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]

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...

[roquijad]

Hey Mark.

Well, no, there's nothing like that in the current model. I don't have either recollection of ever discussing the topic. But, yes, I think it'd be great to have something like that. And I'm all ears to hear what you all suggest for it...

[Gary Thomas]

Although this arose in the context of coding, I think it has more general implications.

Several of the equations in the social/government model have a length of game to date variable. I do not believe that any model should be aware of this factor. It seems to me that this causes the model to change according to the completely arbitrary date that a scenario starts.

The expression "min(1, lgt/1200)" occurs a number of times, where lgt is the length of game in months. Such an expression is going to always be 1 after 100 years of game play.

For example, empire stability = min(1, current empire stability + lgt / 1200)

The first point is that once this reaches 1 it can never drop below 1, and it reaches 1 at most 100 years after game start. Thus, any civilization created more than 100 years after the game start has a stability of 1.

This means, in effect, that empire stability is not a functional part of the model. It should be made realistic or removed. Personally, I feel that empire stability is a function of riots and such, and not a separate trend variable.

On the other hand, there may be some point to it if lgt is replaced by "age of empire" or some such, with the understanding that it only affects very young civilizations.

In general I feel very strongly that the lgt variable will not exist in the coding, and hence cannot be part of any model. It is certainly not recorded at present - all that is recorded is the current year - there is no concept of "the point at which history began".

Cheers

[roquijad]

The expression "min(1, lgt/1200)" occurs a number of times, where lgt is the length of game in months.

Hold it right there!!
LGT= Length of the game turn, in months

If from one turn to the next 20 years passed, then LGT=20*12

If the document said "length of game", I'm sorry!

[Gary Thomas]

Hold it right there!!
LGT= Length of the game turn, in months

If from one turn to the next 20 years passed, then LGT=20*12

If the document said "length of game", I'm sorry!

I suspect I was reading too quickly! Sorry.

Unfortunately I don't think we have length of game turn either, but at least I can see how that can be added!

Cheers

[yellowdaddy]

culture families.

each culture should have an origin point, which gives it a name, and from where it draws its values as defined by the categories in the moral code attributes.

laurant's spartan rebels can then share a Greek culture so defined which can determine thir behaviour, n'est-ce pas?

[LDiCesare]

Culture families would certainly help me with Spartan rebels. I'd like to discuss more about it to get something fleshed out that's consistent with the rest of the model and all, but can't be coding it anytime soon...
Roughly:
Culture family requires the same kind of drifts as the social model provides fro the emergence of new ethnic groups. We may simply start by keeping a pointer to the old ethnic group in a new ethnic group when a group splits. Or something along these lines.
There are two ways fo finding which civ/nationality an ethnic group would prefer: Either based on a list (currently = one nationality), which could be a list of related cultures, probably ordered in terms of prederence/closeness. Or based on comparing moral codes, religion and such. This one is more flexible but lacks in the 'family' aspect.

[yellowdaddy]

perhaps the term "family" is a bit of a misnomer?

could you give an example of a historical "cultural family"?

might it be something like - "china, korea, japan, vietnam" as one "confucian" culture family? they don't all share precisely the same cultural things (they have their own native traits), but mostly they do, eg. Jap, Kor and viet all have about 60% chinese vocab in common (even though none are related to each other except Jap and Kor), as well as architecture and some socio-religious things.

is that the kind of thing you mean?

[yellowdaddy]

I'm not sure this is the right thread, but here goes.

On the concept of Culture in the game.

Assuming that there will be a more userfriendly "production" page and build button in D8, (with production managers or a minister for industry?!) I was thinking on the idea of Wonders in Civ, and how Clash could have a not dissimilar but more interesting aspect to it.

I propose that in the "construction/production" page we categorise different types of things to build, among them (and this relates to this thread i think) a "Build Culture" section.

Rather than all civs join in the rather unrealistic race to build wonders in Civ, you build Cultural "things" (?!) and on a perhaps separate "Investment" or "National Budget" page invest in named Cultural activities.

e.g:
You could "Build" the following:
- Alphabet
(rather than just researching it, you "build" one, and gain influence through "exporting" it to other civs)
- Music Style
- Dance Style
- Art Style
- Clothing Style
- Cuisine Style
(none of these need to be represented graphically, but they could all be constituent parts of one of the game attributes listed in "Culture", they could all be exported to increase trade, and cultural influence over other EGs/Civs)
- Organised Religion
- School of Philosophy
- Political Ideology
(I'm aware there's been mention that Religion in the game would just be something that "pops up", but in ancient times, isn't religion more of a political control mechanism with nationalistic character? shouldn't it be feasible for an ancient state to "build" a religion based at a city, on a leader/character, associated with a nationality - as far as i'm aware most early civs in the fertile crescent as well as Zoroastrianism in Persia and others in mesoamerica, egypt and southeast asia were like this - so you build one by selecting number of gods, and a selection of characteristics, surely Catholicism is like this too, and you use the "build Religion" option to set up breakaway churches and sects to regain political control)
- Build "National Library"
- Currency
- Flag
- Anthem?
(building these national symbols could strengthen allegience to your nation, and affect other civs attitude towards you.

investment options..
well invest in Literacy is Education isn't it - I suppose most of these are already there in the National Economy box, they just need a bit more development and tidying up perhaps.

[LDiCesare]

That's a bit too many details for me.
Political ideology is already done in the regime part of the government model I'm currently coding.
There's also a whole stuff about emergence of religions on the web that you might want to look into.
The rest is going to be too detailed to my taste. Though I can understand that French or Chinese will rather die than eat English cuisine, I'm not sure it's worth modelling this.

[yellowdaddy]

Chinese will rather die than eat English cuisine

i spent 6 months in China craving real bread, tea with milk in it, real ale, and roast potatoes et le rostbif... not to mention dull rainy days, amazing how you appreciate that stuff!

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The rest is going to be too detailed to my taste

sacre bleu!, it's not that bloody detailed! - you build wonders in Civ,
all I'm really saying is that each civ can build them for themselves without the silly "race to build wonders" thing.

[LDiCesare]

i spent 6 months in China craving real bread

You've got real bread in the UK? (sorry) I admit that rosbif is quite good. But that's an oddity as I haven't been able to find much palatable food in my days in the British Isles (though my wife, who's French too, still insists that English can cook well, I remain unconvinced).

More seriously (?) Dance/Art/Cuisine/Clothing style (fashion??) are not things I want to worry about when playing the game. Art is vague enough to cover the whole set of things you are saying, though.
Check the Wonders model too. It's a bit old and all that, but it is worth checking.

[yellowdaddy]

(though my wife, who's French too, still insists that English can cook well, I remain unconvinced).

Yeah, Ok, we import/copy a lot of French bread now - but we do have some non-French things like Ryebread.
I can cook alright though - i often make "italian" things, and my wife (qui est une Cambodgette) forces me to eat weird and smelly oriental food, but you can't beat a nice Shepherd's Pie, and I refuse to beleive that there is any breakfast nicer than a Full English - even Les Americains have tried to commandeer it by calling it an "American breakfast" but then adding revolting things like waffles and treacle ( ) to it ... BBWWEEUUURGGH!( I feel ill just thinking about it)

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I've looked at the wonders thing a bit.

I don't think I'm trying to propose anything particularly detailed or complicated.

I'm merely saying, build wonders, but each civ builds their own wonders.
The idea that all Civs race to build the Pyramids, and somehow before they've even encountered each other, they can suddenly be aware of other Civs miles away building the same thing, and then be forced to stop, or lose all their production points, is just silly.

Let's have all Civs being able to build the same range of wonders which have affects on their own Civ primarily.

The thing about

Dance/Art/Cuisine/Clothing style

is not to go into any depth or detail, they just become wonders, as does "building" your own "alphabet".
Just as you might "research" writing in Civ to be able to build or do other things.
A big difference being that you don't have to build them, you can import/buy them.

The point in having them is this:
LGJ goes on about "culture" "way of life" etc.. I'm looking for ways of quantifying them and even the term "Civilisation".

There's already the idea in the game to have "Cultural" influence on other Civs or Cities or EGs... having a list of "Culture" things which can have a numerical value (perhaps just 0 and 1) can define how much a City or EG is under the influence of a particular Civ, and effect their propensity to riot/revolt.

e.g.

Your Spartans, Thebans and Athenians thing:

you could say:

Greek Culture =
-----------------
Greek Alphabet
Greek Art
Greek Music
Greek Fashion
Greek Architecture
Greek Cuisine
Greek Religion
Greek Philosophy
Greek Ideology
Greek Literature
Greek Currency
Greek Nationalism

You can then take each EG, and give a "0" or "1" as to whether they "have" each "aspect" of Greek "culture". and then give them a score 0/12 - 12/12.
You can then say a score of
0-4 = the EG's culture is Greek-influenced
4-8 = the EG's culture is part-Greek
8-12 = the EG's culture is Greek

You can then quantify a statement such as "the Athenian EG is more Greek than the Spartan EG" because they have a culture score of 12/12 instead of 11/12.

that's all.

I'm not saying go any deeper than that.

It's not a pointless frill, it has a purpose. You don't have to worry about it, you could set a manager: your Minister of Culture to adopt a certain attitude or policy.
It's also related to the diplomacy model; when making treaties you could offer one or some of these 12 categories as part of a "Cultural Exchange" treaty, and again, define the scope of the Exchange. The more you can spread your culture, the more you can conduct trade and diplomacy effectively.

"Art" isn't the right term - "The Arts" perhaps. I know things like clothing and cuisine and dance sound a bit bizarre, but I suppose I'm imagining the economic relevance of certain types of food and clothing materials in world history.
Dance, though?! well, why not - it's sort of connected to religion perhaps... does everything in the game have to be serious and utilitarian?!

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
I'm merely saying, build wonders, but each civ builds their own wonders.
The idea that all Civs race to build the Pyramids, and somehow before they've even encountered each other, they can suddenly be aware of other Civs miles away building the same thing, and then be forced to stop, or lose all their production points, is just silly.

This has nothing to do with Clash wonders as far as I can tell. . . You appear to be under the misapprehension that we have adopted the Civ wonders model. Have you at all looked at the Wonders page on the web page, and the wonders model discussion thread?

Your detailed approach looks too complicated to me at a first read. We simply can't model everyting in the world and it's societies at a high level of detail. Most players, I believe, don't care about this level of detail in modeling culture. We Already go into more detail modeling culture than any game I"m aware of. YMMV :-)

[yellowdaddy]

what makes you think i'm talking about more depth?

I thought I was addressing the ambiguities of the term "culture", and in part responding to Laurant's recent posts about the Spartan's revolting, and "Culture Families".

We all seem to be happy with the idea of "Culture Families", I'm trying to help define them and how they might work in simple and coding-friendly terms. Right now the term seems to me to be a bit floaty and unspecific.

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The wonders look interesting, especially the touch of having Natural wonders - like Mt Fuji I suppose? or The Victoria Falls?
I don't see any conflict with "building culture", whether any writing system could be a Cultural wonder, I don't know. It seems there should be room for this extra.

Having read the Social model pages, I don't think Culture is at all modelled satisfactorially. There's stuff there that's missing or just not quite right.
Essentially, the concept of Culture seems to be a vague and undefined one in this game, and yet it's mentioned regularly.
It seems to exist only in name, and to not actually constitute anything beyond a list of other concepts some defined, some undefined, and clumsily cobbled together.
What I've tried to do is define it in a simple and clear way.

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At least I've worked out where this post should be - in the "Culture Familes" thread!

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Dance, though?! well, why not - it's sort of connected to religion perhaps... does everything in the game have to be serious and utilitarian?!

I think there is perhaps a potential flaw in this game... Is there no place for a little humour and silliness?
I was imagining game situations where FE:
the Republic of Cashtopia might want to liberate the Smegaranian rebels in a province of the Sultanate of Oilistan...
yet, your ministers report that a new Oilistani dance craze is rocking the youth of Cashtopia, and as a democracy the people would take to the streets to show their displeasure if you invaded.

it adds a bit of imagination and atmos to an otherwise potentiall dry spreadsheet and resource-management game. I don't get realy how you can be so keen on having Characters and Dynasties and yet be so apparently reluctant to model culture even in this basic way.

[Gary Thomas]

Perhaps I should repeat what I have said elsewhere, frequently. Clash is scenario driven. So it is not necessary to build in anything. A silly scenario is perfectly possible. What, in this instance, you are asking for is a plague option. This is another thing that requires coding and does not have a high priority. What would you prefer I do? Add a plague option? Or add the ability to save and restore games?

I would think that the correct answer is self-evident.

Cheers