Social Model v3.0

[LDiCesare]

Mark, I think you forgot one point. Concentration of power on a person should be viewed 2 ways:
Number of individuals/groups of individuals, and extension in time (you will more likely be corrupt if you know you are there for life).
Thus demography and geography have a role, but time has another one.
Whether rulers are or can be judged, during or after their reign, also affects corruption.

[roquijad]

"why religions?": it's a good question!!
Maybe the best answer doesn't come from our social model but from the govt and riots models. The historical high influence and power the church has had in govt decisions is IMO the most important reason to have religions in the game. Also, being religion a central part of people's life in ancient time but not in present times has important consequences for what type of govts the people is willing to accept. You can't put a divine monarchy in today's Germany and expect it to work.
Finally, religious discrimination through history has had an impact on the development of certain groups compared to others not discriminated. It has also created revolts and other major social events such as the creation of new nations (Pakistan).


Corruption: The ideas you have cited sound good, but do consider that in the social model we're trying to determine the corruption level of the "average man" in order to simulate how a society (from top to bottom) can be more corrupt than other. Average man's corruption may help us simulate, for example, tax evasion. You seem to be focusing on the ruler and the guys with power. What we can do is incorporate your ideas of govt corruption in the govt model, specially in the part of "spending public funds" (not yet developed). In a corrupt govt some money would be "lost" due to corruption.

[Mark_Everson]

Laurent:

I agree, but am not sure how well we can capture this

Rodrigo:

I was talking about the direct effects of high-level corruption, the ones you cite, but there is also the 'trickle-down' effects. IMO largely the common person takes their cue on corruption from those at the top. I'm not sure we want to model both people's corruption and ruling class and bureaucratic and other types of corruption. But I think what we call corruption should contain components of both. For game purposes I think the more important one to capture is the one for the top of society.

I have also put in an option for a Traditional Economy in D6. A society with high social-model Traditionalism will have a fairly traditional economy. Here is a cross-post for your info

A Traditional Economy means that everyone does what their parents did. When new workers or capital investments are made in a Traditional economy they are made proportional to existing distribution among the sectors. This tends to result in slower growth and more imbalanced prices than a Market economy. Government orders and investments are much more important for growth in a Traditional economy.

In the future the player will be able to influence the evolution of the economy type (probably through the Traditionalism Social characteristic), and it will also have tie-ins with the rate of technology change, and possibly social stability. (The notion on social stability being that Traditional-oriented societies are more stable because of respect for position etc.)

Also in the future economies will not be Purely Market or Traditional but usually somewhere in the continuum between these extreme types.

The Only advantage I could see for a traditional society is social (and probably governmental) stability. Does this match your thoughts? If traditional is all worthless effects then it will make Clash a less rich game since the path the player must take will be clear. I think its already clear in the Long run you want a more market-like economy, but if traditional societies have advantages When you 'make your move' would be an important player decision.

What do you (and others) think?

[Richard Bruns]

Yes, I think that "traditional" economies/societies should have some advantage in terms of stability. While a market economy is good fro creating wealth and growth, it generates winners and losers. Someone who chooses a market approach would have to deal with the possibility of both a rich class interfering with government and a poor, disgruntled class that may riot.

[Lord God Jinnai]

stability and bonuses to resisting religious conversion.

[roquijad]

Ok, I understand now your position on corruption, Mark. I think too corruption at the top of society tends to be "imitated" by the common man, but I think it has a much lower effect than the elements I considered. No big deal, though. I can introduce the two approaches and give them weights we can alter in the future.

On traditional economy, I'm all for it in the sense you plan it (people doing what their parents do and having a penalty on market efficiency and economic growth), but I don't feel social model's traditionalism is the way to model that. It clearly can play a role, but I believe there's a much more important factor: access to education.

The "doing what your parents do" phenomena is easy to see in poor communities. Here in Chile the "upper class" is extremely traditional about a lot of issues, but yet it's very modern when it comes to "choosing jobs". On the other side, those who are very poor show vividly that they can't do any other thing but learn the low-tech job of their parents (carpenters and things like that). They simply can't do something else because they can't afford education, regardless of their "traditionalism level".

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Rodrigo:

Sounds like a good solution on corruption.

I understand about education vs the traditional economy. I just Really don't want distinct Traditional values in Social and Economic models. We need to keep the lid on that kind of potentially confusing thing. How about this:

Economic traditional level takes the societies' tradtional value as a starting point, and modifies it using education, societal wealth, and perhaps other factors?

[Mark_Everson]

Do players pick their starting cultural attributes?

Letting players design their culture from scratch seems like a Lot of fun to me. Then the player can reap the rewards and suffer the disadvantages of their choice through much of the game, since culture should take quite a while to change in a serious manner. Is this something you had in mind Rodrigo?

In my mind we'd have a large variety of historical cultures, fashioned in Clash as best we can with the model (Much better than other games!). Then for some extra spice the player could start their own culture with whatever parameters they like. The attributes should be mostly balanced in terms of advantages and disads or we haven't done our job right, so we shouldn't need a point system. Of course we'll have to be a bit further along to tell for sure. What do you think?

[Gary Thomas]

With, of course a points system for attributes. Bloodcrazed madness costs 15 points, inner harmony with the Zen of nature costs 3, deep respect for learning costs 42 (the answer to everything according to Adams), sore feet costs minus 10 - the possibilities are endless.

Cheers

[Lord God Jinnai]

I was thinking this morning that as long as there are only EG groups like Germans and German-Americans your idea is fine. But the problem arrises when there are 3 groups or more.
I'll use German, French and American FE.

The base EG is German then the group gets devided into 3, German-American and German French and German. Then later the German-French move to America. Now they aren't the same as the German-Americans so would we call them German-American-French? And then what happens if those German-American-French get shipped back to Germany where the German culture remains?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi LGJ:

Mostly after a single "branching" of an EG happens, I think any further splits should get new names. But remember the names are just for giving input to the player. All the EGs in the different areas evolve independently in the code whether they have the same name of a different one. Work for you?

[Lord God Jinnai]

Sounds fine, so long as by the time this becomes important (its a little down the ways from here now) we have enough names and can atleast attempt to historically link names to certain EGs if they player wishes.

[Gary Thomas]

From roqujad, 26th November 2001

A Social Model "technical" document is now available (model equations). I just sent it to Dom and it should be up in the web site pretty soon.

Where is this document available?

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

That update was AFAIK eaten in a disk crash that Dom had. I've sent it to him again, and hopefull it'll appear on the mirror web site fairly soon.

[Mark_Everson]

I saw an iteresting idea posted by Chrispie in the GGS forum.

Populations also have memories of other populations and political powers, they have stronger memories of populations than of political powers. If a particular population was used to attack them for example, they are more likely to remember the population for that than the political force that actually sent them to attack.

In Clash it would be EGs instead of "Populations". I'm not saying this is a top-priority thing to do, but it could be interesting in the long run. An EG could keep track of a limited number of "enemy" EGs or Civs, giving a lot more flavor to the social model. For all I know this is already planned and I've forgotten about it. I think we have mentioned such things before, so Rodrigo, my apologies in advance if this is already in the spec! But if so, if you can point me to where it is, I'd appreciate it.

The quote is from ETHNICITY'S [sic] AND POPULATIONS and the thread where they're discussing it is A possible impementation of ethnic groups. I didn't see much else of interest in the web page or thread...