Social Model v3.0

[yellowdaddy]

RF = the people no longer have any loyalty to their political system, they want to change it.
Their values and the values of the political system have diverged, the people behave as Pro-Active acters their divergence equates to Seperatism - because they want to seperate from the values and goals of the system.
The divergence (Seperatism) leads to the change.

RRF same thing. This kind of Seperatism you can describe as "Divergence of Values" or "Change of Allegience"

So yes, you can describe it as change; but also more specifically as a form Seperatism or divergence - that tells you what kind of change it is.

ADF = as above, the change in policy it can lead to sounds like a response to this form of Seperatism. ADF sounds like Apartheid, when you get a society forming within a society - this seems like seperatism to me, because they replace state structures with ones of their own; they are Seperating from the state: the political system they feel alienated by, and the leadership that they feel alienated by.

the +4.5 and +1.7 scalar averages come from (+5)+(-1)+(+5)/3 and (+4)+(-3)+(+4)/3

How are modelling NRF at the moment? Can you show me the algorithms/equations? What specific problem do you have with using Edu.&Rights? NRF must have factors affecting how it rises and falls?

That riot-model page seems to say that you can only have one rebellion at a time, and the leader has to invoke it, that sounds a bit naff?

(I don't want that getting a good economics be the only way of reducing unrest.)

Pardonnez moi, je ne comprends pas, repetez s'il vous plait?!

[LDiCesare]

the +4.5 and +1.7 scalar averages come from (+5)+(-1)+(+5)/3 and (+4)+(-3)+(+4)/3

Well 5 -1 +5 = 9, divided by 3 = 3. So that's why I didn't get it.

NRF:

Nationalistic Rebellion Feeling (NRF)
NRF=(1-DN)*Rexp(8,-13,NAT)

where:
DN is a dummy variable taking the value 1 if the govt nationality and the EG's nationality are the same and 0 otherwise.
NAT is EG's Nationalism.

I attach Rodrigo's document with the whole set of equations, as I don't remember whether it's on the web.
My problem with edu and rights is to find them... There's a rights in the government system, so I should be able to use that one. But education is more of a problem. I found some traces of it in the econ code, but don't really know what they relate to. I also believe the current equations are quite complex and think they'd be better off if they were simplified a bit so I want to keep it simple. Education is problematic as it's a tech, whose value goes from 0 to infinity, and there is education infrastructure too whose values (ranges) I don't know well.

That riot-model page seems to say that you can only have one rebellion at a time, and the leader has to invoke it, that sounds a bit naff?

No, that's one civil war. It means you say that a specific rebellion is given the name "civil war" and gives you some options otherwise not available. I haven't coded that yet, nor checked too much what the exact effects are supposed to be, apart from decreasing empire stability.

Pardonnez moi, je ne comprends pas, repetez s'il vous plait?!

Sorry... I ment I want to let the player prevent discontent in several ways: Having a good economics is one, but that's not reliable as you are bound to get some recessions during the game. So I want another way, which is dedicated to the kind of discontent: Lower discrimination for ADF, adjust policies for BPF, etc. For NRF: increasing rights and education.

[LDiCesare]

I multiplied the Nationalistic Rebellion Feeling value by square root(1 - civil rights). That makes it manageable. In the Social Test scenario, Greeks are down to 1% (workers) or 3% (aristocracy). Of course that sounds fishy since they are of the same eg and shouldn't have different values per social class for this event... But it gets something interesting: Reduction of about 30% of the risk of riots if you have 50% civil rights with respect to 0. 75% civil rights mean 50% reduction. The square root rewards extremely high civil rights more than a straight multiplication, and the value can't be set too high because of bad policies feelings and of the lack of total control the ruler has over their civ.

[yellowdaddy]

Well 5 -1 +5 = 9, divided by 3 = 3. So that's why I didn't get it.

Sorry, I didn't explain, it's not an equation, it moves up and down a scale: -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5

I actually did 5-6+6=5/3=1.7 because it moves between level -1 and back up to level +5, I should have explained, I forgot and did a very sloppy equation!

So the other one goes: 4-7+7=4/3 ('cos the dif. between +4 and -3 = 7)

What does "Rexp" mean?

Surely Education relates to Research and Development?
Rather than in Civ where yuo just adjust taxation, education levels should affect it.

I agree with you about specific feelings for specific areas, I think I jsut mean you need the economic situation as something that has a strong effect on these PAFs.
I think economics usually effects the intensity and rate of growth of feelings, and is often an element of ADF and NRF (associating greed and corruption with or economic hardship on ethnic minorities)

[LDiCesare]

Rexp is a function which is defined as:

Rexp(a,b,c) is equal to 1/(1+Exp(a+b*c))

It's usually used with a = 1 and b a constant so it's 1/(1 + exp(a + variable)). Basically when variable is very negative, Rexp is worth 1, and when it's very big, Rexp is worth 0.

I don't get how your scale works. It looks like the average, I don't know why you're putting 7s here:
You're doing. 4 + (-3 -4) + (4 - -3) = 4.
Actually this is: a + (b-a) + (c-b) = c. Which means only the last value is useful. I still don't get how the 4.5 can be obtained by a division by 3.

Education as it exists in the code right now is something I find weird. It's useful only for econ in order to grant econ sectors more research points, but doesn't affect other techs or activities. Mark may hopefully explain what that's supposed to do and whether it should encompass more activities. Education infrastructure should probably adjust the RPs generated for all activities, but I can't see if/how it's done.

I agree with you that a bad economic situation should be a factor increasing all other feelings.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by LDiCesare Education as it exists in the code right now is something I find weird. It's useful only for econ in order to grant econ sectors more research points, but doesn't affect other techs or activities. Mark may hopefully explain what that's supposed to do and whether it should encompass more activities. Education infrastructure should probably adjust the RPs generated for all activities, but I can't see if/how it's done.

AFAIK / recall education only boosts econ RPs b/c I was using that as a first implementation, and never got any further. The way it's done for econ should be easily extensible to other areas of the game. Education level should also tie into a lot of other game activities, like the effectiveness / productivity of virtually everything from generalship to economic production. The way that I had envisioned for that is that each area would have a formula to define the "expected" level of education (education "infrastructure" which symbolizes how educated the people in a given square are on average). If education is below the expected level it reduces effectiveness, perhaps linearly. If edu is above, it increases effectiveness, but only as a slowly increasing sub-linear function. Maybe like a sqrt or something. As you can see, this approach requires some coding and xml to accomplish, so I don't think it is an immediate goal. Other ideas on how to handle education are welcome.

[yellowdaddy]

I don't get how your scale works. It looks like the average, I don't know why you're putting 7s here:
You're doing. 4 + (-3 -4) + (4 - -3) = 4.
Actually this is: a + (b-a) + (c-b) = c. Which means only the last value is useful. I still don't get how the 4.5 can be obtained by a division by 3.

Absolutely right, my maths = utter bollocks! Dunno what I did or why!

Key:
W/T = Wealth & Trade
E/R = Education & Rights
P/A = Prestige & Allegience

Year 1:
W/T +5
E/R -1
P/A +5
Expectation Scalar: ('+'5-6+6=5/3=+1.7)

Year 2:
W/T +4 (Econ Growth = -1%)
E/R -3
P/A +4
Exp. Sca.: ('+'4-7+4=4/3=1.3)

Exp. Vector = -0.4


The values for W/T E/R and P/A equate to positions on a scale from -5 to +5, to denote a generally positive or negative mood.

You could have:
W/T +3
E/R -4
P/A +2

which equates (on a 0-10 scale) to:

W/T = 8
E/R = 1
P/A = 7

then it makes sense when you do (a+b+c)/3 = 5.3 in this case, converting back to the scale gives +0.3

---------
- does that mean that LdC's NRF coding is at a bottleneck?
with so many goals that aren't immediate, you might want to post an updated list of the top ten that are...

[LDiCesare]

Nationalistic Rebellion Feeling is currently addressable with civil rights, so I guess it's ok for now and we can pour education effects in later to refine the model.

Now I have another problem. I checked Delenda scenario and found out in this one, the problem is Revolutionary Feeling.
I get, with a government profile of:
Private property: 33%
Social policy: 36%
Warfare: 0.8
Ruler: 0.1
Ethics: 0.1.
For the first social group checked:

Check revolutionary feeling
Checking distance
Comparing Regime Divine Monarchy:
Private property: 10%
Social policy: 30%
Ruler: 0.5
Ethics: 0.5
regime support = 0.39485016
distance = 0.18633026
-> paf = 0.39377046
Comparing Regime Athenian Democracy: Regime policies:
Private property: 50%
Social policy: 60%
Capital: 0.2
Warfare: 0.2
Ruler: 0.2
Human: 0.2
Ethics: 0.2
regime support = 0.14280976
distance = 0.18866977
-> paf = 0.14261593
Comparing Regime Theocracy: Regime policies:
Private property: 10%
Social policy: 80%
Capital: 0.2
Warfare: 0.1
Ruler: 0.2
Human: 0.1
Ethics: 0.4
regime support = 0.20040585
distance = 0.24592382
-> paf = 0.20040585
-> total paf = 0.7929027

Which somehow ends up providing around 16% chances of riots.
I have distances of about 0.2, but the equations provide a feeling of almost 1 * support for the regime.
This is because the equation is:
A=Rexp(50,-300,REGD)*S
which is
S/(1+Exp(50-300*REGD)).
The problem is that: With a distance of 0, we have a value of S/(1 + Exp50) = roughly 0, ok.
With a distance of 1, we have roughly S which is ok too.
But for 0.2, we get S/(1 + Exp (-10)).
Exp(-10) is less than 0.001 soit's almost S.
To get S/2 one needs a distance of 1/6 = 0.167. With 0.188 I'm already almost at S. This means the equation is more or less a step: Either the distance is below a threshold and there's a high likelihood for riots, or not, and there's no riot. The problem is the threshold is at about 0.17, which is way too small considering the support shares above. There's no way people knowing the three regimes above can ever be happy with any one of them as there'll always be support for each of them and the mean regime will always be farther than the threshold.
So the model doesn't work for me as is. I'm going to replace the Rexp thingie with a simple multiplication. That should make things manageable.

The more I'm struggling with the model, the more I find it opaque and hard to react to as a player. Each feeling has effects, but most feelings come from a simple basic factor which is difference of policies (negotiated or regime) and power distribution between the people and the ruler/government. Explaining to the player what's wrong is also pretty complex given the accumulation of factors: To explain a PAF, I must go back to the cause of the paf, here the regime distances, and I'd have to show all of them but to that end, I'd have to store that information which is not otherwise useful, so that's a pain.
I'd rather show what every social group wants in terms of policies and regimes, but that's going to end spreadsheet like..

[yellowdaddy]

...NB, NRF needs the amplifying effects of Economic growth (or sudden lack thereof) (as opposed to PWF).

- - - - - - -

It sounds like you think it needs simplifying, looking at the Govt. model I might agree.

I wonder whether you should only have three social classes:
Rentier (RC), Professional (PC) and Operative (OC) (the latter including slaves) as mentioned earlier in this thread.
Your 6 become:

Military = RC (, PC) (and OC at NCO level)
Ethics = PC
Admin = PC
Kapital = RC (, PC)
Labour = OC
Human = OC

Your Military Leaders and Kapital Owners are the Rentier Class;
Your Clerics/Ethics and Admin are the Professional Class;
Your Labour and Slaves are the Operative Class.

with a knock on effect on your PBs.

[LDiCesare]

The number of social groups is not the problem. Most of the government model is ok, but the riots model is really hard to grasp: In fact, reducing the number of social groups would have about zero effect here as there are just 3 social classes in my scenario (aristocrats, workers, warriors).

I just checked my problem with Revolutionary Feeling again. I told the ai to go with whatever policy people want. With that, they riot. If I change by hand and give them what a minority wants (a regime), they don't riot. This means I have to show the player the possible regimes knowing that the player may define his own values, and show each possible value and the support for each share. That's a lot of panels to know what people may want. And the ai would have to pick a regime among these or do lots of computations to find a good solution. I do not like the idea of browsing maybe 10 possible regimes so I could check which one I must mimick in order to get a good result.

Additionally, the equations are so complex that spotting an error in them is almost impossible.

Finally, the way riots happen is a very long chain:
People want policy X.
This means they feel a Revolutionary Feeling and/or Bad Policies Feeling and/or Replace Ruler Feeling: The corresponding "PAF" are computed.
All PAF are then added together, with variopus weights, to give the probability of an event being called. For instance Riots = PWF + RF + ADF + NRF + 0.4*SDF + 0.6* BPF + 0.1* RRF and Army Betrayal is: RF + 0.2*BPF + 0.2*PWF.
So in order to reduce riots I must act upon any one of the various PAFs. I'll only show the biggest one to the player, as showing all six values is a real pain. Particularly for RF which is actually subdivided in several "I'd want Regime X" feelings.
Getting a feedback to the ai or the player is a real pain with that model. I can't find any way of doing it without resorting to an inane amount of spreadsheets.

I'd rather have a simpler model like:
Discontent 1 = (cause 1) * (aggravator).
Discontent 1 leads directly to a bad effect, bad effect is picked depending on the nature and severity of the discontent. It's easier to present and correct.
It's roughly what I did in Demo8 with the limited social model (Policies and Discrimination only).
I'd show message: People are unhappy because of discrimination - severity 40%.
The effect would be:
Nothing happens (60% since severity is 40%).
Riots (33%) Guerrilla forces formation (7%).
The ai and player can easily understand that, in order to counter this, they need to adjust discrimination.

For Revolutionary Feeling, I'd have not one but several events:
Monarchist regime discontent, Republican regime discontent, etc. each with a smaller %. Currently, the model makes it likely that there be a revolution if there are 3 different regimes that have a small share as they'll ally themselves together in order to overthrow the government. I doubt that communists and monarchists would ally themselves in order for the weaker group to help the stronger overthrow a government.

Note that I said cause and aggravator. Simply put, cause is just a cause (discrimination, bad policies, regime different from desired regime), and aggravator may be the unfulfilled economic expectations.
That way players and ai understand that they can try to correct the possible problems either by having a better economy or by correcting the cause of the problem which is celarly exposed to them.
This may lead to more lines in the riot model, but I'd rather have two lines for 2 different causes than 2 for different effects coming from the same cause.

[yellowdaddy]

cause is just a cause (discrimination, bad policies, regime different from desired regime), and aggravator may be the unfulfilled economic expectations.

sounds about right (economics usually aggravates people more than anything else, even religious extremism) - so there's not too many PAFs then?

So you plan to have more causes than effects in total, and more causes per single effect, then?

This means I have to show the player the possible regimes knowing that the player may define his own values, and show each possible value and the support for each share.

Why should the player get to choose? Shouldn't they be swept along by the results of their earlier decisions/actions?

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
I'd rather have a simpler model like:
Discontent 1 = (cause 1) * (aggravator).
Discontent 1 leads directly to a bad effect, bad effect is picked depending on the nature and severity of the discontent. It's easier to present and correct.

Hi Laurent:

I'm comfortable with your proposed approach, since it seems to make a lot of sense. The big decision for the player then would be in balancing the potential negative effects in economic, technology, or other spheres of the changes made to keep the people happy. For example the people in general might want a monarchy, but that could be slower at tech growth and larger in corruption than a republic regime.

My only caution would be to leave the old formulas commented out in the code so that if we decide your new approach doesn't work for some reason, we can fall back to the old ones easily. Another option (I don't know how hard this would be to code) is to leave the old "complex" model as a player-selectable option for those who actively don't want things to be straightforward and linear. Since you already have the old model pretty much coded, putting in the option to have either might not be too much extra work.

[LDiCesare]

Another option (I don't know how hard this would be to code) is to leave the old "complex" model as a player-selectable option for those who actively don't want things to be straightforward and linear.

Although that is an option, I wouldn't be able to provide:
- a user interface to explain the player what to do
- tell the ai what to do.
I'll certainly do it with a command line argument.

[LDiCesare]

I've created another thread dedicated to the riots part, since this thread is becoming quite big and it deals with the social model in general. Let's keep this one for discussing other parts of the social model (social groups, how to represent them to the player, religion, nationalism, ethnic groups, government model).

[yellowdaddy]

On completely diff'rent tack...

How do political systems and religions work in Clash?

I like the idea of having a sort of "division of power" slider or pie chart, and this interface of generalised policies - do you plan to have it so depending on the settings you pick on the interface, you get assigned an "ism"?

In the "cruise mode" do you return to the traditional select "-ism" as your system of government? If so, how many "isms" do you want?


On the subject of the negotiable Gov.Pol.s -

Slavery and Civil Liberties seem the same to me, though I know you want to have slaves, do you need a seperate policy for that?

Some might say Religious and Ethnic discrim. should be conflated sometimes, though I personally agree with having them seperate.

I think there are some policies missing -

What about Economic policy of the government beyond Property Rights? Primitive Civs have to have a religious system, and become more advanced as economic considerations predominate.

You can have a range of options: religious collectivism (Communism, Fascism, Islamism...) and planned economies, mixed economies as well as market economies and participatory economies and subsistence economies.

Can you have Weberian categories of political power and oligarchies?
charismatic domination (familial and religious)
traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism)
legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy)

[LDiCesare]

I like the idea of having a sort of "division of power" slider or pie chart, and this interface of generalised policies - do you plan to have it so depending on the settings you pick on the interface, you get assigned an "ism"?

Yes, the player's regime name should be found as the name of the regime which is neareste the current regime.

In the "cruise mode" do you return to the traditional select "-ism" as your system of government? If so, how many "isms" do you want?

What cruise mode? There is no selection of a regime, just setting policies and power shares. We might have a panel that offers to swithc to a given regime and adjust the policies and power shares accorsingly.
The number of regimes is defined in a resources file. The regimes.xml file holds 8 regimes for the moment. I don't know how many would be appropriate long-term.

Slavery and Civil Liberties seem the same to me

They are definitely different. You may have the right to protest against the government and have slaves, or be considered guilty until you prove otherwise and have no slaves.

What about Economic policy of the government beyond Property Rights?

What policy? There are already tax rates and property rights. Mark is probably able to tell you more about hpw econ works. I know there is a distinction between traditional and market economies, there may be more and the way we switch from one system to the other is not yet determined (it's jsut a trigger the player cann change for the moment, but it could at least require some tech).

Primitive Civs have to have a religious system, and become more advanced as economic considerations predominate.

Religious discrimination is already considered, what else/more would you want? (edited - I sounded aggressive when I really don't know what you would want to see here)

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
What about Economic policy of the government beyond Property Rights? Primitive Civs have to have a religious system, and become more advanced as economic considerations predominate.

You can have a range of options: religious collectivism (Communism, Fascism, Islamism...) and planned economies, mixed economies as well as market economies and participatory economies and subsistence economies.

The overall econ approach in ancient times is designed to be somewhere between the two poles of pure market economy and pure traditional economy. Traditional means "I do what my same-sex parent did." For a modern game I might add a third "collectivist" possibility, but it is pretty much already taken care of by private property setting.

Game effects (so far) include:
Market:
o Workers move between sectors of the econ freely, making it more productive
o Technological progress is better (other things being equal)

Traditional:
o More stable politically, since the "everyone has their predetermined place" permeates society

I am going to cross-post this in the econ thread. Please respond there with further ideas that impact econ more than the social model in general.

[yellowdaddy]

Originally posted by LDiCesare


What cruise mode? There is no selection of a regime, just setting policies and power shares. We might have a panel that offers to swithc to a given regime and adjust the policies and power shares accorsingly.
The number of regimes is defined in a resources file. The regimes.xml file holds 8 regimes for the moment. I don't know how many would be appropriate long-term.

Cruise-mode as in an auto setting for those who want a quick non-micromanaged game where they don't select policies just a pre-set "-ism" of policies.

They are definitely different. You may have the right to protest against the government and have slaves, or be considered guilty until you prove otherwise and have no slaves.

I meant Slavery as a state of Civil Liberties, a Civil Rights setting of "zero;"
Indenture as a setting just above that "1" if you like;
Class duty as "2" a setting above that, then Individualism as "3", and Anarchy as "4"?! (or 1-5)

What policy? There are already tax rates and property rights. Mark is probably able to tell you more about hpw econ works. I know there is a distinction between traditional and market economies, there may be more and the way we switch from one system to the other is not yet determined (it's jsut a trigger the player cann change for the moment, but it could at least require some tech).

As Mark notes I mean whether a government opts for a 100% free market economy, a mixed economy, a developmental state, an export led economy, an import substitution economy, a collectivist economy, a feudal economy, a parecon economy etc... - there's quite a few options.

Religious discrimination is already considered, what else/more would you want? (edited - I sounded aggressive when I really don't know what you would want to see here)

Yes I know, but as you also probably know Jews and Sikhs and Parsees and groups like that overlap religious and ethnic lines.
I don't disagree with having them seperate, I just wonder how you deal with overlaps.

[LDiCesare]

About religions:
The social model specifies that there are several types of religions:

The type may be "Ethnic Religion" (E-Religion) or "Multiethnic Religion" (ME-Religion). This replaces the designations "Primitive Religion" and "Great Religion of the World" used in version 2, but the difference remains: E-Religions aren't allowed to spread to other EG's and ME-Religions are.

So this means that, for example, only ethnic groups of nationality "jew" can have the religion Judaism.

[yellowdaddy]

That works fine for Parsees (Zoroastrians), Yazidi, even Hindu (and Druze) - because you can only be born one, but does not work for Judaism...

You cannot generally regard the Ashkenazi (or German-Russian) Jews as ethnically Hebrew - the 7th-9th century Khazar khagan adopted Judaism as a faith (as a political decision of resisting Arab expansion) - an ethnically Turkish overlord community ruling an ethnically Slavic population (and perhaps some other I-Europeans like Persians and Turkic Bulgars, and other bits and bobs - Greek, Goth, maybe even the odd Chinese!).

So you could have ethnic religions like Zoroastrianism that don't allow conversion; and Semi-Ethnic religions like Judaism that allow conversions.

(although you may find some that say you can convert to Zoroastrianism, there still exist the Parsee sect which won't accept it)

I don't think the word "nationality" seems apt in this context, because patently there exist followers of Judaism - mostly ethnically Hebrew who do not have Israeli (or even Judaean or Samarian!) citizenship.

I assume you mean the Hebrew EG who are Jewish by religion; (and I suggest the use of the word Hebrew for the EG following the name of the language, and Jewish for the religion) you may also find Christians and Atheists of Hebrew ethnicity...

[yellowdaddy]

anyway, I don't see why you need to seperate slavery from civil liberties - slavery is a state of civil liberties - a subcategory as shown.

I'll shift the economics comments across.

Do you have your government types ("-isms") fitted into these thre categories?
charismatic domination (familial and religious)
traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism)
legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy)

[LDiCesare]

I don't think the word "nationality" seems apt in this context, because patently there exist followers of Judaism - mostly ethnically Hebrew who do not have Israeli (or even Judaean or Samarian!) citizenship.

Nationality in an EG is the name of the civilization the people want to be part of. That is people who want to be part of the hebrew nation. I know it is not adequate as there are many jews who consider themselves both part of their country and of Israel. I know a brazilian for instance, who lives in Brazil, feels brazilian, and sends money to the state of Israel because he supports this state, so he would basically have both nationalities in Clash terms but that's far too detailed for the game to model.

Do you have your government types ("-isms") fitted into these three categories?
charismatic domination (familial and religious)
traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism)
legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy)?

No, the regimes are defined in the regimes.xml and currently there are only archaic/classical regimes. I'm not sure whether your distinction is adequate (I'd dub religious as traditional rather than charismatic) nor what effect that would have on the game.
The regimes have different power shares for the various political power blocks (military, clergy, etc...).

[yellowdaddy]

Originally posted by LDiCesare

Nationality in an EG is the name of the civilization the people want to be part of. That is people who want to be part of the hebrew nation. I know it is not adequate as there are many jews who consider themselves both part of their country and of Israel. I know a brazilian for instance, who lives in Brazil, feels brazilian, and sends money to the state of Israel because he supports this state, so he would basically have both nationalities in Clash terms but that's far too detailed for the game to model.

So does that mean that Civs can't convert to Ethnic Religions unless they are 100% of that EG? Or will you allow some Ethnic Religions which allow conversion for non-ER EGs?

...I'm not sure whether your distinction is adequate (I'd dub religious as traditional rather than charismatic) nor what effect that would have on the game.
The regimes have different power shares for the various political power blocks (military, clergy, etc...).

not my distinction, Max Webers:

http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/...eber/Whome.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber
http://www.maxweberstudies.org/

[LDiCesare]

So does that mean that Civs can't convert to Ethnic Religions unless they are 100% of that EG? Or will you allow some Ethnic Religions which allow conversion for non-ER EGs?

No, a civ can make anything as official religion. I don't know exactly how religions spread. I know that it's possible from people to switch from an EG to another one in certain cases, so you can change ethnicity and probably later religion. I should check that part of the model, but I'm knee-deep in debugging the riots and teaching the ai to cope with it.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
That works fine for Parsees (Zoroastrians), Yazidi, even Hindu (and Druze) - because you can only be born one, but does not work for Judaism...

You cannot generally regard the Ashkenazi (or German-Russian) Jews as ethnically Hebrew - the 7th-9th century Khazar khagan adopted Judaism as a faith (as a political decision of resisting Arab expansion) - an ethnically Turkish overlord community ruling an ethnically Slavic population (and perhaps some other I-Europeans like Persians and Turkic Bulgars, and other bits and bobs - Greek, Goth, maybe even the odd Chinese!).

So you could have ethnic religions like Zoroastrianism that don't allow conversion; and Semi-Ethnic religions like Judaism that allow conversions.

(although you may find some that say you can convert to Zoroastrianism, there still exist the Parsee sect which won't accept it)

Also Hinduism allows converts. Just that you haveto start out at the bottom rung and this doesn't exactly appeal to many people.

Originally posted by yellowdaddy I don't think the word "nationality" seems apt in this context, because patently there exist followers of Judaism - mostly ethnically Hebrew who do not have Israeli (or even Judaean or Samarian!) citizenship.

I assume you mean the Hebrew EG who are Jewish by religion; (and I suggest the use of the word Hebrew for the EG following the name of the language, and Jewish for the religion) you may also find Christians and Atheists of Hebrew ethnicity...

There is also a jewsh tribe in southern africa that has been practicing Judaism since biblical times unkown to the rest of the Jewish community. They are definatly not hebrew, but even by the most orthodox jew they are be considered Jewish branch.

[LDiCesare]

I want to list again the various policies and their in-game effects. Many have little or no bearing on the game itself. One of the (many) goals for D8.1 is to give them meaning.
The policies are:
Tax rate - has a definite effect.
Civil rights - has a twofold effect: High civil rights lower the likelihood of independentist feelings but increases the overall chance of riots.
Ethnic and Religious Discrimination - Effects on riots (antidiscrimination feelings to balance with bad policies feelings).
Slavery - No effect.
Foreign policy - No effect.
Private property - Effect on poor welfare feeling.
Social policy - Effect on poor welfare feeling.
And all policies have an effect on bad policies or regime change feelings.
Additionally, there is Province Autonomy, which affects the likelihood of people wanting independance (people of the same nationality may secede if given a lot of autonomy, people of different nationality may want more autonomy in order to lower their chance of secession) and gives better province effectivity - thus lower chances of poor welfare feeling.

Here are proposals to give some effects to the policies which have none:
Civil rights - increase research efficiency, lowers military morale (discipline).
Ethnic and Religious discrimination - lowers relation with civilizations of other ethnicity/religion.
Slavery - Should create slave social classes, but in which ethnic groups? This population would have a special economic role, but I don't know how to model that. Slaves should have a positive productivity effect but a negative effect as they should increase the likelihood of riotting and would revolt often. Thus a high slavery score would mean lower wages for the same productivity but higher likelihood of riots.
Foreign policy - Definition is "The level of aggressiveness allowed in the international arena." This is supposed to limit the ability of the ruler to declare wars etc. I think it should not lead to silly behaviours like civ2 where you can't declare war in democracy despite the enemy having 20 units near your core cities. This will require diplomacy code to be working before we can actaully use it.
Private Property - Should have an effect on economic model.
Social Policy - Should reduce the revenue of the ruler by a given amount.
Province Autonomy - Should reduce the revenue from the taxes from that province.

[alms66]

Regarding the policies:

Tax rate - This may be built-in already, I don't know, but high taxes should slow the economy, while low taxes should stimulate economic growth.

Civil rights - I agree with your two, and I'd suggest perhaps adding a moderate increase in migration occurances? - people are more free to move about the country and all - even out of the country(?). Probably the best thing to do for now is to tie the bonus to the population limit before migration occurs, so that if it is 5000 @ civil rights of 60, then it is 10,000 @ civil rights of 10 and 1,000 @ civil rights of 100 - just for example, in reality it probably shouldn't be this much of a difference.

Ethnic and Religious discrimination - This should also lower the number of RPs generated by the discriminated group - that is assuming we track that by ethnic and religious groups.

Slavery - For now, I'd just have it give a bonus to production, and increased chances of riots - it doesn't really matter that the rioting might come from the wrong group, that's a minor detail that can be fixed later since we'd need to build a better interface to toggle slavery for different groups.

Foreign policy - I think this should sort of act as war weariness does in civ 3, rather than the civ 2 hard limitation. In civ3, war weariness just causes increased rioting if you are aggressive, but your foreign policy is low (actually it's based on gov't type, but you get the idea). A low foreign policy should also act as isolationism for the state, reducing foreign trade and whatnot (but that's for the future). Other effects are possible, but it's pointless to discuss them since we have no diplomacy, as you stated.
I guess that will be your next big project after stabilizing the social model, coding the diplomacy model... Clash should actually feel like a real game then, rather than the testing sandbox it feels like now.

Social Policy - In addition to yours, this should also grant a bonus to the number of RPs generated (or some other kind of research bonus), since higher social saftey nets tend to make people more willing to take risks - which is another effect, this changes a cultures risk aversion (I forget if that's even part of the cultural template now) over time.

Province Autonomy - This should also reduce the costs of running the province anywhere from 100% (full autonomy) - 0% (no autonomy). I don't know how it's set up currently, but there should be varying levels of autonomy, eventually at least.

[Mark_Everson]

I basically agree with the suggestions that both of you have made, and will only give the additions or rare disagreements in this post.

Slavery - I think that slavery should also have an affect on technology. Specifically what slavery does is make some people more wealthy, and thus able to pursue various technological ideas. It should work something like a function depending on the number of slaves per capita gives an overall modest benefit to technologies in general. However, the presence of slaves does tend to suppress labor-saving investments and ideas IMO. Therefore similarly to the overall tech bonus there should be a significant decrease in effective RP's going into technological areas such as agriculture, resource extraction, and others.

On which group you get slaves from, I have the following idea. I will just phrase it in words, because I expect you can easily turn it into an equation, Laurent. If significant ethnic or religious discrimination exists in the civilization, and the slaves will all be of the unfavored ethnic or religious groups. If there is very little discrimination, then slaves will tend to be spread roughly evenly across the civilization ethnic groups, including the "ruling" group.

Social Policy - spending on social needs of the people should also a decrease riot percentages. I'm not so sure about the contention that increased social spending should result in an increase in RP's. This is probably true at very low levels of social spending per capita. Going from zero social spending to a modest amount should indeed increase RP production. But once you get into the "welfare state" regime, I think history argues that it is the opposite. People are provided for, and there is relatively little incentive to innovate.

Private Property - high private property levels should result in larger productivity overall, and also increase income disparities within the society. The converse is true for low private property levels. Also, With high private property levels the people themselves invest in what they think is needed, from farming capital to education to storage of food against potential future famines. As private property decreases the people will spend less on these things, and to stay even, the government would need to spend more. Therefore hire private property gives the player more control over the detailed investments in the economy, but this control comes at the cost of lower overall productivity.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Civil Rights - It could lower morale somewhat if your army is made of up draftees or recently mobilized indivusals, but often in societies with high civil rights, military has fewer. So perhaps an upper cap on the amount it reduces morale or a diminishing returns cap for higher civil rights = lower morale.

it should also increase eventually (probably not in this coding) law enforcement efforts, not only just rioting.

Slavery - I think production bonus should be a constant based solely on number of slaves and their level of slavery. Indentured servants might work a bit harder if they thought they could be freed sooner. And also if we are usuing any type of generics model (for disease and EG) then it could also play a role here.

I'm also not sure if it should have a more downward pressure on wages anymore than peasantry class would mainly because you had to keep your slaves in working condition or constantly spend money to replace them. They still needed to eat even when they were sick and didn't work FE.

Also i think the social class model itself can handle bonus rp production for "wealhy" people investing resouces into things. Uusually though, this was more social than scientific.

I agree on the distribution for slaves as mark has it, with an exception. The ruling group should have fewer in all circumstances, even when they actually in some twisted sense be discriminated against.

Foreign Policy - I agree with both of alms66's points, exception more isolationist socieites would get bonuses to stability (ie fewer riots, fewers DoIs). And could infact make advances in infrastucture much faster to their current tech level the province would support. Of course all elements dealing with outside world suffer (or perhaps benift in a few cases).

But dealing with inward/outward looking is another thing and far more implications than just foriegn policy.

Social Policy - a boost in rps with a ceiling is fine. Perhaps n ceiling for specific "social" technologies.

However, it shouldn't nessarily reduce rioting. Bad social policies or disciminatroy social policies would raise these, but also reduce revenue and if there was no social policy beforehand, increase rps, which is why as it stnads now only reducing PWF is totally wrong.

Private Property - In addition to what mark said, higher private property should increase the chance of independace feeling and also if implimented eventually should slow law enforcement effiecency.

[LDiCesare]

On which group you get slaves from, I have the following idea. I will just phrase it in words, because I expect you can easily turn it into an equation, Laurent. If significant ethnic or religious discrimination exists in the civilization, and the slaves will all be of the unfavored ethnic or religious groups. If there is very little discrimination, then slaves will tend to be spread roughly evenly across the civilization ethnic groups, including the "ruling" group.

But a tile with only people of the main ethnicity would want salves from other ethnicities. Can the merchants code handle slaves?