Social Model v3.0

[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

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]

Build Culture

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