New social model. Feedback wanted

[Mark_Everson]

Manu:

Wow, the event model looks good. I haven't read everything through carefully, but the general thrust is great. One suggestion. Rather than nailing things down like "Religious War" Why not just have one war event, and if necessary tack on a regieme like religious, ideological, race or whatever on to the generic war event model. Then the partition of the agents would be by whatever the regieme was, but you'd only need one tree for war.

Another related thing I was wondering was about wars that are half secular, half religious. Maybe we just need to keep it simple to keep a lid on computational complexity of the model, but IMO many wars are not easily describable as Just one factor be it religious, race, political (inter-class civil war) or whatever. Your thoughts on this?

I will get back to you on specific events when I have some more time...

Mark

[manurein]

Hi guys. Some answers.

Lord God Jinnai:

1. As you might have noticed it, there is a sub-model for migrations that handles "standard", economic migrations. This model is based on the diffenrence between economic states of the provinces.
In caes of economic boom, and since this event only concerns the province where the boom occurs, there wont be migration directly triggered by this event : the action will be triggered in the booming province, and people leaving there have no reason to migrate. Anyway, this event will have the effect, that the booming province will be better in the classment of the provinces where people want to migrate, so in the turns following the event, the migration sub-model will probably direct more migrating people to the booming province. Thus, there is no need (and no sense) to have a migration reaction to the economic boom event.

2. Stalemate : u're right, this event is missing. I'm not sure of how I will add it, maybe as a standalone event, or maybe I will merge all battle events and put in the data field the result of the battle (defeat, victory, stalemate). TBD. Thanks for raising this point.

3. Diffused techs are tech that u learn without researching them, from another civ, be it directly via diplomatic negociations, or via "natural" diffusion of techs (especially in modern eras, there are few means to prevent a tech from being learned by other civs through scientific publications, trade agreements ...). This is why it is considered a different event from the direct tech acquisition (by research).

4. Tech loss is the result of a long process of not using a tech, I dont consider it as a ponctual event (as U might have noticed, every event I define is ponctual : the situation is radicaly different before and after the event, like in the case of a war declaration or a tech acquisition; this is not the case of tech loss).
Moreover, this is the kind of "events" that would not provoke a reaction of the people like the other events I use for this social model. Thus, I dont think it has to be added to the events used by this model. Anyway, it is an information that is useful for both the economic model and the tech model, and u may decide to pass them this info as an event. Anyway, this event wont be treated by he social model.

5. Unrest : I agree with u, splitting unrest (and every other stuff) between religious, racist, nationalist ... unrests is quite unnatural. It is however the solution I have found to keep things runnable. I may try (and I may achieve) to turn it another way, this is still TBD (But I also may not achieve to ...)


Mark :

The points u raise are linked to the last point Lord raised : dividing everything between race, religion, class and nationality is quite unnatural, but, once again, it is a "trick" to have things more handleable.

any way, we could try to find an answer to the critics u emit on the war event.
There are here two ways to go :
1. We use only one event (WAR), which carries a tag in its datas, this tag giving the categories implicated in this event (categories are religion, race, nationality and class); in this case the decision tree would be very complex;
2. We create a different event for every category combination we can have (for ex: race/nationality event, religion/race/nationality, religion/class ...). In this case, the decisions trees are simpler, but there are a lot of events.

In both cases, a part of the job has to be done by the emitting model (in the case of wars, the emitting model is the diplomatic model) : this model has to decide how tagged the event is. In bith cases, the job done by the emitting model is the same; the difference is just how the event is emitted.
For the social model, using different decision trees is a lot simpler, and I dont think having a lot of vents is such a problem. This is why I prefer the second solution, but this is still TBD. What are ur thoughts on this?
[This message has been edited by manurein (edited October 04, 1999).]

[Mark_Everson]

Manu:

Hey, do whatever's easier for you. I was just trying to simplify things. But if that makes it harder, then pitch it!

On the half-nationalist half-religious war, I think I know an easy way to handle it if we think such a thing is desirable... Just fire both event types! Anyway thought I'd suggest it.

[manurein]

There is a detailed list of ations at the following adress :


http://people.mw.mediaone.net/markev...el_Actions.htm

This document describes the actions that are taken as a response to events.
Events are defined in another paper, which adress u can find 5 posts upper on this thread.
Please provide feedback and critics.
[This message has been edited by manurein (edited October 08, 1999).]

[Mark_Everson]

Ok, I can live with that... We can test out later how it responds if you fire off two events at it too.

BTW your actions model looks really good. I can't wait to see how it works when taken out for a test-drive .

[manurein]

Mark :

About throwing both events in case of religious/nationality war ...

Actually - and even if I havent pointed this up to now, I really dont know how the model will behave in situations where there are more than one event at a time in a province ... ANd this may be the weakest point of the model as it is now : it does not take into account at all the eventual events that have already been treated at this time. And I'm afraid it will have to take into account at a certain extent other events treated in the same turn to keep things coherent.
This is why, as far as things are under our control, I think we must try to avoid sending several events at a time in the same province.

[chance]

I agree completely with your intentions on the religion factor. You should have a way to show development in religion without having to get into this religion versus that religion.

But as a trained philosopher and theologian, I think your continuum is a bit inaccurate and could be tweaked in a way that would still allow for what you're going for.

Some alternate examples:
#Animism: the religion of early, tribal humanity. Some New Age stuff more recently.
#Nature/seasonal: attuned to agricultural cycles; Romanticism last century, revived recently in Wicca, etc.
#Sky god: the religion of the first successful city states; polytheistic. Some say Hitler played on this.
#Prophetic: a counter-cultural religion (which would mesh nicely with your class idea). Early Judaism, early Christianity, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, etc.
#Legal: basically your Book idea.
#Philosophical: Stoicism in the Roman Empire, deism and transcentalism a century or two ago;early Buddhism.
#Centralized: the Inquisition, etc.
#Monastic: Buddhism in Tibet and Sri Lanka, Christianity in late Middle Ages.
#Established: Anglicanism in UK last century; mainline Protestants in US this century. Sort of in decline.
#Pluralistic: people in China and Japan usually practice three different religions simultaneously; US may be headed this way.

I know some people may just not care how you slice it, so if you attach numerical values to each type they'll still use it regardless. But for those who do care about it, you can't use things like "superstitious" and "sectarian" as categories; they're actually just insults that one person uses to put down somebody else's beliefs. (Or you could attach those terms and other to each type to showcase its weaknesses--that way everyone is insulted equally at least.) I think it would be worth the time and trouble to tweak your categories a little so they still have obvious effects on game play but are more accurate and sensitive.

I'm more than willing to help out with this. Just let me know (email best).

[This message has been edited by chance (edited October 14, 1999).]

[Lord God Jinnai]

Finally someone who may be able to help me on my tech model.


#Monastic: Buddhism in Tibet and Sri Lanka,

I'm looking for some overall grouping of various eastern religions such as budhism, taoism, confuscianism, shintoism, hinduism, etc. There may be more than one but i need to know for my social tech model. Please respond in Resreach Tech 2.

[roquijad]

The social model looks alright to me, but it lacks of an information/coordination-capability. It has been common use in history the forced movement of ethnic groups in order to destroy their capability of organizing and riot against their ruler. If you separate them, their power is weakened. Assyrians did it, Inca did it, Romans did it, and even now we can see it in the balcans. So, if you want to include this, which I find very important, you need to define a "level of coordination capability" that can be modified in time with tech.

Rodrigo

[roquijad]

Further comments:

1) I believe the variables that define religion should be revisted. Why
an "importance of books"? why put human sacrifices and not animal ones? I guess the attributes should be more abstract. Sacrifices are irrelevant to distinguish as an attribute for it doesn't have an effect on game terms.
In general, I believe you're mixing general attr. such as tolerance with rather specific
attrb. and may be missing some.
My suggestion would be:
-Tolerance: The assumption (or lack of it) that your religion is the only
valid and that it must prevail over the rest. Agressivness of each religion
would be an outcome of this presception. It's also useful to determine how
tolerant religion is respect to science. Remember that the only reason for
religion to attack science was that it represented a different interpretation
or explanations for the things that were assumed to be divine.
-Materialism: Though religion is a spiritual issue, it is represented by idols, temples and other constructions and goods. Religions such as budhism is rather simple about this and their monks live almost from charity. On the other side, catholics like great cathedrals and the pope and his friends are full with riches. Catholicism has been one of the richest organizations through out history and this was also the reason for
protestants to appear. In game play terms, materialistic religions will push
rulers to construct temples and to control economic power.
-Centralism: The development of some religions into centralized and organized institutions was, in my opinion, a key factor for their level of influence
in politics and economy. It seems to me that it also helped those religions to
overcome threats of disappearing at the presence of other beliefs.
-Level of abstraction: Going from "chamanes" and polytheistic beliefs to a
more abstract sense of one god or the existence of a meta-life could be
modeled with this attribute. It'd be influenced by the rising of science and
the needless of detailed gods and their properties, since many of those can now
be understood by the scientific view and only more fundamental aspects of
life are left in the darkness in which the religion can rest on.

2) Have you thought of using the race-mixing model to model the religion progression over time? Not only you save code, but you can actually model de process of interelation and influences from other beliefs into
the game. That way, religion can smothly evolve from the very basic concepts
to more complex views. Also, religion wouldn't be a given-by-tech-tree
issue, like in civ2, but an actual process in the people, by the people.

Rodrigo

[Mark_Everson]

Rodrigo:

I like your comments and suggestions! You might want to email Manu. Things have been dead in this thread for so long, he might be checking it Very infrequently. I emailed Hrafnkell on your government post, since I think the address in his profile is outdated.

[Lord God Jinnai]

First off to mark: u think u could update his e-mail? I was going to ask him about the char/dynasty a while ago, but like u said it was outdated.

Now on to the main points:

-Tolerance: The assumption (or lack of it) that your religion is the only
valid and that it must prevail over the rest. Agressivness of each religion
would be an outcome of this presception. It's also useful to determine how
tolerant religion is respect to science. Remember that the only reason for
religion to attack science was that it represented a different interpretation
or explanations for the things that were assumed to be divine.

I don't know if these should be the same for religions and science. Also as far as tolerance goes we should impliment something for specific tolerance such as islam has with christianity and judaism, but not with other ones, i guess these would be be inferior on the tech model me and richard are doing, but then some meta-entity religions aren't ness inferior so i'm not sure... Also tolerance could associtate a need(or lack thereof) for the citizens to conform to this religious standards (the old days of europe vs. modern day power of church). I guess there might have to be another one for this such as Conformity?

-Materialism: Though religion is a spiritual issue, it is represented by idols, temples and other constructions and goods. Religions such as budhism is rather simple about this and their monks live almost from charity. On the other side, catholics like great cathedrals and the pope and his friends are full with riches. Catholicism has been one of the richest organizations through out history and this was also the reason for
protestants to appear. In game play terms, materialistic religions will push
rulers to construct temples and to control economic power.

Well materialism shouldn't allocate the lifestyle in such ways as food requirements. This should be handled elsewhere. As far as the other goes, we have to be careful since just because a religion is very materialistic doesn't mean that most of the materials are devine in nature. FE hinduism has statues built for their god(desse)s about each year. But these statues aren't divine, just statues. They represent the deities, but that's all. They aren't divine because of that. However in christianity that isn't true. A crusifix is considered holy and divine.

-Centralism: The development of some religions into centralized and organized institutions was, in my opinion, a key factor for their level of influence
in politics and economy. It seems to me that it also helped those religions to
overcome threats of disappearing at the presence of other beliefs.

As far as influence goes i beg to differ. Many non-centralized religions have has great impact throughout history. These were not nessarily direct, but more cultural. These include but are not limited to Taoism, Shintosim (non-state), many of the germanic and celtic beliefs, as well as other polytheistic ones. Although having centralized religion does help with the implimenting of direct things, cultural aspects are more deeply rooted.

-Level of abstraction: Going from "chamanes" and polytheistic beliefs to a
more abstract sense of one god or the existence of a meta-life could be
modeled with this attribute. It'd be influenced by the rising of science and
the needless of detailed gods and their properties, since many of those can now
be understood by the scientific view and only more fundamental aspects of
life are left in the darkness in which the religion can rest on.

Were doing something like this in our tech model, but it is also culturally related and the level of abstactness doesn't ness mean that a one-god/meta-being type belief will emerge, but a change in how the religion is viewed will.

[roquijad]

Jinnai:
1) I miss a comment on the "coordination capability"
2) Tolerance: True, you can define different levels of tolerance: among similar beliefs (one-god/meta-life) and a general. Let me insist about prosecution of science: it's a matter of tolerance since science is really another way to explain. Existence of religion is the existence of explanations to things. You also wrote about a need to conform to religion standards: I think churches always look for people to behave as they command, but we don't always agree. It's important, then, to distinguish between actual practice from official commands.
3) Materialism: Maybe I didn't explain myself: On one side, if you're in a monarchy and your official religion loves great cathedrals, you (as the player) will feel preasure from them to construct them, using money u wanted to use on something else. On the other side, Catholics had such a great economic wealth that make them a major player in economy. If the econ model allows powerful landowners, a religion such as catholicism could be consider as one. The wealth also helped them spread their beliefs sending people to every corner of the world, making them build churches, even entire towns, support monasteries and so on, all of which cost $. I think relationship between religion and money is important.
4) Centralism: ok. you're right.
5) I don't know the tech model but I hope such things as religions are not in it. Culture/religion should evolve in a mixing fashion instead of a tech you have or not. I think you can handle this in a model like the race-mix because in game terms is really unimportant if you have a meta-life religion, an animistic one or whatever. The really important thing is how attributes vary, like tolerance, and they could change, at least in some way, by the interaction with other beliefs.

Rodrigo

[Lord God Jinnai]

Well as far far as coordination capability goes i think its a good idea, i just don't think with all the other things we're putting in if its ness cause it might be automatically handled by other areas. I'm not sure so don't rely on me.

Anyway as far as the implimentation of religions in the tech tree go we're putting them there because religion or rather the advancement of religion is an advancement of a social tech. This will not handle most of the religious issues which will be left appropriatly in the social model, but will badically control the advancement of it for several reasons:
1> As i mentioned before the advancement of religion is a social tech and we're using the advancement of social techs in our model.
2> Because it mimics the way other ideas have advanced in social sciences we're putting it in there, kinda same reason, but slightly diff.
3> The way we're doing it will make it far less complicated for coding also i believe.

If u want more info on this search for religion in the tech board.

[manurein]

Hi.

roquijad

About the religion point : I dont fully agree with u.

I like ur point on abstraction level. That's what I pittifully tried to model with my "Book" attribute ...

About the human sacrifices and the animal sacrifices : I think there is a huge different between these two acts ... And I think it has important gameplay effects : I the cases I know, an important part of the sacrified were captured enemies, and some wars erupted for this reason...

I have already included the tolerance point.

About the rest of your points, I think that it concerns more the government model than the cultural model, which is mostly interested in the relations between religions and in the influence of religion on the behaviour and culture of people. You talk about political activities of the religion. This concerns the govenment model.

About the Coordination point :


"If you separate them, their power is weakened. Assyrians did it, Inca did it, Romans did it, and even now we can see it in the balcans. So, if you want to include this, which I find very important, you need to define a "level of coordination capability" that can be modified in time with tech."

This is fully handled by the model :
There are two general kind of events in this model : province and global events.
In the first case, the agents react at the province level, and their reaction and the effects of their reaction are highly influenced by the demoagraphic weigh of the agents. Then : if you spread tghe agents, you put them in many provinces and in small numbers and you lower their political power.
In the second case, the global events, their is a repartition method associated with each global events. This method allows to decide which province will react at the global level (agents from all provinces grouped and meaned) and which province will react at the local level. Thanks to this, no minority can have power except if it is concentrated (cause it will react at the province level).

The only point I miss is the influence of tech on this. It can be easily added as a modifier carried by the event's data field, but are u sure this influence is so important?


About using the race mixing model for spreading religion : this a good idea, although I dont think it should replace the whole thing. I will try to find out how integrate it in the current model.

LGJ :

I thonk there may be a way to use the social model to trigger discover of religions : how about using the religious attributes to trigger them? When you have the right combination for the attributes, u discover a kind of religion. Of course, as soon as u have met a religion that has already discovered it, u immediately discover it, and the social model event is useless.

What u think about that?