Social Model v.2

[Mark_Everson]

There has been some previous discussion on migration, and the formation of new settlements, although not in great detail. Please use the search function (at upper right part of main forum page) to search for "migration" and you should find all mentions in the forums. This might miss some entries because synonyms were used for migration in the discussion, but at least its a start.

[roquijad]

Beör:

Just for your info...
The current social model is a "version 3". Two attempts to manage social stuff were made before this one. The first by Manurein (not anymore with us) and the second by Toubabo Koomi (still with us). From the very first model migrations were something we wanted to include, but it never intended to model what you've called "mass migrations" where entire tribes move and settle like goths did, FE. The sort of migrations in mind for the social model were those from a settlement to another, like FE, european migrations to the new world where things like economic conditions and ethnic/religious discrimination play the greatest role as the initatiors of the movement.

There isn't a migration sub-model in this last "version 3" social model covering the above only because I rushed the release of this model. I planned to develop it later. Maybe now it can be developed as a model of its own or within the new population model Richard is creating. But I believe it's important for this migration model to handle only the type of migrations described above (non massive).


Mass migrations are for sure needed. Although there has been little discussion about it, we have envisioned "nomadic civs" in the game to model such tribes as the mongols. In those situations the whole civ would be moving with its population, economy, "govt" and techs. Most of the examples you mention should be handled via this method, like germanic invasions or, in general, the whole indoeuropean movement. This part of the game is still unsolved in the sense that some adjustment would have to be done in each current model (all made for settled civs) to model a moving civ. Nomadic civs IMO is the way in which most of the things you're saying will find a place in Clash.

So, what I mean is I see all the migration issue divisible in two. Mass migrations handled as a per se characteristic of nomadic civs, and non massive, from a settlement to another, handled in the social and/or population models.


All:
About historical accuracy, I think we all agree that the game is not intended to recreate world history exactly as it happened. But now that Beör has brought this subject up, I see the settlement of tribes as something we should take care of more carefully. It's IMO not simply a matter of difining a time framework (scenario). If I want to play a "fall of roman empire" scenario, starting, say, in 300ad, I'd be frustrated if the Huns, goths, etc don't migrate to Europe but to the middle east, FE. We can't guarantee nomadic civs will move where they are supposed to.

Maybe we're not giving enough attention to mass migrations. In games like civ2 these things appear in a very crude way with random barbaric units attacking you. IMO we've given an excellent step forward when considering "nomadic civs", but maybe it's still not enough. In a random world this isn't relevant, but as a player, I'd love to play a "historical" game in earth from 4000bc and ahead, where at least tribes appear in their historical location. I'd like to see in the beggining of the game egyptians and chinese already settled, but I don't want aztecs settled as well. And this is problematic as Beör has shown.

Here's a proposal: What if, as an option for the player when setting his game, he can choose, when playing in planet earth, "historical settlements". This would put some civs already settled in the starting year, but many others would appear as nomadic civs wondering within a small territory. At the "right" historical time, the game would force these AI-controlled nomadic civs to move to pre-set historial locations and try to settle. In terms of code this is really simple, since each nomadic civ only needs to store a date and a few locations to move to and when the date is the right one, simply move the people to those locations. This would give more satisfaction for those who don't want to see germans trying to settle in China.

What do you think?

[Richard Bruns]

Sounds good. I'll start a new thread to discuss this and a few other things I've been thinking about.

[Beör]

During the 36 hour Apolyton recess I had some further thoughts concerning the modelling of migration. This was actuall written september 9th, so please forgive me if I address unnecessarily anything covered in the recent posts

Cyclic nomadic movement patterns
In the default 4000 BC scenario these movements IMO do not have to be modelled: Rarely a nomadic movement pattern would exceed the 100x100 km square, and even if it did the turn-length of at least one year would mean that you would have to model the presence of 'unmoving' nomads in every square along their route. Do not take me wrong, there is no doubt that the nomadic state would have to be modelled, but not the movements.

Uncontrolled migration
This migration should be modelled in a way that it is outside the player's influence. This is probably pretty close to what F_Smith describes as:

quote: People will, on a mapsquare by mapsquare basis, act very much like people in our world

. People will move to better squares depending on the factors - maybe more - I mentioned in the above post. The question remains whether it is desirable to discriminate EGs and religious groupings while doing this. This would probably mean modelling EG and religious composition on a mapsquare basis.

Controlled migration
This is acquainted to the previous discussion on Settlements and How much should the player control. I think that a consensus has been reached that this kind of action should be possible in various ways: FE founding a military encampment might spawn the growth of a city, because people seek the security and the increased trade possibilities of the nearby encampment. Such settlements could be encouraged by local geography (a river), by infrastructure investments (I am not sure of the details here - a major road, a bridge, a port perhaps) or by financial support (simply placing an amount of capital on a square, making it available for the people in the founding of their settlement). I believe it should also be possible but very expensive for the player to found a city outright, by making massive investments and ordering people to go live there.

Mass migration
I have given this a good deal of thought. I think that the initiation of a mass migration should be controlled by the riots model: Given the present circumstances, the people is sufficiently agitated to actually leave the land of their forefathers to seek better pastures. This could spawn a 'Mass migration'-event (MME). The nation splits into two EGs: One EG rallies under whatever leader is available and go adrift across the continent, while the other EG remains in the present location. The player controlling the nation should be given an option to lead the migrating EG or the remainder. The migrating EG converts a proportion of the population of the nations original squares into Migration Military Units (MMU): These are powerful units representing tens of thousands of people moving around. On their way they will leave some people, tired of wandering, behind, while absorbing discontent, maladjusted people from the nations of the squares they cross. This could lead to a snowball effect, creating massive invasions of multiethnic masses, capable of collapsing any empire (rare). On the other hand the Migration Units could slowly diminish, until the EG is lost to history (common). The squares crossed will of course be exploited heavily, leading to potential military conflict along the way. The migration units should have the option of settling down in any squares crossed, provided that the people is sufficiently provided for in the present location, absorbing whatever people are living there. If at some point along the road the cultural attributes are sufficiently different from the remainder EG or the geographical distance is large the two EGs are separated into two Nations (maybe this should happen automatically, the moment the MME occurs). The migrating EG will enter a Migration State, where special production mechanics will apply. Something like: No basic research, but maybe easier acquiring of new tech from the people met on the way. If an MMU stays in the same square for more than a few turns, there is increasing ability to harvest resources in the usual way, but parts of the people will settle down in the square, making the MMU weaker.
The player has little influence on the occurrence of an MME other than tampering with society in the usual way.

Migration following conquest
??? Probably won't have to be modelled separately

[Lord God Jinnai]

Well i know cities were founded near rivers or coastlines throughout history 90% of the time. There are exceptions for oasises in deserts and along cross sections of trade routes, but up until the 20th century this was the case. At that time the highway, autobaun, whatever changed this and most towns were founded at the cross section of 2 major roads.

[Beör]

I think that cities and settlements are conspicuously absent from the present models. After all civilisation is a derivative of latin civis=city. In my oppinion cities are necessary prerequisites of a civilisation. Could anybody please direct me to some discussions on this. I have tried the search function and nothing much came up!

[Beör]

Mark has suggested that I read some of the models with a newcomer's eye, trying to find flaws in the design, and obvious omissions. This is quite a task, and I have decided to begin with the tightly knit models: Social, Government and Riots. I will begin here with Social, because it is the most fundamental, and because this is where I kind of started. I also have a feeling that it is not to late to alter the model in some ways should that become necessary.

First let me say that I think the social model is admirable in its own right. I have not yet grasped the implications of the combination with the other models, and most of the discussion in this thread is above me.

However I have spotted some potential problems, more basic than whether religion should be modelled one way or the other:

1. Civ - EG - Nationality
I think there will be problems with the two-tiered model of Civ and Ethnic group. Example: Libyans (an independent EG) are placed between Roman Empire in Tunisia and Egyptian Empire in Egypt. Romans and Egyptians divide the entire Libyan territory between them. The Libyans living in western Lydia will become an EG at the Roman civ level LybRom), while the Lybians living in Eastern Lybia become an EG at the Egyptian civ level (LybEgy). The Lybian civ has effectively been split into two unrelated EGs. This can be handled, but then the Roman Empire expands into the Egyptian part of Lybia: LybEgy is now split further into LybEgy and LybEgyRom. Jugurtha comes out of the Saharan dessert and conquers the southern part of the whole of Lybia. We now have LybRom, LybEgy, LybEgyRom, LybRomJug, LybEgyJug and LybEgyRomJug - and so forth ad nauseam. These mechanisms will take place whenever a square changes hands and will result in a huge amount of infinitesimal EGs over time.

What is needed is a way to combine these very related EGs into one EG at the civ level as before. To this end I propose an OO class clsNation in addition to the proposed clsCiv and clsEG (this was sort of hinted at in the social model since nationality was one of the characteristics of EG, while the implications of this was not described). An objEG would retain its present civ level interpretation as all people in an objCiv that perceive themselves as being of a certain nationality (objNation). If an objCiv expands to include people from another objCiv but with nationality of an objEG already present, these people will be incorporated seamlessly into a joint objEG: The attributes of the new combined objEG is calculated as a weighted (based on population) average of the attributes of the original EG and the newcomers. In the most basic form clsNation need not contain anything more than a name, and probably a dynamic array pointing to all EGs of this nationality. If desired this concept can later be expanded, giving the objNation attributes, representing the proto-ethnic origin of the nation. These attributes might change over time, so as not to be too distant from the constituent EGs. However I am not sure if this would add anything to the gameplay.

The effect of this would be that a nation is divided into fractions along civ-borders, different, but still sufficiently related to be integrated into eachother should the territory they live in change hands. On average each nation would be divided into no more than 2-3 fractions (an independent and one or two civs). Each fraction would change their cultural attributes over time depending on their Governmental and Religious environment, but still they would be very similar (IRL: talking the same language, having the same mythological material etc). If desired it would be possible to model the splitting of a nation into two different nations, if the individual constituents became sufficiently different (maybe by the root-mean-square approach used to calculate religion-culture 'Distance').

The 'How many religions'-issue could be handled in a number of ways:
One nation - one GWR: The first GWR-convert of a nation decides what is possible in the entire nation. This is unrealistic, but simple to model.
One EG - one GWR: The first GWR-convert of an EG decides what is possible for the entire EG of the civ. This is more realistic, but will lead to instant 'mass-conversions' if a civ conquers people EG with a different GWR from another civ. This is a consequence of the all-or-none mechanics of the concept religion. You can average aggressiveness 35 and aggressiveness 65 to get aggressiveness 50 (assuming equal populations), but you cannot average 35% Christianity and 65% Islam. One method overcoming this would be to split the nation the instant two EGs of the same nationality encompass different GWRs, in fact degenerating the model into something like One nation-one GWR.
One EG - any number of GWR: This is very far from the original social model, and the question is: Will it improve gameplay, or just add unnecessary detail. To be really realistic, this would mean probably tracking proportional GWR-allegiance on a province- if not square-basis. Maybe this is not a problem, but is it really necessary?

2. What is a civilisation
I think the origin of this problem is in the very title of the project: Clash of civilisations. The problem is that 'civilisation' in a sense is ambiguous: What is a civ. Is it an entity with a central government - a civ/empire? Rodrigo seems to indicate this in his Social model where there is no clear sundering between civ, government, empire and controlled provinces: They all signify that the player controls a centralised governmental structure with a geographical entity. It is however very clear that an EG is something different, similar to a nation or a tribe. FE 'If Romans (empire I presume) take Egypt (province IP) then Egyptians (EG IP) end up living under Roman rule (governed by the Roman Empire IP) and they wont necessarily become Roman citizens and support the new regime (they remain being in the EG Egyptians IP). Even more, Rome (Empire IP) can invade just part of Egypt (province IP) so you can find Egyptians (EG IP) in roman provinces (Provinces controlled by Roman Empire, but not necessarily inhabited by EG Romans) and in Egyptian civ (Empire IP)'.

However in the thread Who is the player (good question BTW) it was suggested that a civ is something different from an empire, more like a major, more or less homogenous cultural phenomenon. In a way this makes sense, since Roman civ/culture outlasted the Roman civ/empire by centuries - in a way most of the western world - and probably to a degree the near Orient as well - still live in a 'Roman' civ/culture. It is also true that the geographical extent of a civ/empire rarely coincides with the area under a certain civ/culture. I guess a point could be made claiming that the Roman Civ/Empire really consisted of at least two different civ/cultures: the Greek and the Roman. However, if it is done this way it would probably mean that we had to create a special OO class called clsCivCult interacting with the classes clsEG and clsCivEmp. One CivEmp is composed of several EGs, of which one might be the ruling EG; as above one EG is only part of one CivEmp. One CivCult is composed of several Nations, and like with religion there would be several opportunities for how many CivCults are encompassed by one nation, although I would recommend the one nation - one CivCult approach in this case. This objCivCult approach is so similar in game terms to a clsReligion, that a separate modelling of clsCivCult would IMHO be superfluous. (IRL civilisations and religions have been walking hand-in-hand to a degree where the two are almost indistinguishable)

So what are your thoughts on this: Will there be both civ/empire and civ/cult or just the former?

3. Civs - barbarians
This might not be the right place to comment on this, but I am on a streek, so here goes:
Playing demo 4 it was obvious that the 'bad guys' came in two different flavours: a) Rival civs with mobile units and b) barbarians with limited military power (except to conduct a casual raid), primarily there to be incorporated into your empire before the other civs get around to it.

Will this be the same in the game? I realise that computational resources might limit the number of competing AIs available. But still it would be nice if you never really knew if the people of occitania just might rise to be a powerful civ.

4. General advice
This leads to some advice: To avoid confusion, try to define your game-entities very carefully. Preferably give them a unique name or an abbreviation instead of using a common, but ambiguous term like civilisation. Somewhat meaningful abbreviations would also help the reader, and probably the programmer as well. This makes it a lot easier to spot inconsistencies in the models. I prefer EthTol to ethnic tolerance or ET, RelTol to religious tolerance or RT, Aggres to aggressiveness, Trad to traditionalism etc. In this way it is clear when you are talking about a game term, and when you are talking about something general.


5. GWRs - judaism - others

It is true that Judaism may not have the attributes of a GWR in the sense of being universal and spreading to other nations to any major extent. However, some spreading did occur: The Kazar khanate, a Turkish empire in S Russia, E Ukraine, Caucasus, and bordering regions of central Asia, adopted Judaism to a rather large extent. Kagan (king) Bulan was converted in 821 and for the following centuries, this Turkish tribe lived under a religion of traditional rabbinical Judaism, being judged by the Torah. Had the Turkish kingdom along the southern end of the Volga not succumbed to the Scandinavian derived Rus, the history of Judaism might have been very different. I would therefore make an argument that Judaism is a potential GWR. Another potential GWR is Zoroasthrianism.
I think that the splitting of GWRs could in certain scenarios add to gameplay, but I would prefer to keep it simple

Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, maybe Protestantism)
Islam (Shiit (I hope this is not automatically censored as e.g. Ku****es), Sunni)
Hindi (If you absolutely want to you could perhaps divide them into Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva)
Buddhism (Theravada, Vahayana, maybe Vajrayana)
Judaism
Zoroasthrianism

[This message has been edited by Beör (edited September 11, 2000).]

[roquijad]

Thanks a lot for taking some time to read the model and do this criticism. Here are my answers:

1. In general...
Soon after I released the social model, F_Smith joined actively the team and decided to code this model. The "Beast" (you asked about this in the other thread) is what F_Smith has created so we can all participate in the creation process. There's a thread in the forum called "Object Builder" or something like that. In the very first post there's a link to a page where you can see what's coded so far and you can *play* with it and see what happens. The social and govt models are being both coded by F_Smith in this "Beast".

When F_Smith started to code the social model, he suggested some changes to the social model. The model is in essence still the same, but a couple of things were changed. Most notable, ethnic groups are no longer managed at the civ level, but at the mapsquare level. This adds a lot of realism at the cost of using more computational resources, but F_Smith has convinced us so far that the cost wouldn't be too high.
The other change is the concepts of "Primitive Religion" and GRW have kind of disappear and mixed in a simple "religion" thing. This change in particular is not entirely solved in its details. This change was born also to achieve more flexibility.

The other change concerns "similar" religions. In this thread it was proposed by LGJ and others that a religion could suffer division and create branches, like catholicism giving birth to protestantism and the greek church. So far, this is an idea I commited to think about how to implement, but I haven't done anything yet.

Finally, Mark suggested a richer modeling for the very important Nationalism attribute. I haven't started to think about this yet, but some changes will be there sometime.


2. Civ-EG-Nationality
What I originally planned was that if a civ/empire expands in such way that conquers mapsquares with a new nationality, an ethnic group object is created in conquering civ OO-structure. But any other conquest of the same people would only increase the EG population and change its attributes according to some rule like averaging them. A civ would have then as many EGs as nationalities living within it exist and then there's no "dangerous" multiplication of ethnic groups.

In the real implementation, however, since ethnic groups are located (in code terms) in mapsquares, every time a mapsquare changes hands no EG objects are created or deleted from any civ and no averaging is necessary. In this regard F_Smith's approach is much better.

Either way, there's no problem with territories changing hands. It's all under control.
I've to confess, though, that in F_Smith's implementation there's still a part that confuses me. He has, as far as I understand, separate objects for ethnic groups and cultures. So an EG object has a culture object. I don't know what use this division serves. To me an EG *is* a set of cultural attributes. Having them separated may cause some problems when territories change hands... but I'm not sure. I'm maybe simply understanding wrong the implementation.

I disagree with your approach of having a "meta-EG" or something like that (Nation, as you call it) to which all EGs are related someway or another regardless of where they live. You're right when you say lybians will preserve their culture even if splitted in several empires, but as you also mention, after some time it's possible for these to split for good (a nation produces two nations) or to "forget" their national cohesion. I believe is much better keeping it how we have it. For some time lybians will have the same culture (same cultural attributes) regardless of who's controlling them just because variable "Traditionalism" won't admit any sudden change. But if the situation lasts, it is realistic to expect each lybian EG will evolve differently depending on where they live and a reference to a "meta-lybian-nationality" seems strange and "magical". Magical because the only real way for people to preserve their lybian ways is in reference to their tradition and not to some abstract and independent-from-themselves thing that seems to exist in the vacuum.

3. What's a civ?
An excellent point. I should have written a paragraph about it in the model just to make sure implications of EG modeling are understood.

In fact, once we accept we want a "civ" to be able to hold several nationalities as it happened commonly in history, we must deal with the question "what a civ is?". And as you say this is pretty much related to who the player is. My opinion, as you discovered it, is that a civ is a govt and the player is the ruler of that govt. This govt, in time, controls land where many "tribes" (ethnic groups) exist. Usually, only one tribe considers this govt/empire as "its own". That's why I've said a civ (govt) has a nationality. The roman empire was "roman" (or latin, if preferred).

As philosophical this matter might sound, it has important implications. In civ2 this was solved simply not having ethnic groups with a culture and sense of nationalism. There's only "people". As a result, if you invade other civ's posessions, people don't react. Germans can invade France and french people don't give a damn.

Modeling tribes and govts as two different things as opposed to the vague "civ" term in which any of the former concepts may lie easily, is what adds realism and historical accuracy in a number of fields. Since this realism is one of the top priorities in Clash, we need things divided like that. We need tribes/cultures/ethnic_groups and we need govts/empires. Separate.


4. Barbarians
As I said in the other post, barbarians will be nomadic civs with the ability to settle and successfuly become a power.


5. Religions
Apparently, we'll just have "religions". Not GRW, not "Primitive Religions". PRs, btw, are now called Ethnic Religions to avoid any misconception or prejudice. In this perspective I think the problems with Judaism could be solved.

However, what is most important for me is what you've pointed out regarding multiple religions. Most of Clash team members would like to see each ethnic group able to follow more than one religion as opposed to what I originally planned. The best way to do this in order to manage all the implications of it such as govt religious discrimination or religious fervor, is to convert ethnic groups into EG-Cult units. In the US, for example, you'd find these social units:
American-Catholic
American-Protestant
American-Jewish

instead of simply "Americans" having the property of being christians. This would lead us to a huge number of ethnic/cult groups, specially if these social units exist in mapsquares!
This is, btw, partly the approach Manurein (the first social model developer) took, calling each social unit an "agent".

The alternative is to remain within the initial idea of ethnic groups and provide as part of its definition something describing how people is divided among religions, like:
Catholic-30%
Jewish-10%
Protestants-60%

But this implies a mixing of religious attributes is needed to compute several things and in the other side it'd be difficult to apply a discrimination against some religions if ethnic groups have at the same time multiple cults. Things don't look good this way. Mixing religious doesn't sound too bad in this example, but what about averaging christianity with buddhism?

A third alternative, and the one I'm playing in my mind with, is to allow ethnic groups to follow several religions provided they're similar. Just like the example of alternative two above. Making some adjustments to allow govt religious discrimination to act only against "religious blocks" and to keep religous fervor only between these blocks, then it doesn't sound too bad. Averaging religious attributes wouldn't be too bad if religions are alike and ethnic groups could have multiple cults. The branches idea fits perfectly here.

Anyhow, the thing is modeling religions can become a pain in the ass if we push it too far. On the other side, I confess things are not solved in this topic.


Thanks again for the feedback. Keep insisting in whatever you feel is wrong.
[This message has been edited by roquijad (edited September 11, 2000).]

[Lord God Jinnai]

One question...how are religions going to be modeled now for expasion? Is it similar to Manurien's idea? One thing if there is no differnace now between EG and GWR in coding sence then there should be an expansionistic variable for that religion (not copied over to cultural variables like most of the rest are). This would allow for religions to become expansionistic and later if it comes across another one, heated battle might might take place (heated could me on philisophical level). Anyway the one that looses could have a lower expansionistc score till it dies or almost does like Zoastrianism.

Anyway there currently is no way for hybrid religions like Jainism (Islam and Hinduism) nor is there anything for cultures that have what is called plurality, ie people can worship more than one aspect of a religion. The latter i think is ness otherwise we'd be biasing religion from a western/arabic sence which isn't right either. How do i propose this should be modeled. Well that is tricky. First there could be a 0/1 switch for plurality/not and if not, well under no circumstances can it be worshiped by the same person along with another religion. In my suggestion, although i know it is not the best way to do it, is to average the religions out and take the medium for the score. Although i know it could also be extremes, but we haveto choose one or the other i think.

Anyway plz describe it and if you don't want to post it publicly yet, email me.

[Beör]

RE Ethnic groups

I am not sure I understand.

Do you mean that each square contains a number of objEGs? Each objEG contains a objCulture with the cultural attributes of this particular EG (the reason to do this eludes me - probably an OOD-thing, could you elaborate F_Smith?). I deduce that each objEG must also contain a variable for the number of people of this ethnicity in the square, and depending on how the multiple religion issue is solved, some indication of how many people follow each of a range of possible religions.

This leaves an important question:

Will objEGs of different squares ever act in common?

If not, I fail to see that this models unified action of substantial factions of the population in the Empire. And this was your original idea of the EG-concept wasn't it?

If objEGs do - as I suspect - act in common, then you have to have some criteria for which objEgs will assemble into larger groups. What are they?

It is in this context that I proposed using the Nation. In its simplest form this is really nothing but a name/code that allows objEGs from different origins to assemble into one group acting together - regardless of other cultural attributes, which typically would be averaged in some way. It would probably make sense to put this name/code in an object along with an array pointing to every objEG in the Nation, since this would allow looping through all objEGs of a nation, when necessary. (The addition of 'magical' proto-ethnic characteristics was just an idea (not necessarily a good one, at that), which could diminish the tendency of different objEGs to drift appart as time passes. These characteristics need not be static, but could evolve). I guess it would be possible to imagine other attributes that could have a similar function, the most obvious being language. In fact you could call it language instead if you prefer (I suspect Mark would like this).

This approach has some nice properties:
Historical acuracy. Nations/languages have been very constant through history.
Ease of computation. Basically it just takes comparing two integers to decide if objEGs are 'compatible'.
Handling of simple migration. Basically if a part of an EG migrates from one square to another there will be two possibilities:
There is no objEG of the same Nation there, in which case the people could either a) form an objEG in the new square of the original Nation (if they are numerous) b) join another objEG in the square (the one least distant in cultural attributes terms)
There is an objEG of the same Nation there, in which case the tally of that objEG is just increased.
It might be argued that migration should not take place on an EG basis, but rather as bulk-migration, where every objEG in the origin is reduced proportionally, while any objEG in the target square is increased proportionally. However, thereby you forfeit the opportunity to have discriminated EGs 'vote with their feet' and get the h… out of there.

It also has some disadvantages or complications:
As objEGs of the same Nation evolve as time passes, the Nation may become very inhomogenous. This necessitates the development of methods of splitting the Nation into two or more Nations. However, this needs only be done at fairly large intervals (every 50-100 years).
Conversely, two objEGs of different Nations will not easily be merged, even if they have exactly identical cultural attributes. It might therefore be desirable to develop techniques for merging EGs of different Nations. This too needs to be done infrequently.

[Beör]

Double posted
[This message has been edited by Beör (edited September 13, 2000).]

[Beör]

Tripple posted - believe it or not
Never happened before
Must be lo
o
o
o
sing it


[This message has been edited by Beör (edited September 13, 2000).]

[F_Smith]

Boer:

Hi. Sorry to be just now getting back to you, work is picking up right now. This week and next, my time is kinda limited.

1) Yes, each square has a number of 'ethnic group' objects. Each 'ethnic group' object holds (encapsulates) data describing it -- culture, religion, tendencies and general attributes (number of individuals, demographics info, tech info, etc). Like a 'car' object would hold 'engine', 'color', 'transmision', etc.

2) Yes, in many cases ethnic groups will share the same 'culture'. The 'criteria' for grouping them together is thru their shared 'culture' object.

3) 'Nation' is a political concept, not a cultural one, wouldn't you agree?

[F_Smith]

Lordy:

Again, this is data model speak -- the 'Ethnic Groups' will absolutely have to hold info on what their individual tech levels are.

Like an individual 'car' holds info on what kind of tech it was built with (to an experienced eye).

That has nothing to do with how the player manages tech info, or how the game 'models' technology . . . they're two different things.

It's a 'data storage' thing only.

[Beör]

F_Smith

Maybe I'm just daft, but...

An EG is an object that represents people in a map square. It should hold data that are particular to the people in that mapsquare alone, like their number, demographic info and maybe possessions, together with some pointers to other objects that they are related to in some way. Why then, do you suggest that the square-based EG should encapsulate data that are not unique to a single square? In your next-to-last post you stated that EGs are grouped together through a shared cultural object. So what should really be stored at the map-level is a pointer to the shared cultural object, which then encapsulates the culture properties. The same goes for tech-level, which I suspect must be a civ-level thing. I would have the EG point to the civ, which then has a property called tech level.
Taking your car-analogy: The car should store data on the make, model, year etc, and a pointer to the owner of the car. The owner object should then hold data that is related to the owner, e.g. sex, nationality, insurance company etc.

And regarding the grouping of EGs. You say that EGs are grouped together by a shared culture object. Let's examine what happens: Take two squares inhabited by people with a Lybian culture. Each square will hold an EG, and a reference to a shared Lybian objCult. If the two squares are occupied by different civs the culture of each EG will evolve, beginning from day one. You cannot change the single Lybian objCult two ways simultaneously, and therefore you have to split the Lybian objCult into two objCults, the moment they are under control of different civs. They thus do not longer have a shared objCult, and cannot be grouped, even if they are united under one civ next turn.
As far as I can see there are three ways out of this dilemma:
a) You could group them according to an attribute that does not change when the square changes owner: This is where my suggested Nation/Language/Whatever comes in. It is simply an attribute, unchanged by controlling civ, that can serve as a common reference to group the EGs by.
b) You could group them together according to some arrithmetic 'nearness' FE the D-principle of the social model. However, whenever there is a need for concerted action on part of grouped EGs in a civ, you would have to check every EG against all other EGs to see which ones should be grouped(constructing a large 2x2 matrix of all EGs in the civ).
c) You could refrain from grouping EGs

And: No I do not think that nation is a political thing. Granted, the nation has become more or less synonymous with the state during the last century and a half, but this is not a phenomenon that has prevailed through history. FE the Latvian nation has only had its own state for 20 years between WWI and WWII and for the last 10 years. None the less it has been a national entity for more than 1000 years, and there are actually still a few people (less than 50 I think) that speak the balto-slavic Latvian language. A nation does not disappear from one day to the next as by conquest. In stead it is slowly assimilated into the surrounding nations, until in the end it disappears. I believe this is accounted for in the social model where people of minority EGs slowly change their allegiance to the dominant EG of the civ.

One more thing: I made an argument in my previous post about migration. How is this handled?