things i have a problem/question with.
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-Religion Discrimination (RD): (0-5) This variable describes the relationship between govt and religion. If RD=0 the State is secular. If 1<=RD<=5, there's an official religion and people practicing other beliefs are considered minorities. The type of treatment toward other beliefs becomes more intolerant the higher RD is.
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OK. Here's the way i see it. 0, like u said is secular. That's fine. However, there could be an unoficcal religion in which the majority believes and thus although the gov. is secular, it seems to sometimes lean towards one partical (or more than 1) religion(s).

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-Ethnic Discrimination (ED): (0-10) This variable defines if there's or not an ethnic group above the rest and if so, what kind of treatment other ethnic groups get. If ED=0, all ethnic groups are considered equal and the civ is said to be "multiethnic". If 1<=ED<=10, there's a preferred ethnic group (FE, romans in roman empire) and all the rest are considered minorities (this is the most common case). The type of treatment other ethnic groups get is more disrespectful the higher ED is.
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There can be a whole bunch of ethnic groups the gov. perfers, but singles out one or a few it doesn't.
Also we should put class and idealogy types here too since a government can perfer one over the other. FE not caring if the lower class gets slaughtered in a war that much, or disliking scientifically-minded indivisuals.

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-Slavery (SL): (0-2) Defines if minorities can be slavered or not. 0=Slavery is not allowed, 1=It is allowed in its most common form. This means some people in minorities is slavered with some laws regulating it like the possibility to buy freedom. If SL=2 it is the same as in SL=1, but some specific ethnic groups can be totally slavered in a more brutal way, like it was with africans. For now and until a better procedure is developed, it'll be the ruler's decision which exact tribes can be slavered this way when SL=2.
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There should be 4 levels really. 0 like you have it and 1 and 2 should be 2 and 3. level 1 would be more like identured servants. IE, people who willingly put themselves into slavery for X amount of years for whatever reason. Whether or not the agreement is followed, depends on circumstances like if he gets payed, but must pay his owner and his living expenses, etc. Also slavery can go on even where legally not allowed.

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-Economic Planning (EP): (0%-100%) Defines how much control govt has over economy, both private and public sector. It includes things like prices setting, limits on production, etc.

-Social Policies (SP): (0%-100%) This will define how much of a welfare state the civ has. It will include all redistribution practices, social security, healthcare, free education, etc.
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Hmm.. seems kinda vauge. I hope somewhere down the line we can control more specifically each area, FE control prices, but not the amount of a product or give free health care to everyone, but that's it.

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-Foreign Affairs (FA): (0-100) Defines the level of aggressiveness the ruler is allowed to be in the international arena. 0 means passive/peaceful and 100 means world conquest.
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Acutally i'd say 0 would be more of subjective and around 50 would be passive.

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III.4 Political Structure & Hidden Policies

The distribution of political power among classes and the ruler is called the political structure.

The main role of the Political Structure is saying how much power each entity has
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OK. The ruler should be able to increase his ruling power and/or decrease others by granting more power to others. It would give him more power by eroding away the power of the others. It is also possible for a group to have no political power.

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-Dominant Religion (DR): The religion with most followers within majorities
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There can be more than 1 dominant religion. In which case how do you determine Religious power?

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-Empire's Stability (ES): (0-10) This is a measure of how stable the empire is seen by the people. Events decrease ES, like losing a province, having a riot or if the ruler is being replaced by force. Every game turn ES is increased a bit, so if these events don't happen often, the feeling goes continuously upwards.
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There should be other ways of increasing stability if it is really low.

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Ruler: He can bribe other "politicians" to gain their sympathy. De facto influence is computed as a scale parameter multiplying the total spending in bribes.
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First off, bribing politicians is limited to only some types of gov, unless politicians also include nobility and similar positions.
Another thing is though, he doesn't ness. need to bribe them. Why couldn't he be like Stalin and simply murder them if they seemed to get to powerful. A reign of terror would keep people in line, espically if you didn't know if you'd live to see tomorrow because for whatever reason. Or a ruler might not be so outright cruel. He could use blackmail or other means.

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Religious Class: RC de facto influence comes from the respect and worshiping they receive from the rest of society. The more intolerant the religion is, the more willing to use this influence is. That's because intolerant means religion sees itself as the only way to live, so it tries to impose that. De facto influence is computed as 0.2*MCA_ImportanceOfReligion*(100-RCM_ReligiousTolerance)/10000.
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What in the case of multiple powerful religions such as in pre-British India where Muslim and Hinduism were both major religions?

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Knowledge Level (KL): How known an ideology is. It goes in the range 0-100%. If 100% it means the ideology is perfectly known by the population. When the ideology tech has not been discovered yet, KL=0%. At the moment of discovery it becomes 10%. From that point and ahead, KL increases its magnitude (up to 100%) every turn based on communications techs available.
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Note: Techs, and social advances, can be lost over time. Such as democracy and republic were (Romans and Athenians). So there should be a way to erode its knowledge to everyone also.

Well that's all for now.

[roquijad]

LGJ:

1)"OK. Here's the way i see it. 0, like u said is secular. That's fine. However, there could be an unoficcal religion in which the majority believes and thus although the gov. is secular, it seems to sometimes lean towards one partical (or more than 1) religion(s)."
When the state has an official religion, people not supporting this religion cannot be in majorities.

2) "There can be a whole bunch of ethnic groups the gov. perfers, but singles out one or a few it doesn't."
For simplicity we didn't take that road.

3) "Also we should put class and idealogy types here too since a government can perfer one over the other. FE not caring if the lower class gets slaughtered in a war that much, or disliking scientifically-minded indivisuals."
The govt never "prefers" an ideology, but it's built using ruler's ideology and people's ideologies (when more representative), so it only "takes" a form, depending on relative powers of each ideology, which I believe is better modeling.

4) "There should be 4 levels really. 0 like you have it and 1 and 2 should be 2 and 3. level 1 would be more like identured servants. IE, people who willingly put themselves into slavery for X amount of years for whatever reason. Whether or not the agreement is followed, depends on circumstances like if he gets payed, but must pay his owner and his living expenses, etc. Also slavery can go on even where legally not allowed."
Your new definition for SL=1 matches perfectly the current SL=1 definition. SL=1 means exactly that kind of slavery where people is not ness slavered through all their lives and not ness forced to be slaves. As I said, the widely most common form of slavery seen in the world. As for slavery continuing when not allowed, yes maybe we should include that.

5) Economic Planning and Social Policies: As Axi said it so well when we were developing the model: A welfare state is not the same as a centrally planned economy. Social Policies mean redistribution of wealth. Economic Planning means controlling economic variables and industries. A communist regime has both high. Some current european nations have low EP, but high SP. The US has a medium SP and low EP.

6) Foreign Affairs: "Acutally i'd say 0 would be more of subjective and around 50 would be passive." I agree. Let's take it like that. How we define this variable has only an impact on the diplomacy model, which BTW I don't know its current status.

7) "OK. The ruler should be able to increase his ruling power and/or decrease others by granting more power to others. It would give him more power by eroding away the power of the others. It is also possible for a group to have no political power."
Yes, the model does that.

8) "There can be more than 1 dominant religion. In which case how do you determine Religious power?"
There can't be. As defined, the religion with MOST followers in MAJORITIES. There's only one veryfing that.

9) "There should be other ways of increasing stability if it is really low."
In my opinion, no. Empire's Stability is how people sees stability, so you'd really have to work on people's minds to do so. Some sort of propaganda could maybe work, but I guess people would hardly be influenced by it if they're seeing street protest and riots right outside their houses.

10) "First off, bribing politicians is limited to only some types of gov, unless politicians also include nobility and similar positions.
Another thing is though, he doesn't ness. need to bribe them. Why couldn't he be like Stalin and simply murder them if they seemed to get to powerful. A reign of terror would keep people in line, espically if you didn't know if you'd live to see tomorrow because for whatever reason. Or a ruler might not be so outright cruel. He could use blackmail or other means."
Bribing is a ruler's decision. He might do it or not. Money's corruptive power IMO go beyond any type of regime. However, the model will include the power of the media in freer societies, so bribing will be more difficult on those cases. As for killing politicians... the models already has that. Look at Special Actions.

11) "What in the case of multiple powerful religions such as in pre-British India where Muslim and Hinduism were both major religions?"
English empire wasn't secular by that time, so those religions wouldn't be in the religious class (because are discriminated). However, supposing the english empire was secular back then, the religious class would hold all religions in equal stand and therefore Religous Class would have a de facto influence as an average of what each religion can bring.

12) Note: Techs, and social advances, can be lost over time. Such as democracy and republic were (Romans and Athenians). So there should be a way to erode its knowledge to everyone also.
True. We'll have to make something about it.

Rodrigo

[Lord God Jinnai]

1>When the state has an official religion, people not supporting this religion cannot be in majorities.
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You misunderstood my question. I'm saying that the Civ has no offical relgion and in fact is supposed to be treating all the same, but seems to grant speical benfits for whatever reason to one religion. These are not major, but small. This religious is most likely also widely accepted.

3> The govt never "prefers" an ideology, but it's built using ruler's ideology and people's ideologies (when more representative), so it only "takes" a form, depending on relative powers of each ideology, which I believe is better modeling.
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Still you can have class discrimination in additon to enthnic.

4> Your new definition for SL=1 matches perfectly the current SL=1 definition. SL=1 means exactly that kind of slavery where people is not ness slavered through all their lives and not ness forced to be slaves. As I said, the widely most common form of slavery seen in the world. As for slavery continuing when not allowed, yes maybe we should include that.
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Also I wanted to ask, what would serfdom be then?

5> Economic Planning and Social Policies: As Axi said it so well when we were developing the model: A welfare state is not the same as a centrally planned economy. Social Policies mean redistribution of wealth. Economic Planning means controlling economic variables and industries. A communist regime has both high. Some current european nations have low EP, but high SP. The US has a medium SP and low EP.
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I'm not arguing with that. Its that I may want to regulate certain aspects and not others (assuming my current level on the paramerters are 0< and >100). That's what I'm wanting to be able to do.

6> Foreign Affairs: "Acutally i'd say 0 would be more of subjective and around 50 would be passive." I agree. Let's take it like that. How we define this variable has only an impact on the diplomacy model, which BTW I don't know its current status.
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Oops...Subjective is wrong...i meant Sumbmissve *smacks himself*

8> Ummm...Refer to social model for more info. I think this part is better discussed there.

9> In my opinion, no. Empire's Stability is how people sees stability, so you'd really have to work on people's minds to do so. Some sort of propaganda could maybe work, but I guess people would hardly be influenced by it if they're seeing street protest and riots right outside their houses.
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There are other ways. FE before lets say your civ was pretty peaceful to most demonstations and such. You could start to come down hard with military force and Gestapo-type police.

10> Bribing is a ruler's decision. He might do it or not. Money's corruptive power IMO go beyond any type of regime. However, the model will include the power of the media in freer societies, so bribing will be more difficult on those cases. As for killing politicians... the models already has that. Look at Special Actions.
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And blackmailing? What about that...Also you never answered me what exactly is a politician since the politicians as they are viewed in general didn't exist until beauracracies.

11> English empire wasn't secular by that time, so those religions wouldn't be in the religious class (because are discriminated). However, supposing the english empire was secular back then, the religious class would hold all religions in equal stand and therefore Religous Class would have a de facto influence as an average of what each religion can bring.
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I think it should be possible to favor multiple religions like many arab countries who consider Islam "THE" religion, but will tolerate Christianity and Judaism sometimes.

[axi]

Beware! I have many things to say!

Disclaimer: I did not write the models, Rodrigo did. I only helped at the govt and riots (which at the time were one) and posted them here. There are many comments I would like to make too.

1) Classes: As I made obvious in the riots thread, the UC and the LC serve an economic function and I would like to emphasise this. This explains the strange terms "proletarians" and "capitalists" that remain in the respective class descriptions although no further analysis is made. The UC and the State are the only ones possesing productive infrastructure and resource sites. The LC and the Minorities are the only ones providing labor. With the combination of both, goods are produced and then distributed among the contributors of the various productive factors. So it is not a question of money, it is one of economic role. That is why the UC, the LC and the Minorities are the only classes with a demographic share and the only ones for which a PCI is computed.

I have a unfinished document dealing with all of this, and this I must revise now and present it to Mark and the team as soon as possible. (Oh, I always talk about this and never actually do it! )

2) Cultural preferences: I am the one who introduced variations in the classes preferences for DNPs and I insist that they are too light to make any difference, but Rodrigo does not agree:

quote: axi- One answer to all your protests below is that we need to have more variations in the cultural profiles of the classes, so that we can make changes in the cultural values more interesting and more possible. I have often said that what makes civ-type games boring most of the time is their stability. I would love to see fluctuations, but these can only occur through clash of interests. rodrigo- I couldn't agree more about stability being boring. A goal while writing the model was to take away from the ruler any magical power like in civ2 determining when revolutions must occur or such. The current model has at least for my taste enough things to keep the player worried about inner politics. However, we must keep numbers under reasonable lines. I'm not going to make classes collide between each other just to make the govt more unstable. Classes preferences must be in line to what they supposedly want in real life. If two or more classes tend to think equally about something, well, that's it. In this particular section of the model classes are less conflictive between each other because we're dealing with people's culture and that's something common to all peoples regardless of their class. Any difference between classes in this section must be small. Otherwise you lose the coherency and the goal of this particular section. Although the most important part of the model is the struggle between classes and ideologies, we must remember that the govt model plays a very important role in other things like how will cultural attributes evolve from govt policies, what religions will be accepted or what kind of relationship the civ will have with other civs. It's not only about aristocracy vs proletarians or fascism vs democracy.

Now this is a minor issue per se, but I would like to know everybody's opinion about stability. How stable should the govt model and Clash in general be?

Another issue that comes to mind is the assumption that the participation of each religious and ethnic group in each class is always equal. Rodrigo claims it is, for all groups belonging to the majorities (really belonging to them, not only typically). This is almost always true for all classes except for the two big demographic ones: the LC and the UC. Because of their economic role, special conditions have it so that there are imbalances in it. If f.e. a group which was formerly a minority is accepted into the majorities, will it have a UC worth mentioning of? Won't it consist chiefly of LC members? Or if a province is taken and it's populace is offered citizenship, will there allways be a local UC remaining? Or will they be replaced by the new masters of the province? Think about the proportion of Negroes among the upper class in South Africa for the first case and of the Tartar invasion into China for the second. This is not so important as it seems, but still Rodrigo's answer did not satisfy me.

3) EP and SP: Concerning LGJ's worries, I'll have to admit that, unless Mark has worked on it in the govt model, it is currently kinda vague what exactly these two variables will affect and how. The best use for EP is to provide, through some modifiers, a percentage of each variable that will be possible for the state to control, while the rest will be decided for by the people. This sort of thing I have already done with investment. SP will be probably used rather directly, because it expresses socioeconomic obligations rather than control. I have already used it in some experimental equations concerning the Minorities PCI and it will probably regulate expenditure levels (both public and private) in related areas, like health, education, etc.

4) Religions: Rodrigo insists that either we have no official religion, or all religions besides the DR are counted in the minorities, so they have no political rights. LGJ disagrees, as I had done, bearing in my mind the example of my country which has christian orthodox for an official religion, but all other religions enjoy full political rights for their members. In LGJ's concept of a "prefered religion" the difference would be in the formation of the RC preferences, which would have to be averaged like in the secular case, but with a certain advantage for the DR, while the spreading of religions would also be affected. In my mind it is somewhat heavier: the RC preferences are the ones of the DR and the effect on spreading would be more favorable to the DR, but the religious populations themselves would be able, through their participation in the MCA, to somewhat alter the other classes preferences. These two situations could be described by values 1 and 2 of RD, leaving 3, 4, 5 (and higher) for discriminatory situations. I'm not very interested in religion though, so don't bust my balls about it.

Another issue I don't see refered to is the so called "stupid effect", which occurs when a tolerant agent (ethnically or religiously) lets into the majorities a larger and more intolerant minority and as a result finds itself reduced into minority status, through a change of dominant agent. Rodrigo was quite worried about this - is it solved now?

5) Slavery: Rodrigo should excuse me for quoting whole passages of our previous discussions, but they are really helpful for explaining some decisions. (do not expect to understaand all that is said here)

quote: rodrigo- -Slavery (SL): (0-2) Slavery will be exercised with minorities, or not exercised at all. If 2, slavery is practiced towards minorities. If 1, some "soft" slavery can be practiced to minorities. If 0, no slavery is allowed. axi- This is often called serfdom. Some consider labor in the capitalist system to be the next evolutional level of slavery, "wage-slavery", but I won't insist on this. rodrigo- I'm happy you won't insist on that since we hardly would get to an agreement about that! I'm not familiar with the term "serfdom". I think you'll have to be more precise about your critic here (if any). axi- "Serfdom" is a the state into which the peasants of all the pre-modern societies were reduced, through constant debt to the landownwer, of whom the were totally dependant, since he provided the land, the seed, the tools and the animals they needed and took back almost everything they produced. Serfs had no political rights and the landowning aristocracy had excesive authority over them. Serfdom and Nobility have been throughout history directly linked to eachother. Now don't tell me you still don't understand; your own country was still functioning under this system well into the 20th century. rodrigo- Probably we'll have to extend this variable range because Mark suggested it. axi- If we need this extension to be able to represent more degrees of exploitation, I think that this is a bad way to do it. These additional degrees can be implemented through interpolation, using the MinPCI. In the equations I have provided for it, it is rendered more flexible through the influence of the SP and Hum variables. The 0-2 range for the SL variable must IMHO be kept because it allows for radical changes of the social struture (Like the abolition of slavery in the USA in 1861). TBDF? rodrigo- Serfdom=okay. I did of course know the concept. I didn't know the word in english for that. [Philosophical mode ON] The whole thing about slavery needs a better definition. I'm saying this because I kind of discovered what your vision about slavery is... Under your view, we can call slavery any kind of control over people in which the chances for the subjugated ones to achieve freedom or independence is close to null. A huge level of dependence to other represent for you slavery. Seen that way I understand why you include the term serfdom in this topic or why you can see a modern new form for slavery: "wage-slavery". Your point of view, if we can say I really discovered it, is quite valid, but I'm inclined to use my view of slavery in this particular variable. My view is slavery is the possession of human peoples in the exact ways you own an animal or any other good. Although it might seem very close to your concept, the key difference is the capability to buy, sell and kill slaves just like you can do with an animal. From serfdom to your modern "wage-slavery", this didn't happen. Your employer cannot decide upon your life nor take your child and sell it to other company. When I talk about "soft" slavery, I mean that sort of slavery seen in Greece and other places in ancient times where slaves had the chance of buying their freedom, FE. Where also becoming slaves could be a way to pay a debt and therefore the slave status ended after a number of years. In those cases, people were slaves, but some restrictions were applicable to selling/killing/buying and often also to the kind of treatment they received. I'm not saying that my definition is better than yours, I'm saying that we're talking about different things. Your concept is restricted to the economic dependence in which serfdom and wage-dependence perfectly fit. I'm talking about the feasibility to use humans as animals, not only in treatment but in the kind of rights they posses. My concept of slavery can exist or not in a society. Yours is always present, unfortunately. The limited economic resources in the world makes impossible for us all to be economically independent, so we need to work and depend on our employer. Even in an utopic communist system, we all depend on the State and this State must force us someway or another to work and produce the goods needed. This is why I'm inclined to use my definition for this variable. The level or type of economic dependence can be seen in economic variables, but the possibility of buying and selling humans needs to be defined somewhere else because it has to do with the current code of law and therefore you can never read that info from the econ model. Once the variable is set, then it enters as input to the econ model. [Philosophical mode OFF] "Slavery" will define the possibility to buy/sell/kill humans as an economic good in the same way animals are used. The different levels describe if some restrictions are applied. The range will be enlarged to 0-3 for a little extra flexibility, but you're very right about keeping it on a small range for a "flavor" effect like abolishment of slavery.

I hope this gives some answers about serfdom and for the optimum variable range.

6) Foreign Affairs: A govt setting of this variable will mean everything for the diplomacy model. this will mean what actions will and will not be allowed through the diplomacy interface. This might be an annoyance to the player, although it is just the evolution of the original civ2 concept (No tribute for democracies, etc), but I feel it will help the AI alot. We need the advice of the diplomacy guys for this.

There is a problem here, because there are multiple cultural variables (from the social model) hiding behind this. As even the primitive civ2 design has shown, aggresiveness and expansionism are not the same thing and should be differentiated. Such is the case with FA: High FA means declaring war, or creating colonies? Low FA means raising a defensive army and building castles and walls, or searching for powerful allies to protect us?

7) The Macchiavelian ruler: I have already pointed out that the weakness of the negotiation procedure is that it lets the ruler counterbalance the other classes preferences by taking some extreme decisions for the ruler's gov't profile. The things are bad enough for the DNPs, but for the INPs they are worse because of the multiple loops of the procedure. The first thing I did with Rodrigo's worksheet is to put 100% for Ruler's pol_power in the Ruler's gov't profile and the macro gave me exactly what I wanted. If this happened in the game, it would be exactly like playing civ2 after this. The obvious solution for this is to make sure that the player will not dare to give extreme RGP's, because that would cause an immediate raise to all the related PAFs and an immediate events check and would normally cost him his head (at least). This is something to be set at the riots model of course, but I have outlined it here because otherwise the whole negotiation is useless.

It could also be possible for us to restrict the negotiation to a few or only one loop per turn, so that any governmental change wouldn't take place immediately. Rodrigo insists that an equilibrium must always be reached, but if this prooves to be in any way buggy or unnatural, this could save our efforts.

8) Foul play: For all those who wonder why the name "foul play" is used, I think that this special action must not always mean an assasination. There are more civilised and less dangerous ways to neutralise an adversary that murder. It could be a "frame-up", causing a scandal, which would lead the character in disgrace, reduce the representation of the agent (less than murder of course) and, if it is an ideologic faction, reduce it's KL (since scandals always set ideologic differences aside). Of course the same means could be used against the ruler himself. Sometimes because of the nature of the character, a scandal is much easier than an assasination. This is the difference between Kennedy and Nixon, if you think about it.

9) Tax Rate: This is a minor issue which as we decided is not necessary, but, if the team likes it, could also be included.

quote: For an extra effect, we may consider discriminating taxes into three types: - Head tax: The same amount, paid by everybody. Primitive concept, but it survives to this day in the form of indirect taxes (taxes on consumption goods). It specially hurts the LC. In extreme cases in pre-modern societies, it can result to serfdom. - Income tax: Proportionate to the income, "fair" to everybody. Most susceptible to corruption. - Property tax: Proportional to property. Modern concept, it specially hurts the UC. Leads to redistribution of income. These can be wrought upon taxpayers in any combination, using a three-fold percentile analogy complementary to the normal tax rate. It will help the ruler to direct the weight of taxation in order to control the LC and UC PCI; it is followed by the appropriate class specific happiness effects. This may be also kept as a player exclusive policy.

So what do you say? Do we need this?

10) Interface: We have discussed very few things about the interface that the govt model needs, but here are some elements:

- One of the few main advisors that will be there all the time to help the ruler must be the political advisor (or the "internal affairs" advisor, the name doesn't mater). He will present to the player the approximate PAFs and the current political status. He will define possible threats to the Govt, will present the options for player's actions, both conventional and special, and will optionally give a suggestion (what the AI would have done).

- There must be 3 separate fields of political action and specialised information for the player (3 interfaces?): the political (INPs, presentation of classes/ideologies and related special actions), the cultural (DNPs, presentation of the cultural agents and related special actions) and the economic (presentation of class economic relations/statistics and the effect of PP, EP, SP on them; setting player exclusive variables like tax rate, Labor to Capital Ratios, Investment variables - This will possibly be the main interface for the econ model, displaying info for the whole civ). Specialised presentation of each of the Classes preferences factors and related civwide PAFs should be given there.

- Because of the team's decision not to use bare numbers unless necessary, I suggest that we use a set of sliders plus adjectives or numbers for the INPs and DNPs, some kind of smilies/adjectives for the classes preference factors and a gradient green-yellow-red color-coding for the PAFs.

-There must be a version of the world map called "the political map", presenting the cultural synthesis of each province and the corresponding local PAFs, for the player's civ and all the civs for which there is intelligence.

- The current govt profile, the PCIs (and the Tax Rate?) should be displayed (IMO in numbers) somewhere in the main interface. The PAFs should IMO be graphically represented somehow also.

[This message has been edited by axi (edited June 19, 2000).]

[Lord God Jinnai]

axi:

Now this is a minor issue per se, but I would like to know everybody's opinion about stability. How stable should the govt model and Clash in general be?
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I'm leaning more with rodrigo on this because a ruler shouldn't constantly struggle to keep his civ stable. There are going to be times when things are fine and thus he can build his infrastructure during this time. However, things shouldn't last forever.

Another issue that comes to mind is the assumption that the participation of each religious and ethnic group in each class is always equal. Rodrigo claims it is, for all groups belonging to the majorities (really belonging to them, not only typically). This is almost always true for all classes except for the two big demographic ones: the LC and the UC. Because of their economic role, special conditions have it so that there are imbalances in it. If f.e. a group which was formerly a minority is accepted into the majorities, will it have a UC worth mentioning of? Won't it consist chiefly of LC members? Or if a province is taken and it's populace is offered citizenship, will there allways be a local UC remaining? Or will they be replaced by the new masters of the province? Think about the proportion of Negroes among the upper class in South Africa for the first case and of the Tartar invasion into China for the second. This is not so important as it seems, but still Rodrigo's answer did not satisfy me.
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On your first part, most will be of lower class. However, there can be some upper class which pushed for the group as a whole to be considered a majority and that's why they were let in, because of their influence.
As to your second part, not ness. This mainly depends on a> having enough people you trust and can do a good job b> can put a native person there to help ease tensions hopefully and have him act as a puppet ruler.

On Taxes: I don't ness. see the need of deviding taxes, atleast like that (i mean there were far more types of taxes). I rhink tariffs and such could be placed and should be seperate since merchants usually don't stay in one place. But I would like the government to be able to levee extra taxes if it thinks it needs to.

[F_Smith]

Very nice system.

I guess I'm going to try to help do an OOA on this model, to help prepare it for coding. I only wonder if I should create a seperate thread, or keep it all here.

I'll start by putting it here, if that's okay.

Okay. I'm just starting to mull this over in my head, so point out any obvious stupidities of mine--

Objects:

Ruler (should already exist in game code)
Civilization (should already exist)
Country/Province (should already exist)
SocialClass (again, new object to be created)
Policy??? (I don't know if this should be a seperate object, or if it should be a behavior. Any thoughts?).

Behaviors:

Government (seems new to this model)
Ideology (might already exist, I don't know)


P.S. -- I'm not sure I understood from the text description if a govt was province by province only, or if there was also some sort of a 'centralized' govt. The model would work for both (scalability -- the sign of a good model), but it sounds like we might need two 'Govt' interfaces (local/single prov and 'centralized' or many provs).
[This message has been edited by F_Smith (edited June 19, 2000).]

[roquijad]

I'll give some short answers/comments on some of the issues. The ones I consider most important at this level of discussion. You can insist later on those I don't say nothing about:

A secular State with a "preferred" religion: I agree with you this case being the most common in modern democracies. But I believe the small benefits this religion would have would be small enough so we don't have to worry about modeling them.
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"Still you can have class discrimination in additon to enthnic."
There's some of that in the model. First, political power shares. The Religious Class may have 70% pol.power while the Military Class can have 5%. In that case I guess we can say there's a political discrimination at the classes level. Second, Privileges. The model computes privileges for the upper class considering pol.power shares of UC and LC and their demographic shares. Privileges are those like nobility had in middle ages.
------------
Slavery/serfdom: To reduce ambiguity, I prefer to maintain Slavery strictly as the possibility to use/buy/sell/kill humans in the same way animals are usually handled. Serfdom would be the result of several contingencies. Low LC pol.power, low LC PCI, low Civil Rights, high UC privileges, slavery. This is why I prefer to not handle serfdom with a particular govt policy as it happens with slavery nor having it handled simultaneously with "Slavery" govt policy. Therefore, if these contingencies exist as a result of several govt policies, then serfdom is said to exist in the civ. Possibly showing this result in one interface.
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"Oops...Subjective is wrong...i meant Sumbmissve *smacks himself*"
I knew it....
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"And blackmailing? What about that...Also you never answered me what exactly is a politician since the politicians as they are viewed in general didn't exist until beauracracies."
I'm glad you ask about a definition for "politician". I know now I should have made a comment on that in the model. In this model, a politician is anyone who can politically act. So, for example, high officers of the army (MC members)are politicians, because the model allow them to have political power depending on the regime.
About blackmailing, I think we can add it as a Special Action increasing ruler's de facto influence.
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"the stupid effect": I didn't include that in the model only to make the document easier to read and understand. It's not solved yet, but I'm really not worring too much now about it. We'll see exactly how to avoid it sometime in the future.
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Foreign Affairs: I once thought too that FA wasn't clear enough. The way I see FA, and excuse me if I didn't say it this way in the model document, is regulating the civ's aggressiveness toward other civs. So, if FA is low, you can create as many colonies as you want, as long as you don't attack/conquer other civs.
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The Macchiavelian ruler: As you perfectly said it, Axi, the ruler can face a lot of problems in the Riots model if he chooses extreme values in Ruler's Govt Profile. Even more, there's a specific Pro-Action Feeling for this, the "Replace Ruler Feeling".
Concerning the equilibrium point of the Negotiation Procedure, if you didn't notice, I actually chose your idea! Whenever nagotiations are called, the equilibrium will be found, but not applied immediately. It will be stored and each game turn, the Govt Profile will slowly move toward eq. I think these two elements will prevent the player from being dishonest.
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Foul Play: I agree with what you say, Axi. Not only murders can be there.
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Rodrigo

[roquijad]

Thanks for the interest on how to code the model, F_Smith. Why don't you open a new thread for that with that same post as a start so we can keep this one for discussing over model's features?

Rodrigo

[Lord God Jinnai]

A secular State with a "preferred" religion: I agree with you this case being the most common in modern democracies. But I believe the small benefits this religion would have would be small enough so we don't have to worry about modeling them.
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I have to disagree. It may not have much effect on the government, but on the social part it does have very signifigant power. By even unofically trying to promote a specific religion in a multicultural society could in theory be a very underhanded way of trying to get the culture to follow certain ideals you want. Also the culture itself will not allow itself to divorce itself from religion and state very easily. Although you as the player may consider all equal the people who represent parts of the government will not. Again I'd say 1-2 should be set aside for this, beyond you need a specific offical religion (although others can be allowed).

[F_Smith]

roquijad:

Done.

A question, tho. Will there be both a central and province govt? I assume so, but don't want just guess.

[Mark_Everson]

Quick comment on govt stability:

I think usually governments should be fairly stable (as others have said). However when the player intentionally crosses a clear boundary the civ government could enter an unstable phase. One example would be after warnings that the empire is getting too big to administer practically, the player goes off and conquers yet more land. Well, then the player must cope with the situation they created IMO. But otherwise the player should only have to act (as Rodrigo said) something like every 50 turns.


I accidentally put a comment on centralization that belongs here in the social model... so here it is.

quote: One thing I forgot... Regarding the centralization number, what are the Effects in terms of province functioning? FE if you model a feudal society as one with a capital province with C=100 (the king's) and a number of other provinces with C=20 (king's vassals), then what effect does this have on taxation, who controls the provincial armies etc. Does only 20% of the taxes get to the central government? Can the king call on the whole army (including vassals') indefinitely or only in specified cases? We talked about this stuff at length before, and I'm not sure if you envision this as part of the new model, or not.

I'll try to work up something on the ecomomics of centralization (C), but first I think we need to decide how far we want C's effects to reach. Its a big decision in terms of complexity and reality. As I asked above, should some provinces have their own troops? In the limit of low C, does each province almost have its own government? Where influences of the player are only felt at the margins? This is especially important in modeling feudal civs or those composed of groups of mostly-independent city-states.

I think your use of C as a single number associated with each province is much more practical than giving each province an 'independence setting' in numerous areas. But we need to make some basic decisions about how far it goes soon.

One other issue is changes in C. I see a decrease in centralization as something the player can do at will. However, increasing it should not be easy at all... In many cases it would lead to a revolt or other riot model action.

[roquijad]

LGJ:
I guess we're close to agreement. The main effect is in the social model. To be precise, a secular govt might have a preferred religion, but this has no significat effect because being secular the State cannot directly help a specific religion. However, people in classes politically acting at the govt can have (and will have) a preferred religion. The effect of this over the civ would be a sort of reinforcement for that religion. This will happen because the social model makes all people in the civ affected by the culture of those in the govt (majorities).
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Mark and F_Smith:
Yes, local vs central govt is no small decision. I believe we really just can't afford using the govt model on the central govt level and also at each province. It's not only a matter of cost, but also a matter of the complexity the player would have to deal with. That's why I chose in the model's document to say that the central govt defines the global policies and the local govt just solves local and detailed level problems, which are astract and never really modeled. This works well for a "typical" civ and for most govt forms. However, it's still unsolved how to manage those civs with feudalistic styles or city-states styles. I guess we can refine the current govt model regarding Centralization and AEL variables to include feudalistic regimes, but I believe "league of states" govt forms will be best modeled as a feature in the diplomacy model, as you once suggested, Mark.
What do you say?

Rodrigo

[F_Smith]

Roq:

Just one more question.

A 'province' level, local govt would also have to be included if it will have some potential to affect the game, even if always run by an AI, or local 'character' (governor, king, whatever). For example, differing tax-rates for different provinces would likely require a seperate govt command object for each province.

Will there be anything like this?

[Mark_Everson]

Rodrigo:

Support your take on centralization. I think we can maybe layer a few simple things on it to get the right flavor for feudalism etc if necc.

F. Smith may be right in that we might need a good place to 'plug' local govt characters in, even if things at the local level are fairly simple.

I will be on vacation (and out of contact) soon, so I will just throw out one more point....

Have you thought about special war powers? FE in a democracy during the time of serious threat to the nation usually freedoms are suspended, taxes are raised, social spending is reduced etc. If the people support the war they will generally put up with all this for the good of the 'war effort'. Do you have a way to handle this?

[roquijad]

F_Smith:
I can't give you a good answer on province level govt variables, since as you can see, it's still under discussion. Given Mark support on my crude vision regarding local govt powers, I envision at least a province level tax rate and a couple of variables for military recruitment. It shouldn't be more than that.

Mark:
War effort... I'll see how it can be handled...

[Mark_Everson]

I have been thinking in my idle moments about how to handle the interconnections between the government and economic models. I'm going to do a lot more thinking about this while I'm on vacation. Axi, if you can write up those thoughts that you have been threatening us with on the topic and post them, I will hopefully be able to read them at some point while on vacation.

Anyway, at least in my initial thoughts I have some real problems with the extreme polarization between the labor class and the upper class that was put in to drive conflict in the model. It is the assumption that the labor class controls absolutely none of the capital resources of the society that really bothers me. I think this will put too much conflict in the government model, and also do some bizarre things to the economy... I haven't thought this all the way through, but this may be my last chance to post for a week or so, so I just wanted to say a little bit about where I was headed in my thought process.

Essentially, giving the government and upper class a complete control of the capital in the economic model, and so all the benefits derived from the capital, seems to me for much of the early game to guarantee that the labor class are essentially serfs. Although this was true in a lot of the ancient world, there is also much of the ancient world where it wasn't true. In effect, you are making something Always happen that I thought should be a sign that the player had screwed up, or didn't care about the economy!

So at the point where I am in trying to unify the government and economic models, it appears to me we need to do one of two things. Either let the labor class control some of the capital in the society, or put in a middle class that can do the same. (But even when a middle class exists, the labor class should be able to control some of the capital resources of the society IMO). I am kind of leaning toward us putting the middle class in, even though it complicates the model a bit. One reason, is that everyone already knows the term. And most people know that the economy is generally more advanced as a larger percentage of the population is in the middle class... So IMO we can use it as a gauge of how advanced an economy is (Axi, I know you're not gonna like this )

In a related note, I think the different kinds of taxes that Axi proposed is a good idea, and I had in mind to do something similar. However, we should probably not worry about it just at this point. When things get further along we can start a thread just on taxes, and narrow the list of probably 20 or more types of taxes that will get proposed down to something of order five or so.

Rodrigo, Axi, and others... What do you think about these general points?


[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited June 22, 2000).]

[roquijad]

On Mark's thoughts:

Well, I know I once said something like "adding the middle class would be a pain in the ass" when discussing this model via e-mail with Axi before being posted. I see it now as a easier task if we really want to go that way. Anyway, before taking this road, I'd love to know what parts exactly in the econ model become complex/bizarre with the absence of the middle class. If we can find a way to solve those problems, I think that'd be much more convienient than adding a middle class, because, as you know, when adding the middle class we must add a behavior for it in the govt and riots models, which isn't cheap.

That's the most important difficulty when adding the middle class. What about the pro's? 1)More true-to-life; 2)It can help modeling ending of feudalistic regimes and risings of representative regimes (modern and ancient), because the middle class is by far the most important factor in those processes. 3)It helps modeling migrations from country-side to cities and the modern role of cities as THE major productive units in these times.

Measuring the civ's progress by the size of the middle class... you bet Axi won't like it!! (me neither)
One thing is very very important when discussing about the Upper Class, Lower Class and a possible Middle Class: They must be defined according to their role in society and not according to their (relative) PCI. The latter is the intuitive first choice (it was the one I chose initially), but Axi was very clever realizing the fact that class behavior can be modeled much better and coherently when you instead look at their economic role. I'm saying this only to avoid this discussion going in the wrong way.


As for taxes, I, as a player, wouldn't like to handle more than 2 rates...

[Richard Bruns]

I would like to say that I think modeling the middle class is very important. For almost all of Western history since around 1600, the middle class was an important influence on politics and economics. In the modern era, the majority of the population has been considered middle class.

I don't think it is fair or accurate to put all of these people in the lower class. By the current definition, a neurosurgeon making $300,000 a year and a migrant farm worker making less than minimum wage would both be considered lower class. These people will have very different mentalities, and it would hurt the game to lump them together in a single class.

A good working definition of the middle class is "educated, skilled labor." In the economic model, they would usually provide services. The size of the class would increase as the civ creates more educational infrastructure. They would affect the technology model, creating more RP's per capita than any other class. And in the social model, their mentality and values would be different than the upper and lower classes.
[This message has been edited by Richard Bruns (edited June 25, 2000).]

[F_Smith]

Pardon my nose, but I'm trying to get a handle on this model to prototype it, so ya'll can play with the numbers.

Now ,If I'm off base, please tell me, but the various 'social class' choices are already going to be more than just 'upper class' and 'lower class', won't they? I'm thinking of 'noble class', 'religous class', 'warrior class', (no class -- for people like me), etc.

In other words, 'social class' would be similar to 'culture' and 'religion' -- people objects will have different societal behaviors, each person will be commanded by their own 'Social Class' behavior.

Every turn, the code will run a 'turn()' method in each person's 'Social Class'.

So you can have as many different social classes as you want . . . Does this fit in with ya'lls plans?

[roquijad]

F_Smith:
No! The number of classes is no minor thing. We'll have the Upper Class, Lower Class, Religious Class, Military Class and Bureaucratic Elite Class and maybe, depending on where this thread lead us, a Middle Class. No more than that, no less. We can't afford having just ANY number of classes because modeling their behavior is tough. It will also have impact on the riots model, so adding classes increases the game's complexity several times.

Richard and Axi:
As time passes, I'm more and more inclined to the idea of having a middle class. So, let's talk about how it can be added. I see Axi's approach as the more general way to handle an "economic-political society", where each person earns money through providing some level of labor and through providing some level of capital and having returns for it. But, doing it as general as that gives us as many classes we'd like to have, because it's a continous space of possibilities. Therefore, I prefer to define classes like this:
Upper Class: They provide only capital (land, factories, etc).
Lower Class: They provide only labor.
Middle Class: They provide labor and capital.

When adding the Middle Class in the govt model, only the calculations for Ideologies Attractiveness needs a closer look, so this class would evaluate each economic system as a merged view between LC and UC. No major change is needed in the model. Probably the Income Distribution would have to change and become really two variables (two rates).
The problems I see are two. First, demography. This is an issue still not solved even for the current model, because I wanted this to be an outcome of the econ and govt models interactions. However, adding the middle class makes it a bit more complex, because the demographic share of the middle class shouldn't depend only on the current economic system, but also on the size and tech level of cities, where the middle class really exist. And second, computing correctly a PCI for each of these three classes. I imagine it isn't too hard to do, but I'm not sure...
[This message has been edited by roquijad (edited June 27, 2000).]

[axi]

I don't understand why Mark and Rodrigo are so afraid of my reactions to their thoughts about the Middle Class. Do I look like a fanatic?

Anyway, I have to say that it has so happened that I was quite busy last week and I will also be this week too, since it is the examinations period here and one has to study in the midst of a heat wave (my room has a constant temperature of 31 Celsius - outside it is 24 - 39 ). So it is quite reasonable that I have neither the time nor the energy to think about Clash govt or econ.

I will provide some clarifications anyway, before this issue goes astray, in an effort to simulate the external appearances of the Middle class instead of it's internal structure.

Is anybody familiar with 2-phase systems, such as chemical mixtures or alloys? This is the only analogy I can find for my concept of the clash-class-system , which is more or less presented in my related quotation in the riots model (if you haven't read this, please do - allright Mr Bruns?). Every person's income is a mixture of wages and profits (if wages=0% pure UC, if profits=0% pure LC), and through their analogy he can be placed in any social layer. But in reality, no other class than the LC and the UC is a real class, it is just an alloy. Everyone's political profile can be derived in the same way as his income, since the double source of his income causes every "middle class" member to have conflicting interests. We would only have to use the simple cantilever rule to refer any middle class populationXincome group to a couple of respective UC and LC groups. I think this approach is more programmer friendly, but I am ignorant of such things.

The only problem we would have to deal with is the reverse process, or how to simulate the existance and characteristics of a middle class through LC - UC interpolation and I feel that this is what Mark brings forth. We only have:

1)The mean PCI of the UC and the mean PCI of the LC and also of course their ratio = ID (income distribution) variable, all of them determined from the internal provincial market system (modified by state intervention, either fixed (use of SP) or determined by the player (use of EP)), which will split all surplus value into wages and profits.

2) The historical (given from us, the game developpers) function between consumption vs. investment and income.

3) (possibly, if Mark's econ model isn't incompatible with this) The LCR (Labor to Capital Ratio) for each economic sector, which will tell us how many capital units must be used for every labor unit into production, giving us both a rough estimate of which is the income needed for a producer to be independent (his capital employing his own labor, f.e. a farmer) and also of the advancement of the economy (don't you think so Mark?). It is widely accepted that the capital intensive economies are more advanced than the labor intensive ones. This of course has nothing to do with the size of the middle class but with it's independance; if overall LCR is low as in the advanced economies, it is more difficult to be independent.

What I am not exactly sure of is how are we going to combine all this data to give us a representation of the economic importance of the middle class. I feel that as ID increases and LCR decreases, the size and influence of the "Middle class" would decrease. I also think that a high percentage of private investment over consumption would mean an increase in the demographic shares of people in the upper classes, due to larger profit shares.

I think this is an issue well studied in macroeconomics (I think it is the Keynesian theory), but these are deep waters for me, so it would be helpful if someone more proficient in such matters would explain things to us.

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

[roquijad]

It's not that easy, F_Smith. When I say "class behavior" I refer to the way a social class sees the world and the way it reacts to it. It's a rather philosophical issue. If you take, for instance, the military class and you want to know what kind of things it wants, you'll find there're several problems. For example, you can find military dictatorships in the world, but they can be fundamentalistic, fascist or communist. MC seems to be obsesed with power in some countries, while they appear more non-political in others. So, for a given civ, what kind of mentality the military class have? Each time you want to add a social class, you have to sit down and think a lot about how people in it should behave and why. We need to decide what the class WANTS to produce values ad hoc for it in the different parts of the model, and that's no easy task. It's not like just adding objects to the model.

[F_Smith]

Rodrigo:

I am sorry if I implied it might be quick and easy to decide on what 'behaviors' to give other social classes. It will take thought, and discussion.

A 'SocialClass' command object has a vector of 'policy' objects (key-value pairs of strings and integers: "Capital Investment" "20"). Which is, incidentally, also how 'Government' and 'Culture' work. And there will be default values for each needed type of 'Policy'. So when making a new SocialClass (or Government or Culture) a person only will have to look at the default policies and then decide how to alter those values.

In this way, if Clash becomes popular, a vast number of Government, Culture and Social Class types will hopefully be made by the legions of players.

[F_Smith]

Rodrigo:

That's fine, for now, I suppose.

But remember, you don't have to define all the social classes' behaviors now. An object model like this is flexible, upgrade-able and scalable. Additional new social classes can and will be up to others, later. What would be wrong with someone deciding to add, say, an 'IntellectualElite' social class? Or a 'MediaElite' one? Since the 'SocialClass' interface they'll implement will tell them all the behaviors they'll need to define, is there any actual extra work to be done to the model itself?

I don't see any . . . it will fit right in.

But for now, we only really need one social class, to test the basic model structure. So no problem-o.

P.S.-- there is actually no reason not to allow all social classes to contribute labor, capital and anything else, at varying levels defined by the 'social class'. The code will loop thru it all on a turn-by-turn basis anyway, and get from each person his contributions (taken from his social class) . . . so it's a quick and simple thing to have the 'LowerClass' (UnderClass, maybe?) contribute, say, x percent of it's total net worth (which could be next to nothing) while the 'upper class' contributes a higher percentage of their net worth (which will be considerably higher, of course). Or you can define the 'LowerClass' as returning 0 when you ask for their 'capital contribution'. But it's up to ya'll.

Just don't avoid this because you think it'll be difficult. It's already in. It's just up to you whether or not you use it.

[roquijad]

I wouldn't be so optimistic about classes behaviors being easy to change, F_Smith, but, well, we'll see...

[Mark_Everson]

I'm at home for a day, and then off to a conference. But I think I can be annoying based on my quick scanning of what has been discussed since I left . Also, I have been working on integrating the government and econ models, and have come to some revelations which I will discuss his briefly as I can manage. I am just kind of going to go through the posts since I left, but this will hopefully be coherent.

Although axi's definitions of the classes are attractive from a fundamental point of view, I don't think they can really work at least as far as the economic model is configured. The basic reason for this is that axi's definition does not allow for poor free farmers (as opposed to serfs). The reason is simple. If the upper class owns all land and capital investment by definition, then farmers near subsistence level will never earn enough to feed themselves and avoid starvation. Essentially, the upper class would always take something like one-third to one half the food that the subsistence farming produces, therefore the peasants would starve. So I think all classes need to be able to own arbitrary fractions of land and capital. This is the actual way that it was at many points in history, so I really objective a whole model being screwed up just so that Axi can have ideological purity in the model. I think it is Much better to have it that way anyway, because you get some realistic game play out of it, like when the Roman Republic free farmers evolved into laborers working for the upper class (or just being unemployed). Now there is fertile ground for social strife...

I think having the middle class is less essential than the point above. But because of its historical significance I think it is worth including. Rodrigo, I like your basic ideas on how to implement a middle class into the model. And as Axi points out, we could indeed make a "synthetic" middle class by adjusting the labor and capital possession of the upper and lower classes. I just think that everyone is so familiar with the notion of a middle class that we might as well put it in, and we will probably later think of uses for it that completely escape us now.

On the coding, F. Smith has a very good point in that the objects in the code need to be flexible. For instance, a scenario designer that wants to do a far-future version of Clash, might want to have a different number of rather different social classes. Ideally we should put all this in his initialization file so that if the scenario designer wants to define new classes with new relationships and new ideologies they can do so.

Axi:
there is some difference in the labor to capital ratios in the different sectors. And certainly the labor to capital ratios will change dramatically with per capita income. I'm not sure if we can include all the factors that you talk about in your most recent post, but I had had similar thoughts.

[Lord God Jinnai]

The ability to have more classes for scerio designers could also be useful if we ever had someone who wanted to create a magical clash world for a later port.

[F_Smith]

Just wanted to verify my understanding here, before I go further with the coding . . . forgive me if this is redundant:

A MapSquare will hold a single Government and a collection of EthnicGroups. And EthnicGroups will contain a collection of 'SocialClasses'. And a 'SocialClass' will contain a population number, a 'Culture', and a collection of policy objects (key-value pairs).

I'll be posting code to this effect tonight, unless ya'll point out any gross misunderstandings I've gotten to.

Then, I think, it's time to put out the prototyper that allows us to build these objects so we can see how easy it will be to customize this game as much as a scenario designer wants . . . you want a 'Wizard' class? Or an 'Empath' class? You can design one yourself!!!